Weekend winners
Showei Ohtani. He fanned 11 in 6.1 Sunday. he has 43 Ks in 32.2 innings over six starts. His stuff is filthy. And he’s every bit as good at the plate with a slash line of .348/.392/.652 with five homers. He’s the best story in baseball that I can remember since the post-strike home chase between McGwire and Sosa.
Jerrell Powe. Power, the controversial recruit graduated from Ole Miss over the weekend and dropped this Twitter bomb on the NCAA. “Well @NCAA – I heard from you every single day for 3 years as you tried to stop me from being the 1st in my family to go to college … FF… I graduated today and didn’t hear word 1 from you or anyone in your organization. That says it all doesn’t it? #ThankYouMama”
MLB pink uniforms for Mother’s Day. Cool look across the sport.
Stephan Jaeger. The former Baylor School and UTC star golfer made the most of a “weekend off” from his day job. Jaeger was not in the field for The Players so he drove to Knoxville for the Web.com event there and big-timed his former tour, winning
Brandon Mann. Who, you are asking? Mann, a Rangers lefty reliever, made his big-league debut Sunday. Big deal, you’re thinking. Well, Mann was drafted in 2002 and has spent the last 16 years in everything from the minors to the independent leagues to playing in Japan to not playing at all.. Yes, 16 years riding busses and saving meal money for a chance to get five outs Sunday in relief. Five outs and a lifetime dream achieved. How about these stops before reaching the majors: Princeton, Hudson Valley, Southwest Michigan, Visalia, Vero Beach, Montgomery, Inland Empire, Southern Maryland, Yokohama, Altoona, Lancaster, Fargo-Moorhead, Nashville, Midland, Round Rock and now the Texas Rangers. That’s 1,270.2 innings in 15 professional seasons with a 59-91 record and a 4.35 to get to five outs. Cool story of never giving up on your dream.
Weekend losers
LeBron James. More on that below. (But dude was awful and his plus/minus was -32 and we’re pretty surprised in was not worse than that.)
Dwane Casey. As a 5-at-10 regular noted over the weekend, there just are not a whole lot of examples of a professional dead coach getting a pink slip directly after being named coach of the year by his peers. It happened to Casey on Friday.
Golf. Great weather. Great field. The mumbo-jumbo of “the fifth major” and even a pretty impressive Tiger Woods’ performance on the weekend. And it had all the drama of “Baywatch” – the movie. Webb Simpson ran away and hid from the field and strolled his way to a four-shot win at The Players. And in truth, since no one mounted much of a challenge, it was completely forgettable to everyone not named Simpson – be them Homer J., O.J. or Jessica.
Jordan Spite’s 8 on 18 at the Players cost him more than $100K. For a guy with a nine-figure bank account, that’s not that big of a deal. For the rest of us, that would ruin our week.
Raquel Pennington’s corner people. Pennington, an MMA fighter, asked for her fight to be stopped before the fifth round but her folks in her corner sent her back out. Have they not seen Rocky IV for Paulie’s Sake? Yes, there’s motivation and there are good halftime speeches, but in something like this, if the fighter says they are done, they have to be done, right?
Boston big-time
LeBron was awful, and the Cavs would struggle with the Mocs if James plays that bad again. (More turnovers than field goals made. The same number of made 3s as Stewwie. At times a lackadaisical approach on each end of the floor that made this game feel like the back-end of a double-dip to end a seven-game March road trip rather than the Eastern Conference Finals opener.)
Side note: We are a LeBron homer. No hiding that. We think he is amazing and physically one of the five best athletes we’ve ever seen, and maybe top three with Bo and Deion. But the all-time divider here between Jordan and James, is man, no matter how bad the Bulls were in the early days, it’s hard to remember MJ getting owned like that in the postseason. And it’s also impossible to remember a time when MJ was as invisible on the floor – in the playoffs mind you – as James was for stretches of Sunday’s Game 1.
But for as bad as James was – and he was that bad – you also have to be impressed with the the cut of these Celtics’ jib.
That’s a team with interchangeable pieces that can guard and switch and are well-coached. And maybe more importantly than that last item of being well-coached, this team is allowing itself to be coached well.
On the shortlist of most hackneyed sports cliches out there – right behind the never-possible giving 110 percent and being in the zone and pushing someone under the bus – is a team “buying in.” Uh, all teams winning have buying in. The process of convincing a team to play for the greater good is the ultimate mark of professional coaching excellence, and Brad Stevens is smoking it right now.
And let’s not forget Danny Ainge. This roster is deep and balanced and has pieces to get better even still.
Look at the make-up of these Celtics, and let’s say that LeBron rallies or that Boston finds a way into the Finals and falls short.
Ainge has options.
He could flip Kyrie for Kawhi Leonard, which would mean Ainge theoretically traded a 5-foot-9 Isaiah Thomas and a Brooklyn Nets first-rounder for one of the five best players in the NBA. That would be a nice stroke.
If he believes Irving-Haywood-Horford-Brown-Tatum with Smart, Rozier and Morris coming off the bench is enough to topple the Warriors then go to work with that bunch too.
Maybe there’s a small deal to be had for Rozier, who will never have a higher value than right now.
We refuse to overreact to Game 1 because more times than not, when a Best-of-7 game goes sideways it goes off the rails too.
But it’s impossible not to notice the following things after Sunday’s Boston beatdown.
> LeBron was awful.
> The Cavs could have grabbed this series by the throat again the young Celtics by winning Sunday and bringing doubt into the minds of Brown and Tatum and especially Horford, who was 1-15 vs. James in playoff games before Game 1.
> These Celtics are good, and better than anyone could have projected considering the injuries.
> And, the future Celtics are going to be better than this, regardless of who stays and goes.
This and that
– Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals is tonight, and believe it or not, the Golden State Warriors are a 1.5-point underdog. It’s the first time the Warriors have been an underdog when Steph Curry and Kevin Durant have been healthy and expected to play.
– Speaking NBA betting, Tilman Fertitta owns the Rockets and a casino. Because of conflict of interests, Fertitta’s casinos can not take bets on the Rockets. So, if you bet during the regular season that the Warriors would win the Western Conference, technically the Warriors are the last team standing in the West and Fertitta’s casino is paying those tickets.
– Speaking of betting in general, the Supreme Court releases another round of decisions this morning at 10. Could legalized sports wagering be among them? It’s possible.
– Here’s a strange story. A student at Cornell presented her thesis in her underwear to protest “oppressive beliefs and discrimination” because her professor said her shorts were too short. Hmmm.
– Chuck Knox died over the weekend. The former three-time NFL coach of the year was 86.
– Apparently USC has offered junior college Bernard Schirmer. That’s normally not the level of newsworthiness to make the Monday 5-at-10. Schirmer though is not your normal JuCo lineman. Schirmer you may recall made national headlines for punching a referee during a game.
Today’s questions
Weekend winners and losers, and we are open for suggestions.
Happy birthday to Rob Gronkowski. Have a Co-Cola or three for us today, big guy.
Kind of a cool day for history, other than Gronk’s B-Day of course, this May 14.
First permanent English settlement of Jamestown was established on this day in 1607.
In 1787, delegates gather in Philadelphia on this day to draw up a little document we know as the Constitution.
In 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner administers his first inoculation against small pox.
In 1804, Lews and Clark’s expedition west sets out from St. Louis.
In 1939, Lina Medina became the youngest confirmed mother in medical history. She was five. That’s gross.
In addition to Gronk, a couple of other pretty big names celebrate today as Mark Zuckerberg turns 34 and George Lucas turns 75.
And 20 years ago today, the last Seinfeld aired. Yes, it has been 20 years.
Rushmore of series finales. Go.
This story is free to read.
5-at-10: Weekend winners (Shohei Time) and losers (L is for LeBron), Celtics bright future, Rushmore of series finales
