Starting Five

1. Neil Young, first man to walk on the Harvest Moon, dies. Wait, what? Neil Lomax passes? No, that’s not it. Astronaut Neil Armstrong expires.

2. Boston Flee Party: Red Sox trade Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez and Nick Punto (Carla’s ex-husband?) to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Wait a minute…didn’t former NESN dugout reporter Heidi Watney move to Los Angeles last autumn? Hey…. HEYYYYY!

3. America’s premier marathoner, Ryan Hall (an expectant first-time dad), puts his Mammoth Lakes, Calif., home on the market for $625,000 and advertises on Twitter. Offer him $26.2 thousand and see what he says.

4. The box score for Goodlettsville (Tenn.) 24, Petaluma (Calif.) 16 in the Little League World Series semi-final.

5. iWin: Apple defeats Samsung in court. Down to its last $622 billion in available capital (we’ve all been there), the tech giant avoids having to panhandle thanks to an award of $1.2 billion in damages.

The Reserves

Cleveland Indian rookie pitcher Corey Kluber nearly brained The Captain, Derek Jeter, on Friday night with a pitch that deflected off his helmet visor. The preternaturally placid Jeter lost his cool for once, yelling something at Kluber as he headed to first base. What did Jeter say? “Not the face, man! Anywhere but the face!” (or so we assume)

Bryan A. Graham of Sports Illustrated unearthed this gem from SI’s vault concerning astronaut Neil Armstrong and knuckleballer Gaylord Perry.

How did our beloved New York Mess score more than two runs for the first time in eight games yesterday? Pitcher R.A. Dickey and left fielder Jason Bay, both hitting the interstate, each had one RBI, while first baseman Jason Turner hit a solo shot, his first home run of the season. Mess win, 3-1.

So a vaunted Boston institution has “a rat” in its ranks and quickly rids itself of it? Is this the 2012 Red Sox or The Departed? (You will remember that the infamous text was sent from Adrian Gonzalez’s phone, a nod to a vital plot point in Scorcese’s Oscar-winning film). Shipping up to Boston? No, shipping out of Boston.

Hurricane and/or GOP aficionados, here’s a breaking picture of Isaac.

Adrian Gonzalez? Honestly, you haven’t seen a guy this happy to leave Boston for California since Will Hunting decided to chase Skylar.

Punto didn’t want to leave, but then he got a visit from the Savage Brothers, and that was that….

Are you like us? We imagine Dustin Pedroia approaching Carl Crawford’s locker and pulling a Dignam: “I’m the guy doing his job. You must be the other guy.”

In Sunday’s New York Daily News, baseball writer Bill Madden proposes that positive PED tests should result in voided contracts. He has a point.

Over night on Thursday and Friday morning, 19 people were shot, four fatally, in Chicago. But none of them were shot near an iconic landmark, so, you know…

The sublime Bomani Jones on Lance Armstrong and how his odyssey relates to that of Luther Vandross….

We are not in law enforcement. We have never had anyone point a loaded weapon at us. Hence, this is a sincere question with no underlying implication: Did the two veteran NYPD patrolmen who fired 16 rounds, killing murderer Jeffery Johnson but also inadvertently wounding nine bystanders, do a good or bad job in that moment?

MH loves Lenn Robbins, but his Saturday college football column in the New York Post posits that Notre Dame still has not named a starting quarterback for the Navy game… two days after the Irish did. We suggest following @ChiTribHamilton , @IrishIllustrated , @KeithArnoldNBC or even, and only as a last resort, @jdubs88

ESPN had the College Gameday gang in a sterile studio setting on Saturday. The dearth of a WSU flag and hungover Delta Gammas appeared to play tricks with the sanity of some of the analysts. When host Chris Fowler asked his three comrades for a Heisman favorite, not everyone shouted in unison, “Matt Barkley!” Desmond Howard, a Michigan alum and Heisman winner, voted for the Wolverines’ Denard Robinson, while Lee Corso stumped for Oklahoma quarterback Landry Jones, the second-most popular QB on his own team (Bell Dozer!). Hence, the Heisman will come down to who puts the nastiest beatdown on Notre Dame.

Comedian Matt Goldich, noting that the first day of the GOP Convention in Tampa will be canceled due to rain, tweets that a “twi-night doubleheader versus the Democrats is scheduled for Tuesday.”

For those space exploration fans keeping score, no one has yet moonwalked on the moon….

Lost in all the Dodgers-Red Sox transaction news (the Sawx, by the way, acquired a pitcher namd “Rubby” who, alas, pronounces it like “Ruby”; color us dismayed) is the added news that former MLB Network reporter Trenni Kusnierek  is Dropkick Murphy’ing it to work for NESN and cover the Rojo Hose. Kusnierek had been living in her native Milwaukee for more than a year. How a woman from a northern city bordered by a large body of water directly east of it, a town that worships beer and once had an MLB franchise named the Braves, will ever acclimate to Boston is beyond us.

ESPN2 aired three high school football games on Saturday, the same day that the Little League World Series semifinals were being aired from Williamsport, Pa. If you don’t think that a high school football national championship, to be aired on ESPN, is in the offing, you’re not paying attention.

By the way, terrific graphic from Saturday night’s contest between this scribe’s alma mater, Brophy College Prep of Phoenix, and national No. 1 Rancho Santa Margarita of Orange County. The latter school’s offensive line averages 305 pounds per man, which is larger than half the teams in the top ten of the Associated Press preseason poll. The Ranchos won, 27-14.

Lance Armstrong (who did not die yesterday) finished second in a 36-mile bike race in Aspen yesterday to a 16 year-old named Keegan Swirbul. Really. So that lifetime ban from cycling…? The USADA does not govern the race, so Lance was able to participate.

By the way — and no kidding — Armstrong won the inaugural Steamboat Stinger Marathon , a trail marathon, on August 15 and was planning to run a marathon this morning. Say what you want about whether or not he doped, the dude has an insatiable appetite for competition.