Well, not the real Olympics — the Jewish Olyimpics. The Maccabi Games take place every four years in Isael, and according to the organizers, the 18^th “Maccabiah” just became the world’s second largest sporting event. In case you didn’t know, the Jews take their sports seriously.  

Despite my limited athletic talent, I’m in some pretty good company. The Maccabiah is a big deal here in Israel, with newspapers and TV stations covering the action, which includes everything from fencing to track and field and chess. There are a handful of legitimate big wigs competing, the biggest of whom is Jason Lezak, the American swimmer who finished the final leg of the 400 relay in the actual Olympics, helping  Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal.
And then there’s me. For the past week, I’ve been traveling around Israel with the American cycling team. This is the first time the Maccabi Games have included cycling, and our team is a hodgepodge of young and old cyclists. We have a 23-year-old who’s trying to go pro, a  high-profile computer hacker, a scientific instruments market analyst, a sports psychology guru and an Israeli-American who goes to the University of Houston. Our women’s team includes a former top level rower, a former Olympic-hopeful speed skater and an unemployed Manhattanite who’s been training like crazy with her free time.

On Monday, we’ll all be competing in a time trial in the Negev desert just outside Kibbutz Urim, which sits about seven miles from the Gaza border. Then we head to the opening ceremonies, a hot ticket here in Israel, we’re told. On Wednesday, we compete in a road race in Ashdod, a beach town south of Tel Aviv.

I’ll be sending dispatches from the Jewish Olympics for the next few days, as Team USA looks for gold.

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Tim Wakefield might get another crack at the Braves and other NL hitters next week.

Next Tuesday, Tim Wakefield likely will become the second-oldest pitcher to appear in an All-Star Game, less than a month before his 43rd birthday. The Red Sox knuckleballer will pass Roger Clemens, who had recently turned 42 when he pitched for the National League in 2005.

On Baseball Prospectus, Joe Sheehan argues that the weakest All-Stars — a group that includes Wakefield, not among the 15 most valuable starters in the AL this year — shouldn’t necessarily get to play. Sheehan laments the All-Star Games of old. “Expansion accounts for the larger rosters — up to 33, including an absurd 13 pitchers, for next week’s showdown — but no one is forcing the managers to use everyone,” Sheehan writes. “They and the players can play the game the way it was played in 1958, they’re simply choosing not to. That’s what’s taking the Midsummer Classic down the garden path to becoming the Pro Bowl.”

Why play the last guy on the bench when there might be 10 better players who didn’t even make the rosters? Because each team is guaranteed a representative, some of these token All-Stars take spots from more-deserving players on better teams. The Royals, for instance, have had a lone representative in 18 of the past 20 seasons, the most concentrated run of solo All-Stars for any team. Of course, their lone All-Star this year happens to be baseball’s best pitcher, which shows that not all lone representatives are undeserving.

The need to name one player from each team doesn’t explain one of the more baffling decisions — Javier Vazquez’s exclusion from the NL roster. He’s been the second-best starter in the NL this year, and only one of his Braves teammates — Brian McCann — is going in his stead.

If that decision weakens an already inferior squad from the inferior NL, it could hurt the Dodgers more than anyone. In case you haven’t heard, the All-Star Game now counts — namely for home-field advantage in the World Series. And the Dodgers, as the NL’s best team, have the best chance of representing the league in the Fall Classic. On Baseball Analysts, Sky Andrecheck crunches the numbers and determines that the All-Star Game could be the most important game left for the Dodgers until October.

Associated Press

Tyler Hansbrough and Roy Hibbert didn’t seem to have race on their minds during a recent summer-league game.

The answer, if you’re an NBA fan, is “fairly easily,” since those guys aren’t that great. But Kravitz’s point is bigger — all those not-that-great players happen to be white, which means that, “in a league where little more than 10% of the players are white Americans, the Pacers roster is racially split down the middle, making them one of the whitest teams in the league.” It has become increasingly so after the Pacers’ infamous brawl at Auburn Hills — which the basketball blog Wizznutzz immortalized as “Aubernica” — but Kravitz argues that race (or racism) has nothing to do with those personnel decisions.

The expected kerfuffle followed on such kerfuffle-dependent TV sports-yell shows as “Around the Horn,” but the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ray Ratto wants no part of it. “We’re just here to point out that two of those six melanin-deficient Pacers used to toil [on the Golden State Warriors] — Mike Dunleavy and Troy Murphy — and to the best of our knowledge, nobody ever said the Warriors were too white,” Ratto writes. “They said the Warriors were too not good, but never too white… The difference between five white players and six escapes us. In fact, the whole debate seems to miss the point because the standings seem to sort out all deficiencies in a team’s makeup.”

In the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Steve Carp catches up with Adam Morrison. The former Gonzaga star and third pick of the 2006 NBA Draft was once perceived as a great white hoops hope. Now he’s playing in the Lakers’ NBA summer-league team and trying to find a way to crack the NBA champions’ lineup next season.

* * *

It’s getting more and more difficult for your Daily Fixer not to mention it, so here it is: The New York Mets stink right now. Yes, most of the Mets’ best and best-compensated players are on the disabled list; no, you should definitely not watch the Mets play unless you enjoy buried-in-a-ton-of-Sartre-books ennui and sadness.

In Sports Illustrated, Joe Lemire describes how dire things have gotten for the Mets, who have now lost nine of their last 11 games, and their fans. “From the Mets’ large payroll (at $149 million, its fifth straight year north of $100 million) to recent late-season collapses (see 2007, 2008) to this year’s foibles, this is a disgruntled fan base, tired of its team underperforming expectations,” Lemire reports. “One group of 20-something friends from New York City, all diehard Mets fans who regularly write each other about the team, reported the tone of their email chain resulted in some curious sponsorships, thanks to Gmail’s targeted ad-placement. Gmail, which uses keywords in emails to trigger related advertisements, came up with touts for discount tickets to New York area events, a link entitled ‘no more stinky garbage’ and an ad for bags to pick up after your dog. Optimism is, um, lacking.”

One player who could probably help the punchless Mets is Dmitri Young, a 35-year-old former All-Star currently plugging away on a rehab assignment for the Double-A Harrisburg Senators. In the Washington Times, Mark Zuckerman reports that Young believes he could still help big-League teams, but knows his window is closing.

* * *

The announcement that Baltimore’s Towson Catholic High School will unexpectedly be closing its doors after 86 years means that one of Charm City’s most storied hoops institutions is no more. “For more than half a century, Towson Catholic has turned out stellar athletes who brought colleges scurrying to the little school on Ware Avenue,” the Baltimore Sun’s Mike Klingaman writes. “Basketball was the sport of choice: Carmelo Anthony (of the Denver Nuggets) played for the Owls, as did Donte Greene (of the Sacramento Kings). Both were first-round draft picks, as was [Gene] Shue, who was taken by the Philadelphia Warriors in 1954.”

* * *

Jamie McOwen is a 23-year-old outfielder for the High Desert Mavericks of the High-A California League. As hardcore hardball fans might have noticed, there’s already a red flag — McOwen is a bit “old for his league,” a sign that his stats should be discounted somewhat and that his parent organization’s brass in Seattle probably doesn’t think terribly highly of him as a prospect. Which is fine — discount away. It’s not easy to diminish the impressiveness of McOwen’s current 45-game hitting streak.

“It’s tougher to remain consistent with all the Class A variables — bus rides, mediocre hotels, inconsistent pitchers, incessant in-game promotions — but McOwen is keeping it going by refusing to pretend it isn’t,” ESPN’s Tim Keown writes. “People are noticing, inside the organization and out. His name is getting out there.”

* * *

LeBron James has been dunked on before. It happens to NBA basketball players, even great ones. And so the story of The Dunk That Must Not Be Seen seemed like a one-day thing, if that. (It was covered in Thursday’s Fix, but, in short: Xavier guard Jordan Crawford dunked in LeBron’s face during a pickup game, and Nike officials then confiscated video of the game, seemingly at The Bron’s behest.) But it’s early July, and there’s not much else to write about, and thus people are still writing about it. And thus so are we.

This would almost certainly not be the case had Nike not confiscated the tapes and then offered an unconvincing explanation for having done so, Comcast’s Lee Russakoff argues. “The LeBron/Nike camp is now claiming they confiscated the tape because the cameramen at the event violated the academy’s established ‘no videotaping’ policy,” Russakoff writes. “If you buy that, I have a cashier’s check from a Nigerian prince I’d like you to cash.”

Which is true, but… enough, right? Let’s give the very great Joe Posnanski the last word on this and agree never to speak of it again. “I’m on Nike’s side here,” Posnanski blogs. “Personally speaking, I don’t think Nike went far enough. Personally, I think they should confiscate every and all tapes of Game 6 of the 2009 NBA Eastern Conference Finals. I don’t care if they have to break into homes and erase every Tivo in North America. Get rid of that thing. Never happened. The Finals did NOT match up Orlando and Los Angeles. Those LeBron-Kobe muppets make perfect sense again.” Among Posnanski’s other candidates for post-emptive confiscation: “The entire 2006 Winter Olympics. Remember how Nike pumped up ultimate rebel Bode Miller before those Olympics? No you don’t. Never happened. Confiscated.”

* * *

There is no vehicular traffic on the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. It has been that way since 1995. While the reasoning behind the closure had less to do with creating a more perfect street-hockey environment and more to do with securing the nearby White House, it did create a pretty perfect pickup hockey “rink.” In the Washington Post, Katie Carrera describes the booming street-hockey scene that has developed on the blocked-off block.

“There is a cordial relationship between the hockey players and the numerous police forces that patrol the public street and surrounding area,” Carrera writes. “Every few months, guards emerge from their station to return a collection of fluorescent balls, and some of the officers are so familiar with the games that when the street was closed to pedestrians during the 2008 World Bank protests, those who arrived toting hockey equipment were allowed to pass through and play.”

— Tip of the Fix cap to readers Thomas Cervino, Jason Cohen and Don Hartline.

Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfix@wsj.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.

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Unlike LeBron James’s most recent hoops letdown, the one against the Magic in May was captured on film.

Alongside all the action, there are, as always, lots of reports of possible action in the insanely rumor-drenched period before deals became official. One example: Chris Broussard’s article on ESPN that began with, “LeBron James did not tell Trevor Ariza he will stay in Cleveland past 2010, according to sources close to the Cavaliers’ superstar — contradicting what a person close to Ariza said Monday night.” To recap: A source close to one person tells a reporter what another person allegedly told the source’s friend, before someone else contradicts it. In elementary school, we called this game “telephone.”

In the Houston Chronicle, Jerome Solomon examines what has been an unusually heated NBA hot-stove season. “An NBA player sent me a text message that he had been sent a text message that one of his boys, whom he played with in college and had left a voicemail for but hadn’t heard back from yet, was about to be dealt to the Rockets,” Solomon writes. “Then he sent a text that he got a text from one of his boy’s teammates that the text wasn’t true. Another bad rumor.”

Of course, the rumored-but-unproven has always been a big part of the NBA’s allure. At CBS Sports, Gary Parrish describes an actual event that is already on its way to mythic status. On Tuesday, Parrish blogged that, during a pickup game at the LeBron James Skills Academy, Xavier University guard Jordan Crawford reportedly threw down a two-handed jam in the face of his host. You may wish to read that sentence again, since it’s the closest you’ll get to actually seeing Crawford dunk on King James. Later that day, Parrish reported that Nike officials had confiscated the game tapes, presumably at LeBron’s request.

At Yahoo, Kelly Dwyer acknowledges that the whole thing is silly, but sees it as part of a pattern of recent petulance from James. “This is absolutely no fun, and it falls right in line with a batch of childish behavior from LeBron James recently,” Dwyer writes. “And I’m not in line with those who are letting James slide for this or James’ refusal to meet the media or congratulate the Orlando Magic last month because ‘he hasn’t done anything wrong yet’… We should applaud his game, but to applaud him for merely not being a dingle berry doorknob is ridiculous.”

One of the oldest-school and most curmudgeonly of sportswriting’s old-school curmudgeons, T.J. Simers is not one of the first journalists to come to mind when the phrase “enjoys new things” is used. But with the hugely hyped UFC 100 coming up this weekend, Simers headed to Vegas to meet with the UFC’s profane, Ed Hardy-brand commish, Dana White, and produced an amusing, entertaining column about the UFC experience.

At Yahoo Sports, Dan Wetzel reports on the war of words between Frank Mir and Brock Lesnar that has preceded their headlining match on Saturday.

At the age of 20, Freddy Adu is a little old to be a prodigy. Once the most famous name in American soccer — and the highest-paid player in Major League Soccer at age 14, when he debuted with DC United — Adu later went on to play professionally in Portugal and France. Or, more accurately, to not-play-very-much in Portugal and France. Adu is working his way into first-team shape for the U.S. National Team, but the erstwhile sensation finds himself in the novel position of having to prove his worth both to U.S. coach Bob Bradley and to the management of Benfica, the Portuguese club for which he (barely) plays. “[Adu] no longer is the cocky teenager who signed with United,” John Haydon writes in the Washington Times. “He’s more reflective and says he is working harder to be a true professional.”

Considering that he entered Thursday just a second off the lead in the Tour de France — and has stayed with the front of the pack Thursday — it’s likely that Lance Armstrong is pretty squarely focused on cycling at the present. But before the 37-year-old surged back to the front of cycling’s pack, there was rampant speculation about what the second act of this already hugely dramatic American life would contain. Armstrong’s January interview with Mark McKinnon in the Daily Beast did little to tamp down rumors that he was considering a run for office in his native Texas. In Slate, Bill Gifford examines the developments in Armstrong’s life since then, and ponders how well Armstrong is cut out for that line of work.

“[Armstrong's] athletic career has taken a positive turn: He’s just a fraction of a second off the lead in the Tour de France,” Gifford writes. “His bizarre, histrionic behavior while off the bike, though, leaves one to wonder whether this guy is cut out for public life. Lance actually shares a few traits with Sarah Palin. They both react to any criticism with extreme defensiveness. They demonize their enemies while at the same time cultivating nonstop melodramas that keep them in the news. And while they both periodically issue petulant threats to quit, you get the funny feeling that neither one is going away anytime soon.”

Jim Larranaga’s name became inescapably linked to the word “underdog” after he coached 11th-seeded George Mason to the NCAA Final Four in 2006. Now his son Jay is attempting an even more unlikely feat in his coaching debut. Jay Larranaga played college hoops at Bowling Green and professional basketball in Europe, and is now the player-coach of Ireland’s national basketball team. To say that Ireland doesn’t have much basketball tradition is a huge understatement: The international hoops history of the Emerald Isle consists of one Olympics appearance, back in 1948 — in which the team was blown out in every game, including a loss to Mexico by the score of 71-9. So, no: not so good. But, as Bob Cohn reports in the Washington Times, the younger Larranaga is working hard to build a program more or less from scratch.

Epileptic seizures nearly undid Diane Van Deren’s life, and the lobectomy she underwent to stop those seizures nearly undid her personality. Van Deren’s sense of direction, memory and organizational skills were severely impaired. In a fascinating piece in the New York Times, John Branch explains that Van Deren was not undone by those hardships; in fact, she turned them to her benefit.

“[Van Deren] used to run away from epileptic seizures. Since brain surgery, she just runs, uninhibited by the drudgery of time and distance, undeterred by an inability to remember exactly where she is going or how to get back,” Branch writes. “Van Deren, 49, had a lobectomy in 1997 and has since become one of the world’s great ultra-runners, competing in races of attrition measuring 100 miles or more.”

Former Mets and Phillies outfielder Lenny Dykstra filed for bankruptcy in Los Angeles on Wednesday in the face of an astonishing 20 different lawsuits and with debts in the tens of millions of dollars. Tom Petruno runs down the details in the Los Angeles Times, but for the Full Dykstra experience we recommend the three fine magazine features on Dykstra’s bravado-intensive boom-and-bust post-baseball career to which the Fix linked back in April. Click here, and scroll to the last section.

— Tip of the Fix cap to readers Brendan Flynn and Don Hartline.

Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfix@wsj.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.

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Actor Richard Gere and his son Homer attended  New York’s Subway Series, but more of their fellow fans stayed away this year.

Last month MLB.com spotlighted the 100 millionth fan to attend a game pitting a National League team against an American League opponent in the interleague era, which replaced the previous era in which AL-NL matchups came only during the All-Star Game and the World Series. “Now in its 13th season, Interleague Play has been a big hit with baseball fans,” MLB.com reported, adding, “From 1997-2008, attendance at Interleague games was 11.8 percent higher than the average attendance for intraleague games.” Commissioner Bud Selig said, “Major League Baseball has set its attendance record in four of the last five years, and Interleague Play has been a key to that success.”

But that 11.8% increase is highly misleading, according to Eric Rosen’s analysis of the numbers for interleague games between 2000 and 2008 at Beyond the Box Score. Rosen noted that two-thirds of interleague games were played on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, compared to 45% for intraleague games. And it’s always easier to draw a crowd for weekend games. Correcting for day of the week, Rosen found that the supposed increase was roughly halved.

Moreover, 87% of interleague games were played in June and July, prime months for baseball attendance. Compared to other games in those months on the same day of the week, interleague games had higher attendance of just 0.4%. “If the interleague games weren’t lumped onto Friday, Saturday and Sunday, there would be practically no difference in attendance [about 1000 total extra tickets per team per year, maybe 100 per game],” Rosen wrote.

His analysis ran through last season. This season, interleague play has been a bit of a letdown, with a 6.6% decline from last year, according to Maury Brown of the Biz of Baseball. The Florida Marlins, often an attendance also-ran, hosted the four interleague games with the sparsest crowds. Three of these were in a series against Baltimore, hardly a natural rival. But the fourth was against in-state rival Tampa Bay.

Another explanation for attendance declines comes from the opposite end of the fan spectrum: New York. The Mets and Yankees have been fixtures near the top of attendance standings in recent years, but new stadiums with smaller capacity and higher prices have driven down attendance for interleague play and other games. The Mets failed to sell out any of their nine interleague games and saw attendance drop by 34.37%.

More interesting was how poorly this seething chorus of disapproval tracked with the far less vituperative responses — ranging from tepidly disapproving to wholly uninterested — proffered by paying customers in the fan-in-the-seats pieces that ran alongside those fulminating columns. Dodgers fans cheered Ramirez in San Diego last weekend and Mets fans booed him during his team’s win in Queens on Tuesday night. But on balance the sports media’s sputtering seemed to far outpace the shrug-intensive reaction of the fan community.

The other side of Mariotti’s outrage can be found on the very same Fanhouse network that hosted his rant, from a blogger far less well-compensated or -known than Mariotti. “If you’re going to boo Manny [then] shouldn’t you boo every actress with botoxed lips, or every actor who’s taken HGH to help bulk up for a role?” Fanhouse’s Tom Fornelli wondered. “It’s all just entertainment, folks.” There were some hints even then that some in the media could relate to this perspective — it has a harsh headline, but Jayson Stark seems more bemused than beside himself in this ESPN column on Ramirez’s return.

The point the “where’s the outrage” pundits seemed to be missing was that this is Manny Ramirez we’re talking about. Ben McGrath’s fine 2007 profile of Ramirez in the New Yorker offers a memorable portrait of what that means. “It’s not that [Ramirez] is anti-establishment, exactly,” McGrath wrote. “But in his carefree way he’s just subversive enough — ‘affably apathetic’ is how one of his bosses put it recently — to create headaches for [anyone] who worries about precedent.”

In the opinion of Slate’s Charles Pierce, Ramirez’s blithe disinterest in baseball’s bylaws and pomp-heavy brand is precisely why the sports media’s attempt to mine a rich vein of outrage at his expense has largely been a bust. “Manny’s greatest gift as a professional athlete [is] his innate ability to make everything about baseball that is self-reverentially loathsome look ridiculous,” Pierce writes. “In the great, hushed temple that baseball is perennially building for itself in its own mind, it’s [Ramirez] who provides the dribble glasses, the whoopee cushions, and the exploding cigars. … Manny undermined the ludicrous bloviation that lies at the heart of the most singularly overblown ‘crisis’ in the history of sports.”

If baseball’s steroid era really is on the wane, Jonathan Eig knows whom to thank. If his Washington Post article’s memorable headline — “The Jerk Who Saved Baseball” — isn’t tip-off enough, Eig gives the credit to clownish ex-slugger and steroid herald/myth-deflater Jose Canseco.

* * *

Professional sports teams exist in the same economy as the rest of us, although those who pay a lot of attention to European soccer transfer fees or the NHL free-agent market could reasonably have forgotten as much. “Desperate times call for desperate measures” is usually the cliché that gets used in times like this, but in the NBA’s summer leagues — the endearingly ragtag rookie-and-no-name showcases that a brilliant but shameless young(ish) writer praised in Slate two years ago — desperate times have occasioned measures that are just plain weird. The Salt Lake Tribune’s Ross Siler, who is writing summer league dispatches for ESPN’s TrueHoop blog, highlights one particularly odd instance of NBA belt-tightening.

“For one week at least, [two] Atlantic Division rivals have come together, with a joint New Jersey/Philadelphia entry in the Orlando summer league prompted by the worst economy in a generation,” Siler reports. “Whatever they lose in individuality, the Sixers and Nets hope to save in costs. They took the court Monday in generic blue NBA jerseys, coached by a staff of two New Jersey and two Philadelphia assistants.”

* * *

It’s probably unfair to lump the Detroit Pistons’ choice of longtime NBA assistant John Kuester as their new head coach in with the NBA’s other hardship-driven decisions. But the fact remains that Kuester was by far the cheapest of the finalists Detroit president Joe Dumars considered for the gig. Michigan Live’s A. Sherrod Blakely believes the Pistons’ recent record of burning through coaches might’ve impacted things as well. “[Kuester] might turn out to be an excellent head coach,” Blakely writes. “But it does not change the fact he was not Detroit’s first (or second) choice, which speaks to how Dumars’ affinity for dumping coaches so quickly might be catching up to him.”

Michael Rosenberg of the Detroit Free Press doesn’t see Kuester as a hire of last resort. “There is a perception that Doug Collins pulled out and the Pistons were too cheap to get Avery Johnson, so they settled for Kuester, and I don’t buy that at all,” Rosenberg writes. “Hiring Kuester would be a risk, but [GM Joe] Dumars was going to take a risk no matter whom he hired. I don’t know if John Kuester will make the most of this chance. But I do think he’s earned it.”

* * *

There is no such thing as an easy or auspicious time to launch a professional sports league: It’s very expensive, most such leagues fail and any sport that doesn’t already have a major league of its own might not have the fan base to support one. And yet, in its low-profile, slimmed-down, pioneer-spirit way, the Women’s Professional Soccer League seems like it might make it, Ken Belson reports in the New York Times.

* * *

“Here’s a sure bet,” the Boston Globe’s Stan Grossfeld writes. “No horse trained by Giuseppe Iadisernia ever will win the Kentucky Derby.” This can be said about many trainers, but Iadisernia — an Italian-born Seventh Day Adventist who refuses to race on Saturdays per his religion’s Sabbath — is actually a very successful Boston-area horse trainer who might someday have a shot at Churchill Downs… were the Derby not run on Saturdays. Instead, Grossfeld writes, Iadisernia will have to settle for being “the Sandy Koufax of horse racing.”

— Tip of the Fix cap to readers Don Hartline and Peter Segall.

Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfix@wsj.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.

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Is Joe Torre one of the best managers of all time?

Matthew Namee produced the rankings for Hardball Times, using numbers updated through earlier this season. His system rewards managers for the logical set of achievements: maximizing wins, minimizing losses, winning the World Series and the like. Changing the weights or criteria wouldn’t change the rankings much, according to Namee.

What the system fails to take into account is all of the factors that managers can’t control, most notably intrinsic player talent. McCarthy arrived when the Yankees already had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. And Torre benefited from the biggest payroll in baseball for every one of his 12 years at the helm of the Yankees (except 1998, when they ranked second). Since joining the Dodgers for the 2008 season, he’s fielded a roster with one of the 10 highest payrolls twice. (The Journal’s Darren Everson examined whether Torre was overpaid last year.) Such concerns explain why Chase Stuart, in a similar ranking of NFL coaches for Pro Football Reference’s blog, entitled his post, “Greatest Coaching Records of All Time.” (Don Shula ranks first, while Bill Belichick leads active coaches.)

While managers do play a role in developing talent, general managers deserve more of the credit or blame for team talent. They have very different resources when deciding whether to re-sign players or sign free agents, but the draft levels the playing field somewhat. On Baseball Analysts, Sky Andrecheck ranked 10 general managers who have substantial draft records, based on their success in selecting players who outperformed their expected value based on draft order. Of the 10, Oakland’s Billy Beane leads the pack, which should please Michael Lewis. Brian Sabean of the Giants is in last place, just behind Brian Cashman of the Yankees, who got Torre good talent on the free-agent market but less of it in drafts.

“Seldom, of course, does the Texan look anything but purposeful, at least when you stick him on a bike or put him in front of an audience waiting to listen to a pitch for his cancer charity,” the Guardian’s Richard Williams writes. “Today, however, there is a chance — not exactly odds-on, but certainly worth a punt — that he will pull on the yellow jersey for the first time since 2005. … Given his three-and-a-half-year retirement, and the fact that he is now 37, that would be an amazing achievement in itself. No one has won the Tour at his age. But if he gets a feel of the yellow tonight, it will be hard to prise it away from him before the race reaches Paris on 26 July.”

In the New York Times, Juliet Macur outlines some of the tricks cyclists will be using to beat the heat as the Tour winds towards its conclusion. Would you be surprised to find out that women’s knee-high nylons were involved?

The Journal has daily Tour updates, including video footage from Versus, in this interactive graphic.

* * *

Tim Wakefield is staring down his 43rd birthday and more or less never throws a baseball faster than 70 miles per hour. The veteran knuckleballer has been doing his flutterballing thing since 1992, but was chosen for his first All-Star on Game Sunday, thanks in large part to his 10 wins tying him for most in the American League. He’s the oldest first-time All-Star since Hall of Famer Satchel Paige in 1952, and while there are American League pitchers with better statistics, it’s hard to get too angry about Wakefield finally getting his due.

“There always has been an everyman quality to Wakefield’s presence in a major league locker room,” the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan writes. “That was on display during the past few weeks when he repeatedly violated an unwritten jock rule by admitting that, Hell yeah, I want to be in that All-Star Game. If he wasn’t overtly lusting for it, it was the next closest thing.”

Ryan’s approval is one thing, of course, but even ESPN’s amusingly no-B.S. sabermetrics-minded blogger Rob Neyer is on board with Wakefield’s All-Star nod, numbers (just this once) notwithstanding. “It’s pretty hard to argue that he’s been one of the dozen best starters in the league. Or two-dozen best,” Neyer allows. “All of which leaves me thoughtful but unwavering: I want to see Tim Wakefield pitch in the All-Star Game. He’s a good guy, and historically unique, and I’ve been avidly following the ups and downs of his career since he arrived in the majors 17 years ago. I think an All-Star Game that has room for Tim Wakefield is a better All-Star Game.”

* * *

More so than any sports league this side of the English Premier League, Formula One racing is a sport of moguls, with hugely rich men throwing huge amounts of money after glory and generally enjoying pretty impressive returns. It didn’t seem likely that a series of rule changes instituted by F1 regarding cars’ aerodynamics and famously fussed-over testing programs would make that much of a difference in F1’s culture or standings. But the impact of those rules is visible right there in the standings, where the name Ferrari — the first name in “very fast cars” for most people on the planet — is down in fourth place. “For a brand whose identity is built on racing supremacy, it is a moral imperative to get back on top,” the Journal’s Darren Everson writes. “Ferrari is the New York Yankees of F1, the team with the most titles, the most fans and the cockiest air about them.”

* * *

Late night sports-talk radio is a world away from the quasi-shock-jockery that rules the airwaves during the day, especially in the hands of WFAN’s Steve “Schmoozy” Somers. Somers, a cigarette-voiced throwback known for his free-associative monologues, is a great radio host with an equally great stable of loyal callers. Periodically one of these frenzied, only-in-New-York insomniacs gets a newspaper profile, and it’s always a blast to read, at least for your Fixer. (Here’s John Freeman Gill’s 2004 New York Times profile of Jerome Mittelman, a rabid Yankees fan whose call-in rants were preceded by the “Twilight Zone” theme on Somers’s show.) More recently, the New York Times’s Corey Kilgannon unraveled the mystery of why call-in fixture Short Al from Brooklyn stopped calling in. Long story, um, short — Albert “Short Al” Kaufman is alive and fairly well and living in Bensonhurst. Be sure to watch the video with the article if you want to hear what an industrial-strength Brooklyn accent sounds like.

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The myriad traumas that war visits on those who fight are no secret. The difficulty of working past that pain is a topic that has been the subject of numerous wrenching newspaper and magazine articles. Alan Goldenbach’s article in the Washington Post on a new wheelchair-basketball league at Walter Reed Army Medical Center isn’t one of those stories. Yes, the subtext is painful — each of the players Goldenbach writes about lost their legs in Afghanistan or Iraq. But the story itself is about veterans finding a way to be happy again. It’s hard not to feel good about how well the new wheelchair-hoops program is working in that regard. “Each of the 10 men on the court, none older than 26, has lost at least one limb in combat,” Goldenbach reports. “And many of them said no activity has provided better physical or emotional therapy than their time on the hardwood every Thursday.”

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Presumably it would be difficult to sail solo around the world without having a few remarkable adventures along the way. It may not be surprising that the tale of 16-year-old Zac Sunderland involves wild storms on the high seas, near-collisions with enormous ocean tankers, near-misses with pirates and visits to exotic, ultra-dangerous ports. Still, his story of nearly complete circumnavigation of the globe delivers the goods. In the Los Angeles Times, Pete Thomas offers all of the above, as well as a helpful travel tip: Don’t visit Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

— Tip of the Fix cap to readers Marc Bush and Don Hartline.

Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfix@wsj.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.

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All too often during the Federer era, Andy Roddick has looked this way at the trophy ceremony.

It’s a common theme in commentary about Federer and his dominant run of 15 Grand Slam singles titles in six years to note how many championships his top peers might have won if he weren’t a fixture at the top. After all, he has won 15 of the last 25 majors. In his Wall Street Journal diary of the Wimbledon final Sunday, won by Federer in five scintillating sets over Roddick, Tom Perrotta mused, “When a man becomes the greatest player of all time, there must be casualties, too.”

I tried quantifying Federer’s casualties in the four Grand Slam tournaments. To do so, I compiled the list of 29 other men ranked in the top 10 in the year-end rankings since Federer first ascended to that level at the end of 2002. To that list I added Tommy Haas and Robin Soderling, since each lost in the fourth round or later to Federer twice in the past month.

Then I checked each one’s head-to-head record against Federer in majors. For each loss to the 15-time Grand Slam champion, I made the simplistic assumption that, if he’d played against an alternative opponent rather than Federer, that player would have had a 50% chance of winning, and that he’d have the same chance of winning each remaining match in a Slam. By this model, a loss in the first round to Federer deprived a player of a 50% chance of reaching the second round. Since it would take winning six more matches from the second round on to win the title, that player was deprived of a one-in-128 shot at a Grand Slam. Similarly, a loss in the final to Federer cost half a Slam. Combined, these 31 players have lost 14.3 major titles as a direct result of losses to Federer, compared to 4.4 for the rest of the men’s tour (the total of Federer Slam costs is greater than 15 because he’s reached several finals and semifinals in tournaments he’s lost).

By that measure, Roddick has had the worst of the Federer era. He’s lost four finals, three semifinals and a quarterfinal to Federer, for a combined cost of 2.9 majors. Round up, and you could say that Roddick would be a four-time Grand Slam winner rather than hold just the 2003 U.S. Open title, if only a young Swiss boy had taken up soccer instead of tennis.

No one else comes close to that level; Perrotta was right when he wrote, “If there is one player who sums up the frustration of the Federer Era for every player not named Federer, it is Roddick.” Besides Roddick, only Lleyton Hewiit (cost of 1.25 Slams) and Rafael Nadal (one Slam) have lost as much as one major by this measure. And Nadal, of course, has given better than he’s taken in head-to-head matches with Federer — by beating him in five major finals and one semifinal, he’s cost his rival 2.75 Slams. So you could say Nadal has been to Federer as Federer has been to Roddick. (One measure of how much Nadal has frustrated him: In their seven major finals since the beginning of 2006, Federer has converted just 26% of his break points; in seven finals against other players, he’s converted 48%.)

Roddick’s tough luck at the hands of Federer reflects three factors: Roddick’s consistency in reaching the late stages of Slams (he’s reached 17 quarterfinals in his career); his poor record against Federer (2-19 and 0-8 in majors); and his bad luck in draws, which often pitted him in the same quarter or eighth with Federer. Nadal and Federer have avoided that possible fate by maintaining a stranglehold on the top two rankings over the last four years, during which time they’ve guaranteed themselves opposite halves of the draw and have only met in major finals. Roddick hasn’t been able to consistently hold on to a top-four ranking since early 2007, and even after his run to the Wimbledon final he’s a long way from No. 4 Novak Djokovic.

Federer’s victories in Paris and Wimbledon, meanwhile, have been aided by his avoidance of the other top-four players in both tournaments. Nadal’s early exit from Roland Garros and absence from Wimbledon have been much remarked upon as explanations for Federer’s pair of majors, but relatively early exits by Djokovic (who’s won his last two matches against Federer) and Murray (who’s won his last four) in each tournament helped, too. In fact, after two straight majors — last year’s U.S. Open and this year’s Australian Open — that each featured two matches between members of the Big Four, the last two haven’t featured any.

The level of mismatches Federer faced in the French Open and Wimbledon can best be expressed by his career head-to-head record against his opponents before their matches. Before the French Open, he was a combined 34-5 in his career against Roddick, Haas and Ivo Karlovic, winning a combined 82 of 104 sets. And those, remarkably, were the only three opponents to have won even a single match against him. His combined record against everyone else he faced in the last two Slams, before the French Open: 30-0, with a 66-3 edge in sets.

That isn’t meant to imply that Federer has been merely lucky. There’s more to tennis than head-to-head results among the best. The best players also have to beat some of the other players in each 128-man major. And in this category, no one can touch Federer’s record. He’s won his last 119 Grand Slam matches against players ranked outside the top five.

Federer has maintained his consistency and fitness while changing his game. The serve has become a more important weapon in his arsenal. Every year going back to 2006 — as far as I checked — his percentage of service points won with aces has gone up at both the French Open and at Wimbledon. Those respective percentages were 6% and 11.9% in 2006; they were 10.4% and 17.1% this year, including a remarkable 25% of his 197 service points against Roddick on Sunday.

Federer, holding that weapon, probably didn’t benefit as much as the NBC announcers would have you believe from a supposed advantage in the deciding fifth set: the serve in the first game. The theory goes that in matches without a fifth-set tiebreaker, the first server in the fifth set holds the edge because he can win by breaking his opponent without having to follow that up with a service hold in the next game. That’s how it went Sunday. But a year earlier, Nadal’s break in the 15th game of the fifth set held up on his next game, in which he served out the match. Overall, in the scanty history of the six such matches in Grand Slam finals in the Open era — it’s a historical anomaly and a treat for fans that the last two Wimbledon men’s finals went to extra time — three times the first server in the fifth set won the match, and three times he lost. Only Federer has played in two such major finals in this era. Serving first worked out much better for him this time.

Roddick, a serious underdog, delivered what commentator John McEnroe called “the match of his life,” only to see his best fall short against the peerless Federer, who won his record 15th Slam (a day after Serena Williams won her 11th in more-routine, and therefore less-chronicled, fashion over her sister Venus).

“Here was a tragic hero like none before at Wimbledon,” Filip Bondy writes of Roddick in the New York Daily News, “because there had never been a final like this one.” There was a measure of redemption in Roddick’s defeat, too, Harvey Araton notes in the New York Times. “Once upon a time, Roddick was supposed to be for Federer what Rafael Nadal became, nemesis and measuring stick,” Araton writes. “No one has played more matches on tour against Federer than Roddick. The record is now 19 wins for Federer, 2 for Roddick. But in their fourth Grand Slam final, third at Wimbledon, Roddick finally attached himself to Federer as an opponent to remember.”

Federer, for his part, may have secured that “greatest ever” title at last. That he did it in a display of his uniquely understated brilliance seems appropriate to Simon Barnes of the London Times. “There are all kinds of ways of being a champion,” Barnes writes. “The least sexy, and perhaps the hardest, is simply to stand your ground, simply to outlast the other bugger, simply not to fold and never to compromise… somebody always does break. You know it, both players know it. And Federer simply wasn’t prepared for it to be him.”

Federer’s focus seems even more amazing considering his very pregnant wife Mirka, who watched from the stands, James Lawton notes in The Independent.

In the end, while the result obviously mattered greatly to the men in the match, fans were blessed with that sort of Zen falling-away of rooting interests that happens during athletic duels of this caliber — the knowledge that whomever wins is at least really going to deserve it. “We watched in agony, hearts heavy and sad as Andy Roddick bowed his head after that final miss,” Kurt Streeter writes in the Los Angeles Times. “We watched in joy, marveling at a beautiful performance from the greatest men’s champion of all time, a man who has delivered the sublime and supreme for so long it is now hard to remember life without Roger Federer. For tennis fans, for sports fans, for fans of drama, skill and guts, what great luck.”

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In all the ways and for all the reasons that sports fans project their aspirations and ideals onto athletes, Steve McNair made a great hero. His small-town roots, wide-ranging charitable work and approachable, good-guy rep and unsurpassed ability to play through pain are all the stuff of football mythos. McNair’s shocking murder — he was found alongside the body of a 20-year-old he had been dating — has complicated that heroic narrative considerably. McNair was a married father of four.

“Just because you lead fourth-quarter touchdown drives at Pittsburgh, that doesn’t mean the rest of your life is governed by perfect decisions and on-target reactions. It’s fine to admire what these people do in the heat of athletic competition; it’s unwise to expect them to be infallible once off the field,” the Tennessean’s David Climer writes in USA Today. “This is the lesson we must learn as a pro sports city. Our heroes have many layers.”

Climer has headed up the Tennessean’s saturation coverage of McNair’s murder, and also wrote the paper’s definitive local-reaction piece, which quotes everyone from Tennessee’s governor and Nashville’s mayor to people in Kroger parking lots. And yet for all those words, this story clearly has a few untold sad turns that will no doubt impact how McNair is remembered.

In the Baltimore Sun, Mike Preston remembers the past-his-prime McNair who finished his career with the Ravens as that franchise’s first true quarterback. The Tennessean’s Jim Wyatt delivers a hurts-just-to-read cataloguing of the injuries McNair played through. In Sports Illustrated, John P. Lopez focuses on McNair’s uniquely magnetic leadership ability. And in the Miami Herald, David J. Neal argues that McNair’s newly public transgressions reveal him as nothing more than a human being.

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The wordplay. Oh, dear lord, the wordplay on display in coverage of Saturday’s Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest. “Relishes” his victory. “Fire in his belly.” Look, it’s obviously very impressive that Joey Chestnut ate 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes at the event, and perhaps more impressive that he managed that record-breaking feat while squaring off against archrival and pantheon gurgitator Takeru Kobayashi. And one could argue that it’s a good thing that we as a nation have not yet figured out how to talk about professional binge-eating in a serious way. But put away the pun-stick, guys.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Craig Newman goes a different route, offering a brief (and mercifully understated) paean to Chestnut’s unique virtuosity and a ton of videos of the master at work. Those videos are either stunning or nauseating, depending on how the viewer feels about watching someone drink a gallon of milk in 41 seconds.

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The return of Manny Ramirez to the Dodgers lineup last weekend after his 50-game performance-enhancing-drug suspension highlighted an interesting schism between the sports commentariat and sports fans. Dodgers fans, both those wearing Manny wigs and those with a little aesthetic self-respect, are happy to have their slugger back, of course. But while Ramirez will doubtless hear his share of boos and catcalls on the Dodgers’ ongoing road trip, things seem a bit more muted for him than they were for, say, Barry Bonds. Sports pundits are still scrambling to claim the high ground in high dudgeon, with CBS Sports Scott Miller taking an early lead. “That Manny Ramirez* is returning largely to a hero’s welcome [is] despicable,” Miller fumes. “Absolutely, positively, downright despicable.” (Yes, that asterisk is Miller’s.)

But could it be that fans really just don’t care as much, about Manny or about steroids in general? While sportswriters mourn that this seems to be the case, the Los Angeles Times’s Baxter Holmes took in the scene in San Diego for Manny’s return and discovered a somewhat more complicated reality.

— Tip of the Fix cap to reader Don Hartline and to fellow Fixer Garey Ris.

Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfix@wsj.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.