Hub fans bid kid adieu and other stories

Best sports stories:

1. John Updike, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (You can view this at http://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/hub_fans_bid_kid_adieu_article.shtml) Updike wrote about Ted WIlliams's last game in Fenway Park. Updike at his best--

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg...a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.

2. American Hunger, David Remnick

A more recent article on Muhammad Ali (more on Cassius Clay when he first took the title away from SOnny Liston). See http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/10/12/1998_10_12_054_TNY_LIBRY_000016575 for an abstract--the full article is in Remnick's book:

Sitting in his Michigan farmhouse, Ali smiled as he watched his younger self dancing around the ring, shouting “I’m the king of the world!” “But wasn’t I pretty? I was twenty-two. Now I’m fifty-four. Fifty-four.” Then he said, “Time flies. Flies. Flies. It flies away.”
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3. A Sense of Where You Are, John McPhee

About Bill Bradley, Princeton senior, pre-New York Knicks, pre-Senator from New Jersey. See http://www.johnmcphee.com/senseofwhereyouare.htm.

3:30 am

3:30 am watching the Boston Red Sox gamecast on espn.go.com. Lowell hit a grand slam. This morning I will run a regression on what makes a winning team. Sox are not the ERA leader, so this means other stats are driving them--e.g. OPS. They are #1 in this stat. What is OPS? Must Google.