Stuff that’s interesting, crazy, muddled, odd or just downright frightening:
1) Everyone out here in the West is just thrilled that B.C. product Scott Richmond is doing so well with the Toronto Blue Jays this season. It’s a tribute to both Richmond’s determination and the Jays decision to take a big chance on a guy who came out of the independent Northern League.
But while, Richmond has gone 4-0 with a splendid, Cy Young-like 2.67 earned run average and a brilliant 1.22 WHIP, those who remember Richmond in his final season in the Northern League, are shaking their heads in disbelief most nights.
He went 10-9 that season with the Edmonton Cracker-Cats with a 4.26 ERA. Not bad, not great. But he was pounded by the Winnipeg Goldeyes. In fact he went 1-3 with two no-decisions in six starts against Winnipeg . He gave up seven home runs all season, three to Winnipeg.
Obviously, you can reach the big leagues through the Northern League. However, Scott Richmond makes it appears as if the Northern League is a lot tougher than the bigs.
2) There there is this report, just out in New York City yesterday: New York Islanders owner Charles Wang has lost $283 million in the nine years since he purchased the franchise.
We could have told him it was a bad investment. So, too, could have the guy from whom he bought the team, re-insurer Steven Gluckstern. Gluckstern was a partner of Dr. Richard Burke. He and Burke bought the Winnipeg Jets from Barry Shenkarow and moved them to Phoenix where they just kept losing more money.
Gluckstern, a very nice man who loved hockey, eventually went off and bought the Islanders. It’s hard to imagine one good businessman could be sucked into owning the teams in Phoenix and Long Island, but re-insurance is a lucrative business. Hockey is not. Some say that between the Coyote sand the Islanders, Gluckstern lost more than half his personal wealth.
So now Charles Wang (Computer Associates) owns the team and while no one will have a tag day for Wang, one has to wonder how stupid these really smart people can be.
The NHL is a lousy investment, so unless you’re just a philanthropist who gets a charge out of making millionaires out of otherwise non-descript Canadian twenty-somethings, buying a National Hockey League franchise in the United States is a pretty stupid way to flush your cash down the toilet.
See Charles Wang. Or Steven Gluckstern. Or Jerry Moyes. Or Dr. Richard Burke. Or Alan Cohen in Miami. Or those poor suckers in Atlanta and Nashville.
3) At 11:30 p.m. on May 3, 2009, the Winnipeg weather office predicted that on Monday, May 4, we would have gusting winds up to 50-kilometres and rain.
When I got up this morning, it was perfect. By 6 a.m., the same donkeys who were predicting cold rain were now predicting sun and 20-degree C temperatures.
Of course, at 6 a.m., they didn’t have to do much predicting. All they had to do was walk outside.
We have many problems in this world from an economy that was simply one giant Enron to a mainstream media that preys on fear and ignorance to a national weather office that couldn’t properly predict what’s going to happen to the skies in the next seven minutes let alone the next seven days.
When I was giving ballpark tours at Canwest Park on Saturday, I asked our baseball fans to do me one favour this year: Do not believe a word a TV or radio weather person tells you about the upcoming weather. Not one word. The weather office is as useless as teets on a bull and the more it predicts, the dumber it gets. For a baseball team like the Winnipeg Goldeyes, these wild, stupid predictions of constant bad weather that turn out to be dead wrong do so much harm, it can’t be quantified.
Environment Canada hurts Canadian business. These morons tell people the weather is going to be lousy when it’s not going to be lousy and they seem to do it for laughs. They are bad for the economy and bad for anyone who does business outdoors in Canada.
Along with greedy Harvard MBA grads, we’d all be better off without them.