Forever a scab
In 1994 and 1995, while baseball players were on strike against their bosses to protect the hard-won right to free agency and to combat attempts to cap salaries amid what were soon-to-be-demolished claims of Major League Baseball's fiscal vulnerability, a handful of gutless rodents, hoping to leapfrog themselves over more principled co-workers and unable to find work on an equal playing field, made the decision to walk across the picket line.
The impact of their action is still being felt in small ways inside the baseball world today with the Players Association's permanent refusal to allow these remaining active players (now 5 in active number) to join its ranks, and by extension, to have their likenesses included on MLBPA-licensed merchandise. As this curiously-forgiving
Kotaku article points out, the players are still excluded from having their names appear on MLBPA-associated video games, or recently, in the case of Brendan Donnelly or Kevin Millar, on merchandise commemorating World Championship clubs.
Millar made his reputation on the diamond with the 2004 Champion Boston Red Sox, popularizing a clubhouse catchphrase "cowboy up" to describe the team's collective personality and drawing legions of Scarlet Hose rooters to his side through corresponding media reports. Was Millar also "cowboy(ing) up" when he went out as the lone gunslinger in 1995, delaying an end to the unpopular strike and compromising the bargaining position and financial livelihoods of his colleagues?
Kotaku's Owen Good is correct that the Baseball Players Association is not the United Auto Workers. The MLBPA is the most powerful union in the Northern Hemisphere, while the UAW is a nearly-defunct, bleeding-from-the-gut union all-but-destroyed over the years by corrupt alliances between its compromised leaders and the company bosses and politicians that sell them down the river on everything from trade agreements to health care to war profiteering efforts that murder the children of the working class.
I have tears streaming down my face for Kevin Millar, who has missed out on the birthright of having one's name appear on a video game and has had teammates lobby for his union membership while he's done nothing but cash enormous paychecks made possible by a group of men who put their reputations, careers, and the livelihoods of their families on the line for him and his, and so far as we know, he's never once bothered to even send Curt Flood's widow a small percentage of one of his fat checks. Now, the penalty box should swing open because... why is it? Because 15 years of water has passed under the bridge? Believe me, Kevin Millar has made out just fine. He's a 38-year-old player who has been able to cobble together a 12-year big league career despite
remarkably unremarkable statistics, no speed, little power, little ability to hit for average, and being a right-handed hitter than can play really just one position on the field (first base). He made his choice between his co-workers and management years ago, and management has repaid him handsomely for his loyalty.
Indeed, the list of former replacement players (38) who were able to put together a lengthy career-- Millar, Donnelly, Brian Daubach, Ron Mahay, Cory Lidle, Damien Miller, Shane Spencer, Matt Herges, Rick Reed, Jamie Walker, etc.-- is a who's who of middling players. There's not a .300 hitter, a 30 home run guy, a 20-game winner, or a Gold Glover in the group. It's ridiculous to claim that their continued-exclusion from the union is a long-dead labor issue when 5 of these 38 mediocre talents are still being offered roster spots even 15 years after the fact. It's not just the union that has a long memory.
The licensing of players' likenesses is serious business. It's created the war chest that has made the union the strong one that it is. If it weren't for the Players Association, Millar may have his name on a video game, but he may be getting all of $125 per year for it. That's the amount the Topps trading card company gave each player in return for the use of his image in the early 1960s, in the days just before Marvin Miller became the union's Executive Director. Today, that licensing agreement funds the players' additional income, the union's rainy day fund and multiple charities.
Despite their actions, Millar and the other strikebreakers have benefited plenty from the union. Of course, the high salaries available for players in the business are thanks directly to Miller, his successor, Donald Fehr, and the Association. The collectively-bargained salary minimums apply to them. They get a pension, they're equally eligible for the bargained terms of free agency, get access to recently-negotiated and enacted bereavement leave, and even representation in salary arbitration and disciplinary hearings. I would argue that that's more than they deserve already.
We once lived in harsher times for the bosses and their rats...
After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab.
A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out.
No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his master, he had character enough to hang himself. A scab has not.
Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commision in the british army.
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife, his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country.
A scab is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.
Jack London
Howard Zinn 1922-2010
Howard Zinn is dead.
Shit.
An extraordinary author, historian, activist, and educator, the still-vigorous 87-year-old Zinn passed away Wednesday while swimming in Santa Monica, CA. His extraordinary history text, "A People's History of the United States," was first published in 1980, and it changed history itself. It was not a traditional history book. It didn't preach the traditional "great men" theory of history presentation. It chronicled the vital social movements of the often-powerless and disenfranchised of the nation-- from the perspective of the people responsible for these great successes.
It was radical. It was unabashedly liberal and enlightened. It inspired-- and still inspires-- a livelier democracy. And the greatest thing about it was not in its radical perspective, but in the way that it changed how history is taught. Thanks to Zinn, there is not one United States history, but the recognition and understanding that there are millions of individual histories in the United States.
I'll let Howard's friend
Dave Zirin, the subsequent author of "A People's History of
Sports in (my italics) the United States," tell you more about the man.
Howard Zinn and Studs Terkel gone in the same 15 months is quite a vicious blow.
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The CCI Rally in Des Moines on Tuesday rallied quite a bit of ink across the state. An
AP story ran in the Omaha and Cedar Rapids newspapers, among others; the Iowa Independent story linked here yesterday was posted on
Michael Moore's website; a blogger at the
Register published
CCI's press release (that's something, anyway); and
this site has video of the protests. Enjoy.
Put People First-- Iowa CCI in Action
Right-wing "Tea Parties" erupted all over the country in 2009. We know this because there was an eager news media there at every stop of the way to record each of the individual gripes and complaints about our "oppressive" government of the people. The Tea-Party movement had no ideas or solutions to offer the nation. They just bitched a lot, and bitched loudly, and a few times, violently. A lot of sizzle and no steak, and the news media lapped it up.
Yesterday in Des Moines, by contrast, a group of Iowa citizens numbering in the hundreds, armed with a list of actual ideas and solutions to the nation's and the state's problems, staged a large-scale media event of their own, first, at the Capitol building and then downtown. Yet you'll find no evidence of their activity yesterday or today in the city's one and only, now-decaying news daily,
The Register. The paper skipped the story entirely.
Following a half-day of rallying and lobbying at the Statehouse, hundreds of members of the organization Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (of which-- disclosure-- I am a member and a rally participant during the earlier part of the day), representing multiple nationalities, students and the retired, Iowa-born and immigrant (to paraphrase a rally speaker), packed the downtown office lobbies of both Wells Fargo Bank and Bank of America to protest a pair of financial institutions responsible for helping to sink the national economy, plunging the state of Iowa into a $1 billion budget deficit, taking tens of billions in bailout funds from taxpayers, and then paying out billions in executive bonuses to their top-compensated employees.
Des Moines police were at both bank locations yesterday to chase the citizen activists out of the corporate offices, and the online news journal
iowaindependent.com had a reporter on the scene as well, but a representative from the circulation- and revenue-hemorrhaging
Register was nowhere to be found, as evidenced by the news outlet's list of stories available
online. (Although, in the paper's defense, budget cuts have forced a number of newsroom layoffs in recent years, and the Lion's Club in Johnston was announcing a book sale.)
Nothing to see here, I guess. Only the seeds of a genuine populist political uprising. Perhaps protest placards at the scene were deemed lacking in swastikas and politician-as-Hitler images.
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You make the call: Which is the most accomplished Major League Baseball player?
Player A:
11 years, 828 runs scored, 1575 hits, 225 home runs, 838 RBIs, 253 steals, .280 batting avg., .802 OPS, a Rookie of the Year, 3 Top 10 MVP finishes, and 4 Gold Gloves
Player B:
6 years, 431 runs scored, 929 hits, 174 home runs, 587 RBIs, 57 steals, a .285 batting avg., .834 OPS, an MVP (only time in the Top 10), and 2 Gold Gloves
5 playoff games played in by each. No World Series.
Discussion below.
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President Obama should use his State of the Union address tonight to bludgeon Republicans about the head for their year-long commitment to obstructionism, says
Salon's Joan Walsh.
The year began with a GOP legislator shouting "You Lie" during the Prez's annual address to the bicameral gathering of the Congress, ended with the Democrats losing their filibuster-proof Senate majority, and was marked throughout by the Republicans' stubborn refusal to cede to the President even on the country of his birth. Yet, he still seems to solidly support the prospect of bipartisanship. Maybe by
next January, after a cycle of mid-term elections and 12
more months of personal smears, he'll be up to speed.
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Ed Begley, Jr. is
still the coolest environmentalist around.
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To the question above, if you said Baseball Player A, then congratulations on agreeing that Andre Dawson should be enshrined in Cooperstown this July as a member of the Montreal Expos instead of as a member of the Chicago Cubs. The Hall of Fame itself gets to pick the cap that appears on the enshrined player's plaque, just as it gets to draft the text that appears beneath the player's image. Dawson
told a Chicago radio station this morning that he's been informed by the Hall that his likeness will be that of the Expos player (Young Andre over Old Andre[?]), and that he's disappointed he wasn't first consulted.
Congrats to Dawson on changing the question to "For which team is he best-remembered?" from the previous "Should he even
be in the Hall-of-Fame?" but this one is a no-brainer. It's no personal knock on Dawson. He's correct that he needed the combined service with both teams to be considered a Hall-of-Famer, and he clearly recognizes the very real life advantage of being connected to a popular Cubs franchise that has a thriving fandom and a global reach as opposed to being linked forever with Les Expos Defunt. But this is as it should be. The Hall is a museum, first and foremost, and Montreal may have been mugged of its baseball team (in 2004), but we don't get to write the franchise and its fans out of history as a result of Major League Baseball's corporate relocation actions.
Jefferson and Haiti
The roots of racism in this hemisphere run remarkably deep. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has
the story this week of Thomas Jefferson's reaction when the Slave Revolt broke out in Haiti in 1791. Naturally, the slave trade capitalists were panicked as hell:
Jefferson was terrified that the creation, and flourishing, of a black republic in the New World would serve as a model for the rebellion of America’s own slaves; and that, at all costs, would be unacceptable. As early as 1793, Jefferson wrote to James Monroe that “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man … I become daily more and more convinced that all the West India Island will remain in the hands of the people of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later take place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Potomac), have to wade through and try to avert them.” Two years later, in a letter to Aaron Burr, Jefferson compared the Haitians to assassins and referred to them as “Cannibals of the terrible republic.”
Jefferson feared that a successful Haitian revolution would threaten the stability of slavery: “If something is not done, and done soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children.” By 1802, Jefferson’s worst fears had come true: the “course of things in the neighboring islands of the West Indies,” he wrote to Rufus King in July, “appears to have given considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves….a great disposition to insurgency has manifested itself among them.”---
Pay walls: This story is wild.
New York Newsday, the Long Island, NY newsdaily constructed a pay wall ($5 per week) for access to its online content back in October. They got 35 subscribers.
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Happy Winter! Des Moines' cumulative snowfall this season
now measures 41.4 inches, the most in the city since 1886. It's mostly fun and games for somebody like me, who has had his office closed for parts of three days, but it may not be for the students of Des Moines Public Schools. They might have to go to classes
on Saturday! Can I hear a collective "OMG"?!
ExxonMobil comes alive!
This Supreme Court decision today opening the door for unlimited campaign contributions by corporations (as protected freedom of political speech) is about to damage our political system possibly beyond the people's ability to repair. The ruling will likely stand for some extended period of time (decades?) as the definitive ass-rape of the American people by the corporate state.
The bizarro-concept of corporate personhood is as terrifying in its implications as it is inexplicable in its logic, with its roots in the legal code back not to the United States Constitution, but only to a court ruling in 1886 during the height of the Gilded Age, one that has been overruled twice before, but that has been strangely adopted now by the self-described strict originalists of the bench like Antonin Scalia, and its Chief Justice, John Roberts.
I fear that it's now all over but for the shouting. Campaign finance reform is the #1 issue in American politics because it gets to the gut of each of the other issues. With this decision, you and I have been effectively dismissed from our democracy by five "(indeed)-activist" judges and a group of Frankenstein corporations that have the size and reach of many nation-states--
They the People-- and possessing, as Justice John Paul Stevens described today, "no consciences, no beliefs, no thoughts, no desires."
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On the upside, it will be fun to watch the Tea-Bag movement rush to oppose the ruling, as they purport to stand on the side of Main Street against the might of Wall Street. We are going to see this, righ
t?
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From the structural annihilation of the state to the theater of the living arts, a potentially-fascinating
new production has reached the Broadway stage. Muhammad Ali has been conjoined in fiction with another real-life figure from history, Stepin Fetchit, an African-American entertainment personality who has fallen deeply out of step with the modern standards of presenting the Black Experience since his hey day in the public eye of the 1920s. Portrayed by Ben Vereen in this new show, "Fetch Clay, Make Man," Fetchit was the stage name of Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, and as the widely-advertised "Laziest Man in the World," the character has come to represent some of the most degrading stereotypes of African-Americans that exist in the culture.
I'm fascinated by Fetchit's career, and I'm a passionate defender of Perry's efforts in the context of his time, and of the Fetchit creation's important place in the evolution of cultural standards. (In fact, Perry actually became close friends with the militant activist Ali during the 1960s.) A terrific parallel would be the "Amos & Andy" characters that followed in the wake of Fetchit on radio and television. Modern audiences cringe at the offensiveness, even grotesquerie, of some of these caricatures, but we take a clumsy step backward if we fail to offer pardon for the difficult choices an individual such as Perry was forced to make during his career and refuse to recognize the social contribution Perry made by "opening the doors" he did.
These characters and their presentations need to be explored in unvarnished detail, and by large swaths of the general public, not hidden away to protect fragile sensibilities. There's a rumor that Bill Cosby is the person who made the well-intentioned and successful effort during the 1990s to purchase the rights to the original Amos & Andy television episodes so that they could be kept from the airwaves. (As well-intentioned as is possible, anyway, for a multi-millionaire who's buying up a cultural artifact for the purpose of destroying it.) This is a cultural loss that should be lamented the same way that we lament the looting of historical objects during war. To paraphrase an impassioned and determined Indiana Jones, "They should be in a museum!"
Courtside Observations - by Aaron Moeller
The CM Blog was once again on the road this week, this time sending a representative to Minneapolis to take in an NBA game between the hometown Timberwolves and the Philadelphia 76ers. Once again, the blog correspondent (myself, incidently) was forced to purchase his own ticket and then submit a reimbursement request to the Blogmaster. I'll be awaiting the mailed check, Chris. Hopefully you got my change of address card.
I've been a Philadelphia 76ers fan since forever and usually attend one of their games annually when they travel to either Chicago or Minnesota, but the Great North offers a special incentive - dirt cheap tickets. If you're content to sit in the nosebleeds, a ticket to a T-Wolves game is cheaper than a trip to a Cedar Rapids Kernels game, so for a couple years I've been planning on splurging on a ticket and having a fantastic vantage point for once. No activity better benefits from a close-viewing proximity than the National Basketball Association, and when team legend Allen Iverson returned to the team last month after a 3 year hiatus, that sealed the deal that this was to be the year. I went online and bought a 2nd row courtside seat, sitting right on the center court line. The row ahead of me had to deal with (occasionally tall) people continually walking past, so I contend there was no better seat in the arena than the one I was sitting in. Here are some random thoughts from my NBA close encounter.
* The person sitting next to me was from Ames, which I didn't realize until we both simultaneously recognized former Cyclone and T-Wolf, Fred Hoiberg, sitting three rows behind us during pre-game warmups. I'm normally not aggressive when spotting celebrities and try to be respectful of one's privacy, but come on, he's from Ames. So I told Fred I was from Iowa and my brother went to ISU and he was happy to smile for a photograph.
* Prince is always the one celebrity you hope to see at any major "Event" in the Twin Cities (or at least courtside at a small-e "event" between two teams with sub-.400 winning percentages on MLK Jr. Day when the NBA has their only slate of afternoon games during the year), but he was nowhere to be found. This despite cameras spotting him the day before at the Vikings playoff game. So I knew he was in town... and he's usually easy to spot - he's really short and he and Hugh Hefner are the only people who wear their pajamas in public.
* Despite his unattendance, Prince's music is ubiquitous over the Target Center PA. There was also a lot of Alicia Keys music (and a large image of her by one of the ladies' rooms for no explicable reason), some John Legend, some Stones, and "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers, as it was very much a CM Blog-approved soundtrack.
* Jim from Ames asked Hoiberg for his autograph, and even though Hoiberg went to Iowa State, I've now seen the evidence that he can spell his own name.
* Scanning the game program, I noticed that having been born in June of 1975, Allen Iverson was the oldest player on either team. Having been born in April of that same year, I realized it was likely the first time I have ever attended a professional sporting event in which there wasn't a single player older than me. Next stop, the grave.
* The T-Wolves coaching staff is a literal who's who of players from my NBA childhood. The head coach is Kurt Rambis, who - obviously, I suppose - no longer sports the famous eyewear he wore as a player on those great '80's Lakers teams. And why did he wear those traditional glasses anyway, when Kareem and Worthy had such modern (and more aerodynamic) goggles available to them? Rambis also writes left-handed on his clipboard, though I don't remember him shooting left-handed. Weird.
* Long-time NBAer Reggie Theus is another assistant. He's still a handsome devil and had the sleekest suit of any of the coaches. I miss his jheri curl though.
* Bill Laimbeer is easily recognizable among the coaches as well. Famous as one of the "Bad Boys" on a couple of Detroit championship teams in the late '80's, Bill doesn't even bother to wear a tie, sporting a turtleneck instead. He seems like a pretty cool dude, joking with fans and easily flashing a devilish smile. I was also able to fulfill a lifelong dream at halftime, when I went up to the roped-off section of the tunnel that leads to the home team locker room, waited for Laimbeer to reappear, and then punched him in the face.
* Jim Lynam was an assistant coach for the 76ers in 1983 when they won the NBA championship (the opening tip-off of my Sixer fandom) and remains one to this day. I pointed this out to some of my neighbors at the game who feigned interest in the factoid.
* Eddie Jordan is the 76ers head coach, and a shitty one. He needs to go.
* The main floor announcer and scoreboard personality - for most teams and in most sports - is usually a local news anchor or game show host-wannabe, but the T-Wolves use Wally Szczerbiak, a former player. He's a total pretty boy and was outrageously flirtatious with his female counterpart, who had one button on her blouse undone, revealing a black bra, unbuttened a second while they were giggling before the game, and was fingering and threatening to undo a third. These are the things you don't see in the nosebleed seats.
* Iverson was the oldest player, but Brian Cardinal, a balding white dude for the T-Wolves, looks the oldest, and I felt 10 years younger when he was on the court.
* The Sixers dominated the first half. They were clearly the better team. They had better athletes, both quicker and bigger, were forcing lots of bad shots and generally making the T-Wolves look like the bunch of first and second year players that they are. Most of the Sixer starters spent the entire 2nd quarter on the bench as they worked up a 20 point lead. The crowd was silent and uninspired (not to mention sparse) and it was cool to be able to hear the players calling out plays and numbers. When players would occasionally swear, it was clearly audible across the silent arena, and I wondered if even the television audience could pick it up.
* Iverson swears the most. He swears even when his shots go
in.
* 76er center Samuel Dalembert has become incredibly visible the last week as he is the lone NBA player who was born and raised in Haiti and is now the face of the NBACares earthquake relief effort. This afternoon, upon returning to Iowa, I saw that he boarded a flight after the game in rout to the island. He's also been playing inspired ball and had three blocked shots in the first 5 minutes of the game and he altered a handful of others.
* The Timberwolves, in addition to being near the basement of the Western Conference, are also last in the league when it comes to player tattoos. The Sixers have it all over the T-Wolves in tats. Andre Iguadala, Lou Williams, and Mareese Speights all have significant artwork up and down their arms and/or legs, and of course, Allen Iverson, has long been the poster-boy for the modern-day tattooed athlete. The guy has had magazine articles and photo spreads dedicated to the images. It was cool to be sitting close enough to see all the infamous chinese letterings, the spider-web thing on his neck, the "Only the Strong Survive" on one shoulder, the "Hold my Own" on the opposite one, the "Cru Thik" shout-out to his hometown boys, "The Answer" bulldog, the "East End" on his leg, etc.
* Sixer point guard Lou Williams has the coolest shoes. All the Sixers have red in their shoes, but he has a touch of Sixer blue and white also and what appears to be a '6er logo on them. Believe me when I tell you that Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda used to go crazy over shoes that aren't even close to being as sweet as these.
* I thought they retired the thing during timeouts where the mascot jumps off the trampoline and does reverse dunks. They haven't.
* The Sixers starters returned completely flat in the 3rd quarter and embarrassingly squandered their lead in less than ten minutes. Eddie Jordan can never quite find the right rotation of players, usually riding the hot-hand too long, and leaving guys on the bench too long... but I promised Chris I'd keep my NBA talk to generalities and remember that his readers aren't terribly interested in the current state of affairs for the Sixers.
* One thing I was looking forward to at the game (since my seats were so close) was a kick-ass Andre Iguadala break-away dunk, but it never happened. There may be no higher-flyer in the Association these days, but alas, nothing. But even though he didn't get much of an opportunity to show off, it must be said that in person he is an incredible athletic specimen. He is super-ripped, can jump out of the gym, and visibly stands out even among a group of two dozen ridiculously athletic, fellow professional hoopsters.
* Of course, I was mostly looking forward to seeing Allen Iverson, the greatest small player in the history of the NBA. Years from now, when I remember this single game, I'll recall there was one Hall of Famer on the court that day. The guy you always hear you have to see in person to truly appreciate his speed, his quickness, and especially, his intensity. It's true though that he's on his last legs. A couple times during the game he got the ball on the wing, in transition, and where I'm generally accustomed to seeing him dart past two defenders, fly into the lane toward the hoop, and somehow sneak a shot just past the fingertips of a player a foot taller than him, the defense now collapsed on him, and he had to give up the ball or missed an off-balance, rushed shot.
* The Sixers lost in overtime. It remains to be seen what role Iverson will play now that he's postponed his retirement to return to the team he played ten years for, but when Iguadala missed a buzzer beater in regulation that would have won the game, Iverson wasn't even on the court. He spent the final minute and all of the overtime period on the bench. A huge disappointment. In years past, the game's final shot was always the same call - clear out and let Allen play one-on-one with his defender. I'd have thought Iverson should at least be on the court as a decoy drawing a defender. Instead the whole arena knew a double-teamed Iguadala would get his number called and it didn't drop. The view was grand but a big L was the capper on my northern excursion.
Relief for Haiti
On his birthday, we recall the words of Dr. King who said, "True compassion is more than just throwing a coin to a beggar. It demands of our humanity that if we live in a society that produces beggars, we are morally commanded to restructure that society."
These words instruct us this year upon Haiti, where once again the poverty of its inhabitants has been exposed but so also has the poverty of ideas and initiative for lifting the Hemisphere's poorest country out of its tragedy and despair.
Where the peabrains and the bigots see nothing but
race-based immorality or
divine punishment in the destruction of the Haitian capital city, others see a great hope surrounding the commonality of all humankind, a call to assist but not to seek profit in return. Haitians need our relief contributions in the short-term. Give today to a reliable organization like UNICEF and mark it on your calendars to give again a year from today. In the long-term, they need our collective commitment to help lift up and reshape. This demands political accountability in the United States as well.
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Pat Robertson claimed last week that Haitians had entered into "a pact with the devil" in return for their independence from the French in 1804, and he can go fuck himself. Anybody who backs this guy and calls him or herself a "Christian" should realize that the good reverend is equating the resistance of slavery with a rejection of Christ.
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Haiti's most indelible mark upon the culture of the United States may be best identified through our port city of
New Orleans, Louisiana.
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Quote of the day: Former NBA star Olden Polynice, a native of Haiti,
"Pat Robertson can suck a big one-- you can quote me on that. He is not a man of God and shouldn't claim to be. You can quote me on that. Please."
Jack the Ripper
There's a dick in every group.
At the "Winter Warmup" in St. Louis this weekend, it's Jack Clark, a former cards' firstbaseman who
told the Post-Dispatch today that he thinks Mark McGwire is a "cheater," a "creep," and that he should be banned from Major League Baseball. He added that he would refuse to say hello to McGwire or shake his hand at the "Warmup" autograph event Saturday and Sunday.
Ooh, somebody's mad. It takes a bit of blog space to count each of the ways in which Clark has embarrassed himself here. The most enlightening reveal into Clark's fragile psyche is his jealousy over the salaries of the players that came after him in the game-- "They should all be in the Hall of Shame. They can afford to build it. They've all got so much money."
These signs of deep-seeded animosity require a little background for understanding. This is a guy who spent himself into bankruptcy despite a lucrative, 17-year playing career. He collected 18 classic automobiles en route to a $6.7 million debt in Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, and this filing took place during the 2nd year of a 3-year, 8.7 million contract with Boston. This cat knows how to spend money.
In the early '00s, he took a job as hitting coach with the Independent League River City Rascals, who are based in the western St. Louis suburb of O'Fallon, Missouri. There was a not-so-subtle intent there of working his way up to a similar position on Tony LaRussa's coaching staff downtown, an offer that has yet to come and that was granted instead and accepted by McGwire this winter. We're dealing with a lot resentment here.
For two slugging firstbasemen renown in the same city and separated by only eight years in age, it's hard to imagine more disparate personalities.
McGwire left more than $10 million on the table when he retired after the 2001 season, feeling he could no longer play to his accustomed level of performance, while Clark is clearly obsessed with money-- not just in spending it, but in making it too, leaving the Cardinals in 1988 to become one of George Steinbrenner's high-rent Bronx whores.
McGwire was a well-liked and respected teammate by all accounts-- ever. Even Jose Canseco said this week that he was still a big McGwire fan. As a result of this popularity and strong standing, there's a legion of young players, about to become legion-er this spring, who have been tutored by Mac-- in the clubhouse or in his private gym in California. Clark, meanwhile, caused division in the Cards' clubhouse in 1987 when went down to injury during an early September game in Montreal. If Ozzie Smith's '88 autobiography, "Wizard," can be believed, a number of Clark's teammates thought he should have taken a cortisone shot in an effort to get himself back into the lineup for the pennant drive and the post-season instead of packing it in for the year, and as it turned out, for his career, as a Cardinal. The undermanned Birds wound up losing the World Series to the Twins in 7 games. Come to think of it, perhaps Clark is so anti-steroid that he even thinks cortisone (a steroid hormone-- albeit one that nobody seems to care about) is cheating.
Clark couldn't be helping out the club owners with his comments any more either than if he were a paid operative to help bust the players' union. The MLB Players Association is responsible for all of the money Clark squandered during his playing career and for the quality of his pension today. His harsh comments today indict many of his fellow players for their actions and health decisions, but where are the harsh words for commissioner Bud Selig, the Cardinals' ownership group headed by Bill DeWitt, or the actual rule-makers of the sport who were more concerned with gate receipts during the 1990's than the health of their employees when steroids started finding their way into clubhouses. Those indictments were strangely missing today, but then Clark still needs his post-game commentary gig on the Cardinals cable network. Pathetic.
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It turns out that the head of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker, and his employee, Conan O'Brien, have a personal relationship that goes back to Harvard University. Conan was with the satire magazine
The Harvard Lampoon while Zucker was the president of the student paper
The Crimson. "As a prank," reports a 2004 piece in BusinessWeek, "O'Brien's staff stole all the Crimson issues one day before they could be delivered. Zucker called the cops. 'My first meeting with Jeff Zucker was in handcuffs, with a Cambridge police officer reading me my rights,' says O'Brien."
Zucker knows from comedy.
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Dave was
at his curmudgeonly best last night.
NBC-- "Our Pride is Showing"
My prepared blog entry for Monday was about NBC's clusterfuck in their prime-time and late night programming schedules, but the piece was preempted in favor of our ongoing coverage of steroid use run amok in Major League Baseball.
That delayed blog entry is printed now in its entirety, followed by some imperative updates on the ongoing saga...
The Jay Leno Show is terrible, and so Conan O'Brien gets screwed. The host of the Jay Leno Show, a lasting human symbol of our national mediocrity, left the Tonight Show last spring as part of a transition that was announced in 2004. Then he was inexplicably promoted to a nightly prime-time slot on NBC's schedule permitted to do essentially the same show he'd been doing after General Electric saw an opportunity to cut its prime-time production costs to the bone. Conan inherited Leno's audience an hour earlier-- comprised mostly of the parents of his former show-- and so gone were the Vomiting Kermit and the Masturbating Bear. And gone on the network were all of the prime-time dramas except for the one involving these two Massachusetts-born comics.
Reports now are that Leno will be moved back to his 11:35 (eastern) start time for a half-hour program that will follow your late local news and what has always been the comedian's tailor-made lead-in of consultant-approved news anchor haircuts and investigative stories about kitchen pantry items that could kill your children. O'Brien gets his choice of a later start time (12:05) or the door.
Conan needs to "man up" (not that he hasn't behaved as a man of maturity previously) and walk out. He would take a financial hit, no doubt. His contract with NBC says that the network can move his show to 12:05, although no later, without the risk of substantial penalties and they're prepared to now do that. Conan needs to be willing then to stand firm and step away from a two-year agreement that would have averaged $14 million a year.
The Tonight Show host uprooted his entire show, his staff, and his family and moved them from New York to Los Angeles to go up against the greatest broadcaster in television history with Jay Leno as his prime-time lead-in each and every night. Now his network is pulling out the rug on him after only seven months. "This level of shittiness was not expected," one source told the New York Post, although the newspaper censured the word "shittiness" in its publication and stopped identifying its news sources around 1994 so we can't be sure that it was actually even said.
It was David Letterman that established the yardstick on this one. He told NBC to shove it after a similar display of disrespect and disloyalty by the network 17 years ago. Conan has walked behind Letterman, figuratively, ever since he took over NBC's "Late Night" and now he really needs to do as Dave did or risk looking like the network doormat, which is Leno's job title.
Well, Conan did "man up." He issued a public statement on Tuesday-- he writes
a mean letter, incidentally-- stating that he did not know what his future would hold, but that he would not agree to having his show moved to 12:05. It's an extraordinary letter, though Letterman, discussing the matter on his show, seems to think that Conan would be playing into NBC's hands by walking away the money.
He and ABC's
Jimmy Kimmel each had some fun at NBC's expense Tuesday night.
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Quote of the day: Ninety-year-old Ralph Houk, Roger Maris' Yankees manager in 1961, to ESPN on Monday,
"I think (Mark McGwire) broke (Maris') record fairly. I wouldn't be concerned about it. (McGwire) was a good hitter that deserved everything he got."
Houk also had some instructive comments in reference to rampant amphetamine use by players during Maris' era. Those statements finished as narrow runners-up in the Quote of the Day voting.
McGwire takes his lumps for return to the game
Mark McGwire
said today that he used steroids during his baseball career and the media reaction is close to what I anticipated. I'm thrilled to have Mac back in St. Louis as the Cards' hitting coach this year, I'm certain that the issue will not be a distraction to the team, as it never has been for Andy Pettitte or Alex Rodriguez in New York, but I regret that Mac feels the need to apologize for any decisions he made in regards to his body during his career.
In his typical modest fashion today, he underplayed in his formal statement the reason that he took steroids, but in doing so, the public once again fails to get the chance to look at this issue honestly. McGwire missed 228 games due to injury between 1992 and 1996, going on the disabled list seven times. Then he used steroids (most of which, believe it or not, have a medical purpose) to get healthy and to
stay healthy. Would he have had a career to go back to if he hadn't used steroids? Hard for me to say, or to think that I would have made the same decision, but then it's not
my career or
my life, is it? He did make it back, of course, and in doing so, incidentally, saved the business of baseball. (Note that I said 'business' of baseball, not 'game'. After 150 damned years, can we finally put such childish illusions to bed?)
Mark has endured a hailstorm of media and public excrement for seven years for committing an offense that observers have estimated was committed by as many as 80% of other big-leaguers at the time. For sixteen seasons, American baseball fans, most of them hopped up themselves on more caffeine, nicotine, pharmaceuticals, painkillers, and supplements than you can swing a Louisville Slugger at, demanded his every will to win, on and off the field, to justify the tickets they purchased and the prices they paid. He delivered to the tune of an astronomical growth of the sport. He broke no rules.
He was called to testify before Congress-- without an offer of immunity (even though the publicly-stated aim of the hearing was truth) and in the face of possible coerced testimony by family and friends-- even though he was not a participant in the business at the time, never one of its rule-makers, and had been out of the public spotlight for a year and a half. The fears in the legal community about the Justice Department's overreach in their steroid hunting have since been proven justified, by the way, as the courts have ruled.
He had to endure a series of accusations tossed at him and his co-workers in Washington by a distraught father who had supposedly lost his son to juvenile steroid use and needed somebody to blame-- namely, adult celebrity athletes-- for the boy's death, and then we all endured media re-circulations of the myth that steroids (the Wonder-Drugs!) somehow have the ability to create a kind of supernatural or superhuman athlete. And through it all, he refused to lie, even when he was being asked questions about his personal health and his body that no government official or media figure had the right to ask. All for a lot of public paranoia over steroids, despite the fact that there's a miniscule death risk connected to them by all even-handed scientific accounts, and studies non-existent linking their usage positively to baseball-playing success.
I'm proud of Mark today. His demonstration of courage "add(s) to my respect for him," to echo his manager on the same subject. I'm looking forward-- in a big way-- to having him around the Cardinals this summer. The players should be so lucky as to pick up just a whiff of this guy's humanity, decency, and emotional strength.
Special Report with Brit Hume
Nutjob of the week is Brit Hume, the Fox News "commentator emeritus" who's evidently not retired from commentary just yet. Hume overextended his divine authority on the right-wing entertainment network Sunday by instructing Tiger Woods to trade in his inferior Buddhist faith for a Christian one that he says would offer more "forgiveness and redemption" for the golfer's well-publicized marital transgressions. Then he claimed that the backlash against the comments was caused by "anti-Christian" bias. The whole episode is laughable on its face, but Ruth Conniff has more respect for the depth and motivation of Hume's depraved agenda.
She likens it to a modern selling of indulgences by Hume on behalf of his faith-- Join us, he's saying, and wild sexual exploits can be yours.
Incidently, why are Fox commentators chatting about Tiger Woods on their Sunday political roundtable program?. I'm out of touch, I guess.
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Roger Ebert blows me away with the quality and prolificacy of his journalism. He cranks out multiple movie reviews every week, answers readers' letters in print, delivers essays on the movies and its practitioners in the Chicago Sun-Times and on
its website, writes detailed blog entries, and then responds to dozens of comments in the blog threads from his readers. Then I'll read something about him like how
he can no longer eat or drink and I'll be reminded that he does everything he does while coping with the effects of thyroid cancer. Roger's service to people who love the movies and/or the city of Chicago is an inspiration.
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Quote of the week: Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show," discussing the Flight 253 Underwear Bomber,
"Even if the bomb works, there's going to be 72 very disappointed virgins."
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Premier free agent Matt Holliday is coming back to the Cardinals on a 7-year deal, meaning that all of those breathless expletives hurled by fans at the slugger and his agent, Scott Boras, were a probably a big waste of time and energy. It's now safe to buy your Holliday t-shirt jersey.
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One of the great left-handed pitchers ever, Randy Johnson, announced his retirement Tuesday. Except for the two seasons spent with the Yankees, Johnson was always one of the cool guys in the big leagues. He portrayed himself in a 2006 episode of "The Simpsons" in which his character met Ned Flanders at a lefthanders' convention. My dad and I watched him shut out the Cardinals in less than 2 hours on July 4th, 1999 in the single warmest game I've ever attended. He retired this week at the ridiculous age of 46 and having collected 303 lifetime wins. He'll likely become baseball's first Hall of Famer to rock a mullet on his enshrinement plaque.
Andre and his advocate
Our friend David Levenhagen, who will be hosting a Moeller Television Festival-- Baseball Edition at his home in Lenexa, Kansas February 6th (inquire with me by email), is a big winner today. His enduring protest of Andre Dawson's exclusion from the Baseball Hall of Fame is finally paying dividends today.
Dave has maintained a passionate endorsement of Dawson's Hall candidacy as the top entry on
his personal blog for two solid years (exactly two years tomorrow, in fact) in brave and stubborn recognition of Dawson's diamond achievements, particularly the slugger's years of MLB service as a member of the Chicago Cubs (1987-1992). Earlier today, it was
announced that Dawson would be enshrined in Cooperstown this summer, joining a platform with former Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog and long-time umpire Doug Harvey.
Well done, David! You're hard work has not gone unnoticed, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if that crazy four-syllable last name of yours found its way into the Hawk's induction speech come July.
Anticipatory repudiation
San Diego attorney Ben Pavone is doing a heroic thing on your behalf. He's
withholding his credit card payment from Bank of America this month, and plans to sue the company if they attack his credit in return.
Pavone, who says he has a perfect payment history with Bank of America and near-perfect overall, is pissed that his written request for an increase in his credit limit was met with a reduction instead, as well as an interest rate increase from 10.99 to 27.99%.
"I consider your action an anticipatory repudiation of the contract and am treating you as in breach," he wrote to the company last week, "I am therefore not paying the money that is due on January 3, 2010 out of protest."
When Paulie Walnuts does what the credit card companies do, it's called usery. It's time they get called to the mat by somebody, anybody. They borrow from the government for free, shell out unconscionable executive bonuses, and give the money back to taxpayers at a 27% bump. The fine print on card agreements is so convoluted that
even industry insiders often can't decipher it. Consumers often aren't aware that they're even signing away their right to sue. It's business practice straight out of the gutter.
