Northwest Sports: In the Morning

Been a busy week here at EnjoyTheEnjoyment and SportsNorthwest Mag HQ. The magazine goes to press tomorrow, and since we have a fairly provocative image of David Stern on the cover, I was chewing my nails to the bone wondering if he would somehow come out the good guy. Luckily (for me, not for the Sonics) he was as belligerent as ever. Hooray! (Sort of--I'd rather look like an idiot and keep the team).

Onto the news of the morning, and the weekend...

Miguel Batista, hero of yesterday's game, says he may have "found something" that will let him pitch four or five more years, writes Geoff Baker. Batista told John Hickey that it's "something to make hitters see hard fastball when you don't have the hard fastball."

Husky baseball took 1 of 3 at #8 Cal over the weekend.

John Marzano died at 45, possibly of a heart attack. Here's the obit from his hometown Philly Daily News. A former little league coach tells this story: "John got hit in the eye with a ball and we rushed him to the hospital. We were losing, 5-3, in the bottom of the seventh inning and it was starting to get dark. And all of a sudden, here he came with his father. He had a patch over his eye and there was still blood running down his face. I said, 'Can you see?' He said he could so I put him up to pinch-hit. On the first pitch he hit a grand slam to win the game. And we went on to win the championship at the Vet."

Art Thiel's mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore. Two columns from him today, one in which he excoriates Stern and Bennett, and the other in which he posits that only smart businesspeople can be trusted to save basketball in Seattle.

John Canzano of the Oregonian on Stern: "What makes no sense is why Stern is busy going passive-aggressive, insisting the relocation of the Sonics is out of his hands, instead of dropping his own agenda and protecting the best interests of the league by keeping open discussions between the league and the city. That's supposed to be his job, isn't it?"

Two more Husky womens basketball players quit the team, writes Dick Rockne. That makes five since the start of the season. A former player who I talked to thinks this has to do with coaching styles--new coach Tia Jackson is a disciplinarian, while June Daugherty was more of a players' coach. Personally, I couldn't stand to watch the Huskies under Daugherty--they played like an undisciplined team, committing turnovers constantly and having no continuity on offense.