Burning the Midnight Oil

The Playoff baseball games this past week, culminating in the Cards-Nats game on Friday and the Tigers-Yankees game last night, have been nothing short of fantastic.  I am dying to go to bed each night, but simply cannot tear myself away form the TV set until the games end.

As for the Derek Jeter injury...an awful thing to have happen to anyone, let alone one of the Good Guys in the game.  And when you watched it happen, it really didn't look like anything bad happened, did it?  After watching Joe Girardi's press conference after the game, I really came away with a lot of respect for the Yankee manager in seeing how he handled the whole thing.

One unintended consequence of the Jeter injury is that should the Tigers go on to win the ALCS, the Buster Olneys and Mike Lupicas of the world will attach an asterisk to their victory.  Can't you just hear Yankee mouthpiece Michael Kaye saying "yeah, the Tigers won, but Derek wasn't playing..."

Some other quickie observations:

• I loved watching Doug Fister pitch last night.  Catch the ball, get the sign, throw the pitch.  All within the space of about five seconds.  He is the Anti-Eric Bedard (in more ways than one).  Why can't EVERY pitcher operate like this?
• Do we really need to see the "pitch tracker" on the screen all the time?
• Three men in a baseball booth is one too many.  In fact, if you have the right guy doing play-by-play, it's actually two too many.
• That said, I really like Ron Darling as a color guy.
• The NLCS is on Fox, and you know what that means, don't you?  Tim McCarver is back!! Oh, baby, I love it!
• Jim Leyland is ONLY 68 years old! He looks at least ten years older.  Stay away from the cigarettes, kids.
• I'm thinking that Bruce Springsteen has made more in royalties from the TBS promos in the past week than he did for the entire life of the "Born in the USA" album.

Pirates, Jeter, Olympics, and Absent Friends

The Grandstander is going to be off the grid for a couple of days, so let's clean out the Mental In-Box (Penn State free!)......

• How about those Pirates?  The nice thing about where they are now is that we are concerned, not with being 14 games over .500, but, rather, with being 1/2 game out of first, or two games up in the Wild Card race.  Thank you, Fred Shugars, for making this observation.
• Trade deadline looms and the name that intrigues me the most is Shane Victorino.  He would be a two month rental, which means he wouldn't, or shouldn't, cost the Pirates a boatload in a trade, and tell me he wouldn't be a huge step up in that lead-off spot in the line up?
• Ichiro to the Yankees.  Interesting.
• Speaking of the Yankees, Derek Jeter celebrated his 38th birthday a few weeks ago, and one of the interesting, if not amazing, facts I heard was that Jeter had more career hits as of his 38th birthday than Pete Rose had on his 38th birthday.
• I got into an exchange with ESPN's Buster Olney a few weeks back on Twitter.  Now Buster has to have thousands of followers on Twitter, so I was very surprised that he actually responded to my Tweet, so good for Buster.
• That said, for a major media guy, @Buster_espn appears to have remarkably thin skin.
• Heard on PTI tonight that Andrew McCutchen is hitting .484 in the month of July.  .484!!!!  I have trouble wrapping my mind around a number like that.
• If you read John Mehno's column in Sunday's www.timesonline.com you may come to understand why the Pirates are not rushing to promote Starling Marte - yet.  Good stuff.
• Also, in that same column, John reports that Lacee Collins might be resurfacing at The Fan soon.  C'mon back, Lacee!!!
• The Olympics begin on Friday.  I am looking forward to taking in much of the 300,000 or so hours of coverage that NBC will be offering on it's various media platforms, and I will no doubt be commenting on it over the course of the Games.  What are you most looking forward to watching?  The elfin, robotic female gymnasts? The men's basketball?  Watching how fast Usain Bolt can, er, bolt from the starting blocks? Seeing how many weightlifters and wrestlers get banished for doping?  The bikini-clad beach volleyballers?
• Me?  I can't wait for the curling! Oh, wait, that's in two years in the Winter Olympics.  Damn!
• I confess to missing much of the British Open, excuse me, The Open Championship, this weekend.  Blame it on the time difference, and having other things to do in the mornings.  From what I can tell, it would have been painful to watch Adam Scott's El Foldo over the last four holes, so in a way I'm glad I missed it.
• If you are old enough, you can no doubt remember the dire warnings of 40 or so years ago over the creeping specter of Pay Television.  It would end our entertainment options and the American Way of Life as we knew it.  This thought came back to me when I realized that all live coverage of The Open Championship was on ESPN, and no one, apparently, thinks any thing about that.  ESPN, in case you don't realize it, is, in fact, Pay TV.  Much of the Olympics will also be on Pay TV platforms. That battle has been lost, and was lost, long ago.

Let us end with noting the recent passing of some Absent Friends:

• Pittsburgh radio man, Ted Atkins, aka "Cap'n Showbiz", as he was christened by O"Brian and Garry.  He was the GM of radio station WTAE who came to town, listened to the station and made the first note on his To Do List to "fire Myron Cope".  Atkins soon realized who Cope was, what he knew, and what he meant to Pittsburgh, so he changed his mind and installed Cope with his five nights a week talk show.  The rest is Pittsburgh radio history.  
• Tom Davis.  Those of us who can remember the first seasons of Saturday Night Live can remember that they sometimes featured on air performances by two of the writers, "Franken and Davis".  Al Franken is now a US Senator, and Davis went on to an itinerant career as a comedy writer and performer until he succumbed to cancer last week at the age of 57.  His obit noted that he was responsible for the classic skit where Dan Ackroyd played Julia Child.  Yes, "save the liver" came from the fertile comic mind of Tom Davis.
• And just in today, Sally Ride, America's first female astronaut, died today at age 61, a victim of pancreatic cancer. An inspirational figure.

RIP to all.