A Whirl Around the World of Sports

It's been quiet here in The Grandstand of late, but it hasn't been quiet in the wide, wide world of sports.  Some thoughts.....

GOLF

Is there anything better than one of professional golf's major championships being staged on the West Coast?  For four nights over this past weekend we were able to watch the PGA Championship, the first Major to be staged in over a year (I don't have to explain why, do I?), and it was compelling sport and television deep into Eastern Time Prime Time.

To restate, at one point on the back nine on Sunday, six players were tied for the lead.  We were looking at the very real possibility of an aggregate three hole playoff with as many as six guys playing in the same group.  On the fourteenth hole, that logjam was broken when 23 year old Colin Murikawa, staring a bogey in the face, chipped in from off the green for a birdie.  Two holes later, he drove the green on a Par 4 hole to within eight feet and calmly sank the putt for an eagle and a three stroke lead.  It was a truly remarkable shot, and, at that point, everyone else was playing for second place.

In Murikawa, the PGA Tour has an attractive and exciting young player who is now a major champion.  How many times did you hear it on Sunday? "Colin Murikawa becomes only the fourth player in history to win he PGA Championship at the age of 23, joining Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and Rory McIlroy." Before we get too over wrought about it though, consider this note that popped up on my Facebook Memories last week from 2014.  McIlroy had just won the PGA, his fourth Major in three years.  My buddy and golf maven Joe Riesacher posted a comment to the effect "is it time we put McIlroy in the discussion of chasing down Nicklaus' record of 18 Major Championships?"  That was six years ago, McIlroy was then 24 years old, and in the intervening years he has been consistently ranked in golf's Top Ten and has frequently been ranked  #1 in the world as well, but he has yet to win his fifth Major.  Winning these things is hard, and it makes the astounding accomplishments of Nicklaus and Woods all the more remarkable.

For his sake, because he seems to be a very nice young guy, I hope that Colin Murikawa has a terrific career ahead of him, but don't bet on him becoming the "next Jack" of the "next Tiger."

FOOTBALL

The biggest news in football this week is about what will NOT be happening in 2020, and that came when the Presidents of the schools of the Big Ten and Pac-12 announced that due to safety concerns surrounding COVID-19, they would not be playing football in the Fall this year.  They kicked the can down the road by saying that they would consider playing in the Spring, but don't bet the mortgage on that happening for reasons that go beyond the issues raised by the pandemic.  An interesting conversation on PTI yesterday between Michael Wilbon and Frank Isola pretty much defended the decisions made by the conferences.  Nobody wants to not have football, least of all the schools themselves, but there really seemed to be no other choice.  The virus is real, folks.

And how about the University of Nebraska.  They have been members of the Big 10 for about five minutes, have willingly accepted the gajillions of dollars that that membership has brought to them, and now they say that they are thinking about defying the B1G's decision and would be happy to set up a schedule on their own.  If I was a President of any of the other Big Ten schools, I would propose an immediate motion to kick the Cornhuskers out of the Conference.

BASEBALL, and THE PIRATES

We are now a little over two weeks into the abridged MLB season, and two teams, the Marlins and the Cardinals have been forced to miss multiple games - the Cardinals have only played five games - due to rampant numbers of positive COVID tests.  The Marlins couldn't stay out of the hotel bars and the Cardinals couldn't stay away from a Casino while both were on the road.  Boys will be boys, I guess.

The completion of this season is certainly not a sure thing at this point, and a strong possibility exists that not all teams will play the full complement of sixty games.  To do that, the aforementioned Cardinals, for example, would now be required to play 55 games in forty-four days.  Good luck with that.

Then there are the Pirates.  Until this week's series with the Cardinals was COVID-postponed, they had played sixteen games, and sport a 3-13 record.  They are on a pace that would give them, over the course of a full season, a record of 30-132.  They are on pace not only to the worst season, percentage-wise, in Pirates history, but in all of baseball history.  I think we all knew that it wasn't going to be good in 2020, but this?

It's easy to pick on the players, who have been awful, no doubt about it, but the real villain here, I think, is our boy, former general manager Neal Huntington (FGMNH).  Upon his firing, he left to his successors an organization so bereft of talent, that the team has been forced to go down to the local YMCA's and sign anyone who can throw a baseball sixty feet, six inches just to fill a roster.  The fact that Doyvadas Neverauskas is leading the team in appearances for pitchers, the fact that he is even on the team at all, is a testamant to just what a colossal mess FGMNH passed on the GMBC (Ben Cherrington).  

It's easy to bitch and moan about guys like Neverauskas, Miguel Del Pozo, Chris Stratton, and Geoff Hartlieb.  They're not actually trying to stink up the place, they just plain don't belong in the Major Leagues.  The fact that this is the best the Pirates can do at this point, is a withering indictment of the one time "Best Management Team in Baseball, If Not All of Sports."  Thank you, Bob Nutting.

What about new Bucco skipper Derek Shelton?  He has got to be saying night after night "I waited my whole career to be a big league manager and THIS is what I get?"  First off, 16 games is too soon to pass judgment on anybody as a manager.  So hold the hot takes on that issue, please.  It also has to be taken into account the truly awful collection of trinkets and trash he has been given to manage.  Factor in the delayed start of the season, the bastardized season that is scheduled, and, to be fair, the unbelievable number of injuries that have plagued the Pirates, and, well, I just feel plain sorry for the guy.  Conclusion:  Let's see what GMBC can do in a more normal off-season in 2020-21, see what kind of team can be put together for a full spring training and a full 2021 season, and the see what we get, and even then, it might not be fair to expect anything from a rebuilding (whether they want to say it or not) team until at least 2022.  Then we can pass judgement on "Sheltie."

Oh, and of course it will all depend on how much the MLB Owners and the MLBPA eviscerate each other in the upcoming Collective Bargaining sessions. Those will be fun to read about, won't they?