Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 4/22/2011

4/22/1959:
In a remarkable rally, the Chicago White Sox score 11 runs on one hit in the seventh inning of a 20-6 win over the Athletics in Kansas City. The first two batters reach on errors and Johnny Callison singles in a run, then advances to second on the next play when right fielder Roger Maris fumbles the ball. After three batters, the A's have made three errors. Before the inning is over, Kansas City pitchers Tom Gorman, Mark Freeman and George Brunet combine to walk 10 and hit one in a span of 13 batters; eight of the walks and the hit baseman come with the bases loaded. The inning finally ends when Jim Landis bounces back to Brunet, who throws to first for the out.

Birthdays:
Spencer Haywood b. 1949
Terry Francona b. 1959
Freeman McNeil b. 1959
Jeff Hostetler b. 1961
Jimmy Key b. 1961

Packers Fact:
Wide receiver Sterling Sharpe led the NFL in pass catching three times in five seasons beginning in 1989. He capped that stretch with a club-record 112 receptions in 1993.

“You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.”

—MARY TYLER MOORE, American actress

ON ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SQUEEZE ’EM REAL HARD

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Forty percent of the mass of every tree in the forest is crude oil.

Congressman Bill Sali (R-Idaho)

MANY FACES OF LOVE

Linda Grant spins a kind of mystery that’s not a mystery. It’s seamless, and yet the narrator, Vivien, is only stitching together wisps of memories. Jolted into these memories by a chance meeting with the former mistress of her disgraced uncle Sándor—why disgraced, she’s not sure—of whom she was allowed only a few tantalizing glimpses throughout her childhood. She then remembers how she later got the chance to meet and know her endearing, fat, pendulous-lipped, womanizing uncle, and even to love him, though neither of them ever reveals to the other the knowledge of their connection. The (London) Observer proclaims, “You barely feel you’re reading it at all, so fluid and addictive is the plot.”

THE CLOTHES ON THEIR BACKS, by Linda Grant (Scribner, 2009)