To give you a little peek behind the scenes, there's no time of year quite like the summer months to be a sportswriter at the News Tribune.
Gone is the night-after-night march to the next playing arena, bringing with it a nice respite from the almost constant string of deadlines. Replacing it is a bit more relaxed pace, including some hard-earned vacation time (a week of which I'll be enjoying starting today).
But at the risk of bringing up a science lesson when school is out for the summer, I'm often reminded of Newton's Third Law: For every action, there is an equal opposite reaction.
To put it more simply, when there's no games to cover, there's no games to put in the paper. That's the one thing that makes this time of year tough - while there is less going on, we've still got a product to put out.
Sometimes, you use anything and everything to fill the pages. But other times, the sports fairies grant your wish and you get blessed with plenty of noteworthy stuff. Last week was just one of those weeks.
The following things, in no particular order of importance, came out of nowhere last week to help fill valuable real estate in the sports pages:
• The St. Louis Blues got rid of fan-favorite T.J. Oshie, shipping the right-winger to the Washington Capitals.
While plenty of fans have taken to griping about the move, I'm all in favor of it. Not because of any advanced metrics reasons, or for that matter, any retreated metrics reasons. No, I like the move purely because of the need to shake things up.
To paraphrase what I often utter about the team around the office, "The Blues are who the Blues are." Every year they're good enough to keep the fans engaged. Every year, they have enough talent for a deep playoff run. And every year, they make a shallow playoff run. Maybe getting rid of a big name will go some small way toward altering the storyline. It's not like you're messing with a proven formula for success.
• New York Jets defensive lineman Sheldon Richardson got popped by the NFL, as he was suspended four games without pay for violating the league's substance abuse policy.
Interesting? Yes. Surprising? Not hardly. Richardson has struck me as a knucklehead since he was a Missouri Tiger, so it didn't shock me he would do something detrimental to his team.
And for a guy who goes out of his way to use the media whenever he wants to talk about how great he is, it was a cowardly move to simply issue a statement about the situation. He should have taken his medicine and owned up to things like a man.
• The St. Louis Cardinals fired scouting director Chris Correa on Thursday.
Although the team wouldn't specifically comment on the firing, the read-between-the-lines story is Correa was fired as part of the team's alleged hacking of a database owned by the Houston Astros. It's the latest part of a story that's not likely to go away anytime soon, as an FBI investigation into the incident is ongoing.
The move itself wasn't surprising, as you knew the Cardinals would have to do something like it. What was surprising was there weren't more heads rolling. That will likely come later, as there's no way something like this was done by a "lone gunman."
What I did find interesting was some research I conducted when trying to find out who would likely move up to fill the void left by Correa. While he was still listed on the team's staff directory after he had been let go, it was the names below him that caught my attention, in that there were so few. The number of people listed as a scout or some kind of scouting-related job was right around 10.
I found that a small number when you consider all the players across the nation an MLB team needs to be aware of, and a small number for a team that's done such a good job in the draft during recent memory.
For context, I looked at just the teams in the Cardinals' division, and some interesting things emerged. The team that's second behind the Cardinals in the NL Central, the Pirates, had 16 people listed as scouts or scouting supervisors, while the third-place Cubs had just nine. The fourth-place Reds had just seven amateur scouts and a whopping 14 professional scouts, while the last-place team, the Brewers, had a mind-numbing 51! They listed 13 pro scouts, 26 amateur scouts and 12 international scouts, pretty much a waste of resources considering they were scuffling along at 14 games under .500 going into Saturday's action.
• Rafael Nadal lost in the second round at Wimbledon to Dustin Brown, the world's 102nd-ranked player.
It was the fourth straight year Nadal has exited early to an unheralded opponent at the All England Club, a shocking feat for a man who's won 14 Grand Slam titles, including Wimbledon in 2008 and 2010.
Making it even more odd was he lost to a man who's never been past the third round of a major. Oh by the way, that's still true, as Brown lost Saturday in the third round.
It's almost fitting that Brown's story started and finished in the space of a week, a week in which I thought nothing interesting would happen.