Lost Time Is Not Found Again is what the MPS blog crew has been reading today. Maybe. Go Steve!

+ Jim Thome hit home run No. 550 last night, and the Sox are now .500. {Tremendous Upside Potential.}

+ Brandon Jennings, undrafted players and Europe. {Tremendous Upside.}

+ An interesting look at how basketball plays start, and how they end. {Basketball Geek.}

+ Here’s video of some NFL players trying out the “Wipeout” course. {FanHouse.}

+ Non-sports: The Onion A.V. Club will drop a book this fall. {A.V. Club.} Rethinking the mall. {New York Times.}

Quotable:

“When I finished my story, even after I had seen him play twice, I started telling people I didn’t think Howard would be a dominant NBA player. That whole “he doesn’t get caught up in all the hoopla” thing was part of it. Howard seemed too normal — playing against these short little high schoolers from Christian schools, goofing around in church, walking through the school hallways with just a normal star athlete’s confidence — to be a LeBron-like megastar.

And who knows what these guys turn into by the end of their careers, but it’s hard not to connect those impressions to this week’s James backlash. The kid in the beat-up Crown Victoria won the playoff series and moved on with a smile, and the kid with the Hummer2 and the unapproachable exterior bailed on the handshakes and refused to apologize.” – Dan Steinberg