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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > June
June 2008
BLOG: I’m not so sure O.J. Mayo will be a great pro
Will O.J. Mayo be a great NBA player?
I’m not so sure he will, but almost everybody else seems to think so. Especially the pundits and talk-show callers in the Twin Cities, today, who are lamenting the Minnesota Timberwolves’ late draft-night trade of Mayo — who the team had just made the No. 3 overall pick in the NBA draft — to Memphis for No. 5 pick Kevin Love in what ended up an eight-player deal.
And consequently, the folks in Memphis are giddy about landing the 20-year-old who Sports Illustrated — some 5 years ago — trumpeted as “The Next Big Thing.”
But I’m not sold that Memphis got the best part of this deal. And that’s not because I’m in love with Love. It’s because I have questions about Mayo.
Trouble and a lack of truthfulness seem to follow the guy wherever he goes. And though he’s one of the most talented young players I’ve ever see — and can be quite polite, accommodating, insightful and down-right charming — he’s got a “Me First” side of him that rears its head on and off the court and I think that could end up being his Achilles’ heel.
Already back when he was playing for North College Hill in Cincinnati — part of his six years playing high school ball in three different states — people were saying he was ready for the NBA.
Before Thursday night’s draft one league GM called Mayo “one of the four hardest workers” in the upcoming talent pool. And several people are saying he’s one of three or four draftees who will make an immediate impact in the league.
All that’s probably correct.
But when it comes to Mayo, all that seems true doesn’t always turn out that way. His blogosphere detractors call him everything from a “punk” to a “fraud.” I think that’s over-stated, but I have seen that side of him, too.
The first time I met him was soon after he transferred into North College Hill from Rose Hill Academy in Kentucky, where he’d played high school basketball while being a 14-year-old seventh grader and an eighth grader.
After an early-season game, he introduced me to his “grandfather” Dwaine Barnes. I then visited Barnes, who was working at Milt Kantor’s Victory Wholesale Grocers complex in Springboro.
Barnes claimed he was Mayo’s paternal grandfather and told stories of not knowing the boy was his grandson until O.J. was six or seven years old.
The only problem was that Barnes wasn’t his grandfather, but instead his AAU coach and had orchestrated the move to Ohio from their Huntington, W.Va., hometown.
They lived together — and at times Bill Walker, another NCH transfer who landed in the NBA Thursday night — in an apartment right next to North College Hill High. Barnes bragged of being given keys to the school and that O.J. would often come over late at night and shoot around in the deserted gym.
I wonder how many other NCH students — especially ones who had just moved into the district a couple of months earlier — were given the keys to the school?
Then again, NCH officials seem to have given away a lot more than that — let’s start with integrity — to keep Mayo, Ohio’s two-time Mr. Basketball, around for three years and two state titles before he jumped ship and finished his career at Huntington High, which he also led to the state crown.
It appears that already when he was at NCH — and almost certainly when he was at Huntington High — he was beginning to get thousands of dollars in gifts from Rodney Guillory, a runner for the big time sports agency, Bill Duffy Associates. At least that’s what Larry Johnson, a former sportswriter and another runner and Mayo insider — until he had a falling out — claimed in a big expose by ESPN’s Outside the Lines.
In all — in Mayo’s high school years and last season at Southern Cal — Johnson claimed Mayo accepted over $30,000 in gifts. That included regular ($2,500) shopping sprees, a 42-inch flat screen TV, airline tickets, payment of his cell phone bills ($170 a month) and other items.
His “Me First” style showed on the court, too. His last play in high school epitomizes that.
With his team leading by 40 points in the waning moments of the game, he threw himself an alley-oop pass off the bank board, dunked, then threw the ball into the stands.
He got a technical and was ejected from the game. He celebrated his exile, waving to the crowd, posing for cell-phone pictures, hugging and high-fiving teammates and, most sickeningly, getting a big embrace from his coach.
His apologists — and there are many in the stands and the media — say all that was no big deal. The crowd of 10,000 mostly had come to see him play and he gave them a treat at the end of the game.
They say his associations with Barnes and then Guillory were because he was desperately looking for a real father figure.
Mayo had told me his mother was 14 when she gave birth to him and that she had raised him and his seven siblings on her own. His dad, Kenny Ziegler, a Huntington High hoops star, was in and out of jail. In fact, this past January he was convicted again with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.
That night at NCH, Mayo told me he wasn’t going to go down that path. He was going to play in the NBA. He said that’s all he ever wanted.
And now it’s come true.
He certainly has the game. I just hope it isn’t double-teamed by the trouble that always seems to find him and the “Me First” attitude that never quite seems to leave him.
TweetBlog: A Redd, right and gold Olympic basketball team?
Just a couple of hours ago, USA Basketball announced its team for the Beijing Olympic Games, the stage where anything less than a gold medal for the U.S. hoopsters will be perceived — and rightly so — as a failure.
The 12 man roster — selected on the final approval of new basketball czar and former Phoenix Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo and coached by Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski — includes Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Michael Redd, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, Jason Kidd, Chris Bosh, Dwight Howard, Deron Williams, Tayshaun Prince and Carlos Boozer.
Great lengths have been taken to right the U.S. ship after the embarrassment at the Athens Games in 2004. That group — filled with NBA All-Stars, but not resembling a team — went 5-3 in Greece, losing to Puerto Rico, Lithuania and then Argentina in the medal round. They picked up a bronze medal and a lot of criticism when they got home.
There was plenty blame to go around. It was USA Basketball’s fault for the process it used to put a team together on the fly that couldn’t shoot, was undersized and — because it didn’t require a major pre-Games time commitment from the players — had had little time practicing with each other before Athens.
Coach Larry Brown seemed to lose his team half-way through the Games and there were the players, some of whom played the role of spoiled millionaires, pouting, bickering and openly challenging their coach.
And so Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury are not on this team. But Carmelo Anthony — grown up from those disgruntled days in Greece — is because, as Krzyzewski told some us a while back when we met in Chicago, “our players get it now.”
Colangelo was dismayed by what he saw transpire in Athens:
“Body language has always been a key ingredient in basketball. You learn so much how people communicate — or don’t. What I saw there was very bad. And when I heard and saw how people in our country felt and spoke and wrote about that team it was evident a change needed to take place.”
Part of the problem, too, is that the gap between the US and the rest of the basketball world has shrunk. The dominating days of that 1992 Dream Team — the first group of NBA Olympians that included Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson with bench players like David Robinson, Karl Malone, and John Stockton — are gone.
“In some respects, we’ve been a little bit arrogant about the game,” Krzyzewski said. “It is not our game. It is the world’s game now. It just originated here.”
These days there are something like 75 international players in the NBA, representing 30 countries and many of those guys are the cornerstones of their own national teams..
To combat all this, USA Basketball put Colangelo in charge. He picked Krzyzewski and then met with a group of former Olympic coaches and star Olympians, everyone from Jordan to Jerry West.
With their suggestions, Colangelo invited 33 players to the Senior National team. He informed them he needed a three-year commitment — the team had 42 practices in 2006, 24 last year and is in the midst of a lot more this season — and he was looking for guys to embrace the team concept.
The best story he told from those meetings involves Michael Redd, the Ohio State product from Columbus who is now a star shooting guard for the Milwaukee Bucks.
“Michael Redd stands out,” Colangelo said. “I set up here in Chicago and met with various players. LeBron James was coming in with Cleveland and I talked to (Kirk) Heinrich with the Bulls and some other guys.
“Michael said he’s drive down from Milwaukee. He showed up at my hotel, called my room and then knocked at the door. He was in his sweats and had a hanging bag over his shoulder.
“He asked to be excused and went into the john. He put on a suit and tie and came out to have the interview with me. That was pretty damn impressive.”
He and Krzyzewski both raved about Redd — not only for his professionalism and that explosive offense he can provide on the court — but for the ego-less attitude he has shown. They talked about how he’s been willing to come off the bench and play a role.
Consequently, they said, all of the other players have embraced him as something special.
That’s a sign that this team may be special, as well.
TweetBLOG: Ohio’s Top Ten Sports Towns
Here’s my list of Ohio’s Top Ten Sports Towns.
I tried to consider the number of marque teams and events the place has, the success both the teams and the hometown athletes have enjoyed, the attendance and community support for the teams and events and the way sports is woven into the fabric of the community.
It’s a subjective ranking that certainly is up for debate. When I ran it past three veteran sportswriters and a sportscaster I know, they all agreed Cleveland was No. 1 because of the Browns, Indians and Cavaliers, Cleveland State, some great high school teams, boxing, horse racing, until recently an open wheel auto race, several other minor league pro teams and that often-rabid and always-loyal fan base for many teams, especially the beloved Browns.
One writer thought Columbus — with all things Ohio State, the Blue Jackets, Crew, Destroyers and the Memorial, among other things — belonged ahead of Cincinnati.
I disagreed because along with the Reds and their storied history and those soap opera Bengals, Cincinnati has two big-time Division I basketball schools in UC and Xavier, some nationally-acclaimed high school programs and a rich boxing history that includes yet another Olympian — Rau’Shee Warren — for the upcoming Beijing Games.
The sportscaster thought Coldwater possibly could supplant St. Henry, but I countered not only with all those state titles that are listed on big road signs signs when you enter St. Henry, but the foursome of favorite sons, Wally Post, Jim Lachey, Bobby Hoying and Jeff Hartings. And, of course, there’s that shrine of suds and sports celebration, Fish-Mo’s.
Another writer thought Dayton was rated too high. But the Dragons have been sold out for nine years straight years, have several thousand folks on a waiting list for season tickets and were rated by Sports Illustrated last year to have one of the top ten toughest tickets to obtain in all of U.S. sports.
And Dayton Flyers basketball has been among the Top 30 in college hoops attendance for most of its seasons since iUD began playing at the Arena in 1969. Add in Wright State, the Bombers, the storied history of Dayton pro athletes (including Mike Schmidt, Keith Byars and Ron Harper) and its Olympians (start with Edwin Moses) and the stand-out prep teams, especially in track, and I think Dayton has a strong argument for the No. 4 spot.
As for a few other towns I thought might belong on the list: Athens, Oxford, Ironton and especially Youngstown with everything from Youngstown State to middleweight champ Kelly Pavlik.
Any way, here’s my Top Ten list:
— Cleveland
— Cincinnati
— Columbus
— Dayton
— St. Henry
— Akron
— Toledo
— Massillon
— Canton
— Steubenville
BLOG: A Florida Gator even Buckeye fans can admire
Here’s a guy who has turned his Heisman Trophy award into a real vehicle — and by that I’d don’t mean a stretch limo filled with girls for a club-to-club cruise of The Flats and downtown Cleveland.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it seems like kind of a pedestrian ride when compared to the journey University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow has been on since he won the Heisman six months ago.
Even though the Gators turned out to be a thorn in the side of a splendid Ohio State football team and its Heisman quarterback, Troy Smith, two seasons ago, Buckeye fans who are open-minded have to give some props to Tebow, who’s spent his off-season touring the globe as though he’s a cross between Mother Theresa, the Rev. Billy Graham and one of those dreamy/steamy docs from ER.
A devout Christian who’s the son of missionary parents — and a college student with a 3.68 g.p.a. — Tebow has visited the Philippines and Croatia and spoke at prisons, schools and community gatherings in Florida. He exchanged hand-written notes with President Bush, who commended him as a role model. He rallied sororities in Gainesville to raise over $10,000 for orphans, has visited sick kids in a Jacksonville Hospital and next month heads to Thailand to do good deeds and speak about his faith.
All this has been documented in media reports, especially by Matt Hayes’ of The Sporting News earlier this month. Hayes caught up to the rarely-idle Tebow and over lunch — “I haven’t had a meatball sub in a long time and it tastes good,” the quarterback said — got some of the details of the iconic 20-year-old’s travels.
Tebow told of his week-long trip to the Philippines, the place where he was born and where his parents, Pam and Bob, run an evangelistic association.
During his stay in March, Tebow visited a poor village outside General Santos City, where, he said, swamped doctors got him to help them with various procedures, including a circumcision.
“You don’t have time to get nervous,” Tebow said, “those kids need you.”
According to Florida officials, Tebow is getting thousands of requests to help the needy, come speak or lend his name and presence to worthy causes.
“God gave me this gift for a reason,” Tebow told Hayes. “There’s a sense of purpose in everything I do. It’s not me in control; He is. There’s a great amount of comfort knowing that.”
Whether you are religious or not, whether you are a Buckeye or a Gator, whether you follow sports or not — you’ve got to admire a guy like Tebow, who appears as good off the field as he is on it.
TweetBLOG: Creek’s Masterson — King of the Red Sox Clubhouse
Mark and Judy Masterson are glad their son is making his own history rather than having it written for him.
Their 23-year-old boy, Justin — a Beavercreek High grad and the Boston Red Sox rookie pitcher who’ll start tonight against the Cincinnati Reds at Great American Ball Park — comes into the game with a 3-0 record and a 2.59 earned run average in his four major-league appearances.
“I just hope he pitches well,” said Mark, the pastor of the Creekside Community Church in Beavercreek.
Anything else he’d like to see?
“Well, it’d be fun if he struck out Ken Griffey Jr.,” Mark said with smile.
This wasn’t meant as a jab at Griffey. The Mastersons, humble and low key, just aren’t like that. In fact, this wish was quite the opposite of a Griffey put-down. Mark knows what a great hitter Griffey is, and striking him out would show some of his son’s potential as well.
“At least Ken Griffey Jr., won’t be making his history against Justin,” Judy said.
Mark nodded: “I was so happy that Griffey got his 600th before (today). And besides, Justin’s in the record books for other things. He’s the first pitcher in the history of Fenway Park to be undefeated in his first four appearances.
“Since 1912,” Judy added.
And yet for the other Red Sox players, it’s the way Masterson has made his history — as much as the history itself — that impresses them.
Everybody seems to like the 6-foot-6, 250-pound right-hander who was called up from Double-A Portland on April 23 for a spot start in the Red Sox injury-depleted rotation. Since then he has bounced back down to Portland, come back up, gone down to Triple-A Pawtucket and then come up again.
When he made his big-league debut April 24, catcher Jason Varitek gave his behind-the-plate seats at Fenway — four rows up — to Mark and Judy and their two other children, Mandy and Jonathan, so they could watch the glorious moment.
And not surprising to anybody, Sean Casey has taken Justin under his wing.
“Sean’s a great guy,” Judy said. “He text messages Justin a lot. They talk back and forth all the time. They’ve got similar dispositions. People like them and some of the other guys joke that it’s a competition between the two on who’s going to be the king of the clubhouse for niceness.”
The Red Sox are just now learning what most people who have crossed Justin’s path in previous years already have. That’s why tonight some 34 family members will be on hand at GABP, as well as over 100 people who are coming down from Bethel College, the northern Indiana NAIA school Justin attended for a year after high school. And there will be scores of people there from Beavercreek, as well.
TweetBLOG: Miami’s Newble takes on China, Nike and the Celtics
Everyone is talking about Los Angeles Lakers backup players Sasha Vujacic and Jordan Farmar and the series-changing contributions they made coming off the bench against Boston in Game Three of the NBA Finals, Tuesday night.
Thanks to Vujacic’s 20 points and Farmar’s all-around play, L.A. now trails the Celtics just 2-1 in their best-of-seven series.
But if you look at the much bigger picture — if you look at all of life, not just a world whose parameters are a 94-by-54 (foot) basketball court — there’s another guy on the L.A. bench more valuable than anybody in the finals.
I’m talking about Ira Newble, the 6-foot-7 former Miami RedHawk and eight-year NBA veteran who rarely plays for the Lakers, but is making the kind of life-changing contributions that few other pro athletes are willing to tackle these days.
Beginning last season when he was with the Cleveland Cavs, Newble has tried not only to educate his fellow NBA players about the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan — where government-backed militias have targeted non-Arab civilians, killed up to 400,000 people and displaced another 2.5 million — but get them involved in helping force some accountability and change.
His activism — among other things he wrote a critical letter to Hu Jintao, the president of China, which is the leading importer of Sudan oil and, in turn, a financier of weapons there — seems to have cost Newble his endorsement deal with Nike.
I’ve known Newble for 13 years and he one of the most interesting athletes with whom I’ve ever dealt. That he’s spoken out for the down-trodden — and didn’t worry about the consequences — doesn’t surprise me.
He’s the son of a civil rights activist and he’s also a guy who knows a little about being an underdog himself.
With a low ACT score coming out of high school in suburban Detroit, he ended up playing junior college basketball in Mississippi, then coming to Miami, where he initially butted heads with then coach Herb Sendek.
But he found a mentor in Charlie Coles, then a RedHawks assistant, but the head coach the next year when Sendek went to North Carolina State.
“Coach Coles stepped in and helped me stay,” Newble told me a few years ago when we talked in the Cavs dressing room. “I have a lot of love, a lot of respect for him. He always had my back, encouraged me and showed me the right way to go. Back then, he used to tell me that one day — though he didn’t know when or where — he knew I’d be in the pros.”
Even so, it was a long, no-frills road to the NBA for Newble. In five seasons of minor-league basketball — not counting a trip overseas to play in Cyprus — he played in the IBA for the Wisconsin Blast and in the CBA for the Idaho Stampede, Columbus Cagerz, Camden Power, Oklahoma Storm and Flint Fuze.
Finally he impressed the San Antonio Spurs enough in tryout camp that he made the team for 27 games in the 2000-2001 season. Another tryout the next year in Atlanta got him in a Hawks uniform. Eventually he settled in as a Cavs back-up and defensive stopper.
He was traded in late February to lowly Seattle — part of the Wally Szczerbiak, Delonte West deal — got his release there, sat out 30 days per NBA rule and eventually opted for a 10-day try-out with Los Angeles, rather than a return contract with Cleveland.
His gamble paid off. He made the Lakers team.
As for his Darfur concerns, they began last season when he read a newspaper article about a college English professor, Eric Reeves, who was working for relief for Darfur.
He talked to Reeves, learned about China’s involvement — “How could they be a legitimate host of the Olympic while underwriting genocide and war?” Newble would later tell the Los Angeles Times — and then put together two pages of facts. With the permission of coach Mike Brown he put those sheets into his teammates’ lockers.
“I realized a lot of my teammates were like I had been,” Newble told the Times.. “They had no clue what was going on in Darfur. So I addressed my teammates in the locker room one day after practice.”
He said everyone on the team— except LeBron James and Damon Jones — signed the protest letter to China.
Over the summer he took what he called a “life-changing trip” with actress Mia Farrow to the Sudanese refugee camps in neighboring Chad.
He tells of seeing children draw pictures of their parents being killed. He said he talked to a young man whose eyes had been gouged out and he listened to a young woman talk about being repeatedly raped.
When he got no response from the letter to China, Newble asked Nike to produce some bracelets to symbolize the suffering in Darfur.
“I got a response from Lynn Merritt of Nike that I will never forget,” Newble’s agent Steve Kauffman told the Times. “Referring to Ira, Merritt told me, ‘What a pain in the (ass) he must be to the Cavs, bringing this into the workplace. That would be like me coming into your place of employment and asking you to join the Islam Nation.’ I was horrified. I couldn’t believe what he had just said.”
Needless to say Newble and Nike soon parted ways.
But while he lost an endorsement, the former RedHawk seems to have picked up some good karma. With his pickup by the Lakers, he is now the only player to appear in the NBA Finals for the second straight year.
Even with that, he’s able to see the bigger picture:
“I love the game,” he told reporters last month, “but I never thought I was in it just to dribble the ball up and down the court.”
TweetBLOG: “The guy’s got a bandanna against me”
He was a well-known Dayton athlete who was shot by some guy one night on the West Side. He survived and soon after I went to talk to him and asked why he thought he got shot.
“The guy’s got a bandanna against me,” he said.
He meant vendetta, but I liked it a lot better the way he put it. Because of that verbal blunder, I’ve never forgotten it. In fact, it’s one of my favorite sports quotes of all time.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed thousands and thousands of athletes and every once in awhile I hear a spoken faux pas that just sticks with me.
I don’t know if it’s because of the naivete with which they’re delivered, or it’s the sheer absurdity of it or maybe it’s just those weird visuals you’re left with.
I talked to a pitcher in the Cincinnati Reds organization this year and he was telling me how he was discovered on the playground by the high school baseball coach:
“He gave me a little tryout. He had me throw the ball and he put the radiator gun on me. I was hitting 85, 86 mph back then.”
At a recent Super Bowl, a big lineman told me beforehand how he hoped his team would win because as soon as the game ended, he wanted to run out on the field and let all that “glittery graffiti” come falling down on him. He said he wanted it to fall into his hair and stick on his uniform and arms and face.
I liked that visual. Instead of confetti, I envisioned gang slogans and spray-painted hearts and Cupid arrows hanging from his ears and his cheeks and those massive shoulders.
And finally, back to that guy who got shot in the middle of the night.
Although sprawled on a Dayton sidewalk for a long time and bleeding heavily, he finally managed to crawl to a nearby house, get up on the porch and feebly bang on the door for help.
I asked him about his will to survive and what drove him to pull himself up off that sidewalk.
“I just didn’t want people finding me dead and seeing magnets all over my body,” he said.
All I could imagine was the magnets stuck to the front of a refrigerator door, only this time the notes people would stick under them would say stuff like “Hey, you look dead.”
TweetBLOG: Reds’ Griffey & Wright State’s New AD
Here are some thoughts on Ken Griffey Jr. and Wright State’s Bob Grant — a guy who hits home runs and a guy who might enjoy some home-field advantage:
— on GRANT: — Although the decision on who will be the school’s next athletics director remains a much-debated mystery around Wright State, my guess is that Bob Grant gets picked over George Mason’s Kevin McNamee.
The decision likely will be made Wednesday by WSU president David Hopkins and be announced Thursday.
Two of the key factors are supposed to be a better handling of fund raising and budget, both areas Grant — WSU’s associate AD — already is involved in.
But while Grant has some detractors, he has been at the school a long time, has been loyal and has the support of some of the Raiders’ biggest donors and many of the WSU coaches who were hired while he was an administrative assistant.
While McNamme, the deputy associate AD at George Mason, is a strong candidate with an impressive bio and has the support of several WSU people, as well, home-field advantage may come into play.
The other two candidates are Brian Teter, the AD at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and formerly the sports information director at Miami University, and Steve Downing, senior associate director of athletics at Texas Tech.
— ON GRIFFEY: If you’re a parent and like sharing baseball with your son or daughter, catch a game at Great American Ball Park this summer and — amidst all the giddy excitement about Jay Bruce, the second coming of Homer Bailey and those over-the-fence booms by Adam Dunn (which I think will be coming in bunches now) — make sure to point out Griffey and explain he’s one guy who did it the right way, the natural way, the way few of the great home run hitters of his era did do it.
Forget the steroid-clouded sluggers — guys like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. By all accounts, Griffey has reached the cusp of 600 home runs cleanly. He’s got more in common with the greats of other eras, guys like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Babe Ruth. They weren’t artificially enhanced — unless you count the Babe’s hot dogs and brew.
Griffey almost certainly will be gone next year and though he isn’t always the most embraceable guy, he’s someone every baseball fan needs to see in person. If for no other reason than every home run he hits is believable and worthy of the applause.
TweetBLOG: Jay Bruce, Diaper Dandy
For all the memories Jay Bruce has made swinging a bat — especially this past week with the Cincinnati Reds — here’s one he can’t quite remember.
“They tell me it’s true,” he said with a laugh as he stood alone at his clubhouse dressing cubicle just before the Reds went out to meet — and beat — the Atlanta Braves, Sunday. “I’ve heard about it all my life, but I was too young to remember.”
His dad, Joe, sure does, so let’s let him tell it:
“The first time he picked up a Wiffle bat — we were barbecuing in the backyard and he was still in diapers — he started swinging so natural. He kept hitting the ball harder and harder and harder. I was holding a beer in my hand and finally he hit a line drive that dented the can.”
Since then, Jay’s more than made up for spilling Dad’s brew. When he got his $1.8 million signing bonus as the Reds’ first-round pick in 2005, he promptly paid off his parents’ home, bought them a new car, bought his sister Amy a new home and then made a special promise to his sister Kellan, who is five years older.
The 26-year-old has some mental challenges because of a problem at her birth, but as Jay put it: “She’ll never have to worry about anything, never have to go without.”
TweetBLOG: Thoughts on the Reds
CINCINNATI — Here are a few thoughts as I sit in Great American Ball Park on Sunday waiting for the start of the Cincinnati Reds-Atlanta Braves game:
— I know pitcher Homer Bailey isn’t much liked by many of the Reds players and some of the media who cover the team — they think he showed up from Louisville last year with his “big league” attitude already full-blown — but here’s the flip side of that.
A few years ago when he was playing for the Dayton Dragons, he sat down with me for more than an hour one day and talked — candidly and politely — about everything from growing up in Texas to the expectations of being a top draft pick.
I wrote the story and a few days later in the mail I got a hand-written note from Bailey, thanking me for writing the story. In 35 years as a sports writer, I can remember only a couple of other pro athletes sending me a written thanks.
Maybe Bailey has changed, maybe the bluster is just a facade for the pressure of all the hype shoveled on him when he first came here, but inside I also know there’s a decent guy.
I saw it and nothing that anybody says now will change that.
— I wonder if Jay Bruce had been on the 25-man roster at the start of the season would departed general manager Wayne Krivsky still have his job?
He insinuated plenty of times that Corey Patterson’s addition to the club wasn’t his idea. But when the owner — likely at the insistence of the new manager — tells you that’s the way to go, you do it.
That said, Bruce probably wouldn’t have started off like this. He struggled in spring training, he may have still been a little hobbled with a leg injury and I think it served him well to get some more minor league at-bats.
He’s here now and there’s plenty of time to charge to the top of the division. This is NL Central, not the mighty AL East.
— What will happen in a couple of weeks when Jeff Keppinger is healthy again and ready to play? Does he move back into his old job at shortstop, as I think he should? if so, what happens to Jerry Hairston Jr., who is playing as well as he ever has in his big league career? He needs to be in the lineup, too.
Could he end up at third in place of Edwin Encarnacion? Or maybe Keppinger goes there and Hairston stays at short.
— Speaking of guys not liked in the clubhouse, departed Josh Hamilton didn’t have much of a fan club among some of the Reds’ most established stars last year. They seemed to have tired on his tale of redemption almost from Day One. And they didn’t care for it that the manager’s brother was his guardian angel/babysitter.
Too bad.
What an outfield you’d have in Adam Dunn, Bruce and Hamilton next year when Ken Griffey Jr is almost certainly gone. Then again, you wouldn’t have pitcher Edinson Volquez. If the Reds had developed their own pitching recently instead of always chasing after it, the trade with Texas wouldn’t have been necessary.
But the deal has worked out well for both teams. Volquez is 7-2 with a 1.46 ERA and Hamilton is one of the hottest players in the American League. He leads the league in RBIs with 61, is tied for tops in home runs with 14 and is second in batting average, hitting at a .326 clip.
He may be the only guy with as much sizzle at the plate as Jay Bruce right now.
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