Cleaning out the Inbox

  The delightful-looking fellow to the right has been the number one menace to the future of the ash baseball bat, which had traditionally been used for the bats of major league baseball.

The Athletic tells the story of the Emerald Ash Borer, the invasive species that has singlehandedly devastated the ash tree and changed professional baseball bats from ash to maple, but it also discusses other factors, including Barry Bonds, and the lengths that Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto is going to in order to make sure that he will be able to use ash bats for the remainder of his career.

Terry Pluto of the Cleveland Plain Dealer gives us a double play of his work as Pluto writes of the first two Cleveland Cavaliers to participate in the NBA All-Star Game and a tribute to long-time Browns radio analyst Doug Dieken, who finished his final season with the Browns with the conclusion of the 2021 Browns campaign.

John Johnson and Butch Beard were the first two players from Cleveland to make the All-Star teams and while neither are likely to come up in casual hoops conversations, both had solid NBA careers.

Johnson was the Cavalier's first-ever first-rounder in 1970 and would have a solid twelve-year NBA career with four teams and would win an NBA championship in 1979 with Seattle while Beard would play for four teams in a nine-season run in the league.

As for Doug Dieken, he worked as the Browns radio analyst since 1985 and worked with three different play-by-play announcers during his time with the network.

Listening to Dieken and Jim Donovan through the years has often been more entertaining than the lousy Browns games that they worked on!

Autoblog gets in-depth into gas prices and why for all the pain that we feel at the gas pump, there is a certain amount of value (I was stunned to discover this) for gas at the cost that we are struggling with even today.

The article also deals with the variable of state taxes, imports, exports, and just why even if America kept every drop of its own oil- there still is one reason that the United States cannot become self-sufficient with oil.

We wrap up with the New York Times article on the late ABA and NBA star Connie Hawkins and a recent plan to rename a New York City playground after him.

There is a problem. there is another famous person from the same neighborhood- read the article and guess who it is.