I wrote the following about Elgin Baylor two years ago in one of the most discussed (and in many quarters, hated) blogs ever written on this site.

"To the younger generation, (Elgin) Baylor and (Jerry) West are little more than a couple of old dudes that you see every year at the draft lottery.

In fact, Elgin was MJ before MJ was a gleam in his late daddy's eyes. Jerry West might have been the best pure shooter the game has ever seen. Both men had 50 point nights -- long before the advent of the 3 point hoop, I might add. But Baylor never won a title and West never won an MVP. The Celtics won all the championships and Wilt won everything else.

Indeed, ESPN's The Sports Guy Bill Simmons reminds us today that Elgin was perhaps the game's first sky-walker, the godfather of hang time.

Elgin changed everything. He did things that nobody had ever seen before. He defied gravity. Elgin would drive from the left side, take off with the basketball, elevate, hang in the air, hang in the air, then release the ball after everyone else was already back on the ground. You could call him the godfather of hang time. You could call him the godfather of the "WOW!" play. You could point to his entrance into the league as the precise moment when basketball changed for the better. Along with (Bill) Russell, Elgin turned a horizontal game into a vertical one.

Simmons also reminds the younger post-MJ crowd that Baylor did his thing in a decidedly meaner time and place.

Elgin lived through some things during his career that we like to forget happened now. Lord knows how many racial slurs bounced off him, how many N-bombs were lobbed from the stands, how much prejudice he endured on a day-to-day basis as the league's signature black star. Russell bottled everything up and used it as fuel for the next game: He wouldn't suffer; his opponents would suffer. Oscar morphed into the angriest dude in the league, someone who screamed at his own teammates as much as the referees, a great player who played with an even greater chip on his shoulder. Elgin didn't have the same mean streak. He loved to joke with teammates. He never stopped talking. He loved life and loved playing basketball. He couldn't hide it. And so his body soaked up every ugly slight like a sponge.

Sadly, Baylor is in the news for something quite different today as the Los Angeles Clippers are in the process of parting company with their long-time General Manager. That he will be most remembered for his mediocre-at-best time with the Clippers is a crime.

The LA Times' Mark Heisler agrees that Baylor deserved a better sendoff.

"We greatly appreciate Elgin's efforts during his time with the Clippers and we wish him the very best."

That's it?

That was 18 words -- not even one word for each of the 22 seasons Elgin worked for you.

 Did you ever notice these things never happen to the Lakers?

The words Laker Family mean something with an organization studded with former players and Jerry Buss giving Magic Johnson and Pat Riley multi-million dollar severance packages after they left and were of no more use to him.

You don't hear people talk about Clipper Family. If someone did, I'd think of a family like that of the Emperor Commodus in "Gladiator."

 Vikings went out like Vikings, pushed into fjords in ships to be set ablaze in a hail of burning arrows.

Clippers still go out like Clippers, feet first.

Meanwhile, LA is barely observing the Baylor debacle as they're all in a tizzy after Fox baseball announcer Tim McCarver called the Dodgers' Manny Ramirez, "di####able.

"It's extraordinary - the dichotomy between what he was in Boston and what he is in Los Angeles," McCarver told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I mean, talk about wearing out your welcome in a town, and it was a long welcome with the Red Sox. But some of the things he did were simply de####able, de####able - like not playing, refusing to play. Forgetting what knee to limp on. And now it's washed, it's gone."

McCarver also believes Ramirez presents fans here a scenario they are most familiar with.

"Every sport, there have been people who have held organizations hostage, whether it be Terrell Owens or Randy Moss or Manny Ramirez," he said.

Up the Pacific Coast in Portland, they're madly cheering what The Oregonian's Ryan White proclaimed "had to be the loudest ovation for a loose-ball foul in the history of exhibition basketball in the NBA. Greg Oden played his first pre-season ball for the hometown Trail Blazers, albeit a year late due to injury and surgery.

Yet, many observers including ESPN's J.A. Adande were more impressed with this year's Rookie of the Year candidate, Spain's Rudy Fernandez.

Fernandez had the best highlights. He rose to throw down a lob from fellow Spaniard Sergio Rodriguez on an alley-oop, then threw a bounce pass between Jason Thompson's legs to LaMarcus Aldridge for a dunk. He topped that by catching another Rodriguez lob and spinning in a ridiculous, dipsy-do reverse layup off the glass. Then he dropped a couple of dimes to Martell Webster for two more dunks.

He stole the show and had the crowd chanting, "Ru-dy, Ru-dy." He picked up right where he left off in the Olympic gold-medal game.

All of the pregame attention was on Oden. The postgame buzz was about Fernandez.

Meanwhile, it's all tears in St. Louis today and it has nothing to do with the sorry state of the football Rams.  Cardinals instructor George Kissell, widely regarded as one of the authors of what manager Tony La Russa refers to as the “Cardinal Way,” died Tuesday (Oct. 7, 2008) in Tampa, Fla., after being injured in a car accident Monday night.

Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson, a protégé of Kissell's, once described Kissell as "the greatest baseball fundamentalist I have ever known."

He also described him as the "smartest man in baseball."

"I learned more baseball from George Kissell than from anyone else in my life," Torre told the St. Petersburg Times in 1997. Torre won four World Series titles as manager of the New York Yankees, and in his autobiography he called Kissell his greatest teacher. He told the paper: "A lot of people can play the game, but not as many people can teach the game. And George, to me, was the ultimate."

One February morning in 2005, Cardinals Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. revealed a plaque that had been affixed to the clubhouse at the team's Jupiter, Fla., campus. It renamed the clubhouse for Kissell.

The plaque read, in part: "Every player in the Cardinals' Organization since 1940 has had contact with George Kissell and they have all been better for it. ... Well known for his emphasis on fundamentals, George taught several generations of Redbirds how to play baseball."

He was 88.