Sources: Cuban out

Multiple sources tell Chi-ball that Mark Cuban is out in his bid to buy the Chicago Cubs.

Here is what we are hearing:

Cuban was reported to have bid 1.3 billion. We have been told Cuban’s actual bid was 1 bil. There was an offer to include 300 million in advertising to WGN, owned by the Tribune. That is how the 1.3 figure came about.

Tom Ricketts is now far and away the “leader in the clubhouse”. His bid is not only sufficient, but sources believe he is much more likely to be approved than a Cuban bid.

Cuban was contacted by local businessman and bidder Jim Anixter’s son to engage Cuban in partnership after Anixter’s bid failed, to give Cuban the local ties to Chicago he lacked.

It is believed by these sources that Zell has used Cuban all along to increase the bidding. The orchestration could have gone as far as inviting Cuban to sit next to Sam Zell’s right-hand man Gerry Spector at a Cubs game in the Tribune seats. A source is quoted as saying “If Mark Cuban didn’t exist, Sam Zell would have made someone like him up, he was a dream come true.”"Cuban is not only out of it, he was never in it.”

The source went on to say that the John Canning group was a favorite of the commissioner’s office but wouldn’t meet the price Ricketts and Cuban went to. The major league owners group however, intimated to Zell they would never approve Cuban. The fact is Jerry Reinsdorf still has great influence over the majority of baseball’s owners.

Here is some info on Ricketts:

TOM RICKETTS
Job: Chief Executive of Incapital LLC, a Chicago investment bank that packages corporate bonds for retail investors.
Age: 42
Residence: Wilmette
Education: University of Chicago, BA, MBA
Bio: Former pit trader met his wife at Wrigley Field. Formed Incapital with partners in 1999 to give retail investors an easy way to buy bonds. Son of J. Joe Ricketts, Omaha founder of what is now online broker TD Ameritrade. Brother Pete lost a bid for U.S. Senator from Nebraska in 2006. Strength of bid comes from family war chest Forbes estimates at $2.6 billion.

Original here

Diary entry may offer proof that baseball came from England

LONDON (AP) -- Baseball is as American as ... tea and crumpets?

That may be case, according to a diary uncovered in southern England last year but only now being made public.

Julian Pooley, the manager of the Surrey History Centre, said Thursday he has authenticated a reference to baseball in a diary by English lawyer William Bray dating back to 1755 -- about 50 years before what was previously believed to have been the first known reference to what became the American pastime.

"I know his handwriting very well," Pooley told The Associated Press in a telephone interview, adding he believed the game wasn't very common at the time. "He printed it to show it was new to him. He doesn't mention baseball again. It was something that seemed special."

Bray wrote that he played the game with both men and women on the day after Easter, a traditional holiday in England.

"He was about 18 or 19 (at the time of the diary entry)," Pooley said. "He was a very social man. He enjoyed sports."

The entry reads:

"Easter Monday 31 March 1755

"Went to Stoke Ch. This morning. After Dinner Went to Miss Jeale's to play at Base Ball with her, the 3 Miss Whiteheads, Miss Billinghurst, Miss Molly Flutter, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Ford & H. Parsons & Jelly. Drank Tea and stayed till 8."

Baseball has long been thought to have been an American invention, with roots in the British games of rounders and cricket.

The first recorded competitive baseball game took place in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1846 between the Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York and the New York Nine. The first professional team played in 1869 and the first professional league started two years later.

Bray, who died in 1832, kept a diary for much of his life and wrote a history of Surrey. He also transcribed and published the diary and writings of English writer John Evelyn.

Pooley said he first became aware of Bray's reference in July 2007 after local historian Tricia St. John Barry notified Major League Baseball to say she found a notation of the game that predated their own findings.

"She said, `... I've got a reference in a diary I found in the shed,"' Pooley said.

Pooley said St. John Barry only told MLB about the diary after researchers came to England last year working on a movie by Major League Baseball Advanced Media called "Base Ball Discovered," which examines the origins of the sport.

"She didn't realize its significance (before that)," Pooley said.

The movie is to be shown next week at the Baseball Film Festival in Cooperstown, New York, the home of the sport's Hall of Fame.

"While filming our documentary in England, we met Tricia, who responded to a BBC piece on our film crew being in country, looking at the roots of baseball," MLB.com said on its Web site. "This discovery places William Bray in a new role of importance and provides insight into baseball's beginnings."

The Surrey History Centre said there is a reference to baseball that came earlier than Bray's, but it appears in a fictional book by John Newberry called "A Little Pretty Pocket-Book." Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" also refers to baseball. It was written in 1798 but not published until 1817.

"It is a game steeped in history and now Surrey County Council's History Centre and an inquisitive local historian have provided the earliest manuscript proof that the game the Americans gave to the world came from England," said Helyn Clack, an executive member for safer and stronger communities at Surrey County Council.

A copy of the diary is to go on display at Surrey History Centre on Saturday.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Original here

How much faster could Usain Bolt have gone?

HOW quickly would Usain Bolt have run the 100 metres at the Beijing Olympics if he hadn't slowed in celebration before the finish line? A team of physicists have calculated an answer: the Jamaican gold medallist could have slashed his time from 9.69 seconds to 9.55 seconds.

In the final 20 metres of the race on 16 August, Bolt extended his arms and thumped his chest in celebration, slowing himself a little. But he still broke the world record he himself had set in May.

Hans Eriksen of the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, Norway, and his colleagues, who normally spend their time pondering deep mysteries of the cosmos, wondered whether a few simple calculations might reveal how fast Bolt could have run.

So, in their spare time, they used television footage to measure Bolt's positions, speeds and accelerations as well as those of the runner-up, Richard Thompson. Their measurements show both Bolt and Thompson decelerating in the final 2 seconds of the race, with a larger drop in speed for Bolt.

The team then calculated what Bolt's time would have been had he only slowed down as much as Thompson, arriving at an answer of 9.61 seconds. But this may be too conservative, given how much Bolt outperformed Thompson in the first 8 seconds of the race. So the team also tried assuming, somewhat arbitrarily, that Bolt would have decelerated less than Thompson, by 0.5 metres per second squared in the final 2 seconds, which they say would have given Bolt a time of 9.55 seconds.

It is difficult to get precise measurements from ordinary TV footage, which records at 30 frames per second or less, says Matthew Bundle of the University of Wyoming in Laramie, who studies human locomotion. More precise human motion studies rely on cameras operating at 125 to 250 frames per second, or on tracking motion with a series of light beams which get tripped as people go by, he says. However, he thinks the team's numbers are reasonable.

"We don't mean to say that this is the final and ultimate result," says Eriksen. "Instead, it's a fun application of simple physics, and we've done the best we can." The researchers have submitted their findings to the American Journal of Physics (www.arxiv.org/abs/0809.0209).