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The Daily Digest for Friday, April 11, 2008 |
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April 11, 2008 |
≡ The Daily Digest ≡
 A jinx in reverse: Red Sox buried in new Yankee Stadium? |
= To Our Readers =
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= Tonight’s Menu =
>> Los Angeles, Ca.: The 54-25 Lakers can almost determine their own seeding in the Western Conference with games against New Orleans tonight, San Antonio on Sunday and Sacramento on Tuesday, all at Staples Center. The 55-23 Hornets are in first place, 1 1/2 games ahead of the Lakers, with three games left after tonight: at Sacramento, home to the Clippers and at Dallas. New Orleans has won two of three games from L.A. this season, including a 108-98 win at home on March 14 when Pau Gasol went out after 2:33 of the first quarter with an ankle sprain and did not return. The Hornets have won six of their last seven while the Lakers are on a 5-1 run. Oddsmakers think the Lakers will win and are favored by 4 1/2 points, with an over-under of 212 1/2. That makes the projected final, Los Angeles 109, Hornets 104.
>> Seattle, Wa.: The 6-4 Angels, beset by closer problems, are in Seattle to get their first look at their prime rivals in the American League West, the 4-6 Seattle Mariners in a 7:10 p.m. start. The Halos were 13-6 against Seattle last season and swept a crucial three-game series in late August to essentially win the division. In fact, the Angels won six of nine games played at Safeco Field last season. Seattle comes off a 2-5 road trip to Baltimore and Tampa Bay and will have Felix Hernandez (0-0, 0.00 ERA) pitching against Jered Weaver (1-1, 2.02 ERA). The oddsmakers like the Mariners by a little; it takes $125 to try to win $100 on the home team, but just $105 to try for the same amount on the Halos.
>> Los Angeles, Ca.: The 5-5 San Diego Padres come to Dodger Stadium to meet the 4-5 Dodgers, with aces Jake Peavy (2-0, 0.56 ERA) and Brad Penny (1-1, 2.84 ERA) facing off. Peavy easily out-dueled Penny in a 4-1 Padre win last Saturday for San Diego’s only win in the three-game series at Petco Park and the Padres are 11-1 against the Dodgers in Peavy’s last 12 starts. San Diego comes in hitting .299 as a team against right-handers, while the Dodgers are at .220. So the Padres are favored: it takes $120 to try to win $100 on the visitors, but $110 could return the same $100 on the Dodgers.
= Panorama =
The National Pastime:
>> New York, N.Y.: The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry took another bizarre turn with today’s New York Post story that a construction worker – a Red Sox fan – placed a Boston T-shirt into the foundations of the new Yankee Stadium.
“In August, a Red Sox T-shirt was poured in a slab in the visitor's clubhouse. It's the curse of the Yankees,” a construction worker told the Post. “Nobody knows about it. It's in the floors, it's buried.”
The names of the workers were not released by the Post, but the Yankees released a statement that indicated they weren’t concerned. “We noticed that the Post wrote a fun and interesting story about a T-shirt today – but it never happened. Yankee fans know that burying something in concrete in the basement is never a good thing.”
Why? Because something is buried we should know about? Does Jimmy Hoffa’s family know about this?
NBA Hoopla:
>> Portland, Or.: A good sign for the Trailblazers was a comment by Portland’s strength coach, Bob Medina, about injured center Greg Oden to SI.com’s Ian Thomsen: “other guys you have to encourage them to get in here; with Greg you say, 'Hey, we need to take a day off.' “
Oden weighs 285 now and Portland coach Nate McMillan says he’ll probably ask him to come to training camp next October at about 260. “[T]he main reason is that he's coming off a major surgery and we want him to try to play 82 games, and the more weight you carry makes it harder for anybody.”
Pucked up:
>> Montreal, Canada: Fans of the Canadiens, who haven’t seen the Stanley Cup in Montreal since 1993, are wild for this year’s team that won the no. 1 seeding in the Eastern Conference.
The crowd of 21,273 was so enthusiastic yesterday during Montreal’s 4-1 win over Boston – their ninth straight win over the Bruins – that SI.com’s Michael Farber wrote that “Indeed it was so loud for the first five minutes of the match, the players couldn't hear the coaches.” And in the best line of the playoffs so far: “The arena in Montreal will officially change its name next week from Bell Center to Decibel Centre.”
College Gridiron:
>> Norman, Ok.: Here’s the newest excuse for a speedy receiver who ran slowly during his school’s “pro day”: the surface was too slow.
Oklahoma’s Malcolm Kelly ran a modest 4.68 for 40 yards on Wednesday after his workout was switched from the hard Astroturf surface at Oklahoma’s indoor track facility to the softer artificial turf inside the school’s indoor football practice field.
“People want to say surface is surface, but it's a lot more to it than that,” Kelly told the Associated Press. “You have to think about how much ground time you have running on this mushy surface here and how much ground time you have on Astroturf.
“I get out here and it’s a whole different deal. Just a little bit of time could mean a whole lot of draft money.”
The problem for Kelly is that NFL scouts wanted him to run on a surface similar to that on which he’ll actually be playing instead of the harder (i.e., faster) Astroturf. He’s still projected as a first-round draft choice, however.
>> State College, Pa.: “If I’ve got to have a contract to keep my job here, I’m in the wrong place,” said 81-year-old Penn State coach Joe Paterno. He and Penn State president Graham Spanier agreed to hold off discussions about Paterno’s future until after the 2008 season ends. Spanier wrote in an e-mail message to the AP, “We are in agreement that a contract would have little practicality given Coach Paterno's seniority. None of us see that as necessary.”
So how long Paterno coaches will likely depend on how well the Lions do and how energetic he is. The Nittany Lions return eight starters on offense, seven on defense plus both kickers from a team that was 9-4 last season and won the Alamo Bowl, 24-17, over Penn State. The key will be the development at quarterback of a consistent starter after last season’s up-and-down performance by Anthony Morelli.
>> Gainesville, Fl.: Believe it or not, Florida’s spring game will be televised tomorrow and Gator head coach Urban Meyer has spiced up the event with a contest pitting receivers Louis Murphy, Chris Rainey and Deonte Thompson against 15 students in a 40-yard dash. If any of the students can beat any of the players, “They’re on scholarship,” said Meyer.
A reported 225 students tried out for the event and the top 15 have been separated into groups of five, with five to run against each receiver. It’s one more gimmick to help Meyer sell Florida as the “fastest team in America” with ESPN as the vehicle to communicate his recruiting pitch.
If Meyer actually wants to find the fastest man on campus, he only need to jog over to the Gator track facility, where junior sprinter Willie Perry turned in a stellar 10.19/20.40 double in last week’s Pepsi Relays. But then again, Perry is already on scholarship.
>> Knoxville, Tn.: Free football tickets are now a thing of the past at Tennessee. Until this season, 14,000 seats in 100,000-seat Neyland Stadium were set aside for students, but they’ll have to pay from now on.
Student tickets will cost $90 for the 2008 season or $15 per game, with six games on the schedule. The move leaves only two schools in the SEC who don’t charge students for football: South Carolina and Vanderbilt.
Rings & Things:
>> Beijing, China: In the midst of the IOC’s current crisis over the Torch Relay, work for the future goes on and a major change to the selection process for the 2016 Games was made, allowing the applicant cities to interact with IOC members at a one or two-day seminar, probably next April.
The details have not yet been flushed out, but a special meeting of the IOC will be held in Lausanne and the seven cities currently in contention – Baku (Azerbaijan), Chicago, Doha (Qatar), Madrid, Prague, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo – will have a chance to make their case to members directly.
That’s a switch from the current situation, adopted after the Salt Lake City vote-buying scandal, where cities do not have a chance to meet with the IOC members until the date of decision itself. The 2016 host city will be chosen during the IOC’s meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark in October next year.
>> Beijing, China: Although baseball and softball were booted from the Olympic Games sports program together in 2005, the international governing bodies for both sports are hardly on the same page in lobbying for reinstatement.
The baseball folks, working under the direction of former U.S. Olympic Committee executive director Harvey Schiller, asked for and were granted a 10-minute presentation to senior officials of the 205 National Olympic Committees meetings in Beijing, including a host of IOC members who could vote on baseball’s reinstatement as early as 2010.
The presentation was news to Don Porter, also an American and head of the International Softball Federation. Once he recovered from the surprise, he demanded his own time in front of the group and told the NOC leaders that 90% of the tickets for softball had been sold and that the number of softball federations around the world is increasing. “Baseball and softball are two separate sports and they have their own direction and we have our own direction what we want to do,” Porter told the Associated Press afterward.
Don’t expect Porter and Schiller to be huddling soon on any shared strategy in the future, either. Baseball has significant reinstatement problems in that U.S. major-league players cannot participate in the Games given that the Olympics are always held during the U.S. season. Softball has the best players in the world available and will have a considerable sympathy vote since it’s a women’s-only sport and the IOC has been on a crusade to increase women’s participation in the Games. Its major problem – similar to that of women’s ski jumping – is that it is simply not played that widely around the world.
~ Rich Perelman
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