Robot wars

 We're not a week into the wrapper-fresh season yet, and the Blob already thinks baseball -- the most over-stat-ted game in the world of games -- needs a new stat.

I think MLB should add ABSW to WAR and PEACE and all the other analytics that so fascinate baseball nerds.

"What the heck is ABSW, Mr. Blob?" you're asking now.

Well, it stands for "Automated Ball-Strike Wins", and it would measure every MLB team's success in utilizing the newfangled ABS system to challenge a plate ump's call. It's just like batting averages, except in this case it would be second-guessing averages.

"'Automatic Ball-Strike Wins'," you're saying now. "Would that be before or after replacement?"

Stop it.

No, what got me thinking about this was what happened in the Yankees-Mariners game last night, which the M's won 2-1. It was the Pinstripes' first loss of the infant season, but get this: They went 5-for-5 in ABS challenges.

Five times a Yankee said, "Yeah, you missed that one, ump." Five times the ABS system backed him up.

The plate ump in this case was Mike Estabrook, and he must have hated that. In fact, I'm guessing every umpire in MLB despises ABS. They must hate it worse than Sarah Conner hated all those Terminators.

"(Bleeping) robots," I imagine them grumbling. "Job's tough enough as it is without (bleeping) Data looking over our shoulders. (Bleep). Why can't Captain Picard just shove him out an airlock or something? Make it so, (bleep), yeah."

Sorry, boys (and now, girls).  But Jean-Luc ain't comin' to your rescue.

You're stuck with your robot umps, and God help us if it ever goes beyond that. All it'll take is your clean-hitter hitting an 0-for-31 slump, and XLP Model 34 will be replacing him in the lineup.

Until then ...

Until then, XLP Model 34 will be limited to embarrassing MLB umps. Or enraging players and managers by saying, "Nah, Blue got it right this time."

At which point Earl Weaver will come out of the dugout and kick dirt on XLP Model 34. 

Man. How great would THAT be?

When the joy is gone

 Max Verstappen isn't the first driver to decide he doesn't like his new car. But he is the first one who's won four Formula One driving titles and more F1 races (76) than anyone besides Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher.

He remains, if not the best wheelman in motorsports, at least one of the top two or three. On a good day, with a good car under him, everyone else might as well stay home. You're not gonna beat him.

Who can forget last year, when, even in a Red Bull ride that was not nearly as dominant as it had been, he won six of the last nine races -- including the last three -- to nearly overhaul Lando Norris for his fifth F1 title?  Finished just two points behind after trailing Norris by 104 at one point.

So, yeah. Max was still Max.

Now?

Well, now the cars are all different, thanks to an overhaul of F1 regs. And Verstappen hates the change. Says it's now "anti-driving."

Says it's just not fun anymore, and he's thinking seriously of walking away from the sport at the end of this season.

He said all this after finishing eighth in the Chinese Grand Prix -- the new wunderkind of F1, 19-year-old Kimi Antonelli, collected his second straight win of 2026 -- and, sure, the immediate reaction is, well, he's just mad because it's harder to win these days. More than whiff of gonna-take-my-ball-and-go-home in that.

Except.

Except, Max has always said he'd stick with F1 until it wasn't fun anymore. He said this when he was winning those four straight titles and damn near every race on the skeddy. And he said it even when he was no longer the champion, or before he ever was.

"I can easily accept to be in P7 or P8 where I am," he said last weekend. "Because I also know that you can't be dominating or be first or second or whatever, fighting for a podium every time. I'm very realistic in that and I've been there before. I've not only been winning in F1."

 But?

"But at the same time when you are in P7 or P8 and you are not enjoying the whole formula behind it, it doesn't feel natural to a racing driver ... Then at one point, yeah, it's just not what I want to do."

And here, of course, is where we need to point out Verstappen is still not yet 30. So of course he puts a premium on having fun doing what he's doing. Having once, eons ago, been a 20-something myself, I know this is true. You don't so much care about the money, even (and perhaps especially) when you're either not making any or, like Max, filling entire bank vaults with it. The joy is the thing.

And the joy is gone, for Max Verstappen. Just as it goes for athletes at the other end of the chronological spectrum, when age and infirmity drains what used to be an inexhaustible reservoir of passion.

No one questions the 38-year-old linebacker with a quantum of knee surgeries in his past when he steps away, saying that passion can't beat out the pain anymore. But when a Max Verstappen talks about quitting at the peak of his powers because it's no fun anymore?

Well, then he's just a sore loser. Or seems so.

Me?

I think it's just 29-year-old Max Verstappen being 29-year-old Max Verstappen. And being who he's always been.

Finally, Four

 Well, alrighty then: Arizona, Michigan, Duke-Er-UConn, Illinois.

There's your Final Four, America.

"Wait, who is Duke-Er-UConn?" you're saying now.

Well, it's UConn, but until the very-very-very end it was Duke.  The Blue Devils led by 20 for awhile, and then they led by 15, and still, even when the game clock go down to six minutes or so, they were still leading by double digits.

And then ...

And then, some stuff happened, and then some other stuff happened, and finally with a sliver of a fraction of a second left, this kid from Indiana, I don't know, downtown Hooterville or someplace, and when it came down Duke, er, UConn had won 73-72 and was going to the Final Four. 

In Indianapolis, no less.

A mere 25 miles west of where the Indiana kid, name of Braylon Mullins, played his high school ball.

"The Indiana kid sent us to Indianapolis," Mullins' teammate Alex Karaban crowed.

Indeed. The Huskies are going to Indianapolis, where they'll play an Illinois team that's been good to occasionally great this season, and if this is nivarna in Storrs, Conn., it's something else again in the rest of America. That's because Braylon Mullins' 35-foot, radar-guided, last-second three means we'll be subjected to another week of UConn coach Dan Hurley, aka The Most Annoying Man On The Planet.

I fully expect him to beat Illinois Saturday night and advance to the national championship game, because the Final Four sometimes has a mean streak.

I also expect the other national semifinal, 1-seed Arizona vs. 1-seed Michigan, will be your de facto national championship game.

The Wildcats and the Wolverines, after all, have been the dominant teams in Da Tournament, and not by a little. Arizona has won its four tournament games by  34, 12, 21 and 15 points. Michigan has won its four games by 21, 23, 13 and 33. Their collision in the national semis will likely be the first time either has broken a sweat.

I'm picking Arizona by, who knows, maybe another 35-foot splash with a sliver of a fraction of a second left.

Then I'm picking the Wildcats to beat the Huskies for the national title.

Unless ...

Unless the Final Four leans into its mean streak again, and we have to watch Dan Hurley cut down the nets while "One Shining Moment" plays in the background.

Please, God, anything. Anything but that.

The prodigal sleaze

 I don't know what kind of hooch they're selling down there in the bayou, but the folks in the LSU athletic department need to lay off it. It's done ruint their minds, as the saying goes.

This upon the news that former LSU basketball coach Will Wade -- last seen in Baton Rouge offering a recruit a barrel of illicit cash on an FBI wiretap -- is returning to LSU in the same role, four years after the school booted him for getting it sideways with the feds and the NCAA. 

"Why would LSU do that, Mr. Blob?" you're undoubtedly asking now.

Beats me. Gotta be the hooch, I figure.

On the other hand, it's LSU, which has not been known for the quality of its judgment lately. It poached Brian Kelly from Notre Dame because it thought its football program was the greatest in America (Spoiler alert: It's not). Then it had to eat a gargantuan buyout when it deemed Kelly unworthy of such greatness. 

After which the governor of Louisiana started running off at the mouth about how there was NO WAY he would ever allow such a buyout to happen again. That got the athletic director fired -- which left LSU with no football coach, no AD and not much of a clue.

Apparently the Bengal Tigers still don't.

And apparently Will Wade, the prodigal sleaze, is still ... well, a trifle sleazy.

A year ago almost to the day, see, he signed a six-year deal to coach the Wolfpack at North Carolina State  -- and, no, I don't know what they were thinking, or drinking, in Raleigh, either. Now, just 12 months later, he's bailing.  

(A brief aside: The people caterwauling about the selfishness/lack of loyalty among today's portal-hopping college athletes should take note of this. They clearly learned it from their coaches, who've been displaying exactly the same selfishness/lack of loyalty for decades.)

The oddest thing about this whole affair is Will Wade didn't exactly bring home a string of national titles the first time LSU came calling. In five seasons under his hand, LSU lost 10 or more games four times. And the Tigers advanced beyond the round of 32 just once, losing in the Sweet Sixteen in Wade's second season.

Which of course makes LSU re-hiring him even more bizarre.

I'm tellin' ya, man. That hooch must be powerful stuff.

End of a lovely line

 For awhile there, the long hallowed run looked extendable. Purdue, and the Braden/Fletcher/TKR triumvirate, led by seven at the break. They still led by seven two-and-a-half minutes into the second half. And then ...

And then, the best team left in March Madness hit the gas. And the Purdues and their three-headed paragon of sticking with it ran out gas.

It was Arizona 44, Purdue 17 the rest of the way, the 1-seed Wildcats simply too much the way they've been too much the entire tournament. In four games so far, they've won by 34, 12, 21 and 15 points. No matter who wins the other two Elite Eight games today, they'll go to the Final Four as the betting favorite.

And so no shame for the Boilermakers, who squeezed as much as they could from what they had until they couldn't squeeze anymore. For the second straight game, they shot poorly -- 38 percent this time out, including 8-of-22 from the 3-point arc -- and that more than anything doomed them when Arizona turned up the heat. In the second half, the Boilers were just 9-of-26 from the field, and clanked seven of their eight 3-point attempts.

But shed no tears for this Purdue team, and especially for Braden Smith, Fletcher Loyer and Trey Kaufman-Renn, who looked in the postgame presser to have shed more than a few. They won 117 games as Boilermakers, more than anyone in program history. They took Purdue to the only Final Four it's seen in 46 years, and the only national championship game it's ever seen. And they leave with their names all over the school's record books.

Most assists in a career (Smith). Most 3-pointers in a career (Loyer). Most games played in a career (Smith, Loyer, TKR).

The last perhaps being the most notable, in today's rootless landscape of have-mad-skills-will-travel.

"They're great," Painter told TBS yesterday, at the end of this lovely line. "They emptied their tanks. Every single day they worked at it. They really set a standard for our program and that's what you want. You want guys ... who keep taking it to another level."

And do it in one place.

Return to Bogeyville

 Tiger Woods rolled his Land Rover the other day down in Florida, got clipped for misdemeanor DUI and sat in a jail cell for eight hours, and I think I've figured out what he needs right now.

No, not more rehab from his latest back surgery.

What he needs is driver's ed.

This is, after all, the fourth time he's crashed a motor vehicle since 2009, and the second time he caught a DUI charge for it. The last crash before this one was a doozy, smashing the hell out of his leg and likely ending his time as a serious competitive golfer. It was also the stupidest; he was doing 85 or 90 on a twisty stretch of California road where the listed speed limit was 45. 

In this latest incident, he was speeding along a road not far from his Jupiter, Fla., home when he came up on a truck towing a pressure cleaner, swerved to try to pass it, and nudged the trailer just enough to flip his vehicle on its side. No one was injured, but this latest return to automotive Bogeyville came amid growing speculation that Woods would attempt to play the Masters in a couple of weeks.

Or, you know, not.

He's 50 years old, his body's a surgical Erector set, and he apparently can't drive for doody. The last, of course, has no impact on whether or not he can still play golf like anything more than the ghost of himself. But rental car companies around Augusta, Ga., no doubt already have his picture up.

And, no, not with a caption of him saying, "When I'm looking for a good rollover plan, I choose Enterprise."

More likely, it's "Under no circumstances rent this man a vehicle. He crashes more than (IndyCar driver) Sting Ray Robb."

What's in a nickname

 Comes now the news that Caleb Williams, exciting young quarterback of your Chicago Bears, is looking to trademark the nickname "Iceman," and my inner Old Man Shouting At Clouds is wondering just who these whippersnappers think they are, consarn it. And also dagnabit.

This is because, long before Caleb Williams came squalling into this world, George Gervin had already laid claim to that nickname. He was the Iceman. Is. Always will be, no matter what Williams and the trademark boys decide to do.

Now, maybe Caleb and the rest of the whippersnappin' johnny-come-latelys don't know much about George Gervin, given that he did his thing 50-plus years ago. So perhaps a brief tutorial on the Iceman is required.

Back in the 1970s and '80s (yes, long, long ago), Gervin was a 6-foot-8 splinter of a man, all sharp angles and folding-chair pliability. He came to the Virginia Squires in 1972 out of Eastern Michigan University, then was traded to the San Antonio Spurs, where he spent 10 seasons and made his rep as a virtual scoring machine.

Utilizing the silky finger roll he made famous and silkier jumper, the Iceman played 14 seasons in the ABA and NBA, averaging at least 14 points in every one. He finished his run with 26,595 points (a 25.1 average), 5,602 rebounds and 2,798 assists, and more scoring titles than any guard in NBA history until Michael Jordan came along.

Inducted into both the college and professional basketball Halls of Fame, Gervin was voted one of the top 50 players in NBA history in 1996, and one of the top 75 in 2021.

That's who the Iceman is.

And Caleb Williams?

He led the Bears to the NFC Central title last season and showed enough flashes of brilliance -- who could forget that ridiculous touchdown pass to Cole Kmet against the Rams in the playoffs? -- to suggest he could develop into an all-time great. But he aint' the Iceman.

Sorry, kid. George Gervin bought that one with a million finger rolls, a million years ago. Try again.