On to May

 Someone asked me the other day who I thought was going to win the Indianapolis 500, I guess on account of they thought I knew something about it. This will happen when you covered the Greatest Spectacle for 40 years, and are a certified and somewhat notorious Indy 500 nerd.

(Which I am. Totally. Go ahead, give me a year and I'll tell you who won without looking it up. That is deeply nerdish stuff, friends.)

Anyway, I said, heck, I don't know, which is good news for IndyCar. It means you can't just say "Alex Palou" and be right three-fourths of the time, even though Alex Palou is top dog in IndyCar these days by a considerable margin. He even won the Big One last season, on his way to a fourth IndyCar championship in the last five years.

Here's the thing, though: It was only his first Indy 500 victory.

That's because Indianapolis is a quirky old place, and not just because they'll drop the green on the 110th running of the 500 there in a month or so. It's a quirky place because, for all its age and history, it sometimes behaves with a child-like capriciousness.

Withholds its affections. Punishes the careless/inattentive/arrogant. Makes some people wait and wait and wait some more, while conferring its favor on others when they least expect it.

It's why Mario Andretti, one of the two greatest American racers in history, only won the 500 once in 29 tries.

It's why the two grandees of this IndyCar generation, Scott Dixon and Will Power, have  won the 500 just once each in a combined 41 starts.

It's why Josef Newgarden, a two-time IndyCar champion, went a dozen 500 starts before slamming down the milk -- and then did it two years in a row,

A guy named J.R. Hildebrand had the Spectacle in his pocket one year, only to lose control and hit the wall on the very last corner of the very last lap, allowing the late Dan Wheldon to claim his second 500 win. Louis Schneider, George Robson and Buddy Rice  have their faces on the Borg-Warner Trophy; Michael Andretti, Lloyd Ruby and Dan Gurney do not. 

On and on it goes. One of the most amazing pieces of engineering ever to race at Indy -- the sleek, brutish Novi -- never won there. Ditto the STP turbines. But Coyotes, Chaparrals and Peugeots did.

This year?

Well, it'll be either a Chevy or a Honda, IndyCar having long abandoned the automotive laboratory for comfortable conformity. And who'll take the checkers on Memorial Day weekend?

Take your pick.

Maybe it'll be Kyle Kirkwood, who has one win and five top fives in five races so far this season. Or young David Malukas, who has four top tens. Or, for third time, Newgarden -- who got off to horrible start this year, but has a win and a seventh-place finish in the last two events.

Want someone who's due and then some?

Pato O'Ward's your man. In six 500s, he's finished lower than sixth just one time. In the last five, he's finished second twice, third once and fourth once. In those same five starts, he's led 95 laps. 

Of course, all that means is he could be the next Michael or Ruby or Gurney. Always there, but never, you know, there.

At any rate, it's on to May and Indianapolis. And on to more unhelpfulness from this guy, who knows nothing about the Indy 500 so much as he knows how utterly unknowable it is.

Which is why, when that someone asked who was going to win the 500 this year, I shrugged and said this: 

"Well ... you can never go wrong with Alex Palou."

Now that there's what you call your insight.

The new Cruds

 The New York Mets lost their 11th straight baseball game yesterday, and while it's probably too early to say there's a new chump in town, maybe it isn't. Someone has to inherit the mantle of the '24 Chicago What Sox and the '25 Colorado Rockheads. Why not the Mutts?

Er, Mets?

They're 7-15 now after the Cubs -- The Cubs! First in your hearts, tied for last in the NL Central! -- beat up on 'em in Wrigley Field over the weekend, and in last place in the entire National League. (Even the Rockheads, tied for last in the NL West, have won two more games). They're already eight games behind the front-running Atlanta Braves in the NL East. And did we mention they've lost 11 games in a row?

"Pffft," you're saying now. "That's not so bad. The '25 Rockheads didn't win their seventh game until May 11, by which time they were 7-33. And the '24 What Sox didn't win their seventh game until May 4, when they stood a proud 7-26."

True. It is only April 20, the Blob must concede. And so far no has proved to be as impeccably horrid as the '24 What Sox and '25 Rockheads. The Mutts, er, Mets' 7-15 is as bad as it gets.

On the other hand, to reiterate, it is only April 20. So there's still plenty of time for some truly horrid baseball to be played.

My money's on the Mutts. Er, Mets. Er, the new Cruds, at least so far.

Ageless wonder

 Look, I don't care what you think of LeBron James. I don't care if you think he's a flopper, a whiner, soft as single-ply or (the big one) Not Michael Jordan. I don't care about any of that.

What I do care about is what a wonder of nature he is.

What I care about is what he did last night, when -- at 41 years and 110 days of age, in his 23rd NBA season, after 1,914 games -- he once again put his team on his back and (along with Luke Kennard and his 27 points) got them a W.

With Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves on the shelf for the Los Angeles Lakers, LeBron delivered 19 points, 13 assists, eight rebounds, two steals and a block for the Los Angeles Lakers last night. He played 38 minutes and turned it over just twice. Eight of his assists came in the first quarter, when the Lakers shot 78.9 percent (15-of-19) to forge a 33-29 lead.

Fourteen of  their 15 field goals in that quarter came off assists. It got them started on a 107-98 win that gave the Lakers a 1-0 lead in their first-round playoff series with the Houston Rockets.

"I got to do a little bit of everything," James said when it was done. "It's what the job requires."

Even now. Even at 41 years and 110 days of age.

Associations

 It was all over the news the other day that radio giant Bob Kevoian had died after a long battle with cancer, and right away I noticed the redbud was blooming and the grass had come in thick and green, and how there are days now, more than just one, when the mercury tilts past 75 degrees in the afternoons.

Weird, the associations your brain makes. They are visceral and textural and do not intersect in any sort of geometry known to mathematicians or academics.

And so when I heard the news about Bob Kevioan -- one half of the legendary "Bob & Tom Show" -- I didn't think of seventh-grade boy humor, or Chick andr Christy Lee, or Duke Tumatoe's latest update of "Lord Help Our Colts." No, sirree.

I thought that it's mid-April, and we're just a couple of weeks from May.

I thought it's only a handful of days now until the temple of American motorsports opens its gates again, and a century-plus of ghosts and memories and legend will echo again to the whine of racing engines. Alex Palou, Pato O'Ward and Josef Newgarden 'n' them will be adding to their own legends. They'll be running the infield road course, and, later, on Memorial Day weekend, it'll be "Gentlemen and ladies start your engines" and "Back Home Again In Indiana" and the flyover and 300,000 humans turning the Indianapolis Motor Speedway into a decent-sized city.

It'll be May, and the Indianapolis 500.

And where do Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold fit into all this?

They'll provide the soundtrack (laugh track?) for the whole ancient spectacle, or at least the parody soundtrack. Who could forget "I'm Just A Mario"? Or "The 500 Song" by Heywood Banks? Or "A Song For Dick" by Tammy Whynot, in which a woman laments drawing Dick Simon (a perennial back-marker as a driver) in the annual 500 betting pool?

I got "Dick"-ed again,

I picked Dick to win ...

Ah, memories.

Deja lose all over again

 Time now to look in on LIV golf, which is, in fact, still going, despite rumors that it had become the sasquatch of golf tours -- i.e., occasionally glimpsed but never verified.

Well, forget that noise. Sasquatch lives. It's down there in Mexico City this week, playing in front of a gallery of dozens and somewhere in the tangled wilderness of cable/streaming service TV.

It is, as the saying goes, not dead yet. But it's definitely made out the will and checked into hospice.

This upon the news that the Saudi group who threw truckloads of money at mid-list golfers apparently have decided continuing to do so is not a wise investment strategy. So it's looking for an exit strategy.

To those of us with longer memories than most, this does not surprise, because we've seen it before. It's deja lose all over again.

In other words, it's time to re-acquaint ourselves with the Chicago Fire, the Philadelphia Bell and the Birmingham Americans, among others.

They were teams in the World Football League, brainchild of a man named Gary Davidson, who was instrumental in launching the American Basketball Association and the World Hockey League. The ABA and WHA were ultimately successful enough to put three or four of their teams into the NBA and NHL. Davidson figured the WFL could do the same with the NFL.

And so, like the Saudis with LIV golf 49 years before them, Davidson and Co. decided to open the cashbox back in 1974. Like LIV with the PGA, they shoveled mountains of green at both established NFL stars and not-so-established NFL stars. Like LIV, they ... well, overspent, shall we say.

The Memphis Southmen raided the Miami Dolphins for Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield. Calvin Hill and Craig Morton signed with Hawaii and Houston, respectively. Ken Stabler signed with the Americans, and Daryle Lamonica with the Southern California Sun.

Eventually, the WFL claimed to have 60 NFL players under contract. Most of those, however, were future contracts; Stabler and Lamonica, for instance, weren't committed to play for the Americans and the Sun until the 1975 season. Ditto Csonka, Kiick and Warfield, who signed to play in '75 for the then-outrageous sum of $3.5 million. But the WFL came apart at the seams midway through that season, all its lofty plans dying in a sea of red ink.

And now, LIV golf, which began with similar fanfare and hubris in 2023. The new tour gave Jon Rahm a reported $300 million to jump from the PGA after Rahm won the Masters. It signed then-53-year-old Phil Mickelson for $138 million, Brooks Koepka for $130 mill, Bryson DeChambeaut for $125 mill and Dustin Johnson for $125 mill. It even gave a guy named Talor Gooch $70 mill to come to the LIV side.

Talor Gooch is 34 years old. He has a world ranking of 967. His lone PGA Tour victory came in 2021 at Sea Island, Ga., and, in 124 PGA events, he missed the cut 43 times.

But the Saudis paid him ginormous sums anyway. And for the money, Gooch and the others got to play in out-of-the-way places in what amounted to a glorified exhibition circuit: No cut, 54-hole events, guaranteed paychecks for everyone.

But down-market TV coverage, and down-market venues. No Augusta National. No Pinehurst No. 2. No Doral, Pebble Beach, etc., etc.

Little wonder the viewership numbers have been so miniscule.

Little wonder the moneymen are therefore thinking of bailing.

Little wonder that Gary Davidson, who's 91 years old these days, is no doubt shaking his head somewhere right now, and muttering, "Damn fools."

The weight of appearances, Part Deux

 Dianna Russini resigned from The Athletic this week, on account of she could no longer do her job as an NFL insider without some drooling hack on social media obsessing over her like a hormonal seventh-grade boy. 

Mike Vrabel, meanwhile did not resign as head coach of the New England Patriots, on account of he's the reigning NFL Coach of the Year and the supply chain tends to run thin in that area.

This should surprise absolutely no one.

It is, after all, the way of the world, and has been since Adam blamed Eve for that apple thing. In any unseemly -- or seemingly unseemly -- interaction between men and women, it's almost always the latter who take the hardest hits. The shame, not to say the consequences, are largely theirs. It's such a given after all these millennia the unfairness of it rarely elicits more than a shrug.

"Yeah, the woman loses her job and the man keeps his," is the prevailing sentiment. "And water is wet and fire is hot. What else is new?"

This is not to say there are never consequences for the guys, too, or that they don't occasionally get shown the street. But the second acts for them seem to come much more readily than for the woman in the (in)equation.

None of this, mind you, is to defend Russini or her judgment as a journalist. Whatever her relationship was with Vrabel -- and, listen, the assumption that she and Vrabel must have been knocking boots is merely that, an assumption -- it pretty clearly crossed the tricky line between source and buddy. And, fairly or unfairly, it was mostly Russini who had the most to lose by crossing it.

She was, or is, damn good at her job, after all. If credibility is the coin of the realm for a journalist, she had a truckload. And nowhere is that more valuable, for a woman, than in Sportsball World.

Neanderthals still roam freely there, after all, emboldened these days by the comeback of misogyny in this retrograde America of ours. And so occasionally they'll surface on the Great Intertoob Thingy wondering why these wimmin' are on their teevees talkin' about sports instead of, you know, in the kitchen makin' their man a sammich.

A hard dollar for sure, bucking that sort of headwind. When I came into the biz, for example, Melissa Ludtke of the New York Times was still suing to get into the locker room. Press boxes and sports departments were almost exclusively male. And very few of us wondered why that was so, or what it must have been like for the first women we encountered in those press boxes and sports departments.

Pretty damn lonely, I imagine. Pretty damn intimidating, too, what with all the whispers and innuendo that, when a woman ascended the newsroom ladder, it must have been because she slept with someone -- not because of her talent.

Now it's all these years later, I'm retired, and I can't count the number of talented women with whom it was my privilege to share press boxes and newsrooms. And yet, all these years later, some things never seem to change.

This fall, Mike Vrabel will be coaching the New England Patriots.

Diane Russini will be doing ... something. 

So it goes.

Cruds alert!*

 (*Well, sort of)

Baseball is a strange game.

It giveth, it taketh away, and, sometimes, it rains. Think about it.

"Hey, no fair stealing from Nuke LaLoosh!" you're saying now.

OK, OK. But I'm looking at what happened in the major leagues yesterday, and the weirdness jumped up and smacked me right in the gob.

Over here was Garrett Crochet of the Boston Red Sox, who finished second in the AL Cy Young voting last season but pitched more like Neil Young last night. And over here were my very own Pittsburgh Cruds, who are being disturbingly un-Cruddy at the moment.

Let's start with Crochet.

Who pitched a typical gem until, I don't know, his opening delivery against the Minnesota Twins, who lit him up like a Roman candle in a 13-6 bashing of the Bosox. In just an inning and two-thirds before manager Alex Cora mercifully removed his bullet-riddled remains, Crochet gave up 11 runs -- 10 earned -- and nine hits. He walked three, hit a batter, and had zero strikeouts for the first time in his 68 career starts.

In the first inning, Crochet gave up four hits on 31 pitches. In the second, he gave up seven more.

"Wow, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Have you ever seen anything like that before?"

Well as a matter of fact ...

Let's examine what the Cruds did last night.

What they did was rap out 16 hits and 16 runs in a 16-5 drubbing of the Washington Nationals, and now they're 10-6 and a game clear in the NL Central. And by "a game clear" I do not mean a game clear of their ancestral home in the division cellar.

No, sir. I mean a game clear of the Reds, the Brewers, the Cardinals and the Cubs. I mean they're in first place, with the second-best record in the entire National League as of this morning.

Paul Skenes is doing Paul Skenes things, giving up one hit and one run with six punch-outs in six innings last night. Leadoff hitter Oneal Cruz was 2-for-3, scored three runs and drove in three. Brandon Lowe (4-for-5, five RBI) and Brian Reynolds (3-for-4, four RBI) drove in nine runs between them, and five Pittsburghers collected at least two hits.

Too weird. Like, you know, Donald-Trump-as-Jesus weird.

And before you say anything, yes, I get it: It's only mid-April. Garrett Crochet, whose ERA is 7.58 right now, could win his next ten games and strike out eleventy-hundred batters in a row while doing it. My Cruds could remember who they are and begin an inexorable crawl toward the old last-place homestead. All things are possible in such an upside-down, inside-out universe.

I mean, when I looked at the standings this morning, I saw that the hideous Colorado Rockheads have already won six games, and are merely tied for last in the NL West with the San Francisco Giants. And the woeful Chicago What Sox, even though they're last in the AL Central as always, are actually playing .500 ball over their last ten games.

Not even Trump Jesus is that weird.