Category: Sports

Who?

Frank had a minor role in an infamous baseball incident.

Baseball team owner Bill Veeck was known for crazy promotions and grand, offbeat gestures. With a true love of the game and a wicked sense of humor, Veeck was one of the few executives who realized that baseball was supposed to be fun. Perhaps his most infamous scheme involved signing Eddie Gaedel, a 3’7″ man, to a 1951 contract.

No, not as a mascot or a good luck charm. As a player.

What does this have to do with Frank Saucier? Give me time, I’ll get there.

Veeck wanted to pull his stunt in a home game, of course, to take advantage of the hype. Since the home team always has to take the field first and the diminutive would-be slugger could not play the field, an expendable player would start the game and be listed as the lead-off hitter. When it was time for the home team to bat, the manager would announce that Mr. Expendable was being lifted for a pinch batsman, although I’m not sure that “lifted” is the right word here, given that the pinch hitter was Mr. Gaedel.

And Frank Saucier?

He was Mr. Expendable, the only man in major league history to be replaced by a little person.

The rest of his major league career consisted of 14 at bats and an .071 batting average.

So you think I’m making fun of the guy? You could not be more wrong. I came to praise Caesar, not to bury him. Frank Saucier was an amazing man. He was a naval officer at age 18. He was a genius student. He was a successful entrepreneur, and later a CEO. He was the kind of guy they name things after.

So you think he was good at everything but baseball? Wrong again. He was good at baseball. Really, really good. He once made the cover of The Sporting News, and had a lifetime minor league batting average of .380. (That’s not a typo. Three-fucking-eighty!)

What happened to all that potential? Long story. I covered the rest of the Frank Saucier story, including biographical info and all the inside details of the Gaedel incident, in an article at Uncle Scoopy’s Ballpark.

Here is his official obituary.

Germany entered the match as -700 favorites to advance. According to BetMGM sportsbook insights, 99% of the money wagered was on Germany to qualify! I’ve never seen a betting situation like that – all the money placed on a bet that would have paid next to nothing.

They lost to Paraguay, a team that the USA beat 4-1.

The USA team has so far managed to recover from their embarrassing loss to Turkey. (Turkey lost all of their other games, scoring no goals.)

Thanks to a red card, the USA had to play a man short for the final 25 minutes against Bosnia, but still managed to advance to the round of 16 for the first time since 2002. They are not expected to advance farther because the red card also means that star player will not be eligible to play the next game against Belgium.

Was there any tennis player in history who finished their career without a losing record against any opponent they played more than once?

Apparently not. Some researchers found that Steffi Graf had a losing record against Jo Durie (3-4) and Wendy Turnbull (1-2). She tied Navatilova, 9-9.

Bjorn Borg also game close. He was 1-2 against Paul Gerken and 2-3 against John Newcombe. He tied McEnroe, 7-7.

It’s a difficult achievement because players lose matches if they are too young at the beginning of their careers (like Borg), and they lose matches if they keep playing when they are fading.

Miller struck out 19 of the first 24 batters he faced. (Video)

This feat may not seem that impressive you until you realize the previous record for “fastest to 19 strikeouts” was 37 batters!! Even more impressive, he doesn’t mess around with throwing balls. He just whips them over the plate and dares any batter to catch up to his heater (topping out above 103 MPH), his 96 MPH change, or his 88 MPH slider. He threw only 20 balls to those 24 batters. He has allowed only two base-runners, and has an ERA of zero.

He has so much stuff that it isn’t even fair. If you watch the video, you’ll see that he throws pitches that break to his right, or to his left, or drop off the table. Miller is considered the fastest pitcher in MLB today. He threw the fastest seven pitches in the 2025 season. His average fastball (101 MPH) is faster than the fastest pitch Nolan Ryan ever threw (100.9). His average change-up (95.5) is approximately as fast as Nolan Ryan’s average fastball.

I was watching the Pirates yesterday because I was curious about their new and highly-touted teenage shortstop, Konnor Griffin. Man, shortstops are no longer the wimpy little guys who played there in my boyhood. This dude is a big boy. The announcers reported that Griffin became the youngest Pirate to get a hit in his first game since Hall of Fame second baseman Bill Mazeroski did it about 70 years ago, on July 7, 1956.

And then I realized that I missed Maz’s death in late February.

Many people have maligned his HoF credentials, arguing that he’s there just because he hit one of the most dramatic homers in baseball history. Playing for the Pirates, he became the man who made Mickey Mantle cry when he defeated the mighty Yankees with a single blow. He cleared the left field wall in old Forbes Field in the bottom of the ninth in game seven of the 1960 World Series. It remains to this day the only game 7 walk-off homer in baseball history.

But that’s not why Mazeroski should be in the Hall of Fame. He was better at turning a double play than any other second baseman in baseball history.

People are well aware of dominating performances in pitching and batting. Any good fan knows that Babe Ruth hit 54 homers in his first year with the Yankees, when nobody else in the league could even reach 20. Every good baseball nut knows that Pedro Martinez posted a 1.74 ERA in the height of the steroid era, when the league’s second-place guy was at 3.70. But only a tiny fraction of baseball fans know that Maz put up defensive stats just as impressive as that.

• In 1966, Maz turned 161 double plays. The NL’s second-place guy turned 89.
• That’s the best season in history, but was no fluke – Maz also has two others in the top six.
• Among all second basemen in history, he has the highest lifetime defensive WAR.
• Over the course of a career, he turned a double play every 10.7 innings, making him the best of all time, and one of only two men below 12.

By the way, Maz’s record of 161 double plays is unassailable. The record in this century is 136, and the numbers are on a downward spiral. Nobody even reached 100 in 2024 or 2025, even with all the teams now in the majors. The current baseball strategy is based on “three true outcomes,” which means that the number of ground balls is declining. Because there are so many strike-outs now, and because players try to hit the ball in the air when not whiffing, there are 15%-20% fewer ground balls than in Maz’s era, so even if Maz could come back to life with his 1966 skill level and got paired with the game’s best SS, he could not approach his own record.

Was Maz the greatest second baseman of all time? Of course not. Batting is important, and he stunk as a hitter. There is a baseball stat, called OPS+, which measures the total value of a player at the plate, with 100 representing average production for a major league hitter. In 17 seasons in the majors, Maz never even reached 100. He was always decidedly below average. He wasn’t even the best second baseman of the 50s and 60s. Nellie Fox and Red Schoendienst, near contemporaries, were almost as good defensively, and were consistent .300 hitters.

Was Maz a great player? Sadly, no. His lifetime WAR was 37, with most of it coming from defense, far lower than an average Hall of Famer.

But what is the Hall of Fame designed to honor? Is being the greatest defensive player at one important position not sufficient? I think the Hall is designed to honor special lifetime achievements, and that seems pretty special to me. That got Ozzie Smith (.262 lifetime) and Brooks Robinson (.267) in. Brooks was an average offensive player, and Ozzie was below average, so they are in because they were the best defenders at their positions. Granted, those two men were better overall players than Maz, but there’s no good reason why comparable skills shouldn’t have gotten Maz in as well. I concede that he’s a marginal HOFer, but I would probably have voted for him because “best defense of all time at a key position” swings emotional weight with me.

That’s an odd story to begin with, but what makes it really strange to me is that it is my high school.

It’s quite a story. When I was in that school with my fellow early baby boomers, there were about 2,000 students and it was just a typical Catholic prep school. Today the average graduating class is between 50 and 60 kids, yet they have managed to survive and retain the immense old facility.

How could that happen? Well, they expanded to a “high and middle” school, with grades 6-12, and they charge a fortune to go there, but that still only got them to 315 total students, not enough to pay the bills. Then they had a brainstorm. They saw the high schools in Florida that are basically training programs for elite athletes and realized that there was nothing comparable for (of all things) women’s hockey. They converted some apartments, where the nuns and brothers used to live, into dorms, and created a hockey boarding school. (It’s still a regular high school as well. The hockey players attend regular classes with all the commuter kids.) It was really a radical idea, and not many people thought it would have broad enough appeal to succeed. I never would have thought of it. But it turned out to be genius. That high school is still in business, while our identical sister school, faced with an identical situation and lacking a creative solution, has been closed for decades, as have so many high schools in an era of declining birth rates and increased home schooling.

So, it turns out that I went to a hockey factory, and have never even skated in my life. As ol’ Casey Stengel used to say, “Amazin’!”

Approximately 13 seconds into the race, with her entire body airborne after coming off a turn into a jump, Vonn clipped a gate. With no way to stabilize herself, her body twisted and she hit the ground in a cloud of snow. Vonn tumbled down the slope, coming to rest in a tangle of skis and limbs. “Oh my goodness! No!” cried the NBC announcers, speaking for everyone watching, at home and on site.

In the end, it seemed, there would be no poetic, storybook ending to Vonn’s comeback story: just a medevac helicopter carrying the skier’s prone body into the sky.

These are the 1903 NY Highlanders, a team that would later be called the Yankees. They were not an especially good team, barely cracking the .500 mark, but the three circled men are baseball legends and Hall of Famers.

On the top is John “Happy Jack” Chesbro. He won 21 games that year as the ace of the staff, but it was the following season that got him into the Hall of Fame. He posted an unreal record of 41-12, with 48 complete games. That remains, and probably always will remain, the most games ever won in one season at the modern pitching distance. It may be the most unbreakable single-season record.

Third from the left in the lower row is Clark Griffith. He was then at the tail end of an excellent pitching career, but was in his first year as the team manager. Two years earlier, he had managed the first pennant winner in the history of the American league. That turned out to be his only pennant as a manager, but he would later manage the Washington Senators for many years in the Walter Johnson era. After his playing and managing careers, he had a third baseball life as the team president and owner of the Washington club, where he won three more pennants and a World Series. The Senators’ ballpark was named after him.

Next to Griffith is “Wee” Willie Keeler, the 5’4″ bat-control specialist who coined the phrase “hit ’em where they ain’t.” He had eight consecutive years with 200 or more hits. Through the 1903 season, his first with the Highlanders, his lifetime batting average was .366, which would have been the highest of all time had he retired then. He continued to play when he was no longer effective, and his lifetime mark dropped to a “mere” .341.

As of now, Indiana has the last undefeated college football team and the last undefeated college basketball team.

Helluva second half. There’s no doubt that we got the two best teams into the finals. The stats match up perfectly. The difference between the teams was a blocked punt and that heart-stopping last-minute interception.

Here is how ESPN summed it up:

A 27-21 win over Miami that closed out an undefeated season and brought an improbable national championship to a program that had known nothing but losing and indifference for almost 140 years. Coach Curt Cignetti, who took over a program with a nation-leading 713 losses and turned it into the game’s biggest winner in the span of two years.

The three key plays:

Mendoza’s epic run:

The blocked punt:

The INT: