By Ted Nesi

ATTLEBORO, Mass. (WPRI) – Former Boston Celtics player Jason Collins became the first openly gay active athlete in a major U.S. sport on Monday, and he’s crediting Massachusetts Congressman Joe Kennedy III with helping him make the announcement.

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• Related: Enthusiastic Joe Kennedy III says it’s ‘surreal’ to join Congress (Jan. 7)

Bob Ryan – whose Boston Globe column will be dearly missed after he retires this summer – traveled to Pawtucket last week for the ceremony honoring the late Ben Mondor, who saved the PawSox in the 1970s. The resulting column is a must-read for Rhode Islanders:

PAWTUCKET, R.I. – He did not want the stadium named after him, and he more than likely would not have been too thrilled about what they were doing to perpetuate his memory now, but when you leave so many people behind who loved and respected you, the issue is out of your control.

That is why visitors to McCoy Stadium will now find a life-sized statue of the truly beloved Ben Mondor just outside the left-field foul pole, adjacent to what is known as the “Mondor Gardens.” At the base of the statue is an oft-heard Mondor passage that sums up his outlook on being involved in baseball:

“We’re blessed to make our living playing a little kid’s game on a field of freshly cut grass under God’s blue sky.”

Read Ryan’s entire column here.

• Related: Pawtucket celebrates birthday at former mayor’s stadium ‘folly’ (Aug. 23)

Apparently a decade in Los Angeles hasn’t cured Bill Simmons of his Massachusetts superiority complex.

From his latest Grantland column (emphasis mine):

Do you realize Charlotte has a chance to finish with the NBA’s worst winning percentage ever? The ‘73 Sixers own the worst 82-game record (9-73); the ‘99 Grizzlies own the worst strike-shortened record (8-42); and the ‘48 Providence Steamers set the records for fewest wins (they went 6-42) and most times someone said, “They put a team THERE?” (215,563 times and counting).

Hey Simmons, the team’s name was the Providence Steamrollers, thank you very much. And I’m sure they did the best they could during their very short three-year existence.

(image credit: NBA.com)

The headline kind of says it all. Deadspin was none too kind to WJAR a few months back, either.

But hey, at least they spelled “Rhode Island” right.

Check out this fun column by diehard Patriots fan Tim White looking at our colleague James Bartone’s experience at Gillette on Sunday after he won our internal Channel 12 raffle of tickets to the game.

Bloomberg News thinks so. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, people!

Paterno, right, with Coach Engle and co-captain Scott

The legendary and suddenly embattled coach was a member of Brown’s Class of 1950, the NYT reports:

Paterno came to Penn State in 1950 as a 23-year-old assistant coach making $3,600 a year. He planned to stay for two seasons, to pay off his student loans from Brown University, where he earned a degree in English literature.

Joseph V. Paterno ’50 was quarterback and co-captain of Brown’s 1949 football squad, “considered to be Brown’s finest,” which finished the year with an 8-1 record – one short of their goal, “9 for 9 in ’49.” They finished the season “with a spectacular victory over Colgate, coming from behind to score three touchdowns in the last four minutes for a final score of 41-26.”

Paterno received the Brown Alumni Association’s Williams Rogers Award in 1998 – which “honors an alumnus or alumna whose service to society illustrates the words of the Brown Charter: living a life of ‘usefulness and reputation’” – and delivered one of the university’s annual Commencement Forums in 2000. In 1996, one of his fellow alums donated $1 million to endow the Williams/Paterno Chair in Football at Brown.

Paterno isn’t Brown’s only famous football alum. John Heisman of Heisman Trophy fame was in the Class of 1891. But apparently Heisman didn’t do anything on the gridiron here in Providence. “There were no [football] games between 1886 and 1889, when Brown might have made use of a student named John Heisman 1891, who stayed for only two years,” the Encyclopedia Brunoniana says.

Update: One of my wise readers – a Brown alum himself – points out the 1915 football team appeared “in what is referred to as the first annual Rose Bowl game,” a factoid backed up by Encyclopedia Brunoniana. Who knew?

(photo: Brown University)

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is one of the few big-time political donors in the National Football League who’s given most of his money to Democrats since President Obama took office, a new study by the Center on Responsive Politics shows.

Kraft has donated $28,800 to Democrats but just $4,800 to Republicans since January 2009, according to federal campaign-finance data analyzed by the center.

Kraft has given $1,000 donations over the years to Congressman David Cicilline, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, as well as Chafee administration official Richard Licht when he sought the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 2000, a WPRI.com review of the data shows.

Only three NFL officials donated more to Obama’s party than Kraft: the Miami Dolphins’ Stephen Ross ($37,200), the Seattle Seahawks’ Paul Allen ($36,000) and league official Rodney Peete ($30,400).

(more…)

One of the best things about covering the economy is you never know what off-the-beaten-path story you’ll be tracking. Here’s my update on the shakeup in the Big East Conference. Also, the Projo’s Kevin McNamara has a column today on what it all means for the Providence-based nonprofit.

Update: RINPR’s Scott MacKay has a take, too:

The erosion of the Big East is a blow to Rhode Island’s economy too. If you think the Dunk is going to be overflowing with fans watching the Friars play Verrmont, New Hampshire and Maine, you believe in the Easter Bunny. Downtown Providence bars and restaurants fill for PC games against Connecticut, Syracuse and Pitt, not for pushover teams from hockey-school conferences. Providence, one the capital of New England basketball, could be reduced to a garbage time afterthought.

And while we’re on the topic, you might want to read The Atlantic’s new cover story by historian Taylor Branch: “The Shame of College Sports.” I haven’t finished it yet myself, but it’s winning some high praise.

(I’m going to start using Rhode Island Public Radio’s Twitter handle, “RINPR,” as shorthand for the station since its call letters will change when its new signal starts up next month.)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The Big East Conference is facing the loss of two of its schools just a year after agreeing to keep its headquarters in Providence.

Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh are in talks with the Atlantic Coast Conference about leaving the Big East to join the league, according to a report published late Friday by The New York Times that cited anonymous sources.

The news coincided with the death Friday night of Dave Gavitt, the first commissioner of the Big East Conference, after a long illness. He was 73. The legendary former Providence College coach was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006.

The nonprofit Big East’s revenue totaled $113 million in the year ended June 30, 2010, according to its most recent tax filing. That included $48.7 million made on tournaments and $36 million for broadcast rights.

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Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien will throw out the first pitch at McCoy Stadium tonight as the PawSox host a celebration of the city’s 125th birthday. What the revelers may not realize is that the place where they’re gathering was initially seen as the biggest boondoggle in the city’s history.

The stadium is named for former Pawtucket Mayor Thomas P. McCoy, a powerful Democratic boss and an ally of Governor T.F. Green in Rhode Island’s “Bloodless Revolution” of 1935. McCoy won the mayor’s office in 1936 after three years as party boss in the Depression-decimated industrial city, and he quickly decided to make the baseball park his legacy project – leading critics to dub it “McCoy’s Folly.”

” ‘McCoy’s Folly’ was either the vision of a great mayor with bull-headed tenacity or the work of a corrupt political machine bilking the City of Pawtucket out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a baseball field built in a swamp,” Chuck Arning and Kevin Klyberg, two local National Park rangers, wrote in a 2000 retrospective: (more…)

From The Associated Press:

A wild brawl broke out between Georgetown and a Chinese men’s basketball team last night, putting an immediate end to a supposed goodwill game that coincided with United States Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to the country. …

In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner called it an “unfortunate” incident.

“We look to these types of exchanges to promote good sportsmanship and strengthen our people-to-people contact with China,” he said.

Well, if people-to-people contact was the goal, I’d say the game was a huge success.

Gordon Gee had a brief but stormy tenure as president of Brown University from 1998 to 2000. A decade later he’s now the president of Ohio State University, and the highest-paid public school president in the nation.

ESPN The Magazine reports Gee is in trouble again over an ill-advised comment about Jim Tressel:

As Gee backed away from the mic, a reporter started to ask whether dismissing Tressel had ever crossed his mind.

“No – are you kidding?” Gee interrupted. He sputtered for a second, searching for a one-liner to break the tension. “Let me be very clear,” he said. “I’m just hoping the coach doesn’t dismiss me.” …

Gee had aired his profession’s worst-kept dirty little secret: that presidents can’t really control athletics. Although every infractions case reveals as much, nobody had ever simply admitted it.

The Yankees arrive in Boston tonight to play the Sox in a three-game series just as the two teams find themselves tied atop the AL East.

To get you in the mood, here are two pieces of trivia from this morning’s Boston Globe. The first one shows the astonishing parity in the rivalry recently:

Each year from 2008-10, the teams went 9-9 against each other. Over the last 10 seasons, counting playoffs, the Red Sox are 96-94 against the Yankees. Over 190 games, the difference is 39 runs in favor of the Sox.

No wonder the games are always five hours long.

Then there was this bit on last night’s attendance:

Masterson overshadowed the Boston debut of lefthander Erik Bedard in the Indians’ 7-3 victory before a Fenway Park crowd of 38,477, the largest turnout in the post-World War II era.

I always wonder where those extra fans squeezed in to set a new record.

In an ode to the dying art of the hammer-throw, The New York Times offers this surprising bit of local trivia (emphasis mine):

In the United States, the hammer may be the least heralded sport in track and field. Throwers are often banished to fields away from the main arena because officials fear lawsuits and worry the weights will pock their carefully manicured fields. In Eugene, the site of the United States outdoor track and field championships Thursday through Sunday, the hammer throw field is closer, adjacent to the track where the fans pack the stands.

Decades ago, in the glory days of track and field, the hammer was more popular in the United States, with more than 20 states fielding high school teams in the discipline. Now only Rhode Island carries the hammer as a high school sport.

I wonder what the reason for that is? Might explain why Mayor Taveras took that photo at 38 Studios.

(photo: British Olympic Association, via Wikipedia)

Mayor Menino has confirmed it. Really, though, I just wanted an excuse to post this photo of Chara:

If anyone had told me back in 2001 what the next 10 years of Boston sports were going to be like …

Update: 98.5 The Sports Hub just reported that Game 7 scored an astonishing 43.4 rating in Boston and a 64 share, meaning 64% of all televisions in the area that were turned on last night were watching the game.

Update #2: NBC says Providence scored the second-highest TV viewership for the game, with a 25.9 rating and a 38 share (though that’s far below the 64 share an hour north of here). The network also says Game 7 was the highest-rated sports event in the Boston market since Super Bowl XLII in 2008.

From Wednesday’s Stanley Cup coverage in the Boston Globe:

TD Garden was unavailable to the teams yesterday because of “Glee Live.’’

I wonder if Rene Rancourt went.

It’s not looking great for the Bruins as they get set for Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals in Boston tonight, but we’re keeping the faith here at Nesi’s Notes. The Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont caught my eye with these chart-ready stats about the NHL in his column on Sunday:

According to league data, the average household income (HHI) for NHL fans is $104,000, highest of the four major sports with Major League Baseball ($96,200), the NBA ($96,000), and the NFL ($94,500). Sixty-eight percent of NHL fans have attended college, more than the other three sports (ranging 60.4 percent to 63.6 percent). And 64 percent of NHL fans hold full-time jobs, also more than the others (57-58.1 percent).

All in all, hockey fans are a well-educated, well-heeled, Internet-savvy bunch, no matter what the perception. Not surprisingly, they also like their beer. According to Latimer, Bruins fans buy upward of 30 percent more brew at the Garden than Celtics fans.

I find that interesting and, as Dupont notes, somewhat counterintuitive. What do you think explains it?

Here’s a fun recollection in Kevin McNamara’s Sunday profile of Ed Cooley, PC’s new basketball coach:

Cooley’s life is a Full Rhode Island. His mother is a Narragansett Indian and his family tree owns branches that are seemingly never-ending. “I have more than 300-350 relatives. Easy,” he says.

He played for the Eighth Ward Democrats in the Elmwood Little League against two future mayors, Cranston’s Allan Fung and Providence’s Angel Taveras. Another ex-mayor, Cranston’s Michael Traficante, was his youth football coach with the Edgewood Eagles. When Cooley was at Central High, Taveras played baseball at Classical with some of his friends. “He was a good baseball player,” Cooley says, “a funny guy. Big personality. To see him now, he’s, well, kind of geeky. He wasn’t like that as a kid. I am so proud of Angel.”

The Burnside Building in Bristol

Other than the TPC up in Norton, most of the golf courses around here don’t get much national attention. And they may be thankful for that after reading what The New York Times has to say about the Bristol Golf Club.

“There is no such thing as a really terrible golf course,” writes Times veteran Charles McGrath. “But if some courses are indisputably better than others, then inevitably, some are worse. Quite a bit worse, in my experience. So bad they’re worth a detour – if only because they make you grateful for the other better kind.”

McGrath apparently spends a lot of time in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which he describes as “the Bermuda Triangle of New England” when it comes to golf. “For some perverse reason, the land there – stony, boggy, sandy, full of scrub pine and poison ivy – has given rise to a surprising number of little nine-holers. Some are unmemorable, a couple are just plain lousy, but a few have some genuine distinction. They’re bad in good ways – or at least unusual ones.”

McGrath’s honor roll includes Marion Golf Club, Pine Valley in Rehoboth, Touisset Country Club and Wampanoag Golf Course in Swansea. “But quirky as these courses are,” he writes, “none can compare with the Bristol Golf Club, in nearby Bristol, R.I., which is of a worseness so extreme that you occasionally wonder if it’s not ironic. Maybe, like certain fashion trends, it’s bad on purpose?”

He continues:

Bristol has also been stuck — blighted, you could say — with some of the least likely golfing terrain imaginable. The course is in the middle of an industrial park, so that the opening hole, for example, an otherwise flat and forgettable 137-yard par 3, is enhanced by the sight of a blue metal warehouse building behind the green. When I played here recently, there was a guy out in back welding, and the sparks brightened a day otherwise overcast and dismal.

More warehouse buildings line the left side of No. 2, and if you have trouble finding the green here — it’s partly hidden by stumps and a fenced-in transformer — just aim down the power lines that straddle the fairway. …

The fifth, sixth and seventh are the apogee — or maybe the perigee — of Bristol. I used to dream about them all the time, and in my dreams, the fairways were lined on the right side with old aircraft engines. What a surprise, then, to discover that where I remembered some scattered pieces of rusting steel, there was in fact a full-fledged junk yard, with two large orange cranes dipping and poking into mountains of metal and plastic pipe like giant prehistoric birds picking up straw. …

You don’t need to play Bristol more than once, but that it’s there at all is sort of miraculous. Whoever designed it was no George Thomas, certainly, but he deserves credit for stubbornness. He built a golf course where nobody else would have thought it possible.

(photo: Town of Bristol)

“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify,” Jerry Seinfeld once said. “Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city – you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.”

That may sound sacrilegious in these salad days for local sports fans, with the Celtics moving on to the second round, the Bruins on a three-game streak against the hated Habs, and the Sox righting the ship after a shaky start. But The Boston Globe’s Leon Neyfakh reports that Seinfeld was onto something:

[T]he link between losing [games] and loyalty is less puzzling to experts in the growing field of fan studies, a burgeoning effort in the academy whose practitioners are interested in how sports fans think and why they feel as intensely as they do about their favorite teams. …

Having a winning record, these researchers have found, is just a small part of what makes franchises like the Sox, or the Celtics, or the Bruins, the objects of intense dedication. Instead, their findings point to a variety of factors that contribute to fanship, including our instinct for tribal affiliation, our desire to participate in tradition, and our hunger for compelling characters and dramatic story lines.

Fandom, it turns out, is a surprisingly clear window into our brains, and into how loyalty in general works.

One of the academics featured in The Globe story hails from right in our own backyard: Daniel Cavicchi, an American Studies professor who’s been teaching at RISD for the past 15 years and has a Ph.D. from Brown. (His first book was “Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans.”)

Cavicchi also writes a blog covering the same topics, amusingly named “The Ardent Audience” – check it out. I liked his posts about how iPods are changing listening culture and how fans used to rush the field more.

(photo: Rene Schwietzke/Flickr)

It’s been more than 15 years now since Dan Barry left The Providence Journal for The New York Times, but he’s never lost his love for telling stories about Rhode Island.

Since 2007, Barry has used his “This Land” column to tell readers about a graveyard in Narragansett; Buddy Cianci’s radio career; Nicky Pari’s deathbed confession; the Camp Runamuck tent city under I-195; and North Providence’s corruption scandal. He stopped by Fall River in 2009, too.

Barry’s latest Rhode Island tale in The Times recalls the legendary longest game in pro baseball history, the 1981 PawSox-Red Wings matchup immortalized on those plastic soda cups McCoy Stadium used to sell (and perhaps still does).

Here’s how Barry begins:

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Our planning went no further than to meet at the ballpark. Simple in theory but madness in practice, given the thousands of others with similar plans. My only hope was to find a white-haired man exuding boyish wonder; who looked as if he was about to see a baseball game for the 10,000th time — and for the first.

There! In the red shirt and sunglasses: Joe Morgan, the former Boston Red Sox manager, whose baseball credentials date to the 1940s, when wily pitchers in New England’s old Blackstone Valley League would snap off 12-to-6 curves to teach the college kid not to be too impressed with himself.

Hey, Joe!

And just like that, our continuing baseball conversation picked up where it left off, as naturally as if we had been interrupted by a cough and not a year. No time for idle banter; just instant ruminations about the rules of the game, the historical data, the personalities come and gone.

Read the rest here.

Apparently Barry has a lot more to say about this bit of sports history, too – he has a new book about it, “The Bottom of The 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game,” coming out April 12. I bet he’ll be making his way here for a book signing at some point soon.

Update: Had my Joe Morgans mixed up earlier; thanks to Steve Kumins for very politely setting me straight.

(logo: Pawtucket Red Sox)

Answer: Ernie DiGregorio.

“Ernie D,” as he was known – shades of Pauly D? – was NBA Rookie of the Year in 1974 after a stellar season with the Buffalo Braves. (They’re now the LA Clippers.)

DiGregorio was born in North Providence and attended PC. He “helped revolutionize the concept of the fast-break offense,” according to his biography on the website of the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame (which apparently exists). But his career mostly fizzled out after that first year, and he retired in 1981.

(h/t: Dan Shaughnessy)

(photo: National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame)

Patriots owner Robert Kraft thinks it could work, despite our punishing winters:

“I woke up this morning and my [wife Myra] says to me, ‘Wow, it’s snowing. We should have a game in New England,’ ’’ Kraft said. “And you know, when I supported New York — and I did for a lot of reasons — I’m thinking about it, maybe we should have a Super Bowl in New England, maybe we should get on the list.

“We have a lot of great things in Boston, Providence, and New England. We have the hotel rooms, we have everything. I love games that are played in the elements. I think our snow game against Oakland [in the 2001 postseason] was one of the greatest games ever played.

“And think about it, here we have this situation with the weather and there are 5,000 members of the media show up … The weather, I think, will help us have record TV ratings. So maybe we should consider a Super Bowl in Boston, I don’t know.’’

Maybe we’ll have better luck getting the Super Bowl than we did the World and America’s Cups.

(Also, if you’re a gambling man or woman I hope you took the over on the Christian Aguilera prop bet – my buddy Dan clocked her “braaaaaave” at 10.9 seconds.)

If you want to be the next Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt, you’d better get on it – one leading expert on athletic performance tells The Boston Globe he’s calculated “that the end of almost all athletic improvement will occur around 2027.” In fact, he thinks most of it has already occurred:

In the sports that best measure athleticism — track and field, mostly — athletic performance has peaked. The studies show the steady progress of athletic achievement through the first half of the 20th century, and into the latter half, and always the world-record times fall. Then, suddenly, achievement flatlines. These days, athletes’ best sprints, best jumps, best throws — many of them happened years ago, sometimes a generation ago.

The expert - Geoffroy Berthelot, a researcher at Paris’ Institute for Biomedical Research and Sports Epidemiology – cites a number of factors that have pushed athletes to near the limits of human biology: better nourishment, improved technique, more strength training and steroids.

On behalf of all of us, I’d like to thank Monsieur Berthelot for giving all of us yet another excuse to skip going to the gym.

I’m sure it won’t be long before organized labor’s opponents draw a connection between last Sunday’s crushing playoff loss and this news:

The New England Patriots are now members of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, according to George Nee, the state president of the national labor organization.

“They affiliated all 53 members in all six states,” Nee said. “So now I have to figure out who the player rep is so that they can be on our executive board.”

Nee said the players have always been affiliated with the national AFL-CIO.

But “just recently the National Football Players Association decided that it would be advantageous to affiliate with the state and local federations. We just got notified two weeks ago. So the 53 [m]embers of the NE Patriots are now dues paying members of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO.”

(h/t: Providence Daily Dose)

Update: And credit where it’s due – I should have noted that the news was first reported by the Projo’s estimable Katherine Gregg. You can see why Kathy haunts my dreams as a fierce competitor for scoops.

Soccer’s most powerful officials are meeting in Switzerland this week to decide which countries will get to host the World Cup in 2018 and 2022, with a formal announcement expected tomorrow. The U.S. is one of five finalists to host the world’s most popular sports tournament in 2022.

If the U.S. gets the games, some of the matches will be played right here at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, which would be one of 18 host cities. (It’s listed as Boston on the official website.) Patriots owner Bob Kraft is on the board of directors for the 2022 U.S. bid.

These would be the first World Cup games at Gillette, though the old Foxboro Stadium hosted in 1994, eight years before Gillette opened. The stadium’s fields were upgraded to meet FIFA’s standards last winter.

Bloomberg News sets the scene ahead of tomorrow’s 10 a.m. announcement:

Soccer’s governing body, FIFA, will decide Dec. 2 where sport’s most-watched event takes place. Before that, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the U.K.’s Prince William and the Emir of Qatar will try to charm the 22 voters on FIFA’s executive committee.

The decision is worth billions of dollars to hosts, sponsors and FIFA, a not-for-profit organization that gets most of its income from sales related to the quadrennial tournament. The U.S., one of five candidates for 2022, says a World Cup generates about $5 billion.

“If somebody has decided that he will go with a candidate, this endorsement of interest by royalty or the prime minister or the president of the country really tells you not to have any other thoughts in the last minute,” Marios Lefkaritis, a delegate on the FIFA body that makes the decision, said in an interview. The Cypriot declined to say who he’ll vote for.

Australia, Qatar, Japan and South Korea make up the remaining 2022 candidates. The 2018 race is all-European as England competes with Russia and joint offers from Spain/Portugal and the Netherlands/Belgium. Brazil hosts the 2014 tournament.

A majority vote is required. If that isn’t immediately attained the lowest-scoring bids are eliminated in further voting rounds.

The Red Sox are promising to make some big moves this off-season, and for good reason – without a new superstar, their TV ratings won’t recover, FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal writes in a column today:

The decline in ratings on the New England Sports Network, of which the Red Sox own 80 percent, is nothing short of a call to action.

For the first time in eight years, the Sox didn’t lead the majors in local TV ratings, a major-league source said. They finished tied for fifth, according to figures obtained by FOXSports.com.

The Cardinals had the best local TV ratings, followed by the Twins, Phillies and Reds. The Rays, a low-revenue club with disappointing home attendance, generated the same ratings as the Sox, who show all of their local games on NESN.

The Sox’s ratings on NESN fell 36.6 percent from ’09 to ’10. Only one team, the Cubs, had a larger percentage dropoff on local cable. The Cubs, though, had a less severe decline than the Sox in their 70 over-the-air network games.

While the Red Sox remain a hot ticket at Fenway Park, playing to over 100 percent capacity, their sagging ratings indicate Red Sox Nation is somewhat spoiled by the team’s recent success — six postseason appearances in the previous seven years, including two World Series titles.

Read the rest here.

Buried in Nick Cafardo’s Boston Globe column yesterday was an intriguing little item about our own Pawtucket Red Sox. It seems Theo Epstein and his deputies are eying Hall of Famer Ryne “Ryno” Sandberg, the longtime Chicago Cubs second baseman, to take over as the Triple-A club’s manager:

The Sox are putting together a list of candidates for the Pawtucket job, and Sandberg had a lot of success managing Iowa, the Cubs’ Triple A franchise. He is the rare Hall of Fame player who wants to have a career in managing, and has done it the right way, by paying his dues in the minors.

Sandberg was recently passed over by the Cubs as they looked for a manager. He would succeed Torey Lovullo, who led the PawSox to a 66-78 record in his first and only season there. Lovullo is leaving to join his fellow ex-Sox colleague John Farrell, the Blue Jays’ new manager.

Update: The plot thickens. WPRI Sports Director Eric Murphy, who started here the same week as me last summer, joined us from WOI in Des Moines, Iowa. Could it be that Sandberg is just looking to follow my pal Eric on the Iowa-to-Rhode-Island trail?

We report, you decide.

Update #2: Easy come, easy go: Sandberg just got hired by the Phillies to manage the PawSox’s North Division rivals, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. The two teams meet for the first time on April 26 in Allentown, Pa.