Indy. Helio. Some day-after thoughts

 One by one they came to him, after he stopped the car and climbed the fence as of old. After he climbed down and knelt on the wall and wept and rose again, mock-conducting the roar from the fans with a wave of his arms, the roar that waterfalled down on him from 135,000 souls that sounded more like half-a-million.

They came to him, as Helio Castroneves got down off the wall and jogged the wrong way down the track, and the fans -- God bless the fans -- kept making their sound. As he celebrated like no Indianapolis 500 winner has ever celebrated, because how many times in 110 years does a man achieve this sort of milestone?

That's an easy one: Four times. Four times a man has won the 500 for the fourth time. And the last time it happened was 30 years ago.

And so Helio jogged and cried and waved his arms, and now here they came. And it was not just his race team and his team owners, Mike Shank and Jim Meyer. 

It was everyone. 

Here came Will Power, his old teammate from Penske Racing. Here came the rest of the Penske guys. Here came Juan Pablo Montoya -- Helio actually leapt into his arms -- and Simon Pagenaud and Conor Daly, and now at last true royalty.

Mario Andretti.

Who leaned over the pit wall to congratulate him. And when Helio dipped his head before this Indy prince, Mario kissed it.

There may have been more popular winners at Indianapolis. No, scratch that. There haven't been.

This was Dale Earnhardt finally winning Daytona in 1999, every crew member of every team lining up to congratulate him as he rolled slowly toward Victory Lane. Like Earnhardt, like Mario, Helio is a prince himself at Indy, and was long before Sunday afternoon, when he joined A.J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr. and Rick Mears as four-time winners a dozen years after winning his third. 

That owes more than just to his absurd skill, understand. It also owes much to the man himself, so endlessly cheerful and engaging and accommodating that he has become not just respected by fans and rivals, but beloved.

And it was one hell of a show he and his 32 friends put on Sunday.

It was billed as the kids vs. the old hands, and the kids lived up to the billing. Twenty-one-year-old Colton Herta went to the front on the very first lap. Twenty-year-old Rinus VeeKay led three times for 32 laps. Twenty-two-year-old Pato O'Ward led 17 laps. And Alex Palou, 24, led 35 laps and turned it into a duel to the checkers with Helio in the closing laps.

Five times in the last 50 laps they swapped the lead, the last time on Lap 199, when Helio swept around the young Spaniard on the outside three laps after Palou swept around him. 

And that was that. No way on God's earth was the old hand going to give the kid another opening.

Thus, again, 2021 remains the Year of Geezer Revenge, the 46-year-old Castroneves joining 43-year-old Tom Brady and 50-year-old Phil Mickelson on the top step of the podium. That he did it for a rookie racing team in its very first IndyCar start -- after 10 fruitless years of chasing No. 4 for Penske -- only gave the storyline a bit more shine.

Not that it needed any, of course. Not that any Indy 500 in memory ever shone brighter as it was.

Remembrance of things lost

 Memorial Day weekend, and out on O'Day Road the sun is shining and the sky is blue and it's '68 again, '69, '70. Joe Walsh is singing about the glories of Rocky Mountain Way. A Huey evac chopper is beating at the air as it settles in to land, side doors open, men and women peering out.

A few feet away, men hold tight to their bush hats against the prop wash, transported God knows where in their memories. 

They are old now, these men. They are gray-haired and white-haired and the beards they sport, some of them, give them the look of haunted Santas. Because this is all just a setpiece, out here on O'Day Road. That's a cover band rocking through Joe Walsh, and the Huey is a restored 1970 model taking the old vets and their wives on peaceful rides, and it's not really '68 or '69 or '70, not at all.

Memorial Day weekend, and they are dedicating the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. And they have brought the traveling version of the Wall to commemorate, panels and panels of names stretching away, beginning ankle high and growing until the names stretch far above your head.

The names are Thomas C. Treadway and Harlin P. Treen and Vicente D. Perez. 

They are Sam Tenorio and Wilson N. Flowers and Edward O. Bilsie

They are Jimmie D. Brown and Lanny M. Hamby and Marcas J. Garcia and Vincent Saldano, all of whom died between 23 Sep 1968 and 28 Oct 1969, along with Valentine B. Suarez and David L. Sackett and dozens and dozens more.

Every one of them on this stretching-forever wall had families, and some of them had wives and some of them had children. None of them came home to them from Vietnam. Names and names and names, all of them lost in some benighted place halfway around the world, all of them remembered now on this weekend.

Memorial Day is not a happy day, nor is it supposed to be. It is not about thanking some uniform for his or her service. It is about all of those who did that service, and who didn't survive it.

It is about the dead -- the truest heroes of this filthybusiness of human beings killing other human beings, most of whom didn't ask for any of it.

It is about the men in bush hats and caps porcupined with unit pins, shuffling slowly along the panels and bending close occasionally, searching for their lost brothers.

"Find who you were looking for?" I ask one of the bush hats, whom I'd noticed peering intently at one of the panels.

"Yep," he says.

And then: "Well, four of 'em. There's 12 on there somewhere."

Twelve brothers. Twelve men -- kids, really, most of them -- he laughed and lived and ate and likely got drunk with.

Twelve who didn't make it back.

He did, and so he's here. Because it's his job to remember them, on this weekend and all weekends.

And now here comes the Huey again, beating the air. The cover band screeches away. American flags flutter in the cool breeze, and the old men search, and the panels stretch on and on, names and names and names again, sacrifice in every one.

Fan-dumb

 It's an iffy undertaking, determining the gestation period of nostalgia. Just how Back In The Day does Back In The Day have to be before gooey longing for it is legit?

In other words: Is it too soon to miss the Bubble Days of Bastard Plague Sportsball World?

Because, listen, the fans are back, and that's a good thing. But also, the fans are back, and they're just as hideous as ever.

And that's a bad thing.

Come with us now to Madison Square Garden the other night, where some jamoke spit on Trae Young of the Atlanta Hawks. And come to Philadelphia, ground zero for idiot fan behavior, where some cheesesteak-head dumped popcorn on Russell Westbrook of the Washington Wizards as he limped off injured. And come out to Salt Lake City, where three sheet-and-hood Jethros shouted racial slurs at the family of Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant.

Hey, look! Over here! Is that a couple of drunk women brawling in the cheap seats at a White Sox game?

Why, yes, it is. Isn't it great, having the fans back again?

Now, before you start in, let me offer the standard disclaimer: Most fans are not brain-cell deficient drunks, louts and racist turds. And no one seriously denies having them back restores Sportsball World's soul. Without them, it's all just a bunch of overgrown boys and girls playing catch in the backyard,

But, damn, don't those overgrown boys and girls bring out the stupid in the human species.

Part of it's entitlement, of course, because tickets, parking and concessions leave you as arm-and-leg-less these days as the Black Knight from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." And, gee, the players make all that money for throwing a ball through a hoop or across homeplate or to Gronk down the middle. And so why can't Joe Fan spit on them and say vile things?

I'm sure the sheet-and-hood Jethros out in Utah were thinking that when they shouted this at Ja Morant's dad, who is black: "I'll put a nickel in your back and watch you dance, boy."

Nice. And it's not just a Utah thing, of course.

Kyrie Irving took some heat the other day for making a passing reference to Boston as a bastion for sheet-and-hood jamoke-ery, but he wasn't wrong. Boston's rep as one of the nation's most racist cities goes back decades and is well-earned;  Bill Russell was the first to call out the city for it half-a-century ago, and Boston made national news in the '70s when white folks from Southie rioted over desegregation of the school system.

That didn't even happen in Mississippi when they desegregated the schools. So there's that.

As for what happened in Utah and New York and Philadelphia ... well, here's some truth for ya: The price of admission, no matter how exorbitant, entitles you to nothing. It entitles you to sit your ass down, cheer for your guys and boo the refs.

That's it. That's all.

The good news is, the various organizations understand that, and acted swiftly and accordingly. The Knicks banned the guy who spit on Trae Young from the Garden "indefinitely." Utah fans around the Morants lit into the Jethros when they started vomiting their spew, and Jazz coach Quin Snyder and his star player, Donovan Mitchell, were furious.

Snyder called for a lifetime ban for the Jethros. Mitchell said "there's no place for that in life, not even just in the game of basketball."

As for the 76ers ...

Well. They banned from Wells Fargo Arena the guy who dumped popcorn on Westbrook -- who had to be restrained by security from going after him.

The Blob's take on that: Too bad security did its job so well. Too bad.

Crudball*

 (* - Suggested musical accompaniment: Yakety Sax)

Time now to check in with the Blob's favorite not-really-a-major-league-baseball-team, the cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates, and before you all start whining about how nobody cares about my stupid Pirates, let me say you might actually enjoy it this time.

In a, you know, SNL skit, Comedy Central, Yakety Sax sort of way.

We take you now to yesterday afternoon in P-town, where Javi Baez of the Cubs has just hit a routine grounder to third. The Pirates' third baseman scoops it up, fires it over to the first baseman, and then ...

Well. See for yourself. 

Now, some folks will applaud Baez for some heads-up baseball. Far more of us, however, will stare slack-jawed at the exquisite dumbness of the Cruds, who took stupid baseball to heretofore unimagined levels with the most Crudtastic display of Cruddiness since Fred Merkle did that stupid baserunning thing back in 1908.

Show of hands here. How many people watched this and shouted "JUST STEP ON THE BAG, DUMMY!" 

You? You? All of you?

And how many people shouted "DON'T SUDDENLY LOB THE BALL TO THE CATCHER, DUMMY!" 

You? You? All of you?

And how many people shouted "WHERE DO THE CRUDS GET THESE PEOPLE? TEE-BALL? THE MOE, LARRY AND CURLY INSTITUTE FOR PHYSICAL COMEDY?"

OK. So that was just me shouting that.

You hesitate to call this the dumbest defensive sequence in baseball history, because that covers a lot of waterfront. I'm sure, somewhere in the mustiest corners of baseball's past, there was a play where a routine groundout resulted in an entirely idiotic rundown, a run, two really bad throws and the grounder-outer winding up safe on second.

On second thought ... nah.

The Crud stands alone on this one. That's my conclusion.

Your Probably Wrong Again Prediction

(I wrote this for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's local journalism, and local journalism is more important than ever in an age when greedhead vulture capitalists are resolutely trying to kill it. So, the Blob humbly requests you subscribe, like, yesterday. 

Here's the link:  http://subscribe.fortwayne.com/)

Half-A-Loaf Indy, I suppose you can call this. Better-Than-Echoes Indy. Lights-Turned-Low, Roar-But-Not-A-ROAR!, Masses-On-The-Half-Shell Indy.

This Indianapolis 500 will be all of that, when the 33 come to the green early Sunday afternoon. There will once again be humanity, but only half the usual humanity. You'll once again be able, if you're standing down inside turn one at the start, to track the field hurtling toward you by the sound rolling through  the grandstand ahead of it -- even if it won't be quite the same sound as usual. 

And over whom will that sound wash, when the checkers fly 200 laps later?

Well, it probably won't be Marco Andretti. I'm not making that mistake again.

I'm also not picking Tony Kanaan for the umpteenth wrong time or Helio Castroneves for the umpteenth wrong time or Josef Newgarden, who is surely going to win this someday. I'm also not picking Graham Rahal or Simon Pagenaud or anyone in the last row,.

Even though 2018 winner Will Power starts there because he somehow showed up in a Soapbox Derby car this month.

This likely means he'll become the first driver in 105 years to win from the 11th row, because that's how my luck runs. I covered my first 500 in 1977 and my last in 2017, and in all that time my crystal ball has worked right four times. Which probably tells you more about my troubled relationship with technology than anything else.

This year?

Well, it ain't gettin' any easier.

That's because there are suddenly all these kids around, and they're all talented and engaging and fast, so fast. Five races into the 2021 IndyCar season, there have been five different winners, and four of the five -- Alex Palou, Colton Herta, Pato O'Ward and Rinus VeeKay -- are 24 or younger. Palou, Herta and VeeKay are 21 or younger.

Scott Dixon, your polesitter Sunday, may still be the Jedi Master of IndyCar. But suddenly he and the other old hands are surrounded by the most gifted crop of young drivers since Mario Andretti, Gordon Johncock and the Unsers showed up in the mid-'60s, And so probably two-thirds of the field has a legitimate shot to win this.

Sentiment dictates I pick one of the young'uns -- Herta, maybe, who starts in the middle of the front row and has won four times in just 37 IndyCar starts. Or maybe VeeKay, who starts on the outside of the front row and won the Grand Prix of Indianapolis earlier this month, or O'Ward, the only one of the kids to win on an oval so far this year.

Of course, I won't pick any of those guys.

Of course, I'll pick the Jedi Master, even though hardly anyone wins the 500 from the pole anymore.

I'll pick him because, well, he's Scott Dixon, and he's led 452 laps lifetime in the 500, including 111 last year. Also, he last won this in 2008, so he's way past due, and in the 13 years since he's finished in the top five six times and in the top 10 eight times.

Also-also, in the only two oval races this season, he finished first and fourth and led 369 of a possible 460 laps.

Which can only mean one thing, of course.

Enjoy the milk, Marco.

Olympian obstinance

 The Tokyo Olympics kick off in less than two months, unless they don't. Sharper bettors than the Blob (and they're all sharper, frankly) must be thinking it's even money at this point.

I say this because some 80 percent of the Japanese people are clamoring to pull the plug on the Games, on account of like almost every Olympic Games ever, they're likely to be a financial black hole. Also, the Bastard Plague.

Which right now is experiencing a comeback surge in Japan, where hardly anyone has been vaccinated. It's gotten so bad the U.S. issued a Level-4 travel advisory for Japan -- which essentially means "Don't go there." And almost every major health professional in the world (including Japan) is expressing deep concern about going ahead with the Games.

Also, the other day, one of Japan's leading newspapers -- Asahi Shimbun, which is also a local sponsor of the Games -- called on Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to cancel them, joining a number of other prominent Japanese businesses.

The CEO of Rakuten, Japan's leading e-commerce company, even called the Games "a suicide mission."

So, to recap: The Japanese people, the smartest medical minds in the world. the nation's business community and even some of the sponsors are dead set against going ahead with the Tokyo Olympics. 

So who's in favor of it?

Well, the IOC of course, which would conduct the Games inside reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl if the money was right. The plan is to put the whole business in a bubble, and the host country can just shut up about it. 

"None of the folks involved in the planning and the execution of the Games is considering cancellation," IOC member Dick Pound told Selina Wang of CNN the other day. "That's essentially off the table."

Greed has always been one of the leading causes of tone deafness, and the IOC has never been any more immune to it than any other grasping corporate entity. Go back almost 50 years, for instance, and you can hear echoes of Pound's clueless words in the words of then-IOC chairman Avery Brundage, who in Munich in 1972 refused to allow even the murder of 11 Israeli athletes to interrupt the Games.

"The Games must go on," he declared.

And when did he declare this?

Why, at the memorial service for the murdered Israelis, of course. The next day, the Games did go on. No decent mourning period allowed, apparently.

No consideration, either, for the feelings of medical professionals, the citizens of the host country and even some of the sponsors 49 years later.

Some things. Never. Change.

The Old and the Restless

 And now today's episode in that ongoing daytime drama, The Pack Is Slack, which also is  known in some quarters as The Crybabyin' of Aaron. Take your pick, there are two distinct camps here.

One says the Green Bay Packers have bought, by noodle-brained increments, the now-open disgruntlement of their Hall of Fame quarterback.

The other says Aaron Rodgers is a big fat whiner and he should shut up and play, because the Packers are paying him lots of stackable coin to do so.

Taken as a whole it's The Old and the Restless, and in the latest installment, Rodgers did an interview with Kenny Mayne in which he aired all his gripes with the Packers. Then he decided not to show up for an OTA which he wasn't required to attend anyway.

Or at least that's the way "voluntary" is defined in the Blob's dictionary.

In spite of that, this became an Issue, and compelled Packers coach Matt LaFleur and some of Rodgers' teammates to face a flurry of hungry media questions about it. They all said what you'd expect them to say, which is that they all consider Rodgers a vital part of the team because he's one of the greatest ever to play his position, and they're all wishing him well and hope he comes back to them soon.

The mean little cynic who lives inside the Blob interprets this Media Availability Speak in a slightly different way.

LaFleur: Dammit, Packer Front Office, quit jackin' the guy around. You're messin' with my season prep.

Selected Teammates Of Rodgers: Dammit, Packer Front Office, quit jackin' the guy around. You're messin' with our (potential) playoff bonuses.

Now, I'm sure there are other Selected Teammates who are just as mightily torqued at Rodgers, too. But I have a feeling most of them are in the other camp, and probably the reason I feel that way is because I'm in the other camp, too.

I think the Packers have brought all this turmoil on themselves. And the reason I think that  is they've spent the last decade or so treating their Hall of Fame quarterback -- the franchise, not to put too fine a point on it -- like just another guy.

It's not just that they drafted his potential replacement a couple of years ago without giving him the courtesy of a heads-up. It's that they did the same thing when they got rid of his quarterback coach and some of his favorite receivers. And that they keep drafting defensive players instead of receivers and other assorted offensive upgrades.

This leads one to the obvious conclusion that they've taken Rodgers for granted all these years. Paid him well, but taken him for granted.

After awhile that might tend to make a guy resentful. Not to say bitter.

I don't blame Rodgers at all for being both, if he in fact is. He's looking around at the way other franchises treat their franchise quarterbacks -- check out the dough the Chiefs have spent to keep Patrick Mahomes surrounded by weapons and a stout O-line, for instance -- and then he's looking at what the Packers have been doing all these years, and it's got to sting.

He's still under contract to Green Bay, so eventually he'll play, I'm guessing. But when the contract runs out,  it would serve the Packers right if he'd wind up taking snaps for division rival Minnesota, the way Brett Favre once did. Or even worse, the Bears, once they've ruined Justin Fields the way they always ruin young quarterbacks.

Rodgers of the Bears.

Now that would sting.

Qualifying thoughts

 The TV is on and they're qualifying at Indianapolis on this summer-struck Sunday, and suddenly it is 1995 again. Suddenly I'm standing behind a certain pit at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, shielding my eyes against the glare of the late-afternoon sun as a I watch a crew member unused to scrambling scramble is if his next breath was riding on it.

"How's it looking?" I ask, when he finally pauses for a second.

A wordless shrug.

I don't know if there were any similar sentiments in Will Power's pit Sunday. But I'm guessing the anxiety level would have seemed familiar.

Nineteen ninety-five, see, was the year of the Great Penske Fail, and that particular day the crewman and his mates were making an ultimately futile effort to get Roger Penske's team into the 500 -- in a borrowed Reynard, no less. The entries Penske brought with him, usually meticulously prepared Saturn V rockets, inexplicably turned out to be meticulously prepared meat wagons. They were slower than erosion, and no one could figure out why.

And 26 years later?

Twenty-six years later, Power sat in his car watching the minutes crawl by on their hands and knees, sweating out qualifying runs by Simona de Silvestro, RC Enerson and Charlie Kimball. If two of the three put up faster numbers than his 228.876, he'd be bumped from the 500 with no time to go back out and re-qualify. 

Bumped. Will Power. Penske stalwart, 2018 500 winner, four-time front-row qualifier.

Last-row starter this year, after Kimball and Enerson both failed to get in.

Every driver almost every year says the same thing: Indy qualifying is the most nerve-shredding thing they do in a sport designed to make confetti out of nerves. It is never easy, even if it looks as if the guys who drive for Penske or Chip Ganassi or Andretti Autosport or Ed Carpenter Racing -- a team that always qualifies well for the 500 -- simply dial up a number and then go hit it. 

That's not how it works, they'll tell you. Sometimes they miss -- and sometimes they really miss.

See: Roger Penske, 1995. Penske in general, and Will Power in particular, 2021.

Power will start 32nd, middle of the last row. No Penske driver will answer the green higher than 17th, which will be Scott McLaughlin's launch point on race day. So, yeah, they missed this time.

Everyone else?

Well, Scott Dixon, IndyCar's Jedi Master, won the pole by less than the blink of an eye over 21-year-old Colton Herta. Twenty-year-old Rinus VeeKay starts on the outside of Row 1 and Ed Carpenter inside Row 2 for Ed Carpenter Racing. All four of Chip Ganassi's drivers qualified in the top nine. 

Among them: Twenty-one-year-old Alex Palou, and 46-year-old Tony Kanaan. 

One (Palou) just won his first IndyCar race a month ago. The other (Kanaan) has started 386 IndyCar and Champ Car races and won 17 times, including the 2013 500.

So, fast kids and old hands, both up front. Neon names -- Power, Josef Newgarden, Simon Pagenaud -- deep in the field. A dozen more potential winners scattered between.

All of them, presumably, eagerly await the drop of the green.

But not as eagerly as they greeted Sunday's end.

Old man strength

 This one was for the Back In The Day crowd, when everything was better and we all performed wondrous, mythic feats.

It was for every snicker from every youngblood at the telling of those feats. For all the times the snickers came packaged with rolled eyes and a mighty whiff of condescension. For that great deafening unspoken that makes the Back In The Days crowd grind the enamel off their partial plates: Sure, old-timer. Whatever you say.

God love Phil Mickelson. He shoved all of that right back down their gobs.

Sunday afternoon he went out there at 50 with a one-stroke lead in the last round of the PGA Championship, lost it on the very first hole and then regained it. Then he brought it home with a 73 that was good enough on this day, because his 50-year-old hand was just as steady as any of the youngbloods'.

By the time he rolled in that last inchworm putt on 18, he had to wade through a grasping mob just to get to the green. Nothing remotely like it has been seen in over a year, since the Bastard Plague stole everyone's fun. It remains to be seen if the Plague, like Mickelson, stages a comeback thanks to it, as it has before. 

But enough doom-binging. Let's talk about what Lefty did, and what he didn't do.

What he did was win a major -- his sixth -- at 50, something no one has ever done in 161 years of championship golf. He hadn't won a major in eight years. And in the two tournaments prior to the PGA, he missed the cut in one and finished 69th in the other. 

Last tournament he won?

That was on the Champions Tour. Aka, Geezer Golf.

So, yeah, he had history on his bag Sunday. 

What he didn't have, or need, was a low number.

His 2-over 73 left him two strokes clear of Louis Oosthuizen and Brooks Koepka, a pedestrian round except of course for the circumstance. On three of the last six holes, he made bogey. So it wasn't exactly a finishing kick so much as a grim, determined slog to the finish line.

Give him this, though: He held it together better than the youngbloods chasing him, none of whom could muster the sort of charge that blows up a leaderboard. And when Mickelson lost the lead early, he responded with the shot of the tournament -- a chip-in out of sand on No. 5 for birdie, as ballsy a pressure stroke as you'll ever see.

No one else had that kind of shot in him Sunday. So there's that.

Oosthuizen matched Lefty with a 73 on the day, not the kind of number that reels anyone in. Koepka, breathing down Mickelson's shirt collar after three rounds, wobbled to a 3-over 74. Among the top seven golfers, only two broke 70 -- Sean Lowry and 49-year-old Padraig Harrington, who both shot 69.

They finished tied for fourth, having begun the day too far back to mount a real challenge.

So the Geezer did just enough, on a day when no one else could. 

I don't know how much of an epitaph that is. But it'll do.

A brief Piratical interlude

 And now a name of which you surely have never heard: Wilmer Difo.

Don't feel bad. Wilmer's a position player for my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates, and even I'd never heard of him.

Until the other night, that is.

The other night, see, the Cruds -- firmly settled now in their ancestral home, last place in the NL Central -- lost to the Atlanta Braves, 20-1. This is because the Atlanta Braves are a major-league team, and the Cruds only wear the costume. Which is to say, every day of the baseball season is just a dress rehearsal for Halloween for the Cruds.

And Wilmer Difo?

Well, the other night, he came dressed as a pitcher.

The Cruds put him out there in the eighth inning because they were already down by a dozen runs, so why the hell not. They'd already played him at second base, shortstop, third base and all three outfield positions during his time in Pittsburgh; might as well add a seventh position to his resume.

Suffice to say Wilmer's major-league pitching debut was ... not good.

Before he fled the scene of the crime, Wilmer had given up three walks, three doubles, two singles, a sacrifice fly and a grand slam. Oh, and also eight runs, all of them earned.

That makes Wilmer the proud owner of an MLB record: Highest ERA ever for a single pitcher in at least one inning.

A proud moment for  both Wilmer and the Cruds, to be sure.

OK. So not really.

P(hil)GA

 The PGA Championship kind of snuck up on the Blob this time, and then the Geezer snuck up on the PGA. That's the name of that tune, heading into Sunday at the Kiawah Island Ocean Course.

The Geezer, of course, would be Phil Mickelson, who somehow is hanging on the last scrap of a one-time fat lead heading into the last 18 holes down there in South Carolina. The fickle breezes off the ocean seem to agree with his 51-year-old self, and all that sand and marsh has yet to lay much of a glove on him. So this could be history we're looking at today.

Or, you know, not. You go either way after Lefty went either way on Saturday.

First he put up flurry of birdies to build a five-stroke lead at the turn, and then he gave it all back. Fifty-one-year-old stuff happened to him on the way back to the clubhouse; He put ball in the water and another under a cart tire and another in a bunker and left a birdie putt somewhere near Charleston. 

But on 18 he put a flop shot four feet from the cup, holed the putt and walked shakily away with a one-stroke lead over Brooks Koepka.

Sentiment dictates we hope he's still a stroke or more ahead at the end of today, because if he is he'll be the oldest winner of a major in history. Hard-headed pragmatism, however ...

Well. Koepka has won this tournament two of the last three years. The Wanamaker Trophy practically comes with his house. And his game looks to be back on the win-the-PGA setting again.

So even those of us over the age of Metamucil have to like his chances. Sentiment dictates we hope it's because Koepka puts up a low number and not because Phil unravels like cheap origami.

Age is undignified enough without that, after all.

Journalism fail

 I've never met Emily Wilder, and it's unlikely I ever will. But I'd hire her in a second if I ran a newsroom somewhere.

Her bosses at the Associated Press are another matter. 

Them, I'd show the road for lacking a couple essentials any journalist should possess: An understanding of the profession, and a spine.

The Blob doesn't often set aside Sportsball matters, but today seems the day for it.  Journalism was my trade for close to 40 years, after all. I know a little about it.

What I know about Emily Wilder is she is remarkably astute for a young woman barely out of college. And I know this because of what she tweeted that likely got her fired as an AP news associate two weeks after she was hired.

What she tweeted was American news organizations reporting on the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict invariably skew the way they present news of that conflict. It's subtle, she says, but it gives away their bias nonetheless.

"'Objectivity' feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report the news implicitly stake a claim," she tweeted. "Using 'israel' but never 'palestine,' or 'war' but not 'siege and occupation' are political choices -- yet media makes those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased."

OK, first things first: Emily Wilder is absolutely right about this.

(Except, perhaps, for the "objectivity" part. Objectivity doesn't exist. Everyone, including journalists, are human beings who have worldviews shaped by their own experiences. So what a journalist should strive for is not objectivity but fairness, because the latter is achievable and the former is not.)

Now where were we?

Oh, yes. Emily Wilder is absolutely right.

And the fact she was fired for it proves it.

Now, the AP won't say it was the aforementioned tweet that got her fired, corporations being notoriously lily-livered about revealing such details. But if it was, it wasn't because she violated AP's social media policy banning political comment. It was because she was again, absolutely right -- and news organizations also are notoriously thin-skinned about having their flaws exposed in absolutely right ways.

So they fired her for "clear bias" because they were biased themselves. Ain't that rich.

She also was fired because right wing media outlets -- among them, hilariously, Fox "News", a propaganda organ masquerading as a news organization -- raised holy hell over Wilder's alleged anti-Israel bias, even though Wilder is herself Jewish. In response, AP  sacrificed Wilder to the cancel culture gods.

Not exactly a profile in courage, if you ask me. I imagine somewhere in the Great Celestial Newsroom, Ed Murrow just lit up another Chesterfield and muttered a few choice oaths.

Of course, the AP will point out Wilder herself admitted violating the social media policy, but that's nothing but a smoke screen. Truth is, challenged by the bullies of the right, they  ran like Forrest Gump.

What they should have done instead is sit down with Wilder privately, go over the company policy again (which technically she didn't violate, because she was tweeting about news coverage, not politics) and tell her not to do it again.

And then?

And then, they should have told Fox "News" and the rest of 'em to go whiz up a rope. 

Back in the day, this is exactly what any editor worth the name would have done. But we're no longer back in the day.

Ed Murrow is dead, after all.

Yes-yes to the no-no

 The New York Yankees' latest store-bought ace, Corey Kluber, twirled a no-hitter last night, so, no, it's not true any bum off the street can throw a no-no in Major League Baseball these days. Even if it came one night after Spencer Turnbull did it for the sadsack Detroit Tigers.

Kluber's nope brings to six the number of no-hitters in the majors so far this season, and we're still 12 days away from June. So you can be forgiven for thinking that means no-hitters are today's six-hitters, or some such thing.

If so, this is Bad For Baseball, as we geezers like to say. Any devaluation of a cherished benchmark is, because if it happens often enough it's no longer a benchmark.

Not to pick on poor Turnbull, for instance, but he's not exactly Sandy Koufax. In four seasons in the majors, he's 10-25 with a 4.33 ERA. This is by far his best season to date; he's 3-2 right now with a 2.88 ERA. Last season he was 4-4 with an ERA just under four; in 2019, he made 30 appearances and was 3-17 with a 4.61 ERA.

But the other night, he became only the eighth Tiger to throw a no-hitter in the franchise's 125-year history. And that's with guys like Denny McLain and Jack Morris and Justin Verlander and Hal Newhouser in the archives.

Not sure you could say "Spencer Turnbull" in that sentence and have it come out sounding right. No offense to the young man intended.

The seamheads will tell you this is all because Chicks Dig The Longball, which is another way of saying baseball fans want to see baseballs go a long, long way when they're struck these days. The consequence is the game has devolved, with a few notable exceptions, into go-big-or-go-home.

Big swings mean big hits, after all. But they also mean big misses. 

And so today's pitchers can get away with missing the corners -- even really missing the corners -- and still get a swing and a miss. Taking pitches? Drawing walks? Moving the runner over?

Man, that is so 1970. Who do you think you are, Whitey Herzog?

Not in this man's MLB, by golly. 

Devaluation or no devaluation, sadly.

\

Cranky old guys

 Hey, I get where Tony LaRussa is coming from. I'm a cranky old guy, too.

I can shake my fist and shout at the clouds with the best of 'em, and wonder when this handbasket showed up to take the world to hell. I surely can.

I wonder, at my advanced age, how an entire American political party was hijacked by carnival hucksters and mental patients. And when social media (lookin' at you, Facebook) turned into Orwellian thought police devoid of a humor gene but equipped with a stick up their ass. And when satire died ... and when bigotry started getting invited to all the best parties ... and when baseball went to WAR.

Speaking of which ...

Back to LaRussa.

The manager of the Chicago White Sox is 76-years-old and probably thinks all this analytics business is for the birds, too. But  even this cranky old guy thinks he's been cast adrift on the Out Of Touch Sea. 

The latest example happened last night, when star rookie Yermin Mercedes of the Chisox launched a meatball pitch out of the confines in the ninth inning of a shellacking of the Twins. The score was 15-4 at the time, and the Twins had surrendered, sending out to a position player to lob batting-practice pitches to the Sox hitters.

The count got to 3-0 on Mercedes, which baseball's sainted unwritten rules say is a take-all-the-way situation. But the Twins' pitcher threw another fatty, and Mercedes parked it.

LaRussa was steamed. Called it "a big mistake," and "clueless."

The Blob's position is, yeah, it probably wasn't very sportsmanlike. But the Twins are the ones who made a farce of things in the first place by sending a non-pitcher to the bump. And if you're gonna just give up like that, why should Mercedes or any other opposing player honor that by keeping the bat glued to his shoulder?

So Mercedes jumped on the pitch. Because where is it written that if one team quits playing, the other should, too?

I'm sure the fans in attendance didn't mind, home runs being so popular and all. After all, what's the most popular event surrounding the All-Star Game?

Thaaaat's right. The Home Run Derby, in which selected power hitters get served meatballs and take 'em for a ride.

Now, a legit game isn't Home Run Derby, but the Twins turned it into one. Mercedes simply played along.

And those unwritten rules?

As the Blob has said many times before: There's a reason they're unwritten.

'Cause they're stupid.

Playin' in, explained

The Blob is nothing if not civic-minded ("Coulda stopped at 'nothing'," you're saying), and so, as a public service, here is an explanation of the NBA's Play-In Thingy, which begins tonight with our very own Indiana Pacers hosting the Charlotte Hornets and the Boston Celtics hosting Charlotte:

* The Play-In Thingy involves eight teams, four of whom wouldn't have made the NBA playoffs because they finished outside the top eight in their conferences, and four of whom actually would be playoff teams because they are the No. 7 and No. 8 seeds in their conferences.

* There will be three games in each conference. The Nos. 7 and 8 seeds play each other in the first game, the Nos. 9 and 10 seeds play each other in the second game, and then there will be a third game between the losers of the first games and the winners of the second games. The winner of those games get the No. 8 seeds in their respective conferences.

This of course means the Nos. 7 and 8 seeds in each conference, which used to be in like Flynn, are no longer in like anything. If they lose two games in the kinda-sorta-but-not-really-playoffs, they fail to make the OK-now-for-the-actual playoffs.

You've gotta figure this would really frost the Nos. 7 and 8 seeds' cookies. You play for months and months and months on end -- more months than most wars last, frankly -- only to learn your previously guaranteed playoff berth is no longer guaranteed?

Even if, like this year, you're the Boston Celtics?

They must be lovin' this in pahkin-the-cah country. They must be ready to make parquet out of whoever dreamed up this crazy scheme, and whoever's to blame for it.

The Blob says the latter culprits are mainly the Philadelphia 76ers, who turned tanking into an art form back when they unleashed the Cult of The Process on the league. The Process involved putting the cruddiest product imaginable on the floor while looking toward brighter days via the NBA draft. The more losses, the more lottery picks; the more lottery picks, the better the end product somewhere down the road.

In other words, they turned an old axiom on its head: Past performance would guarantee future results.

The Play-In Thingy is a frontal assault on that sort of manipulation of the system. The thinking is, if you can add a couple more teams in each conference to the playoff mix -- or even the kinda-sorta playoff mix -- you give four more teams less incentive to Process their way through the last weary weeks of the season.

The Sixers, of course, no longer have to worry about that. They're the top seed in the East.

Which means tanking works. 

Which is in turn why the Play-In Thingy is now a thing.

Which in turn, also, means the Blob can ask an apparently unrelated question: Remember that famous picture from back in the day of Doctor J (the Sixers) grabbing Larry Bird (the Celtics) by the throat?

This is kinda the rerun.

Today in homeowner news

 Somewhere in America today, a man is looking around his humble-or-not abode and thinking, "This here is still mine." And also, "Thank you, Damian Lillard."

An explanation is in order.

According to this from Donovan Dooley of Deadspin, some deranged Portland Trail Blazers fan apparently bet the house on the Blazers reaching 42 wins this season. And by "bet the house," the Blob literally means he bet his house.

Or so someone with the Twitter handle LordTreeSap tweeted at Lillard prior to Sunday's season finale between the Blazers' and Nuggets. 

Asked how Dame's hammy was. Then added he needed "you guys" to win 42 games or he'd lose his house.

The Blazers were sitting at 41 wins going into Sunday. And the Blob is pleased to say this weirdo saga with undertones of stalking had a happy ending, because the Blazers beat the Nuggets 132-116.

And Lillard?

Scored 22 points and dished 10 assists, combining with backcourt mate CJ McCollum for 46 points and 15 dimes as the Blazers dropped 43 points on the Nuggets in the first quarter and never looked back.

Way to save LordTreeSap's family homestead, Dame.

Even if this tale is completely not true and LordTreeSap was actually Twittering from Mom's basement. 

If it were so inclined, the Blob would bet large on that.

The service of youth

The young man's name is Rinus VeeKay. You might want to remember it, in case it comes up again two weeks from today or beyond.

He's 20 years old and he hails from Hoofddorp in the Netherlands, and VeeKay is only his professional name. His given family name is van Kalmthout, so "VeeKay" is a professional construct meant to be more easily brand-able.

That decision looks particularly astute this morning, because Rinus VeeKay looks like it could be a brand with some legs to it.

This after VeeKay put the hometown team, Ed Carpenter Racing, on the top step of the podium at Indianapolis yesterday, and did it with a masterful drive. He went from seventh on the starting grid to the front, and then drove away from everyone to win the Grand Prix of Indianapolis on the road course at IMS.

Two weeks from now he'll start the Indianapolis 500 from somewhere near the front, given EPR's penchant for qualifying well for the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. And he won't be alone.

Fun fact, now that we are five races deep in the 2021 IndyCar season: Five different drivers have won the five races.

Second fun fact: Three of the five -- VeeKay, Alex Palou and Pato O'Ward -- were first-time IndyCar winners.

Third and fourth fun facts: Four of the five -- VeeKay, Palou, O'Ward and Colton Herta -- are 23 or younger. And VeeKay, Palou, and Herta are 21 or younger.

I don't know what that says about the future of IndyCar, which is always tenuous given the shaky economics of motorsport and the fragmentation of American sporting interests. There's only so much audience to go around these days, after all, and so many options from which to choose.

What I do know is this: If IndyCar does have a future, the resources are there to sustain it for years to come. And maybe more than just sustain it.

Scott Dixon is still the Jedi master of IndyCar, and Will Power, Josef Newgarden, Simon Pagenaud, Alexander Rossi, Graham Rahal et al aren't going anywhere anytime soon, either. But you have to go back a ways to find a time when IndyCar not only had this depth of talent, but this depth of young talent.

Maybe the mid-'60s, when Mario Andretti and Al and Bobby Unser and Gordon Johncock were coming up. Or the late '70s/early '80s, when Rick Mears and Michael Andretti and Al Jr. emerged. Or the decade from 1980 to 1990 in total, when Mears was dominant at Indy but drivers as diverse as Al Sr., Tom Sneva, Bobby Rahal, Danny Sullivan, Emerson Fittipaldi and Arie Luyendyk wound up taking milk baths on Memorial Day weekend.

Now it's 500 time again, and it's back home in May where it belongs. And it's harder to pick a winner now than it's ever been.

Dixon? Power? Newgarden? Takuma Sato again?

Rahal? Pagenaud? Ryan Hunter-Reay? Helio again?

Or will it be a VeeKay, a Palou, a Herta, an O'Ward -- or maybe a Jack Harvey, a James Hinchcliffe, a Scott McLaughlin, a Felix Rosenqvist?

Used to be a rule of thumb that half the field could wind up taking the checkers in the Big Five. This year you could probably make a legit case for 2/3 of the 33 starters.

That makes it hell to call this thing, of course.

And heaven for the sport itself.

This week in tone deafness

 So remember a few months back, when the Blob unfavorably compared Purdue Fort Wayne's deaf ear to Detroit Mercy's more functional one, in regards to the way each handled its women basketball players complaints about their apparently off-the-rails coaches?

Detroit Mercy elected to shut down the season in response to the players' claims of abusive behavior by first-year coach AnnMarie Gilbert. PFW chose to ignore similar charges leveled at its own women's coach, Niecee Nelson, papering over it with a lot of lawyer-speak about an "investigation" that didn't seem very investigative at all.

The upshot: Unlike Detroit Mercy, head coach Niecee Nelsen was allowed to finish out the season, even though PFW had documentation about her abuse from 22 players, staff and parents.

Well. Perhaps the Blob spoke too soon, praising Detroit Mercy at PFW's expense.

It's May now, see, and Detroit Mercy has regained the lead in tone deafness. The women's program there is in shambles; every player on the roster has left or will be leaving, a completely understandable reaction to athletic director Robert Vowels' decision to retain the embattled Gilbert as coach.

According to this story in the Detroit News, Vowels dismissed the players' concerns about Gilbert, saying an "independent investigation" (air quotes the Blob's own) found the allegations of abuse against her "were not substantiated."

In other words: You girls are just makin' this stuff up.

Or, in different other words: Typical emotional women, getting all in a snit because their coach was being tough on them.

Now, that's probably not the way Vowels wanted to come off, and he did a bit of fine papering over himself with some fluent Press Release about how "any concern from a student-athlete about health or safety receives my highest priority," and how "every concern expressed from this team was heard," and blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda. 

As it turns out, that "concern" manifested itself most clearly with the decision to shut down the season. Apparently it wasn't a response to the players' concerns; the women wanted to continue the season but would do so only without Gilbert, so Vowels canceled the season instead.

The aforementioned comes from former Detroit Mercy guard Jiera Shears, who became the first player to publicly speak out about all this the other day. Shears claims, among other things, that Gilbert brushed off players' injuries, including Shears' concussion, accusing them of goldbricking and calling them "losers," and "cowards." 

Much of it sounds remarkably like the allegations leveled at PFW's Nelson, who gave the school cover to fire her by being a spectacularly awful coach. She was fired at the end of the season after the Mastodons went 22-116 over her five seasons, including 8-74 in conference play.

Which was all the school mentioned when they released her, choosing once again to ignore the multiple allegations against her. 

And you wonder why Division I student-athletes are making so much noise these days?

Your MVP* for today

 * -- As in, "Most Vulnerable Player."

That would be whatever individual of poor judgment and even poorer desire to continue living dared to make a hockey play against an opposing player named "Vladimir Putin." Imagine if you put a body on the guy, or cleaned him out of the slot. Imagine you were a goalie, and you made a kick-save-and-a-beauty against him as a goaltender.

Prolly go something like this ...

Putin: Great save, Yuri!

Two scary guys in trenchcoats: Come with us, Yuri. We must talk.

After which no one ever sees Yuri again, until a hunter stumbles on some human remains deep in the Urals.

It's a fate not even the toughest of hockey players would care to tempt, which is why this happened the other day during a game in Russia.

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. Putin scored eight goals in one game. Clearly this is because he's an athletic marvel with a skill set that combines the best of Alexander Maltsev and Helmut Balderis from the old Soviet juggernaut, and contemporary Russian stars like Alex Ovechkin and Pavel Datsyuk.

What's that you say?

No, I'm not kidding. You should see the guy. He's freakin' amazing.

Come again?

No, this is not at all  like the time that Kim guy in North Korea took up golf and shot a 27 on the North's toughest course his first time out. This is nothing like that. Absolutely not. No, no, no, no.

Now can the scary guys in trenchcoats hanging around outside my house please leave, Vlad?

The strongarm of MLB law

 Somewhere today Vida Blue is throwing figurative fastballs at Rob Manfred's head, or perhaps Rollie Fingers is strangling him with his luxurious 'stache. Next to them stand Joe Rudi and Gene Tenace and Reg-gie!, their potent bats twitching like cat's tails.

That's how you handle leg-breakers, see. You send in other leg-breakers to deal with them.

It's pleasant to think about now that Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, has instructed the Oakland Athletics to begin casting about for places the relocate. This is because the city of Oakland has futzed around too long on a proposed waterfront ballpark complex, which the A's and MLB have been lobbying for because it would enable them not just to suck dollars from a ballpark, but to mop up additional gravy from a surrounding commercial hub.

It's not that Oakland doesn't want to develop the waterfront. It does. But the city's been hurting for cash and investment for years now, and the pandemic has only aggravated that hurt.

So of course now is when Robby Manacles decides to put the arm on the city, its reward for loyally supporting the A's  for 53 years.

The entire thing is just as sleazy and disgusting as it always is when professional sports  blackmail cities for a better deal, a phenomenon we should be used to after all this time. Somehow, though, it's always a shock to see such naked greed and betrayal on display. And that's especially true when it comes at the direction of a sports league itself.

And to put the heat on when that league knows the city it wants to abandon is particularly stressed?

That goes beyond disgusting. That's damn near criminal.

Yet this is simply business as usual for Robby Manacles and his mobster brethren in the other major sports leagues, and it has been for a long time. Oakland in particular has been especially dissed, being especially vulnerable; the NBA Warriors fled across the Bay some time ago, and the NFL Raiders are now in Las Vegas, which has the kind of dough Oakland can only dream about.

And let's not forget our own Indianapolis Colts, swiped from Baltimore almost four decades ago.

As for the A's, Vegas could easily wind up stealing them, too. There would be a kind of  symmetry to that, I suppose, Lost Wages having itself been built by mobsters. One assumes Robby Manacles and the boys would thus feel particularly at home there.

On the other hand, it didn't always end well for some of those Vegas mobsters.

Something to dwell on as Rudi and Reg-gie! and them stand in the on-deck circle, warming up their figurative bats.

Tebow time! (Revisited)

So here we are in 2021, and everyone's in a lather about Tim Tebow again. Time really must be a river, endlessly oxbow-ing back on itself.

Folks are in a lather because Tebow's former college coach, new Jacksonville coach Urban Meyer, is bringing him in for a look-see as a tight end. This is happening about a decade late, but Tebow first had to play out the fantasy he was an NFL quarterback. That's not his fault; he'd been a quarterbacking legend in high school and college, so of course he assumed he'd be one in the pros.

At any rate, he's suddenly all over yapping-poodle talk radio, which mines outrage the way grizzled mountain men used to mine claims back in '49. The Blob accidentally caught part of that from the yappiest of the poodles, Colin Cowherd, who was babbling the other day about what a joke this was and how Tebow was stealing another man's job and what-not.

The Blob could not roll its eyes toward its cerebellum fast enough, hearing that.

OK, first off: It's the NFL. Someone's always stealing another man's job. Players come into the league, they lock down a starting spot, they get older and slower, and finally some kid with fresher legs and less mileage on the odometer puts them on the bench. It's simply the Darwinian order of things in the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League.

Also: Meyer hasn't even gotten a chance to see if this will work. Or, more to the point, if it  won't.

Again, it's the NFL. Sentiment goes to die there. If Tebow is too old, too light and too slow to do everything NFL tight ends are asked to do these days, he'll get cut in training camp. Not even his old college coach is going to keep a guy around who can't help him.

And if that happens (and the odds are pretty good it will), how's Tebow stealing another's man job?

Look. There's no controversy here, except manufactured controversy. Even conflating this with the Colin Kaepernick situation, as some have done, is a tortured bit of false of equivalency.

Kaepernick got blackballed by the league because the people who run NFL teams are cowards and phonies. Tebow's getting a shot with Jacksonville because he passes muster politically with the NFL's flag-waving theocracy, and because the old Coacher misses him.

If Tebow had been kneeling for politically incorrect racial justice instead of for politically correct religious devotion, do you think he'd be getting another shot? And if Kaepernick, a former Super Bowl quarterback, had stayed on his feet for the sainted Anthem and kept quiet about racial justice, do you think he wouldn't be on someone's roster right now?

Of course Tebow wouldn't be. And of course Kaepernick would. 

And why is that?

Because it's the NFL, boys and girls. And the NFL is a bidness like any bidness, constantly weighing value vs. cost.

Now even Tebow Time can outlast that. 

Horseplay, Part Deux

 It's remarkable how often people stuck down a hole have to be told to stop digging.

And so the best advice White-Hair Guy (Bob Baffert) could get from his PR flacks right now would be "Bob, stop talking." This is because the more he talks, the weirder and more contemptible he gets.

The latest from Babbling Bob is straight from the Donald John Trump Rich Guy Caught Red-Handed Playbook: Act the aggrieved party being brought down by shadowy forces who are just jealous of your success. Accountability? That's for the little people.

Thus, right on cue, Baffert trotted out the playbook-approved "cancel culture" excuse for his Kentucky Derby-winning horse showing red in a post-race drug test. He's utterly blameless in all this, you see; Medina Spirit flunked the drug test because he'd eaten some hay a groom who'd taken some cough medicine whizzed on.

No, really. That's his story and he's stickin' to it.

Of course, this doesn't explain how four of his other horses have dinged the Drug Meter in the last year. Perhaps that was "cancel culture," too. Or perhaps he just employs a lot of grooms with chest colds and tiny bladders.

"We live in a different world now," Baffert complained to (surprise, surprise) Fox News. "This America is different."

I doubt he meant it this way, but if by "different" he's saying even celebrity trainers are now being held accountable for their actions, he's absolutely right.

Sucks for him.

Horseplay

Say this about the can of Alpo the Blob touted in the Kentucky Derby: He might have finished last, but at least he did it clean.

Or so one must assume given that Soup and Sandwich, the Blob's parimutuel poodle, was such a pronounced slowpoke. If he was juiced, it must have been with Juicy Juice.

Not so your Derby winner, Medina Spirit, who tested positive for twice the legal level of a certain anti-inflammatory corticosteroid. If a second test comes back with the same result, he'll be stripped of the roses.

His trainer, That Guy With The White Hair (Bob Baffert), has already been kicked out of Churchill Downs for this offense, not to say others. Baffert's horses, it seems, have an odd habit of turning up with hinky stuff in their bloodstreams; this marks the fifth time in the last year one of his horses has tested positive. 

Baffert, of course, don't know nothin' 'bout all that. His denials are a spot-on parody of the faintly paranoid lack of accountability popularized by our former Only Available Impeached Whiny-Ass President, and basically amount to a timeworn dodge.

Honest, officer, I don't know how those drugs got in my car ...

"We didn't have anything to do with this," Baffert told the Washington Post, while hinting vaguely that it must have been someone who doesn't like Bob Baffert. "I don't know how it got into his system, if it was in his system, or a mistake. But we're gonna get to the bottom of it.

"You know, there's problems in racing, but it's not Bob Baffert."

Honest, officer ...

So it goes. And in the meantime, in between his not-very-credible denials, Baffert might at least want to rethink his erstwhile Derby winner's name.

Medina Spirit?

More like Medina Spirits.

All about the green

 Happy Mom's Day from the Blob, and shut the door, were you born in barn?

Also, I swear sometimes you don't have the sense God gave a goose.

Also, pick up that pig sty you call a room.

And last not least ...

You think money grows on trees?

Well, it doesn't, and that's why no one seems to want poor Albert Pujols, a surefire first-ballot Hall of Famer whom serious people believe might be the greatest first baseman of all time. But he's 41 years old now, and age and injury have eroded his skills as they have for everyone in the history of the game. And that's why the Angels of Anaheim And Neighboring Communities released him the other day.

His value, see, no longer justifies the Angels' further investment beyond his current deal, which runs out at the end of this season. And it's why no one else has yet picked him up, because there are few available roster spots for a pricey 41-year-old whose aforementioned skills have been eroded by the aforementioned time and injury.

Everything's about the green stuff in America, after all. About the lettuce, the dough, the simoleons, the jing.

This has always been true to an extent, because to an extent America is at bottom a great engine of commerce. And it's as true in Sportsball World as it is everywhere else -- even in precincts which claim not to be engines of commerce.

Which brings us to the University of Hartford, last seen celebrating its men's basketball team's first-ever berth in March Madness.

The whole university was in a lather over this historic achievement, even though it ended quickly with a first-round loss to eventual NCAA champ Baylor. But before that happened, the nation got to learn a lot of cool stuff about the University of Hartford, like the fact there was a University of Hartford, and that among its alums are a star (Dionne Warwick), an Apollo 13 astronaut (the late Jack Swigert) and a Hall of Fame baseball player (Jeff Bagwell).

But now the University of Hartford has pulled the plug on all that.

That's because the other day its Board of Regents voted to demote the school from Division I to Division III.

It is, of course, a money deal, which is essentially what board chairman David Gordon meant when he said the move was in the "best long-term interests of all (Hartford's) students." In other words: Division I is expensive, and, as it is at most schools Hartford's size, only the athletes truly benefit from that expense.

In fact, there are a whole lot of schools with similar demographics who wind up partially subsiding their D-I athletics with student fees, and often substantial student fees. A move to D-III, which doesn't offer athletic scholarships, would seem to alleviate that.

This doesn't mean Hartford's Board didn't pick the absolute worst time to make this announcement. It did, and the resulting backlash will be fierce. It's already begun, in fact; the softball team blacked out the school's name on their jerseys the other day, and student-athletes are on the march in protest.

It's hard not to sympathize. The men's basketball team must feel especially dissed, being told their ceiling-shattering moment two months ago ultimately meant nothing. And the fact Hartford has been D-I for almost 40 years ...

Well. How hard a sell did those two items make this?

And yet ...

And yet, it's probably the prudent move. Because, no, money really doesn't grow on trees.

Just like Mom said.

The crying game

There may be more contemptible things than guilty parties acting the wronged party. It's just hard to think of any given the way our former Only Available Impeached Whiny-Ass President raised it to an art form for four years.

Thus it's only consistency with the times that compels us to offer fresh contempt for the Houston Asteriskos, who got caught egregiously cheating and now are crybabyin' like 3-year-olds because baseball fans in other cities are giving them a hard time about it.

The latest to do so were the fans in Yankee Stadium, who this week rolled out the full monty of abuse. Signs alluding to various Cheatstros flew from every quarter. Inflatable trashcans -- banging on trashcans being the way the 'Stros communicated what pitch was coming to their batters -- bloomed here and there. 

One guy even dressed up like Oscar the Grouch, a a clever allusion to said trashcans.

A Yankee Stadium usher evicted him for that, alas. And then told him he was doing so because the Asteriskos had complained to Major League Baseball about  the way opposing fans were riding them.

If so, it wasn't the first time. The Asteriskos have been whining about this since way back in early April, when manager Dusty Baker bellyached about all the inflatable trashcans that popped up during a road game in Anaheim.

Said it was "a sad situation," all this abuse. Said it's not like some of the hecklers never did anything wrong in THEIR lives. Said the Asteriskos "paid the price" for their wrongdoing.

The Blob's response to this: Well, boo-freakin'-hoo.

First of all, they didn't pay nearly the price they should have. Only the manager and general manager were punished; the players who carried out the various cheating stratagems got zippo. One of them, George Springer, was rewarded with a fresh $150 mill deal from the Blue Jays.

Perhaps as a result, the Asteriskos have been remarkably unrepentant about the entire deal. Even arrogant about it, one might say.

Yet now they're gonna cry because fans in opposing ballparks are hurting their feelings?

Even the Deposed King down in Mar-a-Lago must be applauding gall that breathtaking.

Fleecing 2.0

Old habits are notoriously bullheaded cusses, and nowhere is that more true than in college athletics. Tradition is a bedrock deal there, and tradition is nothing more than habit dressed up in its Sunday best.

And so it was 1966 before the old Southwest Conference saw its first black football player (Jerry Levias, SMU). And it was the 1970s before a lot of other southern schools allowed blacks on their football or basketball teams, among them Texas and Alabama.

Change happens in college athletics, in other words. But tradition compels the response to it to be, "Well, OK, we'll change, but not really. And not all that much."

Which brings to the state of Georgia, which doesn't hold with change unless the change is to go backward. Thus its new voter suppression laws -- which recall the good old days of poll taxes and literacy tests for primarily non-white folk who are presumed to be guilty of  voting for Democrats.

Now they're up to new shenanigans, those rascals. And this time it's about college athletics.

Georgia's governor, Brian Kemp, just signed another law into the books, see. It will allow college athletes in the state to trade on their image and likenesses, which heretofore belonged only to the schools for whom they worked for goods and services only. 

This sounds like a good deal, on its face. It sounds almost -- gasp -- progressive.

Except.

Except, there's a provision in the new law that allows Georgia schools to essentially keep milking their cash cows just as they always have. 

The provision allows an athlete's school to still confiscate up to 75 percent of his or her endorsement money, and then dole it out from a common pool once that athlete graduates or withdraws from school. 

This undoubtedly will be spun as protection for college kids who don't know how to manage their money. But to the Blob, the basic translation sounds more like this:

OK, we'll let you do endorsement deals, ya lousy ingrates. But only if you turn over 3/4 of the take to us, because there's NO WAY we're gonna allow you to think you have any kind of independence while you're here. So you keep the crumbs under the table, just like always, and we get the lion's share, just like always. 

Consider it our way of reminding you who still owns your ass.

There is, of course, one bright spot in all of this fleecing 2.0: Not every state or school will have such a stubbornly regressive stipulation. So having such a stipulation on the books would likely weigh like an anchor on the Georgia schools' recruiting efforts -- kinda like back in the day, when southern schools' refusal to break the color line ultimately hurt them and benefited northern conferences to whom southern black athletes gravitated.

In which case, it's hard to fathom that many Georgia schools would avail themselves of the aforementioned provision in the new law. So there's that.

Then again ... 

Well, you know: Habits. Traditions. The simple inertia of this-is-how-we've-always-done-things-so-why-change-now.

It's been a wellspring of dumbness before. Don't bet it won't be again.

Mr. Irving's world

Hey, I don't think Kyrie Irving is all that crazy. For all I know I could be a pawn.

Or "Pawn," as Kyrie characterized the ladies and gentlemen of the sporting media, of which I was a dues-paying member for nearly 40 years.

He said this in training camp back in December after being fined $25,000 for violating the NBA's rules about media access, something Kyrie does on a periodic basis. Most recently it happened Tuesday night, when he refused to make himself available to the media after Irving's Nets lost to Milwaukee.

For that the NBA dinged him another $35,000.

That's not what got my attention though.

What got my attention is what he said in December, which could reasonably lead reasonable people to conclude Kyrie is nuttier than a Payday.

"(I am) here for Peace, Love and Greatness," he wrote on Instagram. "So stop distracting me and my team, and appreciate the Art. We move different over here.

"I do not talk to Pawns. My attention is worth more."

The Blob's reaction: It could have been worse. He could have deemed the sporting media Peons or Serfs. 

Pawns ... well, OK, fine. I never thought of myself as anyone's pawn (or Pawn), but if I was, I at least hope I was a poisoned Pawn to the right people -- the crooks, charlatans, nitwits and sociopaths you occasionally encounter when you decide Sportsball Reporter is a better career move than, say, Wall Street Visigoth.

The former does have its moments, even when the occasional Kyrie Irving washes up on your shore.  Remember the whole Flat Earth Society thing? The Moon Landing Was Faked thing? The accompanying Every Photo Of Earth Is Faked thing?

Sure you do. And now?

Now Kyrie has apparently moved on to a higher plane than the rest of us.

He's here for Peace, Love and Greatness, y'all. He and his teammates move differently than mere mortals. Our job is simply to appreciate the Art, and not distract his valuable attention with our mundane earthly matters.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Isn't Kyrie also a clearly intelligent man, aside from the intermittent forays into full-metal-jacket crazy? Isn't it possible he's just someone who thinks more deeply about the world than most of us, and therefore sees it from a different angle?"

Well, yes. I suppose that could be true.

But what a Pawn-y thing to say.

Old men shouting at clouds

Amnesia is a plague for the ages, when it comes to athletes in the doddering stage. They forget so much as the years flutter past, and embellish so much else.

And so a few years back Charles Barkley blasted the Kevin Durants of today's NBA for chasing rings, forgetting that he himself kinda-sorta did the same thing back in the day. The fact his chase was unsuccessful didn't make it less a chase.

Now here comes Terry Bradshaw, whom some folks think has been doddering for awhile. Recently he went on WFAN's Moose & Maggie Show to blast Aaron Rodgers as "weak" for not being happy in Green Bay anymore, focusing on Rodgers' alleged disgruntlement with the Packers drafting a quarterback (Jordan Love) a couple years ago.

Bradshaw pointed out that when the Steelers drafted Mark Malone and Cliff Stoudt as his career wound down, you didn't catch him bitching and moaning. He "embraced" it because he wasn't concerned with either draftee QB.

"Let him cry," Bradshaw said of Rodgers, shouting at clouds and shaking his bony fist.

To which those aware of Bradshaw's revisionist history would reply: Well, son, you'd know all about cryin'.

As Jesse Spector of Deadspin pointed out the other day, Bradshaw no more embraced the challenge of Malone and Stoudt than France embraced the challenge of stopping the Germans in 1940. In fact, as injuries slowly drew the curtain on his career, he bitched and moaned with the best of them as he tried desperately to stave off the end.

On a couple of occasions, he even went after Steelers head coach (and NFL coaching Rushmore occupant) Chuck Noll after Noll expressed doubts about Bradshaw's continued viability.

"He ought to just keep his mouth shut," Bradshaw said, according to Spector's piece.

Now, my memory may not be what it once was, either. But I don't recall Rodgers going so far as to publicly trash his head coach, Matt LaFleur. Let alone a Hall of Fame head coach.

To be honest, it seems Rodgers is less miffed about the presence of Jordan Love than he is the absence of a few more weapons. His loyalty to Green Bay is unquestioned -- the man has been a Packer for the entirety of his 16-year career -- while the Packers' loyalty has been, shall we say, somewhat less so.

Over the years, they've offloaded receivers he's liked, and replaced them with linebackers and defensive ends and the like. Last week was no different; in the midst of the widening rift with their Hall of Fame quarterback, the Packers' alleged brain trust took a cornerback in the first round of the NFL Draft.

It was almost as if they were saying, "That'll learn him, the big crybaby."

I'm sure Terry Bradshaw would have approved of that sentiment, if so.

Big crybaby that he himself is notwithstanding.

Play ball

This morning it was cool and damp and the sky had that quilted look that promises more rain later. But that is just weather.

Of more import is what day it is.

It is Game Day.

It is the day when the gates open at the corner of Ewing and Brackenridge, and the ballpark dabs on its most alluring perfume: equal parts grilled meat and pungent hints of hops and malt, and of course popcorn and roasted peanuts in the shell. The ticket takers are at their stations. The game programs are laid out. The diamond is all perfectly groomed beige and impossibly vivid green, spring and the rains that come with it having done their work.

Parkview Field is open for business again, after too long a time gone dark.

There was no baseball there last summer, and the summer felt counterfeit because of it. All those dreaming young prospects in TinCaps green and gray and red were no longer giving us names to remember in the lingering twilight of a May or June or July evening.  Fernando Tatis Jr. wasn't out there, nor Ryan Weathers, nor the local kid from Ossian, Josh Van Meter.

There was no crack of the bat, no rising murmur to accompany a baseball rising toward the battlements of Harrison Place. There were no Bad Apple Dancers or Johnny TinCap or taco sauce races, or Jake the Diamond Dog, heartthrob of ballpark regulars everywhere.

Tonight all of that is back,  if the rains stay away. Tonight we'll be reminded again of what's unique and charming about minor league baseball, preserved here in the Fort despite Major  League Baseball's best efforts to eradicate its charm and uniqueness elsewhere.

MLB's misbegotten goal is to make the minors more uniform, and also more profitable. So it got rid of 42 minor-league teams in the offseason, many of which had brought that aforementioned charm and uniqueness to their communities for decades. Those teams that were left were reorganized into antiseptic Class A-AA-AAA groupings, and rules were imposed that would give MLB more direct sway over the product.

Control freaks gotta control, as they say. The rest of us can only hope that doesn't mean the minors will become as boringly homogenous as the majors have become.

We can only hope there will remain the regional quirks and oddities that have been the minors' calling card since there have been minor leagues. And that places like Clinton and Burlington in Iowa, stripped of their minor-league affiliations by the MLB vandals, find something to fill the hole in their summers that baseball filled for, respectively, 87 and 97 years.

And here in the Fort?

Tonight we get again what we've gotten for 28 years, first in Memorial Stadium and then downtown. The Bastard Plague took it away from us last summer, leaving us with our own strange emptiness to fill. As with any absence, it made the heart grow fonder.

So grab a dog and a beer and settle in again, ladies and gents. Baseball is back.

And, it goes without saying, a proper summer, too.

Last lap for Robert U.

Of them all, he was the one the talking gene caught. It might have been the only thing that  ever caught him.

Bobby Unser was fast and he was fearless and, lord, could he talk. He was as free with words as his younger brother Al was stingy with them, as heavyfooted as his brother was cool and calculating.

They sprang from the mountains and desert around Albuquerque, N.M., heirs to an iconic racing family that made its bones broadsliding up Pike's Peak and then found other challenges. Jerry Unser Jr., Bobby and Al's older brother, died at Indy before his brothers ever showed up. Bobby and Al went on to avenge him, of a fashion, winning the 500 seven times between them. Al Jr., Al's son and Bobby's nephew, won it a couple more times.

Now Bobby is gone, passing Sunday at 87. No doubt he's bending a few celestial ears somewhere at this very moment.

I'm guessing this, see, because one day at Indianapolis I collared Bobby in the media center to ask for a few words about A.J. Foyt, his contemporary from what those who've been around awhile regard as the golden age of IndyCar. There were the Unsers and there was Foyt and there was Mario Andretti, and don't forget Johnny Rutherford and Gordie Johncock and luckless Lloyd Ruby, whose misfortune on Memorial Day weekend in Indiana became legendary.

Anyway, here I was and here Bobby was, and he talked and talked and talked. He talked about A.J. the racer and A.J. the curmudgeon and the A.J. not everyone knew about, the guy who loaned Bobby a ride one night at some forgotten short track and got halfway mad when Bobby ran faster than A.J. did.

It might have been the only time as a sportswriter when I actually thought "Is he ever gonna shut up?" 

Of course, this was at roughly the same time I was thinking "Thank God for Bobby Unser."

In any case, when he was finally done talking, my notebook was out of unscribbled pages. And my A.J. Foyt feature had some real meat on its bones.

I could have written something with similar heft about Bobby himself, because heavens knows he saw so much. He came in at Indy in '63 driving a Novi for Andy Granatelli, and he went out in '81 driving rocket ships for Roger Penske. The hotshoes were qualifying at 150 when Bobby first answered the green at Indy; when he departed 18 years later, it took 200 mph to win the pole.

So, yes, some stuff happened in his time. In his first start, he finished dead last after turning the Novi into scrap against the first-turn concrete; five years later, he wound up in Victory Lane when Granatelli's sleek white-sidewall turbines died nine laps from the finish.

After that there was the Olsonite Eagle with which he cleared 195 a handful of years later, and a rain-shortened win in 1975. And then the third win in '81 for Penske -- which will forever be disputed because Bobby was first disqualified for passing cars under the yellow, then reinstated a couple of months later.

In between, Mario Andretti was briefly a two-time winner. He still wears the '81 winner's ring they gave him at the banquet that year, and delighted in flashing it at Bobby.

Knowing Bobby, he probably didn't care. The Borg-Warner Trophy still had his face on it, after all. As I'm sure he likely said.

Along with much, much else, naturally.

Those bloody Yanks

 There's always been an uneasy peace between English soccer fans and the Treasonous Colonials who own some of their beloved sides. No Manchester United supporter has ever really trusted the Glazers, and no Arsenal supporter has ever really trusted the reprehensible Stan Kroenke.

In addition to Man U and Gunners, the Glazers and Kroenke also own the Buccaneers and Rams of the National Football League, respectively. Which no doubt makes them immediately suspect among the lads on the other side of the pond -- who know there's only one true footie, and they play it in the Premier League.

But the Yanks are especially unpopular now, with the Glazers and Kroenke having been up to their necks in the money-grubbing European Super League scheme that fell apart because the fans basically staged a revolt against it.

Apparently that revolt isn't over yet.

On Sunday, Man U supporters stormed the pitch at Old Trafford ahead of the match against bitter rival Liverpool, setting off flares and running around and engaging in various other shenanigans. It was the most display yet of their  disdain for the Glazers and their grasping American ways.

To be blunt, they want the Glazers gone. And Arsenal fans want Kroenke gone. The level of  resentment has gone beyond simmer to a full boil.

It's gotten so bad, in fact, that NFL analyst Jay Glazer, who isn't remotely to the other Glazers, has been bombarded on social media with demands that he sell Man U. He tried to explain on Twitter that he's not Those Glazers, but finally gave up and just started rolling with it.

After which he tweeted this.

 At least he's got a sense of humor about it.

The Other Glazers, probably not so much these days.

Olympian stubbornness

 The Summer Olympics begin in less than three months, and apparently you can add the words "no matter what" to that. This is because the organizers in Japan are afflicted with one of the more epic cases of bullheadedness you're likely ever to find.

For instance: According to this post by Deadspin writer Dustin Foote, virtually everyone in the country thinks it's a stupid idea to carry on with the Games in light of the Bastard Plague, which is currently experiencing a resurgence in Japan. In a Asahi Shimbun poll, 70 percent of  those responding think the Games should be either postponed another year or canceled.

Another for-instance: Re the Bastard Plague, only 1.4 percent of the Japanese population have been vaccinated for COVID-19.

Yet another for -instance: Six members of the Olympic torch relay have already tested positive for the Plague. And the relay itself has been closed to the public, which sort of defeats the purpose of the relay to begin with.

But, hell, yeah. Let's invite the world to play in this pesthouse anyway. It'll be fine.

No, really. It'll be just fine.

Tebow time!

 The haters, they've got this all wrong. This isn't about Tim Tebow trying to re-inflict Tebowmania on America, long past its expiration date. This is about Tim Tebow figuring out what he should have figured out about a decade ago.

Which is, he's not an NFL quarterback. But that doesn't mean he's not an NFL player.

And so now comes the news that the Jacksonville Jaguars worked him out as a tight end last week, and this suggests that finally there's a glimmer of self-awareness about the guy. A decade ago he was convinced he was a quarterback, because that's all he'd ever been. And he was a pretty damn good one -- some might even drop the word "legendary" -- in high school and college.

But high school and college are not the NFL. And Tebow simply didn't have the skill set (i.e.: an accurate enough throwing arm) to be a successful NFL quarterback.

What he did have, and this seemed obvious to a lot of us, were the size and athleticism to be an effective tight end or hybrid receiver in the NFL. He was never going to be Rob Gronkowski, but he could definitely be Gronk Lite. 

That's why this makes all sorts of sense. Not only is Tebow reunited with his old college coach, Urban Meyer, he's still only 33. And tight end has become the new glamour position in the NFL, thanks to Gronk and Travis Kelce and George Kittle and a dozen others.

So, maybe the man's finally found his place in the pro game, even if it's taken awhile. Meyer said the other day they'd revisit the possibility of Tebow the Tight End, which suggests we may not have heard the last of this narrative.

The haters will groan and say, please, not Tebow Time again.

The rest of us will just shrug, and get ready to reset our clocks.

Derby time!

 It's Kentucky Derby day down in Louisville, and also here at the Blob, which is not where you come to hear horsey terms like "breezing," "walking the shedrow" and "fetlock." And don't even come at me with "withers."

The only withers the Blob knows about is the late Bill Withers. Ain't no sunshine now that he's gone, God rest his soul.

That said, the Blob loves the Derby, as it also says every year. It loves the Frank Lloyd Wright hats on the women and the top hats on the men and the Kentucky Colonels, who always make the Blob hungry for one of  Harlan Sanders' Myocardial Infarction Value Meals. It loves that Dan Fogelberg song about roses. It loves the twin spires ('cause there's two of  'em), and the moment, every year, when My Friend Flicka balks at entering the starting gate.

My Friend Flicka: "Wait, I gotta go in THERE? Whoa. This was not part of the deal, dude."

That sort of thing.

In any case, the Blob loves everything about the Derby except the mint julep part, as I also say every year. This is because mint juleps look like antifreeze and taste like cough syrup. There might be a more wretched mixed drink on the planet, but it probably involves actual antifreeze.

Other than that ... well, again, this is not where you come to get expert analysis on how to bet your exacta. I will say, however, that most of the touts who do know about exactas and the like think Medina Spirit, a 15-1 shot trained by that guy with the white hair -- Buffet, Bracket, something like that -- is the astute pick to win. 

This is because it starts out of the No. 8 hole, which apparently is quite the primo hole. The post-time favorite, undefeated Essential Quality, drew the dreaded No. 1 post position. There's also a horse named Hot Rod Charlie and another horse named Known Agenda and another horse named Rock Your World, and two horses named for booze, Midnight Bourbon and Bourbonic.

I can't imagine how you'd go wrong betting on horses with "Bourbon" in their names in Kentucky -- even if Midnight Bourbon's a 20-1 shot and Bourbonic is 30-1 and starting from the 20th and last post position.

But what hell. I say drop a bundle on both. 

Or perhaps you could go the way the Blob tends to go, which is to drop a bundle on a horse that probably has a great shot to finish 15th or so. This year, that would  be Soup and Sandwich, which some horse guys think is a terrible horse name but which the Blob sort of likes for that very reason. 

Now, Soup and Sandwich is a 30-1 shot, and it's coming out of the 19 hole, right next to Bourbonic in the outer reaches of the galaxy. On top of that, he's a gray horse, and faithful Blob reader(s) know the Blob's position on gray horses.

Which is, they are frequently Alpo. So Soup and Sandwich -- who has a stablemate named, yes, Chips and Salsa -- likely has zero chance to win.

The Blob doesn't care. It's only money, right? So I'm putting the whole enchilada on Soup and Sandwich.

All two bucks of it.