Good morning!
Quarterback Colin Kaepernick is making a rare start for the 49ers against Buffalo on Sunday. Kaepernick is protesting alleged police brutality by refusing to stand for the national anthem. Those are his First Amendment rights and his quiet resolve has caused a ruckus.
Last month USA Today’s Bob Nightengale asked baseball slugger Adam Jones if he’d consider a similar protest. The Orioles center fielder said baseball is different. “Baseball doesn’t need us. Baseball is a white man’s sport.”
Jones said black players might jeopardize their careers by taking up Kaepernick’s cause. “In football you can’t kick them out. You need those players.”
According to besttickets.com, the MLB racial breakdown two years ago was 60 percent white, 29 percent Latin, 9 percent black and 2 percent Asian.
In the NFL, 68 percent of the players are black.
Jones plays in a city that is 86 percent black yet stands in front of an all-white crowd at Camden Yards.
In 1991 the Boston Globe counted fewer than 20 blacks at a Red Sox game. A few years ago I sat next to a couple from Alabama who were in town for a medical convention. The doctor’s blonde-haired wife looked around and exclaimed somewhat incredulously, “This is the first game where I’ve never seen any black people.”
And there it is: baseball and football are both white man’s sports. It starts at the top, where all but one the 62 owners and/or controlling partners in the NFL and MLB is white. The only exception is Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan who is a Pakistani-American billionaire.
Green Bay is a macrocosm of this non-diversity. The Packers are owned by the citizens of Green Bay, which is 85 percent white and 1 percent black.
I get the sense that what Jones told Nightengale matters more than what Kaepernick is doing or not doing. We no longer abide by separate-but-equal standards, but sports gives us the window to see it’s still there like it or not.
Rockingham Park opened in 1906, introduced the popular Pick-Six wager in 1960, drew over 38,000 fans on Labor Day, 1961, and was mentioned in the 1973 Oscar-winning film “The Sting” starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
Last month The Rock shuttered its doors for good and sold everything at auction. Items dating back to 1912 were put on the block, including roulette wheels, poker tables, jockey photos, horse blankets, cash registers and yes, even a popcorn kettle.
What’s left of what was once called “the greatest racetrack in the world” is its website. It reads, “Rockingham Park is now closed. Thanks for the memories.”
According to ESPN’s Power Rankings, five of the 10 worst teams in the FBS play in Conference USA, but not Louisiana Tech. Today’s UMass opponent is only 3-3 but among the conference elite.
ESPN ranks the Bulldogs 73rd, in the same group with Air Force, Kentucky and Duke. The Minutemen are ranked 118th and are 14-point underdogs in Gillette Stadium versus the visitors from Shreveport.
The Bulldogs are coached by Skip Holtz, the son of legendary former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz. Two nights prior to losing the season opener to Arkansas, 21-20, redshirt senior quarterback Ryan Higgins was arrested for DWI and didn’t start versus the Razorbacks.
He made up for it last week by by completing 33 passes for 454 yards and five touchdowns during the Bulldogs’ 55-52 win against conference rival Western Kentucky.
Today is Band Day at Gillette, and trombonists and majorettes from high schools across the Commonwealth will converge on Foxborough to toot their flutes and pad the attendance figure.
Say what I might about UMass football’s 9-45 record in the FBS, the rankings and point spreads make it more fun than watching URI and Stony Brook on a football Saturday.
Pablo Sandoval is a forgotten man. He was benched after batting .233 in March, went on the DL in April and had season-ending shoulder surgery in May. The Red Sox paid their pricey free agent from Frisco $17.6 million to rehab in Fort Myers.
Boston could’ve used Kung Fu Panda’s postseason magic. In 38 playoff games he batted .381 with six home runs and 20 RBIs, and was named the 2012 World Series MVP.
Ironically, the man who replaced Sandoval wound up making the last out of the 2016 season. Travis Shaw flied to right field with runners on first and second in the 4-3 loss.
October Insomnia: The playoff format whittled MLB’s 10 best teams down to four in a span of 17 games in 10 days. Viewers got to watch a lot of baseball as long as they were willing to stay up late.
Most of America was asleep when the Cubs knocked out the Giants at 2:43 a.m Eastern time on Wednesday morning.
The Nationals and Dodgers played two of the three longest nine-inning games in playoff history. The Dodgers’ series clincher in D.C. on Thursday lasted a record fours and 32 minutes, and the Nats’ 8-3 win in L.A. on Monday took four hours and 12 minutes.
The stop-what-you’re-doing moment was when Cubs’ pitcher Jake Arrieta hit a three-run homer off the Giants’ heretofore invincible Madison Bumgarner.
Mets fans who’d watched Bumgarner stifle their team on four hits in the NL Wild Card game must’ve wondered how Arrieta could do to Bumgarner what the Mets’ entire lineup couldn’t do at Citi Field.
Jerry Daly of Leverett said the Red Sox were cooked the night Mark Teixeira hit a walk-off grand slam at Yankee Stadium. “That was a bad omen, a bad vibe all around man,” said Daly.
The Red Sox lost eight of their last nine games, including the three-game playoff sweep. Indians manager Terry Francona pulled all the right strings against his old team. He used four pitchers to beat Boston 5-4 the first game and left it to Corey Kluber to almost singlehandedly beat them 6-0 the next night. Francona said he’d have kept Kluber in for 175 pitches, but the 6-foot-4 righthander needed only 104 in seven innings before relievers Danny Otero and Bryan Shaw came in for mop-up duty.
Everybody’s rooting for the Cubs to win their first World Series since 1908 but methinks it’ll be the Blue Jays. Seven Toronto players have already teamed up to hit 10 home runs in just four games. They’re swinging the bat and on the proverbial roll that prompted Bob to ask Ray, “Why is there butter on my pants?”
The championship banner will fly in Canada, but two months hence Boston will sign Edwin Encarnacion to replace Big Papi and Red Sox Nation will hibernate in peace.
Unfinished Story: Colorado Rockies shortstop Trevor Story hit six home runs in his first seven games this season. He finished April with 10 homers, tying Jose Abreu for the most in a month by a rookie.
Story was the Rockies’ first round draft pick (45th overall) in 2011 out of Irving (Texas) High School. He played 537 minor league games with over 2,000 at-bats before he was declared ready for prime time.
He was on pace to hit 45 homers and drive in 120 runs when he injured his thumb and was lost for the season on July 30. The next chapter in the Story story won’t be until February, when the Rockies open camp at Salt River Fields in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Squibbers: Terry Francona is 352-294 with the Indians and John Farrell is 339-309 with the Red Sox, a proven manager versus a proven pitching coach. … The website baseball-reference.com provides much of the statistical info used in this column. It was founded by Sean Forman as part of his PhD project. Forman’s brother, Chris, once worked in the sports info office at UMass. He went to Navy and is now at Purdue. … A sold-out crowd of 44,500 watched No. 3 Clemson annihilate Boston College last week at Alumni Stadium at Chestnut Hill. That’s a small crowd by Clemson standards. The Tigers had averaged 76,573 fans in their previous five games. … Mark Snow said the Four Leaf Clover booth sold 1,500 pounds of french fries at the Franklin County Fair. The potatoes were harvested at Szawlowski Farm in Hatfield. “Chef’s potatoes grown down by the river, and they are beautiful,” said Snow. … We mentioned last week that Sadye White graduated from Greenfield High School, which is inaccurate. White transferred to Deerfield Academy in 1989 when the school went co-ed and received a diploma with the first graduating class to include women. … After Rob Gronkowski’s 34-yard catch and run against the Browns on Sunday, Cleveland broadcaster Jim Donovan exclaimed, “It was like a man through boys.” … Cowboys rookie Dak Prescott is tied for third (with Matt Ryan) in completion percentage, trailing only Minnesota’s Sam Bradford and (surprise!) Chicago’s Brian Hoyer (minimum 100 attempts). … Good luck to retiring Shelburne police chief Steve Walker, who’s leaving the same way he came into the job — with a smile on his face. … Keen Ice took an $8,000 slice of the purse with a third-place finish at even money in an allowance race at Belmont Park on Oct. 7. That’s a steep drop from winning the 2015 Travers Satakes and taking home $670,000 after beating last year’s Triple Crown winner American Pharoah. … To paraphrase the late Ernie Harwell, baseball is a businessman in a $1,000 suit jumping up and down holding a “K” sign at Nationals Park. That’s baseball, and October is baseball at its best.
Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning columnist who has penned his observations about sports for four decades in the Pioneer Valley.