Clan-Members » global, and he delivered even better numbers. Dave

OKLAHOMA CITY -- A gunman lay in wait outside Oklahoma Citys Will Rogers World Airport on Tuesday before shooting and killing a Southwest Airlines employee in a premeditated attack that occurred while hundreds of people waited for flights nearby, police said.Michael Winchester, 52, was shot while walking between a crowded terminal and the airport employee parking area. The unidentified suspect was later found dead in a pickup truck in public parking garage overlooking the scene. Police said the suspect appeared to die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.Oklahoma City Police Capt. Paco Balderrama said the shooter apparently knew the victims schedule and routine.This individual went there and waited for the employee to either be coming or going to take this opportunity, Balderrama said. He wouldnt say conclusively that it was a sniper-type attack.The 1 p.m. shooting set off a scramble at the airport, with police immediately closing the sprawling complex and asking passengers inside to seek cover.They diverted incoming flights and refused to give already-loaded aircraft permission to leave. There were concerns the gunman might have entered the terminal and mingled among passengers or employees.We have a heightened level of security all the time. These people have access to aircraft so were very concerned about that, airport spokeswoman Karen Carney said.Winchester- whose address is listed as Washington, Oklahoma, about 35 miles south of the airport -- was a former University of Oklahoma football player whose son James is a player for the Kansas City Chiefs.It is with great sorrow that Southwest Airlines confirms that a Southwest Employee who was injured during a shooting incident today at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City has died from injuries, the airline said in a statement. It canceled flights out of the city for the remainder of the day even though the rest of the terminal planned to reopen.Hundreds of people were stranded inside the terminal for more than three hours before officers began letting them leave slowly. Carney said about 300 people were held on aircraft away from the terminal after their planes landed ahead of a ground stop.Once police determined that a suspect found in a red pickup truck on the second floor of a public parking garage was dead, officers gave an all-clear.The airport handles between 7,000 and 8,000 passengers daily for Alaska, Delta, Southwest and United airlines and has a separate terminal that serves as a transfer center for federal inmates. A jet carrying inmates to the transfer site was allowed to land while the rest of the airport was shuttered.Video from a television station helicopter showed what appeared to be a pool of blood about 100 feet from the airports employee parking area -- and about 100 yards from the airports ticket counters and departure area.While airports have high security, it wasnt immediately known whether surveillance cameras might show the shooting, Balderrama said.Balderrama initially said police had received reports of a possible second victim, but no one was found.Police found the suspects truck in the garage about three hours after the shooting and determined that someone was inside. They were not sure whether he was dead or alive. After about 75 minutes, using a robot, officers determined the suspect was dead.A number of inbound flights were diverted to other airports after Will Rogers suspended operations. Southwest redirected one flight back to Dallas while a Las Vegas to Houston flight that stops in Oklahoma City went to Amarillo, Texas, instead. Two commercial flights from Chicagos OHare Airport were directed to Tulsa, about 100 miles away.Michael Winchester was a punter on the University of Oklahomas 1985 national championship team.Our hearts are truly heavy for the entire Winchester Family. Mike was a former Sooner student athlete as was his son James/daughter Carolyn, the schools athletic director, Joe Castiglione, tweeted Tuesday afternoon. He added daughter Becca was also a student athlete. Please keep this beautiful family in your prayers in a later tweet.---Associated Press reporters Ken A. Miller and Tim Talley contributed to this report.Jake Peavy Jersey .500 on the season. The Jets are now 0-5-1 in the second game of back-to-backs. The game started the same way the Vancouver game started the night before, with the Jets taking the first two penalties of the game and killing off the first, but the Oilers getting on the board first, scoring on the second man-advantage. Lefty ODoul Jersey .C. -- Charlotte Bobcats coach Steve Clifford said after all of these years in the NBA hes still amazed at some of the things LeBron James does. https://www.cheapjerseysgiants.us/2756u-jeff-samardzija-jersey-giants.html . On Mar. 16, coming off a "fight of the year" performance at UFC 154 the previous November, St-Pierre faced Nick Diaz at UFC 158 in what would be his eighth defence of the welterweight title. Using his superior athleticism, St-Pierre cruised to a five round, unanimous decision victory setting up a much-anticipated title defence against number one contender Johny Hendricks. Barry Bonds Jersey . -- The goal posts lying flat on the field, Arizonas fans lingered on the field, congregating around the locker room entrance nearly 30 minutes after rushing out of the stands. Kevin Mitchell Jersey . -- In a span of seven Washington Redskins offensive plays, Justin Tuck sacked Robert Griffin III four times.Baseballs history lends itself to great debates. We ask three of our baseball experts the toughest questions in the sport. Would you choose the games most mythical figure or the modern player who chased him down? Which New York center fielder was better? Would you take The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived or the all-time home run king??Jerry Crasnick, Christina Kahrl and David Schoenfield are at the top of our order for the debut of Three Up, Three Down.1. Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron?David Schoenfield, ESPN.com senior writer: Ruth?... with a caveat. Look, strictly on the numbers, its Ruth. He hit .342, Aaron hit .305. Ruth led his league 12 times in home runs and slugged .700 nine times, whereas Aaron led four times and slugged .600 six times. Ruth drew 100-plus walks 13 times, whereas Aarons career high was 92. Even if you adjust for Ruth playing in a high-scoring era when much of Aarons peak came in the low-scoring 60s, Ruths advantage at the plate was monumental. He is estimated to have created 1,335 runs above the average hitter of his time compared with 875 for Aaron. And thats before we even count Ruths 94 wins as a pitcher.But ... how do you account for the fact that Ruth never played against black players, or that he didnt face the quality of pitching that Aaron did, or that Ruth struck out a ton for his era? If you took young Babe Ruth and young Hank Aaron and put them in the majors in 2016, who would fare better? My concern is Ruths strikeouts. He fanned 12.5 percent of the time in his career, but in an era that averaged half as many strikeouts as now. Hed strike out 200 times a season in 2016, which means hes not hitting .342 or hitting 50-plus home runs every year. Then you consider Aaron was better in the field and better on the bases, and maybe the answer isnt so obvious.Christina Kahrl, ESPN MLB writer:?Aaron, and it isnt especially close for me.Now, sure, relative to his era, Ruth was the more dominant player, with a 206 OPS+ compared with Aarons 155, ranking one-two among right fielders. Ruth also generated a career value of 155.1 WAR at bat against Aarons 136.4 -- again, one-two among right fielders.The problem is that there isnt much to recommend Ruths era as a competitive environment: an unintegrated game in a tiny, eight-team league where four of your opponents are non-competitive clubs that exist for little more than filling out the schedule. We cant even say all of the best white talent played in MLB at that time, because the minors still had a measure of independence and their own pennants and profitability to pursue. So say you swap out half of the pitching in the American League for the best black and Latin pitchers, keeping in mind that has an outsized impact on the talent level when you have so few teams to stock -- goodbye, Hod Lisenbee; hello, Satchel Paige. How do you think thats going to go for the Babe?Then theres big-picture stuff: Not only was the Babe facing a limited pool of talent, he was facing people throwing more limited repertoires. The slider? Not even a thing yet; it only became commonplace in the 30s, as the Babe started fading away. Could he hit it? We dont know. We cant know.Against that, Aaron had to deal with everything we take for granted: larger leagues stocked with a broader variety of talent throwing more pitches while he got fewer chances to see opponents, more travel, bigger ballparks. And despite all of that, he was consistent, he was awesome, and when it came time to take the Babe down a peg on the home-run leaderboard, he was worthy. For an exercise like this, Ill take Aaron every time.Jerry Crasnick, ESPN.com senior writer: Ruth.?Hank Aaron played the game with an understated consistency and grace on his way to passing the Babe on baseballs career home-run list. But Ruth wins out for his showmanship, his larger-than-life persona and those 714 homers before the home-run trot became an American tradition. More than 70 years after the Bambino took his final trot as a member of the Boston Braves, the name Babe Ruth continues to evoke sensations that transcend baseball.2. Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle?Schoenfield: Mays. At their peaks, Mantle was the more devastating hitter, and you can argue that 1956-57 Mantle, who posted 11.2 WAR in 56 and 11.3 in 57, was better than the best of Mays, although Mays had six seasons of 10-plus WAR, including 11.0 in 1964 and 11.2 in 1965. You can argue that Mantles teams won more. But evverything goes to Mays.ddddddddddddHe was the better fielder and baserunner, more durable and aged better, winning an MVP Award at 34, whereas Mantles bad knees forced him to retire at 36.Kahrl: Mays. It becomes less close the more times I look at what is, after all, a timeless debate. Best peak? I suppose that depends on whether you pick the crest (as Dave points out) or the wave, but Mays seven best seasons outpoint Mantles via WAR, 73.7 to 64.7, beyond just beating Mantle in all the other career-total metrics. Mantles advantage in offense, reflected in a 172-156 advantage in OPS+, gets taken down a few pegs by his inconsistency and his frequent unavailability through injuries, incurred on-field or self-inflicted. Then you get into baserunning, which Mays wins, or that 28-WAR swing of career defensive value, and the margins only get wider. You want Mays because hes always there and always delivering and always great, the reliably right answer.Crasnick, Mays.?Its hard to discount the appeal of Mickey Mantle when Bob Costas and so many other baseball-loving American males carry his picture around in their wallets. But injuries took a toll on his longevity and his production, whereas Mays star burned brighter for longer. That grainy, black-and-white footage of Mays World Series catch on Vic Wertz frames his legacy in a way that mere words could never convey.3. Ted Williams or Barry Bonds?Schoenfield: Bonds.?This is a complicated one. In baseball, we revere previous generations like no other sport, and Williams legacy as the greatest hitter ever -- him or Babe Ruth -- survives more than 50 years after he last played. Bonds legacy, of course, is stained by his late-career ties to PEDs. Still, what happened is what happened. I cant pretend that Bonds didnt hit .349/.559/.809 over the best four-year span any hitter has ever had. Those are slow-pitch softball numbers against the best pitchers in the worldLike Williams, Bonds had perfected the art of hitting, which is why pitchers intentionally walked him a mind-boggling 120 times one season. But heres what pushes me to Bonds: Even before he allegedly started using PEDs sometime after the 1998 season, Bonds was the better all-around player. He was maybe the greatest defensive left fielder ever, although he didnt have a good arm, whereas Williams was indifferent to defense. He was one of the best baserunners in the game, whereas Williams wasnt fast and was indifferent to baserunning. Even if you want Williams at the plate, Ill take Bonds in the field and on the bases. And he wasnt too shabby with the stick.Kahrl: Bonds. The toughest call for me of these three, but only because we dont know what Williams might have done if he hadnt lost the better part of five seasons to military service. Would he have been closer to 650 home runs on his career? Yes. And would his all-time record .482 OBP be higher still? Hitting against fourth-rate, all-white, war-time pitching in 1943-45, you could probably bet on that. And if Williams gets those five seasons back from World War II and Korea, he certainly narrows the career WAR gap between himself and Bonds, 123.1 to 162.4. But even filling in those gaps, would that top Bonds performance at his peak as a slugger? PEDs or no, Bonds delivered at the plate at a time when the talent pool is global, and he delivered even better numbers. Dave has already pointed to Bonds insanely huge production in 2001-04, but I dont know if Id take Williams best years over Bonds 1990-1994 stretch, when he averaged 35 homers per season with an OPS+ of 185 (Williams career rate was 190) while providing premium defense. For me, you just cant lard up Williams career with enough might-have-beens and ignore his indifferent performance in every phase of the game that didnt involve holding a bat in his hands to end up putting him above Bonds.Crasnick, Williams.?Of course, you can point to Barry Bonds 762 home runs and other cartoon numbers as the divider. But as a native New Englander, Im too imbued with there goes the greatest hitter that ever was mythology to vote against the Splendid Splinter. My heart lies with Ted the war hero, Ted the master fisherman, and the Ted Williams who knew more about the art of hitting and practiced it with greater passion than anyone who ever picked up a bat. ' ' '