Cross-sport considerations and fancies

Wednesday 6/12/24

I'm mildly surprised that Willie Mays has a higher career on base percentage than Hank Aaron. I wouldn't have expected that.

It seems strange now to think that the Kansas City Royals won back-to-back pennants in the last decade and also the World Series that second time.

Mark Price really should be in the basketball Hall of Fame.

My three greatest NFL defenders of all-time: Lawrence Taylor, Reggie White...and Alan Page.

Looking back, I'm struck now by what a ho-hum thing it was for Boston to have two championship teams in 2018.

These Celtics remind me of the 2018 Red Sox in one regard: their best player hasn't been nearly their best player in the postseason and it hasn't mattered because of other players.

Aaron Donald might be my fourth best NFL defender of all-time.

Those Florida Panthers. What are you going to do? They're so hard to play against. You want a level playing field--or sheet of ice--and you want to take on opponents and have them think, "They're so hard to play against." That can mean a lot of things, but one of them is this idea that you don't stop. You just keep coming. You don't cede over an inch. The Panthers have been playing playoff hockey that way. Edmonton isn't done yet, but they certainly have their work cut out for them now. They'll have to take both games in Edmonton to have a shot. Florida isn't a team you're going to win three games in a row against.

I get the feeling that pretty much no one is aware of this and would be apt to doubt that it's true, but Army won three consecutive national championships in football. I have always known this and I think about it because I reflect on how drastically things can change. That was a time period--the mid 1940s--when college football was so much bigger than the professional game. So nationally-speaking, Army was like the Kansas City Chiefs are now as a front-and-center popular football power.

Does any championship NBA team this century receive more left-handed compliments than the 2003-2004 Detroit Pistons? You'd think it was some miracle that they won the way they're discussed and like everyone on the team was some career back-up and it magically came together that one time. They were right there for a while. They went to consecutive Finals. They had two Hall of Fame players, plenty of very good players who were at their best right then. That was a fantastic team. You know who they're similar to? The 1984 Detroit Tigers, strangely--or fittingly--enough.

I consider almost every baseball movie awful except for Pride of the Yankees, The Bad News Bears, and Charlie Brown's All Stars. It borders on the impossible for me to get through the hokum that is Field of Dreams. Charlie Brown's All Stars is the best baseball movie I'd say, and yes I know it was a television special. I think Marcus Aurelius, who obviously wouldn't have known baseball, would have appreciated it. Field of Dreams is like The Shining in that I don't know how a person can take any of it seriously (save that I do). This is why the word codswallop exists. It's not the fantasy thing that bothers me with Field of Dreams, it's how trite it is while dealing a kind of cinematic drug to a certain kind of person. It plays a kind of person who wants to be played because of their own stuff. Lachrymose nostalgia for things that never were. Nostalgia as death-in-life. Defeatist shit for depressed middle aged guys that they call various melodramatic BS things, but that's what it really is. So dishonest as to be disgusting to me.

It's hard for a catcher who throws from his knees not to be cool, especially if he guns down runners and picks people off that way.