Morning Brew: New kid on the block

Column photo

By Rustin Dodd

Thursday, April 30, 2009

There’s a feeling you get when you live in the Midwest. There’s a feeling you get when you live in a town like Kansas City or St. Louis or Wichita or Omaha.

You realize that people on the East and West Coasts look down on us. You know, East Coast bias, West coast bias — that kind of thing.

But hey, that’s cool, because Midwestern people are modest and humble and hardworking, and we don’t really care what people think about us.

We realize how great this part of the country is, and that’s all that matters.

But then, every so often, the whole country focuses in on something going on here, and well, it feels pretty nice.

At least, that’s how it felt Wednesday evening at Kauffman Stadium as rain poured down onto fountains in the outfield.

You see, there’s a kid who lives in Kansas City named Zack Greinke, and he may just be the greatest pitcher in the world.

Grienke won his league-leading fifth game last night against the Toronto Blue Jays.

And not only that, he’s got an amazing life story. He’s overcome a social anxiety disorder and depression. He’s only 25.

Sports Illustrated put Greinke on its cover this week. Yahoo Sports national baseball writer Jeffrey Passan wrote a profile on Greinke that came out on Wednesday. Hordes of other national writers are flocking to Kansas City to see this Greinke kid.

You could feel it all around Kansas City the last couple of days. And you could feel it in Lawrence too.

On Wednesday night, the entire baseball world turned its eyes to Kansas City — to the Midwest. And for a few moments, it felt good.

Brew Poets’ Society

Well, we’ve reached the end of April — and that means a couple of different things. Of course it means that May begins tomorrow (duh), but it also means that National Poetry month is over. And we here at the Brew would be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to savor the greatest sports poem in American history.

It was written in 1888 by a man named Ernest Thayer, and it begins like this:

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day;

The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,

Can you name it? Yes, it’s “Casey at the Bat,” and the iconic poem ends like this:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;

But there is no joy in Mudville— mighty Casey has struck out.

Thursday

YouTube Sesh

This week’s featured YouTube video comes straight from the “Shake & Bake” department. More specifically, we’re talking NASCAR, where driver Carl Edwards, who attended the University of Missouri and lives in Columbia, suffered one of the most gnarly crashes in recent racing history.

Edwards’ car went air born on the last lap of the Aaron’s 499 at Talladega on Sunday, spinning and slamming into the fence that is supposed to protect the fans from the cars on the track.

Unbelievably, Edwards jumped out of his car and jogged across the finish line - a true Ricky Bobby moment. We usually would tell you to type “Carl Edwards and Nascar crash” into your YouTube search and enjoy, but perhaps “enjoy” isn’t the right word. Just watch ... and be awed.

— — Edited by Realle Roth

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