Favre and Away

The Minnesota Vikins chasing Brett Favre is the rough equivalent of the bassoon player in the high school band finally getting his chance to hook up with the prom queen at their 30th reunion. Except, of course, that the prom queen is now a chain-smoking, twice-divorced cougar with a bit of a drinking problem and a voice like Abe Vigoda.

Ramirez Tests Positive for PEDs

Is this a case of Manny just being Barry?

Harry Kalas, R.I.P.

When I was a kid, there was a clock radio that I kept next to my bed. It was set to KYW, the station that broadcast Phillies games. The rest of the time, it was all-news, all the time, but that didn't matter. It was only on for Phillies games.

That clock radio fit under my pillow. I know this, because there were many, many summer nights when that's where it went, stuffed underneath with the volume up just enough that I could hear it, turned down low enough that my parents wouldn't hear me listening. And I'd listen to Richie Ashburn and Chris Wheeler and Andy Musser, and most of all, to Harry Kalas calling the games, all summer long. They were my lullaby. I'd stay up late to listen to them, fall asleep hearing the description of that three-two pitch, struggle to keep my eyes open long enough to get some of those late games at San Diego or LA.

There were good years, Schmidt and Carlton and Garry Maddox out in centerfield. There were the dirtball miracles of '83 and '93, and the horrible teams of the Chris James/Glenn Wilson/Steve Jeltz years. There was John Denny, and there was Floyd Youmans. There was Steve "Bedrock" Bedrosian, and there was Joe "The Saver" Boever. And Harry called them all, always fair but always a fan, always the voice that meant "Phillies".

Some of the words will resonate longer than others. "Outta here", of course, and that deliberate, affectionate "Michael Jack Schmidt." If you're a fan, you'll remember "Swing...and a long drive" or "It's gotta chance!" or that deliberate, looping "Swing and a miss, he struck 'em out", which looks like nothing on the page but meant everything on the ear. We'll probably be hearing a lot of that last World Series call over the next couple of days, a lot of Mike Schmidt's 500th home run and that home run call in general. And that's fine, and wonderful, and a great way to remember him.

But I'll remember listening to Bruce Ruffin dismember the Padres in a nothing game, right after he was called up and everyone thought he might be the second coming of Carlton. I'll remember that magical 1980 season, and hearing about balls clanking off Charlie Hayes' glove. And I'll remember these last couple of years, when the internet let me pick up the Phillies' home radio feed, and I could hear that voice again, and felt, for an inning or two, like I was still that kid hugging a clock radio under his pillow.

So goodbye, Harry the K, and thank you. You gave us something wonderful, and even us Phillies fans - rough, tough, cranky, nasty Phillies fans - loved you for it. Godspeed, and here's hoping that wherever you are, there's baseball.

WBC

So there are people who love it because it beats the hell out of split-squad B-games from Bradenton. There are people who love it because of the whole national pride thing. There are people who hate it for precisely the same reason, or who decry it for being a pointless exhibition/money grab, or whatever.

I think, largely, they're missing the point.

For me, the WBC is really the spiritual heir to the old barnstorming tours that Gehrig and Ruth used to take their teams on, occasionally bouncing off Satchel Paige and squads of Negro League All-Stars or local all-star teams or whatever. Play "what if", put a couple of lineups born out of sports bar bullshit sessions - and let's face it, lots of us were playing "which country would win?" for ages before this thing got off the ground - and turn it loose.

That's all I want from it, that's all I need from it, and that's sufficient to provide me with plenty of enjoyment. I think the round system's screwy, the pitch count setup is goofy, and the pool setup's a little weird, but what the hell. It's fun to watch. After a winter without baseball, that's more than enough.

Because I Care...

...I think someone really needs to tell the guy who does the Hurricanes' radio commercials that no matter how deep and gruff your voice is, the words "Teacher Appreciation Night" just aren't imposing.

Question for NC State Fans...

You think maybe Herb wasn't the problem after all?

That Didn't Take Long...

According to ESPN, Dallas has released Terrell Owens.

I was walking through the DFW airport when news broke that the Cowboys had signed Owens. All around me, folks were stopping to look at the TV monitors, shouting "Yeah!" and high-fiving each other.

They looked at me funny when I started laughing.

Ah, Baseball

Watched this first few innings of baseball today, a frame or two of the Mets beating the living hell out of the Astros. The Astros treated the ball like it was covered in unobtainium, Clay Hensley pitched like a man possessed...by Clay Hensley, and the Mets hit two homers that cleared the waist-high fences by about twelve inches, combined.

Doesn't matter. Old friend, I've missed you.

Adam Eaton Moves On

Eaton has signed with the Orioles, and outside the Eaton household, no one cares.. Baltimore, rapidly becoming the destination of choice for broken-down pitchers who once had great promise, signed Eaton for $400K and the promise to have someone else open all of his DVDs for him.

Bowden's Gone

On behalf of my Nats-loving friend Hal, Hallalelujah.

As a baseball fan who was disgusted by watching the circus in DC, Hallelujah.

As a Phillies fan who looked forward to feasting on the Nats 18 or so times a year, I say "ah, crud."

And while Bowden may proclaim himself innocent of any and all charges related to the Dominican bonus-skimming scandal that got Jose Rijo fired, that doesn't mean he can refute the charges of being a terrible GM. Whoever takes over - LaCava, Rizzo, the resurrected Paul DePodesta (hey, a geek can dream) will almost have to do better, just because the bar has been set so low.

Weapon X Is Now A Bronco

Brian Dawkins, long a mainstay of the Eagles defense, signed a 5-year deal with Denver today, which will cause no end of friction between me and my brother-in-law, the Broncos fan.

All that being said, I don't think this will bite the Eagles too badly, for several reasons. For one, Dawkins had notably slowed this year, and while his instincts remained impeccable, his production tailed off significantly. For another, Jim Johnson's defense did a lot to emphasize Dawkins' strengths and hide his weaknesses, something that the new scheme he'll be playing in Denver may not do. And finally, if the Eagles have depth anywhere, it's at defensive back.

So farewell, Weapon X, and thanks for the memories. Good luck in Denver - I think you're going to need it.

I Guess The New Coach Hates Country...

"Coach wants to see you. Bring your playbooks. And your moustaches."

Brooks, Dunn released by Tampa Bay...

Lerner's Permit

I used to play fantasy baseball with a guy a lot like Jim Bowden. He was great to have in the league, in large part because he was about as willing a trade partner as you could find this side of the East India Company. He traded and churned his roster incessantly, and if you entered into negotiations with him, all you had to do was wait him out because sooner or later he'd propose a combination that you could live with.

This made for some interesting deals, but not a lot of upper-division finishes, and for the longest time I couldn't understand why he played the way he did. Then, finally, I figured it out.

He wasn't interested in winning. He was interested in looking smart. Every deal, every transaction was a chance to show off how clever he was. The macro didn't matter, and he was incapable of cohering his various moves into a long-term strategy. But each trade he made, he had to "win", and let you know he'd won, and have people tell him how clever he'd been.

That's Jim Bowden. He's completely failed to put together a team. He's made some good trades and interesting signings, but they don't fit together, and he's failed to deal from strength or address weaknesses. But each of those individual deals - for Milledge and Dukes and Willingham and whoever - is clever, right? Each of them by itself was a pretty good move.

As for the Dominican bonus scandal, well, that sounds like a guy trying to be too clever, too. The money, ultimately, couldn't have been the real incentive, not with the money that's floating around for successful GMs these days. No, it had to be the feeling of getting away with something, with getting one over on the system. Was it conducive to building a good team? No, but that's tomorrow's problem. Today was all about getting away with it.

He's probably not going to be getting away with it any more. There aren't going to be many more of those momentary victories. And the franchise he was entrusted with will be, at the end of the day, not very good as a result of all of his efforts.

Here's hoping the Lerners do the right thing, for their business' sake. Get rid of Bowden - his track record certainly mandates it. Let someone new come in to clean up the mess. Someone dedicated to teambuilding. Someone who can plan long-term. Someone who, at the end of the day, doesn't constantly need to be told he's clever.

In Other News...

...Brett Favre has not yet announced his unretirement.

The clock, however, is ticking.

Uncool kid

Alex Rodriguez' real problem isn't PEDs. It's that he isn't cool. The cool kids get away with this stuff. Think about Jason Giambi, all golden thongs and tats and almost-confessions that let us pretend he's come clean so we can love him again. But the uncool kids - the jerks like Bonds and the bullies like Clemens and the sanctimonious teachers' pets like Raffy Palmiero - they don't get away with it. In the court of public opinion, ultimately they're tried for being uncool, and that's when they really get hammered.

So consider A-Rod. When he came up with the Mariners, he was the overachieving nerd, the gawky, hyper-talented kid on a team that already had its smiling, beloved face in Ken Griffey, Jr. He wasn't cool; Griffey sucked up most of the cool in the room, and what was left went to the glowering but personable Randy Johnson. A-Rod was the grind, the kid all the cool kids went to for help with their homework. Big Unit racked up strikeouts, Junior leapt over the wall to take away homers, and A-Rod was the baseball equivalent of the study-hound, quietly excelling in the shadow of the more popular kids.

When his free agency rolled around, that was the defining moment for Rodriguez' coolness. He could have established himself as cool if he'd stayed in Seattle, pledged his loyalty to one team and let the narrative be written for him. Loyal player, wants to win with the team that signed him, blah blah blah - the writers would have made him a hero. Or, if he'd signed with the Cubs, or the Yankees, or the Red Sox - one of the grand old "tradition" franchises - that would have been a story, and potentially could have cemented him as a Schilling-esque "student of the game".

But no, he chased the dollars down in Texas, forever branding himself the two-faced greedhead who lied about wanting to stay in Seattle while going for the big bucks. Never mind that's what me or thee might do - getting paid epic gobs of money to move to a more favorable work environment? Where do I sign? - it was an uncool thing to do. The contract made him an easy target, but the die had been cast. He was all about the money, and visible greed, without lip service to tradition or loyalty or "the chance to win" is uncool.

The botched trade to the Red Sox and the subsequent arrival in New York? More of the same. Never mind that he was willing to take less scratch to go to Boston; that didn't fit the narrative, so it got ignored. Instead, it was all about not caring which "side" in the rivalry he landed on, and then, the worst thing possible:

Landing in New York, playing the same position as Captain Jetes.

Derek Jeter, you see, is cool. Really cool. And he did exactly what the cool kids have been doing to the uncool kids since time immemorial - he picked on A-Rod. Forced him to acknowledge Jeter's dominance, sandbagged him in the media, withheld support at key moments, and made it clear that nobody else was supposed to like A-Rod either.

It didn't help that A-Rod wanted to be cool, which meant wanting Jeter to like him - a sucker bet if ever there were one. He agreed to slide to third base, despite the fact that he was the superior defender at short, but got no credit for the move - or for improving Jeter's defense. And he waited for Jeter to come to his defense over the post-season nonsense when it was never in Jeter's interest to do so. After all, making A-Rod cool would have diminished Jeter's own standing as the coolest kid in school, the queen bee of the Yankee scene's mean girls.

And yet, Rodriguez kept trying, as if he wanted to be cool but didn't know how. Dating Madonna? That's cool, right. Well, it might have been when Jose Canseco did it, but Madonna's coolness factor has long since passed its sell-by date. But it's what Madonna stood for that Rodriguez was after, anyway, the trophy that signified he'd made it past the velvet rope into a place that neither his money nor his stats could ever get him. It's sad to watch. Behind every over-calculated move is one eternally burning question: "Will this get people to like me?"

The answer, for now and always, is no.

Concerning the recent BC-Duke Men's Basketball Clash...

I got my MA from Boston College.

I live in Durham, NC.

Life is good.

Math Is Hard, Continued

Among the breathless state-of-the-game pronouncements in the latest Sporting News is this one:

"almost half of baseball's 30 teams fall below the average rank of 62nd in in-market fan loyalty"

Or, if you want to put it another way, "more than half of them rate above average."

*sigh*

On the other hand, the interview in this week's issue with Shaquille O'Neal is a revelation - sharp, funny, honest and revealing.

Screw You, Tom Hicks

Considering all of the crooked dealings surrounding Tom Hicks' purchase of the Texas Rangers - and if you don't believe me, look up things like "the Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority" and "UTIMCO" - for him to utter sanctimonious horseshit about how he feels "betrayed" by Alex Rodriguez' admission of steroid use is near the intersection of "loathsome" and "two-faced." If Mr. Hicks really feels that bad about it, he can refund the ticket revenues he received based on the appeal of Mr. Rodriguez, along with the regional sports network he built on the A-Rodded Rangers, the commercial sponsorships he accepted during that time, and, while he's at it, the land seized from private citizens for land speculation projects around the stadium site.

The local residents who got their properties nabbed by ASFDA so the Rangers' ownership could buy them out cheap were betrayed - betrayed by their team and by their state government. You, Mr. Hicks, were not betrayed. You went into the deal with your eyes open, benefitted from it immensely, and have no moral standing to decry it now

And I say again, screw you.

And Bruce Begat A-Rod

I blame Steven Spielberg.

I don't think he did it intentionally, mind you. But when he cobbled together Jaws, hiding a defective mechanical shark behind isn't-or-isn't-it there cinematography, he ushered in the age of the blockbuster, the mindset that says that everything's got to be the biggest, the best, the most important or the most catastrophic. And, like it or not, we haven't been the same since.

It's what brings us the Super Bowl in its current incarnation, the NFL recast as Roman gladiators fighting to the death for the noblest of causes. It's what brings us local news reports that breathlessly ask "Is Your Child's Favorite Popsicle A Killer?", to be followed by "This Common Household Cleaner Could Kill You!" and "Killer Secrets Of Your Lawn Care!", day by day by day. It means that movies that stick around more than two weeks are huge, and ones that don't are flops, and there is no middle ground. It means that every pretty young thing who got fifteen minutes in CW teen show is suddenly the hottest thing ever, until next week and she's in the "Where are they now?" file. It's all or nothing, do or die, and every breaking story has to be bigger and more important and fraught with more significance than the one before.

Seriously. How many "games of the century" have we had in college football so far this millennium? Six? Seven? And yet when the next one comes along, we line up for it like suckers, because THIS one is EVEN BIGGER.

Or so they would have us believe.

Part and parcel of all this, of course, is the fact that when you're in blockbuster land, nuance goes out the window. There's no room for the subtleties, the idea that there's more to anything than a simple hero/villain narrative. There's no place for context or a framing narrative, no examination of what the supposedly villainous or heroic act means. It's just the punchline, howled over and over into the echo chamber of a culture where we the mob howls to itself and thinks it's getting its voice heard.

Which brings us to the unfortunate case of Alex Rodriguez. In short, he did steroids, which are a no-no. He did them in a time when there were no penalties attached and he apparently stopped, none of which matters, as the only part of the narrative that has made it to the mainstream is "A-ROD IS A CHEATER".

Well, yeah. But there's more, there's always more. There's the fact that the test results that got leaked should have been destroyed years ago. And the fact that they're evidence in a trial, and leaking them is in fact a federal crime. And the fact that they were leaked right as the Barry Bonds trial - itself looking more and more like an out-of-control boondoggle - is heating up. And the reporter who broke the story has a history with Rodriguez, and has a book on him coming out soon. And there's no real evidence that PEDs as a class actually do enhance performance. And why are PEDs bad when LASIK surgery isn't, and why is it no big deal that the 1970s Steelers were all 'roided out of their minds when they were winning Super Bowls but 5-year old test results on A-Rod are news now, and why do we loathe A-Rod and not give a damn about Paul Byrd or Guillermo Mota, and...

You get the idea. It's the blockbuster concept, the thing that gets the normally levelheaded Jayson Stark to view this as the final torching of baseball's bridge to its past. At best, it's emotional thinking; at worst it's lazy and malicious, a cheapshot for the sake of seizing unstable moral high ground. I'm sorry, but I don't need an admitted steroid user like Mike Golic telling me how bad this is for baseball. I don't need the same reporters who lionized Roger Clemens until they feasted on his flesh to moan about the betrayal of the game's ideals. I don't need Vinnie from Saugus to write obscenity-filled "comments" on the end of overblown ESPN.com op-eds proclaiming Rodriguez' entire career - a career in which even his sandbagging former manager has admitted that he worked harder than anyone - the worst thing ever to happen to baseball. All it does is distract from the real problem, and allow for false band-aid solutions that can conveniently be ripped off whenever we need a new blood sacrifice on the front page.

In a sane and just world, we'd be worrying about other problems than this right now. Economic panic, war, genocide, disease, looming environmental changes and more - these are the things we should be getting upset about. In a slightly saner and more just world, we'd at least look at all the aspects of the story before rushing online with our imaginary pitchforks and torches. But we're in the world we're in, which means that A-Rod will be tried, convicted and tried again in the star chamber of semi-public opinion because it makes good copy, and because we like to see the mighty fall. All the rest - all the things we'd want taken into consideration if it were us in the spotlight - is details, chaff in the wind. Eventually, it will all blow away, roughly around the time the outrage well is running dry. There'll be a new greatest scandal ever, and another one after that, and another one after that.

And the stuff that matters, the stuff that's important - whether it's the context around the blockbuster accusation, or the truly horrifying stuff like the Rae Carruths and Ugie Urbinas and Ambiorix Burgoses and so forth - gets ignored because it doesn't fit the blockbuster story mode. A scrub wide receiver or middle reliever isn't a big enough villain, after all. Contradictory evidence doesn't make for a good enough story. Time and again, we'll go for the big target and the easy shot.

Maybe, honestly, it's because PEDs aren't really a big deal. We can turn on Bonds and Clemens and Palmiero and McGwire, can pretend they've let us down horribly because there's nothing too terrible about having rooted for a guy who may have cheated. Look too closely at an Urbina, though, and we have to confess that we actively cheered on a guy who went after another human being with gasoline and a machete. Demand blood with Carruth, and you admit that once upon a time, we rooted for a cowardly, despicable murderer. That makes us feel bad, makes us question the blind loyalty we give our sports teams and heroes. And we can't have that sort of thing, so we turn on the big names who've committed the minor infractions to make ourselves feel superior, and to give our fandom easy absolution.

It makes sense, as unpleasant a thought as it may be. Blockbuster movies are ones with lots of explosions, lots of inhuman feats of derring-do, and not a lot of nuance. In the end, they make you feel good. No wonder we demand the same from our scandals, again and again and again.

Michael Phelps Caught With Bong

Suddenly, the mystery of how he chows down that megacaloric diet of his is made clear.

Also, I don't actually care.