The last time I spoke with Dirk Hayhurst was 2009. He was standing about 375 feet from home plate at Wrigley Field in Chicago, shagging batting practice fly balls — but mostly he was just standing there with the other Las Vegas pitchers — before a special 51s game against the Iowa Cubs.
Kurt Busch hopes to complete the auto racing double on May 25, driving the Indianapolis 500 during the day and the NASCAR Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina at night. This is the auto racing double.
When they ran onto the field Sunday on an ideal day for baseball, the time was 12:08 p.m., the temperature was 67 degrees, the wind was blowing from left field to right at 8 mph and the Las Vegas 51s were the best team in minor league baseball, by percentage.
It’s Saturday morning at the end of Lake Las Vegas Parkway where the pavement stops, where everything green turns to brown and the terrain becomes uneven. Streams of people, many dressed as superheroes or Star Wars characters, are walking toward the same place. Some are stretching hamstrings.
On the cover of the new book Jerry Reuss finally got around to writing is a picture of him standing on the pitcher’s mound looking mostly irritated, and of Tommy Lasorda, looking mostly blurry, in the foreground. Blurry Lasorda, it can be assumed, is about to remove irritated Reuss from the ballgame.
There was the side Bob Dylan sang about and the side Denzel Washington portrayed in the movies. That was an admirable side. Then there was the other side, the rough side. That’s the side you didn’t hear too much about.
They are two of the most profound tragedies in sports, separated by 41 years, linked by a trail of tears. Frank Shorter was there for both. It’s not something he’s proud of; it’s something he endured. Sometimes, the fates just conspire in strange ways.
Last year at this time, amateur wrestling was trapped in a full Nelson.
Ten days ago there she was, 14-year-old Hunter Pate, a female, a Cinderella story from out of nowhere — an eighth-grader at Grant Sawyer Middle School in Las Vegas. And she was about to become champion at Augusta National.
When he was a younger man, Bill Lusk flew Nikita Khrushchev’s bags around the U.S. during one of the former communist leader’s visits. Now that he’s 80, Bill Lusk drives a one-of-a-kind Porsche 911 around Auto Club Speedway in California at high rates of speed.
