Category: Sports

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:

The vaunted SEC will have no finalist this year.

I can’t ever seem to get a rooting interest in the college football finals. Last year, I wanted them both to lose. This year, I want them both to win.

Indiana has the horsepower, and it would be fun to watch an once-unheralded football school have an undefeated season for the ages.

On the other hand, Miami had to scratch and claw their way here after finishing 3rd in their own conference, and having half of fandom saying they didn’t even belong in the tournament. They are single-handedly defending the honor of the ACC against the Big Two. Plus Carson Beck could become a national champion with two different universities, which is kind of a cool oddity precipitated by the new free-transfer world.

As I type this, Indiana is a 7.5 point favorite. That’s not surprising. The Miami game wasn’t decided until the final play, in a battle between evenly matched teams, while Indiana totally made mincemeat out of Oregon.

You might be surprised to read that Oregon actually produced more yards from scrimmage in that game, 378-362. That’s a pretty amazing stat for a game that Indiana won by five touchdowns, but an offense doesn’t need to amass a lot of yardage when the defense hands them the ball on the three-yard line. Indiana had one scoring drive of three yards, one of four, and another of nineteen.

THE Ohio State University was defending a national championship and spent most of this year looking invulnerable at #1, a place they held from week two through week fifteen.

Many people felt that Miami shouldn’t have been in the tournament at all. They didn’t even qualify to play in the championship game in their own conference, and came into this game as 9.5 point underdogs.

None of that matters now.

Miami has made the final four by knocking off an SEC team and a Big Ten team. They have made it to that point with little offense. They scored only ten against A&M in round one, with 278 yards from scrimmage. Their offense scored only 17 against Ohio State in round two, and they again failed to reach 300 yards from scrimmage.

But, oh, that defense!

They gave a Heisman finalist QB the worst day of his sporting career. They sacked him five times and picked him off twice, including a pick-six. The Hurricanes caused the worst performance by an elite quarterback since 1998, when the Farrelly Brothers cast Brett Favre in There’s Something About Mary.

Weird trivia:

The top four seeds are 1-7 in the new format.

Last year, the top four seeds, coming off their first-round byes, all lost in the New Year’s Eve/Day round. Then the two best remaining teams, seeds 5 and 6, lost in the next round. Then the next best remaining team, seed 7, lost in the championship, leaving the eighth seed as the national champion.

This year, the 2, 3 and 4 seeds all lost. Only Indiana prevailed.

Next up: Indiana vs Oregon; Mississippi vs Miami

A group of Indiana loggers has felled the mightiest redwood in the forest, THE Ohio State University.

And my other wish also came true: lowly, unranked, five-loss Duke won the ACC championship, clearing the way for my sentimental rooting favorite, James Madison, to get the 12th seed. Of course I don’t expect them to beat Oregon, but stranger things have happened. I hope they at least make a good showing. Oregon is favored by 22!

So here is how things fall out for the tournament seeds:

1 Indiana.
2 Ohio State
3 Georgia

If it were my call, I would have dropped Ohio State to 3, because Georgia has now defeated every opponent they faced. (Their one loss was to Alabama, and they got their revenge with a three-touchdown victory.) That said, the difference between 2 and 3 is not really meaningful. There is a big difference between 4 and 5 (only one gets a first-round bye)

4. Texas Tech
5. Oregon

This year, the difference between 6 and 7 is aiso very important, because #6 Ole Miss is a 17-point favorite against Tulane (and they already beat them by 35 earlier this year), but #7 A&M has a tough opponent in Miami. (The Aggies are favored by just four in the opening line.)

6. Mississippi
7. Texas A&M
8. Oklahoma

Major controversy: the committee leapfrogged Miami over Notre Dame! Tough call. That’s hard to justify because the Irish were rated higher by the same committee last week – and both teams were idle, so nothing could have changed.

9. Alabama
10. Miami

Well, nothing objective.

I’ll take a guess: Duke’s victory left the ACC without a team in the tournament, so the committee promoted Miami to remedy that. If that is the rationale, and I can’t see any other possible justification, that makes it more of a political decision than an objective evaluation. That’s a tough beat for the Irish. Notre Dame is rated #3 in the nation by the computers, but will watch the tournament on TV like the rest of us, as the best team excluded from the tournament.

For what it’s worth, the AP poll kept both Notre Dame and Miami, and booted Alabama.

Meanwhile, the 11 and 12 seeds allow some weaker conference champions into the tournament.

11. Tulane
12. James Madison

They could just take the top twelve teams, but holding at least one place for the Group of Five teams is something that the executives feel to be a necessary compromise. Is it ideal that Tulane and James Madison are in while teams like Texas and Notre Dame are out? Nah. If Notre Dame played Tulane on neutral turf, they would be favored by three touchdowns. It would be more if they played at home.

But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

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Computer ratings

Committee and AP rankings