Factoid of the Week That May Interest Only Me

In a truly meaningless but somehow fascinating factoid, I've discovered perhaps the one non-media-member, non-baseball-employee who was at both the Hank Aaron 715th home run game in Atlanta, April 8, 1974, and the Barry Bonds 756th home run game in San Francisco, Aug. 7, 2007.

Harris Barton.

Remember him? Guard on the great 49er teams. Good pal of Steve Young. Very, very smart guy.

"I was 10 years old, growing up in Atlanta, and it was a huge deal when Hank got close,'' he said. "I sat out in right field that night. I remember it well. For Barry's homer, I was right behind the Giants' on-deck circle. You think I was the only one at both games?''

I doubt it. But if anyone out there knows anyone else who was at both, I'd love to know.

Stat of the Week I

This got little attention at the end of last season, and I'm not sure why. But with the regular season just three days away, it bears repeating.

NFL officials, wisely, got more judicious with the flags last year, as this chart suggests:

My take: The ticky-tack calls went way down because of the way officials were graded by the league. And the league wanted less insignificant calls, like the hand-motion false-start calls on a wideout eight yards away from the tackle.

Stat of the Week II

Tony Dungy's book, Quiet Strength, is turning into a surprising story in the book world. It enters its eighth printing this week, which means that 480,000 books will have been printed. It's the most popular sports book since Seabiscuit in 2001.

Here's the stat I like most about this book. It has confirmed sales of just under 250,000 today. That's 86,000 more books sold than the recent coaching biographies of Lou Holtz, Charlie Weis, Jon Gruden and Marv Levy.

Quiet Strength has now sold twice as many books as David Halberstam's 2005 book on Bill Belichick.

It's really rather amazing.

Enjoyable/Aggravating Travel Note of the Week

Not mine. Fellow SI writer Tim Layden's.

Layden, SI's do-it-all football-track-horse racing aficionado, covered the world track and field championships in Japan last week. On Friday morning in Osaka (Thursday afternoon in New York), Layden walked into his room at the Granvia Hotel after a late night at the stadium, flipped on the TV and found the Red Sox-Yankees game, in the fourth inning, live on the YES Network. Dubbed in Japanese.

Via IM, Tim and I agreed J.D. Drew looks just as bad on Japanese television sets as he does on American.

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