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'.)

Onward ...

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 aromatic, 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'.

Stanley!

 The Stanley Cup Final becomes tonight down in North Carolina, and if you think that sounds odd you are clearly a grumblin' geezer of the liver-spotted fist-shaking sort. These are modern times, Grandpa. The Montreal Canadiens don't live here anymore.

(Although, by God, they might have. Got to the conference finals this time around, only to be erased in five games by the rampaging Carolina Hurricanes. Ah, well. Light a candle to the memory of Yvan Cournoyer, and let's move on.)

Anyway, it's the Hurricanes against the Las Vegas Golden Knights in the Final, which means Lord Stanley is going to be paraded down either Dale Earnhardt Way or the Strip when the final horn sounds. Again, this is convergence of the disharmonic sort of the grumblin' geezers, but the world keeps on turnin'. And it's not like either the 'Canes or the Golden Knights don't have at least some hockey lineage upon which to draw.

The 'Canes, after all, started life as the New England/Hartford Whalers of the WHA, which means they've been around for 54 years. And the Knights have already won one Stanley Cup (in 2023) and played in the Final another time (in their inaugural season of 2016-17). So they're bonafide, as Holly Hunter liked to say in "O Brother Where Art Thou."

The Hurricanes, too, although they haven't graced the Final since 2006, when they beat Edmonton to win the Cup. They've been a, well, hurricane this time around, however, blowing through the Eastern Conference playoffs and, from the second period of Game 1 on, outscoring the Canadiens in the conference finals 153-77. 

They score, they smother opponents in their own end, and goaltender Frederik Andersen has been a locked door between the pipes, with a miniscule 1.44 goals-against in the playoffs. So they've got that going for them.

And Vegas?

All the Golden Knights did was sweep the best team in the regular season, the Colorado Avalanche, in the conference finals. They score, they smother opponents in their own end (giving up just seven goals to the league's most potent offense in the conference finals), and their goalie, Carter Hart, ain't half bad, either.

So, there you have it: Two teams that do everything well squaring off for Stanley. May the best non-traditional hockey town win.

Preferably in seven games. Because the best of all playoffs deserves it.

The upside-down

 Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White did a little hollering during a timeout the other night, and now it's all over the Great Social Media Crazysphere that she's about to be fired.

As with everything in the GSMC, you can take that with a grain of salt. Or less.

What's instructive, however, is why it's all over the GSMC that White's about to be fired.

It's because the person she was mostly yelling at was Caitlin Clark.

Some goober in the stands caught it on video, because there's always a goober in the stands catching stuff on video. And now there's this viral clip of White speaking a trifle, well, passionately to Clark, after which Clark stands up, takes a swig out of a water bottle and shakes her head in disgust.

Now, none of us are as fluent in body language as we like to pretend we are. But Clark's body language seemed to suggest her reaction to being, well, coached, was this: You're full of (bleep), Coach.

Which brings us to the Superstar Effect, and how it tends to turn upside-down the way sports hierarchies are supposed to work.

Because if Caitlin Clark were just another player -- say, some anonymous kid on some middle school team -- her hindparts would have been on the bench for the foreseeable future, and Coach would have been carried through the streets in triumph for it. Because no one has any patience for attitude cases, and everything about the way Clark reacted screamed attitude case.

But what happened?

The Superstar Effect kicked in. And suddenly it was Caitlin Clark, Superstar, who was the victim of a mean, incompetent bumbler who clearly shouldn't have the privilege of  continuing as Clark's coach.

White's mistake was failing to recognize that. Her mistake was assuming she could coach Caitlin Clark the way she's coached other players -- by getting in her face when necessary -- without understanding she was CAITLIN CLARK. Savior of the WNBA, unrivaled mover of merch and tickets, all that.

So White hollered at her (Guard somebody!, seemed to be the gist), and then benched her in favor of Raven Johnson, a better defensive player. It was the correct move, given that the Fever was playing like ten pounds of you-know-what in a five-pound bag and getting their asses handed to them on the defensive end. And if Clark were merely that callow middle-schooler, and not, you know, CAITLIN CLARK, no one would have said a thing.

But she is Caitlin Clark. And they did.

On every other level of sport, see, Coach is the clear-cut winner in disputes with a player -- even a star player. In the upside-down of the professional level, however, it's the exact opposite. When Coach takes on a star player, Coach is going to take the "L" every time. 

RIP, in other words. As in, "rest in priorities."

In a sense, then, this is not really Clark's fault. She didn't invent the hierarchy; she's merely its latest beneficiary. Against all those kids and grownups in their Fever No. 22 jerseys, White has no chance in the court of public opinion. She is, after all, merely a coach, and thus an eminently replaceable part.

Is Caitlin Clark a wonderful basketball player, with otherworldly court vision and a knack for getting the ball in the basket? Indeed. Does she also turn the ball over too much, miss more of those logo threes than she makes, and become a liability when the Fever's on the defensive end?

Also indeed.

 But, again, none of that matters, here in the upside-down. And so here comes all this interwhatsis chatter that White should be fired, with even analysts who should know better weighing in.

One of them, the other day, said White was "the wrong coach for Caitlin Clark." 

Know what's most revealing about that?

No one wondered if perhaps Clark was the wrong player for Stephanie White.

Pots calling out kettles

 Drove down to the old neighborhood the other day, just to remind myself how many years have flown past. And how the world keeps turning no matter how much we wish it would stop in its tracks, or -- better yet -- reverse course.

What I discovered was the world is never going to do either. And that's OK, because it's how the cosmos operates and always has.

And so I almost drove past the street I grew up on -- Castle Drive -- because the trees have grown large and encompassing around the entrance, as trees will do after 60 or so years. The house I grew up in looks pretty much the same, except, again, the saplings of my childhood are mighty pillars now.  Which makes the yard look like a postage stamp compared to the yard I remember. 

And the neighborhood?

Different, too. When we moved there early in the 1960s, it was almost exclusively white, de facto racial and economic segregation being what they were then. Now an eyeball count suggests it is largely black, Hispanic, Asian and Middle Eastern -- in other words, the sort of American palette a certain species of American fears and loathes these days.

And yet ... 

And yet, the kids who live there now still ride their bikes up Castle and across the little cut-through to Stinson (named Sitko Drive for Emil "Red" Sitko, a 1940s Notre Dame football star who lived in the neighborhood). They cruise the same streets, and follow the same paths, we cruised six decades ago on our Schwinns and Huffys.

In other words: The world changes.  But only cosmetically.

I wish more people would understand that. I wish they wouldn't be so easily exploited by the demagogues and fear-mongering politicians who love to manipulate them.

Which brings us to our esteemed Lieutenant Governor, Micah Beckwith, who has raised fear-mongering demagoguery to high art.

As both Loot Guv and a minister of the fire-and-brimstone sort, he has both a bully pulpit and a literal pulpit, and he's used both to advance a theology a lot of Christian folk find alien. But we're just plain old Methodists or Episcopalians or Presbyterians, and perhaps are not as privy to the Lord's revealed wisdom as the Loot Guv.

Whose latest pronouncement -- that he hates Islam because it's a "demonic death cult" -- has not only united Muslims, Jews and Christians in public condemnation, but summoned echoes of another demagogue in a collar: Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit radio priest from the 1930s. Increasingly virulent the longer he had a microphone and an audience, by the end of his 15 minutes of fame he was all but Sieg Heil-ing the madman of Germany, Adolph Hitler. That's how unhinged Father Chuck had become.

Now, it might be a reach at this point to say Micah Beckwith is traveling the same trajectory. But, like his 1930s doppelganger, he does seem to get more irrational every time he opens his mouth. In so doing, of course, he ignores the obvious irony: That he's every bit the religious extremist he accuses the followers of Islam of being.

Muslim extremists call America is the Great Satan; Beckwith, in so many words, says the same about Islam. Two sides of the same fanatical coin.

In any event, Beckwith seems to stand not far from the crowd that wants to throw all the Muslims out of the country, on account of we're a Christian nation and the Muslims want to take over America and institute Sharia Law in Mayberry and Mount Pilot and every other wholesome All-American town. So they'd best either convert to Christianity, or get to packing.

All of this is of course preposterous, at least to any rational person. No Mayberry in the U.S., even those with large Muslim communities, operates under Sharia Law or anything remotely like it. Nor is it ever likely to.

But never the twain shall meet between hysteria and reality, and so go Beckwith and his fellow travelers out there on the fringes of American thought.  So, too, goes the supreme irony of the pot calling the kettle black, because it's the pot that wants either to convert every kettle, or effectively outlaw them in violation of one of America's most cherished founding principles.

Hmm. What was that about "Sharia Law" again?

Which brings me back to the old neighborhood.

To be sure, we've taken the long way around the barn to get there, and maybe I've gone on long enough in the interim. But stay with me, because there's one more thing I want you to see.

No, it's not the faint outline of the old cinder track behind the now-boarded-up Village Woods Junior High, grassed over now but still carrying a faint whiff of oxygen debt. And it's not the overgrown field where we used to play baseball, with someone's sweatshirt serving as first base, someone's mitt serving as second and (invariably) someone's brand-new jacket serving as third.

It's this building over here, a few yards away.

When I was growing up, it was the Southeast YMCA. Now, though, it's a mosque; Masjid Akhoon, to be precise. It serves the Muslim community on the southeast side of town just as St. Henry's over on Hessen Cassel serves the Catholic community, or Bethlehem up on Anthony serves the Lutherans. All of them worshipping as they see fit.

Because that's America, you see. And no matter what Micah Beckwith and his ilk say, that's exactly what America should always be.

Throwbacks

 Well, then: It's the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals.

Just like 27 years ago.

Just like the last time the Knicks played in the Finals, and the Spurs won their first NBA title.

Now it's a different Knicks team, this one led by a watch-fob veteran guard (6-1 Jalen Brunson) and not a 7-foot veteran center (Patrick Ewing). And it's a different Spurs team, only ...

Only in some ways it's not.

Back in 1999, see, the Spurs were led by a 23-year-old center who'd been the No. 1 pick in the draft just two years before. This time, they're led by a 22-year-old center who was the  No. 1 in the draft three years ago.

The first guy was Tim Duncan, a platinum-card Hall of Famer everyone called the Big Fundamental. The guy this time is Victor Wembanyama -- who's on a Hall of Fame trajectory, and whom some folks call The Alien on account of he's 7-4 but runs the floor like a man a foot shorter, and plays anywhere the Spurs need him to play.

On the perimeter, he has a silky stroke that regularly bottoms threes. Down in the low post, he blocks shots and rebounds the way you'd expect a 7-4 guy with a 7-9 wingspan to. Out on the floor, he takes it to the rim like a guard, and even dishes like one occasionally.

And he's got the Spurs in the Finals just two seasons after they went 22-60.

Just like Tim Duncan, who took the Spurs to the Finals two seasons after they went 20-62.

I don't know about you, but I sense some harmonic convergence here. A little throwback soft-shoe, if you will. One of those occasions when time's river turns back on itself.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "What about the Knickerbockers? Don't they have some deja vu going on, too? And haven't they blown through the playoffs in historic fashion, winning 11 straight games by an average margin of 23.8 points?"

Well, yes. Sure. They also beat the Spurs two out of three times during the regular season -- the first in the finals of the NBA Cup, and the second on March 1, when they won by 25 points and smothered the Spurs defensively, forcing 21 turnovers and limiting them to just 41 percent shooting.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, that was one of only two regular season losses Wemby and Co. suffered after the first of February. And on the further other hand, even though they lost the season series to defending NBA champion Oklahoma City, they blew out the Thunder in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals, then took Game 7 from the champs in Oke City. 

So they've got that going for them.

And all the rest?

Well, 27 years ago, the Spurs beat the Knicks in five games in the Finals. 

Something to think about, harmonically converging-wise. Or not.

Today's requiem

 I wrote my obit for Sports Illustrated almost two-and-a-half years ago now, on account of the magazine I grew up reading and that steered me into 38 years of writing about our games was long gone by then. Great writing and photography and by-God journalism had surrendered to the omnipotence of The Brand by then, and I mourned appropriately.

Here's what I wrote, if you're interested. Or, you know, not.

Anyway, I'm back on the subject today because SI jettisoned another crop of its writers yesterday, because writers don't matter there anymore. Hell, the bosses can just get AI to do the writing, right? And in some cases (I can hardly say this without throwing up in mouth a little), they have.

I can imagine Dan Jenkins throwing a young scotch against the wall up there in the celestial press box, hearing that. Or Frank Deford or Gary Smith or Rick Reilly or any of the other authors who made Sports Illustrated such a glorious festival of words, images and, again, by-God journalism.

Know what I don't have to imagine?

What another SI alum, Jeff Pearlman, thinks about it. Needless to say, he ain't too happy, either.

Here's how he put it on what can only be described as a seething TikTok video yesterday, and re-posted by the website Awful Announcing:

As a guy who wrote for Sports Illustrated for a long long time and a guy who loves Sports Illustrated, like loves, loves, loves ... this stuff carves me up. And it's one thing that they get rid of writers, they lay people off. What I hate the most is that these corporate douchebags who have taken over the magazine view it just as a name now ...

I do want to remind people, because I think it's important, and I know this makes me a dinosaur. To me, Sports Illustrated is Gary Smith, it's Rick Reilly, it's Grant Wahl, it's Ron Fimrite, it's Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, Jon Wertheim, Phil Taylor. It's the great, great, great writing and reporting, where once upon a time they put money and pride into bringing you the absolute best in sports ... every Tuesday or Wednesday, you'd open you mailbox and there would be this bible every week  of what's going on in sports.

As someone who actually opened that mailbox every week as a kid, I say this: Amen, Jeff Pearlman. Amen.