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Grading The Week: Welcome to Denver, Cal Quantrill! You’ll love life with the Rockies. Except for the pitching parts

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

What the chucklenuts up in the Grading The Week office love about Bill Schmidt’s Rockies moves is the club’s ability — or is it the hope? — to see the good in anything. Take Cal Quantrill, who must’ve seriously ticked off somebody in the Cleveland front office to wind up getting shipped to Colorado on Friday for an A-ball catcher.As a lottery ticket, was it worth a flyer for the pitching-starved Purple? Sure. Schmidt and the Rockies can sell this as giving up almost nada for a smart (ex-Stanford), courteous (he’s Canadian) veteran (he’ll be 29 next February) starter to fill out a rotation that got completely nuked by injuries last summer.“Quan” went 23-8 and averaged 168 innings for the Guardians in ’21 and ’22 before hitting the skids (4-7, 5.24 ERA) this past season. On a macro level, it fits.Rox brain trust see a crafty righty who’ll take the ball every five days and allow the dudes in the bullpen to play Immaculate Grid...

Should Nuggets’ Michael Malone shorten bench, approach must-win in-season tournament games like playoffs?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

NEW ORLEANS — One of the Nuggets’ coaches brought a hypothetical question of strategy to Michael Malone on Friday, before Denver’s third group stage game of the NBA in-season tournament.If the Nuggets make it to the eight-team knockout stage, when every game is an elimination game, should they shorten their bench and treat it like an actual playoff game?Will other teams treat it that way? Or will those games be coached as normally as possible for an early December matchup?“I’m worried about today. When we get to Vegas, I’ll worry about that then,” Malone said a few hours later when presented with the same question during his pregame news conference in New Orleans.“But I had not given that much thought. Obviously if we’re one of those (semifinal) teams that gets to Las Vegas, you can start thinking about, one: What’s at stake? From prize money for the players and how impactful that can be for some of these guys and their liv...

Broncos sense Sean Payton Way is starting to take hold. “You’re like, Holy (crap), it’s working”

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

Adam Trautman has seen this movie before.The Broncos tight end started his career in New Orleans playing for Sean Payton. His rookie year in 2020, they went 12-4 and secured the NFC’s No. 2 seed.Payton is an intense coach by nature. Start winning, his reputation goes, and there’s no sense of a lighten up. He only gets more demanding. Like several of his core coaching principles, this one comes from the years he spent with Bill Parcells.“The hardest time working with Bill was when you were three or four wins in a row,” Payton said earlier this season. “I mean, you couldn’t wait for the game. You’d have a couple tough losses, and then he’d be a little bit more pick-me-up.”Payton’s wired himself in a similar way. He’s pulled big stunts in the past, “creating a crisis,” as he calls it, or putting mousetraps in the Saints’ locker room to implore his team not to “eat the cheese.”The methods can be slightly more subtle, too.“It’s little things like, ‘Hey, I don’t care that we’re winn...

Keeler: Deion Sanders, CU Buffs, please shut QB Shedeur Sanders down. Before Utah Utes finish what Wazzu started.

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

Utah is CU’s bowl game now. And there’s no reason for Shedeur Sanders to play in it.Hold on. Hold on. We don’t quit.There’s a time and a place for macho, Coach Prime.And Salt Lake City next Saturday ain’t it.We’ve seen enough.More than enough. Washington State came into Punishment On The Palouse with the Pac-12’s third-worst pass rush. The Cougars had racked up just 17 sacks over their previous 10 games.They’d piled up four in the game’s first 12 minutes, setting the tone for a 56-14 blowout with an iron fist. They’d knocked out the younger Sanders, CU’s QB1, five minutes into the second quarter.Wazzu’s defensive line? Nice bunch.The Utes’ defensive front? Straight nasty.Utah heads into the weekend averaging almost twice as many sacks per game (three) as the Cougs did before they ran over, around, and through the CU pocket in a 56-14 beatdown. Utes defensive end Jonah Elliss, son of former NFL great Luther...

Opinion: Reclaim our children’s birthright — skiing at Colorado’s mountain resorts

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

Over the entirety of my career as a teacher, primarily in Colorado, the most fun I had by far was teaching kids how to ski. Whether the youngster was a temporary resident of a homeless shelter, a recent immigrant from tropical Honduras, or a special education student whose classroom learning curve was jagged, the response was nearly universally positive and, critically, the timeline for success was usually immediate.My vehicle to do this was a small youth-oriented program of the Sierra Club called Inner City Outings (ICO), which assumed the lion’s share of the liability risk and helped shoulder the costs of transportation.The lure of the mountains was so strong that even kids who, for whatever reason, had no interest in learning to ski would ask to participate in the experience anyway, to hang out and imbibe the atmosphere. Necessarily, we cut expenses by providing instruction ourselves and never turned down the services of the occasional youngster who had skied before and was...

Mathews: How Schwarzenegger recall victory 20 years ago affects today

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

Friday marked the 20th anniversary of Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California, after the recall of former Gov. Gray Davis.For much of the last two decades, the recall has been remembered mostly as a bizarre media circus, with 135 candidates, a hurried 60-day campaign, and a debate featuring Schwarzenegger and Arianna Huffington trading insults.This is a shame, because that strange, cataclysmic event shifted California’s political priorities and offers important lessons that might provide some much-needed hope about our power to change the future.In retrospect, the Davis recall looks like the first of three election earthquakes in the 21st century that shook up American politics. The other two are the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016.For Americans, the recall election, with all its bombast, would preview how politics would grow louder, more populist, more direct. And for Californians, the recall was something more: the beginning of a new era in...

Bernstein: The Biden campaign should pivot to marijuana legalization

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

As President Joe Biden looks to boost his reelection campaign and lousy poll numbers, there’s one policy position that is popular with voters, could help unite Democrats and would leave Republicans scrambling to respond. It’s time he comes out in support of legalizing recreational use of marijuana.There’s even a ready-made playbook for rolling out the new position. In 2012, then-Vice President Biden provided the initial public push that helped President Barack Obama off the fence on the issue of marriage equality — whose views changed and evolved over two decades, like much of America.Now, it’s Biden stuck straddling the middle when his party and public opinion have already decided the issue. According to the latest Gallup poll earlier this month 70% of Americans think the use of marijuana should be legal. At the same time, 24 states have moved forward on their own and legalized recreational use, the latest being Ohio, where voters approved a ballot measure last week. Accordin...

First planeload of wounded Palestinian children from Israel-Hamas arrives in United Arab Emirates

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The first planeload of Palestinian children wounded in the Israel-Hamas war raging in the Gaza Strip reached the United Arab Emirates on Saturday, part of a pledged relief effort by the country to aid 1,000 children. The group of 15 people, including children and their family members, made it across the Gaza Strip’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt on Friday. They then took a flight to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the Emirates.Young children lay asleep on their moms’ laps as the plane finally landed at Abu Dhabi International Airport. Some of the seats of the plane were removed to make room for the most critically wounded children, who needed to lie on stretchers. Some of the young had bandaged arms and legs. Others sat quietly next to their parents or relatives. Some traveled alone. The mood was somber and quiet inside the plane. Many of the mothers said they were exhausted.Twelve-year-old Amr Jandieh, his eyes welling up with tears, ...

SpaceX intenta el segundo lanzamiento de Starship, el cohete más potente jamás construido

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

(CNN) — Este sábado, SpaceX intentará el segundo lanzamiento de Starship, el vehículo de lanzamiento más potente jamás construido.Tras meses de reconstrucción y cumplir con trámites regulatorios después de la explosión en abril del primer vuelo de prueba del sistema Starship, SpaceX está preparada para su próximo lanzamiento.Se espera que el megacohete, el vehículo de lanzamiento más potente jamás construido, despegue este sábado entre las 7:00 y las 9:00 de la mañana, hora local (8:00-10:00, hora de Miami), con la esperanza de que la exploración humana de la Luna y Marte dependa de su éxito.La nave espacial Starship apilada sobre el cohete Super Heavy está destinada a desempeñar un papel clave en la misión lunar Artemis III de la NASA, prevista actualmente para 2025. El resultado del intento de lanzamiento podría tener un gran impacto en los objetivos de exploración lunar de la agencia espacial estadounidense.¿Dónde ver el lanzamiento en vivo del cohete Starship?SpaceX transm...

Cricket-mad India readies for World Cup final against Australia in 132,000-seat venue

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:56:26 GMT

AHMEDEBAD, India (AP) — India, a country of 1.4 billion people, will come to a virtual standstill on Sunday when its cricket team led by Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli takes on five-time champion Australia in the Cricket World Cup final.It will be played at Narendra Modi Stadium, the world’s largest cricket venue with a seating capacity of 132,000. It was commissioned in 2015 and built with the purpose of hosting the tournament final eight years later. In the process it will likely set a world cricket attendance record.From Chennai to Dharamsala and Mumbai to Kolkata, India has played in front of partisan crowds during the six-week tournament. The home side has channeled that weight of expectations and pressure to win 10 consecutive games — the only unbeaten team.“We know it’s going to be a packed house,” said Australia captain Pat Cummins. “There’s going to be 130,000 fans here supporting India. So it’s going to be awesome. You have got to embrace it. The crowd will be very one sided...