Before Strasburg ever threw a major league pitch, he got a standing ovation. As he walked to the Nationals’ dugout after finishing his bullpen warm-up, the hopeful 40,315 fans stood and roared. There hasn’t been much to cheer about in Washington baseball since the days of Walter Johnson, but that has changed. Strasburg gave his eager fans plenty to be happy about during his remarkable debut. Strasburg, who mixes a high-velocity fastball with good off-speed pitches, allowed just four hits and did not walk a Pittsburgh batter. His fastball reached 100 mph and stayed at 99 most of the night.

The Nats got homers from Ryan Zimmerman, Adam Dunn and Josh Willingham. Strasburg gave up a two-run home run to Delwyn Young in the fourth inning that put the Pirates in front 2-1 before Washington answered in the sixth with two home runs that put them ahead for good.

Strasburg also struck out the final seven batters he faced before being taken out of the game. He was supposed to throw only six innings, but stayed in and struck out the side in the seventh on only 13 pitches, blazing a 99-mph fastball past a swinging Andy La Roche on his final pitch of the night. Amazingly, Strasburg did not walk a batter and threw 65 of 94 pitches for strikes.

Strasburg’s debut had been anticipated ever since he was taken with the top pick in the 2009 first-year player draft. The 6-foot-4 Strasburg had a 7-2 record and a 1.30 ERA in the minors before being promoted to the Nationals. His arrival in Washington follows a season where the Nationals had the worst record in baseball with 103 losses.

“It was just a great night for Stephen – a great night for the Nationals,” said Nationals manager Jim Riggleman. “Stephen had electric stuff. He had it all going. When you see guys like this come along, it’s really special. Hopefully, we can keep him healthy and keep it going.”

Strasburg, who signed a four-year, $15.1 million contract, more than proved he was worth the interest. He fired his first pitch 97 mph, a ball inside to Andrew McCutchen. He threw a 1-2-3 first, striking out Lastings Millredge on an 83-mph breaking ball to end it. In the second, he fell behind Garrett Jones, 3-0, but then threw three straight strikes at 98, 98 and 99 mph. He hit 100 against the next batter, Young.

“It’s never easy to hit pitches at 97 to 100 (mph),” said La Roche, Strasburg’s final strikeout victim, “especially, when he’s got a curveball like that. It’s the combination of the two. You can say, ‘All right, here comes 100 right down the middle,’ or ‘Here comes the curveball,’ and it’s still tough to hit.”

After Strasburg finished the seventh, fans gave him another standing ovation. They repeated it when Strasburg was shown on the video board after being removed for a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the inning and he tipped his cap. Later, after he did a TV interview, teammates splattered him with shaving-cream pies.

“I’ve been catching a lot of guys,” said likely Hall of Fame catcher Ivan Rodriguez, battery mate of Strasburg, “but this kid is unbelievable.”

Late in June, Cano led the major leagues in batting average (.367; nobody was within 27 points of him); led the American League in hits (97) and total bases (164) and ranked behind Miguel Cabrera and Justin Morneau in slugging (.614). Only Fred Dunlap in 1984, Nap Lajoie (1901) and Hornsby (seven times in the ‘20s) slugged .600 as second basemen.

They’re the kind of stats that call to mind not just Cooper’s Glimmerglass but also the eponymous hometown of the author’s family. “I just said to Yankees scout Vic Mata when Robbie’s name came up, ‘Maybe one day we’ll be in Cooperstown,’” says Yankees special assistant Gordon Blakely, who, with Mora, signed Cano out of the Dominican cradle of ballplayers, San Pedro de Macoria, in 2001.

The one element about Cano that is even more inspirational than his stroke is his story. Cano is a baseball anomaly: the elite player nobody saw coming, not even his own team and especially not the teams that turned him down in trades or chose not to sign him even one team with a scout who was his next door neighbor.

Cano was a slow-footed, free-swinging .278 hitter in the minor leagues. In the majors, he is a career .312 hitter one of 18 active .300 hitters with at least 3,000 plate appearances. But he is a rare one who is far better as a big leaguer than a minor leaguer. Of those 18 active .300 hitters, all of them had minor league averages within 25 points of their big league average except for three outliers: Magglio Ordonez (43 points better as a major leaguer), Matt Holliday (plus-40) and Cano (plus-34).

Jose Cano, Robinson’s father, did not underestimate his son’s potential, not even from birth, when the elder Cano named him after Jackie Robinson. Jose, who pitched professionally for more than a decade, including six games with the 1989 Astros, was so convinced of his son’s talent that when Robinson was a teenager Jose scared off most major league teams, including Houston, with signing bonus demands in the low six figures.

The Red Sox arranged a tryout for Cano, but scheduled it for the same day he happened to be taking a final exam in school. He missed the tryout. The Mets did give Cano a tryout and wanted to sign him, but their scout, Eddy Toledo, told Jose that the club could not meet his asking price. “I talked to his father and told him, ‘Your son is going to be a good player in the major leagues but I don’t have that $250,000 you’re asking for,’” recalls Toledo, now a Rays scout.

The Yankees, in the early years of their modern-day oligarchy, didn’t blink. They had just won the 2000 World Series, their third straight world championship and fourth in five years. Their attendance had jumped by another million in the championship run. Damon Oppenheimer, the Yankees’ director of scouting, was in the Dominican Republic that winter when Blakely called him and said, “I’ve got a guy who’s going to be at the field today who I think can really hit. He doesn’t run well, so a lot of teams may not be on him.”

On January 2, 2001, the Yankees signed 18-year-old Robinson Cano for $150,000. “My dad stayed up from seven until two in the morning just to do my contract,” Cano recalls. “Teams just wanted to give me like 20 (thousand dollars), and my dad was like, ‘Come on.’”

Cano made such little impact, however, over his first three years in the Yankees’ minor league system, hitting .261, that he was nearly traded three times in three months in 2004. In June, while he was in Double A, the Yankees moved Cano to third base to display him there for a possible trade with Kansas City. One month after than New York offered Cano to the Diamondbacks in an attempt to get Randy Johnson.

One month into the 2005 season the Yankees decided to give Cano a shot as their second baseman. After his first 23 at bats he had two hits and no walks. “(Manager) Joe Torre called me into his office,” Cano recalls, “I thought I got sent down. He said, ‘Robinson, don’t worry. Keep swinging. The hits are going to fall for you one day.’ The next game I had two hits, and a week later I was hitting over .300”

Cano alternately astounded and confounded the Yankees. In 2006, for instance, he hit .342, won a Silver Slugger as the league’s top-hitting second baseman and was named an All-Star. But over the next two years his batting average dropped to .306 and then .271. In ’08, the same year New York signed him to a four-year, $30 million contract, manager Joe Girardi benched Cano for failing to hustle after a groundball that bounced off the glove of Jason Giambi.

Still, Cano knew that his disappointing 2008 season, in which he mostly batted seventh, called for change. Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long flew to the Dominican Republic that December to work with him on his hitting mechanics – pulling the ball, pitch selection and cutting down his trademark glide in the box – not lean,” Long says. “At that time the kid was a little down and out and not feeling good about himself. And there was a concern among baseball people, you know, “This guy’s got to turn the corner.’”

Cano bounced back in 2009 with a .320 season that included a career-best 25 home runs, 13 of which he pulled, though he hit just .207 with runners in scoring position. “This year’s focus is keeping everything we had and now adding to the package: driving in runs,” Long says. The Yankees moved Cano into the fifth spot in the order, behind Alex Rodriguez. He has hit .386 with runners in scoring position.

After Cano hit .400 in April, he told Long, “April was no fluke.” After he hit .336 in May, he told him, “May was no fluke.” He is hitting .377 in June. He is delivering the message month by month, hit by hit, drill by drill, beautiful swing by beautiful swing, not just to his coach, but also to himself: This Robinson Cano is far better than the one who often went unwanted, and yet not as good as the one yet to come.

Had I been in a ‘baseball state’ like Texas or California instead of a basketball hot-bed like Indiana, I might have become a professional baseball player or college baseball coach because not only did I love to play baseball, but I love to coach it too. When I was in high school, many people said that baseball was my best sport, and I even played as a freshman at Purdue. I believe basketball draws on greater athletic skills than baseball and requires the most quickness and coordination, even though you need these qualities to a lesser extent in baseball too.

I was always a shortstop, starting in grade school near Centeron, Indiana. My older brother and I lived on a farm, and he built a ball diamond for us to play on. Later I played shortstop at Martinsville High, and in the summer I was on our town team, playing against some well known touring Black teams, including the Kansas City Monarchs.

I like to follow baseball, and I often go to Dodger or Angel games, and I try to see each major league team at least once. I am a great Walter Alston and Dodger fan and am pleased to be his friend. He gave me an autographed copy of his book, “The Complete Baseball Handbook,” and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Walter is a fine man. I also admire very much Mike Scoscia and his Angels’ team (as shown here with Coach Wooden).

I also attend as many UCLA baseball games as I can because I like to watch Gary Adams, whom I’m very fond of. I spent many of my spring afternoons watching Art Reichle’s teams play at the Old Joe E. Brown Field.

From 1934 to 1946, I coached baseball at Central High in South Bend, Indiana, and I missed not coaching baseball after that, although I had two more years at Indiana State in 1947 and 1948.

I loved to coach baseball – but the weather in California is so much better than in the Midwest where you’re inside so much. One reason I guess that I love baseball is that it meant we finally could get outside!

Baseball’s strength is that it hasn’t changed too much, and it’s shown great consistency in its rules, thus allowing the fans to keep up with the game. The bases are still 90 feet apart, the pitching distance 60 feet, 6 inches. Sure, you have to have some change to have progress, but all change isn’t progress! And change for change's sake is wrong.

I’d like to see the distances in all parks be the same, but that’s now impossible. Baseball’s been fortunate that most of its measurements have remained stable. The rules have been pretty successful as they’ve been handed down.

Baseball…basketball…it’s all pretty much the same. The secret of coaching is keeping your teams as close to the level of competency as you can. Too many teams reach peaks and valleys, and for every peak, there’s a valley. The end result also depends on the opponent’s abilities as to how well drilled and taught they are. In the end, the better drilled team will come out on top.

One of my many fellow Hoosiers I coached against out in California was Everett S. Dean, who headed Stanford first in basketball and later switched over to HIS favorite sport too---baseball! He once wrote a speech for the NCAA, which was titled something like “If I could start over, I would… well, it’s quite possible that if I had been born in California, I would have been coaching baseball instead of basketball.”

With his signature rolled-up game program in hand, Wooden led the Bruins to 10 NCAA championships, including an unmatched streak of seven in a row from 1967 to 1973. Over 27 years, he won 620 games, including 88 straight during one historic stretch and coached many of the game’s greatest players such as Bill Walton and Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“Coach Wooden taught in a very simple way. He just used sports as a means to teach us how to apply ourselves to any situation,” said Abdul-Jabbar. “He set quite an example. He was more like a parent than a coach. He really was a very selfless and giving human being, but he was a disciplinarian. We learned all about those aspects of life that most kids want to skip over. He wouldn’t let us do that.” Wooden is the only person to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor, in 2003.

“He was always the boss. He always knew what to say,” said former UCLA star Jamaal Wilkes. “Even in the heyday of winning and losing, you could almost discuss anything with him. He always had that composure and wit about him.”

Wooden was the master of the simple one—or two- sentence homity, instructive little messages best presented in his famous “Pyramid of Success,” which remains must-read material, not only for fellow coaches but for anyone in a leadership position in American business. Wooden taught the team game and had only three hard-and-fast rules – no profanity, tardiness or criticizing fellow teammates. Layered beneath that seeming simplicity, though, were a slew of life lessons.

Wooden began his career as a teacher during the Great Depression and was still teaching others long past retirement. Up until about two years ago, he remained a fixture at UCLA games played on a court named after him and his late wife, Nell, and celebrated his 99th birthday with a book he co-authored on how to raise children.

Asked in a 2008 interview the Secret to his long life, Wooden replied: “Not being afraid of death and having peace within yourself. All of life is peaks and valleys. Don’t let the peaks get too high and the valleys too low.”

Asked what he would like God to say when he arrived at the pearly gates, Wooden replied, “Well done.”

“And the Chinese laundry man had the line score on a piece of paper on the window of the laundry. I don’t know what number game it was, but the Yankees beat the Giants and they scored in double figures. I mean, they just crushed them. And here is this 9-year-old, knowing nothing, and visibly, I can see it, I stopped and looked at the line score and my first thought was, ‘Oh, those poor Giants.’ And that’s why I became a Giant fan.”

The Yankees walloped the Giants twice that autumn – by 18-4 in Game 2, and by 13-5 in the Game 6 clincher. Soon enough, Scully no longer needed a laundryman’s line score to see the Yankees win the World Series. As the voice of the Dodgers since 1950, he has covered his share.

Scully, 82, was in the booth at Dodger Stadium Friday, June 25, when the Yankees visited for the first time in six years. Scully calls all nine innings of every Dodgers television game at home and in Western division parks. His first three innings are simulcast on the radio.

The Yankees have not played the Dodgers in October since 1981, the most recent of the teams’ 11 World Series meetings. The Dodgers clinched that championship in the Bronx, but the team flew home immediately. Scully and his wife stayed behind, retreating to the Carlyle, where they were staying and where George Steinbrenner had a suite.

“I went into the bar and I said to the bartender, ‘Could I buy a bottle of Champagne?’” Scully said. “So the bartender, looking around, said, ‘Yeah, I’d be happy to do it, as long as Mr. Steinbrenner doesn’t see me helping you celebrate.’ So we went up and ordered potato chips and a glass of Champagne. That was our celebration.”

There had been much more fanfare the last time the Dodgers triumphed at Yankee Stadium. That was in 1955, when Scully said the words Brooklyn fans had never heard before, and would never hear again: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.”

Walter O’Malley, the owner, took the Dodgers’ executives and Scully to the Lexington Hotel, where they rested before the victory party at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn. Scully picked up his date – Joan Ganz, who would one day create “Sesame Street” – for an unforgettable drive.

“In Manhattan, it was the fall and football was in the air, two hours after the baseball game,” Scully said. “We drove through the tunnel – I don’t know if we went through the Lincoln or the Battery tunnel – and it was like V-J Day and V-E Day all rolled into one in Brooklyn. They were dancing in the streets. It was just one monumental block party.”

The next fall, back at Yankee Stadium, Scully called the last four innings of Don Larsen’s perfect game against the Dodgers. Mel Allen had called the first five, counting Larsen’s consecutive outs but never mentioning that a perfect game was in progress.

Scully followed Allen’s lead, but he has never seen the full broadcast. He peeked in when MLB Network showed it in 2009, but quickly changed the channel. “I was so bored with the way I thought that I was doing it, I went right back to the football,” Scully said. “Because it was, you know, ‘Foul ball, one ball, one strike.’ It was awful, and I’ve never listened to it again.”

Other calls have been more satisfying. Scully proclaimed: “We go to Chicago!” when the Dodgers clinched their first pennant in Los Angeles, in 1959, and that became a battle cry for fans. A generation later, on NBC in 1986, he called a “a little roller up along first” that still inspires Mets fans.

Scully does not know how much longer he will work. He thinks a lot about his wife, Sandra, and the loneliness she must feel on game days. Ideally, he said, he might scale back his schedule, if the Dodgers would allow.

“But the problem is that I do love my job,” Scully said. “Can I give it up? I don’t know.”

Baseball would go on without Scully, as it has without Harry Kalas and Ernie Harwell, but it would never be the same. His sense of wonder, bred in the Polo Grounds bleachers watching Mel Ott after school, has never left. Vin Scully is forever young. “I guess,” he said, “my thermometer for my baseball fever is still a goose bump.”

Ask a ball player to play for peanuts and you’re going to get some nasty reactions. But ask them to play for Peanuts and that evokes a lot of pleasant memories.

This year celebrates the 60th anniversary of the comic strip created by the late Charles Schulz. So since it is the diamond anniversary, and Charlie Brown is the most losing pitcher in history, it seems logical that major league parks would want to celebrate the occasion.

Lucy bobble heads were given out in San Francisco, and on Sunday it was Charlie Brown bobble head day in Detroit. Left on the schedule: A June 26 date in Anaheim and an August 15 date in Minneapolis.

Craig Schulz, son of the creator, calls his father “a sports nut,” with baseball his favorite sport.

“When we grew up, baseball was huge around our house. We’d pull my dad off his drawing board and he would play games on a regular basis with my friends,” he said. “When spring came out, my dad actually coached our Little League team for a couple years. … He just always loved the game. He loved the people in the game. He was friends with Willie Mays. He always loved the Giants.” Charles Schulz never fell into the trap of redeeming his protagonist by making him a big winner.

“I think every kid knows, every adult knows that we are going to lose more than we are going to win in almost everything,” Craig Schulz said. “We might as well get used to it, suck it up, and Charlie Brown shows us what it is like to lose and keep coming back day after day and struggle on and hope for that rare victory.”