Brandon Hyde out as manager of the Baltimore Orioles.
15-28 so far this season.
ESPN:
It’s Baltimore, gentlemen.
May 17th, 2025Obit watch: May 16, 2025.
May 16th, 2025Charles Strouse, noted Broadway composer. THR.
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Some of Mr. Strouse’s numbers became so ubiquitous that they seemed revered and reviled by the public in equal measure. Each response in its own way was a badge of honor.
There was the time, for instance, that a stranger accosted Mr. Strouse at a party.
“If I have to hear my daughter sing ‘Tomorrow’ one more time,” he thundered, “I’m going to kill myself — and you!”
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Your loser update: May 16, 2025.
May 16th, 2025We’re about 25% of the way through the MLB season, so I thought it was time to do a loser update.
The question is: what teams are worth covering?
The Braves, which started out horribly, are now 22-22, for a .500 average. I don’t think they’re worth considering in the loser update any longer unless there’s a dramatic change.
There are some teams that are below .400 that might be worth consideration:
Baltimore is at 15-27, for a .357 winning percentage.
The Miami Marlins are at 16-26, .381.
Pittsburgh, the first team this season to fire their manager, is at 15-29, .341.
The Chicago White Sox are at 14-30, for a .318 winning percentage. This projects out to 110 losses, which is bad, but not historically bad, and at least better than last year.
And the Colorado Rockies…7-36, .163 winning percentage. This is bad. This is historically bad. This is a projected total of 135 losses. This is the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network publishing an article:
“Are Rockies worse than 2024 White Sox? Breaking down the numbers”.
The 2024 Sox lost 121 games, but didn’t quite nail down the “worst team in the modern era” mark. Could the Rockies accomplish what the Sox didn’t? Hope springs eternal.
Obit watch: May 15, 2025.
May 15th, 2025Joe Don Baker. Damn.
THR. He was in a lot of good stuff: “Charley Varrick”, “Golden Needles”, “The F.B.I.”, “Lancer”…
He was also in a lot of crap: “Leonard Part 6”, “Final Justice”, and, of course…
Joan O’Brien, actress. Other credits include “Bus Stop” (the series), “Rawhide”, “The Alamo” (the good one, with John Wayne), and “Perry Mason”.
Obit watch: May 14, 2025.
May 14th, 2025Robert Benton, noted screenwriter and director. NYT (archived). IMDB.
Richard L. Garwin, physicist.
A polymathic physicist and geopolitical thinker, Dr. Garwin was only 23 when he built the world’s first fusion bomb. He later became a science adviser to many presidents, designed Pentagon weapons and satellite reconnaissance systems, argued for a Soviet-American balance of nuclear terror as the best bet for surviving the Cold War, and championed verifiable nuclear arms control agreements.
While his mentor, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, called him “the only true genius I have ever met,” Dr. Garwin was not the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, may have greater claims to that sobriquet.
In 1951-52, however, Dr. Garwin, at the time an instructor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, designed the actual bomb, using the Teller-Ulam ideas. An experimental device code-named Ivy Mike, it was shipped to the Western Pacific and tested on an atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Obit watch: May 12, 2025.
May 12th, 2025Hattip to pigpen51 for letting us know about the death of Chet Lemon, center fielder for the Detroit Tigers. ESPN.
Lemon played seven seasons with the Chicago White Sox from 1975 to ’81 and nine with the Tigers from 1982 to ’90. He batted .273 with 215 homers, 884 RBIs, 973 runs and 1,875 hits in 1,988 games.
Lemon set a still-standing American League record for outfielders with 512 putouts during the 1977 season.
He led the American League with 44 doubles in 1979 and made the All-Star teams in 1978, 1979 and 1984.
Johnny Rodriguez, musician. NYT (archived).
Terry Brunk, who used the professional name “Sabu” in his wrestling career. He mostly worked with Extreme Championship Wrestling, though he did spend one year with W.W.E.
Although widely remembered for his use of props and tables in the ring, Mr. Sabu was wary of professional wrestling’s spectacle. He would go on to criticize the larger-than-life stunts that would come to define later iterations of the W.W.E. and other wrestling promotion companies.
“In an Olympic match, you cannot stack a couple tables and then climb something and jump off. That’s a stunt,” Mr. Brunk told an interviewer with Covalent TV at Wrestlecade 2024. “I’m not a stuntman or an actor.”
Somewhat related: a NYT article about wrestlers who died young.
I’ll take “Als” for $400, Alex.
May 12th, 2025President Trump talking about re-opening Alcatraz prompted two stories in the NYPost that are moderately worth linking:
1) An interview with Charlie Hopkins, who is 93, and is allegedly the last surviving Alcatraz inmate.
2) A second interview, this time with Jolene Babyak. Ms. Babyak’s father worked in the federal prison system. Her family lived on Alcatraz twice, and she’s written several histories over the years.
Out of the black…
May 12th, 2025On Saturday, general manager of the Colorado Rockies Bill Schmidt came out in support of manager Bud Black.
Saturday night, the Rockies lost to the San Diego Padres…21-0.
Sunday, the Rockies fired Bud Black. Also out: bench coach Mike Redmond.
I have been planning to do a loser update later this week. I’ve been waiting until we got to about the 25 percent mark in the season. However, I will say that right now, the Rockies are 7-33, for a .175 winning percentage. If my projections are correct, and this holds up for the rest of the season, I estimate that they will lose 133 games. Which would not just be “historically bad”, but would be the worst percentage in the modern era.
Obit watch: May 9, 2025.
May 9th, 2025For the historical record: David H. Souter, former Supreme Court justice. WP (archived).
James Foley, director. The Saturday Movie Group has seen “Glengarry Glen Ross” and I thought it was pretty good. Other credits include “At Close Range” and “After Dark, My Sweet”.
“Rescue: HI-Surf”, the lifeguard series on one of the broadcast networks. I never saw an episode, just promos. But it looked a lot like a version of “Baywatch” that took itself way too seriously.
Also among the dead: “Lopez vs. Lopez” and “Night Court”. I greatly admire John Larroquette. But I also greatly admired Harry Anderson, and I just couldn’t see watching a “Night Court” without him.
“The Real Housewives New York City”. Between Pope Leo XIV and this being cancelled, I think it’s been a good week.
Walking the plank.
May 8th, 2025The baseball season doesn’t really start until the ceremonial throwing out of the first manager.
Derek Shelton out as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
12-26 so far this season, for a .316 winning percentage. Not great, but better than the White Sox and Rockies.
306-440 in “five plus” seasons, according to ESPN.
Obit watch: May 7, 2025.
May 7th, 2025Dr. Philip Sunshine, one of the pioneers of neonatology and a big damn hero.
Before Dr. Sunshine and a handful of other physicians became interested in caring for preemies in the late 1950s and early ’60s, more than half of these unimaginably fragile patients died shortly after birth. Insurance companies wouldn’t pay to treat them.
Dr. Sunshine, a pediatric gastroenterologist, thought that many premature babies could be saved. At Stanford, he pushed for teams of doctors from multiple disciplines to treat them in special intensive care units. Along with his colleagues, he pioneered methods of feeding preemies with formula and aiding their breathing with ventilators.
“We were able to keep babies alive that would not have survived,” Dr. Sunshine said in 2000 in an oral history interview with the Pediatric History Center of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And now everybody just sort of takes this for granted.”
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As chief of Stanford’s neonatology department from 1967 to 1989, Dr. Sunshine helped train hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of doctors who went on to work in neonatal intensive care units around the world. When he retired in 2022, at age 92, the survival rate for babies born at 28 weeks was over 90 percent.
“Phil is one of the ‘originals’ in neonatology, a neonatologist’s neonatologist, one of our history’s best,” David K. Stevenson, Dr. Sunshine’s successor as head of Stanford’s neonatal department, wrote in the Journal of Perinatology in 2011. “He stands comfortably among the great leaders in neonatology and is more than simply a pioneer. He is one of the creators of our discipline.”
Dr. Sunshine recognized that caring for preemies required both technical expertise and human connection. He urged hospitals to allow parents to visit neonatal intensive care units so they could hold their children, sensing that skin-to-skin contact between mothers and babies was beneficial.
He also gave nurses more autonomy and encouraged them to speak up when they thought doctors were wrong.
“Our nurses have always been very important caretakers,” Dr. Sunshine said in the oral history. “All through my career, I’ve worked with a nursing staff that often would recognize problems in the baby before the physicians would, and they still do that now. Well, we were learning neonatology together.”
Crew resource management: it isn’t just for airplanes.
For the historical record: NYT obits for Lulu Roman (previously):
and Cora Sue Collins (previously).
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She reported Mr. Ruskin’s behavior to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where she was a contract player at the time. But, as she recalled, he said, “You’ll get used to it, sweetie.” Soon after, he threatened to keep her from ever working in movies again.
“Mr. Mayer, that’s my heartfelt desire,” she said she told him, adding, “It was the best decision of my life.”
Obit watch: May 5, 2025.
May 5th, 2025Charley Scalies, actor. Other credits include “12 Monkeys” (the movie), “Homicide: Life on the Street”, and “Law and Order” (also “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit”).
This one is for friend of the blog Dave: Will Hutchins, actor. He was a guest on some Westerns in the 1960s and even had his own show, which I’d never heard of, “Sugarfoot”. Other credits include “Perry Mason”, “The New Perry Mason”, “The Horror at 37,000 Feet”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, and “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”.