September 9, 2007

Baseball superstars, bad nicknames and other exotica

JAMES DAY

So tell me, who are the highest profile athletic coaches at Oregon and Oregon State? I don't mean who is paid the most. I mean who ranks the highest among their peers. I say it's the two baseball coaches, Pat Casey of Oregon State and the new kid on the block, George Horton of the restored program at Oregon. Casey is a two-time defending College World Series champion. Horton took Cal State Fullerton to the CWS six times in 11 seasons and won it in 2004. Do the math: The coaches who have won three of the past four national championship are in Oregon, 30 miles away from each other.

These are coaches clearly in the top 10 nationally in their sports. What other coaches at Oregon and Oregon State can you say that about? Mike Bellotti? Mike Riley? Ernie Kent? Not likely. The best candidate probably is Ducks track and field coach Vin Lananna.

A couple of years ago Oregon State baseball was a little-noticed shrub in the state's sports landscape. Oregon had no shrub at all.

Funny how things turn out, huh?

Nickname trauma

I love sports nicknames. And I hate the way teams violate all of my time-honored rules. To recapitulate, they are: 1) they should end in the letter "s", although I am somewhat flexible on this one; 2) they should be something you can dress up a person to represent; 3) they should make sense given the location of the team; and 4) they should fit in a one-column newspaper headline.

I'm tempted to add a fifth: Don't have the same one as a team 75 miles away. That's why I was following with great interest the discussions about changing the Portland Beavers' nickname. Yes, the baseball team had the nickname before the university. Doesn't matter. Overwhelmingly more people in this state identify the beaver with OSU than a minor league baseball team.

To their credit, Portland Beavers officials set in motion a process to change the name. Unfortunately the nicknames proposed as challengers were horrendous: Wet Sox, Green Sox, Sockeyes and Thorns. If these are the ones they liked I'd hate to see the ones they rejected. Thorns? Yes, Portland is the Rose City, but Thorns is hopeless. Wet Sox? Yes it rains here but no one calls their team the Mold Spores. Yet.

The only one that was remotely acceptable was Sockeyes. It honors the state's fishing tradition and there is a cool baseball pun. Plus, fish are under-represented in sports nicknames. The San Jose Sharks have done great with their nickname. Why not use salmon or trout or bass or piranhas? Kudos to the low-wattage International Basketball League for calling its Portland team the Chinooks.

In the end they kept the Beavers. Disappointing. Me? I'm still waiting for an Oregon team to call itself the Firs. It's perfect. It honors the state's timber tradition. And it fits in a one-column headline.

More on Appalachian State

It's refreshing to see that the Associated Press now says it's OK for Division 1-AA teams such as Michigan-killer Appalachian State to receive votes in their Top 25, although for the Mountaineers it's too little, too late: The team does not have any other Division 1-A teams on its schedule. It's hard to imagine AP voters getting all wiggly and jiggly about you when you are playing Elon and Wofford.

One more thing to note on Appalachian State. Yes, the Michigan game was an awesome upset. But a careful reading of the USA Today college football preview section reveals that the Sagarin ratings the paper publishes included I-AA teams in its preseason rankings. Appalachian State was ranked 80th, ahead of approximately 40 Division I-A teams, including a pair of Michigan's Big Ten pals, Indiana and Illinois. Yes, Wolverines fans would have been steamed if they lost their home opener against Indiana, but they wouldn't have set their hair on fire like they did after the Appalachian State loss.

Could it be that Appalachian State is good enough to win a game or two in the Big Ten? Or even the Pac-10? It's an intriguing question. I think they could. They definitely would have been competitive with the Oregon State team that flat-lined Thursday at Cincinnati.