— This will be the 22nd year of the fantasy baseball league I’m in; it is a keeper league, you have mostly the same roster every year.
Woke up Sunday morning to a text saying that the CBS website that hosts our league eliminated all the rosters; 30 players on 14 teams went bye-bye. For the next six or seven hours, I managed to get 378 of those 420 players back on the correct team, but there is still work to do.
Not the best way to start the day.
— NBA star Cade Cunningham will make $52M a year for the next four years; that $1M a week, if you’re scoring at home, and he’s only 24 years old.
Cade Cunningham is from Arlington, TX; couple weeks ago, he bought a minority ownership stake in the Texas Rangers. He threw out a first pitch before a Rangers home game last summer.
Cunningham is among the athlete investors in Sportsology Capital Partners, which recently completed the minority investment in the Rangers. Must be pretty cool to be 24 years old and be a part-owner of a major league team.
— Friend of mine’s son plays baseball for Mississippi State; was watching their game on TV Friday- they had a crowd of 12,824 for Opening Night in Starkville.
— This winter, players went 8-4 against the owners in arbitration cases; since abritration started in 1974, owners have a 362-278 advantage in arbitration.
— P Zac Gallen agreed to a one-year, $22M contract to stay with the Arizona Diamondbacks; $14M of that money is deferred; Gallen had a rough season last year, going 13-15, 4.83, but he was 6-3, 3.00 in 11 August/September starts.
— San Diego Padres signed OF/DH Nick Castellanos and P Griffin Canning. Castellanos might platoon at first base with Gavin Sheets; he hit .250 with a .694 OPS for the Phillies last year. Canning was 1-3, 3.77 in 16 starts for the Mets last year.
— Blue Jays/Astros traded outfielders; Toronto acquired Jesús Sánchez, dealt Joey Loperfido back to Houston.
Sanchez hit .237 with 14 homers for the Marlins/Astros last year; his career OPS is .727.
Astros traded Loperfido to Toronto during the ’24 season; he hit .333 in 41 games for the Blue Jays last year.
— Famous birthdays, February 16th:
Tim Cullen, 84
Glenn Abbott, 75
Tracy Marrow, 68 (Ice-T)
Kelly Tripucka, 67
Craig Neal, 62
Jerome Bettis, 54
Tommy Milone, 39
— Prime Video has an interesting four-hour program on the history of the ABA; the basketball parts of it are tremendous, lot of excellent history. The ABA lasted nine years, changed the way a lot of us watched basketball.
— Kevin Loughery played 11 years in the NBA, for three different teams; he scored 15.3 in his career, pretty good player. Then he became a coach. He won two ABA titles with the Nets, with Julius Erving as their star, but things went south after the Nets traded Erving to the 76ers with the Nets having $$$ problems.
Loughery then coached the Atlanta Hawks for two years, including Dominique Wilkins’ rookie season. From there he coached the Chicago Bulls, where he coached Michael Jordan when he was a rookie.
Pretty interesting career; he coached Dr J, Dominique Wilkins and Michael Jordan, and got fired in all three places. He was replaced in Chicago by Stan Albeck, who was fired after one year, replaced by Doug Collins. Phil Jackson didn’t become Chicago’s coach until Jordan’s sixth season in the NBA.
— Nevada Wolf Pack lost to San Diego State Saturday night; they are now 0-14 at Viejas Arena.
— BYU retired Jimmer Fredette’s number 32 over the weekend; he was Player of the Year during the 2010-11 college season, was the 10th pick in the first round of the 2011 Draft. Fredette grew up in Glens Falls, NY, an hour north of where I live. He was a hell of a scorer.
— Kansas State fired basketball coach Jerome Tang; Wildcats are 10-15 this year, 1-11 in the Big X, after going 18-32 in conference games the last three years. Tang led K-State to the Elite 8 in his first season coaching the Wildcats.
K-State will try to fire Tang for cause. Tang has a buyout of more than $18M, per the terms of his contract, but Taylor believes Tang’s recent public criticisms of the players and the response a press conference spurred in the national media violated the terms of his contract.
— Caden Pierce, the 2024 Ivy League Player of the Year, will transfer to Purdue and play for the Boilermakers next season. Pierce is sitting out this season to finish his degree at Princeton; he is a 6-7 forward whose brother is a receiver for the Indianapolis Colts.
Pierce was hobbled by an ankle injury last year, but still scored 11 ppg, grabbed seven rebounds a game. He scored 16.6 ppg, grabbed 9.2 rebounds/game two years ago.
— Bracketology gives us the top 16 seeds, as of Sunday:
#1 seeds- Michigan, UConn, Duke, Arizona
#2 seeds- Iowa State, Houston, Illinois, Purdue
#3 seeds- Florida, Nebraska, Kansas, Gonzaga
#4 seeds- Texas Tech, Vanderbilt, Alabama, Michigan State
