We’re in the office for a long Saturday. Observations:
Can’t say it broke my heart to see Arizona, the team that supposedly justified its at-large bid by beating Utah and Cleveland State, get slapped silly by Louisville last night….
Had a very strange interview with very strange Darren Daulton this morning. He was doing a card show in Ephrata.
Somebody (not me; I was more interested in Daulton’s metaphysical beliefs) asked Daulton if he thought Curt Schilling, who retired the other day, is a hall of famer.
Daulton said Philly columnist Bill Conlin asked him and Larry Anderson the same thing in Clearwater the other day. Anderson’s response: “My mom taught me, if you don’t have anything good to say about someone, don’t say anything.”
Daulton also quoted Ed Wade on Schilling: “He’s our horse one day out of every five and our horse’s ass the other four.”
Daulton did admit that , “If you want somebody to pitch a big game, you want Curt in mind,” but he added that, “I think there’s guys out there better numbers.”
Problem: There’s guys in Cooperstown with worse numbers.
Not a big fan of the lowest-common-denominator school of Cooperstown arguments (”If Joe Blow’s a hall of famer, Joe Schmo’s got to be,”) but it’s hard to avoid for pitchers clearly below the Maddox/Clemens level.
Catfish Hunter, Don Drysdale, Jim Bunning, Fergie Jenkins, Phil Neikro, Gaylord Perry…. Schilling either won at a greater rate or had team- and era-adjusted overall numbers better than all of them.
Catfish, for example, won eight more games but lost 20 more than Schilling pitching for great teams in pitcher’s parks in a pitcher’s era. Schilling’s overall numbers, in context, are simply better, and this is before we talk about his postseason record, which has rarely been equaled, and certainly hasn’t by any of the above.
Anyway, look for the Daulton piece in tomorrow’s Sunday News….
Missouri’s giving UConn all it can handle as we speak. Mizzou is an amazing and probably underrated story, a .500 team a year ago from a program that’s been a train wreck of late, a misfit collection of transfers (including one from Delaware) and JUCOs that not only defends like savages full-court for 40 minutes, but might be the best overall passing team still playing. Their halfcourt offense, more than their defense, beat Memphis.
They probably aren’t going to make enough shots to get by UConn, but going into today a Mizzou-Villanova national final wouldn’t have stunned me….
One reason to like Louisville to win it all: It’s relatively easy to play their kind of defense full-out for an entire game given the number and length of time-outs in NCAA games. You really don’t notice this as much on watching on TV as if you’re in the arena. The TV timeouts are like five minutes long- teams have full-blown routines to pass the time, including little stools stored under the bench-players’ seats and then broken out when time is called.
The absolute most time that can pass between breaks in an NCAA game is four minutes; the games are essentially broken into 10 (or more) 10-minute (or less) segments. So if you’re Pitino, you just run guys in and out a tell’ em to go as hard as they can- before you know it, you’ll get a rest.
On the other hand, maybe the “format” allows you to get away with a lack of depth….
