The Morning Report
Get the news and information you need to take on the day.
Going, going, gone! All the way to Los Angeles.
That’s the way the story goes, at least. According to legend, a minor-league San Diego Padre hit one heck of a home run at downtown’s Lane Field. The ball escaped the ballpark like a rocket and landed on a boxcar that took it to the City of Angels.
Did it really happen? As a careful historian of local baseball history, Bill Swank says he isn’t sure. But he still adores the story.
In this weekend’s Q&A profile, Swank talks about Lane Field’s hungry termites, the hide-the-ball-in-the-beard trick, the trouble with curve balls and more.
In local news, the investment firm that owns The San Diego Union-Tribune is making a pitch: It would like to buy The Boston Globe, a widely respected newspaper that is struggling to survive.
In a story dated today, the Globe examines the changes that Platinum Equity has made at the U-T.
“The community has already seen such a decline that people feel it can’t become much worse,” the president of a local taxpayers group tells the Globe.
The Globe story offers potential bad news for U-T employees but Platinum representatives are bullish on the U-T’s prospects.
In other economics news, our real-estate columnist Rich Toscano crunches some numbers and finds that the already-scarce local housing inventory shrunk even more in July.
Elsewhere, the U-T reports that local politicians are stepping up their support for SDG&E’s proposed fire-prevention-via-power-outage plan.
“The people who are screaming the loudest are the people who have invested the least in fire protection,” said San Diego Councilwoman Marti Emerald.
An interesting detail in the story: “SDG&E also asked for a rule change that would absolve it of liability if anyone gets hurt or property is damaged when it decides to cut power.”
One of the people to whom Emerald is alluding is County Supervisor Dianne Jacob. Jacob was one of the five people Scott and Andrew queried during their first four-hour morning show routine on KOGO radio this week. Yes, they were able to wake up in time and you can review the show in segments here.
Jacob also had some choice words for the county pension system’s decision recently to hire a new investment director for fee potentially as high as $1.2 million. Take a listen.
Got an unloaded gun handy? You may be able to carry it around openly without getting in trouble, the NCT reports in a story about the growing profile of the “open carry movement.”
And our partner NBC 7/39 reports that former San Diego Metropolitan Magazine editor Tim McClain, a longtime regular guest on KPBS-FM’s weekly “Editor’s Roundtable” public-affairs show, has a new job in the political world.
As the station reports, he’s one of many local journalists who have gone to the dark side… er, I mean gone to work for politicians (or, in Councilwoman Emerald’s case, become one).
Finally, TheStreet.com tracks “the most dramatic case yet of an H1N1 bidding frenzy” — the fuss over a little-known San Diego biotech company’s early research into a swine flu vaccine.
The Coffee Collection (If you missed these good reads this week, check them out over a cup of java).
Leaky Flapper Patrol: We follow a San Diego city water detective as he searches for water waste at a councilman’s house.
Donut Shop Not Included: Residents of Talmadge are patrolling their mid-city neighborhood at night and giving an assist to the cops.
Quote of the week: “I thought that if enough players got sick or injured, they’d see me in the stands in my uniform and ask me to come down to play for the Brewers.” — Baseball historian Swank on watching games in Milwaukee as a young boy.