With the dearth of sports news other than NFL Draft items, The Athletic has focused on terrific stories from the past and our starting link is a story that is new to me!
In May 1971, the Cincinnati Reds are at Dodger Stadium playing the Dodgers and as Maury Wills takes his lead off second base, Reds second baseman Woody Woodward moves towards the bag to give his pitcher Jim McGlothlin an avenue to try to pick Wills off second, if he chooses.
As Woodward arrives at the bag, a sudden noise startles the stadium as an object fell out of the sky and slammed into the ground where Woodward had been standing.
The bag split upon impact (no kidding) and spread flour all over the infield.
After cleanup, the game continued without incident, but what happened?
Apparently, a small private plane decided to screw around and dropped the flour from the air along with a second bag (no word on if that bag contained sugar) landing in the parking lot.
The Pedro Gomez penned piece discusses why this hasn't made more of an impact (rimshot) with baseball historians and also reports that newspaper recaps indicate that during the same game (and possibly the same time frame) the stadium was enthralled with a chicken running across the outfield.
No further report on the chicken, but the Dodgers did consider signing the chicken as a flychaser in the outfield.
Dr. Meredith Wills investigated an issue that baseball fans had been wondering about for a few months- Why and how did the 2019 postseason suddenly see power numbers drop after record-setting numbers for the regular season?
The answer?
The baseball.
The 2019 baseball had been proven previously to have lower seams and a rounder baseball and therefore carried farther when hit due to less drag through the air, but Wills shows that not all of the 2019 baseballs were from the same batch at those used in 2019 season games with many being new, but older baseballs.
I won't ruin the rest of the story with how this happened, but you have to love baseball and their reaction to every problem with the game- Deny, Deny, Deny...
The final article from The Athletic is from their Indians beat writer Zack Meisel.
Many of the beat writers across the league have been looking back on famous trades involving their covered teams, but with a twist.
The "Trade Tree" takes a famous trade and goes back to the past to look at how a player was acquired and then into the future with what the return (or returns) bounty contained when that player was shipping away.
This version of Trade Tree wasn't limited to one player though as Meizel writes of how John Hart built the powerhouse Indians of the mid-90s through his various swaps.
The centerpiece deal is the 1989 trade of Joe Carter to the Padres in exchange for Sandy Alomar.Jr., Carlos Baerga, and Chris James, but the tree also branches back to obtaining Carter from the Cubs for Rick Sutcliffe, the theft of Sutcliffe from the Dodgers and the trade to obtain and transfer out Matt Williams with the Tribe's 1997 World Series run in between.
Terry Pluto writes for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about how recently deceased football Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell (More on Mitchell in the next passings post) was part of the power struggle between Art Modell and Paul Brown that ended with Brown being fired and Cleveland being stuck with Modell until he scurried off to Baltimore in 1996.
It was Brown that decided to trade Mitchell and the Browns first-round selection in the 1962 draft to Washington for the first pick in the draft, 1961 Heisman winner Ernie Davis.
Davis would be diagnosed with leukemia and would never play for the Browns, but there was a point that Davis went into remission and wanted to play.
Art Modell backed Davis and found a doctor that cleared Davis for play, but Brown refused to take a chance and Davis never hit the field.
The decision split Modell and Brown for good and after a 7-6-1 1962 season, Brown was fired in January and Davis would pass away in May of 1963.
Modell's Browns would win the 1964 title and no others before he left town.
Paul Brown would be named to the Hall of Fame and would build the Cincinnati Bengals from scratch.
Another note is this- Paul Brown owned 15 percent of the Browns and sold that to Modell for 500,000 dollars raising the question of what would have happened had Brown raised the money to buy the team rather than Modell?
In my opinion, the Browns would have never left for Baltimore, but they would have been stuck with Mike Brown running them all these years.
I'm not sure that would have been a huge upgrade.
The Ringer interviews actor and former WCW champion David Arquette about why he is still wrestling at 48 years old and for next to no money.
Arquette nearly lost his life in a "death match" in 2018 and there is an accompanying documentary on him to be released soon and it's pretty interesting to see how Arquette feels towards wrestling.
The steep decline of WCW began after a silly idea to briefly make Arquette their world champion and the fans were not only upset about the decision, they turned on everyone involved.
I can't say I'm a fan of Arquette, but it's still a pretty interesting article.
CNN's science department writes of the discovery of data from the Voyager 2 mission that shows the need for a return to Uranus and Neptune.
The discovery is that Voyager traveled through a small plasmoid, which is a magnetic bubble pinched off a planet and then sent off into space.
The plasmoid is the first discovered from the Voyager missions and will hopefully be followed up by missions to one or both planets.
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