If you were thinking about going to tonight’s PCL game at Cheney Stadium in Tacoma, forget it. It’s sold out.

Watching Jamey Moyer (now with Las Vegas, a Toronto Triple-A team) and Mariners’ prize prospect Danny Hultzen in action is certainly more appealing than watching the M’s take on the Red Sox at Safeco Field.

Moyer, 49, is trying to pitch his way back into the big leagues. He spent 11 of his 25 MLB seasons in Seattle.

Hultzen, 22, is trying to pitch his way on to his first big-league roster. The M’s selected him with the second overall pick in 2011.  Should the M’s rush him to the majors?

Hell, yeah. Let’s see what he’s got.

The 8th annual Thunderbird Pro Rodeo will be held Friday-Sunday at Thunderbird Stadium at the Kitsap County Fairgrounds.

The event benefits Corey’s Day on the Farm for the special needs children and Bremerton Kitsap Athletic Teams for special needs youth and adults.

About 200 contestants will compete for $8,100 in added money.

A barrel race will be held 6 p.m. Friday. The rodeo begins at 7 p.m. Saturday with a concert featuring Brian “Buck” Ellard to follow at 9 p.m. Sunday’s rodeo starts at 1 p.m. with military and dependents admitted free. Gates and beer garden open 4 p.m. Friday, 5 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. Sunday.

Admission is $10 (pre-sale online at thunderbirdrodeo.com) and $12 at the door. It’s $9 for seniors, military and 4-H members, $6 for children 7-11.

A VIP pass for $50 is good for the whole weekend and gives fans access to the hospitality area to eat and view the rodeo.

Abbott lands in Texas

Cowboys Christmas: 31 stops and $3.3 million

This one is courtesy the PRCA:
It is called Cowboy Christmas not because it is the busiest week of the rodeo season – there are a few weeks that have more events – but because the Fourth of July week offers the most money in the shortest span of time during the regular season.
This time around there will be 31 rodeos that begin and/or end during the week of July 1-7 with total prize money in the (ritzy) neighborhood of $3.3 million.
Cowboys trying to work their way to the year-end Wrangler National Finals Rodeo will crisscross the Western United States trying to compete in as many as nine rodeos and improve their standing.
Trevor Brazile broke the Cowboy Christmas earnings record last year with $39,993 in a single week and over the years six men have surpassed $30,000 during the Fourth of July week.
There figure to be four rodeos that week with more than $250,000 in total purse – Ponoka, Alberta; St. Paul, Ore.; Cody, Wyo., and Greeley, Colo. – and another half dozen with more than $100,000.

Shooting form the hit on a Sunday morning while listening to Kris Kristofferson’s classic song Sunday Morning Coming Down.

Baseball: 

Port Orchard’s Willie Bloomquist has had three straight multi-hit games for the Diamondbacks, including a 3-for-5 game Saturday against the Cubs and has his average up to .299. Stephen Drew, Arizona’s regular shortstop, is close to returning after breaking his ankle in mid-season a year ago. There’s been talk that the D’backs will platoon Drew and Bloomquist. I bet manager Kirk Gibson starts moving Willie around, playing a little third, some outfield and shortstop.

Todd Linden has an eight-game hitting streak at Triple-A Fresno. The DH/OF/1B from Central Kitsap probably needs to hit with more power on a consistent basis before the Giants start thinking about giving him another shot at the major-league level.

Jason Hammel (8-2) has gone 19 straight innings without allowing an earned run. After a one-hit complete-game shutout, he came back to throw a 5-hitter over 8 innings in a win over the Washington Nationals on Friday. The right-hander from South Kitsap struck out 10 and didn’t walk a hitter. Could an All-Star game be in Hammel’s future? It’s not out of the question.

Title IX: 

In case you missed it, here’s my column on some of the top women’s athletes who’s come through the Kitsap area. And remember, this is just some of the top females who’ve graced our gymnasiums and playing fields.

Let’s Play Two:

Looking for something to do on what looks to be a mostly sunny Sunday? The BlueJackets play the Walla Walla Sweets in a 4 p.m. West Coast League doubleheader at the Fairgrounds. It’s a good brand of baseball, and the price is right.

It’s LeBron Time:

Even the harshest LeBron James critics had to be impressed with how he played while leading the Miami Heat to an NBA championship. And get used to it.  He’s only 27. How many rings will he wind up with? It won’t surprise me if he wins four or five more. Nobody in the league can deal with his combination of size, speed, strength, and unselfishness on the court. He plays defense, he’s a clever passer and although he’s not a great outside shooter, he’s not bad. Has there been a more gifted player? I don’t think so, although he still has a few more titles to win before we can put him in the same class as Michael Jordan.

Flynn’s No,. 27:

You probably already saw this, but in case you didn’t, ESPN’s Ron Jaworski ranked Matt Flynn of the Seahawks as the No. 27 quarterback among the 30 projected starters in the league.

One of the fun things about Gold Mountain Golf Club landing all of these major tournaments in recent years — the U.S. Amateur Public Links, NCAA West Regionals, Husky Invitationals, last year’s U.S. Junior Amateur etc. — is following the careers of the young players who have played in those tournaments.

Just looked at the U.S. Open leaderboard from the Olympic Club in San Francisco and guess who’s tied for ninth at even par?

Beau Hossler. He was 16 at the time and really fun to watch at Gold Mountain last summer. He was the medalist in the Junior Am and eventually lost in the quarterfinals, but you knew this kid, like Junior Am champ Justin Spieth, was going to go on to bigger and better things. Hossler, now 17 and playing in his second straight U.S. Open, shot a 70 on Thursday. The last time I looked, Spieth was even through seven holes.

The young guns just keep coming, and those who have ventured out to Gold Mountain to watch those major tournaments, have had a chance to watch a lot of the future stars of tomorrow.

Tom Fox, the oldest of four brothers who made a mark in the world of motorsports, died earlier this month in Mooresville, N.C.

Cancer claimed Fox, 77, who stayed involved with the sport he loved right up until the end.

Two weeks before he died, Tom was helping younger brother, Bob, work on a car and trailer. He was also helping Bob’s sons, who are also racers, said his daughter Teresa.

“We grew up with parts on the kitchen table,” said Teresa. “You’d get woke up at 2 a.m., when the guys who were getting ready to go to whatever race they were going to — and they were always running to a race — fired off the motor.”

Another brother, Leon Fox, died in 2002 after a battle with cancer. Jim (Teeny) Fox still lives in Bremerton.

Their parents, Alma and Corneluis “Connie” Fox, moved to Bremerton from Nebraska, which is where Tom was born.

The Fox brothers, who all left their own mark in auto racing, were inducted into the Kitsap Sports Hall of Fame in 2008.

Tom and his buddies used to sneak onto the abandoned Navy runway at night and it led to organized drag racing at what is still Bremerton Raceway. Tom and Harry Penor started the Crankers Car Club. Tom Fox later raced on the dirt oval at Silverdale Speedway. NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula I — the master fabricator was part of them all at times during his career.

Tom told me he regretted passing up an opportunity to go to Europe to work on Formula 1 cars in the 1957, but his career took off in other directions once he concentrated on building cars. He aligned with Tom Sneva to form one of the best open-wheel teams in the Northwest, moved to Europe and built Formula 1 cars for Mario Andretti and other drivers. He was known as one of the top chassis builders on the NASCAR Winston Cup (now Sprint Cup). He hooked up with noted Indy Car crew chief George Bignotti, and later built the car and it’s been reported that he was instrumental in the setup of Tom Sneva’s car that won the Indy 500 in 1983.

Early on in his life, when he was still in Bremerton, Tom designed something they called the “Poguar.” It was a Pontiac-powered Jaguar, said his son John Fox, who lives in Bellingham. “I remember seeing a picture of it. It was a goofy looking. I think it made Hot Rod Magazine.”

He operated Tom Fox Automotive for a time on Park and 7th Street in downtown Bremerton, but it didn’t take long for the oldest brother to move into the big-leagues of racing. He eventually settled in South Carolina, and later North Carolina, and he never stopped tinkering with or thinking about race cars.

“I tried stuff nobody wanted to try,” Tom Fox said during that 2008 interview. “I never thought about anything else. I’d think about them damn racing cars 16 to 18 hours a day. Still do. It’s been a good life. I’ve done a lot of stuff. Like I said, I’ve been blessed.”

A July 22 celebration at the Bremerton Elks Club will be held for Tom Fox.

Cal Decker died last week, and this place we live in isn’t going to be the same.

Cal Decker made you laugh, he made you think.

He was a good man, Cal Decker.

Cal was 85 in his early 80s, and working out at the gym used to be part of his daily routine. He was still playing golf six months ago, but his heart finally gave out. He had a bad fall recently and never got back on the course.

Cal was part of a trivia team in a contest hosted years ago at the Cloverleaf when I first met him. My team didn’t stand a chance against Cal. Nobody has as much sports knowledge as Cal Decker.

He was a walking history book with a great mind. Ask him questions about baseball, horse racing, boxing, golf — especially golf — and odds are he’d have the answer.  (Music, too). I’ve never met anyone who knew as much about Northwest golf or cared as much about it as Cal, who graduated from the University of Washington. I cherished the day I rode over to Seattle to watch the Pac-10 golf championships one day with him at the Seattle Golf Club. Jim Stevenson put the trip together.

“Cal was always up for anything,” said Stevenson, who used to golf twice a week with Cal at Rolling Hills. “Cal was a cool guy.”

He was a man for all seasons. The guy was smart. Street smart, business savvy and just a helluva lot of fun to be around.

He was a charmer, a wonderful story teller. He used to own bars and restaurants on first street in Seattle, so you can imagine some of the stories he had to tell. He owned horses at Longacres, and he worked in the King County Assessor’s office for a time. Harley Hoppe, who ran for governor, was his boss and friend.

Everybody, it seemed, was Cal’s friend.

A lot of people knew him as a golfer. Cal used to be first one out on most weekday mornings on the Olympic Course. Hell, I think he might have had a key to the place. He played around the greenkeepers, who were out in the morning, mowing and placing pins and doing what greenkeepers do while the rest of us are sleeping.

After his round (usually nine holes in recent years), Cal made the rounds at Jimmy D’s in Gorst, Romeo’s and Kelly’s 19th Hole, where owner Bob Kelly was another of his good buds.

I was sifting through some stuff recently and came across a letter Cal wrote me. He wanted to know what I thought about his idea of re-naming the Olympic and Cascade Courses at Gold Mountain. He wanted to call one the Fred Couples Course, and the other the JoAnne Carner course — honoring arguably the two biggest names in Northwest golf. He thought it might help Gold Mountain gain some more notoriety and could possibly lead to some major exhibitions, featuring Couples, Carner and other top pros.

The idea never gained traction, but somehow, someway, I’ve got a feeling that somebody’s going to put together something to honor Cal Decker. Maybe it’s a golf tournament with money raised going toward a golf scholarship? I think Cal would like that.

Here’s Cal’s obit, which published in the Thursday, June 14, print edition of The Sun.

Here’s a story I wrote about Cal when Gold Mountain hosted the U.S. Amateur Public Links Championships in 2006.