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?]

Mark Emmert is distressed by this and will consider a blue-ribbon panel. In the wake of some obvious disparities between the men's and women's basketball tournaments comes this report on disparities between baseball and softball:

Until 2011, there were no locker rooms; players changed into their uniforms at their hotels or on the bus. There were no bathrooms in the stadium dugouts, forcing players to run along the baseline or into the stands to share bathrooms with fans. When coaches begged for bathrooms, they arrived the next year at the tournament to find a portable toilet waiting for them in the dugout.

“I used to tell my players to go before the game, because how would you like to be caught coming out of a Porta-Potty on national TV?” one coach said. “And then there was the smell.”

The NCAA has an agreement to keep the softball championship in Oklahoma City until 2035, meaning that this seemingly inadequate and archaic stadium is it for the foreseeable future. And the kicker:

…on television, the Women’s College World Series draws nearly as many viewers as baseball. While the ratings for the NCAA men’s basketball championship far outstrip those for the women’s, the softball tournament drew an average of 1 million viewers over the 2019 tournament, according to ESPN, while baseball drew 1.1 million.

ESPN, which airs both championships, considers the sports to be roughly equal in value to the network, according to a person familiar with the sports’ television rights. The network paid $500 million in 2010 for the right to broadcast the two events, along with the women’s basketball tournament and nearly two dozen other championships, until 2024.

You can kind of squint and maybe see a justification for some gaps between men's and women's basketball. Not by the way the NCAA reckons its value publicly, but there's at least a hypothetical path where you could make an argument. Softball and baseball are virtually identical in terms of revenue! What are we doing?

Almost gone. Eli Brooks was pretty close to moving on:

“Being in the bubble, getting tested every day, he was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this again. I’m not coming back,’” Kelly said. “It was a really hard year for the kids. Not being around their families at all. Being in the (postseason) bubble for so long. It was just really hard. Making the decision, he had to wait until that was all over.”

Sportswriter versus athlete ends one way. A novel version of Someone Thinks Brian Scalabrine Is A Scrub played out in rural Minnesota last week as Post Bulletin sportswriter Isaac Trotter challenged one Will Tschetter to some one-on-one:

I could already see the storyline forming. I was going to have blood streaming down my face like Braveheart and I was going to beat Tschetter.

That idea lasted for, like, 4 seconds.

Tschetter got the ball back and went to work. I was determined not to get dunked on, but that strategy doesn’t work at all when a 6-foot-9 forward is one of the best shooters in the state. He shot 44 percent from 3-point range in 2021, and he got hot in a hurry. He splashed five 3-pointers in a row. I didn’t touch the ball one more time in the first game, and it was 5-0 before I could blink.

"I’m in my zone,” Tschetter said. “You might be in trouble."

Trotter was indeed in trouble.

“Can you just miss like one shot, please,” I begged.

So he'll be elite against undersized future sportswriters. How he does against Big Ten teams not named "Northwestern" is still to be determined.

Even more NHL Draft rankings. The Hockey News has Power 1, Beniers 5, Hughes 6, Johnson 7, and Samoskevich 24. NHL.com has Power 1, Hughes 2, Johnson 4, Beniers 7, and Samoskevich 31. McKeens has Beniers(!) 1, Power 2, Hughes 3, Johnson 11, and doesn't have Samoskevich in their first round.

Etc.: Daily photographer Alec Cohen compiles his career at Michigan. This article on Maxwell's Demon references Claude Shannon and therefore has a connection to Michigan, however tenuous.