Santoro offers his top-four Wolf Pack list

Sports fodder for a Friday morning . . .

Major League Baseball recently allowed fans to vote to determine the four best players in the history of each franchise and, as you might imagine, the choices left a lot to be desired. But a little controversy and friendly discussion never hurt anyone. So, along those lines, we give you the top four players in the history of Nevada Wolf Pack football: Colin Kaepernick, Frank Hawkins, Marion Motley and Stan Heath. There are a ton of other players worthy of consideration. Tommy Kalmanir, Trevor Insley, Nate Burleson, Dontay Moch, Rabbit Bradshaw, Derek Kennard and DeShone Myles come quickly to mind. But Kaepernick, Heath, Motley and Hawkins all helped transform Wolf Pack football in more ways than one.

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The top four Wolf Pack men’s basketball players are Nick Fazekas, Luke Babbitt, Edgar Jones and Pete Padgett. Deonte Burton, Alex Boyd, Ken “Tree” Green, Marcelus Kemp, Kirk Snyder, Darryl Owens, Armon Johnson and Mike “Fly” Gray also shouldn’t be overlooked. In baseball, the top four are Lyle Overbay, Joe Inglett, Andy Dominique and Rob Richie. Fred Dallimore, Jim Stassi, Don Price and Austin Byler also deserve serious consideration. Let the controversy and friendly discussion begin.

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The top four Wolf Pack coaches? That’s a much easier list to come up with. Chris Ault, Gary Powers, Jake Lawlor and Mark Fox. The numbers don’t lie. Other coaches (Trent Johnson, Jim Aiken, Joe Sheeketski, Sonny Allen, Jim Carey, Bill Ireland) had special moments but none of them sustained excellence at Nevada as long as Ault, Powers, Lawlor and Fox.

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Shaquille O’Neal and Scottie Pippen exchanged insults on Twitter this week because, well, that’s what millionaire former NBA stars do these days. O’Neal said that a team of former Los Angeles Lakers greats would destroy a team of former Chicago Bulls greats by 50 points. That is ridiculous because no team with Michael Jordan would lose to anyone with anything important on the line by 50 points. But O’Neal is correct when he says the ex-Laker greats would beat the ex-Bulls greats. The Lakers would have Jerry West, Kobe Bryant, Elgin Baylor, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson with Shaq, Wilt Chamberlain and James Worthy off the bench. The Bulls would have Jordan, Pippen, Jerry Sloan, Artis Gilmore and Bob Love with Chet Walker, Dennis Rodman and Derrick Rose off the bench. The Lakers would win by double digits. But Jordan would score 60 and Shaq and Wilt would combine to go 5-for-22 from the line..

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The five Wolf Pack baseball players selected in the June draft are all doing well. Austin Byler is hitting .340 with four homers and 19 RBI for the Missoula Osprey, Adam Whitt is 2-1 with a 3.38 earned run average for the Tri-City ValleyCats, Kewby Meyer is hitting .314 with three homers and eight RBI for the Princeton Rays, Ryan Howell is hitting just .175 for the Vermont Lake Monsters but does have two homers and seven RBI and Jordan Devencenzi is hitting .417 in just 12 at-bats for Vermont. Former Pack coach Jay Johnson will find out that a bigger paycheck and a fancier conference at Arizona won’t lead to many years when he has more talent than he had with the 2015 Wolf Pack.

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Whitt, with the Houston Astros organization, has had a better season at Tri-City than even his solid numbers would indicate. He pitched 1.2 shutout innings to pick up his first save of the year on Wednesday at Lowell and has allowed just nine hits and one walk in 13.1 innings over eight appearances with 12 strikeouts. That walk on Wednesday was his first free pass since his final game with the Wolf Pack on May 22 against San Diego State. Whitt will be wearing a major league uniform someday.

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The Wolf Pack football team finally announced the kickoff times for all six of its home games this season. The good news is that just one of the games (Davis on Sept. 3) will start later than 4 p.m. Before you get excited and believe the Pack is returning to the good old days of day football, tailgate parties in the warm sunshine and getting home before midnight, it is really due to the fact that television wants nothing to do with the Pack’s uninspiring home schedule. Just one of the games (Arizona on Sept. 12) will actually be on television. The other five will be on the internet’s Mountain West Network for free because, well, that is the going rate for games involving Davis, UNLV, San Jose State, New Mexico and Hawaii..

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The Cardinals better get to the Series this year because it might be their last chance for quite some time. The Chicago Cubs are building something special. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908. For those of you who are convinced that the only thing you have to know about history is when to utter the phrase “back in the day,” the year 1908 was when Babe Ruth was 13-years-old and the internet was something you would use to catch fish or drape over your bed so you wouldn’t wake up with malaria. Kyle Schwarber, who looks suspiciously like Ruth, is the latest young phenom to join the Cubs, a group that already featured Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, Jorge Soler, Anthony Rizzo and Starlin Castro. A Cubs dynasty is coming. Fast.