FanSpeak 5/15/05

Agreeing with critics

MY HUSBAND and I have been fans of Southeast Missouri State baseball for 10 or 15 years since moving to Cape Girardeau, and we've been reading the recent criticism of coach Mark Hogan in the paper and we've got to agree. They go on and on about how they've got all these strong pitchers, but there's rarely an inning where the pitchers get the first batter. You cannot continually let the leadoff hitter get on and not pay for that. If you listen to the two announcers that do the game, they comment on that quite often and that is continually a Southeast problem. So why aren't we doing something about who we're recruiting for pitching and about our pitching coach? We don't seem to see any improvement. That's just something we've noticed that hasn't been commented on, and we think that's a big key.

More NASCAR, please

I'M LOOKING at the May 8 paper and wondering why there's so little on the NASCAR race. There were no results published. There's a lot on the Soap Box Derby.

(NASCAR's Saturday night races, such as last week's finish at Darlington, do not end in time for The Associated Press to release the official final results until after presstime. A portion of a short story filed immediately after the race was published May 8 and a followup story and results were published May 9.)