Summer of weird

Sausage-gate, Cinderella stories and bovine beauties

These are supposed to be the dog days, when baseball settles into a humid haze before the pennant race begins in earnest. It's a time when the biggest sporting events are on the other side of The Pond, when local sports pages are heavy on women's league golf and legion baseball.

But look beneath the surface and there's a certain element of weird perculating this summer.

It's not a question of why you would take a swing at an eight-foot sausage ... but why not. Jonathon Daniel/Getty Images

I mean, how many times can I watch those sausages tumble over each other before I stop tittering like Beavis on a Mountain Dew high? How many times can I read Bud Selig's heavy-hearted apology to the "victims" before I stop wondering if he isn't some alien pod devoid of a human's ability to reason?

Randall Simon's swipe at the sausage was so clearly a playful –- though ill-advised -– gesture. Yet he was led off in handcuffs and treated like Al Capone by local prosecutors. This in the hometown of Jeffrey Dahmer.

When Brewers executive Rick Schlesinger says it was "an insane act of a person whose conduct is unjustifiable" and "one of the most despicable things I've seen in a ballpark in a long time," you have to wonder what kind of Rockwell painting this guy's living in.

Thank goodness for 19-year-old Mandy Block, the schnitzel in distress, who countered Selig and Schlesinger's hand-wringing with a giggle, stating: "I'm just a sausage running in a race."

Aren't we all ... aren't we all.

Meanwhile, in Roswell, New Mexico …

For a town that has spent 56 years trying to prove an alien crash landing and subsequent government cover-up, you'd think they'd have a sense of humor.

But in a Jayson Blair world, editors at the Roswell (N.M.) Daily Record took the ax to sports editor Gregory M. Jones last month when he inexplicably decided to quote groundskeeper Carl Spangler in a story about a local Father's Day golf tournament.

Jones quoted Spangler as saying, "This is a hybrid . . . of bluegrass, Kentucky bluegrass, featherbed bent and northern California sensemilia [sic]. The amazing stuff about this, is that you can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon, take it home and just get stoned to the bejeezus-belt that night on the stuff."

Silly? Yes. Poor judgment? Completely. Fireable offense? Only if you're looking for a reason to fire the guy. Daily Record editor Mike Bush would not comment on Jones' employment history, saying only that fabricating quotes "would have been reason for terminating anybody. Nowhere in the story did he present the quotes as being from a movie."

Back in the good in old days, NOT being able to quote Caddyshack verbatim was grounds for dismissal. It's like the whole world has been turned upside down. It's every American male's God-given right to quote Caddyshack wherever and whenever applicable.

What's really baffling is how a reference to a drunken groundskeeper growing dope on the course doesn't raise a few red flags somewhere within the newsroom. The Daily Record should have axed its whole staff on the premise that nobody was apparently reading the paper as it was being produced that night. Bush would not say who, if anybody, had edited Jones' story, stating: "[Jones] was the sports editor and responsible for his own copy."

You know, you hire a 24-year-old to be your sports editor and you're going to get a 24-year-old's mistakes. That a paper would be so quick to just terminate the relationship instead of mentoring its own protégé is disheartening.

As construction maven Al Czervik once said, "Now I know why tigers eat their young."

And finally, from Gstaad, Switzerland …

Mama always told me to never look a gift cow in the mouth, but could you blame Roger Federer for looking a little bewildered when organizers of the Swiss Open actually gave him a bovine named Juliette last week?

Who knew Monty Hall was a member of the Swiss tennis federation? (Cue mocking game show sound effect: Wah-Wah-Waaaahhhh!)

It is the East and Juliette is the ... cow?

The cow was a not-so-small token of affection for Federer in the wake of his Wimbledon championship. Now, what a 22-year-old globetrotting bachelor does with a cow is a mystery, but I suppose it's the thought that counts. Of course, giving somebody a cow seems less like a "thank you" than a "screw you" to my passive-aggressive way of thinking.

When I was a kid, a relative once showed up at my birthday party bearing a puppy as a gift. An unauthorized puppy. Pepper was received with mixed reviews -- glowing from those of us who didn't have expensive rugs in the house, less so from those of us who did. Pepper vanished mysteriously one day from Casa de Vecsey, the story of her quiet exodus never competently explained to me. I've heard rumors that she landed on a farm upstate, where she would have plenty of room to run.

It sounds like that's that Federer has planned for Juliette, saying he thought she would better off with the rest of the Von Trapps atop an Alp somewhere instead of sleeping on his couch. He promises to write and visit once in a while … and Juliette is definitely invited to his Confederation Day barbecue on August 1.

In fact, she could be the guest of honor.

David Vecsey's Voice of Reason column appears weekly on SI.com.

 

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