Strange and stranger

 The Oakland A's have lost all three of their games so far on opening weekend in the Bay Area, and only 22,784 fans showed up for those games. This will happen when you deliberately put a minor-league product out there and charge major-league prices, which is what A's owner John Fisher is doing.

Fisher, see, wants desperately to get the hell out of Oakland, despite the fact the A's have called it home for almost 60 summers.

He wants to move the team to Las Vegas, even if the A's don't have a ballpark there yet, may never have, and are in negotiations with Sacramento and Salt Lake City for temporary accommodations.

He wants to move the team there even though Vegas seems profoundly lukewarm about the idea -- the mayor even said Fisher should try harder to keep the team in Oakland -- and Oakland just offered to extend the team's lease for five years with a three-year opt-out. This would keep Fisher from moving the team to temporary quarters.

In other words: Oakland is offering Fisher a measure of security to actually make moving the team to Vegas easier.

Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has unanimously approved Fisher moving the team, even though he's gutted the ballclub and you'd think MLB would want to distance itself from the Vegas crowd now that the best player in baseball, Shohei Ohtani, either got himself mixed up with an interpreter who stole Ohtani's money to place huge bets, or Ohtani was using the interpreter to place bets for him.

Strange days for the former Pastime. Strange days indeed.

In the meantime, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred promises what he hopes is a speedy investigation (and by "speedy", he means, "I hope like hell we can clear Ohtani really fast"). This while the A's-to-Vegas chatter continues apace.

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking it might be time for MLB to cool that chatter for a bit. And maybe investigate John Fisher's ownership of the A's while they're at it.

Or would that not be strange enough at this point?

Still dancin'

 So I look up now, and North Carolina State -- North Carolina State! -- is in the Elite Eight. Beat 2-seed Marquette by nine the other night in the Sweet Sixteen, after leading by double digits most of the way. All this after the Wolfpack lost seven of their last nine games in the regular season, including the last four.

But then the Pack somehow jacked around and won the ACC Tournament, which earned them an 11-seed. Now they play 4-seed Duke to go to the Final Four while 6-seed Clemson takes on 4-seed Alabama -- which means the ACC comprises almost half the Elite Eight, and gets to be all snotty and superior again.

But enough about that.

Let's talk about Your Purdue Boilermakers, for whom North Carolina State might be a cautionary tale if the Boilers weren't already full up with cautionary tales.

Full up ... and fed up.

Because here came 5-seed Gonzaga last night, and here came Zach Edey and Co., saying "Nuh-uh, we've already seen this movie." Saw it last year and the year before that and the year before that, and decided enough with this bull***.

Which is why Edey went for 27 points and 14 boards last night, and point guard Braden Smith, who like all of these Boilers takes no guff from anyone, added a stat line for the ages: 14 points, 15 assists, eight rebounds. Lance Jones and Fletcher Loyer added 12 and 10 points, respectively, and Purdue shot 57 percent and 45 percent from Threeville, and Gonzaga was swept away, 80-68.

Three tournament games; three double-digit wins.  Average margin of victory: 26 points.

And so the Eff You, Doubters Tour rolls on, unless it's the Call Us Chokers, Will Ya? Tour. As has been observed in several quarters since the Madness began, this is one locked-in basketball team. 

Or pissed off basketball team. Or mountain-sized-chip-on-the-shoulder basketball team. Or all-of-the-above basketball team

And look, I don't know what happens tomorrow against 2-seed Tennessee, which is playing some damn good basketball itself. The Midwest region is the only one that's gone chalk to this point, and if it goes chalk tomorrow Matt Painter will be in the Final Four and the knuckleheads who said Purdue should move on from him can just shut the hell up already.

Will it happen? Beats me. The difference between a 1-seed and a 2-seed is virtually invisible, so either way it'll be no shock. And it could, because as North Carolina State has shown, chalk sometimes gets dusted in the Madness. That's why they call it the Madness.

Me, I'm thinking Purdue wins. The Boilers are still dancin', and it's big-mad dancin'. And with apologies to Kevin Bacon, there ain't nothin' footloose about that.

As if.

Lunacy unbound

 Poor old Gonzaga. Here's hoping the Bulldogs have their green cards in order.

And, no, not because Purdue could expose them tonight as a bunch of ILLEGAL INVADERS from, I don't know, Gonzagia, maybe, infecting America like PARASITES and VERMIN. As a certain ranting demagogue likes telling his deranged true believers these days when he's in 1930s Germany mode.

"The hell are you talking about, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now, with some justification.

I'm talking about a certain foot soldier in the ranting demagogue's army, Michigan loon Pete Hoekstra, who tweeted  a photo of Gonzaga's basketball team de-boarding a plane in Detroit with this notation: "Happening right now. Three busses (sic) just loaded up with illegal invaders at Detroit Metro. Anyone have any idea where they're headed with their police escort?"

Um, well, Paranoid Pete, my guess is the team hotel. But then I'm not a BATSHITE CRAZY NUTBAR like you and your ilk.

The Blob generally tries to refrain from generalizations, but it's tough to do when you hear the foaming-at-the-mouth hysteria coming from the increasingly unhinged right these days. And so I'll just go ahead and say that an element of that hysteria, particularly where the southern border is concerned, clearly is racist in nature.

Omigod look at all these awful brown people swarming our border, speaking their dirty foreign language, raping and murdering our (white) daughters ...

Maybe that's not the perception they mean to create, to give them more credit than they likely deserve. But it sure comes off that way when Fearless Leader uses loaded words like "vermin" and "invaders" and "parasites" to describe people who, for the most part, are merely desperate to escape poverty and/or violence in their native countries.

Do some of them have criminal records? Sure. Are some of them bad people intent on committing bad acts? No doubt. Are they overwhelming available security along some parts of the border? Certainly.

But would they be so obviously characterized as subhuman if they were, say, white Europeans?

Well ...

Look. I'm not trying to start a whole thing here. I'm just pointing out how, um, interesting it is that Pete Hoekstra saw several people of color boarding a bus and immediately assumed they were "illegal invaders" imported by the Democrats to bring down America and vote for Democrats -- even though as "illegal invaders", they couldn't do so.

Something to think about.

Hizzoner

 The mayor of our fair city passed away peacefully last night, four months after he was elected to a fifth term and a month after revealing he had stomach cancer and it had spread pretty much everywhere.

Two months ago, his beloved wife died of cancer, too. Which reminds us yet again that cancer is a platinum-grade son of a bitch, because it kills both the good and the bad without distinction.

Tom and Cindy Henry were both on the good side of that ledger, and not by a little. They were as good a couple as the city of Fort Wayne, In., has ever known, and their passing is a double blow that will be felt far beyond the tight circle of their immediate family and friends.

In a lot of ways they were Fort Wayne, and not just because Tom was an exemplary mayor for 16 years. On his watch downtown Fort Wayne went from sleepy backwater to vibrant city center; if no one used to go downtown because, you know, it was just downtown, everyone goes there now. 

All of that you'll read elsewhere today, of course. Here, though, you'll read not  about Mayor Henry but Mayor Tom, who was just a regular guy like the rest of us.

Back in the day, see, fellow sportswriter and longtime friend Steve Warden and I used to bug out for lunch to the Green Frog Inn, a wonderful old place down on Spring Street which was owned by Cindy Henry. We still do it occasionally, though both of us are now retired.

Anyway, one day we're sitting there and here comes Mayor Tom, who recognized us as Journal Gazette staffers. Mayor Tom was limping a bit. We said "Hey, you're limping", something like that, and Hizzoner immediately went into Regular Guy mode.

Which is to say, he spent a couple of minutes telling us about his groin pull.

Now, I don't know how other mayors in other towns do things, but I don't imagine many would regale a couple of newspaper grunts with tales of a, um, rather intimate injury. I mean, it's not like we were lifelong buddies or anything. At best we were casual acquaintances.

But Mayor Tom was Mayor Tom, a Fort Wayne guy with a Fort Wayne lack of pretension who lived his whole life here, and who devoted more than 40 years of that life to serving his hometown as an elected official.

"Man," I marveled to Steve that day at the Frog. "In what other city would the mayor tell two people he barely knows about his groin pull?"

Think we know the answer to that.

Opening Day

 In northeast Indiana it's 31 degrees right now, and there was frost on the lawn when I let the dog out this morning.

This means nothing because the forsythia is blooming.

It means nothing because the grass is green again, and here and there it looks as if it could use a haircut.

It means nothing because, in Baltimore and Chicago and Los Angeles and ten other places, the umpire will shout "Play ball!" today. A pitcher will come set. A batter will step into the box and scrunch his feet around until he feels comfortable.

It may not feel like spring in a lot of places yet, But spring is here because baseball is here again -- and today is either opening day or Opening Day, depending on how you feel about it.

How a lot of America feels about it these days is "meh," and that's unfortunate. It's also proof of the immutable law of the universe that dictates change is the one constant. Baseball, cleaved to its history as it is, failed to change for far too long, and now it's trying desperately to play catchup.

Maybe it will catch up, in time. But right now it's losing the next generation of fans, and its demographic skews older every year. When a significant chunk of your fan base is on Social Security and Medicare, that's a problem.

But enough gloom and doom. Enough, too, about Shohei Ohtani, who continues to claim he was ripped off by his interpreter and is not-not-not covertly betting huge sums even as his sport cozies up to the gambling industry. 

(Latest sign of the apocalypse: On ESPN's MLB website this morning there is a video clip of baseball writer Jeff Passan talking about how the Ohtani mess could haunt the Dodgers all season. Right below it is an item slugged "MLB Betting" offering betting tips for the baseball season. Oh, irony!)

Later for that, however. Today is about balls and strikes and Omigod the Royals/A's/Reds are gonna suck again.

And my Pittsburgh Pirates?

The Cruds open in Miami tomorrow night, if you care ("We don't," you're saying). As far as I know, they did as little as they could get away with in the offseason. Some people think there's reason to believe they'll be better this season, maybe even third-or-fourth-in-the-division better, but I'll reserve judgment.

Instead I'll go shopping for a few nice throw pillows to spread around the NL Central cellar. If my Cruds are going to return to their ancestral home, after all, there's no reason they shouldn't be comfortable.

Play ball!

Shut up and play

 Even Caitlin Clark's dad is fed up with it.

Read something the other day that, as his daughter pissed and moaned her way through Iowa's second-round NCAA Tournament win over West Virginia, Brent Clark appeared to yell at her to shut up and play. And, yeah, OK, apparently he didn't say exactly that, but he did appear to say "Stop" or something along those lines.

In the days since, social media has taken its cue from Dad, and, because it's social media, it's been far less gentle about it. And now there's talk in some precincts that Caitlin is only getting ripped for it because she's a woman and women aren't supposed to be quite so, um, fierce about things, and therefore the criticism of her is a misogynistic double standard.

Let me first say that tends to be true when society reacts to the way men move through the world and the way women do. You can deny it, but you'll just sound silly and, well, misogynistic if you do.

Now let me say something else:

In this particular case, there is no double standard. And it's a load of horse pucky to say there is.

Look. I get it. I'm just a male of the species, so what do I know. But I'm also a male of the species who spent almost 40 years working the sports beat, and I have an intermittently good memory. So when I say ripping an athlete for constantly bitching and moaning is an ecumenical proposition, I have data to back it up.

In other words, I remember Christian Laettner.

Who was, like Caitlin Clark, an incandescent talent. And who was, or could be on occasion, an absolute horse's ass. And was duly slammed for it with as much vehemence as Clark is being slammed for it now.

As was Bill Laimbeer, a notorious whiner and flopper. As was Rick Barry, whose prima donna bitching at the zebras was legendary. As were any number of other male whiners and floppers down through the years. 

No one I can recall said they were all just fierce competitors, as some of the double-standard people are claiming ("If Caitlin were a man, she'd just be a 'fierce competitor'"). No one's saying anything about Clark they didn't say about Laettner or Laimbeer or anyone else. They were cut no more slack because they were men than Clark has been because she's a woman.

The lesson here is nobody likes a whiner, and that sentiment is not gender specific. The other lesson is when you reach a certain level of fame, the number of people who call you out on your whining -- and the volume with which they do so -- is going to rise exponentially.

Right now Caitlin Clark is the face of college basketball, men's or women's. With that comes a level of scrutiny that is sometimes unfair but not exclusive to either gender. And social media has raised that level of scrutiny to heretofore unimagined heights.

 And you know what?

That's not going to go away.

It comes with the territory when you lift public awareness of your game the way Clark has for women's college buckets. The women's game is experiencing an unprecedented surge of popularity which has been a long time in coming, and good on that. But with more popularity comes more exposure, and with more exposure comes the realization that the women's game is just as fierce and competitive and entertaining as the men's -- and that those who play it are just as prone to being jerks sometimes.

America picking on Caitlin Clark for being a whiner?

That's not misogyny. That's success.

Because once upon a time, no one would have cared enough to pick on her.

The return of Coach K. Er, Coach C

 The University of Kentucky is bringing back John Calipari for another crack at losing to Whatsamatta U. in next year's NCAA Tournament, and that must frost the cookies of every Wildcat fan from Harrodsburg to Hunters Hollow.

You lose to St. Peter's and Oakland in two of the last three years, and fail to make much of a splash in a whole lot of other years stretching back a decade or so, the true believers start hauling out the torches and pitchforks. Welcome to Wildcat Country -- or Hoosier Country, or Tar Heel Country, or Jayhawk Country, or any other Country whose beating heart is a basketball thump-thumping hardwood.

Know what, though?

Over at the Lexington Herald-Leader -- UK's hometown paper -- they're probably rejoicing. That's because they'll get another crack at spelling Calipari's name right.

Maybe you missed it, maybe you didn't, but the Herald-Leader published a big ol' front page story about Calipari's buyout the other day. Problem was, the H-L spelled his name "Kalipari" in the headline.

Now, you'd think when a guy's been around for 16 years and won you some national titles, "Calipari" would be the ONE name you would never get wrong. But there was "Kalipari' in great big bold type, christening Coach Cal the new Coach K or some such thing.

And the best part?

In the cutline of the photo above the story, "Calipari" is actually spelled correctly.

Now, I could go on a rant here about how this is what happens when you whittle your newsroom down to skeletons and outsource your copy editing to Kalamazoo or wherever, but I've already ranted about that ad nauseum. Suffice it to say print journalism has gone the way of the dinosaur, and all that's left are hedge fund vultures picking over the carrion for every last scrap.

Journalism? Serving what once was regarded as the noble purpose of keeping the local community informed and enlightened?

Pffft. How 1970s.

Anyway, all that leads to "Kalipari", which is hilarious until you consider the boots still  on the ground at the H-L likely were the only ones mortified by it. The parent company prolly is too busy counting its cash to notice.

Quick story.

Way back in the early 1980s (or late 1970s, I can't remember exactly which), when the Blob was still a puppy sportswriter occasionally peeing on the carpet, the paper for which I worked, the Anderson Daily Bulletin, ran a story about the death of a local high school athletic director. Esteemed sports editor Mike Chappell wrote the story, and quoted a school official as saying "We've lost a dear friend." Great quote, and so we used it as the headline for the story.

Except.

Except the headline came out reading "We've Lost A Dead Friend."

The journalism gods were benevolent that day, however. Because for some reason I was wandering around the backshop where they were pasting up the pages (yes, boys and girls, newspaper pages were physically pasted up in those long-ago days), and I caught the error. Or maybe it was Mike, I can't exactly recall.

At any rate, a new, corrected headline was rolled out. And the readers were none the wiser.

But you know what?

At least that never happened when we were writing about Bob Night. 

I mean, "Knight."