Next Stop: Dog Days of Summer [J. Mark English]

Baseball right now is the only sport on the horizon. Football is still a month away. Who cares about basketball during this heat wave? Anyone really taking interest in how much Sydney Crosby will be making over the next few years in Pittsburgh? How about Federer and Nadal? Yea, we can talk about them come the U.S. Open. And the British Open is still a few weeks away.

So baseball really is all there is now, and tonight will feature only an exhibition game, and tomorrow there will be no game. I think tomorrow night may be the only night of the year when none of the professional sport teams (at least in baseball, hockey, basketball, and football) play. Sports Center should be a blast tomorrow night. Exactly what current event highlights will they show?

Perhaps they can continue to pump up their own mini series, the Bronx is Burning. I set my Tivo to record the show, and when I came to watch it, the Tivo had recorded the conclusion of the home run derby. So I missed out on this show that ESPN has been advertising the hell out of for the last few weeks. Grrrrrr.

But I guess there are some news of note to throw out there. Bud Selig will attend the games where Barry Bonds has a chance to break Hank Aaron's record. I hope it takes Bonds two weeks, just to make it painful for Selig.

Baseball agent, Gustavo "Gus" Dominguez, was busted for smuggling ball players out of Cuba. I don't get that. He is getting five years for encouraging players to leave a communist country, giving them an opportunity of a life time. Shouldn't we be celebrating what this guy is doing, not throwing him in jail?

Dayn Perry of Fox Sports breaks down his top 10 All-Star game moments:

1. Babe Ruth wins the first All-Star Game (1933)
2. Carl Hubbell whiffs a quintet of Hall of Famers (1934)
3. Ted Williams returns to Fenway Park (1999)
4. The All-Star color line is broken (1947)
5. Cal Ripken's final All-Star Game (2001)
6. Pete Rose and Ray Fosse (1970)
7. The 1967 marathon
8. The young guns of '84
9. Terry Steinbach redeems himself (1987)
10. The 2003 All-Star Game

I'm biased when it comes to this, but I think the baseball all-star game is the best of the four major sports. I'll be watching tonight. With any luck, the National League will break its losing streak.

Finally, there was a plane crash earlier today which took the lives of some members of the NASCAR community. Here is the story from Barbara Liston of Reuters:

A small plane attempting an emergency landing crashed into two houses near Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday, killing at least five people and causing an intense fire, investigators said.

The twin-engine Cessna 310 was registered to a corporation linked to NASCAR racing and one of those killed, the pilot of the plane, was the husband of NASCAR official Lesa France Kennedy, officials of the popular U.S. motorsport said.

The plane took off from Daytona International Airport en route to Lakeland, Florida but the pilot reported smoke in the cockpit and it slammed into a residential neighborhood in Sanford, near Orlando in central Florida, investigators said.

"We can confirm there were two people on board, including the pilot, Dr. Bruce Kennedy, and Michael Klemm, a senior captain with NASCAR Aviation. Both were killed in the crash," Ramsey Poston, NASCAR's managing director of corporate communications, said in a statement.