The Chris Moeller Archives

John Francis Donaghy 2006-2013

Tonight, "30 Rock" says goodbye on NBC. In it's honor, here's a collection (via Salon) of some of the great pearls of advise offered up by Jack Donaghy over seven seasons. Liz Lemon has-- deservedly-- been the most examined and deconstructed character on this show, but don't ever forget the brilliance of her boss-slash-mentor.

Jack was a recipient of the Amory Blaine Handsomeness Scholarship, the man who coined the phrase "You wish, pal." He bow hunts polar bears and once drove a rental car into the Hudson to practice escaping. He's a man who has the entire liberal media establishment at his disposal, the same manipulation machine that got Barack Obama elected and donated all that money to Rainstorm Katrina. He's a man who once de-pantsed Deepak Chopra while Craig T. Nelson taped it. A G.E. man for 30 years and a G.E. woman for one week of corporate espionage. A man who, like a silver-back gorilla and Mitt Romney's grandfather, requires more than one woman. A man who drinks morning shower scotch. A man extremely secure in his athleticism, his masculinity, and his rectal integrity. Men want to be him. Women want to sleep with him. Bisexuals want to watch. A man who, every year on April 22th, honors Richard Nixon's death by getting drunk and making some unpopular decisions. A man who has a betting system based on horse penis size. A man who put his wedding announcement in Cigar Aficionado. A man who has held Walt Disney's frozen head in his hands.

Jack Donaghy had a falling out with the postmaster general over the Jerry Garcia stamp (if he wanted to lick a hippie, he would return Joan Baez's phone calls). He has showered with Greta Van Susteren and overcome a peanut allergy through sheer willpower. He cuts his hair every two days because "your hair is your head-suit." He's a man who gets all of his news from Dick Cheney's website, Dickviews.com. A man who plans to Benjamin Button himself. A man who once declared, "I am God," during a deposition. A man who attended Harvard Business School and was voted "Most." A man who once hit a stand-up triple off Fidel Castro. The first person to ever say, "I need a vacation from this vacation." The song "You're So Vain" was in fact written... by him.

He will be missed.

posted by CM @ 7:12 PM 0 comments

Our better angels

Bob Costas delivers one of the eulogies at Stan Musial's funeral on Saturday at the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis. He gets choked up at the 8:00 and 13:00 minute marks. I get choked up at the 6:00, 8:00, 11:00, 13:00, 15:00, and 18:00 marks.

posted by CM @ 12:22 PM 0 comments

The death of football?

The culture surrounding the game we know as American football will likely change in a radical way over the next couple decades. Ta-Nehisi Coates, magazine editor and author, refers to himself as a former fan of the game who has said he watched fewer than a couple professional games this season because of a growing conscientious objection. Citing new research, he lays out a brief but pretty convincing argument that the professional version of the game will likely be the last one standing, and may itself be toppled within a generation or so. Researchers at UCLA believe they have isolated the protein that causes football-related brain damage, specifically a disease diagnosed as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Coates writes:

I don't know if this will change anything, right now. But telling a player "You have CTE" is a lot different than "You stand some chance of developing it." 

There's something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players--and maybe athletes at large--to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don't know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How common are college boxing teams these days?) 

After that, I don't know how pro football can stand for long.

The reference to boxing seems most apropo to me. I can't see the sport ever disappearing-- cockfighting still exists, after all-- but people today have almost no Earthly idea how popular boxing used to be. The United States has a seemingly endless supply of collective bloodlust, particularly when it's well-organized, extrajudicial, and "defensive," but the contact sports that have broad popularity, like football, still hold a reputation for possessing a general civility. The Journal of the American Medical Association came out formally and adamantly against boxing in 1983, and that's also, likely not coincidentally, about the same time the sport started to plummet in popular fashion. The most famous boxer in the world, and one of the most recognizable men, period, Muhammad Ali, also retired around that time, but it was around that time ('84) that he also announced publicly that he had contacted Parkinson's Disease due to extensive head trauma he had suffered.

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I've been meaning to take sides in the most fundamental magician debate ever since I read a biography about Harry Houdini ("The Secret Life of Houdini," recommended), and an autobiography by Penn Gillette, and that is this: The Amazing Kreskin is a putz. And not only because he stiffed Deadspin today, as the linked article describes, but because he claims to have supernatural powers as a "mentalist." A whole cottage industry of "spiritualism" grew up around Houdini following his death in 1926, claiming that the famous magician was one of their own, and thereby defaming him as well. Harry Houdini did not, repeat.. did not believe in communication with the afterlife, despite some claims by even some hucksters that were able to get to his widow. The practitioners of Houdini's marvelous art, always most fascinating, and very honorable as well when advertised to the public properly, should always be referred to as "magicians" or "illusionists." Kreskin, regardless of the level of his talent, is full of shit as to its source.

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National news coverage of Stan Musial's death has been generally dismal, as I expected. I watched ESPN all morning on Sunday, the day after he died, and the crawl at the bottom of the screen kept a constant notice, but the talking heads on the screen never once mentioned his name for all I saw, what with the breathless excitement of a pair of pending NFL playoff games that afternoon and evening, and even the Friday night, delayed debut of the National Hockey League season-- and ESPN despises hockey! The hipster website for sports news, Grantland.com, an ESPN bastard child of some confusing bloodline, missed the story of Musial's death entirely. But they did manage to publish multiple on-the-scene reports from Sundance.

Stan should have invented a young chippie to be his new life companion after his wife's death last year.

posted by CM @ 9:34 PM 0 comments

I'm not done yet-- More on the Man

I'm going to go out on a limb and call Stan Musial quite possibly the funniest man in the Hall of Fame. Not jokey-funny so much, but funny in a happy, fun-loving way. A man of such exquisite character would be considered insufferable by all who greeted him if he didn't have a crack sense of humor. As he told Tim Kurkjian on one occasion, "I like to make people smile. It's the only thing I love as much as hitting." He could smile all the time himself because he felt like he was the luckiest person living on Earth. He once told the sportswriter Bob Broeg, during a bout of air turbulence on the team charter flight, "I can just see the headline now: 'Cards plane crashes; Musial sole survivor.'"

posted by CM @ 3:49 PM 0 comments

Stan Musial 1920-2013

I hardly ever watch St. Louis Blues hockey on television, but tonight I am. I want to feel close to the city of St. Louis. Stan Musial, the greatest Cardinal of them all, died three hours ago at the age of 92. The Cardinals made the public announcement of his death.

It's hard to know what to write about the Man on this occasion, and I've had quite a bit of time to plan it. He's been in ill health for months. I can tell you that I ate in his restaurant on my first-ever trip to St. Louis, and on the day of the first game I ever attended. My aunt and uncle got me his autograph from a golf tournament when I was ten. I saw him throw out or present the ceremonial pitch at an Opening Day, a World Series game, and an All-Star Game. I have lived in jealousy of one of my best friends, who shares his birthday. There are six framed photos of Stan Musial currently hanging in my home.

I met him once-- during just my second day ever working in radio. I was a fresh-faced intern in 1996, not even a college graduate yet, and was invited along with news and sports reporter Chuck Shockley to go to the Iowa Capitol Building, where Stan was getting a public tour of the facility from Governor Terry Branstad as a guest of fellow Baseball Hall-of-Famer Bob Feller. (Now Stan and Feller are both dead and gone and Branstad still occupies that office-- a crippling thought.) The opulence of the surroundings that morning-- the high ceilings, the marble, the ornate decor-- met with the gravity of the moment. One percent of one percent of his fans ever met Stan Musial in such a posh setting. I remember that Branstad was droning on and on about the accomplishments of his public career, something Musial was famous for never doing. "You know I'm the longest-tenured governor in the United States," Branstad boasted. "Oh, that's great... just great," Stan humored, busy signing away for little pug noses like Shockley and me. It should go without saying that I never collected an autograph again from somebody I covered during my journalistic career. On cue, Stan pulled a stack of photo cards from the pocket of his sport jacket, and inscribed, "To Chris, a great fan. Stan Musial." I was so excited about this moment that I stayed in radio for an unconscionable nine more years waiting for another to match it.

You will read tonight and tomorrow, and hopefully the day after that too, that Stan Musial was the living, breathing embodiment of the city of St. Louis, of the Cardinals, and of all that's great about baseball and sports. I like to think of him as what's great about the Midwest too. Our heroes are authentic. He wasn't a sour prick like his contemporary, Ted Williams. During his long retirement (five decades), Musial never demanded to be formally introduced as the greatest player in the long history of his team, like another contemporary, Joe DiMaggio, did-- although he easily was that.

He was married to the same woman for 72 years, had doting kids and grandkids, who were at his side when he died. He played his ass off, and won three championships on the field. He competed with the Cardinals for his entire 22 year career, and then made his home in that team's city until his death, becoming as iconic there as the Gateway Arch. Some equally great men and women never did any of those things, but I just thought it important to point out that he did.

I don't need to describe his baseball legacy in more flowery terms than that. Others will. I don't need to go down the list of his records. He held most of the batting ones in the National League when he retired. And I don't need to tell you that I loved him. He was universally loved.

posted by CM @ 9:02 PM 0 comments

Bullies on the farm

Monsanto is a food company so unpopular with consumers that they have spent millions of dollars fighting to defeat laws that require labels on their product packaging. They are also an omnipotent player in American agriculture today, boasting a profit of almost $3 billion in 2012, and they have sued or settled out of court with hundreds of independent farmers, charging them with copyright infringement when the wind blows their contaminated seed into the farmers' neighboring fields. This is not your grandfathers' farming industry anymore.

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Quote of the day: Noam Chomsky, "[The U.S. still names] military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice."

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I have not seen the film "Zero Dark Thirty." Don’t plan to. It’s being marketed as a “journalistic” film by its director, Kathryn Bigelow, with the hope of adding cache as a courageous telling of actual events. I wouldn’t care if Bigelow made a fiction or non-fiction film on this topic. She could make a openly-deceitful historic film like “Django Unchained,” or a deceitfully-deceitful historic film like “Lincoln.” But I do care that Bigelow feels the need to lie about the national security vetting she says she didn't receive to tell “the true story of the killing of Osama bin Laden.”

She contends that she didn’t receive CIA approval for the project, but all evidence indicates that she did. She received unprecedented access. It was even well-publicized that she did-- at least it was prior to the moment her studio began setting the course for the marketing of the film. (That's also why the release of the Obama-glorifying film was delayed until after the election.) Therefore, the film is not courageous, it is not autonomous. It is not the story behind the “official” story, but instead, the “official” story exactly. You can't boast about the access you received, and then deny what you gave up for it in return. I don't know if the film, at the end of the day, endorses torture techniques or not, but I know that the U.S. government endorses torture, and I know that they conducted quality assurance on this film.

All films you see that borrow U.S. military hardware for filming (i.e. weapons or other machines, which are, incidentally, public property) have received similar vetting. This is one of the dirtiest secrets of Hollywood, and the fact that it’s such a well-kept secret, makes it all the more treacherous. "Zero Dark Thirty" is government propaganda of the highest order; in that respect, “Triumph of the Will” for the modern fascist, and this brief blurb of mine, just coined between the two previous commas, if appearing on a promotional poster for the film, wouldn’t win the movie many Oscars, even if the swell of patriotism has Americans racing to the theater.

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When will these fallen athletes get it? The wags are lying when they say that a public admission and apology will only open up the arms for forgiveness. There can be no final walk of shame on PED use because the story can never be allowed to die. After the public contrition takes place, the news angle becomes, “It’s too late.. It’s not enough.. Now s/he needs to make amends.” It’s not enough for Lance Armstrong to say he has a “flawed character,” which incidentally is a more honest confession of his central make-up than most Americans will ever allow for themselves.

Just once, I’d like to hear one of these guys make this speech to the world instead: “I took the shit. I’m not sorry. You guys don't know dick about what it takes to compete at the highest level of sports in this modern medicinal world. The drug your kid can use by prescription to try to grow taller in middle school, I can't use by prescription to battle back from surgery. The 'War on Doping' is a foul scam-- on par with the 'War on Drugs.' Just about every Tom, Dick, and Nancy in the cul-de-sac is on some sort of performance enhancement drug. The top 12 drug manufacturers in the country combined to make almost half a billion dollars in revenue last year, and that’s just the stuff that's legal. Can our Justice Department please concern itself instead with real criminals like corporate banking slot jockeys, wage thieves, and executive branch war criminals?”

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With each passing year, I grow more enamored with the historical figure John Brown. By far, he's my favorite religious fundamentalist militant. The fiery soldier of abolition had the correct convictions, and certainly the courage of them. He forced the holy terror into the hearts of the terrorists. As Henry David Thoreau said, in his work "A Plea for Captain John Brown": "He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist." With Brown, there was to be no more tolerance for the compromise shit that still plagues Washington today-- on even the clearest issues of Earthly morality (such as torture, for example). I hope that when the next Civil War breaks out, there is a John Brown again to light the way for the North.

I'm currently reading Tony Horwitz's ("Confederates in the Attic") 2011 book concerning Brown and his raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia in 1859 entitled "Midnight Rising," and it can be wholeheartedly recommended. How long and powerful is Brown’s cultural legacy? Horwitz's book is 290 pages long, and Brown is bludgeoned and captured on page 180.

posted by CM @ 12:45 PM 0 comments

The Te'o of journalism

My dear sainted favorite website, Deadspin, uncovered this daffy story of the media-sainted Notre Dame football player having invented from whole cloth a story about having a (dying) girlfriend. The player's ultimate motive is still unknown, but he did wind up second in the Heisman Trophy voting last month, and of all the individual or team awards in American sports, that's the one that's most wrapped up in old-fashioned, patriarchal, moralistic, flag-waving values of personal inspiration and courage. So I don't know, maybe he was campaigning or something?

Manti Te'o, all-world linebacker for the Fighting Irish, #5 in your program, #1 in your heart, young Mormon enrolled for four years at the best-known Catholic school in the country after he "prayed on it," was the unofficial ball carrier on the end around play to apply a fresh coat of lacquer to the long-tarnished Golden Dome of Our Lady's Touchdown Jesus Football Academy. In recent years, unfortunately, Notre Dame has been considered, on a good day, a national joke; on a bad one, a dangerous criminal cabal.

And this is because their lies just keep coming. In 2001, head coach George O'Leary was hired and then quickly fired, for claiming on his resume that he had a master's degree. In 2010, a student filming football practice during a local wind advisory was killed when the tower he was standing on fell over. The Indiana OSHA office found that the conditions of work were unsafe, but the university still appealed the $77,500 fine administered because of its negligence. Also, in 2010, a student at neighboring St. Mary's College committed suicide nine days after telling police she had been sexually-assaulted by an ND football player and a full six days before school investigators finally got around to questioning the man she fingered as her attacker. One of the player's friends had sent her a text message the night of the alleged incident that read "Don't do anything you would regret... Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea."

And of course, these lies were not too far out of the norm. Much of the legendary career of famed Irish coach Knute Rockne is exclusively legend, his "win one for the Gipper" speech a big juicy fat one; and the Rudy (Rudy Ruettiger) saga of 1975 is a bunch of crap too, so if Manti Te'o needs to create a terminal internet girlfriend one weeknight to help inspire the Irish past Michigan State, maybe that's just part of the game. What we have here might be just another harmless, "boys being boys" incident, instructive less of young male sexual entitlement and secondary education athletic department hubris than of just the epic volume of bull fertilizer a famous person is allowed to spread about the Earth's surface if he or she first claims to be deeply religious.

Shame, though, on the media agencies that bought into it without bothering to even Google a death notice on the internet, or check the Lexis Nexis research service that's available in the corner of their newsroom. Here, I'm speaking about the reporters particularly at Sports Illustrated, at ESPN/ABC, at NBC, and of course, at what I'm sure is a stiff arbiter of Notre Dame university ethics, the sports page of the South Bend Tribune. My guess is that the same journalistic twits most likely to swallow an "inspirational" story like Manti Te'o bravely doing battle on the gridiron to honor the memory of the fictional Miss Lennay Marie Kekua, who, incidentally, before dying, suffered physically from both leukemia and a crippling car wreck (because you just as well go all the way with the story), are the same "to-the-death" defenders of the fragile moral core of the American sporting world that vote about eight-to-one against allowing Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The ultimate irony in all of this is that these gullible, lazy establishment hacks with the fish hooks still attached to the insides of their mouths went along with Te'o's story out of a desperate desire to convince us how interesting the man is, and now it turns out that he's incredibly interesting!

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If you're curious tonight as to the environment of entitlement that Te'o grew up in, you might be interested in this less-frequently-copied Deadspin story from earlier in the week-- Te'o's father in Hawaii taking to Facebook and asking friends to unsubscribe to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser because the newspaper published a photo of his son missing a tackle on the morning after the national championship game.

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And finally, my favorite Te'o-related comments from Deadspin's bulging stable of brilliant, anonymous commenters...

Pearls of Wisdom- "Finally, a reason to hate Notre Dame!"

Justin Jump- "Fantastic. I can't tell you how much joy it brings me to see the word 'Deadspin' typed out over and over in an article at ESPN.com."

DougExeter- "So she was a metaphor for the Irish's title chances all along?"

Raysism- "Take a bow you motherfuckers."

iced327- "PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN"

Abe Froman- "If Lennay Kekua had access to firearms, she would still be alive."

Gamboa Constrictor- "More like Nosuch Dame, amiright???"

Lana, Lana,...LANAAAAAA!!!- "I'm Guinea need Samoa information before I can Nauru down the possibilities here."

jleonard14- "Sources close to me are saying that Manti wasn't missing tackles against Alabama... he was actually hugging his girlfriend."

Treemanm- "Holy crap, at least Rudy had arms."

Pigsqueel- "How much is Tebow kicking himself for not thinking of this angle?"

flyers4ever- "I think he faked her death to protect her from Brent Musburger."

Carrie Hunt and the Spoonerisms- "Alabama's running backs aren't even sure Manti Te'o exists at this point."

girouxd28- "can someone on here be my girlfriend? sorry im not a heisman candidate"

...and then the one I can't find on the site anymore- "my fake girlfriend makes $5000 a week working at home..." 

posted by CM @ 9:00 PM 1 comments

Now YOUR child can be a Nobel Peace Prize winner

I've now seen "Django Unchained" twice. It's maybe the most discourse-inspiring film I have ever seen-- and enjoyable as hell. Funnier than five Judd Apatow movies.

posted by CM @ 8:18 PM 0 comments

"Preserving History, Honoring Excellence, Connecting Generations"

The National Baseball Hall of Fame is a bizarre institution, its relationship to Major League Baseball more peculiar still. The Hall is a privately-run museum. Never forget this. Its president in 2003, Dale Petroskey, a former assistant press secretary in the Reagan White House, disinvited stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon from a planned 25 year anniversary celebration of the classic film "Bull Durham" because of the couple's public position at the time opposing the war on Iraq. Despite claims at the time that they were disassociating themselves from politics, the museum hosts a statewide meeting each year for the New York Republican Party.

It's located in Cooperstown, New York, because of the erroneous claim that Cooperstown native Abner Doubleday, a Union general during the Civil War, invented the game. In 2008, Petroskey was forced to resign for "failing to exercise proper fiduciary responsibility" over the museum, and even last year, despite the support of almost-endless public promotion and general goodwill, the museum operated at a financial loss of $2 million. Baseball players and teams (and even sometimes, fans) are encouraged to provide personal and historic memorabilia to the "national" museum for the purposes of public display, but the Hall has frequently been victimized by scandals involving artifacts, by large-scale heists and other perpetrated frauds.

Major League Baseball has two methods for inducting baseball figures into the enshrinement wing of the museum-- an annual vote of the 10+-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, and a semi-annual vote by a committee of league veteran or retired players, executives, and media officials. Though the museum purports to host a "National Baseball" Hall of Fame and not a "Major League Baseball" Hall of Fame, the museum, in concert with the Hall, passed a rule in the early '90s that forbid the induction by either group of electors of any person whose name appears on MLB's permanent ineligibility list. This action was taken specifically to keep Pete Rose, banned from MLB for life for gambling, from being inducted.

Rumored and/or admitted users of "performance enhancing drugs" (meaning: steroids, HGH, Creatine, but not amphetamines or monkey urine) have not been deemed ineligible for election, and as a result, some of their names appear on the ballots, but a majority of the writers who vote in the Hall's primary election campaign have taken it upon themselves to declare (or at least privately determine) that they will not vote for an MLB player they suspect of having used PEDs in the performance of his on-the-field duties. Suspicion has been categorized by these voters as anything from a player's full public admission, to court testimony delivered by convicted drug dealers, to unexplained statistical spikes in measured diamond performance, to back acne.

They choose to do so, by admission in most cases, because the Hall of Fame boasts an election eligibility rule that states that candidates should be considered "based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played." Thanks to an extraordinarily-unique reading of this personality clause-- and a very hypocritical one-- as I will now commence testifying, the following individuals have been made eligible for enshrinement one or more times but subsequently voted down...

"SHOELESS" JOE JACKSON, owner of the third-highest career batting average in MLB history
PETE ROSE, MLB's all-time leader in hits
BARRY BONDS, MLB's all-time leader in home runs
ROGER CLEMENS, winner of 7 annual Cy Young Awards as the best pitcher in his league
MARK McGWIRE, 583 career home runs (10th all-time), demolisher of Roger Maris' 37-year record for home runs in a season
SAMMY SOSA, 609 career home runs (8th), only player to hit 60 home runs in a season three times (also, three consecutive seasons)
RAFAEL PALMEIRO, 569 home runs (12th), 3,020 hits (25th)
MIKE PIAZZA, all-time home run leader among catchers (427)
CRAIGH BIGGIO, 3,060 hits (21st)
JEFF BAGWELL, 36th all-time in WAR (Wins Above Replacement) among position players
MARVIN MILLER, founding director of the baseball players' union, responsible for revolutionary improvements to the game-- financially for all involved and to the business' public promotion


Now, consider that the following figures, each brimming with integrity, sportsmanship, and character are enshrined...

KENESAW MOUNTAIN LANDIS, baseball's first commissioner who almost single-handedly worked to keep the sport segregated from his first day on the job in 1920 until his death in 1944; suspended the eight "Black Sox" players for life from the league a day after the men were acquitted in court
TOM YAWKEY, 44-season owner of the Boston Red Sox, whose team never won a championship during his tenure ('33-'76), and was the second-to-last among the then-16 franchise owners to field an African-American player, in 1959, 12 full years after Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers debut
EDDIE COLLINS and JOE CRONIN, both enforced Yawkey's segregation policy as Red Sox general managers
CAP ANSON, who refused to take the field in exhibition games against black players in the 1800s, and is generally credited with establishing and holding the color line in MLB in the pre-Landis era
GAYLORD PERRY, who had admitted before his Hall enshrinement in 1991 that he threw an outlawed spitball throughout his career, from 1964 to 1983, and even titled his 1974 autobiography "Me and the Spitter"
WHITEY FORD, who once said of his habit of doctoring baseballs, "I didn't begin cheating until late in my career, when I needed something to help me survive. I didn't cheat when I won the 25 games in 1961. I don't want anybody to get any ideas and take my Cy Young away. And I didn't cheat in 1963 when I won 24 games. Well, maybe a little."
DON SUTTON, ejected and suspended 10 days for scuffing a baseball in 1978, and certainly didn't stop there
BOWIE KUHN, former commissioner who served as Marvin Miller's punching bag in labor negotiations throughout the 1970s and early '80s, and who worked so diligently on behalf of the clubs to keep salaries down, even if it meant they were refusing to improve their roster through player free agency
TY COBB, once went into the grandstand during a game (in 1912) and pummeled a handicapped man; was coerced into retirement in 1926 (along with another Hall member TRIS SPEAKER) over allegations of game-fixing; a widely-recognized racist once charged with attempted murder against a black man, on record as having assaulted a black elevator operator, a black construction worker, a black groundskeeper, and the black groundskeeper's wife
SMOKEY JOE WOOD, like Cobb and Speaker, accused of game-fixing by former pitcher Dutch Leonard (evidently Leonard was the Kirk Radomski or Brian McNamee of his day)
CHARLES COMISKEY, "outed" a black player, Charlie Grant, who was posing as a Cherokee during an exhibition game; widely regarded as the true villain of the Black Sox scandal, his penny-pinching included having held Eddie Cicotte out of the final nine games of that 1919 season for the purpose of denying the pitcher a performance bonus
ED BURROWS, COMISKEY, BARNEY DREYFUSS, CLARK GRIFFITH, BAN JOHNSON, LANDIS, LARRY MACPHAIL, AL SPALDING, GEORGE WEISS, AND OTHERS (?), club owners and league executives that operated a segregated business
ENOS SLAUGHTER, reported to have been the ringleader in a campaign to organize a players' strike against Jackie Robinson's debut with the Dodgers
WILLIE MAYS, named by outfielder John Milner during the 1980's Pittsburgh drug trials as the player that provided the "red juice," or liquid amphetamines, in the New York Mets' locker room during the early '70s
WILLIE STARGELL, named by outfielder John Milner during the 1980's Pittsburgh drug trials as the player that provided the amphetamines in the Pittsburgh Pirates' locker room during the late '70s and early '80s
HANK AARON, admitted amphetamine user in his autobiography "I Had a Hammer"
REGGIE JACKSON, has tried unsuccessfully to walk back his long-ago admission that he used amphetamines, even while he continues to publicly chastise the later generation of PED users
FRANK ROBINSON, GOOSE GOSSAGE, 'fess up you hypocritical assholes, you know you did the "greenies" that were laid out on every clubhouse table for 20 years
MICKEY MANTLE, who, according to Zev Chafits' book "Cooperstown Confidential," received a steroid and amphetamine injection in 1961 when he and teammate Roger Maris were both chasing Babe Ruth's single-season home run record and simultaneously chasing a pennant for the Yankees, was benched at least one game that September with an abcess caused by the quack doctor that administered the shot with an infected needle
ROBERTO ALOMAR, sued by two different women for supposedly, knowingly infecting them with the HIV virus, cases settled out of court
ORLANDO CEPEDA, served 10 months of a five-year conviction for attempting to smuggle marijuana into Puerto Rico
KIRBY PUCKETT, charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, fifth-degree criminal assault after being accused of groping a woman in 2002 (acquitted)
SANDY KOUFAX, admitted to pitching "high" on painkillers for much of his injury-plagued career, and admitted being on a multitude of PEDs during the 1966 World Series
BABE RUTH, PAUL WANER, GROVER CLEVELAND ALEXANDER, AND HACK WILSON, prodigious drunks, even among their very competitive company; frequent violators of the 1919 Volstead Act (additionally, none of these men ever played against black players. Comedian Chris Rock once accurately described Ruth as the owner of "714 affirmative-action home runs")
PUD GALVIN, admitted to enhancing his performance with the use of monkey urine in 1889
PAUL MOLITOR, cocaine addict until the age of 25
FERGUSON JENKINS, arrested for cocaine possession in 1980
DUKE SNIDER, pleaded guilty to federal tax fraud in 1995
WILLIE McCOVEY, convicted on charges of inadequate reporting of income between the years 1988 and 1990
STEVE CARLTON, told Philadelphia Magazine in 1994, "Twelve Jewish bankers in Switzerland rule the world."
WADE BOGGS, admitted extramarital affair on national television and settled out of court with a woman, not his wife, who sued him for $12 million for emotional distress and breach of oral contract for promising to support her financially.
LEO DUROCHER, suspended for the entire 1947 season for "association with known gamblers" in violation of league rules
DENNIS ECKERSLEY, alcoholic, checked himself into rehab after a dismal 1986 season
CARLTON FISK, pleaded guilty to a charge of driving under the influence only two weeks ago
TOMMY LASORDA, asshole

Who am I forgetting?

posted by CM @ 7:07 PM 2 comments

Stealing Dave Zirin's work

A former basketball player at my alma mater, Iowa State, is getting ink for feuding with his NBA employer, the Houston Rockets, over his anxiety disorder. Here is both the Podcast and written transcript of an interview that Royce White conducted with Slate's "Hang Up and Listen."

It’s not surprising that this diagnosable medical condition would be a bad fit for most teams. The industry of professional sports is not one that’s famous for protecting the physical or mental health of its employees. (See: NFL concussions.) In fact, most teams, for the sake of public relations leverage, continue to foster the widespread misconception that their employees are not workers at all, given their atypical celebrity.

Yet they are-- and should be-- protected by the same employment rights and regulatory protections as workers in any other field. Professional athletes are often needlessly put in harm's way, like the players in Sunday's Washington/Seattle football game, played on a treacherous turf in the nation's capital (Dave Zirin called the game a "nationally-televised OSHA violation"). Here's hoping that White, sooner rather than later, finds an employer that better respects his unique situation.

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More Zirin: If we measure institutional rot at American colleges and universities by the disproportionate emphasis on sports, the rot at the University of Notre Dame almost certainly runs as deep as it does at Penn State.

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ESPN apologized today for Brent Musburger's leering comments on the air last night about the girlfriend of Alabama's quarterback. This is a ridiculous non-story regarding a broadcaster saying, not disrespectfully, that a beauty queen (the current Miss Alabama) is beautiful. ESPN's apology is craven. But some of us are still waiting for Musburger himself to apologize for this report he filed from Mexico City for the old Chicago American more than four decades ago.

posted by CM @ 8:39 PM 0 comments

Everything is not satisfactual

I have a vague recollection of watching Disney's "Song of the South" as a child. If I was even five years younger, I don't think I would. Before the company vault closed, possibly forever, on this racially-troubled picture, there were three re-releases in the 1970s and early '80s. We didn't see it in the theater either. I remember watching it on television, and it may have only been musical clips also (probably on the Sunday night Disney hour).

The movie is now notorious for the stereotypically-racist depictions of Southern plantation life, and the conventional wisdom is that the scenes are simply out of date since the time of the movie's completion in 1946, but the truth is always more complicated. "Song of the South" was actually vilified by civil rights groups as offensive even upon its original release. The NAACP said that the movie "unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts" and New York City congressman Adam Clayton Powell called it "an insult to American minorities." Slate's John Lingan wrote Friday that it was during the '70s and '80s that the white supremacist film actually had a resurgence because, like many pieces of pop art, the nostalgia movement adopted it.

"But after succeeding generations experienced Song of the South's colorful imagery in their Golden Books and accompanying records, in episodes of the Disneyland television series, and through the omnipresence of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," Song of the South became an unlikely hit in three re-releases... 'People who grew up on Disney's Uncle Remus in their homes were more receptive [in 1972] than 1940's audiences had been to a jarringly inappropriate 'Uncle Tom'-ish Southern Melodrama,' (Jason) Sperb writes. And by the 1980's, when it was twice re-released theatrically, viewers brought nostalgia to Song that blinded them to its true offensiveness; in Sperb's telling, the film had become 'so outdated that its offensiveness was hard for some to see.'"

Progress is not a steady march forward, but a dance step forward and backward over time. What is amazing to me is that you can watch this full film, on your computer, at YouTube. Disney is a media company that jealously guards access to its films. It strategically releases classic films from its archive and then pulls them back again from distribution for as long as a generation. The YouTube version, it turns out, is from a UK broadcast so it's allowed to re-posted. We have then, unedited, the entire film.

Take a look at it if you get a chance. It's not appropriate for young children, but film students and cultural critics should be eager to watch any piece of art that's been purposefully guarded from public view for three decades. It's important to remember that racial segregationists were also opposed to the film when it was released so it does have that going for it. The source material is important. The Br'er Rabbit character, in Southern folklore ("Compair Lapin" in Creole Louisiana), originated among the enslaved Africans, and was passed down through an oral tradition. According to his Wikipedia page, Rabbit represented tricksters "who used their wits to overcome adversity and exact revenge on their adversaries." Jamie Foxx appears in movie theaters this weekend portraying a slave that overcomes adversity and exacts revenge on his adversaries in Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained." There's a lot in "Song of the South" to study, if not admire.

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The fiscal cliff never existed. They finally got around to signing their squishy compromise agreement a few days after the New Year's deadline. They simply made the bill retroactive. We got snookered.

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Democrats are fond of telling their liberal supporters and critics that negotiation and compromise are necessities in a democratic government, but this group of politicians isn't even skilled in negotiations.

posted by CM @ 11:43 AM 0 comments

The crickets of Cooperstown

The exit polls are coming out and it's becoming apparent that nobody will be selected for Hall of Fame induction by the Baseball Writers Association of America this year when the voting tally is announced next week. This, despite what is easily the most accomplished slate of candidates since 1939. It's becoming comical. Baby boomers have effectively hijacked one of our country's most famous museums.

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You gotta check out this article-- David Schoenfield's take on the history of cheating in baseball. Particularly interesting to me was this statistic adding up the number of pitchers that hauled 300 innings in a single season. He lists by decade:

1901-10: 142
1911-20: 89
1921-30: 34
1931-40: 19
1941-50: 13
1951-60: 8
1961-70: 29
1971-80: 37
1981-today: 0

What an unbelievable spike in the '60s and '70s. Amphetamines, anyone?

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The condo dumpster filled up like never before during the week between Christmas and New Years. Consumerism.

posted by CM @ 9:27 PM 0 comments

Beware the good guys

One of the stories that caught my interest during the holidays was the one about the Sandy Hook-area newspaper that published the addresses and names of gun permit holders in their area. This is not a new journalistic idea. Des Moines’ alt-weekly, Cityview, did the same thing in our city several years ago, and then stared down the barrel, if you will, of angry gun owners.

The bold action this month by the Journal News (Westchester and Rockland, NY) was justified for two great reasons. Number one: Freedom of information. Possession of a gun permit is a matter of public record. The news outlet did not publish the names and addresses of people who own guns. They published the names and addresses of people with permits issued by the state, and the state is acting on behalf of the entire citizenry when it decides to issue one of these permits. Therefore, I have a right to know.

Number two: My right to feel safe in my home. This is the same argument made frequently by gun owners in favor of possession, but because I am not blind to statistics, I have come to recognize that the gun owner, even the “lawful” one, is somebody I need to fear as a neighbor. Most shooting deaths take place in the home. In homes with guns, a member of the household is almost three times as likely to be the victim of a homicide as somebody in a gun-free home, and for every firearm death in the United States, there are nearly three gun injuries requiring emergency medical attention. Furthermore, guns are not subject to health and safety regulations so we can't even be sure that guns, used properly, are safe. I live in an urban area, and there is no justifiable purpose for a gun here. Westchester, New York, is even further from rural than my city. I want to know if any of my neighbors are licensed to pack, and I don't want to just know who has them, but how many have them?

National Rifle Association top man Wayne LaPierre spoke out December 21st about the school shootings in Sandy Hook. His ludicrous solution: not more regulation, but more armed teachers and school staffers. In his words, the “good guys” need to have guns in order to fight the “bad guys,” but see, the “good guys” team shares the blame for Sandy Hook. A law-abiding, licensed owner of at least a dozen firearms, Nancy Lanza, failed to keep her guns safe from a close and dangerous family member, and those guns were used to murder 28 adults and children, including her. You say you're a law-abiding gun owner? I believe you. And I fear you. How can you prove to me you will keep your guns safe? "Bad guys" can't be trusted to steer from violence, and "good guys" can't be trusted to keep their guns away from "bad guys".

The United States Supreme Court has never overturned a gun control law, not even local community bans on the sale and/or possession of firearms. Every federal Court of Appeals that has ruled on the meaning of the Second Amendment has held that it protects the rights of the state to maintain a militia, not for the individual to own a gun. Owning a gun, therefore, is not a right, it's a privilege. And I want to know who is being granted the privilege in my community, and if I lived in a community that had just been terrorized by gun violence on such an epic scale, you could be damn sure I'd want to know.

posted by CM @ 8:43 PM 2 comments