Two sports notes

(1) Lou Brock has died.

Brock was one of the stars of the great St. Louis Cardinals teams of the mid and late 1960s, that won three pennants and two World Series in five years.

Brock is best remembered for his central role in bringing the stolen base back into prominence, after it had largely fallen out of the game in the 1940s and 1950s. He eventually broke both the single season and career records for stolen bases (Both records were later eclipsed by Rickey Henderson).

The sabermetrics revolution was not kind to Lou: he was exactly the sort of player — a speedy singles hitter who didn’t walk — that got devalued by advanced statistical methods, that revealed that stolen bases were not particularly valuable relative to some other offensive accomplishments, and that getting on base is the single most important skill a batter can have.

Nevertheless he was a memorable star of the game, and those of us who came of age during his era will always retain a sharp image of him. RIP.

(2) Tennis’s US Open was already going to be a strange tournament, with both Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer choosing to sit out the action. It got a lot stranger today when the only member of the Big Three playing in it got disqualified for hitting a linesperson with a ball. While Novak Djokovic’s actions appeared to be unintentional, there’s no question that he was properly DQ’d under the rules.

This guarantees that a player who had never won a Grand Slam tournament before will win this one, as remarkably no player with a major tournament victory will reach the quarterfinals. My hypothetical money is now on Daniil Medvedev, the intriguing young Russian who made a great run at the end of last season, including extending Nadal to five sets in a classic US Open final.