— I’ll be back later tonight, after I go thru the NCAA Tournament brackets for a while, but in the meantime, I’ll clean out my notebook and post some stuff. I usually get fidgety the couple hours before the brackets come out.
— Conference tournaments are fun and all, but a game like Purdue-Michigan, where both teams are already going to be high seeds in the NCAA Tournament, how much do the head coaches really care about winning a conference tournament?
Main thing is that no one gets hurt; the NCAA’s are what matters and your first game is going to be on Thursday or Friday.
— There shouldn’t be any college basketball games on Selection Sunday; everyone should just go home and rest and they should have the NBA, spring training and golf on TV all day.
— Modern basketball: 9 of St John’s 15 players are transfers, including all five starters; some teams just don’t recruit high school kids anymore, they oach good players from other schools.
— Speaking of Rick Pitino, when he was coaching Providence in late 80’s, he had some terrific assistant coaches. Jeff Van Gundy, Herb Sendek, Stu Jackson, Gordon Chiesa and he also had a point guard named Billy Donovan.
— WAC only had seven teams this year; their conference schedule was kind of unique, you play the other six teams three times each, so it is an 18-game conference schedule. When you play a team in the conference tournament, you are playing them for a fourth time in a season.
— Sunday is an unusually active TV night; all the bracket talk will be on, the US plays against the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, and the Academy Awards stuff is on TV. I’ll be listening to the baseball game while doing a night full of bracket research.
— Famous birthdays, March 16th:
Erik Estrada, 77
Kate Nelligan, 76
Ozzie Newsome, 70
Rodney Peete, 60
Steve Israel, 57
Todd Heap, 46
Curtis Granderson, 45
Blake Griffin, 37
Tim Hardaway Jr., 34
Joel Embiid, 32
Rowdy Tellez, 31
Vladimir Guerrero Jr., 27
— I don’t know what to think about the World Baseball Classic; it makes a lot of $$$, which is all the people who run it care about, and it probably helps grow the game globally, but if I owned a big league team, and a player I’m paying $20M a year was loudly saying how much he’d prefer to win this tournament than a World Series, that would make me queasy.
— Opening Day for baseball is mostly March 26th; there is one game on the 25th, but starting on Wednesday, all the teams will be back together and can get ready for the season.
— There are five baseball players who stole 40+ bases in a season, and didn’t hit a triple during that season. You’d think really fast guys would hit at least one triple:
1978, Miguel Dilone, A’s, 50 SB
1986, Mariano Duncan, Dodgers, 48
1985, Davey Lopes, Cubs, 47 (he was 40 years old)
1997, Rickey Henderson, A’s, 45 (he was 38 years old)
1988, Jose Canseco, A’s, 40
— Pitching coach for the Milwaukee Brewers is Chris Hook, an unfortunate name for a pitching coach, especially for a pitcher who might be struggling. “Oh….Hook is coming to the mound”
— I think it is weird when I watch TV, then get e-mails a day or two later asking me if I liked the shows/movies I was watching? Whose job is that?
— This winter was cruddy here in upstate New York, too darn cold. Got stuck inside so much, I’ve watched way too many podcasts about fantasy baseball, probably 12-15 mock drafts, and the fantasy league I’m in is a keeper league, so we don’t even draft, except a two-round draft for younger guys.
Will be fun when the NCAA Tournament starts this week, then the real baseball games start next week, and the weather outside gets better. Have already taken a couple of two-mile walks in my neighborhood on the few nice days we’ve had. My I-Phone tells me how how far I’ve walked, so that makes it more useful.
— Last week in Florida, there was an election for mayor, and the guy who won the election won by one vote. Imagine the guy who lost? That must’ve sucked.
— Jim Irsay owned the Indianapolis Colts for 28 years; he passed away about a year ago. He had an amazing collection of memorabilia that was recently put up for auction.
Thru Saturday, those auctions had raised $93,656,609; most of the stuff is music-related- he had an amazing collection of guitars used by famous musicians, but he also had the saddle used by jockey Ron Turcotte when he rode Secretariat to 1973 Triple Crown; it sold for $1.524M, and the jersey Wayne Gretzky wore when he scored his 500th NHL goal sold for $952,500.
