Gone for Good: The Washington Nationals have, contrary to all usual behavior in past seasons, won 11 of their last 12 games, including one this afternoon, and looked like a decent ball club while doing it. So naturally, manager Jim Riggleman decided this was the perfect time to resign. Riggleman apparently was bothered that the [...]
"Darn you, Cal Ripken!"
How often do you get to say that? I'm saying it a lot lately.
To wit: For the current print edition of Washington City Paper, which, coincidentally or not, is made of the very same material as the $100 bill, while the internet version is made of nothingness, I wrote about the disappearance [...]
We learned this week that Jim Riggleman, another guy named Jim who got a top coaching job in DC after coming here from Seattle intending to be just an underling only to be thrust into a more prominent position and then led his team to a lousy record which inspired much debate about his job [...]
For the print edition of City Paper, I wrote yet another column about Charles Mann and Art Monk's debacle in Anacostia. The former Redskins spent a decade promising that community a job training center, and then sold the proposed site for more than 10 times what they paid the city to obtain it.
One fascinating (to [...]
In case you missed it: The pre-post-racial they-said/they-said-they-didn't situation from last year's Dunbar-Fort Hill football game will lead to a small, mostly ceremonial change in the athletes' Code of Conduct applied to all Maryland public high school sporting events.
***
The Great Dan Steinberg posts a Great Video of Ryan Zimmerman talking up D.C. United to promote [...]
Ralph Friedgen is getting more attention than any of his Maryland players this preseason, all because he lost weight. Friedgen dropped a reported 105 pounds time around.
Good for him.
But these Friedgen-Lost-Weight stories are threatening to be like the Michael-Westbrook-Is-Finally-Focused articles that used to run around here every year at this time. Friedgen, remember, got just [...]
Dan Snyder talked to the Associated Press about his 10 years as an NFL owner.
We've heard most of it before: Snyder was young when he got the team, which is the only reason he made mistakes (charging for training camp, hiring Steve Spurrier) that everybody else would have made, too. But he's learned and now [...]
Competition's coming at Dan Snyder from all sides. Just as his monopoly on sports radio went all to crap with WJFK morphing from guy talk to an all-sports station ("The Fan"?....geez), now comes a rival to Snyder's fan site, extremeskins.com: Burgundy and Gold Obsession, or BGObsession for short, has gone live.
The punchline here is that [...]
The same ol' Natinals. Only worse, says the Washington Post's Chico Harlan, whose game stories get more fabulous as the team gets less. From Harlan's latest truth-telling gem:
"If anything, the first four games of [new manager Jim] Riggleman's tenure introduced an even lower grade of achievement and fortune. At least during the typical Manny Acta [...]
Ryan Zimmerman, the mandatory all-star, threw a ball into the stands for no apparent reason. Sean Burnett played hot potato with the ball on a come-backer. Nyjer Morgan got picked off first. The Nats lost.
Bottom line: The squad came out of the All-Star break in midseason form.
***
Local newspapering doesn't get any better than when KidsPost [...]
Cheap Seats Daily has learned...that new Washington Nationals manager Jim Riggleman's boyhood fight song was STOLEN!
From GIRLS!
As reported in this space the other day, Riggleman's baseball team at Richard Montgomery High School used a special cheer to get fired up before games:
Thunder, Thunder, Thunderation
We’re the Rockets Delegation
When we fight with determination
We create a soul [...]
After decades a couple weeks of rumors, this afternoon at the Verizon Center WJFK-FM brass will officially announce the station's flip from man talk to sports talk.
All the highlights of the new lineup — eight hours a day of Mike Wise and LaVar Arrington – and the date of the switch, July 20, have already [...]
Mere hours after the Washington Nationals named a new manager, local genius and longtime City Paper person Dave Nuttycombe sent me some photos from an old Richard Montgomery High School yearbook of the small, tough kid known around Rockville as "Little Jimmy Riggleman."
Apparently Riggleman, a jocky sort, grew enough right after his 1970 graduation to [...]
