One of the greatest records in sports started inauspiciously on this day 40 years ago.
The Baltimore Orioles were shut out that afternoon at home, collecting exactly one hit in the contest.
Their third baseman was 0 for 2 with a walk.
That was Cal Ripken Jr., and he wouldn’t miss a game for the next 16 years.
Shortly after Ripken’s streak began I was brought into this world.
Which means I must also soon be turning… no, that can’t be right.
Happy Memorial Day, everyone.
After the Miami Heat went up two games to none over the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals last week I assumed the League would have Miami tank one or more to bring in some revenue. More games = more money.
But with their third win in as many games Wednesday night the Beantown ballers are poised to take the best of seven with a win tonight at home.
So much for everything I thought about life and the universe prior to this series.
Baseball writer Roger Angell died this past Friday at the age of 101. Though calling Angell a “baseball writer” is a little bit like calling the London Philharmonic a “band,” that’s what he was, the most famous baseball writer on the planet for more than half a century. He lived from global pandemic to global pandemic, from the first year of Prohibition to the decriminalization of marijuana in some form in nearly every state. He witnessed every New York Yankee World Series win, writing about the game from when Willie Mays was in his prime to when the World Series was officially “presented by YouTube TV.”
A hundred other public obituaries have said more elegant things than I can about the life and career of Roger Angell. Most say he wrote more like a fan than like a sports-page scribe. More like a writer is what they mean to say.
He didn’t write a million books. As a matter of fact he kind of wrote only one, A Pitcher’s Story, written with another of my other heroes, David Cone. Most of Angell’s books are collections of short stories, and I’ve read them all. Actually I own most of them, and I’m extremely cheap about buying books. Angell didn’t write a ton of books, I suppose, because he did have a day job: fiction editor (among other things) at The New Yorker, the magazine where he worked for something like 62 years. As far as I know only Hugh Hefner can top that one.
Featured, naturally, in Ken Burns’s Baseball, Angell speaks of the game with the same seriousness and joy he brought to the printed page. I believe one can say that about the game itself: seriousness and joy.
And a day in the life of Roger Angell.
LeMahieu-Judge-Rizzo-Stanton-Torres.
Seriously, that’s like Murderer’s Row on ster-
let’s just say it’s a really good start to a lineup.
When that group goes one-for-eighteen and the only two other hits you get are from your eight and nine hitters…
probably not the best game to have on national TV.
Tomorrow would be my dad’s 80th birthday. Funny how as you yourself age the number thought of as “old” increases as well. I used to think 80 was ancient; now it’s closer to eh, my dad would only be 80.
As I’ve noted previously we are all in the business of becoming our parents, and I’m pretty much the poster boy for turning into my own father. Same deal: used to think it awful, but now it’s a solid plan.
I’m near a milestone birthday myself, exactly half of the aforementioned number. I’m pretty much on the Mike O’Connell Sr. program, but with one major difference regarding fathers and sons. It occurred to me only recently that the biggest difference between my dad and me is that when he turned 40 his dad was still around, and would be so for another five years. By the time I’m 45 my dad will have been gone for more than two decades.
Hmph.
That’s your math for today. For some musings, head to today’s episode of Math and Musings.
The new Pokemon Trading Card Game expansion set, Astral Radiance, hits stores May 27. Or May 23. Or this past weekend. Somehow these things find their way into certain stores ahead of official release dates as “pre-releases,” a phrase somewhere between a Buddhist Koan and an oxymoron.
It’s a little bit confusing to me when exactly these cards, of which my son is already enamored, will be available. Oh, you can buy them now and we have. They’ll certainly take your money for a little bit of cardboard. But somehow they don’t become real for a couple weeks, real as in their value in online games or as official currency in the world of Pokemon. They’re not really Pokemon cards; they’re just pieces of cardboard until the gods of Pokemon bestow their virtual blessing.
Get it?
Me either.
Once again I’m a little too literal and a little too 20th century for this world.
Better get my eight year old to explain it to me.
Again.
Most of life is a bore, and you’ve got to filch excitement whenever you can.
Sudden-death overtime in Game 7 of an NHL playoff series?
That’s a sure thing.
Just when I thought hockey and basketball were done for me this year, my childhood heroes of the Garden come through.
Awesome.
Today’s broadcast of Math and Musings is our 50th episode.
An homage to the 50th episode of Politics After Dark, today’s episode takes a nostalgic turn to Binghamton and fifty years of history.
Find that little purple button on your phone and enjoy.
Sunday night was the concluding episode of Winning Time, HBO’s series on the 1980s Lakers. Apparently there will be a Season Two, so let me instead say concluding episode of Season One. (Until today I’d had no idea there would be more than this single set.)
I’ve had mixed feelings about Winning Time since I panned its first episode two months ago. I feel as though it got better, though not necessarily any more true. In fact, as the season went on it seemed to get more and more fictional, and more and more, well, actionable. Though I said some time ago that I hadn’t heard any former Lakers players in arms about their depictions… now I have. And if I were them, yeah, I’d probably be upset. Nobody looks too great in this one, with the possible exception of future commissioner David Stern, ironically one of the few people depicted who can’t sue.
(He’s dead, by the way.)
I guess the thing to remember is that it’s not a documentary, it’s a TV series.
And in the end (or at least the end of this season)… a damn good one.
Friday on Math and Musings I made a cryptic reference to “other things” I had going on this weekend besides the Kentucky Derby and Mother’s Day. I didn’t want to say too much in case it was a flop, but having gone successfully I’ll now make note of Loudoun County’s “Run the Greenway” road race, a soggy affair held Saturday morning along Virginia’s Route 267. Let the record show I never drive on 267 because there’s a toll, but for the novelty of running on this highway I’d brave even the Binghamton-like conditions I encountered.
I never run in bad weather because I never really run in nice weather either. Ain’t my thing anymore. But it was my thing for many years, and like falling off a bicycle you just never forget. I walk up to the starting line and figure I can still do it. Same reason why I never practice the piano. I practiced for like 30 years. Now I pretty much got it.
Running in a road race? If it sounds interesting I’ll do it even in a downpour.
Because I still got it.