I distinctly remember talking about Kerry Wood’s 20K game right after it happened during high school baseball practice. That was his rookie year. 1998.

This stat is crazy:

Among pitchers with at least 1,000 innings, Kerry Wood is one of three in MLB history whose strikeouts per nine innings was 10.0 or higher.

He’s just ahead of Pedro Martinez and just behind Randy Johnson.

Perhaps even crazier is a stat they just put up on Sportcenter: since his debut in 1998, no pitcher has given up fewer hits per nine innings on average than Wood. 

It’s one of those what-might-have-been stories (along with former teammate Mark Prior), but he’ll always be remembered for that 20K game. 

“Golden ages” in sports are weird things. They’re usually only declared after the fact — and often well after the fact. It’s often the “too far in the forest to see the trees” syndrome mixed with a lack of historical context, so perspective is lacking until further down the line. 

But that’s not the case with men’s tennis right now.

Because there are three players that are potentially the three greatest players that have ever lived, what we’re all watching now is unprecedented — and obviously the golden age of tennis.

Brian Phillips lays this out as well as I’ve seen for Grantland today. I find his comparison to The Iliad apt:

One of the great things about this era of the game, though — it goes along with the cruelty we were just talking about — is that it feels almost epic. That’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in sports, but I mean it literally here. Think about, say, The Iliad. It’s a book about combat, about wild golden armies tearing each other to shreds, but here and there in every battle there are heroes whom no one can touch. Hector and Achilles and Ajax and the other superheroes of the B.C.E. basically wade through the enemy, mowing down everything in their path. They’re not even in danger. There’s absolutely no chance that some minor Trojan is going to bring down Achilles; it’s not happening. And after hundreds of pages of this, when they finally start facing each other, you can’t freaking believe how intense the moment is, because you’ve been primed to think they’re invincible.

Isn’t that basically the state of tennis today? Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have won every major tournament but one in the last seven years.

That’s insane.

Also insane: the fact that Andy Murray, the fourth wheel of this three-wheel car, might himself be considered one of the best players of all time as well were he not playing against Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic.

Murray’s five-set loss to Djokovic in the semifinals last weekend was itself a match for the ages. But it looks like nothing — and will be forgotten — because of the six-hour Djokovic/Nadal final.

This is obviously a bit old, but I finally got around to reading it on the plane today. It’s brilliant.

Simmons is a die-hard Celtics fan. Hates the Lakers with a passion. But he rightly calls bullshit on what went down. The best parts:

Once word leaked of the deal, rival owners started rebelling almost immediately. What was the point of that lockout, and all the talk of competitive balance, if the Lakers were allowed to immediately acquire Chris Paul? Dan Gilbert sent a scathing e-mail to a few of the other owners that, of course, was leaked on the Internet last night.

The best part of the letter: “This trade should go to a vote of the 29 owners of the Hornets.”

(Translation: “Let’s cut Demps’ balls off, throw the last few weeks of negotiating out the window and go back on our word. Also, I’m thinking of starting a support group for small-market owners who overpaid for their teams, don’t have the balls to sell and would rather whine, bitch and bully about their lot in NBA life. I’m going to call it O.A.: Overpayers Anonymous.”)

And:

Just know that I’m a die-hard Celtics fan and die-hard Lakers hater … and even I am appalled. I hope Chris Paul sues. I hope the Rockets sue. I hope the Lakers sue. I hope Dell Demps resigns and makes a sex tape with a stripper wearing a David Stern Halloween mask. Whatever happens, the season has been irrevocably tainted — we just watched FIVE teams have their seasons screwed up by this debacle. 

The league has moved on. The teams have moved on. But what went down remains total bullshit.

It’s amazing that over the past few years the discussions have evolved from whether Federer is the best ever, to whether Nadal will be the best ever, to now whether Djokovic may eventually be the best ever.

These are three of the best players ever and they’ve come back-to-back-to-back.

Michigan on the comeback trail. Big time.

A few crazy things:

• His 3,000th hit was a homerun, despite the fact that he had not homered in Yankee Stadium in almost a year.
• The only other person to hit a homer for hit 3,000 was Wade Boggs, also not a homerun hitter.
• Jeter is the fourth youngest player to get 3,000 hits. Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader, was 8 days older than Jeter is now when he got his.
• After a rush of players getting to 3,000 in the early 2000s, no one had in over 4 years since Craig Biggio did.
• Biggio only had over 200 hits once in a season. Jeter has had 200 hits or more in seven seasons. 
• Most amazingly, Jeter is the first player ever to get hit number 3,000 in a Yankee uniform.

No surprise there.

They’re saying now he may have taken up to $40K for signing memorabilia over the past few years. That’s on top of the cars and whatever else he was doing. All under resigned-but-should-have-been-fired coach Jim Tressel. Who of course knew everything that was going on yet said nothing and then lied about it.

Oh, and he let Pryor and other players now suspended play in their bowl game last year. A game which they barely won thanks to Pryor’s 336 total yards.

Ohio State AD should be the next to go. Then the school President. 

The only real question is just how big of an example the NCAA makes of Ohio State? Worse than USC? If so, seasons will be erased, scholarships taken, and no more bowl games for quite some time.