MLB’s 2020 schedule has Mariners opening July 24 in Houston, the hottest of coronavirus hotspots. Maybe by then it will have gone away, like a miracle . . .
Author: Art Thiel
Art Thiel
Never having met a metaphor he could not twist beyond recognition, Art has been illuminating, agitating, amusing and annoying Puget Sound sports readers for a long time. Along with Steve Rudman, he co-founded Sports Press Northwest because it didnt seem right that the Google monster should aggregate daily journalism into oblivion without at least a flesh wound from somebody. Thiel and Rudman labored under the Seattle Post-Intelligencer globe until the print edition died an undeserved death in March, 2009. Art continued on at its online successor seattlepi.com while working on SPNWs creation. His radio commentaries can be heard Friday and Saturday mornings and Friday afternoon on KPLU-FM 88.9. In 2003 he wrote the definitive book about the Seattle Mariners, Out of Left Field, which became a regional bestseller. In 2009, along with Rudman and KJR 950 afternoon host Mike Gastineau, Thiel authored The Great Book of Seattle Sports Lists, a cross between historylink.org and Mad Magazine that has become mandatory reading for any sports fan who has an indoor bathroom. A graduate of Pacific Lutheran University as well as two dead papers and a live one, the News Tribune of Tacoma, he has become a fan of entrepreneurial online journalism because it allows him to continue a lifelong passion to take the English language to places it rarely visits willingly, and does not involve the cleaning of kennels or stables.
The first summer camp day of MLB’s return went spitless in Seattle, far as anyone could tell. But since 15 to 20 Mariners didn’t show, hold off the sanitary celebration.
The ability of college campuses to open sufficiently to permit football may depend on reigning in places like UW’s Greek Row. Can double-secret probation work?
Minor-league baseball season officially became ashes Tuesday. The Mariners get workouts underway Friday in the sanitized T-Mobile bubble. Health drama begins.
Thanks to the virus, UW athletics cut 15 percent of its new budget. And thanks to young people’s urge to party, some program collapses seem on the way.
A cause. Not a corporation. The remade sports barn and concert hall at Seattle Center, home to a World’s Fair, will be a billboard for a world crisis. Climate Pledge Arena. Brought to you by Amazon.
Don’t call the re-start of baseball a settlement. It’s a cease-fire. Resentments linger, nothing is resolved, and the union plots to do its worst. As if life needs more tension.
A racist put a noose in the garage of NASCAR’s only black driver. Bubba Wallace and his fellow drivers answered. Maybe there is a future without Confederate flags.
With the federal failure to set national protocols, college football is the sport that will have the hardest time against the virus. And be hurt the worst financially.
QB Kevin Thomson, an Auburn-Riverside grad in 2014 who starred last season at Sacramento State, joins Washington as a fifth-year graduate transfer.