Archive: March, 2009
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
I know how colleague Paul Hagen feels this morning. Hagen is the smartest baseball guy I know. He saw that Cole Hamels wasn't throwing hard this spring. He talked to scouts who told him that Hamels wasn't throwing hard this spring. He watched Hamels, talked to Hamels, talked to other people, and they all insisted that there was nothing to see here, that it happens every spring. And that's the way he wrote it, straight as always -- here are the whispers, here is the explanation, the guy says there is no problem.
And now Hamels is heading north to see the doctor.
Unlike Hagen, I am not the smartest baseball guy I know. I am not the hundredth smartest baseball guy I know. But in the middle of August of 2007, it was starting to get late and this was Hamels' first long run as a major-league starter. So he pitched one night in Washington -- 6 2/3 innings of shutout baseball -- and I got talking to him afterward about his physical conditioning and how his arm was feeling and he laid it on really thick, how everything was swell, how he had experienced nothing more than the normal aches and pains of a long season and how he was ready for a healthy and strong stretch run. Again, he laid it on thick and I was his willing accomplice.
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
Jeffrey Lurie is a billionaire.
Yawn.
This is not news, even if Forbes magazine puts his name on a list. We have all known for a while that the Eagles are worth somewhere north of $1 billion. Given the prices of sports franchises -- given reporting/guesstimating done by Forbes itself over the last couple of years -- this has been pretty well established (although, to be fair, it really ain't worth a billion until somebody says they're willing to pay that much).
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
Was out in a sporting goods store this morning. There were two racks of Eagles jerseys right by the front door. They were Brian Dawkins jerseys, a couple of dozen of them. The adult sizes were marked down from $80 to just under $40. The kid sizes were marked down from $60 to just under $30. "Clearance" is what the sign on the top of the racks said.
Dawkins dressed at one end of the Eagles' locker room at the NovaCare Complex. Tra Thomas dressed on the same side but at the exact opposite end. Dawkins and Thomas were the last two remnants of the Ray Rhodes era of Eagles football. Now both are gone -- Dawkins to Denver (accompanied by outrage), Thomas now to Jacksonville (greeted with a shrug).
Opposite ends. Somehow, that fits. Dawkins and Thomas were exemplars of the positions they played. Offensive linemen are all about calm -- about technique and working together and covering for each other, about the collective over the individual. That was Tra. Safeties are the NFL's natural born killers -- about emotion and raw terror, about the launching like a missile and the punishment that missile can deliver. That was Dawk.
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