Focus Stacking, final thoughts

In the past few days, I made a decision on a focus stacking program for macro photography, replacing the function within Photoshop with a separate program called Zerene Stacker. Here is why I decided that decision was necessary. The first image shows Photoshop's attempt at stacking 12 images of a little succulent that is only 1/4" across. The second image highlights four problem areas where Photoshop couldn't find the proper focus. There are at least four other problem areas that I did not highlight. The final image is Zerene's attempt. Although there are retouching functions within Zerene, I did not use them. All I did to the image was run it through Photoshop's Raw Filter to adjust color and contrast, which I do with every image that I post. In my opinion, the difference is astounding.

One deficiency of Zerene compared to the other programs I tried is it does not work directly with CR3 (RAW) files. To process 16-bit (rather than 8-bit JPG) the CR3 has to be converted to TIF. My Photoshop subscription includes both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom, and Zerene Prosumer edition has a plugin for Lightroom Classic that converts CR3 on the fly. But I HATE the Lightrooms! I have been doing my own image file management for 25 years and their system is overly restrictive compared to the way I'm used to. I don't need batch processing, I can find old files that I am looking for quickly enough, and my system doesn't crash every couple of days. Maybe if I had been using them all along I would think differently, but I have tried the Lightrooms and I HATE them.

I use a different, less intrusive Adobe product to convert from CR3 to 16-bit TIF, Adobe Bridge. Then I import the TIF files into Zerene, run both stacking methods (PMax and DMap), and decide which image is better. There is a retouching function within Zerene to handle stubborn halos. I played around with it yesterday, but I didn't see the need to use it on any of the images I did today. PMax is usually (but not always) either better or the same as DMap for the types of images I feed into them.

Even though I have no interest in using the Lightroom plugin, I plan on getting the Prosumer edition for metadata preservation. There also are a number of other functions that I haven't explored yet but may find useful. Maybe I do have some hot pixels and a mask would help with the trailing that I've seen on some images. As I investigate this, I see the amount of effort some photographers go to for extreme closeup images of insects, for example. All I want is images of my little plants with the metadata.

Photoshop is a powerful program, but a lot of niche programs exist to address deficiencies within Photoshop. Another one that I use is StarStaX, which stacks nighttime images for star trails. Unlike focus stacking, Photoshop does an adequate job of star stacking, but it is just so SLOW that it is easier to use StarStaX. Other examples are PTGui (panoramas), Luminar Neo (sky relacement and portrait enhancement), Krita (for digital artists), and Rebelle 8 (painting). Someone sees a niche and fills it, that's what innovation and free enterprise look like.

Focus stacking

In photography, focus stacking seems like such a simple concept. You take multiple images of the same scene with different focus points and use software to combine the in-focus parts of the stack of images. With an object against a distant background it works great.

But with multiple objects close together and partially covering each other like the leaves of a plant, there is a basic dilemna. The image of a leaf covers a bigger part of the camera's sensor when it is blurred than when it is in sharp focus. As the camera progresses through the focus points, the front leaves become out of focus and their fuzzy edges partially cover the leaves behind them that you want to be in focus. None of the images in the stack can show the back leaves entirely in focus because of this fuzzy blob, and the stacking programs aren't smart enough (yet) to get around this. The result is a halo around the front leaves and lack of detail it the back leaves.

I've been running into this situation when processing focus-stacked images of little plants in Photoshop for my greenhouse blog. Newer cameras have a function built in to acquire the stack of images; older cameras you need to select the focus points manually. After some internet research I found five practical ways to do focus stacking with my particular setup, which is a Canon R5 Mark II camera (Canon's flagship) with a 100mm RF macro lens.

• Photoshop (my current method)
• Canon in-camera, Depth Compositing
• Digital Photo Professional (DPP) program from Canon, Depth Compositing
• Zerene Stacker program
• Helicon Focus program

My macro subjects lately have been succulent plant acquisitions. I want good images of them to see how they are growing and changing over time, and to post on my blog and web site. I usually shoot the images on our kitchen counter with the black granite as a background. Typically I use settings of AV mode at f/8, ISO 100, exposure time set by the camera. I usually don't use any supplemental light, so exposures are several seconds and a tripod is mandatory. If anyone happens to read this and they are wondering "Why don't you...?" then they can do their own testing. This is not an impartial review; it is the process I used to figure out which method works best for me. This is real world testing for me and I don't know or care what anyone else's needs are, so do your own testing and make your own decision. Zerene and Helicon both have 31-day trial programs, DPP comes included with Canon cameras, and I'm guessing Nikon and Sony have something similar to DPP. The first two subjects are:

• An Echeveria Neon Breakers. I figured the overlapping leaves and crinkly edges would provide a real challenge. I shot 48 exposures with focus steps of 2.
• A Powder Puff cactus (high contrast) with a little flower (low contrast). Photoshop chokes on the flower, I think because of the difference in contrast. I shot 18 exposures with focus steps of 3.

The focus steps are the amount of change the camera lens does between images as it moves focus from near to far. A lower number means the images are closer together in focus, and a higher number potentially means there would be bands of the image that are out of focus. I usually set it at 3 or 4, but for really small macro subject 1 or might be more appropriate.

The in-camera method is quickest because it produces an image immediately. But even with my highly-advanced Canon, the output is only JPG. Also, there is no opportunity to select which images to use. All of the images in the stack are included so you have to guess how many you need. In the first test image, there was extensive haloing around the Neon Breakers leaves. After going through the images one-by-one it was apparent that 48 was WAY too many. Fourteen was the right number, omitting the first image (the front of the pot) and the last 33 (the background). One reason I like to shoot JPG along with CR3 RAW files is I can more easily flip through the JPGs to see which frames to include.

DPP took 21 minutes to process the 48 images of Neon Breakers. I would call the result identical to the in-camera processing, which makes sense since they both use Canon algorithms. Reducing the stack to the 14 images that were actually needed, processing time was cut to six minutes and eliminated the worst of the haloing. There is no haloing around the back leaves with a distant background, but still some around front leaves where they are close to other leaves. I was actually impressed with how well DPP did. I exported the final image as JPG but found later it can be saved as 16-bit TIF. This is a decent result from DPP, and yes, the plant is that blue. Even where there is haloing among the leaves, it is a soft edge rather than the hard edge you see in Photoshop.

Photoshop required a few more mouse clicks, but only took four minutes to process the 14 source images. Yes, the hard edge on the haloing was there. That's the reason for this exercise.

Next up was Zerene Stacker. It can't handle RAW CR3 files directly¹ so I used JPG. It took three minutes to stack and save two images using different algorithms, PMax and DMap. According to the documentation, "PMAX excels in preserving fine detail and sharpness, while DMAP is ideal for smooth transitions and natural results." In my opinion, PMax produced the better image of the two. Both methods have weird artifacts scattered around the image in the form of short lines. Except for these artifacts, Zerene produced the best image overall. (How was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?) The trails seem to angle toward the center, and maybe it has something to do with how the program stacks images with different focus points, but why is this the only program I tested that has this problem?

Finally, Helicon Focus took only three minutes to process and save the images using three different algorithms, Weighted Average, Depth Map and Pyramid. I loaded the CR3 images and the output was DNG, which according to my way of thinking gives Helicon an advantage over Zerene. The Weighted Average was the best of the three, and in fact produced the best image of any of the methods. (And didn't have any streaks.) Pyramid produced a similar result, but from the description of Depth Map I would not use that one for my typical subjects.

I already had a winner in mind, but I wanted to see how the various programs handled the cactus flower. I determined that it was appropriate to use all 18 of the images that I shot so I just looked at the in-camera processing and did not use DPP. The flower is not in focus and that is all I will say about that. Same with Photoshop. Let's move on to the contenders.

In Helicon, all three algorithms almost got the flower into focus, with some haloing. I really couldn't pick which of the three I preferred, but none of them were as good as the Zerene image. Or should I say, most of the Zerene image.

Zerene got the flower into focus with almost no haloing with the PMax algorithm, but the little streaks in the background remain. DMap also has the streaks, and didn't do quite as well on this stack as PMax. Here is the Zerene PMax image with the streaks cleaned up.

Using the Photoshop Remove tool to hunt down the streaks reminded me of the old days when my Canon 1D Mark I sensor would get so dirty that I would spend hours cloning out dust spots. One of the last images I shot with that camera was "Little Brothers" in 2004, and it required quite a bit of cleanup before I sent it off to the publisher. I don't want to start doing that again on every image.

After the first day, this is where I am:

• Zerene and Helicon produced the best results. DPP took third place (surprisingly) ahead of Photoshop. But for each stacked image DPP produces, it leaves a folder of large (~25Mb) .bin files, something which needs to be cleaned up when you are done. In-camera processing is identical to DPP and is quicker since there is no user-involved processing, but you have to know ahead of time how many images to shoot. That's often not easily determined.
• Helicon nailed it on the Neon Breakers but didn't do great on the flower. There are a lot of settings in the program and maybe there is a combination that would handle it better.
• Zerene did the best job on the flower, but I had to clean up the streaks. I want to like Zerene, BUT, those streaks.
• DPP did well on the Neon Breakers but not on the cactus flower.
• My premise for doing this was that Photoshop's focus stacking produces inferior results. Today did not change my mind.
• Helicon can handle Canon CR3 files and can output DNG files. Zerene only deals with JPG and TIF files.
• Zerene, Helicon and DPP have additional features that will take time to explore. Today I was just trying to find something that worked without much fiddling around.
• Both Zerene and Helicon have different levels of licensing, and the cost is similar enough that it is not a factor in choosing between the two. Zerene calls their tiers Student, Personal, Prosumer and Professional for $39, $89, $189 and $289 for lifetime licenses (no yearly option). Helicon calls its levels Lite, Pro and Premium costing $30, $55 and $65 for one year; $115, $200 and $240 for lifetime. DPP is included with Canon cameras, and Photoshop is subscription based.

Note: All of the images produced today by the various stacking methods were run through the Photoshop RAW filter for the usual color and contrast adjustments, then were cropped and saved as JPG. This is part of my workflow and is not affected by which program produced the stacked file. I'm not dumping Photoshop, just its focus-stacking function.

Day 2: I decided to use Helicon as a default for the next few days, but it crashed a several times this morning. It is a Beta, version 9.0. They promised a lot of upgrades over version 8.3.11, so I threw caution to the wind and went with the Beta. After a few more crashes, I uninstalled Helicon and tried to install the "stable" version, and it came back trying to install version 9 again. I don't have time for this so Helicon is out of the competition. Like I said, this is not an impartial review so screw'em for wasting my time.

DPP version 4.19.10.0 shows a copyright date of 2024 so it is definitely not a Beta version. This image has a little bit of haloing, but compared to Photoshop's version the haloing does not have a hard edge and is thus less noticeable. And, I experimented with a tool in DPP called the Depth Compositing Editing Tool that can be used refine particular areas. Using this tool it would possible to bring the cactus flower into focus, eventually. It is a tedious process, like going back and removing dust spots in the old days or removing artifacts in Zerene images. It would take hours, but taking a few minutes to sharpen up a few areas in this image took just a few minutes. I think this tool is the reason that storage fills up with the .bin files previously mentioned, so I have to make sure I am done before deleting them.

In my history of using photography software, to me DPP has been like Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, an object of disdain. (My dislike of the Lightrooms is another story.) DPP is not a very useful photo editor but this one tool is useful.

For the next comparison, I picked this succulent with overlapping leaves, as most of them have. The first image from Photoshop shows what the problem is. The next images show Zerene Stack and Digital Photo Professional doing a somewhat better but not perfect job. The final images are Zerene Stack with 16-bit TIFF files and some retouching.

In the first image, look at the part of the leaf just left of center and you will see Photoshop haloed with a hard edge. Just below that in the Photoshop image is, frankly, a jumbled mess. Zerene handled that part of the image very well, but has some dark haloing in other parts of the image. DPP has softer haloing than Photoshop but blurred some leaf tips and overall did not do nearly as well as Zerene. It appears to me that when using JPG as source files for Zerene, the stacked image does not have the color and contrast of the other methods. This time, I didn't run any of these cropped images through Photoshop RAW filter to adjust color and contrast in an attempt to see the difference between 16-bit and 8-bit source images.

Photoshop, hard-edged halos

Digital Photo Professional, softer halos and some blurred tips

Zerene Stack, best of the three

Zerene did the best, but the 8-bit image seems a bit thin (less color and contrast). In Adobe Bridge, I converted the original CR3 files to 16-bit TIF and imported them into Zerene. After Day 1 I was partial to the PMax method within Zerene, but in this test I played around with some of the DMap settings and found that this method got closest to what I was trying to achieve.

I also learned a little bit about the retouching function within Zerene and was able to get rid of most of the background haloing. Retouching didn't help much with haloing inside the subject area where one leaf is close behind another. But these are extreme crops of the original images, only about 5% of the original number of pixels. Unless you are doing extreme cropping, the haloing of the Zerene image (soft edge) does not overwhelm and is MUCH better than Photoshop stacking (hard edge). Here is the extreme crop of the 16-bit image after retouching.

Photoshop still has an extremely important role to play in the process, and for this full image, I did my usual RAW filter adjustments and also used the remove tool to clean up some areas the Zerene retouching didn't quite get. Also, there were no streaks in this image for some reason, which is what annoyed me yesterday about Zerene. This is what I expect to see, and it takes a few steps to get there.

None of the programs are perfect. There are a couple other things I plan on doing when shooting succulents to alleviate the haloing problem and reduce the need for time-consuming retouching, including: Shooting with an aperture of f/8-f/11 rather than wide open to minimize the size of the out-of-focus blob, and shooting from a higher angle more often to minimize front leaves partially obscuring back leaves.

In summary: Zerene Stack.

Zerene Stack did the best job in my testing of preserving foreground focus while minimizing the effects of haloing. The streaks will need to be addressed when they appear, but each of the methods require some retouching either within the program or in Photoshop. I still have most of a month remaining on my trial period before I decide which Zerene license to get.

In the Zerene Stack pricing tier, the $100 difference between Personal and Prosumer gets the user some additional features. First on the list is "Preserve all metadata." They list another 17 features including a Lightroom Classic plugin, but for me the metadata capability is the big one. Last month I looked at the origination date on an image I took in 1999. I often look at metadata to determine camera settings that I used in past situations, fireworks for example (ISO 200, 4 seconds, f/11, manual focus). There are other features that I may find valuable as I get to know the program, but metadata is the big one initially. There is no difference in features between Prosumer and Professional, so since I rarely make money with my photography I am leaning toward the $189 lifetime Prosumer license.

¹The Zerene Stack licenses for Prosumer and Professional include the capability to install a Lightroom Classic plugin that skirts the problem of not being able to load RAW files directly. I really HATE the way Lightroom Classic manages files and forces the user to do it their way, so this is not an attractive feature for me. I use Adobe Bridge to convert CR3 to TIF and go from there.

The Truth is Out There

I tried the Meta AI which is now prominently displayed on the Facebook left-hand menu. Here's how it went:

"Is Mark Zuckerberg a space alien?"

"No, there's no credible evidence to suggest Mark Zuckerberg is a space alien. He's an American technology entrepreneur and businessman, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Meta."

Of course they would say that.

I have never used Twitter/X much, but I actually had an exchange with Zuckerberg in 2022. He posted a picture of himself with a group of apparent students in Peru, looking over someone's shoulder at a computer. It looked awkwardly staged to me so I answered, "Creepy as usual. Are you a real human boy?"

I was a little stunned to receive a reply. He said, "I'm human."

That was the entire message. I'm going to need more than that. A blood test performed under controlled conditions should suffice.

The Northern League

"The Northern League" was the name of a independent baseball league that operated in the Upper Midwest until 2010. Since the name seems to be available, use it for a new D1 league with football at the FCS level. This makes so much sense that it will never happen. The members of this league would come from the Big Sky (football and basketball), the Missouri Valley Football Conference (football, duh), and the Summit League (basketball). Members should include:

• South Dakota State and U.
• North Dakota State and U.
• Montana State and U.
• Idaho State and U.
• Weber State (Utah)
• Eastern Washington
• Northern Arizona
• Northern Colorado

That's 12. Cut out the last two if 10 would be more manageable. This would be BY FAR the best FCS football conference and a pretty good mid-major basketball conference. There are natural rivalries here, unlike the current conferences. What does SDSU have in common with Youngstown State? What does Montana have in common with Cal Poly? The 12 I have named are all state schools of similar size. The first six are in states where there are no FBS teams soaking up the attention.

Besides external forces, there are internal reasons why it will not happen. South Dakota State does not want to lose the home court advantage of having the Summit League basketball tournament in Sioux Falls every year. North Dakota State may want to jump to FBS sooner rather than later. (2026 update: Yep.) But this week a crack formed in the Big Sky. Cal-Davis is joining the Mountain West in all sports except football, where it will remain in the Big Sky. Mountain West football is FBS, so how long will the two leagues tolerate Davis having that split?

On the other hand... rather than forming an FCS super conference, take all of the above and make it a Group of Six FBS conference. It would be very competitive. According to the Sagarin Ratings, South Dakota State is the highest-rated FCS football team at #39 and would be the betting favorite at a neutral site against EVERY Group of Five team except Boise, which is in the FBS playoffs. In fact, the Jackrabbits would be the favorite against half of the teams in the Big Ten (which has 18 teams now). There are too many obstacles to making this happen, but it should.

A headline I never thought I would read

I am not a gambler, but the following headline from a football fantasy site grabbed my attention: "Isaiah Davis or Odell Beckham Jr. | Who Should I Start?" The two were on opposing teams Sunday, Beckham with the Dolphins and Davis with the Jets.

Odell is a famous NFL player and has had enough big moments to be considered a star. He played and won a championship for one of the elite Bubbas of FBS college football LSU, had an iconic moment on Sunday Night Football with the Giants in 2014, and won a Super Bowl ring with the Rams in 2021. He is currently with the Dolphins and has only nine catches for 55 yards this season after coming back from injury. Most people have never heard of Davis. He followed a much more obscure path to the NFL but was the best running back in the FCS last year as South Dakota State won its second consecutive championship. After being limited to special teams most of the season, he scored touchdowns on a pass last week and a rush this week. In answer to the specific question asked in the headline, Davis was the better fantasy football choice last weekend with 67 total yards and the TD, while The Great OBJ had one catch for one yard.

Although the NFL all-time scoring leader is from South Dakota State (Adam Vinatieri), I'm just not used to players from my alma mater scoring touchdowns in the NFL. Vinatieri scored on a two-point conversion in 1998 and had a passing TD in 2004, but never crossed the goal line for a TD. It seemed most of the other players from SDSU who made the NFL were linemen, such as Hall of Fame Center Jim Langer, who toiled in the trenches for the undefeated Dolphins of legend. He played 151 games, touched the ball on every play as a center, but he never accumulated any offensive stats except for recovering two fumbles. When I was at SDSU in the late '70's, I knew an offensive lineman (can't remember his name) who got invited to Oilers training camp. He didn't make the first cut, got paid a few thousand dollars, and came back to Brookings. I don't know what he did after that, but I'm guessing that one of the highlights of his life was being a teammate of Earl Campbell for a couple weeks.

Since SDSU went D1 FCS, it has become more common for Jackrabbits to make it past training camp and actually play in the league, and not just in the trenches. Tight End Dallas Goeddert of the Eagles got the TD ball rolling and has 24 TDs in seven seasons. The next great Jackrabbit tight end, Tucker Kraft of the Packers, has nine TDs in two years. Davis' predecessor at Jackrabbit RB, Pierre Strong, Jr. of the Browns, has two TDs in three years. And now Davis has two TDs as a rookie with the Jets.

Although the Jackrabbits have two good running backs named Johnson succeeding Strong and Davis as they enter the quarterfinal game against Incarnate Word this Saturday, one thing they have been missing is All-World tight end play as they got from Goeddert, Kraft, and Zach Heins, who got a look from the Chargers this year but didn't make the team. I don't know if there are any NFL touchdown makers on the current Jackrabbit squad. In the tradition of the great Jim Langer, the next draft pick might be another center, Gus Miller, the 2023 FCS Rimington Award winner.

Flowers

I noticed last year that the wildflowers in the woods here in Montana change from week to week. There's not a lot so far as we just had a snowstorm just two days ago, but here are a couple. The crocus is actually from a month ago and the other one is from today. And a turkey.

May 24

May 24

April 24

Blackbird

I haven't done a lot of exploring the area this spring, but I did make it to the wildlife management area north of Bridger, MT yesterday. A distant blue heron (not pictured) and lots of blackbirds. The second image is swallows around the nest box in my back yard. These will end up on the main web site eventually.

Oops

When looking back at old photos, you never know what you will find. Here's one from October 20, 2001, Montana winning over Northern Arizona in Flagstaff 38-27. Griz quarterback John Edwards is getting sacked by NAU's Pisa Magele. Their paths in life diverged after that. Edwards is now an attorney in Billings. Magele was convicted in two sexual assault incidents (one of them the same month as this game) and was sentenced to more than 40 years in prison.

One (or two) more

Jeff Mezydlo of Yardbarker places South Dakota State as #8 among all-time greatest FCS football programs. That's about right, no argument there. But he concludes by saying, "Two-time Super Bowl champion and Hall of Famer Jim Langer and star Philadelphia Eagles tight end Dallas Goedert remain the two most prominent football products of the school."

Interesting. You would think that the player who has scored more points than anyone else in the history of the National Football League, four-time Super Bowl champion Adam Vinatieri, would be on the list. Less egregious, you would also think the 1965 NFL MVP whose number was retired by the Philadelphia Eagles, #44 Pete Retzlaff, would be mentioned.

Update 6/8/24: The article apparently has been updated, but these omissions still have not been addressed.

2026: Update Vinatieri's resume to include the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The article has not been changed.

Local boy makes good

A few days ago, I wrote I never thought that my alma mater South Dakota State would ever have an All-American championship quarterback. Today I will say I never thought a Milbank, South Dakota boy would follow in the footsteps of Bear Bryant and become the head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team.

Word hit the interweb a few hours ago that Kalen DeBoer is the new coach at Alabama. Kalen (can I call you Kalen?) is a native of Milbank and got his start in college football playing and coaching at the University of Sioux Falls. When I moved back to Sioux Falls in 2007, the college's stadium was a short bike ride from my house and I caught a few games at the tail end of his coaching tenure there, where he won three NAIA national championships. In those days, the Fighting Baptists (actually the Cougars) from Sioux Falls ran roughshod over the other Midwestern church schools that make up a majority of NAIA membership. In his final season of 2009, some of his team's wins were 80-0 over the Lutherans from Concordia University, Seward, NE; 58-0 over the Evangelical Christians from Dordt University, Sioux Center, IA; and 59-7 over the Methodists from Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, SD. Now he goes to Alabama where football is a religion.

DeBoer has been the HC at the University of Washington and just lost to Michigan in the national title game, so he has experience as a Power 5 (now 4?) coach. But Alabama is another level.

It got me wondering about how many South Dakota natives became big-time college football coaches. The most famous would be Frank Leahy from Winner. He played for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame 1928-30 and coached four national championship teams there in the 1940s. The next one I know offhand is Josh Heupel, an Aberdeen native who quarterbacked Oklahoma to the national championship in 2000 and is now the HC at Tennessee. After some internet searches, I was reminded that Smokey Joe Salem from Sioux Falls worked his way up the ladder and coached the Minnesota Golden Gophers 1979-83. I did not know that George Veenker from Sioux Falls was HC at Iowa State in the 1930s, and was the head basketball coach at Michigan for a few years before that. As far as I can tell, that's it, that's the list.

At the pro level, Norm Van Brocklin was born in desolation near Eagle Butte but his family moved to California when he was 5. After a Hall-of-Fame NFL career, he was head coach for 13 seasons with Minnesota and Atlanta, never making the playoffs. Richard Bisaccia was the interim coach for the Las Vegas Raiders in 2021 after John Gruden quit/was fired due to scandal. Bisaccia is a native of New York but graduated from Yankton College, which no longer exists. (The college was best known as the alma mater of another New Yorker, Lyle Alzado. The campus is now a federal prison.) Despite a 7-5 record, making the playoffs and receiving support from the players, Bisaccia was passed over for the permanent position in favor of Josh McDaniels. (How did that work out for you, Mark Davis?) Bisaccia interviewed for the HC position with the Colts last year and is now an assistant with the Packers.

A few days ago, ESPN posted some very speculative 2024 Top 25 rankings that place Alabama at #4 and Tennessee at #17. Jot it down, October 19 in Knoxville, Alabama Head Coach Kalen DeBoer from Milbank, South Dakota will face off against Tennessee Head Coach Josh Heupel from Aberdeen, South Dakota in what is likely to be a crucial Southeastern Conference Top 25 showdown game.

University of Sioux Falls souvenir football

Jan. 17 update: Dan Lyons of Sports Illustrated took a stab at guessing the replacement for DeBoer at Washington. He came up with five names: Ryan Grubb, UW offensive coordinator; Lance Leopold, Kansas HC; Chris Klieman, K-State HC; Jimmy Rogers, South Dakota State HC; and some guy named Pete Carroll. Grubb was an assistant coach at South Dakota State then joined DeBoer at Sioux Falls. Klieman was HC at D3 Loras College in Iowa and at North Dakota State before going to K-State. And of course Rogers has been at South Dakota State in various capacities for many years now. Leopold has no Dakota connections but somewhat paralleled DeBoer's career by starting at Wisconsin-Whitewater, a Division 3 powerhouse. (Carroll has no small college connections.) It turns out that Lyons was completely wrong as UW plucked the HC from Arizona, but it is interesting that guys who start out at small colleges in the Upper Midwest are getting considered for jobs at the FBS level.

The Greatest Jackrabbit (updated)

My undergraduate alma mater has been playing football since the 19th century but rarely had notable team success. When South Dakota State announced it was going Division 1 in 2004-05, I thought they were suffering from delusions of grandeur. The football team made the playoffs once in Division 2, in 1979 when they got blown out 51-7 by Youngstown.

Despite this mediocrity, some good players made their way through Brookings over the years, including 1953 grad Pete Retzlaff (Eagles Pro Bowler, NFL MVP 1965), 1970 grad Jim Langer (Hall of Fame center on the undefeated Dolphins) and 1995 grad Adam Vinatieri (NFL all-time leading scorer). I proclaimed Vinatieri as the Greatest Jackrabbit in 2006. This was based on his pro career because he wasn't really a household name in college. He did make all-conference teams, but there have been kickers with better stats for the Jackrabbits since then, including his own nephew Chase Vinatieri.

After the transition to D1, a strange thing happened to the former mediocre D2 program: It became one of the bullies of the FCS. The Jackrabbits rose almost unnoticed in the shadow of dominant North Dakota State, going further and further in the FCS playoffs as the 2010's progressed. In 2022 it culminated in a beatdown of the Bison 45-21 in the FCS championship game. Including the regular season in 2023, the Jackrabbits have beaten the Bison five straight times, and they won the FCS title for a second time a few days ago 23-3 over Montana. SDSU has had incredible depth and balance in recent years, but every championship team except the Baltimore Ravens has to have a dude at quarterback.

We don't know whether Mark Gronowski will make it in the NFL. He could declare for the draft now, or he could play two more years in college. He could return to SDSU, or he could transfer to an FBS program (rumor: Northwestern). But based on just his college career to date, he is The Greatest Jackrabbit. Some highlights:

• First team FCS All-American Quarterback, 2023, according to the AP, Sports Illustrated, STATS, Phil Steele and others.
• Walter Payton Award, FCS Offensive Player of the Year.
• The Athletic Directors Association named Gronowski as FCS Offensive Player of the Year, and one of 52 Academic All-Stars in FCS.
• Most Outstanding Player, FCS Championship Game, 2022 and 2023.
• Career record of 37-3. The only real FCS loss was to North Dakota in the COVID spring season 28-17. The second loss was in the COVID spring championship game when he was injured on the fifth play of the game. After missing 2021, the third loss came in his first game back from injury in 2022 to FBS Iowa 7-3. (Sam Herder of HERO Sports phrases it this way: He is 36-1 as a full-game starter against FCS teams.) Since the Iowa loss he has quarterbacked 29 consecutive victories.

There's more, but you get the idea. When I was going to lackluster D2 games as a student back in the '70's, I never thought the Jackrabbits would have an All-American quarterback leading the team to multiple national championships. Even if he announces in the next few days he's moving on, Mark Gronowski is The Greatest Jackrabbit.

Update Jan. 17: Gronowski has said he will finish his mechanical engineering degree at South Dakota State, so he has not declared for the NFL draft or the transfer portal. I think it is pretty certain he is not going into the draft this year, but he could still decide at a later date to enter the portal. The SDSU offensive coordinator said today Gronowski is participating in off-season conditioning. Maybe the next hint will be whether he participates in spring football practice which starts around March 20.

Jan. 24: Another honor for Gronowski, named second team Academic All-American by College Sports Communicators. This is all of Division 1, not just FCS, and the first teamer was Bo Nix of Oregon.

April 30: Gronowski announces he will play for the Jackrabbits at least one more year. Celebration ensues.

A year later: After losing in the semifinals to eventual champion NDSU, Gronowski made his expected exit to the Big 10 for one final year to improve his draft stock. However, the landing spot was Iowa, not Northwestern. He may have put off going pro to recover from an undisclosed injury for which he had surgery. My wild guess is it was an arm or shoulder injury. He might miss spring ball, but if he comes back in the fall and has a decent year, he might get drafted.

My tribe

College football tribalism is something I ponder from time to time. I haven't been to a South Dakota State game since I was graduated from there in 1978, but this season I was hanging on every game as they have marched through their schedule undefeated, including yesterday's FCS national championship win over Montana 23-3. I am a current resident of Montana, and in comparison to SDSU, I've been to more Montana games in the past 35 years (two, including one this year), I have more Griz swag, and I know more Griz fans. But my loyalty yesterday was not in doubt. My tribe won.

With the FBS championship today, I recalled that I have been to more Michigan games in the past 35 years than SDSU games: Michigan 35, Boston College 13, September 7, 1991. Desmond Howard scored four touchdowns that day and won the Heisman Trophy that year. I had just moved to the Boston area and BC had an impressive home schedule, so I was a season ticket holder for that one year. (And got fundraising letters for the next 15 years.) In addition to #2 Michigan, BC also played #1/AP national champion Miami and #17 Georgia Tech at home.

I also have been to games coached by current Washington Coach Kalen DeBoer, back in 2007-09 when I had just moved back to Sioux Falls. The University of Sioux Falls stadium was a short bike ride from my house, and DeBoer won three NAIA national championships there before starting his climb to the FBS national championship game. The tribe I rooted for Monday night was Washington due to this tenuous connection, but that didn't work out too well, 34-13 Michigan.

College football schools, or should I say college football programs, rely on this tribalism for financial support. These days, everything illegal Reggie Bush and his family did when he was in college is now legal, so they may as well give him back his Heisman. (Update: They did.) It is hard to believe that South Dakota State quarterback Mark Gronowski (FCS All-American, Walter Payton Offensive Player of the Year, Most Outstanding Player of the FCS championship game twice) will not attract attention from FBS boosters who want to give him NIL money. One rumor is Northwestern because his offensive coordinator at SDSU, Zach Lujan, is (according to another rumor) heading there to be OC for David Braun, who was elevated to head coach after an early-season scandal. Gronwski grew up in Chicago's west suburbs and Northwestern is in Evanston just north of Chicago. Braun was defensive coordinator for North Dakota State last year, so Braun went head-to-head with (and lost to) Lujan and Gronowski just last year. Twice! Suck it Bizon! (That's my tribalism leaking through.)

I don't know what the dollars would be for Gronowski. Jeff Kolpack of the Fargo Forum said $800,000, but I don't know if he has some basis for that estimate or just pulled a number out of the air. From everything I have heard, it would be six digits. I would be sorry to see him leave my tribe, but I understand that sort of money would be hard to pass up for a college student who may or may not be drafted by the NFL. And Gronowski, unlike the many Exercise Science majors in the SEC, is an engineering major. Northwestern has an engineering school.

If all this comes to pass, Lujan and Gronowski may discover that Northwestern is a step down in player talent from this year's South Dakota State team. Bill Connelly of ESPN wrote that SDSU could have won the Big Ten West this year. Sagarin ratings support this claim, indicating SDSU would be eight-point favorites over both Wisconsin and Iowa, and 11 points over Northwestern. Sagarin's final ratings put SDSU at #18 in all of Division 1, ahead of every G5 team and most P5/P4 teams. But Lujan and Gronowski will make a lot more money by leaving South Dakota State, and as a member of a powerful but minor tribe I have to accept that.

It makes me wonder. The schools cannot play the players directly, so (for example) Texas A&M's player NIL "payroll" of $10 million is all privately raised. Many more millions are donated in support of facilities and staff. What sense of satisfaction does someone get from donating large sums of money to a football program, particulary one like A&M that went 7-6 this year? If SDSU called me up and said, "Donate $100 and we can keep Mark Gronowski," I might do it. But $1,000, probably not. I'm not THAT tribal. The beneficiaries for my IRA are my spouse and the Gary Sinise Foundation, a highly-rated charity that supports veterans and first responders. The protectors of all of the tribes that make up the USA need our support more than football players.

This site software sucks

To say that I'm fed up with this blogging site Blogger/Blogspot is an understatement. I want to include images from my server at GoDaddy, but much of the time the attempted inline images show up as broken. This started happening a few years ago and so far I've just tolerated it and put a disclaimer at the top of the page. Google, the owner of Blogger, apparently wants me to upload my images to their server. For me, that adds another step and makes maintenance more complicated. So I've been investigating blog alternatives.

One of the options on GoDaddy is Wordpress, which apparently is a popular program. It was rather easy to import the Blogger XML backup file into Wordpress, but I found it extremely difficult to customize the pages to look the way I wanted them to. I thought, "If only Wordpress used the PHP/SQL command syntax that I used to construct my web site...." Hmmm.

So I decided to port my blog posts from the past 20+ years into my GoDaddy SQL database and write PHP pages to access them. Trouble is, I've discovered no easy way to import the Blogger XML file. So I'm doing a lot of cut-and-paste.

I will leave my text-only rants (such as this one) on this Blogger site, but anything that uses images from my web site will eventually be a PHP page hosted on my web site. This is still a work in process, but click here to see what I've got so far.

Fear the Rabbit

The South Dakota State Jackrabbits won the NCAA Division 1 Football Championship (FCS) over the weekend, dominating nine-time champion North Dakota State 45-21. This was reported as South Dakota State's first NCAA national championship, which isn't entirely true. It was the first D1 championship.

For a journalism class at South Dakota State 45 years ago, I did a writeup on construction of a new shopping mall. I didn't go into it looking for a scoop, but it turned out that the project had not been announced yet and this was big news in the small town of Brookings. My professor used her contacts and the article ended up on the front page of the Brookings Daily Register, the first time I had something published in a real newspaper. My primary source for the story was Sid Bostic, a loan officer at the local bank which was involved in the financing. His claim to fame was throwing in a midcourt shot to win the 1963 NCAA College Division national basketball championship for the Jackrabbits, 44-42 over Wittenburg, Ohio.

With the exception of this NCAA championship, South Dakota State was an unremarkable participant in College Division/Division 2 men's sports over the years. During my college years 1974-78, the basketball team made the tournament once and lost badly to Green Bay. The football team under Coach John Gregory, who sadly passed away a few weeks before the recent championship game, made the D2 playoffs once, losing to Youngstown 51-7 in 1979. Meanwhile, North Dakota State won three College Division football titles by poll from 1965-69 and five D2 championship games from 1983-90. By the '90s, the SDSU men's basketball team made the Division 2 tournament most years but the football team remained mired in mediocrity. When SDSU announced it was going Division 1 in 2004, I thought the school administration and athletic department were suffering from delusions of grandeur and would be condemned to permanent irrelevance in the two major men's sports.

What I realize now is SDSU had no choice. The Universities of South Dakota and North Dakota followed their ag school State cousins to D1 five years later, and with perfect hindsight I believe they should have done it earlier. The SDSU men's basketball team has been an above average mid-major program, winning the Summit League to qualify for the NCAA tournament six times, but not yet accomplished that first March Madness win. The women's team is a mid-major powerhouse, advancing to the Sweet 16 in 2019 and winning the WNIT in 2022.

Anyway, football. After some decent seasons during the transition starting in 2004, the climb really began with a 58-10 win over Eastern Illinois in the 2012 playoffs. But by then North Dakota State already had a championship under its belt and took out the Jackrabbits in the next round 28-3. The next few years through 2015, Jacks were unseeded in the 24-team tournament. In 2016, they started getting seeded in the top 8. There were early-round wins, but including that 2012 game, North Dakota State ended South Dakota State's season four times on their way to nine championships through 2021. The most recent of the playoff losses to the Bison came in the 2018 national semifinals.

The last two seasons have been weird. SDSU was the #1 seed in the 2020-21 COVID year but lost by two points in the national championship game to Sam Houston after quarterback Mark Gronowski was lost to injury in the first quarter. In the 2021 fall season, the Jackrabbits beat North Dakota State but also had some bad losses and were unseeded. I know the records may say differently, but prior to this year it seemed like they always lost to UNI even if UNI was terrible. As an unseeded team, they had to travel all over the country with playoff games in all four time zones before falling at Montana State in the semifinals. NDSU recovered from their regular season loss and dominated Montana State 38-10 in the championship game.

This year, the Jackrabbits beat North Dakota State in the regular season again AND this time avoided those bad regular season losses to gain the #1 seed again, escaping UNI by three points with the help of a late penalty. The Jackrabbits have won the last three Dakota Marker regular season games with North Dakota State, but Bison fans would issue reminders about their 4-0 playoff record. Finally that was put to rest with the dominating 45-21 result on Saturday.

They call it FCS in football and mid-major in basketball. It's tough being a fan of a mid-sized school, and is becoming tougher with the transfer portal and NIL money. SDSU's best basketball player Baylor Scheierman decided to return to his home state of Nebraska and play for Creighton of the Big East. My fear is some of the top Jackrabbit football players may be lured away also. I can't help but note that the two running backs who both went over 100 yards in the championship game, Amar Johnson and Isaiah Davis, are both from the state of Missouri. Gronowski is from Illinois. When they were little kids, they didn't dream of playing ball in Brookings. Tight End Tucker Kraft famously resisted attempts to get him into the portal and get some bigger NIL money, but he is from Timber Lake, South Dakota, the most desolate place I have ever been to on Earth. (And I've been to Antarctica.) Downtown Brookings must have seemed like Times Square to him the first time. But he is giving up his remaining eligibility to enter the NFL draft, where he will likely go in the second round. (Update: Third round to Green Bay.) Barring any other major defections, SDSU will be a solid #1 in the 2023 preseason FCS polls. (Update: Historic dominance.)

A longer-term question is whether North Dakota State and perhaps South Dakota State will be lured to an FBS Group of Five conference. For now that is a bigger question up north, but it seems to be percolating south. Teams are shifting around in the Group of Five, and there may be a landing spot somewhere. Travel is a concern, of course, but right now the Dakota teams have to travel to Youngstown for football, and flying to San Antonio is just as easy. I think it is cool to win an FCS championship, but supposedly there is more money in the minor bowls than in the FCS tournament. For South Dakota State, however, leaving the Summit League would mean giving up what is essentially a home court advantage in Sioux Falls in the conference basketball tournament every year. Unless they can find a football-only conference, the anticipated gain in football money may be offset by a loss in basketball money.

The transition away from Division 2 may have begun in 2004, but perhaps it has not ended. My preference would be for the Jackrabbits to pound out a few more FCS championships before taking another leap, but the BIZON may not wait that long to cash in on their reputation as an FBS wolf dressed in FCS sheep's clothing. The two don't have to move up together, but being together in 2004 made that transition easier.

One last thing. One news service reported the recent Jackrabbit win over "their hated rival." I don't think that's accurate. The four Dakota schools are all on the eastern edge of the Dakota land mass near the more populous states of Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska. They can't afford to hate each other. They all need each other to succeed, and any hate should be directed toward those other states. I can't find greater joy than any one of the four beating the Gophers on the football field, which NDSU and (strangely) USD have done and SDSU has come close. It probably won't happen, but it would be fun to have Gronowski, Johnson and Davis stick around and beat down Oklahoma State in 2024. (Update: Gronowski and Johnson will be there, Davis declared for the NFL and was drafted by the Jets.) Originally they were supposed to play Nebraska in 2024 but COVID blew that up. I don't know if the Sagarin computer ratings (combined FBS and FCS) mean anything, but the 14-1 Jackrabbits finished this year #41 and the 4-8 Nebraska Corndogs were #65 after firing their coach mid-season.

Rapid City Flood

It has been 50 years since the Rapid City Flood, when 238 people were killed in a flash flood that swept down Rapid Creek and other waterways after a downpour stalled over the Black Hills and dropped 15 inches of rain in a few hours. My parents were attending a concert on the west side of town, and left for home when a National Guardsman came on stage and told everyone to leave. We lived on a hill in southeast Rapid City, so we went to bed and didn't know what happened overnight. My brother called from college in Montana in the morning, and that's the first we knew of it.

My Dad worked for the power company, so of course he was very busy. The water was unsafe to use, and I remember going with him in his work truck through the dusty streets and National Guard checkpoints to the power plant just to take a shower. It was interesting that one of the after effects of too much water was the dust.

In 2002, I was in Rapid City on the 30th anniversary of the flood and snapped these pictures of western Rapid City from Dinosaur Park on the hill in the middle of town. The flood came from the upper left and swept though town to the lower right. The second image shows the Baken Park Shopping Center. Floodwaters came through the back and out the front, leaving the shell still standing, and it was rebuilt. Downtown Rapid City is to the right on the other side of the hill and was decimated.

Renaissance

We usually don't patronize Renaissance Festivals, but this one in Red Lodge, MT was just a few blocks away so we biked over. Lots of broken lances in the jousting.

Maintenance

My web site thomasoneil.com has grown, sometimes haphazardly, over the past 20+ years. I have 4,160 images on 217 pages. In addition to scenics, airplaces, spacecraft and celestial objects, there are images of 176 animal species. Writing an HTML file (see glossary below) to display just one image could be done with just one line of code, for example this could be a perfectly valid HTML file in its entirety: <img src="puffin.jpg">. No caption, just an image. Not very useful, but valid. Categorizing and presenting 4,160 images using just HTML code would be impossible. About 20 years ago as my image library was growing, I created an SQL database on GoDaddy and learned how to code SQL queries into PHP files to display the images and other information. There are different web sites that organize images, but by doing my own coding I have complete control. Within the limits of my knowledge and motivation, of course.

I just did a redesign of my web site, which seems to happen about every 10 years. I had to brush up on my PHP, SQL and CSS knowledge, which made for a good intellectual exercise I'm going to claim is better than Wordle (which I have never played). I used MS-Access at work years ago, and gained some portable experience working with SQL. For the PHP coding to access the SQL, I was self taught. Same with CSS. There are many internet examples for accomplishing the necessary tasks. Some are nothing but a headache, and some of them work. I'm about 98% done, with all remaining is updating automatic redirects from HTML pages to PHP pages. Tedious.

A couple things got me going on doing this redesign. First, I wanted to upgrade my PHP version on the GoDaddy server from 5.6 to 8.1. Since 5.6 is the lowest supported version, I figured at some point it would be deprecated and my site would cease to function properly. As I got into making the changes to my PHP code, I decided I may as well do a complete overhaul. Another reason was the new but persistent difficulty of Blogspot to consistently display inline images (i.e. images hosted on my GoDaddy server rather than uploaded to Blogger). Sometimes they display, and sometimes they show a broken image. With my Photo of the Year posts, that's 20+ broken images, so I decided to move POY from the blog to my site so the images would display. Anyway, new features:

• I coded a new dropdown top menu and a standard footer. GoDaddy doesn't seem to support Server Side Includes where the standard header and footer are contained in separate files, so formerly I had to touch a lot of files to make design changes. I recently figured out how to do an "include" with PHP coding instead of SSI. This will make the site easier to maintain.
• The "Destinations" menu item replaces "Galleries" and is now PHP/SQL generated rather than manually maintained.
• There is a new "Years" menu item featuring "Photos of the Year" and links to a new PHP/SQL-generated page showing all photo destinations for a year.
• The new "Aircraft, etc." menu item links to two new pages, "Celestial Events" and "Air Shows and Museums" in addition to the "Aircraft/spacecraft Index."
• The new "Methods" menu item links to all my trailcam and remote image pages. I also put in a link to "Celestial Events" on the theory that I use different methods when shooting the sun than with other subjects.
• Re-designed left menu for the home page. Still subject to change.
• The large "Recent" image in the center of the page is now generated from recent photo uploads. I used to have to change this manually within the file, and it only rotated among five images. It will change depending on how many images I post, but I believe the current image pool is over 60.
• The recent events list is now PHP/SQL-generated. It is the 10 most recent photo pages. I used to edit this list manually.
• I've now been going this long enough to put in a "20 years ago on thomasoneil.com." This is in addition to the Pedro item from 1999. I don't know if there is an effective way to auto-generate this, so for now the selected items are manually maintained.

More pages are PHP/SQL generated than before, so will be easier to maintain. After fixing the old "journey" pages, the next major project would be to edit just about every blog post from the past 20 years to remove any inline images and replace them with uploaded images. I don't know if the sudden problem with inline images is the fault of Blogger or GoDaddy, but it really doesn't matter. Even if I accept that mission, it could take a while. I'm not under any illusion that very many people care, but it satisfies my OCD. Update: As of December 2023 the problem persists, so I decided to port most of my 400 blog posts for 20 years over to my own web site server with my own coding. Screw Google.

Examples of inline and uploaded images. If the first image is broken, that's the problem I'm having. If not, it just proves that intermittent problems are the hardest to diagnose and fix.

Inline

Uploaded

Glossary
• HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. The basic language of the World Wide Web, created by the legendary Tim Berners-Lee.
• SQL: Structured Query Language, a language for managing data.
• PHP: Originally Personal Home Page, now PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. A language which runs on the server and dynamically creates HTML to pass to the user's browser.
• JavaScript: I don't use it much, but mention it here because, unlike PHP which runs on the server and is unseen by the user, JavaScript runs on the user's device in the browser.
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets, used in combination with HTML to format web pages.
• MS-Access: Microsoft's desktop database application.
• SSI: Server Side Includes. A capability to paste together several different HTML files (such as header, side menu, body, footer) into one web page.
• GoDaddy: Company that tries to do funny Super Bowl commercials.
• Blogspot: Blog site owned by Google. All hail Google, one of our technological overlords.

Baseball

Baseball resolved its labor dispute and will start on time. I used to extensively patronize baseball 20 years ago, even maintaining baseball web sites (squeezebunt.com and BaseballArizona.com) for 6-7 years. What I learned in those years of attending the Arizona Fall League and spring training is there are countless minor leaguers barely scraping by, hanging on in the hope of breaking into the big time. The first image below is from the 2002 Arizona Fall League, featuring a Red Sox minor leaguer by the name of Kevin Youkilis. I recognized the name from the 2000 Bourne Braves of the Cap Cod League, where he summered while attending U of Cincinnati, and that's the second image.

Youkilis went on to a somewhat distinguished career, picking up the nickname, "The Greek God of Walks" for his ability to get on base. (Just to explain this to modern players, if the pitcher throws the ball a foot outside, you don't have to try to pull it for a home run.) He was an excellent fielder, and won two World Series rings with the Red Sox, although he didn't actually make the post-season roster in the 2004 epic drama. Even in 2007 when he won a Gold Glove at first base, he had to sit in favor of David Ortiz when there was no designated hitter for the two games in Colorado. (He did play in both games as a defensive replacement as the Red Sox swept, so he was on the field as the celebration started.)

Youkilis doesn't look like an athlete. He is shaped something like a barrel, and his batting stance was weird. But it just shows with the peculiar talents needed for baseball and with perseverence, you can make the big leagues. And if you were lucky enough to be with the Red Sox during the first decade of this century, you could have become Tom Brady's brother-in-law. Youkilis is married to Brady's sister Julie.

The Greek God of Walks with the Scottsdale Scorpions, 2002

Tom Brady's future brother-in-law on the Cape, 2000

Oh, wow. Mark Texiera playing for Orleans in the summer of 1999. He was attending Georgia Tech at the time.

Tex, 1999

Just for the heck of it, I'll throw in this picture of Frank Robinson from the first time I attended Arizona Fall League in 1999. He was the league's Director of Baseball Operations at the time. I hadn't seen the original of this image for quite a while until today.

I was scouted by the Mets

Continuing the mid-winter baseball theme, I've been going through all of my bubble gum cards. I knew I had two Jim Kaat/Katt cards somewhere in a box after news came out of his selection to the Hall of Fame, and after I found them I dug further into the box. In addition to a few thousand cards, some of them worth $100 and most of them worth $.01, I came across a business card from Russel L. Sehon, Scout, New York National League Baseball Club. In other words, the New York Mets. Written on the card was, "Good luck Tom, Your friend, Russ Sehon, 7-4-69."

In 1969, my Dad had a side gig taking care of the landscaping at a motel in Rapid City. He struck up a conversation with Sehon, who was in town scouting the Basin League, a college summer league. And of course my Dad probably said, "I've got a boy who plays baseball." Sehon was kind enough to meet with me and offer a few pointers on my swing. The Holy Grail for scouts of that era was to find the next Mickey Mantle, and I'm sure it didn't take long for Russ to figure out that I wasn't "The One." A few weeks later, the Little League season ended and my baseball career was over at the age of 12. Childhood's end, time to start getting summer jobs.

After having my memory prompted by that business card, I did some research to find out how Sehon ended up as a baseball scout. He was a Kansas boy, and even though he was scouting for the Mets when I met him, he lived in Lawrence. He was a native of the small town of Lecompton and graduated high school there in 1935. He is in the back row, second from the right in this picture of the graduating class.

Apparently Russ played college baseball at Kansas University before turning pro at age 21 in 1940. Like so many players of his generation, his career was interrupted by WWII. He served in the Navy and his name is one of 940 on the Veterans Memorial in Lecompton. His one minor league homer came in 1946 for the Jackson Senators of the Class B Southeastern League. Although he had no power, he hit .301 in his minor league career. In 1947-48, he worked in the athletic training department back at KU and was coach of the Jayhawk baseball team. Future long-time head baseball coach (and manager of the 1965 Basin League champ Rapid City Chiefs) Floyd Temple was a Jayhawk baseball and football player at about that time, but it isn't clear whether he played for Russ. The KU press guide says Russ was 7-12 as KU coach in 1948 but offers few other details. He may have been finishing up his coursework during that time because his obituary said he got his degree in 1949. The obit didn't mention his wife's name but did list three sons and four grandchildren.

Sehon spent part of the 1949 season as manager of the Hutchinson Elks, the Pirates affiliate in the Class C Western Association. His scouting career started in 1950, and he spent the next 37 years prowling the Great Plains for the Phillies, Braves, Angels, Mets and Yankees. He passed in 1998 at age 79 and is spending his eternal rest in Olathe.

He scouted me for the Mets. It didn't quite work out. That's how I choose to remember it.

I have to go off on just one more Kansas University tangent. One of the players Sehon was interested in seeing in Rapid City the previous year, 1968, was a fellow Kansas Jayhawk, Franklin "Junior" Riggins. This is the entry in the 1969 Chiefs program looking back at Junior's 1968 season:

As mentioned in the bio, Junior played in the backfield at Kansas. His last football game was the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day 1969, a 15-14 loss to undefeated Penn State. (The quarterback of that Kansas team was future Chicago Bear Bobby Douglass, a strong runner with a rocket arm and no accuracy, but that's a whole 'nother tangent.) Junior was drafted by the AFL Chiefs and NFL Cardinals, but never played pro football. He only rushed for 865 yards in three college seasons, and since he was "husky" they were probably looking at him as a fullback, back when fullback was a thing. He went the baseball route but never got past "AA". After five minor league seasons, he entered the real world and spent his adulthood as a golf equipment salesman in Vienna, Virginia.

That "strong Kansas backfield" also included Junior's younger brother, who was much better at football than baseball. Making football a career choice paid off when he was named MVP of the Super Bowl in January 1983 as the Washington team beat Don Shula and the Dolphins. One of the epic plays in Super Bowl history was younger Riggins' 43-yard TD run on fourth down to give his team the lead for good. The classic video shows a Dolphins player getting a handful of jersey, but just momentarily.

The younger brother is John "Riggo" Riggins, Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 1992. End of Kansas tangent.

Katt/Kaat

Jim Kaat and Tony Oliva were selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this month, joining 1968 Minnesota Twins teammates Harmon Killebrew and Rod Carew. I have two Topps 1965 baseball cards on which Kaat's name is misspelled "Katt."

This is an excerpt from my Aug. 23, 2005 blog post looking back at the first Major League game I saw in which Kaat was one of the starting pitchers and just one of eight future members of the Baseball Hall of Fame on hand:

---

These days the Twins play in the Baggiedome in downtown Minneapolis, but in the '60's and '70's they were out in the suburbs. My first major league game was at age 11 on June 22, 1968 at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington.

Today the Mall of America sits on the site, but back in 1968 it was baseball under open skies. In the game program (25 cents) it says, "Half of the fun at a ballgame is keeping score," and instructions were provided on how to do so. It didn't say what the other half of the fun was, so I kept score.

Visiting was a mediocre Yankee team, six years removed from winning the World Series and nine years away from winning their next one. Twins pitcher Jim Kaat got the first two Yanks to fly out, but the third connected for a home run. It was my first major league hit, so to speak. Referring to the scoring instructions, next to the name "Mantle" I drew four horizontal bars (four-base hit) and a "7" (to left field) then circled all of it (run scored). The scoreboard flashed the message that it was the 528th home run of Mickey Mantle's career.

Of course I remember that The Mick hit a home run in the first major league game I attended, but documented on the scorecard are forgotten details. For instance, Mantle was playing first base, not the outfield. The designated hitter hadn't been adopted by the American League yet, so I figured the move to first base was because of his knees. Web research today verified that one of the great center fielders of all time spent the last two years of his career at first base due to bad knees, and they were two awful years. He retired after the 1968 season after hitting only .237 with 18 homers in 144 games. The notation on the scorecard that he was playing first base is what compelled me to look it up. Perhaps the "other half of the fun" is looking at a scorecard 37 years later and seeing details and clues that add substance to imperfect memory.

The scorecard also shows: Tony Oliva put the Twins ahead with a two-run homer in the fourth, but the Yankees scratched out four runs in the seventh and won 5-2. Stan Bahnsen, who went on to win Rookie of the Year, allowed six hits (three to Oliva) and struck out nine to get the win. Hall-of-Famer Harmon Killebrew went 0-4. With the help of Baseball Almanac, I have recreated the box score as it would have appeared in the paper the next day.

---

The box score reveals how the game has changed in 54 years. There was no designated hitter. The game was completed in two hours and 10 minutes, an hour less than the average game today. The winning pitcher, a rookie, pitched a complete game. Kaat was leading 2-1 after six innings, what we call now a "quality start." Kaat lost it in the 7th, but he had 180 complete games in his career so it is impossible to say it was a mistake to leave him in. Back then, the best pitchers were starters and the bullpen was usually populated by the very young, the very old, or the very mediocre. The position of "closer" didn't become universal until the '70's, and "setup man" came long after that. These days, the analytics zealots would have roasted Manager Cal Ermer on social media for the sin of wasting a quality start.

Below is my very first attempt at keeping score. As you can see, I went back and did some edits afterward to perfect my scorekeeping technique. I didn't know yet that a called strike three was a backward K. According to Baseball Reference, there were three backward K's in the game. I see a mistake there in the third inning where I gave Kaat a single, but he shows 0-for-2 in the box score. It was a fielder's choice with Frank Quilici out at second. I had so much to learn.

I was counting members of the Hall of Fame who were in the dugouts that day and came up with eight, including the two who hit home runs: Kaat, Oliva, Killebrew, Carew, and pitching coach Early Wynn for the Twins; Mantle, first base coach Whitey Ford, and 2nd baseman Bobby Cox for the Yankees. Cox, who started the game-winning rally in the 7th inning, didn't get inducted for his playing career, but for his long managerial career primarily with the Braves. I'm not including Yankee GM Lee MacPhail, who may not have been there. Yankee third base coach Frank Crosetti isn't in the HOF but won 17 World Series rings as a player and coach. Other names I recognize from the roster include shortstop/future Royals Manager Dick Howser, and pitcher Al Downing who gave up Hank Aaron's 715th home run. And then there was a former Yankee who was a coach with the Twins in 1968, Billy Martin. Martin spent his last year as a player with the Twins in 1961 and stayed with the organization as a scout and coach. He also worked as a sales representative for Grain Belt Beer during that time. That is so right, but so wrong.

Billy Martin is listed as a coach elsewhere in the 1968 program, but is not on the roster shown here because a month into the season he got sent to manage the Twins AAA minor league team, the Denver Bears (7-22 at the time). The Bears improved significantly during the remainder of the season (66-50) and he became Twins manager the following year. The Twins won the AL West in 1969 but lost badly in the very first ALCS 3-0 to Baltimore. Owner Calvin Griffith favored starting Kaat in Game 3, but Martin chose someone else and lost 11-2. After various incidents over the years, apparently this was the final straw for Griffith, and Martin was fired a week after the season. Much of Martin's bad behaviour was blamed on his drinking, but there were plenty of times he was rather impolite even when sober. His abrasive personality and tendency to drink too much was very well known but it didn't keep the Tigers, Rangers, Yankees, Yankees, A's, Yankees, Yankees, and Yankees from hiring him as manager, only to eventually fire him for the usual reasons. None of his stints lasted three full seasons, and his last and shortest tenure was 68 games with the Yankees in 1988. On Christmas Day 1989 at age 61, he died in a drunk driving accident in which he (probably) was not the driver.

Former Yankee teammates Mantle, Ford and Martin were a legendary party trio in the 1950's. They used to hit Manhattan after home games to drink the night away with the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Rocky Marciano, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and Rock Hudson. As an 11-year-old, I knew nothing of this, but now I wonder if Mickey and Whitey missed Billy, who was out in Denver, as they threw down a few in some Twin Cities watering hole that Saturday night in 1968. In this team picture from the 1968 program, Martin is in his characteristic hunch (front row, fourth from the left).

Another Twins player listed above is Jim Perry (third row, fourth from the left), who won the Cy Young Award during a distinguished career but is not in the HOF. However, his somewhat controversial brother Gaylord is, and the two of them have the second-most pitching victories by siblings behind Phil and Joe Niekro. My final useless factoid is the 1968 program says Tony Oliva's real name is Pedro Oliva, Jr., but Wikipedia says his birth name was Antonio Oliva Lopez Hernandes Javique. Wikipedia says Pedro is actually his brother's name, which he used in order to appear three years younger as he was trying to establish his baseball career after arriving from Cuba. Other players who have supposedly fudged their age include Albert Pujols, Bartolo Colon, Miguel Tejada, and Little Leaguer Danny Almonte who at age 14 was blowing away 12-year-olds.

What is baseball without trivia, statistics, trivial statistics, and just a few lies?