Wait, That Can't Be Real: Holograms, Trades, and Temperatures
Three-Dot Wednesday 7.16
If the Los Angeles Lakers actually trade LeBron James, then they’re willingly giving up a billion dollars in revenue. Seriously. Imagine the scene for his final season. Tickets for any Lakers game- home or away- will probably start at a thousand bucks (that’s $1.6 billion in sales right there assuming every arena seats 18,000 and sells out). Then think of the licensed memorabilia sales. How many Lebron things can the Lakers authorize with their logo on it? T-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, hats, hoodies, holograms, whatever you can think of and more. Not to mention every team will sell pieces of the court, used towels, lockers, and whatever they can think of as well- the Lakers get a cut of that, too. And then, here’s the kicker- the Lakers don’t want to see all his retirement footage be from another team. You won’t be able to escape highlights from “Lebron’s last game at Madison Square Garden,” or even “Lebron’s last game in Charlotte.”
Now, if LeBron willingly wants to leave and go somewhere else, they’ll accommodate him… to a point. But even LeBron knows which team he retires with means something. Which makes all of these trade rumors simply that. It’s also a genius way to keep a middling Western Conference team with major salary cap issues in the spotlight daily.
And he’ll for sure play another year after this, and it’ll be with the Lakers. Why? Because then he’ll have played 24 seasons. Does that number mean anything to the Lakers, and Lebron himself? Yeah, just a little bit. The Kobe worship is real, and everybody in Lebron’s camp- and the Lakers themselves- know it…
I didn’t watch a second of the MLB All-Star game, but I’m very glad that after it was a tie game after the regulation nine innings they went to home run derby to end it- it’s merely something I’ve been advocating for years…
But I sure did see the hologram recreation of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run on April 8, 1974, and it was tremendous- to a point. Two things I want to spotlight about it. One, that in the background of Aaron as he’s mobbed at home plate is a 22-year-old white trenchcoat-wearing Craig Sager, who went on to become the guy at NBA games who wore outlandish suits. He was a cub reporter for a Florida radio station that carried Braves games and decided to go to interview Hank the moment it happened. Now he had a press pass, but there wasn’t nearly as much security at the time, so he just hung out down by the field and when the moment happened hopped the fence and there here is in all the footage…
The other thing is they used a lot of the legendary Vin Scully and his call of the history-making home run since they were playing the Dodgers that night, and very little of Braves broadcaster Milo Hamilton except for his famous call….
But whoever edited the segment took out the most important part of Vin’s call- when he acknowledged the time, the place, and the era. They took out: “A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol,” and left the rest of it in. It ignores this time, place, and era as well, and for that the otherwise wonderful presentation is marred. See it for yourself…
The Colorado Rockies entered the All-Star break at 22-74, tied for the 4th-worst record in MLB history since 1901. It almost looks to be a certainty that they will lose more than 121 games, the new record set by the Chicago White Sox just last year.
But the mark they are really trying to avoid is becoming the first team since 1935 to win fewer than 40 games in a season. It’s only happened four times! Last year’s White Sox went 41-121, and even the hapless New York Mets of 1962 went 40-120 (they had two rainouts that weren’t made up).
The Rockies have played 96 games, which means they have 66 left. They’d need to go 18-48 just to get to 40 wins and “only” lose 122 games. The thing is, they seem to win about a game a week… and there are 10 weeks left in the season… stay tuned, as they say…
(The worst team since 1901 was the 1916 Philadelphia A’s, who went 36-117… Colorado is on pace to win about 36 games, which is absurd. And you can learn much more about the entire 1916 season in my book, which you should get if you haven’t already…)
I didn’t mention it when it happened, but on July 4th, the Pittsburgh Pirates Single-A team, the Greensboro Grasshoppers, threw a perfect game using three pitchers. That was a pretty cool achievement, considering how hard it is to throw a perfecto at any level.
But I have to mention them now, because they then threw another combined perfect game, becoming the first team in pro baseball history at any level to throw two perfect games in a season, and they did it in a nine-day span! This time it took four pitchers, and only one of the pitchers overlapped with the first one…
Curiously, although there have been only 27 major league perfectos, the minor league list is much longer. That’s partially because they include 7-inning perfect games, and I’d guess at least 100 major league games have been perfect through seven. But you’d also have to suppose that’s because there have been so many more minor league games played. And the quality of opponent, especially in the early days when most teams were independents and cobbled together what they could for teams from the local townsfolk, would be, uh, shall we say, highly variable…
Look, I’m not saying the adventures of the West Sacramento Nomads (aka the former Oakland A’s) are about to get very sticky, but they themselves are keeping track of game-time temperatures, which are only going to get higher (and explains why they hardly have any day games until September). The highest start-time temperature so far this season was 95 degrees on June 18th against the Astros, a game they lost 11-4 with Houston getting 20 hits…
But apparently the highest-recorded temperature for any A’s home game was July 27, 1956, in Kansas City against the Yankees. It was night game (fortunately?), went 14 innings and lasted 4 hours and 47 minutes! Yikes. The attendance was officially over 30,000, which seems almost impossible... The Yankees eventually won 10-9 when Mickey Mantle scored on an error, and I wonder how many actually stayed for the finish…
And the last time any A’s game started when the temperature was over 100 was July 26, 2018, at Texas when it was 101 (before the Rangers moved into their new dome ballpark). That finished a week of super-extreme heat start times for the Rangers, and that was a night game as well! The A’s won 7-6, taking the lead for good when the one and only Bartolo Colon gave up three runs in the 4th…
(It will surprise nobody that the hottest recorded temperatures in MLB were in Texas… and that “turf temperatures,” which regularly got to 120+ in places, don’t officially count..)
Unfortunately, the A’s are in Houston for this July 26 and 27, so we can’t get any good symmetry there. But you know that record is going to be broken…
And it might not be during their stay in Sacramento… apparently the current highest-recorded start-time temperature ever in pro ball was… 115 in Las Vegas in 2017! You can’t make these things up, unlike Lebron James trades and cutting parts of historic Vin Scully calls…
George Crowe. First Base. Stan the Man got more votes in 1957, barely. George played for the Dayton Rens in 1948-49.
Thanks for including that clip at the end. Speaking as a longtime Giants fan, predating my move to the Bay Area, I always appreciated the way that Vin Scully called a game. Sad that MLB deleted that significant portion of his comments from whatever they showed at the All-Star game. I didn't watch either. I don't care how they end an all-star game. Don't even care if they play one. But I sure hope a HR swing-off does not become the way they end nine inning ties in regular season or playoff games. HRs are not the most exciting plays in baseball, and certainly not when they are hit off of batting practice pitches. That is TV, not baseball. May as well be watching old b/w footage from Wrigley Field in Los Angeles.