mark emmert

Fairly unusual. Any interest in an inside-the-park grand slam? Sure:

Gotta love it, @lexieeblairr! Her 5th HR this season. #GoBlue pic.twitter.com/mComZj1lC4

— Michigan Softball (@umichsoftball) April 24, 2021

That's probably up there in terms of least driven home runs, anywhere.

This is not a bucket list thing but it should be. As anyone who follows @internetraj on twitter (or reads Punt/Counterpunt) knows, the idea of a "bucket list" was invented by the 2007 Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman vehicle The Bucket List. This is distressing to many people who experience a sudden onset of the Mandela effect when told this, because they thought bucket lists were a thing well before the release of a 2007 buddy comedy.

Anyway, opening the floodgates has nothing to do with Curt Flood but it should. Fifty years ago today Flood retired from baseball, a relatively peripheral figure on the field but a seismic event for the business of sports:

Curtis Flood, once one of the game’s best defensive outfielders and a founding father of modern free agency, quietly fled Washington and the Senators on April 27, 1971. He had tried to change Major League Baseball forever and emerged too scarred to believe he could ever find a home there again.

“It devoured him,” his widow, Judy Pace Flood, a decorated actor for decades whom Flood first saw when she appeared with Willie Mays on “The Dating Game,” said in a phone interview last week. She remembered one of Flood’s teammates with the Senators told her later that “Curt was the saddest person he had ever met or seen. It was awful.”

The last time Pace Flood saw him that year, she was dropping him off at spring training. He was out of shape after missing a year while he refused to report to Philadelphia, and his new Senators manager, Ted Williams, reportedly bemoaned the fact that the team signed him in the first place. He was radioactive, a man who had sued a baseball establishment so powerful that many of his teammates and close friends, Gibson included, were too worried about the consequences to stand alongside him or attend his court hearings.

Tremors of Flood's departure are still being felt today—the NCAA is just now removing the sit-out year from revenue sport transfers. He paid a tremendous price just because he asked for basic fairness. RIP.

[After THE JUMP: Tschetter is hard to make a pun out of?]

Sponsor note. Maybe you've got an idea for a small business. Maybe you've decided you can sell consultation services to LSU basketball coaches despite the fact you're a CPA and have no basketball knowledge deeper than "maybe close out sometimes?" Well, hell, that'll probably work!

What you need now is a lawyer to get your small business on firm footing and review any contracts you sign with LSU's athletic department. Richard Hoeg is that lawyer. He will tell you that, yes, you could improve LSU basketball. He will make it happen. Maybe the next Shaq can get a six seed.

Juwan Howard talks to the NBA on TNT. People even like it when he swears on TV!

I'm going to up my swearing to become more popular.

Howard mentions that part of his drive at Michigan is to clear the path for other black head coaches, and it's maybe not a coincidence that the Big Ten has deviated from the coach hiring script this offseason. Before Juwan Howard, the Big Ten had not hired a black men's basketball head coach since Tubby Smith in 2008. This offseason Penn State and Minnesota have given black assistants head coaching jobs.

On the search. Brendan Quinn on the events that led Howard to the head coaching job. Nobody had to cajole Howard into reaching out to Phil Martelli:

Howard had answers. In the days leading up to the interview, he had spoken to friends throughout basketball, gathering opinions. One of them was Kentucky coach John Calipari. “No one really knew it,” Calipari said, “but Juwan was out there doing his own research all along the way.”

That’s why on the Monday before the interview, Phil Martelli, recently dismissed from Saint Joseph’s and on vacation at Disney, got a text message from Calipari saying Howard was going to call. Martelli, fairly confused, said OK. Once the two connected, Howard first asked Martelli to paint a profile of what it takes to be a great head coach at the college level. They talked through it. Then, toward the end of the conversation, Howard gauged Martelli’s interest in serving as his No. 2. “Something like, ‘Would you be interested in taking this journey with me?'” Martelli remembers. Steve Fisher called next. Howard’s former coach at Michigan and the coach of the Wolverines’ 1989 national championship team wanted to double-check that Martelli was legitimately interested in coming aboard with Howard. “Are you serious about doing this?” Fisher asked Martelli. He was.

The article also contains a quote from Grant Hill that adds to the giant pile of Everybody Loves Juwan.

[After THE JUMP: the most famous, period] 

[Lead photo HT: Tony Barnhart]

Sponsor Note. If you've got a small business this is a good time to have a lawyer check out your Ps and Qs. If you're starting one there's no time like the present to get yours off the ground. Here's an idea: drive around picking up children and taking them somewhere. It doesn't matter where. Just, you know, away. You can bring them back if you want. Later.

If you're starting a voluntary child abduction company, that sounds like something with a lot of legal bits to figure out. Richard Hoeg is the man to do that. He's got a small law firm specializing in small businesses. Even if you're not planning on going into a business as fraught with complications as child… well, I don't want to say "care"…

Even if you're not going into a business as fraught with complications as child relocation, having a solid legal foundation for what you're doing will prevent problems in the future. Hoeg it up! This slogan is unauthorized.

If only. South Korea has resumed playing baseball, albeit in a modified form.

KT Wiz held a socially distant first pitch before their game today pic.twitter.com/DR0R9wulRi

— Dan Kurtz (@MyKBO) May 5, 2020

Random sports things have resumed!

We have a smoke delay, there is a building on fire near one of the stadiums pic.twitter.com/b5mUnkO10t

— CJ Fogler (@cjzer0) May 5, 2020

The Bundesliga is preparing to resume as well.

Both South Korea and Germany had no-bullshit, hardcore responses to coronavirus. This Atlantic article describes the Korean response in exacting detail. South Korea had the advantage of a preseason game, as it were, when MERS ran through their hospital system a few years ago. The government reacted with a lack of transparency and was blasted out of office afterwards. Mask wearing is culturally entrenched; idiots cosplaying as militia aren't roaming around demanding that nail salons re-open; public health is not politicized.

So they get baseball and soccer. We get nothing.

[After THE JUMP: maybe I'll start writing about old television shows]