Orel Family

One month ago, it appeared as if the most interesting thing likely to happen on the last day of the season might be Adam Dunn's pursuit of history . The pennant races were dull, with clear leaders in every race. Little did anyone know... On September 9, the St. Louis hosted the Atlanta Braves in the first of a 3-game series. The Braves led in the wild card race by 7.5 games. Going in to the bottom of the ninth, the Braves were ahead in the game, 3-1. Their sensational rookie closer, Craig Kimbrel , took the mound. A win would improve the Braves record to 85-60 -- a .586 winning percentage -- and reduce the Braves magic number for a playoff spot to 10, with 17 games remaining. A .586 winning percentage equates to 9.97 wins per 17 games. With two outs, the Cardinals had a runner on first base. Rafael Furcal , hitting .217, came to the plate. Kimbrel prepared to close out the game, but then something strange happened: He went wild. He walked Furcal on 4 pitches. Then he wa...

A record was set tonight in Major League Baseball. It's a bit of a big record, though I'm supposing that the record-holder would just as soon not have it. And you wouldn't know it from that picture, either (that was a home run). In Chicago, the Designated Hitter -- and if ever there was a more ironic title, I'd like to know it -- Adam Dunn went 0-for-2 with a walk. For the year now, he has 66 hits and 75 walks. Not many players get more walks than hits in a season, though some of those players are very, very good. That list includes Rickey Henderson and Barry Bonds . But this in not about Dunn's ability to draw walks. Dunn has also amassed 174 strikeouts this season. That's 108 more strikeouts than hits; the record is 112, set just last year by Mark Reynolds , then of the Arizona Diamondbacks. The ratio of strikeouts to hits, 2.64, is a record for someone with as many hits as Dunn. But this is not about Dunn's impressive ability to miss the baseb...

In recent years, I have used this blog less and less frequently... but sometimes there are things, little things, I just want to remember. And if I just put it on facebook, I may never find it again. Tonight, I got home very late from work. Elianna was waiting for me. "Guess what?," she said. "Remember that spelling test I took??" "Did you get it back?" I knew she hadn't studied for it, because she lost the study sheet. The day of her test, I thought I had found it on her bed. There was a big yellow sheet of paper there, and in big letters, in her handwriting, it said, "SPELL WORDS." It had a lot of words on it, all scribbled down in her writing. So I had said, "Here are your spelling words! OK, now, accio?? " and at that point I gave up trying to help her for her test. But I digress. "I get to re-take my test!!" That was a prelude to, "I was close, I only missed that one by one letter!" Later, as...

I'm not much for attending major political events, or going to see big-name politicians. When I was at grad school at USC in 1984, I saw two campaign appearances. At the first one, Walter Mondale had to answer some particularly obnoxious hecklers by bellowing, "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. This is the school that produced Donald Segretti! " No, they didn't throw tomatoes, as Susan Estrich has recalled, or if they did, their aim was bad enough so I didn't notice. Then again, they probably didn't know who Segretti was, anyway. It was a great put-down, but the jecklers just kept on shouting, "Reagan Country!" Later that same fall, I saw a campaign appearance for the Republicans. Vice President Bush spoke. The USC mascot, Traveler , paraded around with its rider --presumably Richard Saukko -- in full regalia. The introduction was by Moses himself, Charlton Heston . It was all very... regal and distant. Politicians -- good polit...