quid.pro

Gary Carter, 1954-2012

I’ve always been a baseball fan but nothing reinvorgated my love of the sport more than the 1986 World Series. And no one was more important to that Mets win than Gary Carter. He will always remain a favorite, may he rest in peace.

In praise of being old

“Endurance is not a young person’s game. I thought I might even be better at 60 than I was at 30. You have a body that’s almost as strong, but you have a much better mind.”

Diana Nyad, on picking up long distance swimming after a 30-year hiatus

American McCarver

Sorry things have been a bit quiet here but I’ve been blogging a bit more over on American McCarver of late and a lot of the quick sports hit stuff that might have showed up here is over there. It’s a great blog, you should read it if you enjoy people funnier, smarter and more blog savvy than me. You can recognize their posts because they usually have about 10x more comments (or whatever Tumblr calls them) than mine.

Granted...

It’s good to see major leaguers giving something back to the kids. It puts it all in perspective.

Zito said his trip through the Minors helped him gain some of that perspective. Seeing the younger players work so hard and enjoy the game as much as they do, all without the perks associated with being a Major Leaguer, inspired the 2002 American League Cy Young Award winner to remember something he had long since forgotten.

“It’s all about baseball. It’s all about having fun and enjoying the game,” Zito said. “That’s what they do. I’ve definitely been enjoying the game a lot.”

He dropped about $6,000 or $7,000 on meals for his Minor League teammates over his four rehab starts, as the tradition goes. Granted, Zito is signed to a seven-year, $126 million contract, but the gesture was less about money than his appreciation for the players.

When the brand goes awry

I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about personal brands lately and the different examples of one person empires (something I touched on in a post for SAY’s blog). I’ve seen enough Bravo in the last few months to be a complete fan of Bethenny Frankel — if you don’t know her story, you should read up. The right voice creates the ultimate micro media with retail brands and business infrastructure to go along with. From reality stars to sports figures to politicians, our media landscape is as much who we follow as what we watch.

As a complete non basketball fan, I did watch last night’s game (congrats to @mcuban!)  rooting not only for the Mavericks but also against LeBron James. If anyone has done more to damage his personal brand (in the not-involving-sex category), it would be “King” James. From Sports Biz:

Like a medieval fable gone wrong, this King hasn’t seen the error of his ways. He still doesn’t get that fans aren’t mad at his actual decision to leave Cleveland, but the way “The Decision” show went down.

And he still doesn’t understand that the reason he is disliked so much is because he brings it on.

Some personal brands — Donald Trump or Glenn Beck come to mind — are based in negativity and work because of it. But sports personalities almost universally have to be positive and LeBron has some serious work to do if he’s going to recover his own.

Cody Ross is boss

“[Cody Ross] could be the running mate on a Tommy Lasorda presidential ticket, and I’d still love him. It’s good to see him hitting well.”

Grant Brisbee goes about as deep as a Giants fan can in expressing his love

Schadenfreude and the Dodgers

As a Giants fan, the 2010 World Series was amazing. Enough said on that. If you don’t believe me, email me privately and I’ll send you some stories to go read, pictures to gape at and video of an amazing parade.

As a Giants fan, the Dodgers’ current situation is like icing on the cake of 2010. It even has a Wikipedia page! For those of you who don’t follow baseball but are still reading this post, the powers that be at Major League Baseball have taken over control of the Dodgers from owner Frank McCourt. MLB is one of the few government granted monopolies and normal business rules just don’t apply. If the league doesn’t think you’re doing right by the league, your team can get taken away. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.

The story is interesting because there are so many angles. Other teams have similar problems but they’re not the Dodgers and baseball respects its history. And its money — Los Angeles is the second largest media market and much is at stake. But probably most importantly, the owners of baseball teams (all incredibly rich people, not surprisingly) see their ownership as a badge of respectability. Frank McCourt, the primary owner of the Dodgers just isn’t respectable anymore. He may never have been (his original purchase of the Dodgers — from Fox! — was controversial at the time) but now he’s divorcing his wife in a very public, very LA way.

Baseball teams are to rich people like houses are to the rest of us. In other words, too big of an asset to survive a divorce. A couple of years ago, the Moores had to sell the Padres after their divorce and now the McCourts are heading down the same path, the difference being that Bud Selig is doing it for them. The Mets may be next for a different reason — that team’s owners were on the Madoff gravy train — but that’ll be someone else’s schadenfreude as I still have a special place in my heart for the Mets.

But not the Dodgers.

Further schadenfreude

• Renck: Dodgers’ dive big tragedy
• Major League Baseball seizes control of Dodgers
• Dodgers react to MLB takeover
• Former Rangers president agrees to oversee Dodgers
• MLB Trade Rumors additional links

These are all of my favorite things

I’ve always been into word games and as a kid got so into crossword puzzles that I started creating them myself. Not that you need to hear my story of woe, but this was in the days before computers and the internet (at least for a 13-year old living in Pennsylvania) when writing a puzzle meant graph paper, pencil and a bunch of dictionaries. I eventually found a reference book that was meant to help you solve/cheat puzzles by listing every word with a certain two letters in it — for instance all words with the pattern *s**e. It was a great help in building them too except it only went up to six letter words, meaning that most of my puzzles ended up with very few words longer than six letters.

I haven’t created a puzzle from scratch in 30 years and have been meaning to play around with software that I know is available to help build puzzles. Added to the list of things to do with my copious free time.

All of which is a long winded intro to this story of crossword puzzling genius and the intersection of four of my favorite things: technology, music, baseball and puzzles:

Never mind the valley’s beautiful weather, cutting-edge companies, mega-wealthy moguls. The valley’s latest claim to fame is that among the tech wizards who immerse themselves in WYSIWYG, HTML and SCSI is a strong cadre of crossword constructors able to build ambitious puzzles whose up and down letters vex even those well-skilled at filling in the blanks.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done the Times crossword puzzle regularly although this article has made me want to start again.

Giants to clinch in 162 or fewer

I only take issue with the Dodgers in 3rd place. I think they’ll fight it out with the Diamondbacks for last with the Padres again being better than anyone expects. But of course, the biggest disappointment of 2011 will be the Phillies who will be fighting with the Rockies for the wild card all year.

And anyone who wants to disagree with me, I’ll kindly point to my 100% success rate in predicting Giants’ World Series trips

Let the games begin!

It’s almost summer

Our tickets came. I have to break last year’s record of 42 games. Of course, that included a bunch of play-off games...