Whole new thing

 Well, isn't this just the world turned cattywampus.

Remember back in the day -- and I mean really back in the day -- when college hoopers of a certain refinement could declare something called "hardship" and enter the NBA draft before their college eligibility ran out?

Didn't really matter whether the hardship was actually hardship (though in a lot of cases it was). It was a slick little loophole for players to escape the collegiate plantation and start drawing a hefty paycheck for doing what they were good at. And a lot of guys did that.

Bound forward over an Everest of years and a foothill of decades, change "guys" to "gals", and check out what's happening here in the year of our Lord 2025.

Seems the women are declaring anti-hardship. Or something very like it.

In the last week, a couple of them with college eligibility still to run have decided to stick around campus -- some campus, anyway -- for another year rather than enter the WNBA draft. And this despite the fact both players were likely to be lottery picks in said draft.

The first, Notre Dame guard Olivia Miles, was projected to be the No. 2 pick in the draft and ship out for Seattle and the Storm. She's decided to enter the transfer portal instead, on account of she can probably make more money next season via NIL deals than the Storm would be willing or able to pay her.

And the second player to announce she's foregoing the WNBA?

That would be LSU guard Flau'Jae Johnson, also a virtual lottery lock, who was last seen scoring 28 points for the 3-seed Tigers in their Elite Eight loss to top-seeded UCLA. This season she averaged 18.6 points and was a third-team All-America.

But she's got a cozy NIL deal with Unrivaled which includes equity in Unrivaled's 3-on-3 league, which just concluded its inaugural season. This, again, almost surely makes her more financially secure than any WNBA team could make her. So Johnson will stick around Baton Rouge or wherever for another year, because the WNBA will still be around next year and, if Johnson has another stickout season, her draft status will likely rise still further.

This of course knocks the whole concept of "turning pro" into a cocked hat, because Miles and Johnson and college players of their stature have already turned pro in everything but name.  The NCAA so botched the NIL and transfer portal rollout that virtually every college kid who can hit the J or bang the glass is a perpetual free agent, jumping from one school to another to another in an unending search for the chunkier deal.

It's a model that simply isn't sustainable, and everyone knows it. It remains only for the schools to finally admit their "student-athletes" really are paid employees after all, and start signing them to contracts the way they would some hotshot coach.

Now, I don't know if two players opting to stay in college because the potential money's better constitutes a trend, but it kinda feels like it. And in a backassward sort of way, it lends weight to WNBA player complaints that they are grotesquely underpaid in light of the league's Caitlin Clark-fueled explosion. 

That they are grotesquely underpaid is beyond debate; Clark, the driving force behind the WNBA's surge in popularity, will make just over $78,000 this year to play for the Indiana Fever. The average NBA player is making just shy of $12 million -- or not quite 154 times more.

This is not to say WNBA players should be paid what NBA players are paid; even Clark admits that's ridiculous. But it is saying they should be paid more than they are.

Especially when a potential lottery pick can decide to "stay in school" and make more money.

World turned cattywampus. Oh, you bet.

Cruds and stuff

 We're officially one week into the baseball season, and that means it's as good a time as any for our first Cruds Alert of the new campaign. And there is both exciting news and no news at all on that fr-

Hey, where are you going? 

(Background noise of desks being pushed back, hurried footsteps, panicked cries of "No! Not the stupid Pirates!" and "Run for your lives before he says 'Buccos' again!")

Oh, relax. This isn't about my Buccos.

Well. Not entirely.

I will say the "no news at all" part of today's report is that my Cruds have already moved into their accustomed digs in the NL Central, which is to say the cellar. At 2-5, they're a half-game adrift of the next-to-last Brewers. Of course, they're also just 2.5 games out of first, which means the division title is still in reach.

OK, so no. No, it probably isn't.

But you know what?

There is exciting news in Crudville. As promised.

That's because the Chicago What Sox, the worst baseball team in modern history last season, are off to a glittering 2-4 start. This means that, after an entire week, they're tied for first in the AL Central. Giddy joy is presumably unrestrained on the south side.

Then again ...

Then again, the What Sox are also tied for last place in the Central. This is because everyone in the division is 2-4. Heck, if Connie Mack came back from the dead and brought his old Philadelphia A's with him, they'd probably be 2-4.

At that, they'd still be a game better than the Colorado Rockies, who were the worst team in the National League last year and apparently no better this year. The Rockies are 1-4 and already five-and-a-half games out of first in the NL West, where the grotesquely loaded Dodgers are 8-0 and probably headed for a 160-win season or something. 

So who's the Cruddiest of the Cruds right now?

Surprisingly, it's the Atlanta Braves, who are off to an 0-7 start and likely wondering what  happened to all that tall cotton in which they used to be awash. The Phillies are already five games clear of them, and the Marlins, of all people, are four games ahead of them. 

The Marlins! Who lost an even 100 games last year.

The baseball gods are cruel.

Rumor milled

Look, we all know what social media is. It's that nice thing we can't have because some thoughtless gomer tracked mud all over it, or smeared it with his or her greasy fingerprints, or used it as as a shop rag to wipe 10W30 off his/her hands.

"But that was my favorite Whitesnake tee!" you cry.

 "So?" the gomers reply.

This is kind of what they're saying to Mary Kate Cornett right now.

If you don't know her name, it's because there's no reason you should, but of course that's not the way the social media hellsphere works. People do know her name now, and it's all because the gomers decided her life was their business. They decided to wipe their hands on it, and now she's that ruined Whitesnake tee and wants to know what she did to deserve this.

The answer, of course, is nothing.

The answer is Mary Kate Cornett was just an 18-year-old freshman at Ole Miss until she started dating a certain BMOC, and a handful of troglodytes started spreading vile, baseless rumors (i.e.: blatant lies) about her. That's just what some people do, and, no, I don't know why. Because the world is over-served with  asshats, I suppose.

I mean, just look at the collection of insufferable clods running the show in Washington these days. Talk about Asshat Central.

Anyway, the rumors/lies would have been bad enough for Ms. Cornett had they just been confined to campus. But then the social media gomers got hold of them, and, being the Junior Fire Marshal journos they imagine themselves to be ("We got badges and everything!"), decided a college freshman's private life was Big Honkin' News.

So here was Pat McAfee of ESPN, a gomer first-class, yapping about it on his widely listened to/watched show. And two guys from Barstool Sports, that bastion of oafish seventh-grade-boy misogyny. And an ESPN St. Louis radio host. And former NFL wide receiver/certified loon Antonio Brown, another gomer first-class.

The Barstool Sports guys were a couple of yapping poodles who go by the online handles Jack Mac and KFC. The St. Louis poodle was Doug Vaughn. Just to get their names out there.

Thanks to them, but mostly thanks to McAfee, Mary Kate Cornett has been thoroughly rumor milled, with predictable results. Asshat America, remember? 

And so she started getting mail calling her a slut and a whore, surprise, surprise. Was moved into emergency housing and switched to online classes because of the harassment.  Her family's home was even "swatted" -- i.e., someone called in a false report that brought the police SWAT unit to their door.

All because McAfee and the rest of the gomers thought her business was their business.

Now Cornett and her family are thinking about dropping a lawsuit on McAfee's head, and by proxy on ESPN's. In a fair world they'd win and lighten a few wallets, but, again, it's not a fair world. That's because the phrase "social media" includes the word "media."

One of the most nefarious things the gomers have done, see, is blur the line between what is mere entertainment, and what is the legitimate gathering of news. The gomers tap-dance on either side of that line, and they're pretty slick about it -- slick enough that they can defend themselves by claiming any salacious rumors they were amplifying were legitimate news because of Mary Kate Cornett's connection to a legitimate news personage, and how about that First Amendment, boys and girls?

You see the problem here. They're not really media in the traditional sense, all these yapping poodles, but in 2025 the traditional sense no longer applies. If the Pat McAfees cannot in any way be regarded as newsmen, the blurring of that aforementioned line allows them to operate within the newsman's framework.

No matter how poorly the newsman's hat fits them. And with what reckless disregard they wear it.

Inhospitable

 Saw a post (actually a re-post) from a friend of mine yesterday in which someone named Mike Rothschild asked a very good question on the Magic X Twitter Thingy, and I wish I had an answer for it.

Or rather, an answer that's different from the obvious one.

The question Mr. Rothschild asks, see, alludes to the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games, both of which are scheduled to happen on American soil. Mr. Rothschild wonders what would possess any international athletes or fans from other countries to come to America for either, given that America is not really America anymore but some fear-and-loathing hellscape dreamed up by a delusional old man and his grasping billionaire henchmen.

Or to put it another way: We ain't exactly down these days with holding up lamps for the huddled masses. 

More likely the lamps are torches and come with a side of pitchforks, standard accessories for a mob driven buggy by the paranoid fantasies of the delusional old man. This is hardly an un-blazed path in our beloved nation, sadly; the arc of our history might eventually bend toward justice, but it has also bent far too often toward bigotry, ignorance and plain old jackbooted thuggery.

And so lately we've been revoking visas and green cards and disappearing their holders until hell won't have it -- do not pass go; do not collect due process. This is not happening, mind you, because the holders are all hardened criminals threatening your family and mine. Mostly they're tourists and students who came here from overseas to become doctors, scientists, researchers and the like, and who wound up being abducted in broad daylight, shoved into unmarked vans by masked men and shipped off to some gulag in El Salvador or the American south.

Their crime: Expressing opinions that displeased the delusional old man and his Regime. 

Or having the wrong tattoo. Or the wrong surname. Or signing the wrong editorial. You know, all the things that will get you in trouble in a (cough, cough) freedom-loving nation.

Still, it's gotten bad enough in this (cough, cough) freedom-loving nation that some foreign governments are warning their citizenry to stay away from us, because, well, you don't know if you'll come back. There's perhaps a bit of over-the-top performance art in these warnings, but then again perhaps not.

Which gets us back to Mr. Rothschild's question: Why would any foreign athlete or visitor want to come to a place that's become so demonstrably inhospitable to foreigners? 

The aforementioned obvious answer is they wouldn't. In fact, how many of the participants might just to decide to boycott the World Cup or Olympics altogether? 

"Oh, that's just silly, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "We've not gone so far down the paranoia rabbit hole that we'd whisk some Iranian wrestler or Venezuelan fencer off to Stalag 17 for waving his country's flag in a threatening manner. It would create a huge international incident, for one thing."

Fair point.

On the other hand, this assumes the delusional old man would behave rationally, a bet not even Vegas would take at this point. Besides, why would you think the old man and the rest of his America First crowd would care about an international incident? What in anything they've done these past ten weeks suggests they'd give a damn about what anyone else in the world thought? 

Detain some other country's athlete or fan? Why not?

If they don't like it, let 'em eat tariffs.

Torpedo this

I'm sure former University of Michigan prof Aaron Leanhardt knows more about physics than I would if I loved to be 200, but I think he's wrong, wrong, wrong. OK, so mostly wrong, then.

What Leanhardt said the other day about the torpedo bat, which he's credited with developing, is it's not his baby that's making baseballs jump out of the yard like scalded cats. It's the man wielding the thing.

"It's about the batter, not the bat," he says.

Yeah, well. I think it's about both.

I think the torpedo bat -- an odd-looking cudgel with the weight shifted toward the end, making it resemble either a bowling pin or, yes, a torpedo -- is like feeding steroids to your  Louisville Slugger. In other words, it's a performance-enhancer every bit as stat-skewing as the exotics with which players were shooting themselves up back at the turn of the century. 

I know, I know. This is codger-speak of the most flagrant sort.

But I say it after watching Aaron Judge and the New York Yankees make a joke of the game over the weekend, using the torpedo bat to mash 15 home runs in three wins over the Milwaukee Brewers -- including an astounding nine in one game. And I say it after Elly De La Cruz of the Reds, who surely doesn't need the help, used a torpedo bat to drive in seven runs the other night with a single, a double and a pair of dingers.

Mind you, this is not to ignore the fact baseball has devolved into a mash-or-nothing enterprise. That's the game now, and I get that. I also get there are practitioners of that game who can send rockets into orbit on the regular without the aid of enhanced weaponry.

And I also, also get it's not just baseball whose parameters change with the equipment of the times. In golf, for instance, Scottie Scheffler isn't exactly whacking gutta perchas around with a Harry Vardon mashie anymore. He's doing it with lab-engineered balls and composite drivers with clubheads the size of New Jersey. 

All of which has changed the game, and not necessarily for the good. More and more golf courses, it seems, are defenseless against better players with better training regimens and better sticks -- to the point where, at the Houston Open over the weekend, it took a closing 67 and a 20-under 72-hole score for Min Woo Lee to bring home the W.

Two of his pursuers, Gary Woodland and Sami Valimaki, shot 62s on Sunday. Scheffler carded a 63. Fourteen players shot 65 or better.

As for baseball ...

Well. I could see the torpedo bat -- plus the player wielding it -- turning the record books into kindling. Just as 300-yard drives in golf provoke more yawns than gasps these days, the torpedo bat could render the 60-homer season no big thing anymore. Or that could just be the codger-ly alarmist in me shouting at the kids on the lawn again.

What I do know is this: If the torpedo bat in the hands of an Aaron Judge or an Elly De La Cruz continues to be as absurdly deadly a weapon as it was in baseball's opening weekend, MLB might eventually have to weigh in. And, being MLB, however it does that will surely displease as many folks as it pleases.

Me? 

I just wish the torpedo bat had been around when I was a kid. Woulda made all my strikeouts much more impressive.

Century marks

 Today in this locale WOWO radio celebrates its 100th birthday, and again I'm in Vermont on a crystal clear winter's night, twirling the dial in the old late-model conveyance. Nine hundred spins past and then 1000 and then 1100, and right before 1200 comes up the voice of Bob Chase suddenly booms out at me from across the Green Mountains and 750 miles.

"AAAND HERE COMES WILLETT INTO THE ZONE ..."

Fort Wayne Komets hockey, by god. Chaser barking the play-by-play as if he were riding shotgun with me beneath a spray of stars flung like diamonds against the night sky.

That's what I think of when I think of WOWO, back when it was still those mighty 50,000 watts and went all across the eastern half of the nation.

People in North Carolina and Ontario and, yes, Vermont knew Bob Chase and Komet hockey, because of WOWO. Young girls danced barefoot on a West Virginia road to its music. The late great Atlanta Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard even mentioned it obliquely in one of his pieces, writing about hearing a hockey game in Fort Wayne, In. one night.

If you knew nothing else about the Fort, you at least knew WOWO. It made the city far more recognizable within a far larger orbit than it ever would have been otherwise.

And now it's 100 years old, and God bless it. Went on the air in 1925, when the Klan ran Indiana and even its governor wore the sheet and hood. It was a dark time, and there were darker times ahead -- the crash of '29, the Great Depression that followed, two young black men hanging from a tree in Marion like Billie Holliday's strange fruit -- and then would come World War II and telegrams freighted with heartache arriving from places of which no one had ever heard: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Bastogne.

WOWO was around for all of it. And of course much, much more.

If you grew up here and are of a certain age, WOWO was the voice of your mornings, especially when winter put its foot down and the snow piled up. That's when Bob Sievers would read off the school closings, either gladdening your heart or gently breaking the bad news that, yes, you'd best be headin' for the bus stop.

Jay Gould would be there with him, giving us the hog and soybean futures. Dugan Fry, too, later on. And of course Nancy Lee and the Hilltoppers would provide the musical accompaniment, singing endlessly about that Little Red Barn on a farm down in Indiana.

Now it's all these years later, a whole century of them, and so much is different, surprise, surprise. Bob Chase is gone and the Komets come to us from another station these days. The 50,000 watts are gone, too, WOWO having powered down a good space of years ago. And, like so many other AM entities across the last 30 or 40 years, it's become a megaphone for hard-right politics and the purveyors of same.

From Nancy Lee and the Hilltoppers to Joe Rogan and the like: Now there's a long and winding road for ya.

And yet ...

And yet, few threads run through this city's last 100 years the way WOWO 1190 AM does. Few trace memories of a particular time in this particular place are not informed by it. If it has reached the century mark of its existence, it has just as surely left a century of indelible marks on this city. Fort Wayne's tapestry would not be complete without it.

Nor would a certain long-ago night in Vermont, beneath those stars like diamonds.

Onesies

 And now a salute to chalk, on its special day.

Chalk is what you grew up with in elementary school, lying there in its little tray at the bottom of the blackboard. It's what you wrote math problems with in front of the whole class, and what you got them wrong with in front of the whole class. Chalk is what you had to break in half when it was new, or else it would send up an almighty squeak when you tried to write with it.

Chalk dust is what you banged out of the erasers when it was your turn to bang the erasers together. It's what turned your fingers white or yellow or green or blue. And it's what will be all over San Antonio next weekend, when the NCAA's Chalk Four convenes to decide who's best at putting a round ball through a round hoop.

"Wait, I thought it was the Final Four, not the Chalk Four," you're saying now.

Well, yes. And no. And on second thought (or third), yes, because it's actually both.

That's because all four No. 1 seeds are still standing in Da Tournament, which makes this the chalkiest March since 2008, the only other time the Final Four was an all-onesie party. March Madness? The hell is that? The only thing less mad than this March is the March of Dimes, or maybe a good old John Phillips Sousa march.

Here's how predictable (aka, boring) this has been: In two of the four Elite Eight games, all of which involved 1s, 2s and 3s seeding-wise, 1-seed Houston paved 2-seed Tennessee by 19 and 1-seed Duke washed 2-seed Alabama by 20. And in the third of the four games, 1-seed Auburn never trailed after jetting out to a 23-8 lead on 2-seed Michigan State, who eventually expired by six.

Only 3-seed Texas Tech kept the weekend from being a total sleep aid, leading 1-seed Florida by nine with 2:55 to play. But then Thomas Haugh bottomed a pair of threes and Walter Clayton Jr. scored eight points in the last 1:47, and the Gators survived, 84-79.

Now they'll get Auburn for the second time this season, while Duke faces Houston. The Blue Devils are the Final Four betting favorite, on account of their average margin of victory in Da Tournament so far is a nail-biting 23.4 points.

Speaking of, you know, boring.

Hopefully, Houston can beat that 23.4-point spread against the Dukies. Hopefully, Florida-Auburn replicates Florida-Texas Tech. 

Although the first time the two met this season, Florida won by nine. At Auburn.

Ah, well.