Can a season end the day it begins?
It just did.
The ant tripped the elephant. The skinny guy kicked sand in the bully’s face, grabbed his girlfriend and stole his car. Some kids from Appalachian State came down from the Blue Ridge Mountains and delivered a sermon in Michigan Stadium, before 109,000 non-believers.
Goliath falls.
Watching Joel Zumaya put more runners on base in the 10th inning than Nate Robertson had allowed in 8 2/3 , I was reminded of that moment in “The Ten Commandments” when Edward G. Robinson sneers, “Where’s your messiah now, Moses?”
Zumaya’s return was so hyped, you’d have thought he was bringing a couple of holy tablets down from a mountain. That myth was quickly exploded in the hot hours Thursday afternoon, when Zumaya couldn’t finish the little masterpiece Robertson started.
He had a head full of shaving cream and a smile that could light up a stadium – if he hadn’t already done it an hour earlier. Jair Jurrjens may look, on paper, like the name of a Dutch hand lotion, but this kid with a string of shells around his neck just threw his first major-league victory, gave up one hit in nearly seven innings, and, for one night, anyhow, had Tigers fans laughing and saying: “Pitching problem? What pitching problem?”
“Who covered you in shaving cream?” Jurrjens was asked.
“Todd Jones,” he said, grinning.
“What does it mean?”
In sports, it’s good to be original. The first to dunk. The first to throw a knuckleball. The only time you don’t want to be original is when it comes to bad behavior.
Michael Vick is finding this out. Using drugs? Sexual assault? DUI? Waving a gun? As pathetic as it seems, those offenses no longer shock in the privileged world of professional sports.
As soon as the Tigers wake up this morning, they should go to their calendars and rip out the current page that reads “August.”
It’s September now.
Oh, maybe not by the moon and the stars, but by the little white ball that measures the season. “September” is really a frame of mind in baseball. It means crunch time, the shedding of the fat, every game and inning with consequence for the playoffs.
NEW YORK – Two nights earlier, he was sleeping at a hotel in Altoona, Pa., sharing a room with a minor league teammate.
Friday night, he had his own key at the Hilton in New York City.
And here he was now, Saturday afternoon, at the plate in Yankee Stadium, facing Roger Clemens, a future Hall of Fame pitcher who had already won 40 major league games before the kid was even born.
Elvis thinks people have forgotten him.
This is nearly five decades ago. Elvis is fresh off a two-year stint in the Army, much of it spent in West Germany. Now he fears everything is gone, that the public has moved on.
Elvis takes a train to tape a TV show with Frank Sinatra. “He was scared to death,” Ray Walker tells me. Walker, in his 70s now, was a member of the Jordanaires, Elvis’ backup group. He still remembers that train ride.
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