Child's play

 Meanwhile, in Formula One ...

They ran again Sunday at history-thick Monaco, and guess who won F1's most famously glittering event?

No, not Max Verstappen. The four-time world champion's engine took a dump as soon as the staging lights winked out, leaving him sitting on the grid while everyone else roared away without him. Finally got it going enough to limp around for one lap before retiring the car, extending what has been an ugly season for him.

"OK, so Lando Norris, then? Oscar Piastri?" you're saying now.

Nope. The McLaren jockeys finished fourth (Piastri) and DNF (Norris), not at all what you'd expect from a team that dominated F1 a year ago.

"Lewis Hamilton? Charles Leclerc? One of those Esteban Ocons or Pierre Gaslys?"

No, no, and ... no.

It was Kimi Antonelli in his Mercedes.

Won from the pole. Won his fifth straight Grand Prix, out of six contested so far. Leads Hamilton and his Ferrari by 66 points in the title chase, and teammate George Russell by 67.

Oh, and did we mention he's just 19 years old?

"Oh, come on," you're saying now. "A 19-year-old going all Verstappen/Hamilton/Michael Schumacher on everyone? Really?"

Yes, really. He's 19. Looks even younger. Plucked from the litter at 18 by team principle Toto Wolff and placed in seven-time world champion Hamilton's old seat. Now he's making child's play out of the most technologically demanding racing series in the world instead of, I don't know, getting ready for the prom or something.

There he was again on the podium Sunday, giving everyone a champagne bath as the youngest Monaco winner in history. Even his predecessor -- the previous youngest winner -- saw fit to salute the young Italian.

"That's a lot of wins, buddy, you're catching me up, man!" joked Hamilton, who finished a distant second this time around.

Well ... not yet, Lewis. But give the kid time.

Which he has a lot of, obviously.

 

The right Tempo

 Maybe you missed it in all the other weekend sporting life, but they ran the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga two days ago, and Golden Tempo won again for trainer Cherie DeVaux. That made it two legs out of three in the Triple Crown for Golden Tempo, and two out of three for DeVaux, the first woman trainer ever to do that.

Know what was the best part of it all, though?

Golden Tempo came from nowhere to win it. Again.

In the Kentucky Derby, if you recall, he was dead last at the head of the stretch before getting on his, well, horse and galloping past the entire to field to nip Renegade at the wire. Saturday was an instant replay: Golden Tempo was at the back of the field before hauling ass down the stretch again to beat Commandment by a nose.

Two races; two immortal stretch runs. And now the Blob is wondering, in its usual cattywampus way, what the horsie set could have done to offer Golden Tempo a real challenge. 

OK, so we got the usual buttload of horses here for the Derby. We'll bring in an extra gate to load 'em into. 

Except for you, Golden Tempo. You start across the river in, I don't know, Seymour or someplace.

Or ...

OK, so we got nine horses for the Belmont here at Saratoga, including Golden Tempo and the odds-on favorite Renegade.

Renegade gets to start with all the others. Golden Tempo, we're sending you across the state line to Vermont. You start from Montpelier.

Now that would be a stretch run.

Good craziness

 I don't know where Lord Stanley is in the Great Forever After, but I'm guessing he'd welcome a stiff shot of some well-aged scotch about now. It's a pretty safe bet the tussle for his Cup hasn't gone easy on the old aristocratic nervous system so far, because it hasn't on anyone else's, either.

This after the Vegas Golden Knights took a two-games-to-one lead in the Stanley Cup Final last night, but not before giving everyone on the Strip the vapors. The Knights led 4-0 in the second period after Mitch Marner collected the fastest hat trick in Final history -- three goals in six minutes and 10 seconds, beating Rocket Richard's 69-year-old record by 11 seconds -- only to see Carolina storm back with four straight goals to force overtime.

It only took two OTs for Vegas to finally win 5-4, and of course that wasn't ordinary, either. Shea Theodore got credit for the goal after Carolina's Jordan Martinook inadvertently banked it in off goaltender Brandon Bussi's skate.

Craziness. But not the sort iconoclastic journalist Hunter Thompson used to call "bad craziness"; this was good craziness, as in "Man, that was crazy. Let's see some more."

More than likely, we will, if the first three Final games are any signpost. The last two games have gone to overtime; in each of the first three games, someone has blown a multi-goal lead.

In Game 1, it was Carolina, who led 2-0 early before losing 4-3. In Game 2, it was Vegas, who led 2-0 with 10:20 to play before Carolina scored three goals in less than five minutes, Vegas tied it, and Carolina won 4-3 in overtime.

Last night it was Vegas blowing the lead again, only to save the W on the flukiest of bounces.

Great stuff. Legendary stuff, even. And exactly the stuff everyone was predicting for this Final, which features two teams who, if not mirror images of one another, are as evenly matched as you're likely to see.

And so: More craziness, please. And another shot for Lord Stanley.

Crossing the (state) line

 Well, now they've gone and done it. Crossed the Rubicon, if you will -- or at least almost, kinda-sorta, pretty much something like it.

Yesterday, see, the  board of directors of the Chicago Bears voted for the first time on a new stadium site, and came out in favor of a proposed site on the other side of the state line. And so, welcome to the Chicago Bears of Hammond, everyone. 

Maybe. Kinda-sorta.

I say this because nothing's a done deal until someone touches a pen to the bottom line, and no one has yet done that in this Bears-to-Hammond deal. Until that happens, a vote by the board of directors and a bunch of happy talk from Bears president George McCaskey and CEO Kevin Warren is just play-acting to squeeze the Illinois lege and governor JB Pritzker.

In the meantime, though ...

Well. It does sound like the Bears are serious about this. I'll give 'em that.

"We believe a world-class stadium project in Hammond will transform the region, connecting Northwest Indiana and the South Side of Chicago though the Loop and across the neighborhoods and suburbs stretching north of the city," McCaskey and Warren said in a statement.

All that sounds great, except there's no stadium yet, and no surrounding village of bars and restaurants and high-end hotels, and no special parking next to the stadium for the muckety-mucks. Also no shuttle service for the unwashed masses in their Urlacher and Bobby Douglass jerseys who'll be parking in, I don't know, Munster or Griffith perhaps.

(For the low, low price of 30 bucks a head, no doubt.)

Anyway, with the Illinois lege gone until fall, and having again futzed away the spring session without moving on this, Indiana looks like it's won this. That it's done so because our own Guv, Mike Braun, promised the Bears everything but streets paved in taxpayer gold is just the way this sort of bidness gets done, disgusting as that is.

The Blob's position on this is if the Bears want a new stadium, the Bears should pay for it. They're an anchor franchise in the most lucrative sporting conglomerate in America, so it's not like they haven't got the money. Freeloading off the taxpayers for a development study after study has shown has limited long-term economic impact should be strictly verboten.

Yes, and pigs should be able to fly, do barrel-rolls and land at O'Hare on Sunday afternoons. Believe me, I get that.

So here comes Mike Braun with an armload of tax breaks and other incentives, and here are the Bears following established tradition -- i.e., he who fleeces Joe Taxpayer hardest gets the cheese. Lucrative sports franchises have been playing off one municipality against another since the Dodgers and Giants lit out for California 70 years ago. They call it leveraging; the rest of us just call it what it is, which is blackmail.

So there's plenty of precedent. And for those who think it's beyond weird that the Bears would abandon Chicago for some godforsaken patch of land in, ugh, Indiana ... well, New York lost the Jets and football Giants to a godforsaken patch land in New Jersey decades ago. 

The Commanders play in Maryland, not Washington. The 49ers play in Santa Clara, not San Francisco. And so on.

The Chicago Bears playing in Hammond, Indiana?

Oh, hell. Why not?

The First Fan. No, really.

 The President of the United States has accepted an invite to attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals in New York, and, listen, the Blob is fine with that. Anything that takes Fearless Leader away from policy decisions is aces high with me.

And, OK, so that was snarky. This, however, is not: At least F.L. is legit.

He's a New Yorker, for one thing, and as such has lived and (mostly) died with the Knicks for a long time. According to NBA commish Adam Nosferatu Silver, Fearless Leader used to regularly attend the NBA Draft in Madison Square Garden, and once even had a cameo in an NBA promotional video.

So, yeah. He's a Knicks fan with receipts, as the current lingo goes.

Not gonna lie. I find that refreshing.

I find it refreshing because when politicians and legislators make forays into Sportsball World, it generally ends poorly. John Kerry, when he was running for president in 2004, famously said "How about those Buckeyes?" in an Ohio-Michigan border enclave that turned out to be heavily pro-Wolverines. Hillary Clinton, a lifelong Cubs fan, donned a Yankees cap when she was running for office in New York. Numerous other examples exist.

Donald John "Do What We Say Or We'll Bomb You Back To The Stone Age" Trump is not one of them, so good on him. What's semi-hilarious about that, though, is it puts him in the same company with his No. 1 hate-fetish Barack Obama, which surely must grind his gears during his nightly lunacy fits.

Obama, see, is a Chicagoan to the bone, and a  full-blooded White Sox fan. Never has pretended to be anything but. Never tried to curry favor with the northsiders by claiming to be a Cubs fan, too.

Just like Fearless Leader -- whose unhealthy obsession with Obama is well-documented, and springs from the fact Obama is, well, smarter, more grounded and just generally a better human being.

Also, Obama once gently needled F.L. at the correspondents dinner. Opened a festering wound in F.L.'s Hindenburg ego that apparently never has healed.

Anyway, kudos to the guy for being an actual First Fan. They're in tall cotton right now, Knicks fans. Their guys went out to San Antonio and stole Game 1 of the Finals, 105-95, closing out the game with an 11-0 run.

Or as Fearless Leader might put it: Greatest game EVER. You can't believe how great it was. Very, very great.

Cruds alert!*

 (*Which does NOT include my Pittsburgh Pirates, who are four games above the waterline and doing just fine, thank you, sailing along in second place in the NL Central. So you can all just stand down -- or, in other words, quit yer bitchin'.)

My wife is always after me to Blob something about her beloved Boston Red Sox, and I always say no one cares about her stupid Red Sox, which is perhaps uncharitable of me but mostly true. However ...

However, attention must now be paid.

Didja see who's in last place by three games in the AL East, and, on June 3, has the third-worst record in all of the American League?

The Boston Red Sox!

Or, given their current state of deterioration, the Boston Rolled Sox.

The Rolled Sox, generally accustomed to lording it over the East with their evil twins the New York Yankees, are currently down to Garrett Crochet, Roman Anthony and not much else. They're like the mansion where the town robber baron used to live sitting empty and slowly falling apart because the town robber baron died and left the family fortune to his doofus son.

The doofus son, or his real-life incarnation, decided the remedy was to fire manager Alex Cora before the season was a month old -- a move my wife (Julie) continues to say was stupid, stupid, stupid. She has a point, because, as with most such moves, it hasn't solved the problem.

 The Rolled Sox remain deeply fragrant, on account of they're just not a very good baseball team. They could bring back Terry Francona or summon Joe Cronin from the grave,  which they didn't, and they'd still not be a very good baseball team.

On the other hand, their partner-in-footwear might actually be one, believe it or not.

That would be the Chicago What Sox, who are almost good enough to be the White Sox again. The Pale Hose are three games over .500 and sitting comfortably in second in the AL Central, just two-and-a-half games behind division leader Cleveland. Minnesota is another three-and-a-half games back.

"But what about the Colorado Rockheads, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now. "They're still the Rockheads, right?'

Yes, they are. But even the Rockheads are better than last year, when they were basically a church softball team.

Not only are they not the worst team in baseball -- that would be the California Bane-gels, wallowing around at 23-39 as of this morning -- they're not even the worst team in the NL West. At 24-38, they're a half-game out of the cellar, which for now is occupied by the San Francisco Compliants, who are 23-38.

This may be small potatoes in some precincts. But for the Rockheads, it's a quantum leap forward; last year on this day, after all, they were 11-50. So even they would be burying their 2025 selves.

As for the Rolled Sox ...

Well, there's always Garrett Crochet. And Roman Anthony. And, you know, a hotdog and a beer.

A (bed)timely proclamation

 Look, I don't care if you think the mayor of New York is going turn the Big Apple into Tehran or outlaw hotdogs at Yankee Stadium. Just keep your Islamophobia and MDS (Mamdani Derangement Syndrome) down there in Mom's basement for a bit, OK?

Because That Muslim Guy, Hizzoner Zohran Mamdani, just demonstrated he knows his city as well as anyone, and red-lined the cuteness meter at the same time.

With the hometown Knicks about to play in the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years, see, he's declared a moratorium on bedtimes.

Yes, that's right, America. Yesterday, surrounded by a bunch of young New Yorkers, he signed an "executive order" repealing kids' bedtimes for the duration of the Finals. Then the kids sealed the deal by putting their handprints on the EO.

WHEREAS, bedtimes should not impede the ability of New York's Cutest to cheer for the Knicks and watch every second of this historic Championship series ... the proclamation read.

"As Mayor, you're forced to make many difficult decisions," Mamdani posted on X. "This was not one of them."

Waiting now for some MDS-afflicted fruit loop to condemn Hizzoner  for -- let's see -- "interfering in parental decisions" and "government overreach." 'Cause you know it's comin'.