MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports Tim McCarver, the former catcher and broadcaster, died last week at the age of 81. McCarver was as baseball as they come: a player for 21 years and a broadcaster for 40 more. To younger fans, McCarver was an oft-maligned analyst who did New York Mets games before becoming the…
New MLB rules just might be the ticket MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports Major League Baseball has made the most significant rules changes in the game since the American League told its pitchers to lose the bats and introduced the designated hitter in 1973 (New York Yankees’ Ron Blomberg, by the way, was the first…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports The Daytona 500 was Sunday, I believe. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. won, right? Yeah, he won in overtime. Overtime? You can do that? Actually, I know the Daytona 500 was Sunday because I spent the previous week in South Carolina, so it was clear Daytona was on Sunday. I have always been…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports Pitchers and catchers have reported to spring training, and as the great Chuck Thompson would say, “Ain’t the beer cold!” Now pitchers and catchers reporting is a great thing, don’t get me wrong. Yet it’s just pitchers and catchers reporting because pitchers have to get their throwing in and if…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports I am able to tell you I correctly predicted the score of last Sunday’s Super Bowl to be 38-35. I am unable to tell you I correctly picked the winning team of last Sunday’s Super Bowl to have been the Kansas City Chiefs. I said 73 total points in a…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports It’s baseball season now. Pitchers and catchers report in two days. Ha! Fact. The moment the Super Bowl ends means another season of boffo ratings conclude for #NFLTheTVShow, and if the ratings weren’t boffo for the one we saw on Sunday, then there is no such thing as boffo. But…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports LeBron James became the leading scorer in NBA history Tuesday night, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar by sinking a 20-foot turnaround with 10.9 seconds left in the third quarter against the Oklahoma City Thunder, putting him at 38,388 points for his career, more than any other player in NBA history. By the…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports It’s Super Bowl week in case you hadn’t noticed, and through each week leading up to our most obscene unofficial national holiday (more like the fall of the Roman Empire), the media is always scrambling to come up with something that has a new angle or twist of its own…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports The Pro Bowl Games (not game – Games). Did you watch it (not them – it)? I saw it; I checked it out. Didn’t grab me. From the middle of last week to the end of the weekend, the Pro Bowl players seemed to be enjoying themselves a great deal,…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports Former Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke said more than once that head coach Joe Gibbs was “the best bloody hire I’ve ever made.” Actually, the best hire Cooke ever made, at least as a sports team owner, was Bobby Beathard to be the Redskins’ general manager in 1978, because…
