BRAVO to the Washington Nationals for hands-down the best week of their five years in the nation’s capital. And if anybody needed a good week, it was the Natinals.
Getting the four-year, $15.2-million deal in place with No. 1 draft pick Stephen Strasburg less than two minutes before the signing deadline is win-win for everybody involved. It’s good for Strasburg, he of the 102-mph fastball; it’s good for his agent Scott Boras, as though any of us really care about that; and it’s good for the Nationals, a franchise that has been the poster child for ineptitude since planting roots in Washington, if planting roots in D.C. is possible for anybody or any MLB team to do.
Not long ago, it said here this deal wouldn’t get done. It says here now the reason it got done is because of the work of Mike Rizzo, who until yesterday, was the Washington interim general manager. Rizzo was said to be one of three candidates being considered for the permanent GM position, but on Thursday Nats president Stan Kasten essentially told him, “There has never been anybody else, you big palooka.”
Things like this are nice to see, because not only is the 48-year-old Rizzo being trusted with the welfare of a franchise for the first time, he’s being rewarded for a job well done, which is rare anywhere in this day in age, much less in professional sports, and much less in Washington, D.C.
All Rizzo has done since taking over for the disgraced Jim Bowden, is reshape the Nats’ pitiful bullpen with minor-league signings and then acquire Nyjer Morgan and reliever Sean Burnett in a deal with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Third baseman Ryan Zimmerman may be the face of the Nationals franchise, but Morgan is the reason you watch the Nationals play. He’s a flat-out old-school ballplayer with flair. Simply watching him run is worth the price of admission, and he’s made a huge difference for Washington playing center field. Of course, these are things Pirates fans already knew.
Short of hiring Branch Rickey (which would have been pretty amazing since Mr. Rickey died in 1965), the Nationals would have lost even more face in their town and around baseball had they told Rizzo after all he’s done, including broker the deal with Strasburg, that they still wanted to take things in another direction.
The Nationals are hardly a juggernaut, but since the Morgan trade and since Jim Riggleman was made interim manager to replace the fired Manny Acta, they have become a baseball team worth the occasional watch for a non-Nats fan. Under Riggleman, Washington entered last night’s game playing one game over .500, which would have been unimaginable at the All-Star break.
The Nationals actually play a pretty decent game of baseball; they finally play like a professional baseball team, thanks to the way Riggleman handles a game and holds every player accountable.
Should this brand of play continue, and even improve, through the remainder of this season, the first hire Mike Rizzo should make as the permanent general manager of the Washington Nationals is Frostburg State University’s Jim Riggleman as permanent manager of the Washington Nationals.
THE NCAA has deemed new Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari is not “at risk” in light of his former team, the Memphis Tigers, being nailed for an unknown person taking the college entrance exam for a player on the 2007-08 team. However, Memphis will be forced to vacate the record 38 victories from its Final Four season, in which it lost to Kansas in overtime in the national championship game.
Everybody in Calipari’s new Old Kentucky Home, from Gov. Steve Beshear to the school’s athletic director Mitch Barnhart, has gone out of their way to say they’re not concerned with this following the slicked-back coach to Lexington as he embarks on making the Wildcats a national power again. Yet it certainly followed him from Amherst, Mass. to Memphis, Tenn. as this marks the second time a Calipari team has had to forfeit a Final Four season, with the coach’s 1996 Massachusetts team being the first.
By the NCAA’s definition, there is a difference between “at risk” and being a risk, and given his history it cannot be said hiring Calipari isn’t a risk, particularly for a university that has put together a rather colorful NCAA violations resume itself through the years.
It’s funny that the previous Final Four team of Calipari’s to be stricken from the record came in 1996, for that was the same year Kentucky won its national championship under coach Rick Pitino.
Calipari has always been linked to Pitino for a variety of reasons as their careers have followed similar paths. The big difference in the two, college basketball observers have long said, is Calipari is slimy and Pitino is not.
Just as there appears to be a difference between being “at risk” and being a risk, given who and what’s been in the news of late, there appears now to be two definitions for slimy as well.
Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.
Mike Burke - Sports
Doing the right thing in our capital
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Happy birthday, Brooks
Today is Brooks Robinson’s birthday. That’s right, good ol’ No. 5 is 75 years young, a term the great Chuck Thompson used all of the time, and a term that, even as a child, drove me up the wall when Chuck would use it to send birthday greetings to somebody who had just turned 100.
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How to e-mail (or phone) us your games
It will remain one of the great mysteries of my life (until I hit the lottery, that is) that seemingly grown men and women who have the mental capacity to sit at a computer, compose an e-mail and send it, cannot look at the little league/softball game reports that appear daily in the Times-News and duplicate the format we require for publication.
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The DH, the rook, ‘old school’ and the Codes
Baseball, to say the least, is presently buzzing in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, as the Orioles streaked to baseball’s best record through the first 29 games, while the Nationals seem to be every bit the contender they were said to have been, sitting atop the National League East as of yesterday.
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Take me out to the coin collector’s?
You know, you try to do the right things, but sometimes it just doesn't pay off in the end. And that's fine.
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We’d have taken Hines back, too
The Mega Millions madness is over for now, and that’s a good thing, because, frankly, I’m a little bit ashamed of all of you. Really. If you could have just seen yourselves and the way you’ve been acting these past 10 days, with nothing but greed soaring from your eyes, you’d be embarrassed, too. It’s as the great Charles E. Lattimer used to say (to me quite a bit, actually), “(Jiminy Crickets), look at yourself, son.”
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With no rule, there is no spirit to break
Three days after paying a king’s ransom for the No. 2 pick in the NFL draft and the right to select Baylor quarterback Robert Griffin III (or, if Jim goes completely Irsay on us, Stanford quarterback Oliver Luck), the Washington Redskins were informed by Commissioner Vernon Wormer that they had violated double-secret probation, bringing to mind a piece of Redskins history that would produce one of the great lines in sports.
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No need to wonder what ACIT means to Karcher
This weekend’s 52nd Alhambra Catholic Invitational Tournament will mean a great many things to a great many people, from the players who will be competing, to their coaches, schools, family and friends, and to the fans who come to see some of the best high school basketball in the country.
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Shot clock should help loaded ACIT to light it up
The idea had been floating in Joe Carter’s thoughts since last year’s ACIT final between DeMatha and Benedictine, when DeMatha head coach Mike Jones, to help alleviate his team’s injury and foul issues, slowed the pace of the game in the first half of the title game his Stags would win, 53-43.
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Senior Day honor is the least Mosley deserves
COLLEGE PARK — Sean Mosley will be honored at Comcast Center today on Senior Day prior to Maryland’s game against Virginia, and it’s difficult to believe it’s been four years since we got our first glimpse of the 6-foot-4 guard out of Baltimore’s St. Frances Academy when he was the Most Outstanding Player in the 2008 Alhambra Catholic Invitational Tournament field.
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Somewhere over the rainbow starts here
During a break in the program Sunday night, former Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Bob Robertson sat at a table backstage sharing some stories from the day when he played some of the finest defensive first base and hit some of the longest home runs in the major leagues in helping the Bucs to the 1971 world championship.
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