A busy offseason for the league last night culminated in the election of a new Commish, Adam Cronstein. Let’s all wish Adam well as he has big shoes to fill after Ryan Silverman. Ryan, a big tip of the cap to you for the past 3 seasons. You did a great job and we can’t thank you enough. A quick bio on our new Commish:
Adam has played in the league for over 20 years and was brought into the league the same way a lot of us were, by his dad. He played with his dad and his brother, who joined the league a few years later, for several years. Adam has been married for 13 years and has two kids Ari and Zev, who both come out to the games from time to time and play ball. Just like all of us with sons, Adam hopes to still be playing when they are old enough to play in the league. Adam told us a story last night that I can relate to. When he was a captain and was on the ratings committee, he was a passenger in a car driven by his wife in a snow storm to a wedding in upstate New York. While his wife was driving and white knuckling the steering wheel, Adam was kicking back talking about the softball draft for hours. That sums up our new Commish nicely.
In other news, AJ Goldhoff and Scott Friend were elected to serve on the Commission. Congrats, guys!
A ton of birthdays since the end of the season and I’m sure that I missed a few:
Brad “the Human Rain delay” Wagner
Pat “Sunshine” Feldman
Olivia “The Big O” Goldhoff
Albert Weisbrot
Pete “The Straw that Stirs the Drink” Soltesz
Joel “Sparky” Fogel
Scott Sadler
Corey Noris
A couple of big anniversaries as well:
Rick Lefton
Scott “Dire” Wolf
AJ Goldhoff
Engagements:
Ryan “The One Man Gang” Marcus
Former league MVP Mark “Big Blue” Tenenholtz
And finally, one wedding as Evan Gildenblatt got married.
In other Tenenholtz news, Rick retired from his job and is now playing golf, advising Triple Creek on rain outs, and I believe may be helping coach Walnut Hills baseball, if I heard correctly last night.
Congrats to everyone who won awards a couple of weeks back at the banquet and a big shout out to Mr. Mike for the nice plaques this year.
For those of you who signed up for the Oy Vey 5K, thank you and sorry that it got rained out. Be ready for next year already as it will be back better than ever.
I can’t remember if Tito Francona was hired by the Reds before the last blog posts, but if not my take is great hire for the Reds. Unfortunately he can’t hit, run or pitch. The good news though is that he brought in former Red, Chris Valaika, as his hitting coach. When he was with the Guardians they didn’t strike out nearly as much as the Reds did last year. Did you know the Reds had 5 players strike out over 100 times with Elly leading all of baseball with 213!!! 213 times Elly didn’t even put the ball in play. If he can cut down on that, the Reds will be much better. Watching Tito on the great Netflix series about the 2004 Red Sox, you can see why he is such a good manager. The total opposite of David Bell.
As for the Bengals, am I the only one that sees them going the way the Reds did with Votto and just wasting the prime years of Burrow and Chase? God I hope not, but when you are as good as those two (Plus Trey) and your team is 4-7, you know you are going the wrong way.
Count me on board as loving the new college football playoffs. According to Temple Sholom’s star alumnus, Stewart Mandell from the Athletic: 23 teams are still in the running for one of the 12 spots compared to 8 last year. How great would it be for the Army to make it? Or see Alabama come to Bloomington or South Bend to play IU or ND?
In a story that might only interest me, I found it amusing that the owners of Heritage Bank Center, after the report came out about how much we need a new arena, are now saying we should build it on the current site. If only they had put ANY money into that dump over the last 30+ years maybe we won’t need a new arena. I don’t care what those clowns have to say when it comes to the new arena. Just get it done so we can get the NCAA tournament, conventions and concerts like Kacey Musgraves, who went to both the YUM Center in Louisville and Nationwide Arena in Columbus just last week while skipping Cincy.
Finally, Roger and I will be lobbying the Reds to do bobbleheads of journeymen of the 80’s this season since the Reds have pretty much done all of the Reds we would want. So with Roger’s expert advice we are pitching bobbleheads of Eddie Milner, Ron Robinson, Kurt Stillwell and Kal Daniels.
Be on the lookout soon for news about next season. Registration starts on January 1!
Have a nice Turkey Day, everyone.