The world according to Jim:
• Is it just me, or has August – normally the dog days of the sports calendar anyway, with both baseball’s playoffs and football’s regular season seeming so far away – been even more dreary and chaotic than normal?
I suppose we could blame it on the heat; anyone out there still claiming climate change isn’t real? But there have just been so many weird things on the sports ticker this month that have taken some of the joy and anticipation out of our games and achievements. …
• Overshadowing so many other things in this region are Mark Walter’s legal and financial concerns. That large-scale discussion wasn’t triggered until his sudden sale of the Lakers was disclosed, less than a year after he’d taken control of the team (and with planned additions to the team’s front office already in progress).
I’m not a financial expert by any means, and the various aspects of this story – going back to some of the transactions within his firm’s insurance companies that helped enable his group buy the Dodgers in 2012 – have my head spinning. But the information out there has my skepticism antenna up. …
• With Walter and Dodger co-owner Todd Boehly apparently willing to sell their share of Chelsea FC, as well as reports that Walter sought a buyout of the Dodgers and Lakers’ Spectrum TV deals … well, the logical conclusion seems to be that the Dodgers themselves might be on the market, if Walter needs that much money to pay off loans and satisfy federal regulators. The definitive statement earlier this week that the Dodgers are not for sale? I’m sorry, but at this point I’m not yet convinced. …
• But while that story was huge news in this region, and red meat for the “Dodgers are ruining baseball” crowd coast to coast, that hasn’t been the only discordant note in the sports world. …
• There is the way that a certain element – politically motivated, undeniably – has hijacked the conversation around the WNBA. No longer are we talking about the world’s best women’s basketball players doing what they do so well. Instead, we are hearing the drumbeat of transphobia, aimed at a league where as far as I can tell transgender athletes aren’t eligible anyway.
But why let the fact that an issue doesn’t exist prevent you from screaming about it? …
• As for Enes Kanter and Royce White, once non-entity NBA players who announced they were identifying as transgender and declaring for the 2027 WNBA draft, the term “useful idiots” comes to mind. …
• Shouldn’t we be talking instead about Las Vegas’ A’ja Wilson, a four-time MVP who is among the league leaders in scoring, rebounding and blocks? Or the Indiana twosome of Kelsey Mitchell and Caitlin Clark – and if you guessed which one of those led the league in scoring, you’d likely be wrong. It’s Mitchell.
Or the impending retirement of the Sparks’ Nneka Ogwumike, who has not only been a star in the WNBA for 15 years but also its conscience as the president of the WNBA Players Association. …
• Then there is the continuing chaos taking place in college sports, the latest manifestation being a judicial ruling that a player who had qualified for a fifth year of eligibility could return even if he’d showed up in an NFL or NBA camp.
The idea that athletes, especially on the power conference level, should be compensated for their effort and the money they generate for universities and athletic departments is absolutely valid. But the vacuum left by the feckless and toothless NCAA has been filled by lawyers shopping for legal cracks in the system, judges who have obliged them, and agents who aren’t registered and, unlike their professional brethren, aren’t subject to professional oversight. Any surprise that there’s chaos?
The Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big XII themselves issued edicts this week to stop the trend. That may be the first step toward conference self-governance, which tells me that conference commissioners Tony Pettiti, Greg Sankey and Brett Yormark have a better chance at stopping the lunacy than Congress would. …
• Then again, no sooner did the Power Four conferences act than judges in Texas and Louisiana issued restraining orders the last couple of days to prevent those bans of former pros. …
• Bottom line: Where there are no rules, there is no honor. …
• This story, at least, should bring a smile: Roger Federer will be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame on Saturday in Newport, R.I. He was not only one of the best but among the most elegant players of his time, he filled the men’s tour vacuum left by Pete Sampras’ retirement, and as part of the Big Three with Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic he won 20 major titles and a career Grand Slam. …
• My candidate for sports book of the year: Tim Brown’s impeccably researched biography of Nolan Ryan, “Nolan: The Singular Life of an American Original.” And within that tome, here’s the passage of the year, in which Brown describes the control issues that had bedeviled Ryan early in what would be a historic big-league career:
“If he’d been a house painter, he’d have dropped a thousand gallons of paint from a hundred feet up and, sure, the house would be white, and so would the windows and the patio and the driveway and the dog. A lot of his box scores read like that, like a car driven only at redline RPMs, which is thrilling and hairy and all, but sometimes hard to keep on the road.”
Things we wish we’d written, indeed. …
• So here’s today’s quiz: Ryan threw a record seven no-hitters for the Angels, Astros and Rangers. How many catchers caught those gems? Answer below. …
• Are there others who watch baseball and wince when a catcher seems more interested in framing a pitch than catching it? For example, the low-and-outside pitch to a left-handed hitter, where many catchers now position the glove to pull it back into the strike zone – and leave themselves susceptible to missing it altogether. …
• Quiz answer: Seven different men caught Ryan’s seven no-hitters: Jeff Torborg, Art Kusnyer, Tom Egan and Ellie Rodriguez of the Angels, Alan Ashby of the Astros, and John Russell and Mike Stanley of the Rangers.
(And a reminder: Torborg, who passed away in January 2025, not only caught Ryan’s first no-hitter in May 1973 but Sandy Koufax’s last one, the perfect game in September 1965.)
jalexander@scng.com