The Chris Moeller Archives

Enjoying the passage of time...

Happy New Year. Hope your 2011 is this great.

posted by CM @ 6:08 PM 0 comments

Moeller TV Listings: New Years Eve 2010

Daryl Hall, one half of the best selling musical duo in U.S. history, had more #1 hits than the Eagles, more top ten hits than Billy Joel, more "blue-eyed soul" than Aaron Moeller, and he's on his way back. Says New York Magazine about the music of Daryl Hall and John Oates:

In the last five years, new media and morphing demographics have changed the longtime perception of Hall & Oates as a symbol of slick, overproduced eighties pop to, variously, great American songsmiths on a par with Lerner and Loewe, master studio craftsmen who wrought our very sonic firmament, and—to a broad and fervid demographic—the epitome of True Pop Values.

Daryl's webcast, "Live From Daryl's House," will air on WGN America at 10pm central time on New Years Eve. Tell Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest to suck it.

posted by CM @ 6:27 PM 0 comments

Haley Barbour's rebel yell

There will be a doublewide-trailer-load of visiting dipshits in Iowa during 2011 with cameras and reporters following them around recording their every word and movement. It's called the Iowa Caucuses and one such dipshit will certainly be Mississippi governor Jefferson Davis Hogg, er, Haley Barbour, as big an historical revisionist as walks our streets. Just before Christmas, Barbour told The Weekly Standard: "You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

For those unfamiliar, the White Citizens Council, in Yazoo City and elsewhere, was responsible for a unique brand of racism, acting as the South's most segregationist organization operating in the open-- the Klan in tailored seersucker, rather than bedsheet cotton. If the Ku Klux Klan wasn't at the forefront of fighting school integration in Yazoo City, it's only because the White Citizens Council had already done such a good job of squashing it through intimidation-- first, publishing a list of signatories to a petition supporting integration, then threatening economic boycott, not on white-owned businesses, as Barbour boldly fibs, but in efforts to keep away the NAACP. It was a charter member of the White Citizens Council of Greenwood, Mississippi, Byron de la Beckwith, that shot and killed Medger Evers in 1963, and then the White Citizens Council that came to the killer's legal defense. This all transpired when Barbour was in high school in Yazoo City so he's either a liar or the most ig'nent public official in all'a Dixie.

Barbour wears on his lapel, and flies in his office, a flag that symbolizes-- and is intended to symbolize-- the Confederate army, a band of terrorists fighting for the establishment of a republic founded on the principles of white supremacy. His actions and comments would seem to question his fitness for the job he currently has, let alone a higher political office. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author linked twice in the previous paragraph, points out, "Of all the United States, Mississippi has the highest percentage of African-Americans. Haley Barbour, evidently, knows very little of their history. Indeed, there may not be a governor more ignorant of his constituents in all this great land."

But when Barbour arrives in Iowa, the Des Moines Register and the local television stations will treat him as a viable candidate for the Republican nomination for president because that's where the American Republican party is today. Barbour has already been at the top of the party as chairman of its National Committee (in the late '90s), and less than two years ago, he was named the chairman of the party's Governors Association. The Washington Post, earlier this year, called him the most influential member of the Republican Party today. Indeed, Southern reactionary racists are one of the tent poles of the GOP coalition, as they have been ever since candidate Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi (where three civil rights workers had been murdered by the local government in 1964), making a clearly-coded speech declaring "I believe in state's rights," and promising to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them." ("State's rights" was still a dog whistle for Southern whites in 1980.) Barbour carries the disgraceful legacy of Reagan with him today, but it's evolved now into something more polite and palatable to the voting public. The message of racial intolerance is implicit, and no longer considered crude. Indeed, calling someone a racist is now the worst offense that one can commit in a public debate. It devolves the discussion into one of personal prejudice and discredits the argument.

Is Barbour a racist? He's the worst kind. He wants you to believe racism doesn't exist.

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The Justice Department's investigation of Bradley Manning is stinking up the countryside. While the Army Private accused of leaking government secrets to Julian Assange is getting the Guantanamo treatment in military prison in Virginia, his accusers are making absurd claims against him and covering up, the traditional media outlets are behaving like government lapdogs, and Osama bin Laden will probably be in United States government custody long before Manning is given his Constitutionally-mandated day in court. How vital is WikiLeaks to the future of our democracy? We need a WikiLeaks to make public the crimes and overreaches of the WikiLeaks investigation.

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All you need to know about American media (and maybe America as a whole): Al Jezeera, operating in one of the most restrictive journalistic environments in the world, picks Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as Newsmaker of the Year. Time magazine chose Mark Zuckerberg.

posted by CM @ 5:34 PM 0 comments

The best of 2010

I said goodbye a year ago to the CM Blog film awards. Instead, here are my top five favorite things in the culture this year. Remind me to make this recurring.

Alison Brie. Most of the year, she's adorable, ambitious Annie on "Community," who is herself sometimes Southern-drawled Caroline Decker from Corpus Christi when she's out on the town armed with fake ID. Then summer rolls around, and she's "Mad Men's" effervescent Trudy Campbell, dancing the Charleston with her beloved husband and rockin' maternity negligees hiked up nearly to her basket of kisses. More shows for Alison Brie please.

Smash His Camera. This documentary film was the most entertaining new feature to move up and out of my Netflix queue this year. It's subject is Ron Galella, the legendary New York City paparazzo who hunts celebrities from around corners and behind bushes with his photographic lens on the streets of the Big Apple. Galella became famous during the early '70s when he was court-ordered to stay at least 75 feet away from Jackie Kennedy Onassis, then a year later, punched in the mouth by Marlon Brando after the actor left the Manhattan studio of "The Dick Cavett Show." Today, Galella is a septuagenarian, as busy in his career as he's ever been, and sounding only slightly creepy when he says something like "I think at the time Jackie became my girlfriend."

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Years ago, author and historian Daniel Okrent invented the concept of fantasy sports, and became a trusted talking head on a few of Ken Burns' PBS documentaries. But he's also a terrific writer. This spring, his publisher released his account of American's greatest Constitutional blunder short of the formation of the Electoral College. For 14 strange years, alcohol was illegal in the United States. 480 pages of Okrent read like about 150. It's not a central thesis, but it's impossible to read this political, economic, and social history-in-one book and not think about the current blunderous "War on Drugs." I'll avoid the paronomasian adjectives for the book such as "intoxicating" and "delicious," but there they are anyway. The Ken Burns PBS adaptation is due in 2011.

Backatown. It's Troy Andrews' world now. At only 24 years of age,"Trombone Shorty" is New Orleans' top man of brass, and that puts him on the throne of the palace in American musical culture. This album marked Shorty's major record label debut in 2010, and propelled him and his backers, Orleans Avenue, onto the stages of the Letterman, Leno, and Kimmel shows, into a recurring dramatic role as himself on HBO's "Treme," and an end-of-the-year Grammy nomination. A first man of the second line, cooked up in an Armstrong-meets-Lenny Kravitz gumbo, Trombone Shorty is standing tall.

Kenny Powers. The main character of HBO's "Eastbound and Down" is like many things already seen on television-- just more of it. The former star baseball pitcher, on the road back to the big leagues and forward to personal redemption, is what he believes himself to be-- a myth, a legend, "a man with an arm like a fucking cannon, a mind like a scientist, and a cock like a burmese python." South of the border, he's "La Flama Blanca," the black flame, walking into "a Mexican standoff in Mexico." He's a tit man, not an ass man. His heart got broken in Season 2, but in the end, he decided, she was just like the Italian woman Michael Corleone married in "The Godfather." His true love and his future lie awaiting in the United States during the coming year.

posted by CM @ 6:41 PM 0 comments

Bob Feller

I met Bob Feller for the first time when I was about 9 years old. My aunt, a college student in Cedar Falls at the time, took my brother and me to a nearby K-Mart to get the baseball Hall-of-Famer's autograph. Truth be known, I was not yet aware of Feller at that time in my young baseball-obsessed life, and my aunt didn't know who he was either. She knew that Aaron and I were baseball fans--that's why we were there, but she was not a sports fan herself, and she had a rather low opinion of athletes in general. I don't recall the specifics of the encounter, but I remember that meeting Bob Feller that day didn't change her opinion.

The obituaries for Feller today have described him rather accurately according to my experience. He was gruff to the point of seemingly perpetual anger. The definition of "rude" is in the eye of the beholder, and his biographer, Bill Gilbert, described Feller as "not intentionally rude or anything," only "candid," but The Register's sports columnist Sean Keeler recalled an interview today he once had with Feller that pivoted mid-way on Feller's implementation of the phrase, "What are you? Stupid?"

I suspect that I encountered Feller on maybe four more occasions after the first meeting. On my very first day at WHO Radio in 1996, I got to go to the State Capitol and meet the governor of Iowa, Feller, and Feller's guest, Stan Musial, another Cooperstown grad, but one with a disposition as sunny as Feller's was surly. (Together, they are exhibits A & B on why people should live their lives with open minds and tolerance.) When I hosted "The Baseball Show on KXNO," my partner and I missed an opportunity to get a recorded interview with Rapid Robert, but we got a roughly-hour-long private tour of the pitcher's museum in Van Meter, just west of Des Moines. When Hall of Fame favorites Ozzie Smith and Whitey Herzog visited the museum, I would venture out there, and it was easy to strike up a conversation with Feller while the visiting luminaries were signing autographs. He was very accessible in these situations, but never what you would call "warm." Naturally he liked to talk about his own life and career with a young man who showed an interest. He wasn't prickly or irritated, but then the topic of our conversations was never my radical political affiliations. Or his.

In 1965, Feller, then a small business owner in Cleveland, campaigned "like a man obsessed" to be the first Executive Director of the Players Association, according to Marvin Miller's book. Miller eventually took the position, and that's fortunate of course. Feller would have been shitty at it. (To give you an idea of what the job was thought to be at that time, the other leading candidates to lead the union were team executives like Giants Vice President Chub Feeney.) Feller had always been and continued to be, throughout his life, a member of the baseball, military, and American conservative establishments. He was a "champion of common sense," Keeler writes, but only if you accept the premise that reactionary cultural opinions constitute sense. (And why is it exactly that a progressive, culture-altering figure like Miller or Curt Flood is never described as being a "champion of common sense"?)

As one of baseball's all-time great pitchers, Feller had a captive audience for his opinions, no matter how absurd they might be. He went on record before integration as saying that Jackie Robinson would not make it in the Majors, and that no players from the Negro Leagues were skillful enough to succeed in an integrated game. In 1969, he was quoted as saying, "I don't think baseball owes colored people anything. I don't think colored people owe baseball anything either." In 2004, he called Major League Baseball's decision to honor Muhammad Ali at the All-Star Game in Houston "disgusting." Ali, he said, "changed his name and changed his religion so he wouldn't have to serve his country."

In 2005, Feller told the audience of a St. Louis sports radio station that Latino ballplayers "don't know the rules of the game," eventually hanging up the phone on his bewildered interviewer. During the broadcast of an Indians game in 2006, he remarked strangely that catcher Victor Martinez reminded him of minstrel star Stepin Fetchit. In his elderly years, he would rarely concede that any current players rose to his same level of talent or that of his mid-century contemporaries. He seemed to be almost tortured by the fact that latter day players made a better living on the field than he ever did. He was an outspoken critic of steroid users, but then something seemingly innocuous like the expanded use of bullpens pissed him off too. His voting absence won't be missed on the Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee. The official votes are kept secret, but judging by his public comments, I'm confident that Bob Feller cast more ridiculous Hall ballots than any man in history, and he was a living member of the Hall of Fame for a remarkable 48 years.

Feller did have one hell of a pitching career. Playing all of his 18 years with the Cleveland Indians, he posted a career 3.25 ERA and struck out 2,581. He was selected to eight All-Star teams, pitched three no-hitters, 12 one-hitters, and 218 times over the course of his life going to ballgames reminded the guy standing next to him to remove his cap for the National Anthem. He threw the second-fastest pitch ever officially recorded-- 107.6 mph-- in a game against the Washington Senators in 1946.

Feller was a tireless promoter of the game, a great competitor, and his loss on Earth will be felt, but his death is being mourned today most deeply by those who shared Feller's faulty view that the world was a black and white place. We won't miss that type when we're finally rid of it. There were no shades of gray in Bob Feller's world, and there certainly isn't today. He's dead.

posted by CM @ 8:34 PM 0 comments

And he's not even Muslim

Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified military documents to WikiLeaks, has been held under solitary confinement and cruel and inhumane conditions for seven months now and counting. He's alone in his cell for 23 of 24 hours each day, and allowed neither a pillow nor a bed sheet. Damn, if only we could think of a crime to charge him with.

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Michael Moore won't let us down. The filmmaker put his money where his mouth is, contributing $20,000 to the bail posting for Julian Assange, then writing a letter telling us why.

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When the U.S. Department of Justice isn't torturing, suspending habeas corpus, and chasing down steroid users, it sometimes does its job and sues corporate criminals. Unfortunately, there's no word yet about a pursuit of prison sentences for those accused of negligence and violating federal regulations in connection to the greatest environmental crime in the nation's history. Maybe if we had found Barry Bonds' fingerprints on the BP/Halliburton oil rig.

posted by CM @ 5:19 PM 0 comments

An unconstitutional mandate

A "Republican" judge is trying to free ObamaCare from one of its most distasteful, corporate-friendly, and anti-democratic elements. One progressive expert recognizes this and frames the issue nicely.

We need real socialized medicine in the U.S.-- a single-payer system and health care as a human right, not the forcing of Americans to become unwilling consumers of a defective product from a private industry they despise. Corporate profit is NOT a right.

posted by CM @ 8:39 AM 0 comments

Tony, unlike Whitey

Please spare me a defense of Cards' manager Tony LaRussa by comparing him to Hall skipper Whitey Herzog. Yes, Whitey preferred "old school" players, but the difference is that Whitey had only two rules for his players-- be on time and hustle. We hear about new Tony rules every day.

It's inaccurate to say, as the writer of this linked article does, that Ted Simmons could have stuck around with the Cardinals if he so desired after Darrell Porter was acquired to supplant him in 1980. Whitey, according to his book, traded the veteran catcher for one reason only-- "poor arm strength." After Porter became slotted to become Whitey's everyday catcher, was Simmons going to force Keith Hernandez, the greatest defensive first baseman of all-time, off the initial sack? Was the 31-year-old long-time backstop going to patrol the carpet of Busch Stadium's vast outfield? That inaccurate claim above by the reporter is indicative of an entirely silly article.

Thirty years ago this month, the hard-nosed but very expensive Simmons was dealt by the Cardinals from a position of strength at the catcher position, as part of a potentially-beneficial, seven-player, blockbuster deal, because of the player's physical limitations on the field. On Sunday, the hard-nosed and inexpensive Brendan Ryan was dealt from a position of weakness in the Cardinals infield, for a bag of balls, because his manager didn't like his personality. There are no free spirits allowed in baseball's most morose and joyless clubhouse.

A forced transaction on a Whitey Herzog-managed team is having to deal a guy (shortstop Gary Templeton) because he flipped off some hecklers in front of his home dugout. A forced deal on a Tony LaRussa team is having to part with a damn-near perfect ballplayer named Scott Rolen because he can't co-exist with his overheated manager. That handicap of personality is the real reason so-called "irrational" Cardinals fans resent the long-tenured LaRussa.

posted by CM @ 7:24 PM 0 comments

International justice

Authorities are attempting to bring an international terrorist under arrest. The criminal in question has put world diplomacy in peril and been responsible for endangering the lives of American servicemen and women. The criminal's business associates are trying desperately to keep the man from going to prison, which would damage the future of their enterprise, but international extradition would certainly be difficult under any legal scenario. Of course I could only be talking about Dick Cheney.

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This summer, one of the giants of the entertainment world-- the dazzling but reclusive Sade-- is embarking upon her first world concert tour in a decade. I'm comfortable advertising it to you because I have already purchased my tickets for one of the two shows in Chicago in August. This year's release, "Soldier of Love," is just her second studio album in 18 years. Entertainment Weekly gave it an 'A' grade this fall, opining that the avant-soul chanteuse "exhales peerlessly while the boys behind her fluff one heck of a sonic pillow." The atmosphere at the United Center will be charged enough as it is, but it will be an additionally exciting evening for me as I plan to ask Sade, on bended knee, to accept my ring and join me in the holy bond of marriage.

posted by CM @ 9:01 PM 0 comments

"David Letterman: Agent of Influence"

Just when you thought WikiLeaks couldn't get any cooler, their supporters attack the MasterCard and Visa websites, and one of their hijacked diplomatic cables makes public just how important David Letterman is to the world. It's a Late Night(/Show) World of Love, indeed.

It turns out that Top 10 lists, "Will it Float" competition, and probably even Lyle the Intern have been helping the West win "the war of ideas" against Islamic jihad in the Middle East. Tonight, join Dave and his guests Barbara Walters, Jayma Mays, and Alison Balsom, only on CBS... and MBC 4.

posted by CM @ 8:39 PM 0 comments

Dispatches from the police state

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates dropped a few interesting statistics on us today. I've copied and pasted the entire, rather brief, entry, but here's the link besides to the site and comment thread:

There are roughly 2.3 million people in jails and prisons in America, more than any country in the world.

The United States has 756 people in jail per 100,000 people. No other country has more than 700, and only two are over 600 Russia (629) and Rwanda (604).

Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males. African-Americans--males and females--make up .6 percent of the entire world's population, but African-American males--alone--make up 8 percent of the entire world's prison population. I know there are people who think some kind of demon culture could create a world where a group that makes up roughly one in 200 citizens of the world, comprises one in 12 of its prisoners. But I kind of doubt it.

One final thought: If you released every black male in prison, our prison population would stand at 1.5 million, leaving us, still, with the second largest prison population in the world. Only China--a country with four times as many people--would have more (and barely--1.57 million). Russia would be a distant third with 890,000.

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How about some public support-- and support from elected officials-- for the execution of Scooter Libby, who outed a CIA operative-- a much greater offense, of course, than "endangering our national security" through exposing corruption by government officials? For that matter, how about the execution of Dick Cheney as well since it's evidently no longer necessary to be convicted of a crime, or even charged with one, to be worthy of government execution?

How about the execution of publishers and journalists at the New York Times, the Guardian, and other papers that first published WikiLeaks-related materials? WikiLeaks websites have published only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables that have been exposed, and nearly every one of them had already been published by these newspapers, each news outlet with an equally-global reach. Please, please, can we have more blood, please? The 58 more allied dead in Afghanistan during November only makes me thirsty for more.

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Quote of the day: "In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble." --Ron Paul

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All hail President Obama-- the courageous "pragmatist." But now explain to me how Obama breaking his campaign promise and caving to Republicans on $120 billion in tax cuts helps to protect Social Security from the very consistent and sophisticated efforts by the right wing to dismantle it. Safeguarding the social safety net and the future of every American would actually be the "pragmatic" approach.

It's a corporatist lie that Social Security teeters on insolvency. The program subtracts nothing from the Treasury and adds nothing to the national debt as it's completely funded by the payroll taxes of its eventual recipients into a targeted trust fund. There is currently a surplus in that trust fund of $2.6 trillion. So what does Obama do? He proposes more massive cuts in that payroll tax-- the only funding source for the trust fund.

Social Security has had absolutely no connection to America's debt for any of the program's 75 years. It's the continuing war on Iraq, the tripling of the number of soldiers in Afghanistan, and the crippling tax cuts for the wealthy that have gotten us into this financial mess. Now that mess is about to get decidedly worse, and it's the Social Security trust fund that stands to get gutted. It was one thing for Obama to choose not to mirror the actions of Franklin Roosevelt upon his ascent to the presidency during a time of economic depression. It's something else entirely now to actually destroy Roosevelt's legacy.

posted by CM @ 9:09 PM 0 comments

The death of a baseball near-great

Former Cub Ron Santo's death on Thursday is a terrible occasion to write an essay focused on the man's shortcomings as a player and as a broadcaster. That's why I've waited until Sunday.

By every personal account and my own impressions, Santo was a very nice man, and was dealt some severe challenges in his life-- not-the-least of which apparently being that a large number of his baseball colleagues and paid-to-be-objective observers of the sport failed to share his opinion of his Hall of Fame credentials. The man made a 20-year post-playing career out of lobbying--begging-- to be enshrined at Cooperstown. This crusade led him into a career as a radio broadcaster, a position for which he was ill-prepared, staggeringly inept all the way to the end, and which made a mockery out of what small amount of qualification actually exists to ascend to such a position.

Many former ballplayers become broadcasters as their second career. Some are particularly erudite about the game and the spoken language, men such as Joe Morgan, Tim McCarver, or another former Cub, Rick Sutcliffe, but there's also an avenue to success in broadcasting if the erudition part is lacking. That avenue is "personality," or "color," if you will. Broadcasters like Dizzy Dean, Phil Rizzuto, or Mike "Moon Man" Shannon worked or continue to work for decades on radio and/or television despite poor grammatical skills and some mangled syntax because they're colorful. Examples of color during a broadcast would be Dean's frequent substitute of the word "slud" for the word "slid," or his Southern-fried expressions, or Shannon's one-time Sunday afternoon gem during the 1980s, "Today is Mother's Day, so for all of you mothers out there, happy birthday." As a broadcaster, Santo was a different type altogether. He was the type to speak very slowly; to start a sentence, then stop three or four words in and cause his audience to attempt to psychically empower him to find a way to finish it. His eyes would witness a piece of action on the field, his mouth would immediately react with a cheer or a groan, and then would begin the long and painful task of Ron's brain trying to formulate into coherent sentence structure what he had just seen.

Not everybody has the gift of broadcasting, and Santo must have known this, just as Tribune Media executives must have known it, but Santo had to be a broadcaster, you see. He was on a mission to get inducted into the Hall of Fame, and because of predecessors to the microphone like Don Sutton, Rizzuto, and Richie Ashburn, he knew that getting a highly-visible day-to-day job with the club was a terrific way to keep his name from fading into baseball obscurity. Cubs games on WGN Radio became a daily paid advertisement for Santo's Hall credentials. He was beloved by Cubs fans, we were frequently told (and certainly that was true). His longtime partner Pat Hughes would openly promote his candidacy, even introducing him frequently as "future Hall-of-Famer Ron Santo." The Illinois House of Representatives formally threw their support behind Santo's Hall bid in 2007 with House Bill 109, and he became the subject of a documentary film called "This Old Cub."

Because of Jiminy Cricket, it probably seems to most people like the world would be a better place if wishing hard enough for things could actually make them true, but it doesn't work that way, and for this we should be thankful. Ambitious delusion and self-promotion can make one's mind believe "that anything is possible," but if substituted for reality, would also make Newt Gingrich the smartest man in America. This is why we need the numbers.

It's true that too few third basemen have been enshrined at the Hall (we're only up to 11 that played in the Majors), but there would seem to be a lot of revisionism going on when it comes to Santo's career. A common argument is that Santo's career line of a .277 BA/342 HRs/1,331 RBIs, while admittedly modest, needs to be taken in context. He played in the era before steroids, a local radio man repeated on the air in Des Moines again Friday, and it's unfair, they say, to compare Santo to players of today with their "inflated" numbers. But in truth, everybody is already not comparing him to today's players in terms of raw statistics. If they were, the last of these debates would have taken place years ago. The truth is: his stats are nowhere close to today's version of a borderline candidate (say, Rafael Palmeiro or Edgar Martinez). He has Gary Gaetti's career power numbers combined with Bob Horner's batting average.

For what it's worth, and this is vitally important, Ron Santo actually was on a steroid for much of his career-- a defined chemical structure called Wrigley Field. Santo's playing career may have overlapped an era of pitching dominance in the National League, but he was not playing his home games in the cavernous multi-purpose stadiums like Busch Stadium, Olympic Stadium, or the Astrodome that helped to make it the era of pitching dominance that it was. In half of his games, he was swinging right handed in a Wrigley Field that has a painted 365 foot designation in the left field power alley (and former Cubs manager Jim Riggleman once remarked that even that length of distance probably couldn't hold up to review). The home and away splits for Santo's career (which was spent with the Cubs for all but one season) looks like this--

HOME: 1,136 games, 4,075 at-bats, 659 runs, 1,217 hits, 216 hrs, 743 rbis, .296 batting avg.
AWAY: 1,107 games, 4,069 at-bats, 479 runs, 1,046 hits, 126 hrs, 588 ribs, .257 batting avg.

Friendly Confines, indeed. With this type of home and away split, he should become an honorary member of the Red Sox (see Yastremski, Carl; Rice, Jim; Boggs, Wade). This might explain why Santo's career looked so much better to Cubs fans than to everyone else.

Santo was considered one of the top third basemen of his era, with five Gold Gloves and 9 All-Star appearances, but these are era-specific numbers that are inflated as much as any "steroid-inflated" numbers. It was much easier to make an All-Star team when the National League had 10 teams than it is now that there are 16. This is a distinction nobody ever talks about when comparing between eras. In this case, the Gold Gloves and All-Star selections are impressive, but like his offensive numbers, they make Santo a candidate for the Hall-of-Very Good. Neither category has recognized historic precedents that are automatic for induction.

If a guy plays 15 years and puts up Hall numbers that have him right on the borderline, then we do have the option of looking at those additional ballgames, those moments during the year when baseball games count for more, commonly referred to as "the postseason." This is where "This Old Cub" is "par for the Cubs." In other words, he never played in a postseason game. A Ron Santo team never finished closer than 5 games to first place, and only twice (both in the post-1967 divisional seasons of '68 and '69) did they finish within 10 games. The guy simply never played in a truly meaningful game. Those videos where you see him literally kicking his heels on the diamond during a "pennant race," those games were being played in July.

If Santo were inducted, that would make him the fourth member in the Hall from the infamous 1969 Cubs team that nosedived in August. This would not be a Hall of Fame record for a non-winning team, mind you, but all four in this case (the others already in are Ferguson Jenkins, Ernie Banks, and Billy Williams) would have been inducted primarily for their play with the Cubs during that same period of the late '60s/early '70s, and all the team had to show for it was about half-a-pennant race. It's completely out of proportion. The Big Red Machine of the mid-70s, by way of comparison, only has three Hall of Famers. If Cubs officials and their rooters succeed in getting Santo into Cooperstown, they'll probably just move on to Don Kessinger as their next initiative.

Contrast Santo's career numbers to those of former Cardinals third baseman Ken Boyer. Boyer's career overlapped much of Santo's-- he played from 1955 to 1969. In roughly 200 fewer games, Boyer batted ten points higher at .287, scored only about 34 fewer runs, hit 282 home runs, and drove in 1,141. He walked less often than Santo, but struck out fewer times too. Like Santo, he won five Gold Gloves at the hot corner, and played in 7 All-Star Games (reminder: to Santo's 9). But additionally, Boyer won the National League's Most Valuable Player award in 1964, and propelled the Cards to the '64 Championship, adding a memorable exclamation to his career with a 6th inning grand slam down three runs off the Yankees' Al Downing in Game 4 at Yankee Stadium, then following it up with a three-hit, three-run performance in the decisive, victorious Game 7.

I wouldn't argue that Boyer is worthy of the Hall either, despite a similarly-very good, but not great career. Meanwhile, however, only one of the two men-- Santo-- has an enormous Hall-of-Fame-promotional machine behind his candidacy. His long career with essentially just one team, and a life and career filled with physical challenges have made his Hall crusade a cause celebre. You're considered cruel if you don't think this man deserves what he so desperately wants. Boyer, for his part, didn't have to contend with the same health issues that Santo did during his playing career (though some back problems actually did lead to a shortened tenure), but he hasn't been able to promote his candidacy during a long retirement either since he was dead of cancer at the age of 51 in 1982.

Santo succeeded in having his Associated Press obituary state that he was "regarded as one of the best players never to gain induction" into the baseball Hall, which is an exaggeration in itself if we recount that he got only 4% of support his first year on the ballot, disappeared from the ballot for four years, and didn't resurface again as a popular candidate until he started his high-profile lobbying efforts. ESPN Chicago ran a number of Santo-related stories this week in tribute to the man's life and career (I stopped linking at five articles), and the news of his passing will no doubt give even a modest boost to Santo's Hall chances beginning already this winter. Boyer's chances remain much slimmer though. And ESPN St. Louis doesn't exist.

Santo deserves great credit for being a relatable player/former player. He was always a team guy, by every account. Fans liked the fact that he demonstrably enjoyed winning, though his endurance in that respect was never seriously challenged. He certainly used his celebrity to tremendously charitable ends, and was heroic in facing his obstacles in life head-on. Yet it was always so sad to me-- not that he didn't make it into the Hall of Fame during his life-- but that he seemed to need that external validation so badly.

A lot of Cubs fans would probably tell me square up now that "it's a Cubs thing." I'm not capable of understanding what Santo meant to the Cubs organization. But that's quite clear he meant a lot, and the fandom part is universal. I love a former Cardinal like Willie McGee so much that I would want any potential honor for him that I could help achieve for him as one of his legions of potential fans/advocates. As he faced each new rejection from the Hall voters, Santo often claimed that he was giving up, that he didn't care if he was ever enshrined. He would be getting honored in some fashion on the field by the Cubs, and that honor from the Cubs "was his Hall of Fame," he would say. But then January would roll around and we would hear another news story about how he was in tears at home when the call wouldn't come. But maybe that's part of the whole "Cubs thing" that's tough to grasp. Maybe the individual awards and accolades become all-important when there aren't any championships to share. A new Hall of Famer is the biggest thing going for the Cubs franchise every time they get to add a new one. A very good player has to be recognized by others as one of the all-time greats or it's not enough. They become more than just the awards, they're little pennant and championship consolations. Miserable saps.

Say, did you know that Don Kessinger scored 109 runs for that '69 Cubs team? That's almost great.

posted by CM @ 4:05 PM 0 comments

A laughing matter

I'm not joking about this-- I think it would be very difficult to be a professional athlete and have to deal with idiot sports journalists. Sports reporters comprise a pretty lowly stratum in American life overall, as evidenced by the stooges that make up the television program "The Sports Reporters." In my book, they're right down there with radio disc jockeys-- though I generally adore fictional radio disc jockeys. Go figure.

Arizona quarterback Derek Anderson had to defend himself vociferously Monday night after ESPN's cameras found him laughing with a teammate on the sidelines while his team trailed San Francisco by 18 points. But this reporter who all but scolded Anderson after the game looks like a twit and so does MNF broadcaster Jon Gruden, admittedly a coach by first professional, who got everybody fired up to begin with. Anderson then had to lose his cool and deny that he had done it to try to rescue his professional reputation. What would have been better for the quarterback to be doing at that moment? Crying? Should he have gone all-Carlos Zambrano on the Gatorade bucket? Yeah, teammates love that type of behavior when the team is getting blown out.

Derek Anderson can play on my team any time. Hell, he already did-- with the fantasy St. Louis Clydesdales in 2007.

You know what does annoy me though? U.S. soldiers that laugh on the battlefield. That shit's gotta stop.

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Cheers to Deadspin commenter "Rynosaurus," a surprisingly-clear-eyed thinker for an obvious Cubs fan, who dropped some George Bernard Shaw on us this week in regards to the Anderson flap: "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

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Former Cub Ryan Theriot is now the Cardinals' shortstop. I'm not sure he's a solution on the field, but he's saying all the right things.

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You gotta feel bad for LeBron James upon his return trip to Cleveland tonight. A lot of people leave Cleveland and are never forced to go back.

posted by CM @ 9:15 PM 2 comments

X-Ray vs. Groping: Choose Your Own Orwellian Adventure

Americans, who can often be trusted to willingly surrender their own individual liberty, recently informed pollsters for ABC News and the Washington Post, by a 64% affirmative, and a 2-1 margin, that they're cool with the use of full-body scanners before boarding an airplane. Perhaps this should be unsurprising however as the framed debate on airport security in the nation nowadays is between these digital x-ray images of fully-naked bodies and getting "gate-raped" by a same-gendered, uniformed employee of the federal government wearing rubber gloves. Also, the divide is wider, 70-27%, among those Americans that seldom or never fly so what do those people care about who's getting padded down, right? An airline passenger stripped to his or her smile by a public x-ray image has about as much of an impact on their daily lives as a dead Afghani.

But here's what Americans don't know about these whole-body scanning machines: The TSA has promised travelers that the scanners blur the facial features, that they place the viewing employees in a separate room, and that the images are immediately deleted upon a single viewing, but according to information delivered to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC.org) after a successful FOIA request earlier this year, the body scanners expressly ordered (demanded) by the TSA from the manufacturer have the ability to record, store, even transfer these digital images, and TSA officials have the ability to remove any and all of the privacy filters, contrary to their public claims. Why are they lying?

Meanwhile, a number of prominent scientists have been speaking out about the immediate and long-term radiation effects of these machines. They argue that there has been a mountain of misinformation about their safety provided through the media.

And for the privilege of all of this lost privacy and increased health risk, these scanners cost taxpayers about $170,000 each.

The issue has been a popular subject for some months over at Nader.org. Ralph Nader has already devoted quite a bit of effort in our time to the improvement of airline travel. His lawsuit against Allegheny Airlines in the early '70s forced the airlines to begin compensating disenfranchised passengers when flights are overbooked and reservations have to be canceled. He has advocated for the creation of an airline passenger association, a passenger "Bill of Rights," and one of his consumer groups lobbied for years to force the airlines to install impenetrable cockpit doors on commercial planes. The airlines successfully fought that demand, of course, because of its price tag, and then after the mass deaths of September 11th, they got the American taxpayers to foot the bill instead.

Somebody's getting rich on these x-ray machines too. Never forget that important consideration on any issue such as this.

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As a tribute to the late Leslie Nielsen, HuffPost posted 10 ways this week that Nielsen's epic 1980 film, "Airplane!", anticipated the TSA silliness with which we're forced to deal. After the first two, it gets to be kind of stretch, but it's worth a look.

posted by CM @ 6:05 PM 0 comments