Cleaning up this week's biggest problems
This afternoon I went to the doctor-slash-nurse practitioner to get my ears inspected. The last week or so I could hear almost nothing out of my leftmost auditory canal. My self-diagnosis was 'impacted wax,' which is probably more information about my inner ear than you were looking for, but then that's why Al Gore invented blogs.I had my ears rinsed out three years ago at the same office. (I call it "rinsing," I don't know what they call it.) I had a pretty good idea that this was what was needed again, but of course a small part of you always assumes the worst. Maybe it's something else. Maybe I'll never hear out of that ear again. Maybe the sympathy I would get out of something like that might help me get girls. My imagination was running wind sprints.
Skip to the climax: turns out the culprit was wax. My lack of a formal medical education once again did not prove to be a deterrent to me in the slightest. An utterly charming and very attractive woman, not grossed out at all, used some sort of water suction device to pull out of my left ear a disgusting gob of goo that resembled a Sun-Maid yogurt raisin, and then pulled out one about half the size from my right ear.
And now I can hear. Everything. My voice is louder. Her voice was louder. The rattle in the office's central air conditioning unit was louder. The traffic was louder. The front door of my building and the door of the mailbox were louder. My television has been turned down to about half of the volume of where it was at this time yesterday. This sound of typing right now is driving me absolutely batty. I feel like my sense of hearing has become... superhuman.
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The Mets' Johan Santana no-hit the Cardinals Friday night, but of course, he actually didn't. Thanks to modern video technology the entire world that cares to can see Carlos Beltran's 6th inning line drive hitting the chalk behind third base on its way into the left field corner, as well as the mark it left behind on the chalk for continued inspection during the final four innings. Before that stroke, the Mets had a shot at their first no-hitter in 51 years, one of only two Major League franchises that has never had one, and the third base umpire, it would seem, gave them a break. Only that's not his job. The official scorer has the imperative, by custom, to make sure any team's first hit is legitimate, but he/she is deciding how a play is scored-- hit or error, not safe or out, ball or strike. The umpire isn't supposed to do the same.
Mets fans, and the New York Daily News as their instrument, are upset that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a Saturday morning headline reading "No-Hitter" with an asterisk behind it, but that's exactly the way this game should live in our memories. This is like the Armando Galarraga perfect game from last year in reverse, except also that last year's umpire, Jim Joyce, admitted afterwards that he botched it. On Friday night, the offending umpire, Adrian Johnson, stayed silent.
And of course the reason he did is because in a no-hitter/perfect game that was, opposed to a no-hitter/perfect game that wasn't, there's a perception that nobody is being victimized. Johnson is hoping that his epic flub will not take anything away from Santana's glory. What I'm not sure about though is why Johnson gets a free pass on the action itself. I find his potential motivation to be entirely in question. Everybody on the field is already thinking about the possibility of a no-hitter by the time a pitcher has worked unblemished by a hit into the 6th inning. I put forth the hypothesis that Johnson momentarily forgot that he was an umpire-- and not an official scorer-- and wanted to make sure the first hit the Cardinals achieved was a no-doubter. After last year, every umpire in the league is afraid of potentially "Jim Joyce-ing" somebody so Johnson, operating under that mindset, was overly susceptible to botching a call in the pitcher's favor if he thought the ruling could go either way.
Should there be instant replay in Major League Baseball? Of course there should. Prohibiting the use of the technology when it exists in advanced form-- and when baseball competes simultaneously with the National Football League, which has used instant replay without almost any shred of controversy for almost two decades-- is a fool's mission. The head fool, though, Bud Selig, says he still believes in the "human element," an argument that could also be used to defend murder and genocide. (Just sayin'.)
We have instant replay in baseball now only up to the point that the New York tail of the dog has demanded it. The technology of instant replay had already long-existed when the Yankees were granted a home run against Baltimore in the 1996 American League Championship Series-- despite fan interference by that punk kid Jeffrey Maier. No league action was forthcoming after the Maier incident-- even to avoid future such occurrences. But then all it took was the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez and the Mets' Carlos Delgado to both lose a home run to a blown fair/foul call weeks apart in the spring of 2008 for the commissioner to change his mind about the use of replay-- but only in respect to home run calls. Uh huh.
For their part, ESPN New York reported the no-hitter Saturday with almost no mention of the blown call. ESPN St. Louis was silent also because it doesn't exist.
Major League Baseball has signed on for expanded replay in 2013 so maybe Santana's no-hitter will wind up being the last no-no that really wasn't. It's the Mets fans I feel bad for though. Despite being pond scum generally, they waited 8,019 games, some of them, for a no-hitter. They deserved to have their first one be legitimate. Not this travesty of desperation. It's like getting married at an advanced age and settling for Larry King. When they chat on message boards about the Post-Dispatch asterisk, they curse reality the way Royals fans did in 1985, the way I can only imagine fans of the most starving teams must when they've been given so little in return for their energy for years on end. They know their achievements are perceived by the rest of the world to be approximately as legitimate as the Vichy Government of France in 1940.
Several Mets fans have remarked wildly and absurdly that the Cardinals have their own "asterisk" in the dugout in the person of hitting coach and home run conquerer of Roger Maris, Mark McGwire, but that argument only washes if you accept that Mighty Mac's legal use of steroids in 1998 was somehow invalidated by future policy. The equivalent of discrediting those would be if they decide to add back all the balk calls for the last 100 years when they do away next April with the fake-to-third-fake-to-first pick-off play. It's just a silly proposition on its very surface.
God, I hate the Mets. They're arrogant and loud. And ugly. And that's just the fans. They're so classless they even booed Mookie Wilson's kid when he played for the Cardinals in the 2006 NL Championship Series. Their team gets media attention so far above what it's actually earned on the field over a half century of play that they make the Boston Red Sox look like the Red Sox. And I'd like to conclude by saying that I think the team should give Bernie Madoff's money back to his victims.
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Another Mad Men Spoiler alert (Don't read further if you haven't watched last night's episode): I would never off myself, especially so soon after I got my hearing back, but if I did choose to hang myself like Lane Pryce did, I would also choose to do it from a door, next to a Mets pennant.
posted by CM @ 3:59 PM
1 Comments:
Your observations on the "no-hitter" were the best I've read. Nice job.
I had a similar experience with wax removal. I, too, left with a superhuman expansion of my own ego and powers.
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