The Daily Dose/February 1, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Leading Off: Play ball…
Debating the merits of who does and who does not belong in the baseball Hall of Fame used to be fun, but longtime fans of this crap know our feeling is all the fun was taken out when Gary Carter was elected. If you were as good or better than Carter, welcome aboard. If you weren’t, tough noogies. There was nothing to argue about.
That’s changed now, though, with the selection last year of Harold Baines by a veteran’s committee. Now, Harold was a very good major league ballplayer for many years, but nobody, least of all Harold, was clamoring for his inclusion in Cooperstown and he is now our baseline: if you were as good or better than Harold Baines, get your induction speech ready. If you weren’t, well, you played major league baseball, which is farther than most baseball players get.
By this standard, everyone elected this year – Mike Mussina, Mariano Rivera, Edgar Martinez and Roy Halladay – deserved it. By this standard so did others who were not elected.
They are letting an awful lot of people into Cooperstown nowadays. This decade saw 40 people elected either by baseball writers or a veteran’s committee, a bit more than twelve percent of all inductees. 29 of those 40 were elected the past six years.
We don’t know about you, but when we think Hall of Fame the term that comes to mind is “all-time greats”. It’s their hall, but they are now electing some who do not immediately come to mind when you think “all-time great”.
“All-time very good”, yes, but not all-time great.
Today At The Site
The Diary of a Nobody: It’s a very leisurely day around The Shire for Sparrow and The Wife, as about the only thing that gets done is The Wife throws the trash out while Sparrow pays the bill for his VA check-up.
We were all done by early evening…In the afternoon The Wife, for some reason, had run going to a movie up the flagpole but I didn’t even look up what was playing so I could veto everything out of hand: I dismissed the idea immediately…When it’s a leisurely day it’s a leisurely day and you don’t ruin it by leaving the house.
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On This Date
In 1960 – What History now refers to as the Greensboro Sit-Ins begin when four black students from North Carolina A&T University are refused service at the lunch counter a Woolworth store in Greensboro and declined to leave. This protest led to further protests at the store before spreading throughout the state and the South. In July the store manager, tired of losing money, began serving blacks.
In 1995 – John Stockton of the Utah Jazz gets his 9,992 career assist, establishing a new NBA record as the Jazz defeated the Denver Nuggets 129-88. The old record had been held by Magic Johnson and Stockton would retire in 2003 with 15,806 assists, still the all-time record, and his career average of 10.5 assists per game trails only Johnson’s 11.2 assists per game.
In 1964 – The British Invasion begins when the Beatles ascend the #1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 with I Want to Hold Your Hand. It was the first of three consecutive #1s for the Beatles, the first of six #1s for the year and the first of 20 #1s in their career, all Hot 100 records, the latter two of which still stand. Still one of the great lines of demarcation in chart and cultural history, I Want To Hold Your Hand would spend seven weeks at #1 and would be Billboard’s #1 song of the year.
Quotebook
Insanity triumphed because sane people were silent.
Randy Shilts (1951-94)
American journalist and author
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
Illinois was the first state to ratify the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, doing so 154 years today, the day after Congress sent the amendment to the several states for ratification.
Today’s Stumper
Who was the first British act to have a #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100? –Answer next time!
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