A blur of Red & White
On Tuesday night, I attended the Detroit Red Wings’ preseason intrasquad scrimmage, the Red & White Game and had a great time. My photos are here.
Some bullet points from the night: (Keep reading…)
I’m planning to attend tonight’s Red & White Game, the preseason intrasquad game between the members of the Detroit Red Wings. I hope to post some twitter and flickr content during the game. Watch for a wrapup post here afterwards.
Wayne Gretzky is the one who is most often labelled with the words “hockey ambassador,” but Modano was nearly as great of a statesman. The similarities to The Great One didn’t end there. Just as Gretzky’s half-tucked-in jersey would become his sartorial trademark, Modano’s loose and oversized sweater — puffed up with air as he power-turned, billowing behind him like a superhero cape or an American flag as he blazed down the ice — is one of hockey’s more enduring images. And while Gretzky remains the game’s leading scorer, Modano has more points than any other American player. … Read More
(via Grantland)
Some notes in the form of a photo essay from Sunday’s game at Comerica Park in Detroit between the Tigers and Minnesota Twins:
Our approach to the field.
Tiger Stadium (1912-1999)
This afternoon, the Detroit Tigers will try to sweep a three-game set against the Minnesota Twins at Comerica Park in Detroit. I will be on hand for the game, so stay tuned to this site, twitter, and flickr for updates.
Doug Fister is scheduled to start for the Tigers, and although his record on the year is 7-13, he struck out thirteen in his last start (against Cleveland) and took a perfect game into the seventh inning in his previous start (against Kansas City). The Tigers have won ten of their last eleven games, including a current eight-game winning streak, so this should be a fun one.
The NFL’s as-yet-unabridged preseason finished up last weekend, and the Detroit Lions turned in another dominant performance, posting a 4-0 record and notching an especially impressive win over the New England Patriots. Analysts and commentators repeat the common mantra that the preseason doesn’t mean a lot, but in the same breath, many of them are pointing to this year’s Lions as a team that could be a surprise success.
While it’s hard to see any strong statistical correlations between performance in the presesason and regular season– mostly because the team has been consistently bad in the regular season and bad overall– a few observations are possible. The most obvious one is that the last time Detroit went 4-0 in the preseason was 2008, a historically bad year in which the Lions became the only team to go winless in a 16-game NFL regular season, also therefore setting the record for most losses in a single season. Moreover, they won more preseason games (10) than regular season games (8) over the last three years.
What to make of this? The Lions haven’t been above .500 since 2000, when they were 9-7 (2-2 in the preseason), and they haven’t been to the playoffs since 1999, the year after Barry Sanders abruptly retired, so it’s tough to believe the popular predictions of greatness this year. It does feel like a lot more pieces (on the field and sidelines, and in the front office) of a winning team are in place this year, but many fundamental ifs remain for a team playing in the same division as the defending world champions. Predicting which Lions team– the successful preseason version or the perennially disappointing regular-season version– will show up this year may be even more difficult than predicting which Eddie Murphy will show up to host the 2012 Oscars.
During Justin Verlander’s 8K, 1 run, 7 2/3 inning retribution against the Twins last night that ended in a 7-1 Tiger victory, the Fox Sports Detroit crew ran a graphic comparing Verlander’s numbers so far this season with the 2010 final season numbers for Felix Hernandez, the reigning AL Cy Young winner. The comparison looked something* like this:
Verlander became this seasons’ first eighteen-game winner last night, his sixth straight win. There are about five weeks remaining in the regular season, during which time Verlander will try to cement his claim to the Cy Young Award against contenders Jered Weaver and C.C. Sabathia.
* It looked almost nothing like this, but it might if FSD’s on-air talent, Rod and Mario, had to do their own infographics too.
On Friday night in San Francisco, the Giants’ pitcher, Ramon Martinez, hit Phillies CF Shane Victorino, which, in short order, caused a bench-clearing brawl for the forty-seven-thousandth time in MLB history. Martinez’s pitch apparently was no accident; rather, it was some sort of response to the decision by Philly’s previous batter, Jimmy Rollins, to steal second after his two-RBI single put the visitors up 8-2 in the sixth.
I don’t know whether this episode is dumber than the Angels-Tigers spat about which I wrote last week. It’s a tough call: benches didn’t clear in the Detroit incident (hardly an “incident” by that town’s standards), but the unwritten rules supposedly violated– admiring a home run and bunting during a no hitter– were much tougher to justify in the circumstances; in SF, benches did clear, but stealing second up six in the sixth at least is closer to jerk-move territory. Keep reading…
The first newspaper I read seriously and regularly was the Wall Street Journal. A test preparation company gave me a free print subscription, and I milked it as long as I could by doing things like stopping delivery when I was away, which had the effect of tacking more issues onto the end of the subscription. When it finally dried up, a friend on his way out at Dow Jones, the family driven organization that used to control the Journal before News Corp took over, lined me up with an online subscription, which carried me another year or so. By that time, newspaper websites were in full bloom, and a subscription really didn’t mean anything. When the family split and Rupert Murdoch took over, a digital lockdown followed closely on the heels of a substantial (if sometimes misguided) increase in content. No worry, though, as a free and easy workaround makes it simple to get behind the Journal’s paywall. All you have to do is…. Well, I don’t want my cell phone hacked, but, as Jimmy Cliff said, you can get it if you really want, and frankly, it isn’t even that tough.
Uh, hockey? Right. The WSJ has a regular feature called The Weekend Interview, a full-page study of one person, accompanied by an illustrated portrait by Ken Fallin. For reasons that make sense to me, Fallin inspired my photographic selection for this post, above. Because ALDLAND is neither the Journal nor The National Sports Daily, though, more often than not, the interviews are going to have to be imagined.
Chris Osgood is the right subject for this site’s first Weekend Interview. When the Detroit Red Wing goalie retired last month, my immediate reaction registered on the sadness side of the line. It wasn’t totally shocking, although I had thought he’d be around another year or two, especially given Captain Lidstrom’s decision to stay on. And Osgood is likeable, if not a perpetual fan favorite (but few goalies are). Osgood also is the type of player for whom the immediate hall of fame question is more than an element of the motions through which to go the media has obligated itself for every retiree; for him, it’s a real question, an interesting question, a debatable question, and possibly ridiculous that it is a question at all, and like Jim Gray, I promise I’ll promise you I’ll get to that question right away. Here goes… Keep reading…
Sunday at Comerica Park in Detroit featured a premiere MLB pitching matchup between the Los Angeles California Angels of Anaheim’s bemulletted Jered Weaver and the Tigers’ Justin Verlander. Although the Tigers won, it was Verlander who took heat for some of his post-game remarks. Keep reading…
ALDLAND 