The WGOM

All the cold that's in this town sucks.

I just logged on to check a few things and was saddened to see that Joe Nuxhall died. It’s like that as you get older, I know. Grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, neighbors and family friends. The ones we called grownups as children one by one disappear and only the memory, a dim reminder of the living thing remains. Joe Nuxhall was the voice of baseball for me as a child growing up in Ohio, just a few hours drive from Cincinnati. Few broadcasters could infuse a ballgame with the wit and knowledge and drama that Joe could. He was as respected and loved by Reds fans as Herb Carneal was by Twins fans, and I will miss him as I miss every part of my childhood that passes away. This is an excerpt from an article titled "Fading Voices" that I wrote for GameDay this summer:

Once upon a time if you wanted live baseball, you got it on the AM radio. Back then, before the advent of FM or XM, before TV extended its limited reach, the AM radio clear channel stations ruled the American airwaves. Operating without interference from sundown to sunrise, their high-power signals bounced off the ionosphere to reach listeners more than a thousand miles away. From the 30’s through the 70’s, baseball fans in many parts of the country were treated to fairly regular evening game broadcasts from several different teams, often in distant cities, many of them called by legendary announcers in the prime of their careers.

So for all the convenience we have today, we’re slowly losing something that tied the years together, that bound the season with the times and connected one generation to the next. We're losing the voices of our childhood memory, the voices of the broadcast pioneers who filled thousands of nights for millions of fans with the drama and disappointment and delight of baseball. We're losing the voices that narrated the modern game, the original voices of summer.

As a youngster, my corner of the baseball world was dominated by the Big Red Machine. We were treated to games called by Joe Nuxhall, the youngest major league player ever, who made his big league debut as a 15-year old southpaw during World War II and his radio debut in the 60’s. Nuxhall was famous for his signature sign-off, “This is the Ol’ Lefthander, rounding third and heading for home.” His broadcast partner starting in the 70’s, 2001 Ford C. Frick award winner Marty Brennaman, coined his signature call of a Cincinnati win, “And this one belongs to the Reds,” in just his second broadcast for the team. While Brennaman still calls games for the Reds, Joe Nuxhall recently retired and is currently battling cancer.

David Gilmour(!) with the Tap.

These go to 11.

What you rather have, a World Series ring or a Hall of Fame plaque? Fifty-seven percent of respondents in the ESPN.COM poll said the ring.

I say the plaque.

I think that it's this simple. Whose career would you rather have: Ted Williams's or Al Newman's? Ernie Banks's or Steve Lombardozzi's? Barry Bonds's or Randy Bush's?

The 2006 Minnesota Vikings through 13 weeks:

Excepting the 9-3 debacle of a loss to the 49ers, this season has been very simple: when the Vikings have forced more turnovers than they've committed, they've won, and when they've committed more turnovers than they've forced, they've lost. On turnover neutral games, it's gone both ways.

Most of the evidence would seem to point to this as about a .500 team, and with the caveat that I've seen a grand total of five quarters of Vikings football this season, that seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. As of the time I'm posting this, it's possible (though not probable) that the Vikings could control their playoff destiny as soon as next week, setting themselves up for a first-round playoff thrashing. Hooray parity?