John Blanchette

So Tuesday’s big development from the Seattle Mariners was the revelation that after each losing season, CEO Howard Lincoln dons a hair shirt, mixes a castor oil highball and docks himself an unspecified portion of his considerable salary. Oh, and the M’s introduced their general manager, too.

SEATTLE – You know how when somebody of Pac-12 pedigree rolls over some crumb-bum outfit like Utah State or Wyoming, and snooty writers weigh in that it doesn’t mean much of anything? And you know how it drives the loyal-to-the-extreme believers nuts? So why do we keep doing it?

For all the mystery over who might be the alpha dog at the University of Washington this season, there’s a much larger question. Fifteen hundred pounds worth.

So, Spokane is back in a $250-a-game indoor football league. For some, this will be the entire takeaway from the rebooting of the Spokane Shock that was formalized on Tuesday. Explanations, rationalizations, context, even upside – they won’t want to hear any of it. The idea that the franchise is retreating to a reality of minimum- wage football will spawn the obligatory kneejerk disdain and one-horse-town japes, and it will be reflected at the ticket window next spring.

The piece of paper he signed in June, Derek Ryan confessed, still rests on his nightstand, perhaps so he can wake up from one dream and be transported right back to his favorite one. Or maybe a National Hockey League contract is just comforting bedtime reading.

They milked about all the spectacle they could out of Tuesday evening at Avista Stadium: a home-run derby, a helicopter, a Hall of Famer. The initial Northwest League-Pioneer League All-Star Game – the actual game – wasn’t an afterthought, by any means, but you don’t dream up something like this and then aim for understatement. Now the clock is ticking to see which of the young participant players is the first to make it to MLB’s mid-season Circus of the Home Field Advantage.

If there’s a suspension to be imposed or a rained-out game to be rescheduled in the Pioneer Baseball League, the decree is issued out of an alcove next to the kitchen at Taste, a comfy eatery at the corner of Howard and Second Avenue. Occasionally, the clang of pots and pans during the birthing of bobotie or farro salad gets to be too much, and league president Jim McCurdy – who owns the joint with wife Mary Ann – takes calls in the dining room instead.

Having reclaimed the summit of international basketball over the past couple of decades, you’d think good old American know-how could subdue the neighborhood ballers of Uruguay and the Dominican Republic in between Olympics. But that’s the puzzle of the Pan American Games, the scaled down Olympics for us New Worlders.

It isn’t enough that the job Matt Santangelo took on a year ago as backboard-and-ringleader of Hoopfest has required a lot of drinking from the fire hose – which, by the way, sounds like an ideal hydration plan this weekend, ballers. No, then he and the event’s other caretakers, new and old, decided to extend Hoopfest’s claim to Friday, adding a practice round and live music and the deftly named Hopfest beer garden. More asphalt was annexed for extra courts. The boys from Bristol are parachuting in to air baseball and soccer highlights, and even some 3-on-3, live from Nike Center Court – and welcome to them, as long as they leave Skip and Stephen A. home.

For someone who seemed easily reconciled to the glorious, communal possibilities of football and the inevitable beatings it delivers to the soul – to say nothing of the body – Connor Halliday authored a stunning twist to his tale Friday. Surprise immediately turned to mystery, which it will remain unless he decides to share the thinking behind his jarring U-turn exit from the game at the age of 23.

No longer is it enough to simply join a team. There must now be the “buy-in,” a commitment of heart and mind that sounds concrete and final, and yet remains strangely undefined. So let’s take a stab at it.

First he had fled his home, and then his uncle’s home – fearing for his very being and the prospect of becoming a grim statistic, another of the more than 300,000 people who had died in Burundi’s hateful civil war. So Come Nzibarega ran. And, yes, he was still a statistic, but a breathing one – part of the half-million Burundi refugees scattered to neighboring parts of Africa: Tanzania, the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda. He had made his way even farther, to Ethiopia – an urban refugee on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, where he was safe. But safety is not security.

On Whitworth University’s athletic web site, Joe Green’s profile lists as his hobbies as rock climbing and welding, along with “yelling, clapping, eating Doritos.” Is he: