ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the L.A. Rams for ESPN from 2016 to 2018 and the L.A. Angels for MLB.com from 2012 to 2016.
MINNEAPOLIS — Caleb Thielbar was 22, freshly drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers but still a devoted follower of his hometown Minnesota Twins, when the most painful memory of his baseball fandom took place: 11th inning, Game 2 of the 2009 American League Division Series, Joe Mauer lofts a fly ball down the left-field line that’s ruled foul, even though replay confirms it landed fair.
Every Twins fan seems to have a bitter moment like that; this just so happens to be Thielbar’s. Minnesota’s record-breaking, 18-game playoff losing streak spanned 19 years before it finally ended Tuesday. And the Twins’ stretch without winning a playoff round spanned even longer, 21 years, all the way back to 2002 — until they finally vanquished it Wednesday, defeating the Toronto Blue Jays 2-0 to sweep their wild-card series and advance to an ALDS matchup against the dominant Houston Astros.
Few savored it more than Thielbar, now a high-leverage reliever on a scrappy, dangerous Twins team that is already historic.
“It’s hard to fathom how many times you get to the playoffs, and then you’re swept and you’re out,” said Thielbar, a product of neighboring South Dakota. “It’s hard to realize how quick that happens. Whatever our playoff run ends up being — to have a little bit of an extended run, I know it means a lot to the people out there. It means a lot to us in here, too, to be a part of the team that ends that streak. A lot of the guys in here throughout the week were talking about it — that we wanted to be the team that ends it. That was kind of a chip on our shoulder for us going into this postseason.”
The Twins’ pitching staff — led by Pablo Lopez and Sonny Gray, the two frontline starting pitchers who did most of the heavy lifting this season — held the Blue Jays to only one run in 18 innings, letting what little production their offense could muster hold up. In Game 1, it was Royce Lewis returning from a hamstring injury in time to belt two home runs. In Game 2, it was a brief fourth-inning rally — triggered by the surprising exit of Jose Berrios — that proved to be the difference. And all throughout, these Twins — some young, many of them unheralded — continually executed on the little things that mattered.
Twins manager Rocco Baldelli was inspired by it in his postgame speech, in the middle of a home clubhouse ready to explode in champagne and beer, when he went around the room and pointed to every contributor he could find.
Moment after moment after moment after moment — came through, came through, came through, came through.
Nobody came through like Carlos Correa, the star shortstop who spent most of the year hampered by plantar fasciitis but has long brought his best for stages like these. In Game 1, he retrieved a slow roller that trickled away and made an off-balance throw home to nail the speedy Bo Bichette, turning in a play that Baldelli believes “we will see forever.” In Game 2, he executed a pickoff of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at second base with Toronto threatening, once again swinging the momentum of the game with one play.
Correa found Gray after the first inning and informed him that the Blue Jays’ baserunners couldn’t hear their third-base coach yelling “back!” because the Target Field crowd was so loud.
“He’s like, ‘The timing pick is going to be there,'” Gray recalled. “‘It’s going to be there.'”
The Twins held a 2-0 lead in the top of the fifth, but the Blue Jays had runners on second and third with two outs and Bichette up to bat. When the count ran full, Correa gave the signal to a coach in the Twins’ dugout, who relayed it to Gray’s PitchCom headset.
Timing pick, second base.
Gray executed the pickoff perfectly, then returned to the dugout and was shocked to find out it had been put on by Correa.
Said Correa: “I felt it was the right spot to do it.”
“For me, it was just about executing the play,” Gray said. “But for him to have that awareness is what makes him special.”
The Blue Jays, with a decorated lineup that underperformed throughout the year, rallied often but barely came through. Their 15 hits was the most ever by a team to score one run or fewer in its first two postseason games, according to research by ESPN Stats & Info. This year’s Tampa Bay Rays held the record for only a couple of hours.
Maybe it was meant to be.
Lopez wore Johan Santana’s jersey prior to his Game 1 start, then became the first Twins pitcher to win a postseason game since Santana, who just so happens to be his boyhood idol. Afterwards, he alluded to the possibility of fate being at play. The following afternoon provided a different example, one that harkened back to the Mauer foul ball that still haunts Twins fans everywhere.
This time, the opposite occurred.
The bases were loaded with Blue Jays with only one out in the sixth inning and Louie Varland, another lifelong Twins fan, on the mound. Matt Chapman hit a line drive down the left-field line that would have at least tied the score. Instead, it drifted slightly, landing mere inches to the left of the chalk for a foul ball. On the next pitch, he bounced into the 6-4-3 double play that ended the threat. For the first time in a long time, the Twins had the October luck they needed on their side.
“It was a long time coming,” said LaTroy Hawkins, the former Twins reliever who was on the 2002 team that last won a postseason round and now works within the front office. “I’m just excited for this group. This is a different team now. This team is built around pitching, and as we know, pitching wins championships — pitching and defense. I’m just excited to see what the future holds. They’re not done yet.”
After an entertaining Week 0 appetizer and a smattering of games Thursday and Friday, it’s time for Week 1 of the college football season to finally kick off. And the game to start off the first full Saturday of the season couldn’t be much better.
It’s the Texas Longhorns vs. the Ohio State Buckeyes. It’s the No. 1 and No. 3 teams in the preseason AP poll facing off. It’s a College Football Playoff rematch and Arch Manning’s first major test as starter against the defending national champions.
Needless to say, it’s going to be good.
We’ll be keeping track of Texas-Ohio State — and any other notable happenings that might pop up — as the college football season returns. Here’s everything that’s going on across Week 1 in college football:
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Just as it was the first time, Lee Corso’s final headgear pick was Brutus Buckeye.
Corso selected the third-ranked Buckeyes to beat top-ranked Texas on his final appearance on ESPN’s “College GameDay” on Saturday.
He made the prediction on the 50-yard line at Ohio Stadium 16 minutes before kickoff, quite a change from the first time in 1996 when it was done in the parking lot outside the Horseshoe.
“To everyone who has been a part of the journey, thank you,” Corso said during the opening segment of Saturday’s show.
It was the 46th time Corso donned Brutus Buckeye’s head. Ohio State is 31-14 the previous occasions.
Coach Ryan Day gave Corso an Ohio State helmet with a buckeye leaf on it for each time he chose the Buckeyes. Day also gave Corso an additional sticker to put on in case he picked the Buckeyes.
An area restaurant also made an 85-pound cake of Brutus’ head.
Corso, who turned 90 on Aug. 7, has been a part of “GameDay” since its start in 1987 and has made pregame shows entertaining under a simple philosophy: “Football is just the vehicle. It’s entertainment, sweetheart.”
The three-hour show was a celebration of Corso more than a finale. Besides looking back at Corso’s career, the show analyzed Saturday’s key games and included an interview with Bill Belichick, who makes his debut with North Carolina on Monday night against TCU.
It was the 26th time “GameDay” was in Columbus. It was outside Ohio Stadium on Oct. 5, 1996, where Corso’s popular headgear prediction segment began.
Corso donned Brutus Buckeye’s head before Ohio State faced Penn State, and the rest is history.
Corso has worn 69 schools’ mascot headgear and has dressed up as Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish leprechaun, the Stanford tree, and Founding Fathers James Madison and Benjamin Franklin.
He has a 66.5% winning rate on his headgear predictions (286-144), which is much better than his 73-85-6 mark in 15 years as a coach at Louisville, Indiana and Northern Illinois.
With all due respect to “Not so fast, my friend,” those aren’t the words that first come to my mind when I think of Lee Corso, who will be making his final “College GameDay” appearance Saturday at Ohio State. Instead, it’s that first sentence. Because those are the first words I ever heard from Coach. Well, the first I heard in person.
By the time he said that to me, on Saturday, Oct. 1, 1994, I had already heard him say so many words, but always through a television speaker. I had been watching him on ESPN for seven years. When “College GameDay” debuted Sept. 5, 1987, I was a high school student living in a college-football-crazed house in Greenville, South Carolina. My father was an ACC football official, and my role at the house was to get up Saturday mornings and make sure the VCR was rolling on Dad’s game that day so he could break down the film when we got home from church on Sunday.
Then, what to my wondering eyes did appear but a new ESPN studio show, previewing all of the day’s college football games, including wherever Pops might be with his whistle. It was called “College GameDay,” and that night in the same studio, the crew was back with highlights of all those games. It was hosted by Tim Brando, whom we knew from “SportsCenter,” with analysis provided by human college football computer Beano Cook and … wait … was that the guy who used to coach at Indiana? The last time we saw him, wasn’t he coaching the Orlando Renegades to a 5-13 record during the dying days of the USFL?
Brando tells the story of Corso’s ESPN audition, how the then-52-year-old looked at his would-be broadcast partner and said, “Sweetheart, I’m here for the duration. This show is going to be the trigger for your career and my career. I’m going to be the Dick Vitale of college football. Football doesn’t have one. And this show is going to be my vehicle.”
That vehicle shifted into drive and stayed there, even as “College GameDay” remained parked in Bristol, Connecticut. Eventually, Brando moved on and wunderkind Chris Fowler took over as host. They were joined by former running back Craig James, who was nicknamed the “Pony Patriot” because of his college tenure at SMU and his NFL stint in New England. But that’s not what Coach called him. He addressed James as “Mustang Breath.”
That was the formative years “GameDay” lineup I consumed so hungrily during my college days in Knoxville, Tennessee. My roommates and I rose groggily on Saturday mornings to see whether Corso picked our Vols to win that day before stumbling out the dorm doors to grab a cheeseburger and head to the Neyland Stadium student section. If he said Tennessee was going to win, we declared him a genius. If he said the Vols were going to lose, we would scream, “What the hell do you know?! You only lasted one year at Northern Illinois!” That night, pizza in hand, we would watch him on the scoreboard show and again shout at the television. It was either “Spot on, Coach!” or “Hey, Coach, not so fast, my friend!”
Those were the autumns of the early 1990s. Just as Coach had predicted, “College GameDay” had indeed been a trigger. And he indeed was becoming the face of the sport he loved so much. At home, we could feel that love because we recognized it. We loved college football, too. Whether Corso picked your team or not, his passion for the sport was indisputable. That created a connection. Like seeing the same friends every Saturday, the ones whose season tickets have always been next to yours. Or the tailgater who has always parked in the spot next to you, offering up a beer and a rack of ribs. Or the guy you happen to meet as you are both bellied up to a sports bar on Saturday to watch college football games. All of them.
In a business full of phony, Lee Corso has always been the genuine article. And in a world full of awful, Lee Corso has always been fun. All at once so irresistibly relatable but also larger than life.
So, now, imagine my through-the-looking-glass moment of that first time I heard him speak to me directly. That October Saturday in 1994. I was an entry-level ESPN production assistant, barely one year out from those dorm days at Tennessee. I was also barely five years from bowls of cereal back in our Greenville family room, labeling a VHS tape for my father while watching Corso break down what he thought might happen in Dad’s game.
“Appreciate you, young man.”
My assignment that day was to cut and script a highlight of my alma mater as the Vols hosted No. 19 Washington State. The headliner play was a long touchdown run by wideout Nilo Silvan on a reverse pitch from some kid named Peyton Manning. But the quiet play that really handed the Vols the upset was a fourth-down conversion early in the fourth quarter, when a 1-yard Manning run earned the first down by barely an inch, all while still in Tennessee territory. That set up a field goal that ended up sealing the 10-9 win.
Back then, every ESPN highlight was produced in a converted basement room crammed with tape machines and filled with the noise of 20-somethings like me, scrambling in and out of the edit rooms that lined what we called “screening.” When you were done piecing together your one-minute tape and scribbling out a handwritten script, you ran out of that edit room and down the hallway to the tape room and TV studio to deliver it all.
As we were about to pop my Tennessee-Wazzu tape for the delivery dash, the door to our edit suite opened. It was Lee Corso. Without us knowing it, he had been watching through the window to see what plays we had included in our highlight. Without saying a word, he pointed at my script — called a “shot sheet” — and motioned for me to hand it to him. He read it, flipped it around so it was facing me and used his finger to tap the box describing that decidedly nonsexy fourth-quarter fourth-down conversion.
“Appreciate you, young man.”
Then he continued.
“I came down here to make sure you had this play in there. That was the play of the game. If we hadn’t had that play in this highlight for me to talk about, then I would have looked like a dummy. And I don’t need any help in that department, do I?”
He squeezed the shoulders of my editor, the guy at the wheel of the machinery.
“I appreciate you, too.”
Then he walked out into the furious racket of screening and shouted through the aroma cloud of sweat and pizza, “How we doing, troops!”
Someone shouted back, “How was Nebraska, Coach?” A reminder that this was the first year that “College GameDay” had hit the road. They went out once in 1993, to Notre Dame, as a test. It went well, so they were headed out six times in 1994. Just two weeks earlier, they had gone to Lincoln, the show’s third-ever road trip.
He replied: “Lot of corn and big corn-fed dudes!”
Another shout: “You excited about going to Florida State-Miami next week, Coach?”
“Let’s hope it goes better than when I played there!” A reminder that the Florida State defensive back they called the “Sunshine Scooter,” who held the FSU record for career interceptions (14) for decades, was a career 0-2 against the Hurricanes in Miami.
Before Coach scooted back down the hall to the studio, he said it again. This time to the entire room of kids desperately trying to find their way in the TV sports business.
“I appreciate y’all!”
That was more than three decades ago. And whenever I recall that story, it is echoed back to me by every single person who was in that screening room with me back in the day. And the people who first went out on the road with “College GameDay” in the mid-1990s. And the people who are out there with the show today.
In so many cases, it’s the same people. Jim Gaiero, the current producer of “GameDay,” was also down in screening back in the day. The group that produced the incredible “Not So Fast, My Friend” ESPN documentary was led by a handful of Emmy Award-winning feature producers who also were down in the pit, and also were recipients of so many “appreciate you”s.
It is impossible to measure the impact of someone like Corso, the face of his sport, taking those moments to encourage, to mentor, and to, yes, coach. That’s not common. But neither is he.
On the morning of the 2024 Rose Bowl, the College Football Playoff semifinal between Alabama and Michigan, I was sitting with Coach just before he headed out to the “GameDay” set. I shared with him that story from 1994 and told him how much it had always meant to me. He replied: “Winning games is great. But any real coach will tell you that isn’t the best part of the job. It’s watching those that you coached up as kids, seeing them grow into adults, have great jobs and raise great families. That’s why you do it.”
Lee Corso spends every Saturday surrounded by those he has coached. And that’s why it has been and will be so hard to say goodbye. It’s why there was never an icicle’s chance in Phoenix that Corso was going to be off the show after he suffered a stroke. It’s why he was still part of the show in 2020, when COVID-19 had him stuck at home in Florida as the rest of the crew was back on the road. It’s why he has been on the show ever since it was born, even as it has grown from a few guys in a studio to a few dozen fans behind the stage on the road to the rock concert circus caravan that it is today. Exactly what Coach believed it could be when he showed up for that first audition 38 years ago.
Love. That’s why.
You see it in the eyes of those who work on the show. The way they look out for him. The way they still hang on every word he says. We all see it very publicly when we watch Kirk Herbstreit. It’s hard to remember when we see the current Herbie, the father-of-four statesman of the sport, but when he first joined “College GameDay” in 1996, he had just turned 27, less than four years out of Ohio State. When Kirk posts those early Saturday morning videos of Coach sharing a story or Coach pulling a prank or Coach cracking himself up as he tries to figure out how to navigate an overly complicated escalator, we all feel that. Just as we have felt that since the first countdown to the first “College GameDay” on Sept. 5, 1987.
Not so fast? It has gone by too fast. But what a friend.