Scores On This Historic Day

July 31, 1997: The Major League Baseball season comes to its trading deadline. From 1923 until 1986, the deadline had been June 15. Despite his already having hit 34 home runs this season, the Oakland Athletics trade Mark McGwire to the St. Louis Cardinals for Eric Ludwick, T.J. Mathews and Blake Stein. They were 3 pitchers, and, between them, they went 30-30 for the A's. By the trading deadline 2 years later, July 31, 1999, none of them were still with the A's; by July 24, 2002, none of them were even in the major leagues anymore. McGwire finished the 1997 season with 58 home runs; 1998, a new record of 70; 1999, 65. When he retired after the 2001 season, he had 583 home runs, and was one of the most beloved players of all time. Of course, it was eventually revealed that he did it with steroids, costing him so much goodwill. Perhaps no player in history, except for Pete Rose, ever had such a fall from grace. Less publicized, but more shocking, was the trade the Chicago White ...

July 31, 1981: The rock band Journey release their album Escape . It turns out to be their biggest hit, with their signature song, "Don't Stop Believin'," and what a 2003 VH1 special called the top "power ballad" of all time, "Open Arms." The cover lists the title as " E5C4P3 ," as it it's a personalized license plate, and someone already had the California plate reading "ESCAPE." It's an early example of what the Internet would come to call " Leetspeak." Left to right: Jonathan Cain, Ross Valory, Neal Schon, Steve Perry, Steve Smith. In 1983, Bally Midway released a video game based on the album, with Atari licensed to produce a home version. The premise was that each of the 5 members at the time had to get past various obstacles, in the fashion of games like Breakout, to reach their instruments: L ead singer Steve Perry his microphone, Neal Schon his guitar, Ross Valory his bass guitarist, Jonathan Cain his ...

July 31, 1969: Elvis Presley takes the stage again. It had been a while. And he had returned to the scene of a "crime." No, I don't mean that the Las Vegas hotel where he was performing was owned by the Mob. Whether that was true or not is, for the purpose of this post, irrelevant. Elvis' first concert stand in Las Vegas was an unmitigated failure. On April 23, 1956, still early in his career, he began a 3-week stand at the Frontier Hotel. He did 2 shows a night, at 8:00 PM and 12:00 Midnight. Putting aside his already-present nicknames of "Elvis the Pelvis" and "the Memphis Flash" -- "The King of Rock and Roll" would come later in the year -- and with Nevada's nearby atomic tests in mind, he was billed as "The Atomic-Powered Singer." He was just 3 months past his 21st birthday, barely old enough to be allowed onto the casino floor. And most of his fans ranged from only a little older to considerably younger. They literally...

July 31, 1964: Country singer Jim Reeves is killed in a plane crash. He was 3 weeks short of his 31st birthday. James Travis Reeves was born on August 20, 1923 in Galloway, in eastern Texas. He pitched in the St. Louis Cardinals' farm system before an injury ended his career. After failing his U.S. Army draft exam, he became a radio announcer, and had the perfect voice for it. But that voice was so good that, like many other disc jockeys, he began to think he could sing as well as anybody whose records he was playing. Unlike most of those deejays, he turned out to be right. He was announcing for KWHK in Shreveport, Louisiana, the station that broadcast the South's most popular music program, The Louisiana Hayride. One night, a performer was late, and Reeves was asked to substitute. By the Autumn of 1955, "Gentleman Jim" was a country-singing star. "Four Walls" was his 1st big hit, in 1957. In 1960, "He'll Have to Go" hit Number 1 on Billboard ...

July 31, 1964: Ranger 7 provides the people of Earth with the first close-up pictures of the surface of the planet's only Moon. Ranger 6 was supposed to be the probe that did that. It was launched on January 30, 1964 from Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic coast of Florida, and it reached the Moon 3 days later. Everything worked -- except the cameras. Like the hockey team in New York and the later baseball team in Texas named the Rangers, when its big moment came, Ranger 6 choked. The source of the problem was found and corrected. On July 28, Ranger 7 was launched, also from Cape Canaveral. It arrived 3 days later, and worked perfectly, taking over 4,300 photographs in 17 minutes before it crash-landed on the lunar surface. It would be another 5 years, to the month, before human beings landed on the Moon. * July 31, 1964 was a Friday. This was also the day on which country music singer Jim Reeves was killed in a plane crash. I have a separate entry for this event. These baseball g...

July 31, 1910: One of the world's most notorious murderers is caught -- using technology never before tried. Hawley Harvey Crippen was born on September 11, 1862 in Coldwater, Michigan. He became a homeopath, a practitioner of what would now be called "alternative medicine." His 1st wife, Charlotte, died in 1892, of a stroke. No foul play has ever been suspected in her death. Together, the Crippens had a son, Hawley Otto Crippen, who was left in the care of his father's parents. In 1894, Dr. Crippen remarried, to Kunigunde Macamotski, daughter of a Polish father and a German mother. She had anglicized her name to Cora Henrietta Turner, and was a music hall singer who performed under the name Belle Elmore. In 1897, they moved to England, where Crippen, unqualified to be a practicing physician under British law, made many as a distributor of patent medicines (so, more or less, a pharmacist), while Cora continued her stage career. Kunigunde Macamotski, a.k.a.  Cora Henr...

July 30, 2009: The New York Times and Sports Illustrated publish reports that reveal that  David Ortiz  tested positive for a banned substance during survey testing in 2003. "Big Papi," the biggest reason why the Boston Red Sox won the 2004 and 2007 World Series, cheated. It was also revealed that Manny Ramirez, another big bat behind those titles, had failed the same test. But this was not new: He had been exposed as using performance-enhancing drugs earlier in the year, after having been traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was "nice"  of the Times and SI to reveal it 6 years after the fact, 5 years after the Red Sox finally ended "the Curse of the Bambino," and 2 years after they won a 2nd World Series as well. Still, those World Series wins are hereby invalidated. Let's be blunt, shall we? Let's be brutally honest. The linchpin to saying that the Yankees "cheated" their way to winning the 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000 World Series i...

July 30, 1980: The Olympic Games continue in Moscow. With the United States, West Germany, and many other nations boycotting, in protest of the host country, the Soviet Union, having invaded Afghanistan, the Soviets and other Eastern Bloc or "Warsaw Pact" nations were doing very well. Poland was not. Poland was going through a crisis in which its government, tightly controlled by the Kremlin, was repressing a genuine "workers' revolution" in the country. People marched in the streets, protesting the Soviet government. As a result, in these Games, the Soviet crowd booed Polish athletes. One they booed was a pole vaulter, Władysław Kozakiewicz. Born in 1953, to Polish parents in Lithuania, the family was sent to Poland in 1958, as part of the last wave of post-World War II "repatriations" of ethnicities. His older brother Edward was a pole vaulter, before switching to the decathlon (which includes the pole vault), and taught Wład. Wład became one of the...

July 30, 1980: Houston Astros pitcher J.R. Richard suffers a stroke. A career that looked like it was headed for the Baseball Hall of Fame is over. James Rodney Richard was born on March 7, 1950 in Vienna, in Northern Louisiana. He grew up near Ruston, at the same time as quarterback Bert Jones, and, about 70 miles to the west in Shreveport, quarterback Terry Bradshaw. By the time he was a senior at Lincoln High School in Ruston, he was already 6-foot-8 and 220 pounds, so he certainly had the build of a football or basketball player. But baseball was his sport. His idol was St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson, and it showed: Gibson was "only" 6-foot-2, but was a black man with a savage glare on the mound, and not afraid to throw close to a batter, and with good enough control to do it while scaring him but not hitting him. And Richard turned out to be the closest thing we've had to Gibson since Gibson. Colleges saw his size and wanted him for their basketball programs...