NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Next week, the Jets play New England on Monday night, so the loser update won’t go up until Tuesday morning.
Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
Your loser update: week 8, 2020.
Sunday, November 1st, 2020Obit watch: October 30, 2020.
Friday, October 30th, 2020Dan Baum, journalist and author.
He was somewhat famous for being fired by the New Yorker: more specifically, for tweeting about being fired by the New Yorker.
Over three days in May 2009, he tapped out his saga in more than 350 tweets, each less than 140 characters.
The media world, which always paid close-attention to Twitter, hailed the result as a breakthrough in storytelling: Not only was Mr. Baum pulling back the curtain on an august legacy publication; he was also unspooling his tale in real time, one tweet after another. (He learned as he went along not to do things like break up sentences between entries.)
Mr. Baum ended up producing one of the first examples of what is now called a Twitter thread, in which multiple tweets are linked together to provide more information than can be captured in one entry; today, entire novels are written in threads.
He went on to write several books. The NYT singles out Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans (affiliate link) as his “most acclaimed” book. Among his other books is Gun Guys: A Road Trip (affiliate link), a book that great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn recommends.
NYT obit for Billy Joe Shaver.
In the opening seconds of a televised college hockey game on Oct. 20, 1995, Roy, a forward, skated in to body-check an opposing defenseman, crashed into the boards and fell to the ice.
“It was as if my head had become disengaged from my body,” he recalled in a book, “Eleven Seconds: A Story of Tragedy, Courage & Triumph,” written with E.M. Swift. “I was turning the key in the ignition on a cold winter morning, and the battery was completely dead. Not a spark. Just click, and nothing. And right away it passed through my mind I was probably paralyzed.”
He had shattered his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. The injury left Roy a quadriplegic. Eventually he regained some movement in his right arm, which he used to work the joystick on his wheelchair.
College hockey is held in awe in Boston, its athletes worshiped and its fallen participants mourned. Shortly after Roy’s accident, more than 200 special church masses and prayer services were held in his honor, according to his father, Lee.
That reverence for the younger Roy grew as he gave motivational speeches and raised money to help those with spinal injuries and to fund research.
The Travis Roy Foundation, established in 1996 to support people with spinal cord injuries, has given nearly $5 million in research grants and helped more than 2,100 quadriplegics and paraplegics, according to its website.
Your loser update: week 7, 2020.
Monday, October 26th, 2020NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Next week, the 6-1 Chiefs.
Your loser update: week 6, 2020.
Monday, October 19th, 2020NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Down to one team after six weeks. I thought this was fairly rare, but it actually happened in 2016. And in 2015 and 2012, we had no losers at this point in the season.
Are the Jests bad enough to pull this off? My optimism is fading.
Obit watch: October 13, 2020.
Tuesday, October 13th, 2020Joe Morgan, baseball player and television commentator.
At 5-foot-7 and 160 pounds, Morgan, who was sometimes called Little Joe, was among the smallest great players in the history of the game. He was also among the greatest second basemen, and some, like Bill James, the groundbreaking interpreter of statistics, say he was the greatest of all.
He won five consecutive Gold Gloves, led National League second basemen in fielding percentage three times and finished second six others. In an era when sliding base runners routinely tried to take out the second baseman to prevent double plays, Morgan was known as especially tough in the pivot.
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In 1975, that team, whose stars included future Hall of Famers at catcher (Johnny Bench), first base (Tony Perez) and second base (Morgan), and the all-time hits leader (Pete Rose) at third, won 108 games and defeated the Boston Red Sox in one of the most memorable World Series in history.
Morgan, the league’s M.V.P., batted .327 for the season, hit 17 homers, drove in 94 runs, stole 67 bases and won a Gold Glove. He didn’t have a great postseason, but in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the Series, he drove in the winning run with a single to center. The next year, again the league M.V.P., his production was arguably even better: a .320 batting average, 27 homers, 111 runs batted in, 60 stolen bases in just 69 attempts, a league-leading slugging percentage (.576) and another Gold Glove.
The Reds weren’t quite as dominant during the season — they won six fewer games — but they powered through the postseason, sweeping the Philadelphia Phillies in three games for the National League pennant and the Yankees in four games in the World Series.
“Joe Morgan was a genuinely great player,” Bill James wrote in his analytic volume, “The Bill James Historical Abstract.” His 1976 season, James wrote, which included leading the league in sacrifice flies (12) and fewest double plays hit into (two), “is the equal of anything ever done by Lou Gehrig or Jimmie Foxx or Joe DiMaggio or Stan Musial.”
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He began working as a broadcaster in the mid-1980s, first locally in Cincinnati and San Francisco, later for ABC, CBS and NBC. But his public profile did not prevent his being mistaken for a drug courier and knocked to the ground by policemen at Los Angeles International Airport in 1988. Morgan, who claimed he was targeted because he was Black, sued the city. The case was settled in 1993 for $796,000.
Morgan’s most prominent television role was on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball,” where he appeared from 1990 to 2010. Teamed as color commentator with Miller, an upbeat play-by-play man who was the lead broadcaster for the Giants and a Hall of Fame inductee in 2010, Morgan was a popular figure within the game and with many fans, but over time he grew crusty and disputatious on the air — “the Grumpy Old Analyst,” Richard Sandomir called him in The New York Times.
A self-described “baseball traditionalist,” Morgan was especially known, and sometimes ridiculed, for the disdain he frequently expressed for the statistics-based approach to the game described in Michael Lewis’s best-selling 2003 book, “Moneyball” — a philosophy of roster-building and game management that has now been accepted as wisdom by analysts of every stripe and adapted in various modifications by virtually every team in the major leagues.
Noted.
Monday, October 12th, 20201. I was looking over some old blog posts, and ran across this quote from a 2014 “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column on ESPN:
TMQ Vows: By 2020, I Will Reduce Factual Errors 17 Percent Compared to 2005 Columns
Credit where credit is due: TMQ has certainly met – as a matter of fact, exceeded – that goal. Hats off to Easterbrook.
2. I wanted to highlight this blog post (by way of Hacker News): I think it’s a nice bit of writing, but it also is a good illustration of the kind of thing I was talking about in this post.
Your loser update: week 5, 2020.
Monday, October 12th, 2020NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
New York Football Giants
New York Jets
Obit watch: October 10, 2020.
Saturday, October 10th, 2020Whitey Ford, legendary Yankee.
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At 5 feet 10 inches and 180 pounds, Ford seldom overpowered batters. But in his 16 seasons he mastered them with an assortment of pitches thrown with varying speeds and arm motions and delivered just where he wanted them. “If it takes 27 outs to win, who’s going to get them out more ways than Mr. Ford?” the longtime Yankee manager Casey Stengel once said.
Methodical on the mound, Ford was irrepressible off it. He joined with Mantle and Billy Martin for late nights on the town, inspiring Stengel to call them the Three Musketeers. Mantle, too, entered the Hall of Fame in 1974, and at the induction ceremony he was asked about the chemistry behind the friendship between him, the country boy from Oklahoma, and Ford, who grew up on the streets of Queens. “We both liked Scotch,” he said.
“In those early years it was three of us — me, Whitey and Billy Martin,” Mantle said, adding, “They were both brash, outspoken guys, and I could stay in the background.”
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Ford missed the 1951 and 1952 seasons while in the Army, but returned with an 18-6 season in 1953. As he remembered it, Yankee catcher Elston Howard gave him the nickname Chairman of the Board around the mid-’50s.
Ford kept rolling along, winning 53 games from 1954 to 1956.
Then came an infamous night in Yankee lore. In May 1957, Ford and Mantle joined with a few teammates to celebrate Martin’s 29th birthday at the Copacabana nightclub. A patron wound up on the floor with a broken nose and accused Hank Bauer, the Yankees’ strapping right fielder, of decking him. Bauer denied it, and no charges were filed, but the Yankees fined all the players who were there for the embarrassing headline-making episode. It was never clear who clobbered the customer, and Berra famously explained, “Nobody did nuthin’ to nobody.” But Martin was soon banished to the lowly Kansas City Athletics.
I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere (though I’m sure the NYT will get around to it, just like they did for Gardner Dozois…oh, wait) but my mother forwarded an obit for Bette Greene. She was probably most famous for Summer of My German Soldier.
Your loser update: week 4, 2020.
Tuesday, October 6th, 2020NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
New York Football Giants
Houston
New York Jets
In related loser and sports firings news, having started the season 0-4, the Houston Texans have fired Bill O’Brien.
You know, I’m liking the chances for someone to go 0-16 this year. Not necessarily the Texans, but one of these four teams.
Obit watch: October 3, 2020.
Saturday, October 3rd, 2020Terry Goodkind, noted fantasy writer.
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While Mr. Goodkind attracted numerous readers with his storytelling, he angered some others with his worldview and his criticisms of fantasy fiction. He was a follower of Ayn Rand, whose Objectivism prized the individual over the collective, and he spoke about her ideas publicly and inserted them into his novels. He also often distanced himself from the genre in which he had achieved fame.
He told an online audience on Reddit that he had “irrevocably changed the face of fantasy” and “injected thought into a tired, empty genre.”
In a phone interview, his literary agent, Russell Galen, said: “His fans were wrapped up in his work and Terry personally. And then there were people who literally despised him. Terry was unique in that field in delighting in controversy, delighting in stirring up verbal combat, delighting in stirring up criticism. He was very feisty.”
Bob Gibson, pitcher.
Gibson won both the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award and Cy Young Award, as its best pitcher, in 1968, when he won 22 games, struck out 268 batters, pitched 13 shutouts and posted an earned run average of 1.12. The following year, Major League Baseball lowered the pitchers’ mounds to give batters a break, but Gibson won 20 games and struck out 269.
He won at least 20 games five times and struck out 3,117 batters, relying on two kinds of fastballs, one breaking upward and other downward, and a slider that he threw at about three-quarters speed. He threw 56 career shutouts and captured a second Cy Young Award in 1970. He was an eight-time All-Star, won a Gold Glove award for fielding nine times and pitched a no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1971.
Pitching for three Cardinals pennant-winners, Gibson won seven World Series games in a row, losing in his first and last Series starts. His physique was not especially imposing — he was 6 feet 1 inch and 190 pounds or so — but he holds the records for most strikeouts in a World Series game, 17, and in a single World Series, 35, both against the Detroit Tigers in 1968.
He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, his first year of eligibility.
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Profiling Gibson for The New Yorker in September 1980, Roger Angell told how after his 17-strikeout game against Detroit, a reporter asked if Gibson had always been as competitive as he seemed that day.
“He said yes,” Angell wrote, “and he added that he had played several hundred games of tick-tack-toe against one of his young daughters and that she had yet to win a game from him. He said this with a little smile, but it seemed to me that he meant it: he couldn’t let himself lose to anyone. Then someone asked him if he had been surprised by what he had just done on the field, and Gibson said, ‘I’m never surprised by anything I do.’”
Derek Mahon, Irish poet.
Clippings.
Tuesday, September 29th, 2020Missed this one until I was tipped off by, shockingly, Mike the Musicologist:
Doc Rivers was fired as head coach of the Clippers yesterday.
The precipitating incident for this seems to have been the team blowing a 3-1 lead in the playoffs and losing to Denver. He was 356-208 in seven seasons, but the team has struggled in the playoffs.
Also noteworthy:
Edited to add: fixed the poor formatting introduced by trying to use the visual editor in the WordPress app on the iPhone.
I missed the other big news yesterday.
Tuesday, September 29th, 2020There was another set of indictments that came down which I totally missed. And these are a surprise, though they don’t get the “tax-fattened hyena” tag.
Eight former NFL players and a Houston athletic trainer were indicted in a scheme to attempt to defraud an NFL player trust by submitting false claims for medical benefits, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced Monday.
The players, which include former Texans receiver Corey Bradford and linebacker Shantee Orr, are accused of submitting false reimbursement claims for physical therapy by Houston trainer Louis Ray, who owns Rehab Express in the Galleria area.
Apparently, this was the old “create fake invoices” scheme. The players would turn the invoices over to the “Gene Upshaw NFL Player Plan, a health-reimbursement account set up for former players”, get payments, pocket the money, and kick some back to Rehab Express for creating the invoices in the first place.
If I run the numbers on this after taking out Ray’s share, it works out to an average of about $76,000 per player. Which isn’t exactly small change, but it’s not in the sevenn or eight figure range where I would consider doing a crime and escaping to a country without an extradition treaty. Also, the payouts seem to have varied quite a bit:
Ray, 59, was indicted on a first-degree felony of Securing the Execution of a Document by Deception, for allegedly taking checks valued at more than $300,000.
Bradford, who was an original member of the Houston Texans in 2002 and played four seasons for the team, was indicted on a second-degree felony for allegedly taking checks valued at more than $150,000 and less than $300,000.
Orr, who played linebacker for the Texans from 2003 to 2007, was indicted for a third-degree felony for allegedly taking checks valued at more than $30,000 and less than $150,000. Fabian Washington, James Adkisson, Rex Hadnot, Clint Ingram and Chad Slaughter were indicted for the same.
Derrick Pope, who graduated from Galveston Ball High School and played linebacker for the Dolphins for four seasons, was indicted for a state-jail felony for allegedly taking checks worth more than $2,500 and less than $30,000.
Your loser update: week 3, 2020.
Monday, September 28th, 2020Cincinnati and Philadelphia tied, so both come off the list this week.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
New York Football Giants
Denver
Houston
New York Jets
Obit watch: September 23, 2020.
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020Gale Sayers, one of the great NFL players.
A consensus all-American at the University of Kansas — where he was called “the Kansas Comet” — Sayers chose to play for the Bears of the established N.F.L. over the Kansas City Chiefs of the upstart American Football League in 1965. He went on to have one of the greatest rookie seasons ever.
He led the league in all-purpose yards (rushing, receiving and runbacks) with 2,272 yards, scored 22 touchdowns, six of them in one game, and was named to the all-league team for the first of five consecutive years.
He was injured in 1968, went through knee surgery, and came back in 1969.
But 1969 became a somber season. For two years the Bears had matched players by position when they shared hotel rooms on the road. Sayers, who was Black, was paired with his backup, Brian Piccolo, who was white — apparently the first time a Black and white player had shared a hotel room for an N.F.L. team. The two men bonded, partly through racial jokes.
But in November that year Piccolo was found to have embryonic cell carcinoma of the lungs. Sent to the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he underwent surgery to remove a malignant tumor, but doctors found that the disease had spread to other organs.
The following May, Sayers was given the George S. Halas Award for the Most Courageous Player. In his acceptance speech, he said: “I love Brian Piccolo. I might have received this award tonight, but tomorrow I will take it to Brian Piccolo at Sloan Kettering. When you hit your knees tonight, please pray for Brian Piccolo.”
Piccolo died on June 16, 1970, at 26. Sayers was a pallbearer at his funeral.
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An injury to his left knee held Sayers to only two games in both 1970 and 1971. After fumbling twice in three carries in an exhibition game in 1972, he retired. He had scored 39 touchdowns in only 68 pro games and compiled a career average of 5.0 yards per carry.
In 1977, Sayers was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at 34; he remains the youngest person to receive the honor. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame the same year.
Tommy DeVito, one of the original members of the Four Seasons. Interesting fact:
Ron Cobb, noted production designer and artist for SF films.
He created some creatures that appeared in the cantina scene of “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” in 1977. He was also asked to help with spaceship illustrations for a movie pitch that would eventually become the 1979 blockbuster “Alien,” starring Sigourney Weaver.
Mr. Cobb’s work has appeared in several movies that have become classics of science fiction and fantasy. He designed scenes and costumes for the 1982 movie “Conan the Barbarian.” And he was a consultant for “Back to the Future” in 1985, helping to design the famous DeLorean time machine that transported Marty McFly, the character played by Michael J. Fox, back and forth through time.
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“He was passionate about making the science correct,” Ms. Love said. “He wanted accurate science, and he wanted great design.”
Mr. Bissell said Mr. Cobb devoured knowledge wherever he could find it and shared books on subjects including philosophy, technology and evolution. “Here’s a guy who actually just never cared about money,” Mr. Bissell said. “He always just cared about his work.”
Your loser update: week 2, 2020.
Monday, September 21st, 2020NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Carolina
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
Philadelphia
New York Football Giants
Cincinnati
Denver
Houston
New York Jets
Miami
(Saints and Raiders are the Monday night game. Both are 1-0 at the moment.)