Charles Fischer

7-2 Ducks after five innings. Nothing on offense, but Will Sanford came back in! He gave up a double, but on his 100th pitch...got a strikeout!

7-2 Ducks after four innings. Nothing on offense this inning, and Sanford had real control issues. He walked two batters, plinked another and then walked in a run. He is up to 75 pitches in four innings, so I expect he is done for the day. Gave up his first two earned runs of the year.

7-1 Ducks after three innings! Dominic Hellman blasts a single away from the shift, and then Maddox Molony got a bloop single behind second base. A passed ball moves both runners up, and then the Boilermakers passed Drew Smith to first base. Gabe Miranda walks to score a run, and then Burke-Lee Mabeus hit a GRAND SLAM over the RF fence on a low-to-high swing timed perfectly!

2-1 Ducks after two innings. You have to pardon me...I got behind because I was making my brunch as the game began. Jax Gimenez walks, and Dominic Hellman got an error-double as the center fielder dropped the fly on the run to score Gimenez. Will Sanford put them down easily to finish the first inning. In the second inning, we saw Drew Smith zing a base hit down the 3rd baseline, and then Jack Brooks scorched a hit up the middle to score Smith. Will Sanford began having control issues as he walked two batters, gave up a hit, and a sac-fly scored a run for Purdue.

I prefer..."Old Mountain-West."

Boy...this shoots the hell out of my day! Welcome to Big-10 Baseball Charles, because when they start their games at 4:00 PM...it is just after lunch for us. Purdue is where Coach Waz coached for a few years, so not only does he know Big-10 ballparks well, but he knows this one superbly. Surprisingly...Purdue is a decent team, a team that could beat us if we don't play (or pitch) our best. The Boilermakers are 8-3 as they swept Marist, won a series with Portland, barely lost to No. 11 Southern Miss 5-4 and beat Beavis in a tournament, 5-2. So come ready to play, as their pitcher, Cole Van Assen has an ERA of 4.16 (respectably good) and we counter with our ace, Will Sanford. (ERA of 0.00) Purdue has some really tough relievers, and some others that don't look so hot. I imagine to take a game off of us--they will throw the best relievers at us in the first game? Saturday's game is at 11:00 AM PST, and Sunday at 9:00 AM PST? (Charles...get used to it!) Will Sanford

Really, really good points, and the 13 day layoff answers my concerns about a layoff. 13 is not the 28 days of the past two years....

He borrowed $50 from his father. Sold shoes out of the trunk of his car. Got dropped by two banks. Got sued by his own supplier. Got hit with a $25 million government bill he couldn't pay. Today his company is worth $100 billion. And you've definitely got a pair of his shoes in your closet. Philip Knight was born in 1938 in Portland, Oregon. His father ran a newspaper. When Phil asked him for a summer job his father said no. Go find your own work. So Phil ran seven miles every morning to the rival newspaper. Got himself hired. That was Phil Knight at 18. Already refusing to accept no as a final answer. He ran track at the University of Oregon under a legendary coach named Bill Bowerman. Bowerman was obsessed with one thing. Making shoes lighter. He believed that every ounce you removed from a runner's shoe was like removing a pound of weight from their body over the course of a race. He would cut apart his runners' shoes and rebuild them by hand. Looking for fractions of ounces. Phil watched and filed it away. He went to Stanford Business School. In a class about small businesses he wrote a paper that would change his life. The paper asked one question. Could Japanese shoe manufacturers do to German shoe manufacturers what Japanese camera makers had done to German camera makers? In other words — could cheaper, high quality Japanese production destroy the German stranglehold on the athletic shoe market? Adidas owned the world in 1962. Phil Knight wrote a paper in a classroom saying they didn't have to. Then he decided to prove it. He borrowed $50 from his father. Flew to Japan. Walked into the Onitsuka Tiger shoe factory. Told them he represented a major American distribution company. He had no company. He had $50 and an idea. The Japanese executives asked what his company was called. Phil Knight looked around the room desperately. And said the first thing that came to his mind. Blue Ribbon Sports. They shook hands on a deal. Blue Ribbon Sports didn't exist an hour ago. Now it had exclusive rights to sell Japanese Tiger shoes across the entire United States. He came home and started selling shoes out of the trunk of his green Plymouth Valiant at track meets across the Pacific Northwest. Just Phil. His car. And a box of shoes. Sales were $8,000 in year one. Then $16,000. Then $34,000. Then $84,000. Doubling every single year. But banks wouldn't lend him money. Every time sales doubled Phil needed more inventory. More inventory meant more cash. And the banks kept saying no. Two banks dropped him as a customer entirely. He was perpetually on the edge of collapse. Payroll would come due with nothing in the account. Suppliers threatening to cut him off. He described those years as operating in a constant state of near death. One wrong move away from bankruptcy. Every. Single. Day. For eighteen years. Then Onitsuka Tiger tried to replace him. They had watched Blue Ribbon grow from nothing to a serious operation and decided they wanted a bigger American distributor. They were going to cut Phil out of the business he had built from $50 and a trunk full of shoes. Phil Knight could have accepted it. He had no money to fight back. No manufacturer. No brand. No leverage. He had nothing. So he did something that should have been impossible. He started his own shoe company. From scratch. He needed a logo. He paid a graphic design student named Carolyn Davidson $35 to design it. She came back with a simple curved shape. Phil looked at it and said he didn't love it. But he didn't have time to find anything better. The swoosh was born. For $35. Today that logo is worth billions of dollars. He needed a name. His first employee Jeff Johnson woke up from a dream one night with one word in his head. Nike. The Greek goddess of victory. Phil didn't love that either. But again — no time. Nike it was. In 1972 Nike launched at the US Olympic Trials. Phil announced that four of the top seven finishers had worn Nikes. The first three had actually worn Adidas. Phil Knight didn't care. He was building a story. And nobody builds a story by telling people you came third. Then the US government came for him. A letter arrived demanding Nike pay $25 million in import duties. Twenty five million dollars. Nike didn't have $25 million. Nike barely had enough to make payroll. The government claimed Nike owed taxes on every shoe manufactured outside America. The fight nearly killed the company. Three years of legal battles. Three years of not knowing if everything he had built would be seized by his own government. They settled for $9 million. Phil called it an absolute war. He survived it. Then came Michael Jordan. In 1984 a Nike executive pushed Phil to sign a rookie NBA player to an endorsement deal. Phil wasn't interested in basketball. Nike was a running shoe company. He reluctantly agreed to meet the rookie. His name was Michael Jordan. Nike signed him for $500,000 a year plus royalties. Unheard of money for a rookie who had never played an NBA game. The NBA banned the original Air Jordans immediately. Said they violated uniform color rules. Nike paid Jordan's $5,000 per game fine every single time he wore them. And turned the ban into the greatest marketing campaign in sports history. The shoes that were too dangerous for the NBA. Every kid on every playground in America had to have them. Air Jordan generated $126 million in its first year. Today the Jordan brand alone generates over $5 billion annually. From one reluctant meeting with a rookie basketball player. Phil Knight took Nike public in 1980. On that day he was worth $178 million. His first employee was worth $6 million. Today Nike is worth over $100 billion. The most recognized sports brand on the face of the earth. Built by a man who borrowed $50 from his father. Who made up a company name on the spot in a Japanese boardroom. Who paid $35 for the most valuable logo in sports history. Who operated on the edge of bankruptcy for eighteen straight years. Who got sued by his supplier, dropped by his banks and hunted by his own government. And refused to quit through every single moment of it. The swoosh on your shoes right now started in the trunk of a green Plymouth Valiant at a track meet in Oregon. Sold by one man with $50 and an obsession. Just do it wasn't just a slogan. It was the only strategy that ever worked.

Hey George, Nice to chat with you, and yes...it is a slow off-season, so analysis videos like these are interesting about our Oregon players preparing for the NFL Draft. Our thanks.

I don’t like byes…as the team that is supposed to be given an advantage suffers the reverse. Sixteen or thirty-two…no byes!

Ducks lose 10-6. So many gifts by the pitchers...seven walks and four plinked batters. Eleven bases given without even hitting the ball?

10-6 Beavis after eight innings. I admit...I was not watching closely at all--I have a hard time when we're getting our butts kicked. But we got some runners and a grounder scored one, and Angel Laya hit a triple off the wall to score another. That guy is quite the athlete...fast!

10-3 Beavis after seven innings. So we gave freshman pitcher Shane Johnson a shot. Whoops! This must be like how Beavis feels in football Civil Wars?

7-3 Beavis after six innings. We change pitchers to freshman Josh Hollis, but not much changed for Oregon. Drew Smith walked and the Angel Laya nailed a low pitch and put it over the CF fense to score two!

5-1 Beavis after five innings. Michael Meckna just gave up his first earned runs of the year. Too many of them... Oregon offense is stagnant.