Hometown News For Orange County, Texas
Hometown News For Orange County, Texas
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Besides unbearably hot weather, the month of August also means football is here—NFL teams are starting their training camps while colleges and high schools are passing out equipment to get ready for the grueling practice sessions three or four weeks before their first game. Most of the players in the above mentioned categories are eagerly looking forward to the first REAL game of their respective seasons and even the scrimmages and exhibition games that will soon begin. Many h...
Last week’s All-Star Game, which was won by the American League 5-2 without any help from the four missing Houston Astros players, created a lull in the regular season for most major league players. But the baseball writers corralled MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and grilled him on future plans or changes he anticipates trying to help speed up the games and produce more offense than during the first half of the 2021 season. Manfred’s major gripe is the defensive shifts tha...
Last month the big news about last night's All-Star Game was that the Houston Astros had seven players nominated, which led the major league teams. After the ballots were compiled a couple of weeks ago, four Astros players were selected for the American League All-Star roster-the entire Astros' infield with Alex Bregman at third, Jose Altuve at second, Yuli Gurriel at first and Carlos Correa at shortstop. Then the players voted for the game's eight starting position players...
When all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court acted unanimously last week to decide that the NCAA's $5,000 limit on the education-related benefits that athletes can receive violates federal anti-trust laws, it opened a clear new path for collegiate athletes to receive compensation for their name, image and likeness (NIL) while playing their sport for their college or university. "This led to the NCAA Board of Directors approving one of the biggest changes in the history of...
Here it is the final day of June, which over the past few decades has been a month when our Houston Astros have had problems winning baseball games. That wasn’t Houston’s problem this season—at least for the first three-and-one-half weeks—until they traveled to play the lowly and rebuilding Tigers at Detroit last weekend. In a reversal of most seasons, the 2021 Astros have had a huge winning record against opponents who were in the top echelon of their respective divisio...
“Black Monday” two days ago began a new era for many major league pitchers when the new rule on the “use of sticky substances” was enacted by Major League Baseball whereby the umpires may begin to check pitchers for using foreign substances on the baseball they throw in a game. The umps can call for the game ball regardless of whether they suspect a violation. Pitchers found with foreign substances are subject to immediate ejection and a 10-day suspension. Teams with the gui...
A great performer is one who can step on any sized stage and have a successful show (or game in this instance). Orange native Chad Dallas has had that kind of success throughout his young career as a baseball player. He began to be noticed while a member of the West Orange-Stark Mustangs baseball program where he was a catcher as well as a good pitcher. Chad would often catch his older brother Jack when he was on the mound for the Mustangs. Jack graduated and earned a...
New England Patriots head coach and general manager Bill Belichick is one of a kind. Many assistants who have worked under his guidance have been or still are successful National Football League head coaches. However, one who is not a head coach any longer is Bill O’Brien, who was canned after four games last season by the Houston Texans after starting the pandemic-modified season with an 0-4 record in his fifth year at the helm of the team. O’Brien came to the Texans bri...
One of the first things I learned to do in baseball as a Little Leaguer after hitting, throwing and catching the ball was how to properly slide gracefully into a base on my bottom. Taking it one step further was the importance of sliding into second base in an effort to break up a double play. When I was in high school our coach was adamant that we spend at least 10 minutes before each practice sliding in the high jump pit. When I was playing in the 1954 Little League World...
I was able to watch a plethora of sporting events on the tube last weekend and either saw or heard about some weird scenarios that ended some of these contests. Locally, we had the two Dallas brothers-Jack at Lamar University and Chad at the University of Tennessee-- help their respective school's baseball team get into their post-season conference tournaments and the Orangefield Bobcats earn a berth in the regional semifinals WITHOUT getting a base hit to drive in the...
Although major league baseball is well into its second month of play and high and college teams are focused on their respective playoffs and the NBA also is set for its long playoff run, there has been plenty of attention by the sports media given to football. Last week the National Football League announced its 17-game schedule for all teams, and closer to home Sam Houston State was successful in its FCS national championship game against No. 1 South Dakota State while the...
Major League Baseball continues to make changes that will take some of the dominance away from the pitchers and assist the hitters to bring more offense that fans demand into the game. When I was in my heyday some 60 years ago, we pitchers loved the high mounds most baseball diamonds used. But as the batting averages and home runs dipped, MLB decided to lower the mounds considerably, hoping to insert more offense into the game. I remember watching batting practice before the...
Most of the country's sports journalists were right on the money when their mock drafts indicated that as many as four quarterbacks would be selected in the first 10 picks of last weekend's National Football League's 2021 draft. There was no surprise whatsoever that Clemson's Trevor Lawrence would go the Jacksonville Jaguars as the No. 1 pick in the entire draft. And with BYU's Zach Wilson going next to the New York Jets and Trey Lance of North Dakota State going third to the...
The National Football League’s annual draft which begins tomorrow should have a heavy emphasis on quarterbacks, with as many as five expected to be selected with the first 10 picks. The NFL was one of the very few sports organizations that played a complete schedule last season due to COVID-19, although many of the games were played at a later time and date than originally slated. Most of the games were played in stadiums with no fans or very few spectators. And there was a s...
There are probably no more ardent professional sports fans than those in the Houston area. These fans show up in droves at the stadiums and sports complexes to watch their heroes in action. And for most of the time, the Houston Astros, Houston Texans and Houston Rockets have been good enough to qualify for the respective post-season playoffs. These three franchises for 2021 have really hit the skids and are working diligently just to have a chance at victory in the latter stag...
Playing a 60-game schedule without any fans appears to have hurt interest in the major leagues due mainly to the excessive length of the contests believed to be caused by home runs, walks and strikeouts, according to an Associated Press article that appeared in Saturday's newspapers. "As baseball games get longer and less action-packed, the sport has been looking for ways to reverse the fan-unfriendly trend," the article pointed out. "Among the biggest targets-infield shifts...
The Houston Astros must be mad!! They are upset over the fact the Oakland A's won the American League West Division title last season. They are angry over the catcalls the A's fans were hurling at them for allegedly cheating to win the 2017 World Series during the opening four-game series of the 2021 major league baseball season. So, Houston retaliated by completely overwhelming Oakland by scores of 8-1, 9-5, 9-1 and 9-2 in the four-game series that began last Thursday night...
It was a couple of days after Christmas in 2018 when my grandson Logan Smith and his family were visiting Orange for the holidays. Logan was home in Lufkin from West Point on the Christmas break, but was a pitcher for the Army baseball team and had various daily pitching routines he had to do to prepare for the upcoming season and wanted me to work out with him. I told him my days of seeing 90 mile an hour fast balls were long gone. So, his mother Karen remembered that her...
While most of the sports fans around the country were paying attention to the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament and how they were doing on their personal bracket, fans in the Southeast Texas and Houston areas were focused on the daily soap opera about the Houston Texans’ unstable quarterback situation. Because starting quarterback Deshaun Watson has been adamant since January about never wanting to play another down of football for the Texans since, General Manager Nick...
Major League Baseball has been trying to speed up the game for the past few decades, but unfortunately with very little success. Last year’s shortened 60-game season saw a couple of new ideas put into practice, but received mixed evaluations from various baseball people who have been around the game for decades. Personally, I really liked the idea of having designated hitters used in both the American League (where it has been a fixture for nearly 50 years) and the National Le...
Last week’s column about the possibilities of where J.J. Watt would end up was already in the paper ready to be printed to hit the streets when the blockbuster news he had signed with the Arizona Cardinals was announced. I scrambled and added a couple of paragraphs near the end of the column and sent the column on its way to be published. There’s a good chance the same thing might happen with this week’s Korner as many media outlets agreed with the column in Sunday’s Houston C...
To no one’s surprise, when the final gun sounded and ended a 4-12 season for the Houston Texans, it would be the last game J.J. Watt would play in a Texans uniform. The 10-year Superstar felt he had some good productive years left in the tank at age 32, but he wanted a Super Bowl ring. And playing for a team that hadn’t even gotten out of the Division Round of the playoffs, it wouldn’t happen for Watt in Houston. So, before a new general manager and head coach were hired...
The unusual blast of wintry weather prevented our newspaper from hitting the streets last week, although my column got to those I e-mail and the others appearing on our website. However, I’ve been writing this column for more than a half century, and last Monday was the first time in my career that I did it with several inches of snow on the ground, icicles hanging from the window awnings, the daytime temperature hovering around 20 degrees and the wind chill hitting single d...
I’ve been writing this column for more than a half century, and today (Monday) is the first time in my career that I’m doing it with several inches of snow on the ground, icicles hanging from the window awnings and the temperature up to 24 degrees at noon with a wind chill of 10 degrees, where the actual temperature was supposed to be Tuesday morning. I can just imagine the Global Warming crowd is hightailing back to their closets until this cold wave is over. Ironically, maj...
I was one of the perhaps 90 per cent of sports analysts who picked the Kansas City Chiefs to successfully defend their world championship in Super Bowl LV Sunday night incorrectly, doubting Thomas Brady could notch his incomparable seventh title, but not figuring how great the Tampa Bay defense really would be. CBS, which televised the annual football extravaganza, figured out after the game that Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes scrambled 497 yards from the pocket...
