Bush to Appoint Someone to Be in Charge of the Country
President Bush has declared war on The Onion, the weekly newsstand and on-line satire page. The New York Times reports that the White House is seeking to prevent The Onion from continuing to use the Presidential Seal on its satirical recreations of the President's Weekly Radio Address.The nuttiest part of the Times story is the last comment from the White House spokesman. Nothing tells the world you have a sense of humor like a Cease and Desist order.
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I got a kick out of this article by Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Telander. The column is average, but his Chicagoan's map of the world is pretty funny.
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Speaking of the White Sox, the team our greatest sports scribe, Thomas Boswell, calls "baseball's most overlooked, ignored, and almost utterly invisible team," they're headed towards a sure World Championship. I write this even as they trail in Game 3 of the Series. This will be 17 out of 19 for the teams with home field advantage in the Fall Classic.
It's time for the designated hitter to go. It's long outlived its usefulness offensively, and it's ridiculous to play under two sets of rules in the final series. Someone explain to me why so many people think this is a good thing. If it created more interest and mystery in the Series, then why would the outcomes based on home-field be so assured.
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Kudos to Major League Baseball for making the Astros open their roof for tonight's game. It's good to know the Cardinals' complaining didn't go for naught, albeit too late to make a difference in the LCS. It is patently unfair for Houston, or any team, to have the crowd noise advantage of an indoor stadium. And especially in Texas, where the climate is mild and baseball fans still have to be told by the scoreboard when to cheer.
posted by CM @ 8:26 PM
6 Comments:
How is crowd noise an advantage for the home team in an indoor stadium? It sounds exactly the same to each team. To be consistent, you must also support banning domes altogether or fans making noise in domes.
Which road manager told his players this year to simply pretend that the crowd was cheering for them – problem solved! If MLB dictates this during the playoffs and World Series, why not during the regular season? What about crowd noise in an outdoor stadium? Does it hurt the players' feelings to know that the other teams fans don't want them to win? What's next, MLB telling teams how much to water the infield before a game, what pattern to mow the infield grass…
MLB in this case is like our government: always micromanaging. IMHO, Houston should be able to set up its field in any way it want as long as it meets the baseball rules. I don't believe there is any written rule about roofs or crowd noise. TA
As long as it "meets baseball's rules"? A retractable dome probably counts as an unforseen change in the sport that Henry Chadwick (or whoever wrote the first rule book) never could have considered. It does give the Astros, essentially, control over the weather, which is giving a little more deity-like power than I'm comfortable awarding a home team.
Let's face it - baseball is inherently unfair and rightfully so. It makes up the fabric of the greatest game on earth. It seems a little crazy to make too much of this issue or use it to again run down Major League Baseball, which is one of the most overly maligned organizations in our country.
There's something positively bipolar (but charmingly so) about baseball and the constant fan attention to the steady stream of things that get defined as 'unfair'. Let's keep in mind that this is a sport that has very strict rules about exactly how many inches of pine tar can be put on a bat, but at the same time allows every stadium to set its own dimensions, including a left field wall in Boston that's about five times taller than any other and a ballpark in Houston that has an inexplicable hill in centerfield.
But far be it from me to take the fun out of it. I guess the best thing to do is retract this observation and just let the beautiful language of baseball debating play itself out.
The same arguments are used to excuse shotty umpiring.
Ninety-five percent of baseball fans love the "inherently unfair" elements of the game at any given time. The other five percent are rooting for the team in the process of getting screwed. All's fair there, which is why I think it would add an interesting element to the game to introduce an alligator pit to the new Busch Stadium just behind second base. Alligator pits are just what baseball needs to be unique from the other sports.
I admit that MLB's decision to change course just before the World Series was capricious, but I enjoyed the whole spectacle as a league admission that the roof played a major role in the LCS, which, of course, it did, and which we all ultimately saw in both the regular season and the World Series.
We can look at two decades of Minnesota Twins' home and away winning percentages to back up the same advantage. Do we really want to reward the teams that only have to prove they can win under one set of conditions? Is it fair to penalize older, heritage ballparks that don't have the same opportunity to play God with the conditions? In the case of the Twins, are we really rewarding excellence in the sport by playing in a setting where the fielders can't see half of the flyballs and no one on the field can hear the crack of the bat?
Air currents play a major factor in how outdoor parks play at night as opposed to the daylight. The difference, though, is that, here, natural elements dictate, not the whims of home team executives based on who's playing or pitching on a given day.
Selig was only demanding (albeit too late) that the Astros follow their own stated policy. He did the same thing to the Diamondbacks in 2001, although again too late.
Like TA, I see the issue as a microcosm of our government, but speaking instead to the public's general disinterest in their own leaders' accountability and sense of fairness.
My larger point was only that if you're a baseball fan you should be used to it by now. Let's not pin it on the commissioner's office just out of habit.
Personally this home field 'unfairness' first occurred to me in the mid '80's when the Cardinals had a roster full of track stars who couldn't hit very well so they started swinging down on pitches and spraying choppers around that moved twice as fast through the infield and bounced three times higher than they would have on real grass. The way I remember it the '87 Twins could only win at home, but so could the Cardinals.
When George Brett sat back on his left foot and inside-outed the ball into the leftfield corner, it was called scientific hitting. When Willie McGee did it, it was called slapping. Any thoughts on this discrepancy of reporting? I have one.
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Here are some statistics you're clearly not familiar with:
1987 Cardinals
Home record: 49-32
Road record: 46-35
1987 Twins
Home: 56-25
Road: 29-52
2005 Cardinals
Home: 50-31
Road: 50-31
2005 Astros
Home: 53-28
Road: 36-45
George Brett's Charley Lau hitting style was always questionable which is probably why it has faded, but it worked for him. I'd be likely to call George Brett a slap hitter too if he hadn't had good power numbers.
Here are some statistics you're clearly not familiar with:
Career homeruns
Willie McGee - 79
Vince Coleman - 28
Ozzie Smith - 28
George Brett - 317
Career slugging
Willie McGee - .396
Vince Coleman - .345
Ozzie Smith - .328
George Brett - .487
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