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Beau Vine

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Beau Vine

  1. Quote

    Leading air safety experts have concluded that the captain of flight MH370 deliberately crashed the plane. They include the man who spent two years heading the search, who now says Captain Zaharie Amad Shah carefully planned a murder-suicide mission.

    The Malaysia Airlines jet was on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board when it disappeared.

    Analysis of satellite data indicates it ran out of fuel and crashed in the Indian Ocean west of Australia, thousands of miles from its intended destination.

    Some debris from the Boeing 777 has been washed up on Indian Ocean beaches. But the biggest underwater search in history, coordinated by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), was called off in January 2017 after two years.

    The seabed search was led by Martin Dolan, who told a special edition of the 60 Minutes Australia programme: “This was planned, this was deliberate, and it was done over an extended period of time.”

    Captain Zaharie, aged 53, was accompanied on the flight deck by an inexperienced first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid – who was on his first Boeing 777 mission without a training captain overseeing him. 

    Six days after the plane disappeared, their homes in the Malaysian capital were searched, and computer equipment taken away. It contained evidence suggesting Captain Zaharie had used flight simulation software to prepare for diverting the aircraft.

     

    Captain Simon Harvey, a British pilot who has flown the 777 widely in Asia, said the mission was “planned meticulously to make the aircraft disappear”, including flying along the Thai-Malaysian frontier to avoid either side taking action.

    “If you were commissioning me to make a 777 disappear, I would do exactly the same thing,” he told the programme.

    A Canadian air-crash investigator, Larry Vance, said he believed that Captain Zaharie put on an oxygen mask before depressurising the plane to render the passengers and crew unconscious: “There is no reason not to believe that the pilot did not depressurise the cabin to incapacitate the passengers.”

    Read more

    Mr Dolan dismissed the possibility that terrorism was involved. “If this had been a terrorist event, it’s almost invariable that a terrorist organisation will claim credit for the event.

    “There was no such claim made.”

    The panel disagreed about whether Captain Zaharie was in control of the aircraft at the time it hit the ocean. 

    Mr Vance said he believed the pilot “ditched it deliberately to keep it as intact as possible,” while Mr Dolan said the evidence was that “the aircraft spiralled into the ocean and crashed”.

    Here's a short article in case you don't want to watch a 49-minute video.

  2. 13 minutes ago, VolenteHawk said:

    I think it will land on "about the same".  There are lots of hands in the cookie jar for widespread sports gambling...leagues want compensation, governments want their piece, and ultimately those hands are powerful enough to get it done.  All in all, if I'm betting legally in Texas but paying a worse price due to all the mouths to feed, I'm going offshore or through a bookie, anyway.

     

    I think the leagues will heavily bribe -- excuse me, "lobby" -- state legislatures to license the newly-approved gambling, so that you will only be able to bet NFL games with an NFL-licensed bookie in your state.

  3.  

    15 minutes ago, slorch said:

    He’s not even a Top 10 player, and it’s mostly because of his defense.

     

    There are literally zero people in this thread claiming that he's an all-time top 10 player, yet that's what you're arguing against?

     

    • Like 1
  4. 30 minutes ago, Dbeasy said:

    To the Ginobli haters, I get it. He whined a lot. But man, if you just look at the incredible heart and hustle, combined with the weirdest basketball moves ever, you have a truly special player.

    So you don't actually get it.

    (I like Ginobili a lot.)

  5.  

    2 hours ago, Dbeasy said:

    Sprewell
    Kidd
    Iverson
    Rondo
    Payton

    You just made my list, buddy.

     

    23 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

     


    Hakeem? Guess he blocked too many of your team’s shots.

     

    No shit.  My two favorite NBA teams were Seattle and Dallas, and Hakeem just abused both, but I seriously don't understand how anyone can hate Hakeem.

     

    My lists:

    NBA

    Malone

    Stockton

    Ainge

    Kiki Vandewedghe

    Bill Hanzlik

     

    NCAA

    Harder to hate college players.  I tend to hate the guys that the media gloms onto and completely overrates (hey Vitale):

    Wojo

    Grayson Allen

    Danny Ferry

    Jon Pinone

    Reggie Williams

     

    I have always liked Laettner.  Dude was a fucking warrior.

     

  6. John L. Smith is a national fucking treasure:

     

    After Arky let him go (and he declared bankruptcy), he coached 3 years at Fort Lewis College in Durango and has now spent the last two years at... Kentucky State University?  I didn't know there was such a thing.  The "Thorobreds?"  Yes, that's how they spell it.  OK, then.

    image_handler.jpg

     

     

  7. Quote

    On Friday, one of Texas’s most notorious killers, Clara Harris, was released from prison. Sixteen years ago, Clara was a pretty and personable dentist who lived in a prosperous south Houston suburb with her husband David, an orthodontist, and their twin three-year-old sons. On July 22, 2002, she got into her silver S-Class 430 Mercedes-Benz and drove to the Nassau Bay Hilton, across the highway from the Johnson Space Center. Accompanying her was David’s sixteen-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Lindsey, who was visiting from Ohio, where she lived with her mother.

    Clara and Lindsey walked into the lobby just as David and his office receptionist, Gail Bridges, were emerging from an elevator. Days earlier, David had admitted to Clara that he and Gail had been having an affair, and he had promised Clara that he would end it. Obviously, he hadn’t. Clara, who had been tipped off to David’s whereabouts by a private investigator she had hired, went berserk. She lunged at Gail, slapped her, grabbed her shirt and tore it off, all the while screaming, “You bitch, he’s my husband!” At the same time, Lindsey began hitting her father with her purse, shouting “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

    Eventually, Clara and Lindsey stormed back to the Mercedes. They saw David and Gail heading to Gail’s SUV in a different part of the parking lot. Clara suddenly gunned the engine and raced toward them. The Mercedes glanced off Gail’s SUV and hit David before he could get out of the way, propelling him 25 feet across the lot. Lindsey opened the door and stuck her feet on the ground, as if she was attempting to escape, according to witnesses, who then saw Clara whip the car around, hit the accelerator again, and drive over her husband’s crumpled body a second time. Then she did another 180 and ran over him a third time.

    When Clara finally stopped the car, she got out, looked around, walked toward her dead husband, cradled him in her arms, and begged him to breathe. “I’m so sorry,” she was heard saying over and over. “David, I’m so sorry.”

    The murder made headlines all over the world. One of the English tabloids nicknamed Clara “The Driller Killer.” In Houston, it was the story of the year. Local radio talk shows were jammed with callers debating whether Clara was a cold-blooded murderer or a good woman who simply did what every woman secretly wants to do when she finds out her husband is cheating. I wrote a long article about her, titled “Suburban Madness,” for Texas Monthly. When I went to her first court appearance, nearly a dozen photographers were there to capture her every move. “Clara!” a reporter shouted. “Do you miss David?”

     

    At her trial, in February 2003, she testified before a packed courtroom that she did not mean to kill her husband but was only trying to wreck Gail’s SUV. In the heat of the moment, she went on to say, she didn’t even know she had run over David. Prosecutors, however, went after her, saying she knew exactly what she was doing in that Hilton parking lot. Their most devastating witness was David Harris’s teenage daughter Lindsey, who testified that a week earlier her stepmother had told her, “With all he’s done to me, I could kill him and get away with it.” On the night of the killing, she said, Clara “stepped on the accelerator and went straight for him,” saying moments before impact, “I’m going to hit him.”

    Nevertheless, Clara’s attorneys persuaded the jurors that Clara had acted under “sudden passion” rather than with intent to kill, and they gave her a twenty-year sentence. (While the sentence for intentional murder in Texas is twenty years to life, murder in sudden passion carries a minimum penalty of just two years, with a maximum of twenty years.) Staring at a photo of her twin boys, Clara bowed her head, her dark brown eyes brimming with tears, and then was escorted away. Her sons went to live with another couple who had been close friends with Clara and David.

    Over the years, there were occasional stories in the media about Clara. In 2005, Oprah arrived at the prison in the town of Gatesville (near Waco), where Clara was incarcerated, to interview her for her talk show. In 2007, Clara was brought back to Houston for a civil trial to defend herself in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by David’s parents. This time, a jury had little sympathy for Clara’s story, and it ordered her to pay $3.75 million in damages. Around Houston, she became a pop culture reference. “I’m thinking about pulling a Clara Harris,” a woman would say with a laugh after learning her husband had done something really stupid.

    What very few people knew was that Clara was a model prisoner. As part of a prison program, she learned Braille and worked several hours a day translating school textbooks into Braille. What’s more, she didn’t violate any prison rules. “Clara’s goal was to get paroled so she could be reunited with her sons,” Emily Detoto, one of her original defense attorneys, told me. “Every waking moment, she thought about those boys. And she was not going to do anything to jeopardize her chance of getting parole so she could someday be with them.”

    Clara was first eligible for parole in 2012, but she was turned down. Over the next five years, she was turned down three more times. Apparently, some members of David’s family had written letters to the parole board declaring that Clara didn’t deserve mercy—that she should at least serve her full twenty-year sentence and be released in 2023.

    But last year, she got a new parole attorney, Kevin Stouwie of San Antonio. He came up with a new strategy. At her parole hearing this past October, he brought her two sons, who were then nineteen years old and attending universities in Texas. They said they had come to the prison every month for the last fifteen years, without fail, to visit their mother. Yes, the twins acknowledged, they had lost their father, but at the same time they had lost their mother, whom they loved deeply. They were victims twice over, they said.

    In November, Clara’s application for parole was granted, and her release date was set for May 11. She was quickly inundated with requests for interviews, but she turned all of them down. “Although she knows she can’t disappear, she is going to do her best to stay out of the public eye,” said Stouwie. “All she wants to do is make up for lost time with her boys.”

    Clara is now sixty years old, and her hair is getting gray. Because she is penniless (and legally, she still owes her in-laws $3.75 million), she will initially live with a friend, and she will look for a job. (According to Stouwie, the company that runs the prison Braille program has asked Harris to keep working once she returns to Houston. Because of her criminal record, she can no longer practice dentistry.) Her friends have told me she is worried that people she meets will realize who she is and back away. “It’s too bad if they do,” said Detoto, who has kept in touch with Harris since her conviction. “Yes, she made a horrible fifteen-minute mistake. But she’s a wonderful woman. It’s time to forgive her and let her move on.”

    From Texas Monthly, maybe the shortest thing Skip Hollandsworth has ever written...

  8. On ‎5‎/‎2‎/‎2018 at 4:26 PM, PatrickMcHorn said:

    I'll take blain or northloop as a running around buddy. 

    You're doing blain wrong.  

    The only time I've met blain (right after the Wimberley flood), he set up his smoker in my driveway early in the morning, and when I got back that afternoon sweaty, dirty, and exhausted, he had the best beef ribs I've ever tasted ready.  I don't even have a word for how awesome they were.

    *THAT'S^ how you do blain.

     

    Edit: Also met northloop that day.  He was really cool except that he and MIA both showed up wearing matching Hello Kitty t-shirts, which bothered me for some reason.  

    • Like 1
  9. 15 minutes ago, PantsTent said:

    What's the timeline for this?  My daughter is only 10 but she'll answer the "what do you want to be when you grow up" question with "veterinarian".  And I couldn't take her going to aggy if this holds up.

    Lol, see the above post -- I was there once, and had the exact same anxiety.

    Fortunately, she decided that she couldn't bear putting an animal to sleep, and decided she wanted to be an engineer.

  10. 1 hour ago, CooterBrown said:

    I looked it up once and out of the 30-odd vet schools, aggy was like 12th. Pretty much the definition of middling.

     

    I know anecdotal evidence sucks, but our main vet is an A&M grad, and he's the fucking best.  He (and his office) have been taking care of our dogs for nearly 20 years and I have absolute unconditional trust in him.  He has had a couple of other A&M grads working in the office, and they've been excellent, and also a couple of non-A&M grads who have been great, and I think that also reflects extremely well on him.

    The biggest problem with the A&M vet school is the same problem that pervades all A&M graduate programs -- they give (large to huge) preference to A&M undergrads in admission decisions.  It's not as bad as their MSF or LERE programs which formally restricted their admissions to A&M undergrads at one point, but when my daughter was about 10 and wanting to be a vet, my closest A&M friend told me, "She needs to go to A&M for undergrad, because the A&M vet school will turn down UT grads with a 4.0 in a pre-vet track."

  11. I think this was mostly on Shaggy; I searched for a Surly thread and only found one short one started by Hugo, and fuck him, so here's a new one from mystatesman:

    Quote

    Highlights

    Many steps separated the 23-year-old Conditt from his oldest friends and set him on a course of loneliness.

     

    Investigators have struggled to find a confidant who could provide a window into Conditt’s life and motives.

     

    Forensic searches uncovered evidence that he used Grindr, a dating app, to exchange messages with gay men.

    PFLUGERVILLE —

    Several years before embarking on a bombing spree that terrorized Austin, Mark Conditt had turned against his family’s devout Christianity and declared himself an atheist.

    It was the first of many steps that separated the 23-year-old from his oldest friends and set him on a course of increasing isolation. He lost his job in the tech industry less than a year before the bombings. Investigators have struggled for weeks to find a single confidant who could provide a window into his life.

    His roommates told authorities Conditt kept his bedroom door locked and dodged questions about why.

    During the race to stop the attacks and in the weeks after, investigators also obtained information indicating that Conditt was questioning his sexuality. As a 17-year-old, he had written that homosexuality is “not natural,” echoing the teachings of his religious education, and raising the prospect of inner turmoil in his final months.

    On the day Conditt killed himself with his own bomb, ending the string of attacks that killed two others and injured four, interim Police Chief Brian Manley declared Conditt “a very challenged young man,” a remark that drew criticism from some who thought it was too sympathetic to the bomber. Manley later made it a point to publicly refer to Conditt as a “domestic terrorist.”

    Six weeks later, the answer to why Conditt carried out the attacks remains stubbornly elusive. Investigators who have analyzed a recorded confession he left say Conditt appeared to treat the bombings as an experiment that started with him wondering whether he was capable of building explosives and whether he would get caught.

    READ: Why Austin bomber Mark Conditt’s confession may be kept secret — forever

    However, officials also say it likely will be impossible to fully understand his purpose. Despite spending countless hours studying his life, they still have few clues to his motive but say they are confident in ruling out possibilities such as politics, racially motivated hate or links to international terrorism.

    For this story, the American-Statesman has confirmed details of the investigation and Conditt’s life with four law enforcement officials closely involved in the case.

    The revelation that Conditt might have been struggling with his sexuality in some ways echoes the case of Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old who shot and killed 49 people at the Orlando gay nightclub Pulse in 2016.

    Both men came from staunchly religious backgrounds that frowned upon homosexuality. Mateen’s attack, at the time the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, sparked debate over whether a socially engendered “internalized homophobia” partially motivated the attack. In recent months, evidence suggesting Mateen was not gay has come to light, and investigators have cast doubt on that conclusion.

    In 2012, when he was a student at Austin Community College, Conditt wrote a blog post opposing gay marriage for a government and politics class.

    “Just look at the male and female bodies. They are obviously designed to couple,” he wrote. “I do not believe it is proper to pass laws stating that homosexuals have ‘rights.’ What about pedophilia or bestiality?”

    But two men who lived with him told detectives they thought Conditt might have been gay, and forensic searches uncovered evidence that he used Grindr to exchange messages with gay men.

    If he were gay, Conditt would have struggled with coming out, given his family and social circles, said Sierra Jane Davis, a transgender woman who also grew up in the Pflugerville home-school community and knew Conditt.

    “It’s not something we talked about, but I do know that it would have been difficult for him and his family,” Davis, 23, said.

    It’s unclear if Conditt’s family ever learned about his struggles with sexuality. His parents have denied repeated interview requests, and a family spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.

    Despite his rejection of their religion, Conditt’s parents tried to help him find a sense of purpose in his early adult years. His father bought a home nearby that Conditt lived in, and the two renovated it together. Conditt acted as the property manager for the home, which is at the end of a small neighborhood street. He was in charge of finding roommates and collecting the monthly rent.

    3 WEEKS OF TERROR: How 7 Austin bombing incidents unfolded

    Investigators are still trying to piece together how Conditt learned about explosives. They are hopeful that several older computers found in his home that are currently being examined might reveal clues. The Statesman also confirmed that investigators identified a person they thought might have taught Conditt some skills about building bombs. That person has since been cleared of any suspicion, as were Conditt’s roommates.

    The fact that the two people killed in the bombings, Anthony Stephan House and Draylen Mason, were black led many to believe the attacks were racially motivated. But investigators continue to say they have found no evidence of that in Conditt’s communications, online activity or in his home.

    Investigators who have scrutinized the biggest clue in the case — a 28-minute confession Conditt recorded as he learned police were closing in on him— say he never identified what specifically drove him to harm others and spoke in the recording, which has not been publicly released, about the attacks with no sense of feeling or empathy for the victims or their families. The Statesman reported two days after Conditt died that he called himself a “psychopath” and says he felt as though he had always been one. He ended the tape saying, “I wish I were sorry, but I am not.”

    ‘A lot of people didn’t understand him’

    At the time of the bombings, his father, William Patrick Conditt, was an account executive for the information technology company Insight, according to a LinkedIn page. His mother, Danene Conditt, home-schooled her son and his two younger sisters.

    Mark Conditt participated in a Bible study and outdoor activities group called R.I.O.T., which is a commonly used acronym among Christian youth groups that stands for “Righteous Invasion Of Truth.” It comes from a 1995 hit by the Christian rock artist Carman, who sings, “Righteous, to conform to the Bible / Invasion, an armed attack / Of Truth, the real state of affairs / Like a church on the move that will not double back.”

    Conditt told his family he was an atheist when he was 18 years old, investigators said, although he sporadically attended various churches after making that decision. He was known in the past to attend the Austin Stone Community Church, although the church says it has no record of him being involved recently.

    A statement by the Texas Home School Coalition shortly after Conditt was revealed to be the bomber, which put Texas’ home-schooling community on the defensive, emphasized he had stopped practicing Christianity.

    “Raised by both parents in a Christian home, Conditt reportedly walked away from his faith several years ago,” said the statement from the group’s president, Tim Lambert.

    READ: The 20 hours that led to Conditt’s downfall 

    Davis said she was close to Conditt until about two years ago – when she told him she had decided to transition. Davis said Conditt didn’t cut her off immediately but fell out of touch with her, as did many of her friends and family members.

    “He told me that he couldn’t support my decision to live this life,” she said. “I expected that from everyone.”

    She described their group of friends as “home-schoolers who wanted to talk about God with other Christians.”

    “He was a quiet guy, but he was always willing to talk,” she said.

    Like others who knew Conditt, Davis said she was shocked to learn he was capable of violence or interested in making bombs.

    Jeremiah Jensen, another Pflugerville home-school graduate who knew Conditt, said he was a “deep thinker” and an “assertive person” who would sometimes turn others off by becoming combative in conversation.

    “A lot of people didn’t understand him and where he was coming from,” said Jensen, 24, who fell out of touch with Conditt four to five years ago. “He loved to think and argue and turn things over and figure out what was really going on.”

    Conditt was athletic, Jensen said, and enjoyed rock-climbing and parkour — a form of training that involves finding creative ways around, over and under obstacles.

    Jensen said he had hoped Conditt would grow out of his difficulties and was stunned that he was behind the bombings.

    “I always thought that he would eventually find his wings and become someone who was stable and had a great inner life and family and go on to live a good life,” Jensen said.

    Lacking direction

    After his mother graduated him from home schooling, Conditt worked for four years at Crux Manufacturing, a semiconductor maker in Pflugerville, before being fired last summer, said Shane Miller, a co-owner of the business who is a family friend and had known Conditt since he was 9 years old.

    Conditt worked in various of roles at the company, from packaging and shipping to project planning.

    Miller said that Conditt was not fired because of bad behavior, but because the company had grown rapidly and needed to restructure many of its positions.

    “He wasn’t meeting the new expectations of the job role, so he was let go for that reason, but he wasn’t doing a horrible job,” Miller said. “The company grew beyond his experience level, and we needed to get other people involved.”

    READ: Team repairs first Austin bombing victim’s home as gift to his widow 

    Miller added that he thought it would be good for Conditt to explore new possibilities and offered to have him do some work at the company while he looked for opportunities. Conditt declined.

    “I don’t think he knew what he wanted to do,” Miller said.

    After leaving the Crux job, Conditt worked for some time at an Austin-area garage door repair company, investigators said.

    Jensen said that, while there are many positive aspects of home schooling, its insularity might have contributed to Conditt’s lack of direction in early adulthood.

    “Loneliness can be an issue,” Jensen said. “It’s just very difficult for a lot of kids to find a way to fit in once they are out in the real world. … I have a feeling that is what happened with Mark. I don’t ever remember him being sure of what he wanted to do.”

    At the home he remodeled with his father, Conditt sometimes played video games with two roommates, one of whom detectives say he had met through a church organization. The roommates told police after the attacks that Conditt told various stories about why he wasn’t home for long periods when police say he was carrying out the bombings.

    On the Sunday that he planted a trip-wire explosive device that injured two men in Southwest Austin, he told them he was baby-sitting his sisters at his parents’ house, they said.

    But mostly, the roommates told authorities, Conditt was a man they didn’t really know.

     

    • Like 4
  12. 3 hours ago, CurlyDumps said:

    As of yesterday morning, Treatyoak thought JoePa was guilty.  When presented with info from a credible, world-renowned expert who analyzed the facts and evidence of the case, he plugged his ears and yelled "LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU."  

    I can't decide which reply to go with, so here are both:

     

    1.  Louis Freeh is literally about as much of a "credible, world-renowned expert" as you can find -- he was a US Attorney, he was a District Judge, and he was appointed to run the FBI by Bill Clinton, even though Freeh was a Republican.  Yet you question his report and take the report from a guy hired by the Paterno family at face value?

     

    2.  It blows my mind that you think that "world-renowned experts" don't sell themselves out.

    What do you think "expert witnesses" do in court?  Do you think "expert witnesses" (who are also usually "world-renowned experts") are objective in court?  Do you really think "expert witnesses" don't tailor their testimony to benefit the party who hired them?

    Do you know the word "gullible" is not in the dictionary?

    • Like 1
  13. Stark's Useless Info column:

    Spoiler

    No hits. No outs.

    These two feats are not like the other. But they came on the very same evening this week.

    James Paxton threw a no-hitter Tuesday in Toronto. I’m going to take a wild guess that you noticed that. But here’s what you may not have noticed:

    Dylan Bundy threw something we refer to as “a no-outer” against the Royals. Seven hitters faced. Zero hitters retired. Four hitters making home run trots. And kids, don’t try that at home. Certainly not in the first game of a homestand following an 0-6 road trip!

    So what happens when you get a no-hitter and a no-outer on the same day? The Useless Info Department is all over it. That’s what. So fasten those seatbelts. Here we go.

    THE NO-HITTER AND THE NO-OUTER

    I was amazed by how many people that night had the same thought that I did: When was the last time we’d seen a no-hitter and a no-outer on the same day anyhow?

    And of course every single one of those people had a related thought: “Well, obviously, that knucklehead Stark would know!”

    OK, so I looked. I spent way too much otherwise-useful time, which I theoretically could have spent bonding with my loved ones, looking. But when you folks demand these sorts of life-altering answers, I know what I need to do. So I looked.

    Last time it happened (h/t to @mattmccall)? It was actually as recently as June 13, 2012 – Matt Cain’s perfecto, paired with a P.J. Walters 4-hit, zero-out mini-start for the Twins. But wait. This gets better.

     I also found two times that it happened just involving Nolan Ryan! There was Sept. 26, 1981 (11-K no-hitter for Nolan, 3-and-done start for Ed Whitson). And there was May 15, 1973 (12-whiff no-hitter for Nolan, 5-and-seeya start for Larry Christensen). See what happens when you throw seven no-hitters? You wind up in the middle of all kinds of trivia.

     So in total, amazingly, this was the sixth time both of these momentous events occurred on the same day in the division-play era. But hang on, because here comes the big note. Get ready!

    Most of those games where the starter didn’t get an out didn’t last as long as Dylan Bundy’s seven-hitter start, you see. So what happens if we look only at starts in which the starting pitcher faced at least seven batters? Here’s what:

    There has been just one other day like this one in the entire live-ball era. That’s what you get. That day was Sept. 1, 2007. Clay Buchholz handled the no-hit portion of the festivities. The Phillies’ J.D. Durbin did the rest, with a start that went: Single, HBP, single, single, single, walk, single.

    So there. I looked. You can all resume your regularly scheduled lives now. You’re welcome!

    THE NO-HITTER WATCH

    Now let’s keep rolling – with five fun no-hitter tidbits from a no-hit kind of week:

    First, here’s to James Paxton. The 98th, and next-to-last, pitch of his spectacular, no-hit evening was clocked at 100 miles per hour. (Yeah, technically, it was 99.5, but we round those off and call them 100.) So how often do you see a guy throwing 100 frigging miles an hour in the ninth inning of a no-hitter? Here’s a shocker: Almost never!

    There is only one other recorded instance of anyone throwing that hard in the ninth inning of a no-hitter, in fact. According to MLB’s pitch-tracking data, which goes back 11 seasons, the other guy to do it was (who else?) Justin Verlander, who launched the 105th pitch of his May 7, 2011 no-hitter at 100.4 mph to Rajai Davis. Rajai fouled it off – before striking out three pitches later.

    Coincidence alert: This happened in the very same ballpark as the one Paxton was twirling in (Rogers Centre).

     Loved this list from the Yes Network’s James Smyth. In honor of Josh Donaldson, who made the final out, it’s all the MVPs who ever made the last out of a no-hitter:

    Josh Donaldson (Tuesday vs. Paxton)
    Willie McGee (1992 vs. Kevin Gross)
    Hank Aaron (1969 vs. Ken Holtzman, 1967 vs. Don Wilson)
    Ernie Banks (1965 vs. Jim Maloney)
    Frank Robinson (1964 vs. Ken Johnson)
    Ted Williams (1958 vs. Jim Bunning, 1951 vs. Allie Reynolds)

     Welcome to 2018 – the first year in baseball history with no-hitters in three different countries. There was Sean Manaea in Oakland last month, the Dodgers tag team in Mexico last weekend and Paxton’s gem in Toronto – all in a span of 2 ½ weeks. We’d like to thank the Dodgers for making that possible, by throwing the first major-league no-hitter ever in a country not known as Canada or the United States.

    Shockingly, however, this is actually the fourth time there have been no-hitters in two countries in the same week. The names are fun, so here come the other three:

    May 10-15, 1981 – Charlie Lea in Montreal, Len Barker in Cleveland
    June 29, 1990 (same day) – Dave Stewart in Toronto, Fernando Valenzuela in L.A.
    May 3-7, 2011 – Francisco Liriano in Chicago, Justin Verlander in Toronto

    Finally, check out this tremendous nugget from MLB.com’s Matthew Leach. Walker Buehler started that combined no-hitter for the Dodgers. He also hit a single at the plate because… of course he did.

    He’s the 11th NL pitcher in a row who started a no-hitter in an NL park and also got a hit. Which makes no sense at all, naturally. You know how many 11-game hitting streaks there have been by any individual pitcher in the last 100 years? That would be exactly one – by Carlos Zambrano in 2008. Crazy!

    THE BUNDY WATCH

    On the other hand, poor Dylan Bundy’s night wasn’t quite that upbeat. So here come five things you should know about the first single-homer-homer-homer-walk-walk-homer start in baseball history:

    The bad news is, Bundy was the first starting pitcher ever to give up four home runs and not get around to recording an out. But hey, the good news is, we found three pitchers – via baseball-reference.com’s awesome Play Index – who gave up four home runs in an outing in which they faced fewer batters than he did.

    Pat Mahomes – 5 batters, 4 homers on Aug. 17, 2001
    Jason Grilli – 6 batters, 4 homers last June 3
    And the only starter, Catfish Hunter – 6 batters, 4 homers (to Rick Burleson, Fred Lynn, Carlton Fisk and George “Boomer” Scott) on June 17, 1977

     Remember when the Royals were hitting four home runs this season over their first 422 trips to the plate? Yep. Same team. But they somehow hit four home runs in a mere seven visits to the plate against Bundy in this game. Unreal.

    Those four homers (and zero outs) aside, it’s wild enough to see a box-score line that includes the tagline: “Bundy pitched to 7 batters in 1st.” Did you know that only one other active starter has ever spun off one of those “Pitched to 7 in 1st” lines?

    That would be Matthew Boyd, in only the second start of his career, on July 2, 2015, against the Red Sox. Here is how his night went: Single, single, single, homer, homer, single, wild pitch, walk.

     Meanwhile, no Oriole had put up a “Pitched to 7 in 1st start in more than six decades. Last to do it: Bill Wight, against the Indians, on Aug. 31, 1955.

    But here’s the really crazy part of Wight’s game: After he went single-single-double-walk-double-walk-single, Hal Brown came out of the Orioles’ bullpen, faced 29 hitters, closed out the game and gave up no hits. Seriously.

     Lastly, as sabermetric legend Tom Tango points out, this start capped an out-of-nowhere three-start meltdown by Bundy in which he gave up nine homers (and 22 runs) in just nine innings! Just thought I’d point out that Mariano Rivera had 13 different seasons in which he didn’t give up nine home runs or 22 runs all year.

    THE OHTANI WATCH

    We have an unusual blockbuster Shohei Ohtani feat this week – since officially, it never actually happened. But luckily, we have witnesses!

    Tuesday night, in batting practice at Coors Field, the incredible Ohtani-san hit a baseball where no one has ever hit a baseball. You can watch it here. (It’s the second of two BP homers.) 

    It roared off into the mile-high ozone, cleared the fence in deep right-center field, soared beyond the bullpen and crashed off the fence beyond the third deck, behind Section 303. To give you an idea of how far away from home plate that is, check out this tweet from Rockies broadcaster Ryan Spilborghs.

     

    In his quest to tell this remarkable story (and hopefully win an Emmy for outstanding achievement in hiking), Spilborghs trekked all the way outward and upward to section 303 on TV the next day. He told us he was so far from Planet Earth – I mean, home plate – up there that “I couldn’t read the jersey on any player. I couldn’t tell facial description. And I have good eyesight. But it was beyond my ability to tell what player was who.”

    At first, he said, he wasn’t sure if he was even in the right place – until he looked at the railing behind the section, “and I saw the ball mark. And I was like, ‘Holy crap.’”

    Error! Filename not specified.

    So how could he be sure this was Ohtani’s ball mark? Because Spilborghs has been watching batting practice at Coors Field for over a decade, as a player and broadcaster. And have we mentioned that this was a spot that no previous baseball had ever visited?

    Spilborghs rummaged through his memory bank for us. He has seen Matt Holliday take BP. And Carlos González. And Giancarlo Stanton. And hundreds of other guys. And never, he told Useless Info, has he “seen a ball that came off the bat like that.”

    He checked with Angels hitting coach Eric Hinske. Hinske told him: “I’ve never seen a ball hit there.” Then Spilborghs showed Nolan Arenado a photo of where the ball landed. Arenado’s response: “No way he did that.”

    But Ohtani did that, all right. So of course we needed to find out how mammoth a home run it actually was. And fortunately, we knew just where to turn – to Greg Rybarczyk (@hittracker), creator of the ESPN HR Tracker and currently a senior baseball research and development analyst for the Red Sox.

    After perusing YouTube videos and consulting his Coors data, Rybarczyk estimated Ohtani’s deepest poke of the day at an incomprehensible 517 feet. Which is just a few feet short of a tenth of a mile.

    So please. Think about this. Why are we obsessed with Shohei Ohtani? Because he can throw a baseball 101 miles per hour. And he can hit a baseball 517 feet. And he’s a real human being.

    “This is the equivalent of Sidd Finch (the fictional Sports Illustrated cover boy once created by George Plimpton),” Spilborghs said, “but without the worker boots.”

    Oh, and also without the fiction. We repeat. This is a real person doing this stuff. So Spilborghs started to ponder the possibilities of Ohtani opening the door for “other players like this” and then it hit him. There are no other players like this.

    “Even if there aren’t any more guys like Shohei, hitting 517-foot BP homers and throwing 101, who cares?” Spilborghs said, chuckling. “Why don’t we just marvel at the one we’ve got?”

    THE BARTOLO WATCH

    Bartolo Colon joined yet another fun club in the last week. Let’s call it the 4/44 Club. And how does a guy get admitted into this 4/44 Club, you ask? Pretty darned easily, actually. Just give up four home runs in a game – at age 44.

    The club has just three members. But I knew you’d enjoy them:

    BARTOLO (May 4, 2018) – long balls served to Mookie Betts, J.D. Martinez and Rafael Devers (twice).
    RANDY JOHNSON (Sept. 1, 2008) – long balls served to Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, Joe Mather and Felipe Lopez.
    GAYLORD PERRY (April 10, 1983) – long balls served to Gary Gaetti, John Castino and Randy Bush (twice).
    HONORABLE MENTION – Charlie Hough once gave up four in a game at age 46. And Jamie Moyer did it at age 49!

    USELESS INFO OF THE WEEK

    Who’s the greatest slayer of giants in baseball? Diamondbacks pitcher Matt Koch, obviously. He now has matched up against former MVPs two starts in a row – Clayton Kershaw on May 1, then Justin Verlander last Sunday – and his team won both of those games. According to @StatsByStats, he’s the first pitcher to run into two different MVPs in back-to-back starts in more than 70 years – since Ed Lopat had to duel Hal Newhouser and Dizzy Dean on Sept. 23-28, 1947.

    Addendum No. 1: I hate to break it to the descendants of Ed Lopat, but Matt Koch’s feat had a way higher degree of difficulty – since there have only been two starting pitchers who won an MVP award in the last 25 years, and he faced both of them!

    Addendum No. 2: At least Koch gets a break with his next start (Friday against the Nationals). He only has to face the defending Cy Young – Max Scherzer.

    Braves rookie Mike Soroka won’t forget his big-league debut for all kinds of reasons. But here’s one of them: He got his first career plate appearance before he threw his first career pitch. (Right you are. The Braves batted around in the top of the first.)

    That’s happened just two other times in the last 10 years, according to the Elias Sports Bureau – to the Reds’ Luis Castillo last June 23 and to the Cardinals’ Tyler Lyons on May 22, 2013.

    Gerrit Cole overmatched the Diamondbacks with a dazzling 16-strikeout complete game last week. But he sure did take a unique path to those 16 whiffs. He had no strikeouts in the first inning. And he had no strikeouts in the ninth inning. But he crammed 16 K’s into the seven innings in between.

    So how rare is that? Elias tells us he was the first pitcher to pile up that many strikeouts in a complete game, with none in the first or ninth, since Dwight Gooden did it on Sept. 12, 1984.

     But that’s not all. Cole also had a second big-strikeout game that very same night – at the plate. In the offensive portion of his evening, he went 0 for 5, with five K’s. And that’s even more rare. He’s the first pitcher since 1900, Elias reports, to fan five times during any kind of double-digit strikeout game, let alone a 16-strikeout game. Wow.

    Finally, this portion of Useless Information is apparently brought to you by the number five – because we’re saddened to announce that for the 16thconsecutive year, nobody in baseball went 5 for 5 on Cinco de Mayo. Last to do it: Omar Vizquel, on Cinco de Mayo 2002.

    FIVE STRANGE BUT TRUE FEATS OF THE WEEK

     Josh Donaldson and Yangervis Solarte both homered in each game of the Blue Jays’ doubleheader in Cleveland last week. And that, of course, has been done before. But they also homered in those two games while wearing two different numbers (thanks to a postponed celebration of Jackie Robinson Day). And I’m going to bet that no teammates had ever done that before.

    But that wasn’t the only wacky thing about that doubleheader. The Indians had a seven-run inning in Game 1 and a nine-run inning in Game 2 – but didn’t get a sweep out of it (thanks to a 13-11 loss in Game 1). The last team to have two innings that big in both ends of ANY doubleheader? Reginald Jackson’s 1975 A’s. But at least they bludgeoned the Tigers, 11-0 and 16-4, the day they did it (July 22).

    So how about this for losing the hard way? The Angels scored in the ninth, 10th and 11th innings of their game against the Mariners last Saturday – and still lost. Last team to put runs on the board in the ninth, 10th and 11th of any game that didn’t end in a win, according to @StatsByStats: Eric Byrnes’ 2003 Oakland A’s, in an April 3 defeat to (yep) the Mariners.

    Then again, must have been one of those nights in the Pacific Time Zone. That same evening, the Orioles managed to lose in Oakland despite A) allowing a mere two hits and zero runs over the first 11 innings, B) throwing eight consecutive hitless innings in one stretch and C) putting 11 runners on base in between hits allowed.

    So how did they find a way not to win a game like that? Well, their hitters also struck out 20 times, in a related development. But according to @StatsByStats, they were still the first AL team in over three decades to lose a game in which they gave up two hits or fewer over the first 11 innings. It hadn’t happened since the Tigers did it – also in Oakland – on May 1, 1987.

     But nobody in the last week found a stranger but truer way to lose a baseball game than the great Corey Kluber. How did the winning run score in his 3-2 loss in Milwaukee on Tuesday? On a home run – by a relief pitcher (Brent Suter).

    A sincere thanks to Fox Sports Wisconsin’s Craig Coshun, for saving me the trouble of looking up all the relievers who have ever hit a home run off the incumbent Cy Young winner. According to @StatsByStats, he tweeted, that has happened just two other times.

    There was a 1957 homer by Turk Farrell off Don Newcombe. And there was a 1969 bomb by Clay Carroll off Bob Gibson. I still find it incredible that Carroll hit an extra-inning game-winner off Gibson that day – and never hit another homer (or extra-base hit) in a 14-year career!

     

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