This is one of those hodge-podge kinds of weekends, sports-wise. Baseball season has ended, the NFL is sort of coasting toward the final weeks before the final rush to amass a record good enough to get to the playoffs, and the NBA is just getting started.

Locally, the wild and wooly playoff season is here for a goodly number of high school football teams, cross country is over; basketball and wrestling are not yet in competition.

So we’ll just take a look at some “stuff.”

First off, let’s congratulate the Columbian Tornadoes on their outright Northern Ohio league title and Calvert and Mohawk for their co-championship in the Midlands Athletic League in football.

Big congratulations to Fostoria St. Wendelin’s Josh Souder, a state champion in cross country. Also to Carime Reinhart of Hopewell-Loudon, the top finishing girl (3rd place) from area schools in the state cross country meet held last weekend.

We mentioned above that baseball season has ended. That, of course, is not really true. It seems that baseball season never ends. Fans and major media talking heads manage to find something to say about baseball virtually everyday of the year, even the so-called off season.

The professional tennis season actually never does end.

Somehow I got interested in the World Series this year. Hard to figure out why, since it involved two West Coast teams. But somehow the Anaheim Angels and San Francisco Giants made it interesting.

It probably was the fact that the two teams apparently were pretty evenly matched. Each won most but not all of their home games, keeping the suspense alive. There was no big issue over blown calls or other controversy.

The worst infraction of common sense was allowing a three year old to run out to home plate during a play. What were they thinking?

Mentioned that the NBA opened its 1002-03 season this week. Who cares?

I’ll admit not a lot of folks care too much about Formula One racing either, but it has a certain validity based on its long history, dating back to about the time the first two car owners in Europe wondered which one was faster.

But there seem to be some watershed changes going on in that segment of sport. Last Monday, the Formula One Commission of the International Automobile Federation agreed on some significant rule changes.

Some of these changes are a little hard to understand if you are not familiar with the procedure. For instance, teams which limit their practice sessions to just ten days during the season will get more time to practice at each race site.

In addition, there will be two days of qualifying, with each car getting a single run each day. The first eight places in each race will earn points.

One of the biggest rule changes is the outlawing of team orders which affect the outcome of the race. That is in response to Ferrari’s action in the Austrian race, when it directed its driver Rubens Barichello to let its other driver, Michael Schumacher, win the race.

The FI Commission declined to adopt a couple of proposals that had been rumored before its Monday meeting. They wisely chose not to direct that the fastest cars in qualifying be ballasted for the race. They also decided not to approve the proposal that drivers switch cars each race. That would have looked like IROC.

Worst thing they did was make official the abandonment of the Belgian Grand Prix at a course called Spa-Francorchamps, one of the most beautiful race courses in the world, running as it does, among the trees of the Ardennes Forest.

Reason for the abandonment was said to be poor fan and competitor facilities. Real reason probably was the fact that tobacco advertising is not allowed in Belgium and without tobacco ads, no one can afford to race at that level.

In case you missed it this past week, Dan Gurney’s attempt to field an American FI effort by next season has fallen through. It may never happen.

Good news is that Danny Ongais is still active. Ongais hit the big time in auto racing as a top fuel dragster pilot billed as “The Flying Hawaiian.” He then ventured into sports car and Indy Car racing. He was on the team that won the 1979 24 hours of Daytona.

Now at 60 years old, he will drive in the Grand American Finale at Daytona next weekend. It is to be his last race and will be the last race for what is called the SRP prototype category as the premier car in the Rolex Sports Car Series.

Aloha.