Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 8/3/2011

8/3/1939:
On his 37th birthday, catcher Joe Sprinz of the San Francisco Seals in the Pacific Coast League is injured on a Treasure Island stunt in San Francisco Bay. During the Golden Gate International Exposition, celebrating the opening of the Bay Bridge (1936) and the Golden Gate Bridge (1937), Sprinz tries to set the altitude record for catching a baseball. The first ball, dropped 800 feet from a blimp, hits the bleachers. The second becomes embedded in the field. Sprinz gets his hand on the third drop, but the ball glances off his glove and back into his face. He's knocked unconscious, suffers 12 broken bones and loses 5 teeth. It's later estimated that the ball was traveling 150 miles per hour.

Birthdays:
Lance Alwroth b. 1940
Marcel Dionne b. 1951
Rod Beck b. 1968
Troy Glaus b. 1976
Tom Brady b. 1977

Packers Fact:
Linebacker Bernardo Harris led the Packers in tackles in 1997 and 1998. He did it again in 2000 and 2001.

ON POST OFFICE-RELATED MOVIES,
GREAT LINES FROM

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Blind woman: You’re a godsend, a savior.

Postman (Kevin Costner): No, I’m a postman.

The Postman (1997)

“Every ‘kick in the pants’ sends a real man a step forward.”

—J. KENFIELD MORLEY, American businessman

YOUNG AMERICA’S OLD HICKORY

The age of Andrew Jackson was also the era of the Erie Canal, utopian dreams, Joseph Smith and the birth of Mormonism, the first recorded utterance of the phrase “manifest destiny,” the Trail of Tears, mesmerism, phrenology, a fast-growing economy, P.T. Barnum, Henry David Thoreau, unrestrained drinking, and the first temperance movement. David Reynolds argues that it was a major turning point in American history and does so entertainingly and persuasively.

WAKING GIANT: AMERICA IN THE AGE OF JACKSON, by David S. Reynolds (Harper, 2008)