sub teacher.
Traverse City, MI
Joined March 2011
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USA vs Canada women, best rivalry in sports? It all started in Nagano ’98. Incredible story unfolds in new book “A Miracle of Their Own.” Advance copies available before Gold Medal Game.
This is likely best thing 70's has posted. Relationship tween fans and team via Superstation. Sterling at his best.
Tim Rappleye retweeted
"The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase."
Yogi Berra, asked about a recent vacation.
Tim Rappleye retweeted
Show this Novak Djokovic point to anyone who doesn’t like tennis and they’ll start loving it.
The Vogelbach effect
How is this possible?
During last night's World Series Game 3 on October 26, 2026, the Milwaukee Brewers saw 175 pitches and only swung and missed 13 times.
The odds of this occurring in a modern Major League Baseball game are incredibly slim, reflecting an elite contact rate of roughly 92.6% on swings. In today's high-velocity, high-spin environment, a typical MLB team averages a whiff rate of about 24% to 26% per game.
Holding a Major League pitching staff to just 13 total swinging strikes over 175 pitches is a statistical anomaly, demonstrating a hyper-disciplined approach at the plate that propelled them to a dominant 10-1 victory over the Rays.
Tim Rappleye retweeted
Tickets for the watch party tomorrow in Milwaukee are more expensive than the actual World Series game in Tampa. Insane.
I'd pay $20 to see that movie.
June 6, 1944. An American paratrooper jumps into Normandy in the dark and lands on the roof of a church.
By the end of the war he had been declared dead, held a funeral he didn't attend, escaped the Nazis, and fought his way toward Berlin in a Soviet tank unit.
His name was Joseph Beyrle. He's believed to be the only American soldier to serve in both the US Army and the Red Army during World War Two.
Beyrle was from Muskegon, Michigan. He joined the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. His buddies called him Jumpin' Joe.
On D-Day night his plane was hit by flak and he jumped early. He came down on a church roof, slid off, and lost his unit in the chaos. For a few days he fought on his own, blowing up a power station and cutting German communications.
Then he was captured.
Here's where it gets strange. A German soldier ended up wearing Beyrle's uniform and dog tags. That German was killed. When the body was found, the Americans identified it as Joseph Beyrle.
The army told his parents their son was dead. His hometown held a funeral mass for him. His obituary ran in the local paper.
Meanwhile, he was very much alive, being moved from one German prison camp to another.
He escaped more than once. One time he and two other prisoners jumped off a train heading east. They thought they were heading for Russia and freedom. They got lost and ended up in Berlin, where they were caught by the Gestapo, beaten, and tortured.
In January 1945, from a camp in eastern Germany, he finally made a clean escape. He went east, toward the gunfire. Toward the Soviets.
When he found a Soviet tank unit, he walked out with his hands up, holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and shouted the only Russian he knew. American comrade.
It worked.
He asked to join them. And they said yes.
For about a month, an American paratrooper rode with Soviet tank crews as they pushed toward Germany. He used his demolition training. He fought. He was reportedly welcomed by a Soviet officer who was one of the rare women commanding a tank battalion.
Then a German dive bomber attacked. Beyrle was badly wounded.
He was evacuated to a Soviet hospital. Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov reportedly visited, heard his story, and gave him papers to get to the American embassy in Moscow.
When he showed up, the embassy didn't believe him. As far as the US was concerned, Joseph Beyrle was dead. They held him under guard until his fingerprints proved who he was.
He made it home to Michigan in April 1945.
In 1946 he got married. In the same church where they'd held his funeral.
Decades later, in 1994, he was honored at the White House by President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin for serving both countries.
And the last twist. His son, Joseph Beyrle II, grew up to become the United States Ambassador to Russia.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Joseph Robert “Joe” Beyrle had two sons. The elder son, Joe Beyrle II, served during the Vietnam War, but wasn’t a US Ambassador. That was the other son, John Beyrle.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Be…
Tim Rappleye retweeted
I believe this will be considered one of the most important videos in US history from this time.
Tim Rappleye retweeted
Robin Yount walked out to throw the first pitch at the first Brewers World Series game in 44 years, and he was wearing another man's jacket.
A plaid sport coat. One of Bob Uecker's actual ones, off the rack in his closet.
Yount is the one who asked.
When he found out he had the first pitch, he went to Brewers broadcaster Lane Grindle and asked whether it would be appropriate to wear a plaid jacket in honor of Ueck. Grindle told him he thought it would be incredible.
Then Grindle went a step further and asked Uecker's family whether the crew could borrow the real coats.
They said yes right away.
So Yount walked to the mound in Bob Uecker's jacket. And then on the mound he took it off.
Underneath was a Brewers jersey. Number 19. UECK across the back.
The entire radio crew wore the coats too. Josh Maurer got the one Uecker wore in the Miller Lite commercial with Whitey Ford and John Goodman, which is also the coat he is wearing on the cover of Catcher in the Wry. The engineer, Kent Sommerfeld, wore the one from the commercial Uecker did with John Madden.
Outside the ballpark, people were setting Miller Lite cans down at the foot of the Uecker statue. Ryan Braun got the crowd to shout for Ueck before the game.
Now understand why it had to be Yount.
He played 20 seasons and every single one of them was in Milwaukee. He was the starting shortstop on Opening Day of 1974, at 18 years old, and he did not stop until 1993.
Bob Uecker had been in that radio booth since 1971.
Which means Uecker called every game Robin Yount ever played. All 2,856 of them.
And in 1982, the last time this franchise got here, Yount was the Most Valuable Player in the American League. He hit .414 in that World Series with a home run and six runs batted in.
Milwaukee lost it in seven games.
Yount finished with 3,142 hits, all of them in a Milwaukee uniform, and he won a second Most Valuable Player award in 1989 after a shoulder problem moved him to the outfield. Only two men before him had ever won it at two different positions.
Uecker did not make it to this one. He passed in January of last year at 90 years old, after 54 seasons calling Brewers games, and the team got back to the World Series twenty-one months later. The broadcast booth has his name on it now, which is not the same as having him in it.
Milwaukee beat Tampa Bay 3 to 2.
A man who gave one city his entire playing career walked to the mound carrying the coat of the man who described all of it, took the coat off, and showed everybody whose name he had on his back.
nytimes.com/2026/10/16/opini…
Spoiler alert, Go co-ed. Logical
Tim Rappleye retweeted
Phil Mickelson once lost $143,500 in a single day on 43 baseball bets - and for him, that barely counted as a bad one. Over three decades he ran more than a billion dollars through the books and lost around $100 million
Here’s what makes it worse than bad luck: Mickelson was no mark. Six majors, a man who hits 1,500 practice balls a month just to know his 9-iron flies 145, who factors in temperature, altitude, the grain of the grass, a degree of loft worth exactly three yards. Precise to the yard. He read edges better than almost anyone who ever placed a bet - his partner, pro gambler Billy Walters, said it flat: “Phil had accounts as large as anyone I’d seen.” He understood the math cold. It took $100 million from him anyway
Because the book never had to beat his judgment. It beats you on the count, not the call. Look at his actual bet: $110,000 to win $100,000. That spread alone means he had to be right 52.4% of the time just to break even - not to win, just to stand still. Almost nobody beats a coin flip by that margin for long, and Mickelson made that exact bet eleven hundred times in five years. His precision wasn’t the defense. It was the trap. The surer a man is of his read, the more he plays - and the more he plays, the more certain that 52.4% hardens into a wall. The house doesn’t need you to be wrong. It needs you to keep going
In 2012 he called Walters to put $400,000 on the US team to win the Ryder Cup - a team he was playing on that week. Walters’ answer: “Have you lost your f-ing mind.” Europe won. Justin Rose beat Mickelson himself. Years later he admitted the gambling had turned “reckless” and “embarrassing” - then, in the same breath: “It isn’t a threat to me or my financial security.” A hundred million down, still sure he had it handled
And this was never about golf, or baseball, or a single bet. The house doesn’t beat the reckless - they bust early and go home. It beats the disciplined, the ones certain their edge will carry them, because they’re the ones who never stand up. That certainty feels like an advantage. It’s the leash. Mickelson carried it sharper than you ever will, and it cost him a fortune one “I’ve got this” at a time
So the only question that matters, and the house already knows your answer: if a man who calculated every shot to the yard, who read the edges better than almost anyone alive, couldn’t stop himself a hundred million in the hole - what makes you so sure you could?
Tim Rappleye retweeted
The GRU hacked into Jared Kushner's iPhone. Dutch military intelligence (MIVD) then recruited a GRU spy who gave them access to the hacked phone. What MIVD discovered was that Kushner had access to two bank accounts --one Azerbaijani, the other Israeli --where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed deposited money. It sounds like a slightly far-fetched episode of "Slow Horses," but it's real. And it proves just how eye-poppingly corrupt this administration was and continues to be as its "special envoy" decides the fate of tens of millions in Europe in the Middle East. Simply incredible reporting by Matthew Cole, drawn from his new book on Kushner. vanityfair.com/story/jared-k…
To the college puck fans who mourn the loss of the vaunted WCHA, last night’s NoDak-Gophers tilt woke up the echoes. Long live the WCHA, at least in October. Damn the B1G!
