Watchdog

Veteran MLB official scorer Howie Karpin has a more relevant take on the whole C.C. Sabathia error/hit controversy than you or I do.

Here it is.

As a typical, obnoxious, New York-centric media scribe, I have not written enough about the recent passing of Skip Caray, the Braves' long-time announcer.

To partly atone, here is a link to an Ernie Johnson/TBS tribute video via our friends at Awful Announcing.

Heyman is being Heyman again on the Manny Ramirez trade, which he dissects in spectacular detail here.

The former Newsday scribe was well ahead of the national media curve on the story - no matter what other media outlets might have claimed - as he often is on baseball matters.

(One of his specialties over the years has been information involving Scott Boras clients, which now includes Ramirez.)

I'd like to be as good a reporter as Heyman, but that would involve making many phone calls, and I'm just not that sociable of a guy.

Here is an amusing item today from my former Tribune teammate at the Baltimore Sun, Peter Schmuck, regarding his peculiar kinship - or maybe not - with the Mariners' J.J. Putz.

Putz comes off like kind of a, um . . . Oh, never mind. Maybe Schmuck should instead bond with the Blue Jays' Kevin Mench.

Just a thought.

Hey, wait, what does this have to do with sports business/media? I don't know.

I'm just treading water waiting to be dunked into the Olympic TV water tank by my editors.

Just got off the phone with Betsy Thomas, executive producer of TBS' "My Boys," the best show about a fictional sportswriter who never works since "Everybody Loves Raymond."

I will be addressing this matter at length in a future newspaper column, but the short story is that Ms. Thomas would love to show more of the lead character, PJ Franklin, at work, but there simply isn't time in a nine-episode season focused primarily on her relationships with her male, poker-playing, beer-drinking buddies.

Fair enough. But how does Franklin have time to socialize at all during baseball season?

Thomas said she researched the matter before the show launched in 2006, including shadowing then LA Times baseball writer Steve Henson.

"I've chatted with many who say, 'I don’t travel all the time during the season; I don’t travel to all the games,"' she said. "But I've spoken to others who say you have no life. I think it depends."

Lennon? O'Brien? Davidoff? Heyman? Your thoughts?

The "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" stamp in honor of the song's 100th anniversary was issued a couple of weeks back.

The WatchDog family bought some Monday.

You should buy some, too.

Here is the link.

(We're off to an exciting morning, aren't we?)

Uh, oh. Jeff Brantley is annoying the Reds again.

This time it was Ken Griffey Jr., who celebrated a home run by bringing out an old-school throat-slash gesture aimed at the Cincinnati announcer.

Yikes. Imagine the reaction around here if Jose Reyes had tried that on Keith Hernandez!

(Did you notice how I did not mention that in 1984 I interviewed Jeff Brantley when he was a member of the Mat-Su Miners of the Alaska League? That's because my goal this week is to stop tying every post back to something in my life that no one cares about.)

I'm listening to John Mara's second appearance in five hours on WFAN to explain the personal seat license thing, this time with Chris Carlin and Kim Jones.

Kudos to him for his accessibility. But listening to this is getting kind of depressing.

As an antidote, watch Buck O'Neil (above) singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," then watch tonight's special about the song on ESPN.

I'm out. Have a good weekend.

Loyal readers know about my fascination with the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," whose 100th anniversary I celebrated with a long feature over the winter that I can't figure out how to link to from here.

Thus I will be sure to TiVo Friday night's special on the song - it's on ESPN via MLB Productions - that features various players taking a stab at singing it. Deep, mysterious sources tell me the rendition by the Phils' Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins is a highlight.

Another will be Adam Wilbur of Medford, a band director in the Longwood school district, leading the crowd at Yankee Stadium in "Ball Game" at Tuesday's All-Star game.

Wilbur won a nationwide contest for the honor sponsored by Baby Ruth candy.

Here is my Wednesday newspaper column on Fox's coverage of the All-Star Game. Let's just say a few additional things occurred in the hours after my 10:45 p.m. deadline!

But much like in 1970, when I battled sleep to watch Pete Rose run over Ray Fosse, I made it to the finish line . . . long enough to see Fox finally get around to paying tribute to the late Bobby Murcer in the bottom of the 11th inning, then again as the final image after the post-game show.

Better late than never, I suppose.

If I'd known how Jonathan Papelbon would be treated by the Bronx faithful, I'd have mentioned in the newspaper column his crack during the red carpet parade earlier in the day, in which he told Fox he felt like he should be riding in the Popemobile to protect himself from hostile fans.

Here is an interesting Boston Herald story about Papelbon and his friends in the New York media.

Anyway, it was an interesting, wacky TV experience, and Fox mostly handled it well.

I'm currently on hold for a Bob Papa conference call. See ya later for the live chat.

Famed official baseball scorer Red Foley has died.

Here is an obit written by John Jeansonne of Newsday.

I mentioned this a while back, but here's a reminder: Thursday evening, Don Larsen's 1956 perfect game will be on public view in New York City for the first time since the day it happened.

Here is schedule and ticket information from our friends at reelsportsfan.com.

Speaking of perfect games, my daughter and I Wednesday attended a screening of "The Perfect Game," a movie coming out Aug. 8 about the 1957 Monterrey, Mexico, team that won the Little League World Series.

It is a treacly, very-family-friendly movie that is quite well done for what it is.

There is no more sacred rule in WatchDog Nation than that a link must be provided every time former Newsday scribe Jeff Pearlman writes an article in which the words "fart" and "aplomb" appear in the first sentence, and in which he profiles a major league general manager who grew up in Queens, attended Cornell and is younger than several of my handkerchiefs.

Thursday night MLB Productions is unveiling a new show on ESPN called "Holiday Inn Presents: Unbreakable Records MLB 2008."

The show is based on a recent poll of 150 major league players who were asked to select three baseball feats that most impress them.

Count on the following no-brainers making the top 10: Cal Ripken’s games played, Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA and Ted Williams' .406 batting average.

I would not call any of those marks unbreakable, although they all will be difficult to surpass. The truly unbreakable records are the ones set under circumstances that no longer exist, such as Cy Young's 511 career victories and Jack Chesbro's modern-record 41 wins in 1904 alone.

Poor Chesbro still ended up being a goat among New York's American League fans, because his wild pitch on a spitball on the final day of the season allowed Boston's AL squad to beat out the Highlanders for the pennant. (Some who were there swore it should have been scored a passed ball. But I digress.)

I wish my Tribune teammate (for now), Bill Plaschke of the L.A. Times, would have thought of this before Michael Strahan retired.

Then I could have copied him and tried to talk Strahan out of retiring and thus costing me my bet with Schwartz of the Post that Old No. 92 would play in 2009.

Sigh. Back to vacation.

Much as it drives me nuts that TBS' "My Boys" is about a baseball beat writer who has an active social life in the summer, I was willing to overlook that reality flaw because it's a cute, well-written show.

But now a friend of the main character who also is a baseball beat writer not only seems to spend the summer not working, but he is engaged to a Swedish nanny (who looks like a supermodel, actually).

So, to review: baseball writers spend all summer playing poker, drinking beer and dating Swedish nannies.

Paging Oscar Madison! Help! (Come to think of it, Oscar did his share of drinking and playing poker. Oh, never mind.)

I have been doing my best to ignore baseball on vacation, but Saturday night I caught the rain delay chat between Wayne Hagin and Howie Rose on WFAN, in which Wayne recalled his worst rain delay horror story:

Aug. 12, 1990, Rangers at White Sox . . . seven hours and 23 minutes!

I was there! My friend and I stayed for the first five hours or so, then left and watched the end of it in our hotel room.

On the way out we were told we could come back for a future game even if that one eventually was played that night. We declined.

Never mind the previous two posts. Here is the definitive rendition of the national anthem at a sports event.

As wonderful as Whitney Houston's traditional take on the national anthem was at Super Bowl XXV (see post below), the most famous - or infamous - rendition ever performed at a sports event was Jose Feliciano's 40 years ago at the World Series in Detroit.

From a 21st century perspective, it's hard to believe what a controversy this caused.

If it were performed today, it would be considered creative and unusual and haunting, but certainly respectful.

The other day I viewed a fascinating production called "Base Ball Discovered" from MLB.com in which the producers put a few more nails in the coffin of the Abner Doubleday myth and trace the origins of the sport to several games still played in modern-day England, as well as to a journal from the mid-18th century.

The film debuted at the SABR convention in Cleveland last week, but the trouble is it doesn't have a distribution plan quite yet. It seems like a natural for the new MLB-owned channel set to launch in January.

I'll keep you posted.

The writer/director/producer is Sam Marchiano, daughter of Sal and a member of the famous New York Newsday part-time staff in Kew Gardens in the late 1980s, which produced numerous future sports journalism standouts.

OK, this will be my last post of the day in tribute to George Carlin. It's an exchange he had with Bob Costas on HBO on June 13, 2002, about being a Dodgers fan on Oct. 3, 1951.

(The question I have is why he was listening to Russ Hodges on the Giants broadcast rather than Red Barber on the Dodgers station. But it's too late for me to ask George now.)

Bob Costas: “You grew up as a Brooklyn Dodger fan. Where were you when Bobby Thomson hit the home run that broke all of Brooklyn’s heart in ’51?”

George Carlin: “I was sitting at home listening on a little Crosly Radio and I had my little cat in my hand, a little kitten, it was a black cat and I named him Ezzard, after Ezzard Charles, who I think had beaten (Joe) Walcott earlier that year.”

Bob Costas: “He was heavyweight champion of the world.”

George Carlin: “Right. So I had Ezzard in my lap, and I love animals and I’m not cruel to them at all but when Bobby Thomson hit that home run and I heard Russ Hodges describing it, I tossed the cat. I didn’t throw him in a mean way, I tossed him in disgust, and I looked over and saw him heading for the window, an open window and we had two stories, plus the backyard in the apartment house. So it was a three-story drop. Fortunately for Ezzard, the curtains were there. He grabbed the curtains, then swung out over the yard, and swung back in and I went and got him.”

Bob Costas: “He had the good claws.”

George Carlin: “Yeah, he has the good claws, he had good hands. And he lived.”

(One more thing about Carlin: Yes, I was watching "Saturday Night Live" when he hosted the first show, on Oct. 11, 1975. Sigh.)

Even after getting a lift from a Sunday SportsWatch column about his life as a hockey fan, Mike Myers' new, critically panned movie, "Love Guru" crashed into the boards and was knocked unconscious in its first weekend at the box office.

On the flip side of the sports movie continuum, here is a piece from SI.com about what has become of the characters in the movie "Bull Durham" 20 years after its premiere.

I always have sort of preferred "Field of Dreams," frankly.

"Bull Durham" has a tad too much s-e-x in it for a baseball movie. None of that actually goes on in the sport, does it?

Here it is, everyone. George Carlin on baseball and football. A classic. RIP, sir.

Oh, boy. More drama at Shea today.

While I'm waiting for it to play out so I can finish my newspaper column, here is a link to a good idea from WGN in Chicago that YES and SNY should copy before Yankee and Shea close for good.

(Is the U.S. Open over yet?)

Milton Bradley of the Rangers went looking for the Royals' play-by-play man Wednesday night after hearing some negative stuff said about him.

Yo, Gary Cohen: Be nice to the Diamondbacks today!

I'm in my weekly Thursday blogging funk. I'm finally cracking under the pressure.

I can't keep up with the full-time bloggers and their NSFW links and their youth and their lack of children and mortgages. I have to focus on my newspaper column now.

Check out our other sports blogs. Enjoy the Mets game and the U.S. Open and the NBA Finals and "My Boys" and the 1992 Champion Spark Plug 400 on ESPN Classic at 2 p.m.

I'm out.

My pals from Newsday.com's Final Score blog are oozing into my territory again, linking to T.J. Simers' column calling Curt Schilling a "sissy" for hit-and-run blogging.

I don't mind. I'm a team guy. I am the page views tide that lifts all boats.

Why the picture?

Because T.J. mentions Mrs. Kobe Bryant, and my other finalists were pictures of T.J. or of Schilling's old, ketchup-stained sock. So I made the tough call.

I watched Game 4 of the 1969 World Series on the recently released six-DVD set of Mets classics, and thought it was cool that the announcers mentioned Tom Seaver's days as an Alaska Goldpanner.

Then I read this story in Sports Illustrated this week about the Alaska League, where Seaver played in the 1960s and I reported in the 1980s.

Then I got an e-mail out of the blue after 24 years from USA Today sports copy editor Ron Somers, formerly my competitor at the Anchorage Daily News, who as you know is famous for the scoop that produced the worst day of my professional career.

More about that below, if you care. (I'm not offended that you don't. I write this stuff mostly for my own amusement.)

As you know, I reached out to Alvin Dark to discuss my column of last Sunday revisiting the controversial column(s) written about him in 1964 by Newsday's Stan Isaacs (left).

Mr. Dark declined to comment, but I did dig up a video exchange between Isaacs and Dark in the 2005 Dan Klores documentary "Viva Baseball," in which Dark describes the "blow" the Isaacs pieces dealt him and questioning the columnist's portrayal of him.

Click below for a transcript.

As promised, I reached out to Alvin Dark to see whether he cared to comment about his controversial interview with Newsday's Stan Isaacs in July of 1964, which I retyped here.

As expected, he politely declined through his foundation.

I guess he is putting it all behind him.

Like Willie Randolph and the Mets.

A couple of loyal readers were interested in reading the entire Stan Isaacs column referenced in my Sunday newspaper column.

Alas, the copy exists on microfilm, not electronically, and thus cannot be linked to in the conventional manner.

So I now am going to re-type the entire thing. At 11 o'clock on the Sunday night of Memorial Day Weekend.

Please don't tell Mrs. WatchDog, as she will begin to worry about me . . . more than she already does.

(Keep in mind that despite the long quotations Isaacs uses from Dark, he said he did not take notes during the interview.)

Click below to read the full column.

Here is my Sunday newspaper column, in which I veer off in an unconventional direction from the controversial interview with Willie Randolph last week in The Record.

Venerable copy editor Greg Gutes sparked the idea, saying the incident reminded him of Stan Isaacs' chat with Alvin Dark that led to a Newsday column on July 23, 1964, in which Dark was quoted questioning the mental abilities and heart of his black and Latino players.

Before you dismiss Dark as a Neanderthal from a bygone era, compare this line to what you hear from some callers to sports talk radio in 2008 regarding the Mets' Hispanic-heavy lineup:

"You can't make most Negro and Spanish players have the pride in their team that you can get from white players."

(I will try again to reach Mr. Dark in the coming week to see if he has anything to say about any of this, 44 years later.)

Amazingly, it took Isaacs' Dark column nearly two weeks to become a national story in those pre-Internet days. But for its era, Ian O'Connor's Monday morning column on Randolph was shockingly slow to explode.

WFAN first mentioned it very late Monday afternoon, Newsday quoted it extensively Tuesday and it wasn't until Wednesday that the other New York papers got around to it.

Speaking of how times change, Isaacs spoke to Dark in San Francisco en route to covering a U.S. vs. USSR track meet in L.A. We used to send people cross-continent to cover track!?! Um, we don't do that anymore.

The St. John's baseball team has too much time on its hands. Check out this video. (I tried embedding it, but couldn't stop it from playing automatically.)

Cowboys shooting Indians? A tad borderline in the political correctness department, no?

I spoke to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann Monday night after he wrapped up his "Countdown" show, in which he reported there might be more Red Sox souvenirs buried deep within the new Yankee Stadium.

When I asked him whether he finds the ongoing Gino Castignoli saga "amusing," he said he did, "but not for the reason most people do."

Then he told the tale of a spookier ballpark curse: The one upon Braves Field in Boston.

Legend has it that while the Braves were winning the 1914 World Series at Fenway Park - their South End Grounds didn't have enough capacity - a cave-in during construction of Braves Field buried a dozen mules and horses alive around third base.

"There was no effort to remove them or save anything of them, they just left them there,'' Olbermann said.

The Braves moved into their new home in 1915 and didn't win the World Series again until they moved to Milwaukee.

Olbermann doubted stadium jinxes really work. "If you could jinx a stadium, wouldn't you need 24-hour security and background checks on everybody working there?" he said.

Don't the Yankees do that already?

Like I said, Manny being . . . well, you know. (MLB shut down the YouTube version. Here is the video at MLB.com.)

And, just for the heck of it, check out Neil Best being Neil Best.

Charley Steiner just interviewed me on XM Satellite Radio. He fairly but aggressively engaged me in an interesting (I hope) debate about the existence of sports media columns in general and the approach some people in the job take to it in particular.

Eventually I (figuratively) threw up my hands and told him what I tell everyone:

That as much as I enjoy my current job I never have denied it is silly.