Pete Rose said it, almost all of the ex players and sports writing pundits on TV repeated it over and over, experts all: “Good pitching beats good hitting!”

Well, maybe not legitimately good hitting.

Maybe great pitching beats good hitting, and even great hitting, ala Bob Gibson.

The New York Mets have good pitchers with great stuff, but they are not great pitchers yet, and Kansas City’s hitters might have taken their hearts, as well as the hearts of the Mets, period, by wearing down their ace with a simple but great strategy that has gone on since the beginning of the game—make him throw strikes, foul off his good pitches until he makes a mistake and then just meet the ball for singles and doubles and let those speed burners run wild on the base paths, unnerving the opposition while disrupting the rhythm of the ace and eventually knocking him out of the game.

If you looked closely, you saw that DeGrom does not have a slider of the likes of Tom Seaver or a curve in the league with Nolan Ryan or Sandy Koufax and has not perfected an exceptional change-up but has relied on devastating speed and movement and spotting the ball and can inevitably be worn down by a .line-up of experienced two-strike hitters.

DeGrom finally started missing his spots.

The Mets pitchers were successful against a Dodger team with big holes in their line-up and in the swings of their younger hitters who appeared over-matched. The Cubs swung and missed more than any team in baseball and struck out more than anybody in baseball, duping the experts into thinking Mets’ starters were near invincible.

The so-called experts are overwhelmed by the speed gun and the unusual poise of such a young staff of hard-throwers on the Mets.

As I said before, The Royals have a line-up similar to the great Cincinnati Reds and New York Yankees of the 1970s, with a top-to-bottom balance of tough table setters and power hitters along with speed on the base paths to drive even the greatest pitchers in the game crazy.

The lesson? Power is over-rated and diminished by good scouting reports; and especially in cold weather when the ball is deadened. Toronto was over-rated. The home-run derby at all star break is distracting bullcrap and akin to the slam dunk at the NBA all star game and discourages the real game for the instant gratification of unknowledgeable fans obsessed with sensationalism. It’s doubtful any these fans know how to keep score.

I’m not sure if the shifts are helping or hurting these teams. If anything, it makes for awkward baseball, with a big third baseman chasing down hard shots in short right field and trying to pivot on doubleplays.

I hope Kansas City can stay away from the PHD’s from the Ivy League.

Fielding techniques have changed drastically and in some cases are downright wrong, and especially infielders back-handing balls right at them, sweeping at and trying to snare balls one handed without getting in front of them. Hosmer is guilty of this and booted a big one that cost a run and was lucky to be bailed out by Alex Gordon’s homerun that tied the game. A loss, because of this boot, could have changed the path of the series. With a man on second, Hosmer has to get in front of that hard smash, and if he can’t catch it he can at least knock it down and prevent the run scoring.

I’ve seen infielders from all infield positions, especially shortstops, backhand balls right at them. You back hand the ball only when you HAVE to. Otherwise you field, plant and throw. Elementary.

It seems, at certain points in the game, Harold Reynolds, doing commentary with Joe Buck, needs to go down on the field and tap those hitters attempting to bunt and show them the simple art of laying down a sacrifice. It’s embarrassing. Even the great Mickey Mantle knew how to lay down an excellent drag bunt.

Cespedes is swinging too hard and lost his groove. Swinging too hard leads to pulling out, not keeping your eye on the ball, and swinging at bad pitches. He might be in an irreversible tailspin, and if he is, the Mets are finished. Hitting slumps are the toughest things to fight your way out of in baseball. I recall waking up at 4 in the morning at age 9 and finding my father (Murray Franklin), who was still playing in the old Pacific Coast League at 39, swinging a bat in front of a mirror in the living room after taking the collar in a game that night for the fourth straight time.

One of his solutions to get out of a slump? Play pepper. I wonder if any of these modern players play pepper.

Somehow, I don’t have the trust in Ryan Madson in a crucial relief situation as Ned Yost does. He gets behind and comes in with cheese.

The cold weather isn’t helping David Wright with all the stiffness in his lower back.

Kansas City is playing a blood-thirsty game of cold-blooded killers.

The last thing on their minds is home runs.

At the gym where I work out most mornings a bunch of older guys talk baseball all the time in a serious manner all during the season but a couple confessed they fell asleep during the first extra innings game.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’ve known too many fair-weather wanna-be baseball fans who talk the game but know nothing about it and don’t really care enough.

If you want to hear the stupidest remarks ever by baseball fans, go to a Dodger game.

Michael Cuddyer, one of the great productive very smart grinders in the game, looks finished, and it’s sad, and it hurts. He deserves better, but like Clint Eastwood says in “Unforgiven” before he shoots Little Bill, who professes he doesn’t deserve such a fate, “Deservin’s got nuthin' to do with it.”

And that’s baseball—pitiless.

Elijah Cummings and Adam Schiff tried to come to her aid, but Hillary didn’t need them. She endured the inquisition, the steady bombardment of insulting drivel and accusations and falsehoods from the likes of Trey Gowdy and his menagerie of goons and held firm, displaying an arch calm and deliberate, articulate answers to their prosecutorial grilling, saying just enough but not too much, and what was evident in her demeanor was the boon in hers—lack of an unreasonable and bullying male ego, which seemed to be transfused into the two female members of the panel.

This ugly gob of male ego, always spoiling for a good fight and incapable of admitting defeat, pushed hard into the dinner hours trying to grind her down, but Hillary, like a slick shortstop from the Dominican Republic, kept fielding their vicious grounders and throwing them out with ease as they tripped over first base repeatedly and then kicked at the dirt and yelled at the umpires like sore losers, and little boys.

Hillary’s lack of male ego was what this miserable pack of jackals could not contend with. She exhibited no anger at their insinuations, their incriminations, only the same arch calm that held firm for eleven hours as they blistered her with one toxic salvo after another, one repeated, droning, boring question after another, one more strident hysterical raising of the voice, one more sententious play to the national audience for a little recognition as they became smaller and smaller, little men using a pea shooter to take down a giant.

They were led by Trey Gowdy, a man who resembles a hairless weasel with skin gloss and taped on ears, who looked like he was trying out for a John Grisham lawyer part in one of his novels turned into a movie. His two hit men, the wheedling, sneering Jordan and Roskam, played big for Fox News while Hillary maintained that arch calm, almost smiling at their little boy ineptitude and cry for attention, once flicking lint off her shoulder, as if signifying these men as no better than flies or gnats. All day long, as they tried to wear her down, she wore them down, until the whole sorry lot seemed to be talking to only themselves, like deluded sociopaths.

Hillary was too strong for them, too tough, too smart. And, fact is, because of what women have had to tolerate from men since the beginning of time, they ultimately have more steel in their gut. Just ask those who have tangled with Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Angela Merkel, who ate their male competitors for lunch.

I hark back to my own mother, a diminutive woman whom my father, war vet, professional athlete who played hurt and never missed a day’s work no matter how sick, said, “You think I’m tough? She’s tougher, believe me.”

My father, who grew up a Russian Jew in a German/Polish anti-Semitic neighborhood, where he fought every day and went on to become an amateur boxing champion, would punch anybody out who uttered anything derogatory about Jews, or used the kike, sheenie terminology around him. My mother, a Jewish lady with small, exquisite features and an IQ of around 160, had a far different way of dealing with such mean prejudice. She told me the story of driving across the country from Wisconsin to Norfolk, Virginia, where my Dad was stationed in the Navy before shipping out to the South Pacific. Dad had managed to arrange for the wife of a fellow Navy man, an officer, to share the driving in Dad’s Packard.

Mother agreed, and they set out from Madison, where the lady had been a cheerleader and debutante and almost immediately began informing my mother that the real enemy of World War II wasn’t the Germans, but the Jews, who were responsible for it. Roosevelt’s cabinet was infested with Jews. The Jews controlled the money. The Jews were greedy. The Jews this, the Jews that, the woman taking my mother for a gentile perhaps because she was so stunningly beautiful and perhaps not fitting the stereotype of what a Jew looked like in that era.

My mother said, “I let her go on. Unlike your father, I did not fly off the handle. She was spoiled and terribly entitled and she continued this kind of talk for an entire day. I still let it go. I remained calm and pleasant. I waited until we were about a hundred miles out of Norfolk, and when she started in again, I pulled over on the side of the road, and I just looked at her. I didn’t say anything for about a minute. And then I told her, ‘I want you to know you’ve been traveling with a Jew for the last two days.’ Well, I thought she might die right there. I cannot tell you how shocked she was, and how devastated she was when I just sat there and looked at her. I wasn’t mad. I just looked at her with pity and compassion for being such a narrow, shallow person who would never experience the privilege of compassion. She was from a rich family, I was poor. Well, she started apologizing, the poor thing was crying, she became hysterical. She apologized and apologized, and when she calmed down, she said, ‘but you don’t…look like a Jew.’ Oh,' I said, 'what does a Jew look like?’ She cried and blubbered the last three hours of our trip.”

Mother said that the suffering this woman experienced those last one hundred miles was probably ten times worse than the damage my father inflicted on men who had uttered Jew-baiting remarks in his presence—several of whom ended up hospitalized. Mother said, “That woman will never forget that experience, and every time she thinks about it she will cringe, and maybe cry, and you can bet she will never repeat that business again.”

Maybe it IS time for a woman president, somebody without the kind of blustery male ego owned by an unfulfilled man like George W. Bush, who never played sports and ended up a cheerleader at Yale but couldn’t wait to go to war with his equally unfulfilled chicken-hawk pals. Maybe it’s time we had a cool, calculating, clever woman who’s been working her way around some of the biggest male egos on the world stage and in her own government and learned how to deal with them through thick and thin, victory and defeat, as well as the storm of bullshit they’ve thrown at her for decades.

You want tough? Just ask Bill. And now you can ask the Benghazi goon squad licking their wounds after getting torn up by this subtle tigress.

Bring ‘em all on, lady, they’re fair game.

It looks like the Mets and Kansas City in the World Series and should be, because both have the best balance of hitting, pitching, and defense, though KC has better defense and more speed and a stronger bridge to their closer, while the Mets have the superior starters.

Toronto has a crew of powerful hitters who are not as adaptive as players like Hosmer, Perez, Gordon, Zobrist, Cain, and even Morales, none of whom take a plan to the plate of busting the fences. Instead, they are adjusting to pitchers and just trying to hit the ball and hit it hard and allowing the power to take care of itself.

One wonders if George Brett had any influence on these kids when he went down and spent time in the dugout as a coach for a few months. Brett despised striking out and is probably appalled by the number of players who don’t seem to mind striking out 100 times plus as long as they hit a few home runs. Kansas City now has the toughest team to strike out in baseball and they hit line drives that some times leave the park but concentrate on wearing down pitchers, just like they wore down David Price.

Kansas City’s one worry is the inconsistency and volatility of their starting staff, which could blow up at any time and stress the relief core. They have no true stopper.

Look back at the types of hitters who succeeded in the 1970s for two of the most dominant teams, the Yankees and Cincinnati. Both were offensively stocked with great situational hitters to set up power hitters like Reggie Jackson, Graig Nettles, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez. Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey, Dave Concepcion of the Reds, Chris Chambliss, Lou Piniella and Thurman Munson of the Yankees were all tough outs, tough to strike out, hit line drives and had just enough power to scare a pitcher. Thus, these teams were as balanced as any ever to play the game.

Chicago, a little like Houston, has too many young guys who swing too hard and are not experienced enough to develop a plan and strike out too much. You need a couple woodchoppers to slow down those big arms and up their pitch counts. They miss too many balls.

When Arrieta was interviewed after his brilliant but draining, emotional pitching performance in the wild card playoff, the first thing he said was, “I’m exhausted.” This was an omen. He wasn’t quite the same against St. Louis and proved more vulnerable against the Mets; his tremendous half season run of dominance has finally worn him down and made him not quite as sharp as he was.

I think Don Mattingly should be relieved if the Dodgers let him go. A man of his caliber as a former player, teacher and person should not have to follow the orders of these so-called boy geniuses in the front office handing down line-ups and shifts culled from their voluminous stat charts and saber-metrics. What do these dudes know about the smell of the game? It’s a simple game and these guys can’t out think it. Anybody who thought the team they put out this year had a chance with only two great starters and a bunch of riffraff have no clue as to the grueling nature of a seven game series. Writers bring back the days of Koufax and Drysdale, but they didn’t play in two extra playoff series and they had a great third starter in Claude Osteen, a money pitcher in his own right, a clever lefty with great stuff and acumen who finished games strong. Just ask Vin Scully.

The fact that almost every player on the Dodgers was hurt at one time or another is a disgrace. Ethier is once a baby always a baby. Carl Crawford is a left-handed hitting track star who without that speed would be a .250 hitter and is now the perennial walking wounded who should have learned the drag bunt years ago. The Dodgers are a 300 million dollar mess. I love it. Money don’t buy everything, big shots. Go buy another mansion or another plane and sit in your luxury boxes with your sycophants.

In the future you might see players forced to adjust their hitting styles to overcome the new plague of shifts. These players are zoned into hitting certain pitches in certain areas and probably need to cut down on their swings, play a lot of pepper, take a lot of BP, and learn to hit the ball hard where it’s pitched, and better yet, hit any ball where they want--if this occurs the hit-and-run, the most beautiful play in baseball, will make a comeback and ESPN can display this elegance instead of the constant onslaught of tape measure home runs that parallel basketball dunks and have pretty much ruined the play of American youth.

I am NOT interested in how many MPH's a ball comes off the bat of a hitter. I’m capable of hearing it and seeing it!

Schwarber of the Cubs handles that bat like he’s been watching Babe Ruth and eats a lot of hot dogs and drinks a lot of cokes like the Babe.
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Shorten the season to 154 games and start a few days early so we don’t have to watch the most important games of the year with players wearing ski masks and resembling Eskimos emerging from igloos.

It’s wonderful to see the best player of his generation back at some small measure of baseball on Fox, but Pete Rose looks and sounds like a goof. So what. It’s great just to see him.

I saw A-Rod as being brought in by a major sports network. Have they no class or sense of shame?

I’m sick of watching big league infielders backhand balls right at them. You backhand the ball in the hole if you HAVE to, plant and throw. These infielders all have major league arms, but they don’t like getting in front of the ball.

IF ESPN gets the Series and I have to listen to that woman in the booth I’m putting on mute.

The hardest thing to do in all of sports is hitting a baseball, therefore it must be simplified. Watch Daniel Murphy hit and you’ll see what I mean—no moving parts, short compact swing with just enough power to get it a few rows up.

You realize how hard it is to hit a baseball when you watch Lucas Duda.

Look for styles of hitting and playing the game change over the next few years, especially if KC prevails. Maybe it will lead some of these players who seem helpless as bunters, drag bunters and place hitters to learn to do these small things that lead to big victories.

It’s a disgrace the Chicago Cubs paid a pitcher named Jon Lester around a hundred and fifty million dollars and he can’t hit a lick even for a pitcher and doesn’t seem to care, can’t bunt a player along, and can’t hold anybody on base.

If the game does change to what is termed  “small ball” there’ll be more hamstring pulls from running all the time instead of swinging too hard and ripping obliques.

Every home plate umpire seems to have his own too tight or too loose agenda on calling balls and strikes.

Almost all these hitters taking close third strikes an inch off the outside corner and complaining better learn about :guarding the dish” and stop taking off for first before the umpire makes his call.

The Gashouse gang would jeer most of these guys, but not Josh Donaldson.

They all deserve to be cheered for coming this far at such a tough game.

I’m trying not to be like most everybody else in this country since 9/11 and control myself when I feel like strangling this Arab who works at the gas station/store/deli/bakery on the corner downtown, just off the pier. At one time this establishment was owned by a greed-monger from New York City who was married to an even more aggressive greed-monger, who has moved out of the area after selling out to Arabs, who, if humanly possible, are hated even more than the greed-mongers from NYC, especially after they bought our only two liquor stores from long-standing white owners who were not hated or jacked up prices and fired all the long-established white townies who were barely competent yet at least pleasant and replaced them with morose, unsmiling, downright rude relatives from the homeland.

I don’t go to the liquor stores, but the blueberry muffins are so delicious and reasonably priced, I visit the bakery at the gas station mornings to purchase my lone muffin, which is about as much money as I want to contribute to these bloodsuckers, and especially the swarthy, lean-faced, surly young guy who works the register at the front counter from opening at 6 in the morning until closing at 9 in the evening. He’s usually on his cell phone conversing in Arabic, looking worried and solemn, and he’ll wait on you when he pleases without making eye contact or saying thank you, making a show of taking his time, appearing oblivious to the forming of a line of restless, impatient customers, many of whom need him to go behind the glassed-in counter across the room about 10 feet away to fetch muffins or donuts or croissants or pastries prepared in the wee hours along with breakfast burritos by a Mexican woman who seems exhausted but remains friendly and used to stay until 10 in the morning to wait on people and say thank you with a smile when we dropped change or a dollar into the glass jar with the TIPS sign on it.

But I guess the new owner, who comes in a couple times a day to empty the register for a deposit without looking at or saying anything to anybody, cut the Mexican woman’s hours and has no new landsman to help out his current standoffish uncommunicative relative.

Before the hated New Yorker sold the place he employed a local brother/sister act who baked and cooked and their pastries were voted best in the county in the county alternative paper but the Arabs kicked them out and replaced them with the Mexican. The Arab who works seven days a week does not like to come out from behind the counter and always expresses irritation with me I suppose because I never buy coffee or anything else but a lone muffin. He reluctantly goes behind the glass counter of gleaming goodies and stands there looking crucified, with a little open bag and asks which is the blueberry when I suspect he knows which is the blueberry and especially so since all I ever order is the blueberry muffin. “You have to know the blueberry,” he tells me.

“YOU have to know which one is the blueberry,” I tell him for the hundredth time. “They must be labeled and priced.”

He says, “What do you want?”

I remain polite because I try to see things from his perspective, a Muslim propagandized by voodoo gibberish and marooned in this rich country rife with hedonistic degenerates on every social level, obsessed with garish consumerism, kinky sex, narcissism, exhibitionism, reality programs full of obscenely wealthy women with fake boobs and bulbous lips and mousy husbands and tiny pampered dogs and empty-eyed offspring, repellant jingoism combined with money-sucking Christian TV evangelists and their chanting trance-like minions—an endless tapestry peopled by a diet-crazed fat farm of feeble, drug-addicted hypochondriacs complaining about free health care and Obama. Is there any end to it? So I can see why this wretch is disenchanted with us, but still, he’s taking our money with a sneer and nobody bothers to take that sneer off his face.

“I want a blueberry muffin,” I repeat, raising my voice.

A couple file in behind me. “I don’t know what is blueberry,” he insists, holding his bag. “You tell me blueberry.”

“How am I supposed to know blueberry when I don’t make them?”

His mouth narrows, his eyes flash. “You want blueberry, you tell me what is blueberry.”

A couple framers, in a hurry, dusty trucks running outside, walk in. “I don’t know which one is blueberry! Last time I came here you had me pick one out and it wasn’t blueberry, it was chocolate chip! I don’t want chocolate chip. I want blueberry. A couple days ago I was in here and you were stacking candy behind the counter. You made me wait six minutes while you very slowly finished, knowing I was waiting, and then you did me a big favor asking me what I wanted when you know I come in here at least five mornings a week for a blueberry muffin, and you act like I’m sending you to the fucking gas chamber when I ask you to go back there and get me a fucking blueberry muffin. Is that the way you treat people back home? Huh? Answer me!”

He throws up his hands in frustration, as if dealing with an impossibly stupid person, yet remains cool as a few people in coats and ties trickle in. “You want the blueberry? I don’t know what is the blueberry.” He points to the muffins, so neatly arranged. “You tell me what is the blueberry.”

“I DON’T KNOW WHICH ONES ARE BLUEBERRY!”

A small, retired, white-haired lawyer who walks two Schnauzers and knows me by my dog, says, “Dell, I’m not sure, but I think those ones in the third row are blueberry.”

“How can YOU tell?”

“Well, they look kind of purple on top.”

“Twice I picked up purple on top and they were chocolate chip.”

“I see your point.”

“Why doesn’t Mohammad here have labels?”

“My name is not Mohammad,” snaps the Arab, aggrieved.

“Fuck you, Mohammad, you piece of shit.”

Mohammad walks out from behind the glass counter and stands behind the register to take money for coffee from a framer. Several people are behind me, addicted to the delicious pastries facing us. My teeth are clacking. I walk over to a rack of chew and candy beside the register and pummel it, knocking items to the floor. “Why are you here, motherfucker? Everybody hates your guts.” I point a finger. “I’ve put up with you for a year now, because you have the best blueberry muffins in the county, even if they’re not as good as the ones before you wrecked this place, but as of now, I will never come in here and buy another motherfucking blueberry muffin, you sonofabitch, because half the time I get a chocolate muffin or an orange muffin, or a goddam raisin muffin, which I detest….”

The lawyer has me by the elbow. “Dell…”

“I’m not finished yet.”

“Come on, Dell, you’ve made your point.”

Mohammad goes back behind the glass to wait on trade. It’s early and none of these still half-asleep people want to be shocked at this hour, want only their muffins and pastries and coffee.

A woman says, “I’d like a lemon poppy muffin, please.”

“What is the lemon poppy?”

“You don’t know?” The lawyer and a few others try to help. Mohammad crosses his arms, appears bored. I walk out. I will now have to frequent the Coffee Den on the main drag, where the blueberry muffins fall apart in dry crumbs and don’t taste as good and cost more but at least everybody treats me like a prized citizen even if I don’t buy their coffee.

At night, when I walk my dog downtown, I will still see Mohammad standing outside by the pumps either smoking or on his l phone, and I will no longer feel sorry for him because he seems so alone and miserable in this country people risk their lives emigrating to.

Everybody participating in sports today is aware of the camera, whether it’s a cell phone at a Little League or Pop Warner game or 15 power lenses at an NFL game. Everybody connected to and competing in sports feels they are on stage in this era of constant exposure and unchecked narcissism, and nowhere is it expressed more dramatically and with an opiates glee than on ESPN, where professional grown-ups acting like corny wise-acres read sports scores and show highlights with just enough personality to turn them into celebrities.

Where does one begin with ESPN, the sports channel that started out with funny guys like Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick delivering needed sports news and highlights but turned into this giant octopus that has become indispensable and irresistible to what seems well over half the population of America?

ESPN has drugged the American sports public and lulled them into becoming so desperate for something to stuff into the emptiness of their meager lives and molded them into nebulae so dependent on a fix that they’ll actually get up in the morning and watch First Take, or more properly First Fake, a sort of contrived debate show involving Stephen A Smith and Skip Bayless, two utterly unlikable gasbags who pontificate as the final decision makers as to who are winners and who are losers in the world of sport.

Stephen A Smith, a glib, bespectacled and proudly sartorial black man, is a winner. Stephen A Smith will in his own way inform you he is a winner because he is an insider and you are an outsider who stands in awe of his standing with top of the line black super star athletes AND their beautiful wonderful wives who are his trusted and intimate best friends, like Lebron James, to whom he is privy on all matters of dramatic importance, is even better friends with Carmelo Anthony of HIS New York Knicks AND Carmelo’s beautiful wonderful charming wife, and even better friends with D-Wade, or Duane Wade, who is without a doubt the finest father and human being on the planet as well as in the National Basketball Association and has taken he, Stephen A, into his confidence on all matters of his own personal importance, so that when the hungry fan is in a frenzy to want to know if D-Wade is going to re-sign with the Miami Heat or on his contract year seek a trade that would break the heart of an entire state, Stephen A will let you know as soon as a very busy D-Wade, with all his projects to give back and be good, lets him know.

Oh how Stephen A. relishes your hanging on his every word and meaningful phrase!

Stephen A sometimes becomes so deliriously giddy with his self-importance at being the best friend of at least half the elite class of black athletes that he giggles like a man who has just gotten laid by a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader because he knows this would aggravate and probably anger the very territorial Skip Bayless, his trumped up nemesis who is an unabashed advocate of his precious Cowboys, about which he has written numerous books and finds even more excuses for their tragic failures to win a Super Bowl in over 20 years, a fact Stephen A glories in and rubs in on Skip every time he defends them.

Stephen A also owns a very in-your-face-dead-serious-authoritative-know-it-all tenor and I-mean-business mien when he’s on his high horse over the defense of one of the most obscene idiots on the sporting scene, one Floyd Mayweather Jr, the welterweight cheese champion of a boxing era mostly evaporated, a person once imprisoned for beating women (all is forgiven by Stephen A although he is passionate about his defense of women because of his devotion to his mother and sisters), a braggart, an excessive collector of multiple gaudy luxury items that so impress Stephen A., who is his very close friend and special guest at his mansions, and refers to his very, very close friend smugly, almost giggling, as “Money.”

What Stephen A, who knows less about boxing than he does about baseball, which is nothing, will never say and can’t because what he is essentially is a shill, is that in a genuine boxing era, like the 1970s, “Money” would have gotten his ass beaten into punchy submission in less than 5 rounds by the likes of Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Hearns, Roberto Duran, and Marvin Hagler, all of whom fought each other in the tough heyday era of the 1970s AND could punch, a talent Money totally lacks. Stephen A and Skip repeatedly debate and shill Mayweather’s fight with Manny Pacquiao when both are far over-the-hill and appealing only to those who know absolutely nothing about boxing but are caught up in the phony emotion these two clowns trump up along with savvy promoters adept at duping the public into spending millions to watch what anybody with a boxing education knows is a hoax.

Stephen A, who off-handedly refers to athletes not considered elite as “scrubs,” which is what he was as a basketball player, feels so exalted by his throne at ESPN that he has failed to consider that each one of these scrubs was a superstar in high school, a star in college, and would kick his ass at anything involving a ball. Stephen A, a front runner surrounding himself only by the ultimate winners, and not the also-rans who have productive careers and almost win championships, is America’s foremost jockstrap-inhaler, a status so visually and audibly nauseating that the sole reason for his being in his venue is that the American sports fan, out of boredom and dissatisfaction at his own ignominy, must have a powerful gene urging a hatred of self that can only be assuaged by punishing himself by watching and hating Stephen A--another sort of drug.

Unless, of course, this sports fan hates Stephen A’s counterpart on First Fake, Skip Bayless, even more.

Mr. Bayless, a sharp, intense 60ish man, non-drinker, highly educated, dedicated and disciplined long distance runner, is unlike Stephen A in that he is white. Also unlike Stephen A, Skip is NOT close to athletes, possibly because it’s impossible to be so when he knows without doubt at some point he is going to rip them, unless, of course, they are Michael Jordan and Tom Brady, two super stars he idolizes as near perfect and above condemnation.

Unlike Stephen A, who hugs black athletes as well as black hip-hop entertainers and comedians who come on the show like long lost brothers and deliver bar-room opinions of sports teams and idols, Skip delivers a quick, curt handshake. Unlike Stephen A., who thrives on attention and adoration, Skip seems to enjoy being hated as the contrarian, the curmudgeon, the provocateur.

Unlike Stephen A, Skip avoids ongoing flowery phrasing, verbosity and hyperbole by taking down or consulting notes and concentrating on statistics and long thought out opinions delivered in a stern professorial way that Stephen A often finds maddening. LIKE Stephen A., Skip will go on seemingly endless, unendurable monologues so outlandish in their claims that Stephen A will yawn, drop his head, shake his head, sigh hugely, pop his eyes out in outraged disbelief, and finally step in to interrupt, while Skip, as Stephen A retaliates, smirks, tightens his mouth in a bitchy way, and transforms his face into condescending, almost gloating smugness as if Stephen A’s excessiveness is an admission of defeat and a victory for he, Skip Bayless, the older and wiser of these two choreographed buffoons.

Unlike Stephen A, who will actually, from time to time, admit he has been wrong in a rare act of humility, Skip can be consistently wrong about viciously ripping a player or team for years, even decades, even when every statistic is stacked against him, even when every ex athlete and pundit on ESPN disagrees with him, yet continue to defend his stance and insist with an almost demented unreasonableness that he is right--like a dog refusing to give up a bone.

Not to mention Skip’s irrational attachment to HIS Dallas Cowboys and defense of their legendary chokes and excuses for failures, of late, and for the last few years, Skip, a Christian, has developed a man crush on one Tim Tebow, a Heisman trophy winning quarterback who has been cut by every team in the league but whom Skip maintains can be a success if only he’d get a chance! Tebow, a devoted and disgustingly humble ever-practicing Christian schooled as the modern athlete in conducting the corny correct goody-goody interview and delivering bland answers to stupid questions from desperate sportswriters and TV reporters, kneeled in thanks to Jesus after every touchdown and victory during his brief successes with the Denver Broncos, further ingratiating himself to the born-again zealots while sickening those fed up with Jesus crazed athletes thanking and crediting the Lord for victories and personal successes, as if they were chosen.  

Tebow, whose performance became an embarrassment after winning a few games in the last minutes for Denver after stinking up the field for 3 and 1/2 quarters, has been cut repeatedly by NFL teams, and a long list of scouts and ex quarterbacks have come on First Take and testified to Skip that Tebow absolutely cannot pass nor process an offense or solve a defense and has no chance to make an NFL team while Stephen A nods knowingly, snickering.

Yet Skip persists and runs off his gamut of statistics and comparisons and insistence that Tebow BELONGS on a NFL team while Stephen A, also a Christian, who admits the Christian boy is a wonderful person and wishes him nothing but the best, appears at first frustrated, then exasperated, and finally infuriated as he screams, “THE MAN CAN’T PASS!" Whereupon Stephen A reads off the list of those who are experts and feel Tebow stinks, but Skip carries on, believing in his “eye test,” which above all prevails, and at last Stephen A refuses to further the debate, clamming up as Skip blithely maintains “I know I’m right” and claims the reason Stephen A refuses to continue the debate is because Stephen A knows he, Skip, is right, whereupon Stephen A, who has professed during tender moments on previous shows that he “loves Skip,” waves his hands at Skip in an angry fed up manner and unleashes a diatribe at his dear friend, which Skip, who during tender moments on previous shows has openly and nauseatingly professed his love for Stephen A, continues his asinine and ridiculous defense of Tim Tebow, who no longer plays pro football and has become a color man and shill for college football.

Sometimes, as the female moderator, a sort of statue or fixture, watches and listens with swooning attention, the two geniuses shout over each other and drown each other out in their love affair and nothing it seems is accomplished but hot air that evidently raises ratings and attracts commercial sponsors and continues ESPN’s siege in taking over America with sustained and well orchestrated inanity.

Lulu is a black Boxer/Labrador mix who lives around the corner two blocks down and sometimes gets out and prowls our street and ignores me when I call out her name from my deck. I surmise she’s not quite sure I’m the guy who used to live one door over and across the street before I moved here a few years back, but I feel she should at least acknowledge Wilbur because when we walk past her fence on her street she goes to the gate and barks at him like she means business, and Wilbur immediately pulls me to this gate so they can indulge in a heated, vicious, tail-wagging bark-off before I can pull Wilbur, a Chocolate Lab who outweighs Lulu by a good 40 pounds, away.

When Lulu sniffs out our street, never moving closer than two doors down from my deck, she totally ignores Wilbur barking at her in a manner indicating he wants to rip her apart limb from limb.
On a morning some time ago I was walking Wilbur down the street where we caught hell for my allowing Wilbur to pee on a row of new plants in front of a recently built house by a newcomer to our neighborhood. As Wilbur lifted his leg and watered several of these plants, which are actually little trees, a blind went up and we were chastised like criminals caught in the wrong back yard. Since then I have tried to pull Wilbur’s 90 pounds of powerful bulk away from those plants on a bad knee with some success, because I know this man and his wife are on a constant lookout for our violations of their shrubbery.

On this street I keep Wilbur leashed, which I don’t like to do because his walks are the highlights of his days and he treasures these nuggets of playful and agenda-driven freedom. Of late I’ve taken Wilbur to the bluffs north of town where he can run loose and sniff and pee and shit as he pleases on anything he wants, as long as he doesn’t chase skunks.

Anyway, the other Saturday night, around ten, I walked Wilbur past the home where we’d gotten severely chastised, feeling that at night the owner would not be anticipating dogs peeing on his plants, and when I peered into the open window, to my surprise, the man and wife and a young couple I took for a daughter and son in law, sat at a table facing each other and holding hands and praying, the good book in the hands of the father, the room dimly lit by a single candle, and no sign of the usual TV one saw in almost every house in town this time of night.

I felt this was as good a time as any to encourage Wilbur to pee on the plants, and he did, with gusto, while I lurked behind a parked car to view the new neighbors continue their prayer meeting. I have no problem with this. I felt their humble lowering of heads while the father read was perhaps something miscreants like Wilbur and myself might at some point in our existences need, just for the hell of it, as our intentions were surely not benevolent or respectful or Godly, especially when compared to these fine, family oriented people attempting to do the right thing and become good neighbors—except for their intolerance of my dog.

Anyway, the following Sunday morning the father was out tending to the shrubbery when I came down the same street with Wilbur on his leash. The family lives on the corner, a couple houses down and across the street from where I once lived, and on this morning Lulu was out, standing in the middle of the street, staring at us, bristling to become engaged with Wilbur. Wilbur became so excited at the prospect of playing grab-ass with Lulu that he pulled hard and cried. I felt it would be unfair to deprive him of one of his favorite pastimes and unleashed him, and the two dogs immediately began moving in a circle of sniffing each others asses, and then Lulu lay on her back in a submissive posture while Wilbur pounced on her and began doing what male dogs do when they feel it is their right to deliver rough affection to a female.

I peered up and saw the man stiffen at such outlandishness. I nodded toward him in a friendly manner but he did not nod back, seemed clearly worried as Lulu nipped Wilbur on the neck, jumped up, and took off on a dead run toward the man holding a spade. Wilbur lumbered after her. Just as Lulu neared the man, and he began to move back, she took a sharp turn and headed into an empty field across the street, and Wilbur continued to give chase. At this point I limped after them on my bad knee and made a pretense of corralling them, which I knew was futile as Lulu tore across the street and led Wilbur on a series of quick starts and stops and broken-field running, again tearing past the man.

He grew increasingly nervous, even rattled, as I apologized profusely for losing control of my pet and igniting this chaos. As Lulu led Wilbur toward the man again, he jumped back, sort of hurried after them as they headed for the row of plants beside his new house, and then he yelled, as if stabbed by a huge sharp knife, and indeed looked wounded, “They peed on my house! They peed on my house!” I scurried over just as they finished and continued their chase, past the man, who turned red, and I yelled at Wilbur, calling him a bad dog and tried to chase down the two animals, but there was no use as I spotted the wife at the window, not happy.

The dogs continued their chase, but this time, to my credit, as they began again heading toward the man’s house, I headed them off and sort of herded them up the street toward where Lulu lives with Dennis and his wife, four doors down. Dennis, my old neighbor and some time drinking companion at the Schooner’s Wharf, is a landscaper and as easy going a person as exists in this laid-back small beach town, and when Wilbur chased Lulu into his yard I explained with some guilt the shenanigans Wilbur and Lulu had just perpetrated against our new neighbor.

Dennis, who was loading equipment onto his work truck, just chuckled, for in the past, when his gate was open, Wilbur has chased Lulu into the house, where he is not above peeing on potted plants and furniture. His wife quickly closed the door and I managed to get hold of Wilbur in the yard and leash him, and it was no easy feat pulling him up the street in his state of excitement as he repeatedly turned to look back, where Lulu stood at the gate, totally calm, as if nothing untoward had happened in our quiet neighborhood on a perfect Sunday morning.

Since then, taking the high road, I have changed Wilbur’s morning circuit to completely avoid these new members of our neighborhood, as there are plenty of places to pee without causing a disturbance.

Power hitting teams are traditionally shut down by good pitching, where, like last year, Kansas City and San Francisco chipped away by cutting down on their swings to wear out top line pitchers. How many home runs were hit in last year’s World Series? Not many. Each game was a war of attrition and a brilliant show of great defense under immense pressure, excellent and sometimes daring base running, and engineering a few runs to squeeze out close victories against superb starting and relief pitching.

Everybody is on the Toronto bandwagon, especially the ex players and punditry on ESPN and MLB Network, but they are a team with so-so pitching outside of Price and a touchy bull pen and they depend on home runs and have few situational hitters that build rallies and manufacture runs the old-fashioned way.

In 1963 the Yankees, like Toronto, were stocked with power hitters who did know how to manufacture runs, but a great Dodger pitching staff held them to 3 runs in a 4 game sweep!

Throughout the history of the game, consistently good teams like the Yankees and St. Louis have savvy general managers with a great instinct for what their team needs, and what kind of player has the clutch gene to help them down the stretch and into the playoffs, and cull a veteran late in his career with just enough left to get them over the hump

The Yankees picked up Johnny Mize and later Enos Slaughter in their waning years and both came up huge. The gem this year might be Chase Utley of the Dodgers, who was a big time player in the Philadelphia championship run, can still field his position, battles at the plate and has enough power to change or win a game.

Look out for lefthanders, who for decades have baffled hitters from both sides of the plate--Carl Hubbell, Lefty Gomez, Whitey Ford, Mickey Lolich, Ron Guidry, and of late Andy Pettitte, Cole Hamels and Madison Bumgardner. There’s an excellent crop this year—Hamels, Kershaw, Keuchel, Lester, Kazmir, Price, Anderson…

T



 


​There is constant chatter about the inexperience of rookies who’ve never been in the playoffs or World Series. Well, many of these kids have been in College World Series and pennant races and since little is expected of them, there is nothing to lose, while star players of which too much is expected often press—like Barry Bonds. The same can be said for journeyman or marginal players who’ve never won—they’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose, which speaks to all the unheralded heroes throughout the history of the game. Denny Doyle?

During late innings in tight ball games, especially in the deciding games, even great hitters, the best in the game, will find themselves swinging too hard at hittable pitches and either missing or fouling them off, and swinging at bad pitches they wouldn’t normally bite on. The last couple innings of last year’s final World Series game, Kansas City found themselves in this situation against Bumgardner.

Teams like Texas and Houston, who nobody was picking at the beginning of the year, or now, and were not expected to win their leagues, were supposedly rebuilding, will feel less pressure than a Kansas City, who has “been there,” and Toronto, who hasn’t been there but much is expected and are to me over-rated.

It is a disgrace how many big leaguers strike out so much and don’t seem to mind, and this is especially true with Houston, who has more hard swingers than I’ve ever seen on any team and swing and miss at more balls than I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of any of their big swingers with the exception of Correa who changes his plan with 2 strikes. George Springer, who has a great swing, a great eye, a quick bat, a natural, could emerge in these games as a future star. He’s already a fine outfielder and runs the bases well but I fear he’ll hurt himself swinging so hard. (wrist tendons, oblique muscles). The reason they lead the majors in missing 90 plus heat is BECAUSE they swing too hard

These guys all swing like Reggie Jackson.

The Dodgers should win a 3 out of 5 series against the Mets with their two great starters against three inexperienced starters, and especially Harvey, who, if I was a player, would want to beat with a burning hatred. I also think the Dodgers will have a tougher time in a 7 game series with their dysfunctional lineups due to injuries. They’ve got strong, inconsistent arms in the bull pen that need to get hot. The toughest team for them to beat would have been the Pirates.

Something seems wrong with St. Louis. They might be gassed. Their starters are young and the bull pen looks tired. Maybe the lay off will help. They’re still the best fundamental team in the mix by far. They need a lot out of Matt Holiday, if he can play.

Maybe it’s time for fresh blood in the Series.

Don’t be surprised if Kansas City eventually feels a hole in their pen without last years un-hittable closer, Holland.

Houston has 4 strong starters and some whips in the pen and gazelles in the outfield and a solid infield

Hinch might be the next great manager—smart, cool and in charge without the bludgeon.

All these teams seem in competition as to who has the ugliest, most idiotic haircuts and should never take off their caps. Their mothers should know better.

ESPN, get that woman out of the booth and away from John Kruk. It just doesn’t look or sound right. She adds nothing but quotes from the clubhouse, clichés and new-age terminology involving statistics and saber-metrics and feeble commentary, knows about as much about baseball as some guy in a bar who played in high school. She is redundant, representative of over-reaching by market-obsessed stooges running the corporation. Stop swamping the game in with stats. Let the game breathe.

Women will watch the game whether there’s a dame who never played the game in the booth or not. ESPN’s plan is so obvious they should be embarrassed. Most sickening, Rick Sutcliffe, company man, supports her with gushes. Stop it!

I’m sick and tired of the Gatorade pour on the head of interviewed so-called heroes. Give it a rest. Save it for the final game for the championship, put the champagne away.

I already miss watching Mike Trout. Get him some help so we can see him for an extra 3 weeks.

Ditto Bryce Harper.

Still, watching what remains is exhilarating.

Football can wait.

I was nurtured and educated by a professional baseball player and former Big League'r from the age of 7 on, and because of this, whether I like it or not, the game throughout my 72 years has been an addiction and intoxicant, and for that I am grateful, even if it has distracted me from other more urgent endeavors and interests, though when all is said and done baseball probably takes precedent over politics, technology, the spread of nuclear weapons, gun control, the environment, more serious involvement in the economy, international intrigue, terrorism, and even my favorite pastime, boozing in the local pub.

So, since I live 225 miles from the nearest Big League ball park and 100 miles from the nearest minor league park, and will scarcely attend a big league game anyway because of the hassle, and am not driving 100 miles to watch a minor league game, I watch a lot of baseball on TV, and feel blessed with Dodger and Angel games and ESPN and now the MLB-ESPN.

What I love about watching baseball on TV is that I can work a crossword puzzle and read a novel or magazine and still watch the game, as long as I tune out these people in the commentating booths who will not shut up.

I do not need every intricacy of the game explained to me. I haven’t learned anything new from color commentators since Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver retired. Joe Morgan was no chatterbox, but, being a secondbaseman taught the game by the great Nellie Fox, he disclosed nuances and situations in a quiet subtle way, like an understated teacher.

McCarver, like Vin Scully, remained quiet when something exceptional occurred and let the scene play itself out. A former catcher, he made intermittent but very incisive comments in anticipating what was to occur, actually feeling the game at a gut-level and transferring it to the fan. I felt myself “thinking” the game along with McCarver. He was uncanny. He was not afraid to upbraid a player too dumb or selfish to play the game the way it was supposed to be played, or to expose the behavior of a hotdog desecrating unwritten protocol observed by ball players for over a century.

McCarver and Morgan were gems.

What we have now evidently are former players or former sportswriters perceived as experts who cannot shut up. The sports writers accumulate so much useless information and intrusive statistics you want to muzzle them. I like Tom Verducci, because, like most of us, he loves the game. But I don’t need him. Nor his ilk of excessive verbalizers on ESPN and MLB who never played the game.

More than anybody, I do not need Curt Schilling. Despite his tremendous knowledge of the game, he is a self-righteous know-it-all and oozes an authoritative and patronizing attitude that exclaims, “This is MY game, not yours, so listen closely and you might learn something.” I don’t like his goody-goody jingoism supporting war and maudlin displays of reverence for the troops. Leave that to the politicians.

Schilling, by the way, got in trouble with his opinions and has been temporarily replaced by a cliché-ridden female voicing the insulting obvious, no doubt the choice of ESPN corporate stooges obsessed with marketing. What they should do is clean house and stick the excellent Joe Buck with only Rick Sutcliffe, a knowledgeable and brutally honest ex-pitcher possessing the colorful personality and charm of one of his mentors, the great Don Drysdale.

In some cases, there are 3 people in a booth taking turns or talking over each other, squelching and smothering the game so that you have baseball tape flowing out of your ears, and then they consult the sportswriter down on the field with the latest trade or gossip or tidbit, and sometimes we have to look at them as they eat something you want, like a knockwurst smothered in onions and mustard, or as in Texas where these guys are wolfing bar b cue ribs!

I’m going to miss Vin Scully. That cliché—“let the game come to me”—is Skully. Alone in the booth and needing no help, he early on establishes an easy flowing rhythm, a cadence, and drops fascinating incidents and anecdotes observed in the past that are attuned to what is happening. He does not opine, or critique, or explain, but points out, being too modest and humble a man to think he has the audacity to expound on the game and openly criticize a ball player, people he admires for their  courage and incredible skills to play such a game he, Skully, knows is so heart-breaking and beloved. What Skully does is drop hints perhaps alluding to bad baseball.

Skully’s storehouse of knowledge and subtle involvement in the game is so profound and organic that it is a part of him as it casually pours out like good literature or understandable yet eloquent poetry, never pushed or stilted or obvious or show-offish or created to fill space because the game is “too slow” and the viewer so empty and stupid he cannot see or feel the same things he does and needs constantly to be entertained.

Vin respects the fan, understands the fan, gives the fan credit for knowing enough about the game and is sitting alongside the fan with an imaginary beer and cigar, making the game a little easier for the fan, a little more enjoyable, and taking nothing away from it.

With the playoffs and World Series coming up, the coverage and commentary will be so overdone and saturated, so drowned in statistics and technicalities that one will wonder how a simple game could become so complicated.

When I was 14 Dad took me to the LA Coliseum to see the Chicago Bears play the LA Rams, who had a new running back named John Arnett who’d been an All American at USC and was one of the most balletic broken-field runners ever to play the game at any level. At that time I was a 9th grade running back at Roosevelt Junior High in Compton and regarded myself as a broken-field runner in the mold of Arnett, though I had no appetite for the brutality of football and was out there because I could run, and run fast, and dodge tacklers trying to take me down like a terrified hare.

Dad (Murray "Moe" Franklin) was originally from Chicago and played football briefly at the University of Illinois and hated it and went on to play baseball there and later signed a contract with Detroit and eventually reached the big leagues. So the Bears had been his team and were a notoriously rough and sometimes dirty bunch, once hailed as “Monsters of the Midway,” with beasts like Bill George and Fred Williams and big Doug Atkins and were coached by the legendary George Halas. Chicago had a quarterback named Ed Brown who could heave a spiral 80 yards and hit a receiver like tall lanky very speedy Harlon Hill on a dime. Even faster than Hill and perhaps the fastest man in the league was their sleek black halfback, Willie Galimore.

Dad and I arrived at the Coliseum 2 hours before game time so we could check the players out from our program, read their bios, and study them with our binoculars as they warmed up, doing calisthenics, stretching, running wind sprints, and best of all watching them run plays and follow the high booming spirals of punters come down to a Willie Galimore who settled under it, caught it, and took off like a flash in zigzag patterns.

Watching Galimore, Dad said, “He’s so smooth he doesn’t even look like he’s running. He glides, like his feet skim the grass. White guys don’t run like that, not even Arnett. He reminds me of Jesse Owens.”

Then Dad related to me a story of Owens when he was playing his first year of minor league baseball in Beckley, West Virginia. At that time Owens was running exhibitions after his miraculous feats in the Olympics at ball parks, taking on the fastest man on all white teams and giving them a ten yard head start at 100 yards. Since Dad was the fastest guy in the league and described in local papers as “Grease Lightning,” he took on Owens.

“Dell, I got a hell of a start, and I was ahead, and I couldn’t hear him, because he was so light on his feet, I thought I might beat him, and then, with about ten yards to go, he flew by me like I was standing still. Afterwards he shook my hand. A very gracious man.”

Watching Galimore take handoffs from Brown and burst through holes in practice drills, he was an arrow cutting through wind.

                                                                  ****

At game time, the Bears were introduced and ran onto the field from the tunnel at the end of the stadium, and then the Rams congregated at the tunnel, lined up, and the starting line-up was announced, each Ram sprinting onto the field, and then the PA announcer boomed, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOUR LOS ANGELES RAMS!” And the team burst onto the field and you felt goose bumps and Dad nodded at me and smacked my shoulder. “You ready, boy?”

Oh yeh. It was an amazing game, with oodles of offense and vicious tackles. Just as in practice, Ed Brown hit Harlon Hill with an 80 plus yard touchdown, Hill catching it over his shoulder on a dead run while the Ram defensive back trailed by half a yard and lunged at him and missed. All afternoon Brown assassinated the Ram secondary. Meanwhile, John Arnett returned several punts, zig-zagging, Cutting sharply, reversing field, his balance so exquisite he’d reach down and touch the ground in some instances, a puma. Half the game Dad and I were standing and shouting. Folks around us flashed looks of shock at our rabid behavior. Since the stadium, which held 100,000, was not even half full, Dad and I moved down several rows for a better view and witnessed a maniac named Ed Meadows continue to rush the passer after the ref called the Rams for movement on the line and threw a flag and blew his whistle. Meadows grabbed  unsuspecting quarterback Norm Van Brocklin by the head and threw him to the ground, Van Brocklin’s helmet flying off, and Van Brocklin was livid, pointing,  screaming, and they penalized Meadows for roughing the passer but didn’t kick him out of the game, and Dad said, “These guys are animals, Dell. betcha they’ll  retaliate in five minutes. You watch.”

Sure enough, a few minutes later, after Galimore was corralled on the sidelines and taken down around the Ram 20 yard line, Les Richter, a middle linebacker known for his dirty  tactics, piled on, and lay upon Galimore, squashing him, and little George Halas, in suit and tie, sprinted down the Bear sideline and began beating on Richter’s helmet with his clipboard before the refs pulled him off and then Halas began berating the refs for not calling a penalty on Richter, who was engaged in shoving matches with Bear players before refs broke that up.

Dad was up and screaming. “Look at that old man sticking up for his players. Hot damn!”

The Rams lost in a high scoring, exciting game full of spectacular plays. Hill scored 3 touchdowns. Arnett wowed the crowd over and over again on kickoff and punt returns during which there occurred several blindside blocks and we were angry he wasn’t used as a running back, cussing the Ram head coach. At the end we were both drained and nearly voiceless. We walked out of the stadium and Dad commented on how gifted these athletes were, how they were the “cream of the crop.” There were so many great plays I urged Dad to get home so we could catch highlights on the 5 o’clock sports section of the local news. But the traffic was heavy and we didn’t get home until 6. Dad said I could stay up for the late news at eleven o’clock and watch highlights even though I had to go to school the next morning, because he was going to watch them too and knew I’d be miserable if I couldn’t relive those moments with him.

We both wanted to see the Hill catch and Arnett and Galimore’s runs one more time before they disappeared forever. Exhausted as we were, our bodies and minds were still reverberating with the excitement of a great NFL football came—cream of the crop.