Today in weirdo news

Look, we all know Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh is a couple of sandwiches shy of a picnic. I mean, come on, when he was a big-deal NFL coach, he wore $8 pants. He once ate cold cereal with Gatorade instead of milk. One time, he slept over at a recruit's house.

Comes now the latest evidence that the Prince of Ann Arbor is a certified weirdo, courtesy of Matt Hayes of the Bleacher Report. In his Michigan football preview, he includes an anecdote from former UM quarterback Wilton Speight, who says Harbaugh once pulled him aside and told him not to eat chicken.

 

"Why?" Speight asked.

 

"Because it's a nervous bird," Harbaugh replied, presumably from his home base on Mars.

 

He went on to expound upon his theory that eating chicken, especially the white meat, was making human beings sick, or some such thing. And that we'd all be better off if we just ate beef or pork.

 

Presumably Harbaugh was not aware that pork markets itself as "the other white meat."

 

Anyway ... there you have it. It should be noted that this anecdote, like a lot of anecdotes, may or may not have a whiff of urban legend to it. But let's be real here. It sure sounds like Harbaugh, doesn't it? 

 

Don't eat chicken, people, even though your doctor would probably tell you it's better for you than either beef or pork. Load up on cheeseburgers and pork chops instead. You'll be turning handsprings at 90, like Jack freaking LaLanne. 

 

Yeesh. God only knows what he thinks about fish.

Tour de quiz

The Tour de France, also known as That One Bicycle Race, ended yesterday on the Champs Elysees, and of course about 12 people on this side of the Atlantic noticed. This is because we are a provincial lot, we Americans, and if there are no Americans up there on the podium, we tend to pay attention to sports that do involve Americans on the podium.

Like, I don't know, professional cornhole, perhaps.

(No, really. I'm not making that up. There actually is such a thing. And, no, I have no earthly idea why).

Anyway ... That One Bicycle Race ended yesterday, and over here we were all so wrought up over professional cornhole or NASCAR or the Greater Velveeta-On-Rye Open, most of us couldn't name the winner on a bet. And so, as a public service, the Blob offers a short multiple-choice quiz to see if anyone can actually identify the winner.

The winner of That One Bicycle Race was ...

A. Pee Wee Herman.

B. Lance Armstrong (secretly entered as a French rider, LeRance Armoire).

C. Some guy named Schwinn.

D. Your paperboy.

E. Eddie the bike messenger.

F. That dude at the gym who ties up the stationary bike for two hours and then never wipes it down when he's done.

The correct answer is "G," for "None of the above."

The correct answer is "Geraint Thomas," who is Welsh, and who rides for Team Sky, and, really, that's pretty much all I know about him.

But he won the flowers and that bowl they give the winner, so he must ride a bike real good. And so hooray for him.

Dog days

Checking out the baseball standings this a.m., and the exciting news for all Blobophiles is, no, that's not a preface to yet another Blob about the by-now wearisome Battle for the Cellar.

("Stop it, stop it, STOP IT with the posts about your stupid Pira-- Oh. All right. Carry on, then," you're saying).

Besides ... the Battle is over for now. The Pirates, for some unaccountable reason, have actually begun impersonating a baseball team, while the Reds continue to be the Reds, if slightly less hopeless than previously. Still, the Pirates are now actually in third place in the NL Central, a game ahead of (what?) the Cardinals. And they're now eight-and-a-half games ahead of the Reds, so--

("Stop it! STOP!")

OK, OK. I'm done.

No, I was checking out the baseball standings, and what I actually noticed is that the Baltimore Orioles, who are plumbing perhaps historic levels of awfulness this sad summer, are 41 1/2 games behind the first-place Red Sox in the AL East. And it's not even August yet.

Talk about your dog days. There's still 57 games left in their season as of this morning. Which means even if they won every single game from here on out, and the Red Sox inexplicably lost every single game, the O's wouldn't catch the Beaneaters until sometime in the middle of September.

What must the mood be like in that clubhouse right now? Fifty-seven games left in the season. That's two full months and change. And even if they caught fire -- which for the O's would mean, oh, winning half their remaining games -- it would still be a fight to even get out of the cellar, on account of they're 17 games behind even the next lowliest outfit in the East, the Toronto Blue Jays.

Seventeen games out of next to last. Think about that.

Now think about what the O's must all be thinking about right now.

I think I know:

1. Golf.

2. Fishing.

3. Hunting.

4. Christmas trip to Disneyland with the fam.

5. Snorkeling in Aruba/St. Kitts/St. Bart's.

6. More golf.

Anything but baseball, in other words.

OK. So they probably are thinking about baseball in at least one respect.

"Are we done yet?"

Stained

Milwaukee Brewers All-Star pitcher Josh Hader was roundly booed in San Francisco last night, but not because he silenced the Giants bats in an inning-and-a-third of peerless relief. He was booed because, almost a decade ago, he was a dumb high school kid.

No, really. That's why.

It seems that back in 2011, when Hader was 17 years old, he did what a lot of 17-year-olds do: He acted the fool on Twitter. Unfortunately, in this case acting the fool involved a lot of vile racist and homophobic tweets. Being 17, Hader didn't understand the eternal nature of Twitter. Once you put something out there, it's out there forever.

And so during the All-Star break, when he should have just been soaking up the kid-on-Christmas-morning ambience of the whole event, Hader found himself answering for things that happened almost literally in another lifetime. This being America in 2018 -- a time perspective forgot -- he's continuing to answer for it. And probably will for a good while.

He's accepted that, to his credit. The Brewers have, too.

“This is hanging over Josh. He feels this every day," Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell said last night. "So that’s not going to go away after today. We’re on the road, it’s something different. But he’s hurting. So I don’t think that’s going to go away today.”

In other words, he's going to continue to get what amounts to a life sentence of shaming. And that in itself deserves to be shamed.

Look. There are people in this country who deserve to get called out every day for being racist or homophobic or misogynist. One of them resides in the White House. Many more are the nitwits who keep calling the cops because people of color are doing something suspicious, like Walking While Black or Sitting In a Restaurant While Black or Doing Their Jobs While Black.

Those people are getting exactly the shaming on social media they deserve.  So are the men who insist on using their positions of power to sexually harass women, or worse. The backlash against this -- that it's all the fault of rampant "political correctness" -- is both laughable and disgusting, given that what the backlashers call "political correctness" is nothing more than expecting people to behave like civilized human beings. That a big chunk of society at last finds it unacceptable to behave otherwise is one bright spot in an age when America seems to be marching resolutely backward in all other areas.

That said ...

That said, the shaming of Josh Hader is a bridge too far.

First of all, all those offensive tweets happened years ago, and who knows of whom they were a product. I don't know what Josh Hader's home environment was like growing up. I do know that the sorts of things Hader was tweeting are not the product of nature, but nurture. They are learned behaviors.

Also, high school kids are frequently knuckleheads. So there's that, too.

In any event, there is overwhelming evidence that in these intervening seven years, Hader has successfully unlearned those learned behaviors. His teammates say so. Everyone around him says so. And Hader himself has bashed his teenage self to a fare-thee-well, and apologized for his actions. Unless some other evidence shows up to indicate he hasn't changed, that ought to be the end of it.

Of course, it's not. Of course, Hader still had to undergo sensitivity training mandated by Major League Baseball, a frankly absurd state of affairs. And of course, he'll still be the target of boobirds on the road -- unlike at home, where his first appearance after the All-Star break elicited a standing ovation.

That shouldn't have happened, either.

So what should happen?

Oh, I don't know. How about nothing?

Anthem worship

This just in from the National Anthem front, in which black football players kneeling quietly with their heads bowed during the National Anthem became an issue mainly because President Donald J. Trump, Fake Patriot, decided to make it one.

Goodness. The shiny objects an unscrupulous man will use to distract us while he sells us out to hostile regimes. And it's working!

Anyway ... the news from the self-appointed Anthem Police is that it's not just kneeling that's regarded as disrespectful. Apparently you have to stand a certain way now, or you're whizzing all over the  anthem, and the flag, and the troops, and, I don't know, maybe even Mom and apple pie.

Courtesy of Deadspin, here is the tale of one Laurie Vandenberg, a baseball fan in Alaska who went to a minor-league game and was irked that one of the players stood with his hands behind his back during the anthem, finding it as disrespectful as kneeling. So she confronted both the player, Kona Quiggle, and a couple of team execs, threatening to shame them on Facebook, which she did.

Blessedly, the team execs treated Anthem Cop Laurie's concerns with the seriousness they deserved, which is to say not very seriously. They said they had no issue with the way Quiggle was standing for the anthem, and planned to do, well, nothing about it. And Quiggle himself explained he was standing that way -- in the military it's known as parade rest -- to honor a friend who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

What's appalling about this is that the guy even felt compelled to explain himself. It directly contradicts everything for which his friend died, and everything the anthem and the flag and all the other nonsense the anthem cops have chosen to wrap up in it represents. What business is it of theirs how Quiggle or anyone else chooses to stand, sit or kneel for the national anthem? And why should their opinion -- or that of Our Only Available President -- be the official word in that matter?

I thought the whole point of America is that there should be no official word in these matters. I thought that's what we were all standing (or, yes, kneeling) to honor. Silly me.

Look. The Blob has long been on record as saying it finds nothing inherently disrespectful in football players choosing to kneel during the anthem to call attention to racial injustice in this country. They're not mooning the flag or shaking their fists at it or cursing at it. They're not disrupting it by trying to drown it out. They're simply kneeling, as you would in church.

Myself, I, too, stand with my hands behind my back during the anthem. I always have, not because I'm consciously honoring the military, but because it feels more genuine (and therefore more respectful).These days I also tend to bow my head in prayer for a nation that's clearly lost its mind, given that this sort of lunacy has actually become a political issue. I suppose that would be seen as disrespectful by the anthem police, too.

Well, it's not. And do you know why it's not?

Because when I stand for the national anthem, it's only my opinion of how and why I do it that matters. I really don't care what you or Laurie Vandenberg or the charlatan in the White House thinks.

In America, freedom is never having to explain yourself in these matters, or answer to any self-appointed arbiter's idea of what is properly respectful of that freedom. Who doesn't get that?

Well. Other than the self-appointed arbiters, that is.

Your dumb baseball moment for today

... comes to us from St. Louis, where Cardinals' rookie pitcher Daniel "Greatest Name In Baseball" Poncedeleon had a no-hitter going through seven innings against the Cincinnati Reds. And then, well, didn't.

This is because the Cardinals' interim manager, Mike Schildt, lifted Poncedeleon after the seventh, because he'd thrown 116 pitches and baseball today is obsessed with pitch counts. Poncedeleon was well over his, so even though he clearly wasn't struggling, Schildt yanked him and sent in the Cardinals' rag-armed bullpen.

Who promptly surrendered two runs in the last two innings and allowed the Reds to escape with a 2-1 win.

"We weren't in a situation where he would have been able to finish that game with a no-hitter,'' Schildt said later, articulating the prevailing wisdom (or lack of same). "It was his time.''

Somewhere Old Hoss Radbourn, who once pitched 73 complete games in a single season, just elbowed Walter Johnson, who pitched 30 or more complete games seven times in a career that lasted 21 seasons. They both rolled their eyes and laughed.

A big fat W for golf

OK, OK. So maybe he'll do it. Maybe. Just ... maybe.

Maybe Tiger Woods is not finished, despite the Blob's serial eulogies of the man, despite its many posts throwing shovelfuls of dirt on his grave. That's the news from windblown Carnoustie over there in Scotland, where Tiger, a 42-year-old man of many surgically-repaired parts, shot a 71 Sunday and tied for fifth in the British Open, behind playing partner Francesco Molinari.

Molinari is the first Italian ever to win the British Open, but never mind that. The more significant achievement was Tiger Woods actually hanging with the big boys in a major again, even briefly taking a Sunday lead for the first time in almost a decade.

Alas, he couldn't hold. But the Blob's long-standing prediction that he was done winning majors, for any number of perfectly legitimate reasons, suddenly doesn't look like the sure thing it once was.

This is because, even recognizing that Tiger Woods is the king of his era and perhaps any era, I underestimated just what a unique talent he was, and apparently still is. And I'm prepared now to concede that perhaps he isn't finished winning majors, that if he can be in the mix in a major that means he can win a major, and perhaps more than one.

I still think his back will eventually betray him again. But maybe not soon enough to stop him from reaching back and tapping into his old self again, the self the world of golf still thinks it sees in him. And that is nothing but good news for the game itself, because even now no one draws the crowds or jacks the ratings the way Tiger does.

You're always loathe to say "He's back," because that always sounds like you're jinxing whoever "he" is. And given Tiger's age and infirmities, it's just as decent a bet he misses the cut in the PGA as contends again. But for now ... yes, he's back.

And all of golf rejoices.