— Big trade in the NFL Wednesday; Buffalo Bills traded star WR Stefon Diggs to Houston, for three draft picks: 2nd/6th round picks later this month, then a 5th round pick in 2025.
Diggs put up 100+ yard receiving games in five of his first six games last year, then averaged only 51.2 yards/game the rest of the season. Buffalo takes a $31M dead cap hit this year, while the Texans are positioning themselves to be favored in the AFC South this fall.
— People here in Las Vegas have been looking at NFL totals bets every day, but how can you do that before the draft in three weeks? Rosters can/will change a lot between now and then.
Teams like Vikings, Broncos don’t know who their QB will be this season; I’m told that QB is kind of an important position in football.
— Sun Coast hotel/casino here in Las Vegas has a 24-hour coffee shop, Du-Par’s, which has the best pancakes I’ve ever had, seriously, they’re excellent.
— Tigers-Mets got rained out the last two days in Queens, will try and play a doubleheader on Thursday, which means I’ll be waking up way earlier than I wanted to.
— In his last three games against New Orleans, Phoenix Suns’ star Devin Booker scored 52-52-58 points, making him only the second player ever to score 50+ points three games in a row against the same team.
Wilt Chamberlain is the other player, but he did it against nine different teams, not just one.
— Milwaukee Bucks were 30-13 when they fired coach Adrian Griffin earlier this season; they’re 15-15 since they hired Doc Rivers to replace him.
— Famous birthdays for April 4th:
Mike Epstein, 81
Craig T Nelson, 80
Christine Lahti, 74
Tommy Herr, 68
Jack Del Rio, 61
Scott Rolen, 49
Ben Gordon, 41
JP France, 29
— RIP to Joe Flaherty, the great comic actor who passed away at age 81; Flaherty was in Second City TV, where he played anchorman Floyd Robertson next to Eugene Levy’s Earl Camembert in the news skits on that excellent comedy show. RIP, sir.
RIP to Barbara Rush, who passed way at age 97; she is one of six actors to appear in both the TV series Batman and the original Magnum PI, where she played Magnum’s Aunt Phoebe. She played Nora Clavicle on Batman. RIP, ma’am.
— College basketball’s Final Four is this weekend; there are already 1,360 names in the college basketball transfer portal, because that is how the sport works now. With 362 Division I teams, that works out to an average of 3.76 players per team in the portal.
— Forgot to mention this earlier in the week, but lefty pitcher Shota Imanaga threw six shutout innings in his MLB debut Monday, not giving up any hits until the 6th inning. Imanaga didn’t get much hype when he signed; that was reserved for Yomamoto with the Dodgers, but so far, so good, although the wind was blowing in Monday and Imanaga is a fly ball pitcher.
— Dodgers 5, Giants 4- Shohei Ohtani hit his first home run for the Dodgers.
— Back in 1948 a guy named Fred Gehrke got paid a dollar a helmet to paint the LA Rams logo on all the Rams’ helmets— they were the first team to have their logo on a helmet, and for that, he is the Pro Football Hall of Fame, as an innovator.
Fred Gehrke has a well-known great-grandson; Christian Yelich, outfielder for the Brewers.
— This week marks the 48th anniversary of a cruddy day in A’s history, when they traded Reggie Jackson and Ken Holtzman to the Orioles, as they slowly dismantled what had been a great team, winning the World Series three years in a row (1972-74). By 1977, they were truly terrible, as free agency had started in the major leagues and the A’s couldn’t match up $$$-wise.
Now this year, the A’s are 1-6, and have been shut out three times already. It would be nice if a really, really rich person bought the team and they actually tried to win again.
— For second day in a row, a team lost its DH during a game, but this time, it came back to bite them, in an embarrassing way.
Arizona trailed 6-5 at home in the 11th inning- they had runners on 1st/3rd with two outs, but Bronx walked their next batter intentionally, because Arizona’s DH Ketel Marte went in to play shortstop after they pinch-ran for Geraldo Perdomo, which left the Snakes without a hitter when Perdomo’s spot in the order came around in the 11th inning.
Pitcher Scott McGough took a called third strike to end the game. Managing in the DH era is supposed to be easier, but two teams losing their DH in the first week of the season, both in close games, seems like managerial malpractice.
