Musings 10/29/13
We need a name—a handy label—for those times in life when your righteous cause is spoiled by idiots. It’s very difficult to criticize the presidency of Barack Obama, for example, and have it gain any traction because half of the people who publicly criticize the president are being overtly racist. The Affordable Health Care Act does not suck because it’s socialist. It sucks because it’s not socialist enough. The solution is the single-payer system. But that argument also has been smothered.
Here’s another: Condoleezza Rice has been named to the panel that selects the teams that will play for the college football national championship, yet if somebody were to say that she doesn't deserve this or any other type of institutional position on account of she's a war criminal, the argument would get no attention because some dumbass named Pat Dye commenced the entire Rice debate by muttering, in the unfortunate hearing distance of somebody other than his hound dog, that
she shouldn’t have the job ‘cause ladies don’t understand football.
We need a name for that.
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The Tea Party represents perhaps a final crisis of Conservatism. Some have attempted to use the philosophical assault by Ted Cruz and others to try to make the old-fashioned Taft/Eisenhower conservatives look more “moderate,” and of course then, more “sane” by comparison. I don’t see it that way. That the long-standing belief in limited government has stood up so poorly to this challenge from its most unhinged adherents should help to discredit the entire philosophy. The Conservative movement survived McCarthyism because Senator Joe was an increasingly-unfocused drunk, but this political animal will be just as opportunistic and a lot more disciplined. Cruz represents the final reality behind faulty conservative ideas. You can’t have a small government about fiscal matters and also have a small government about social matters because of capitalism’s irredeemable nature. Civil liberty requires a humanity that capitalism doesn’t and cannot possess.
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I once talked to the radiant actress
Marcia Wallace on the phone. In my radio days, I called her and connected her for an on-air interview involving one of the many fundraisers she did in her life to help combat cancer. She was a native of Creston, Iowa.
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Moeller TV Festival 12 is coming to Des Moines Saturday, December 7th, and right on cue,
new research from England indicates that watching TV makes you a better person, more altruistic. Researchers report (in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology) that viewers become more likely to emulate characters that evoke “admiration and aspiration,” but for this to be the case, the viewer has to first take time to reflect upon that visual text and their viewing experience. So the larger problem is not getting people to watch television, but forcing an attention-deficit culture to take the time to think about it. That’s where my brother Aaron and I come in. The Moeller Television Festival, making the world a better place since 2002.
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It’s time that movie stars
Nicholas Cage and Leonardo diCaprio get out of the dinosaur collecting business. It’s impeding science. You don’t see Harrison Ford going to dinosaur bone auctions. And that’s probably because he played the guy that famously said “It belongs in a museum!”
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This op-ed, submitted to the New Statesman in England by actor Russell Brand on the topic of overthrowing our corrupt political system, demands to be read. It's incisive, thought-provoking, outrageous, and seriously the most fun you'll have reading any item this week. Cheers to England for producing a star with the social conscience of Russell Brand. Our movie stars steal dinosaur bones.
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"It belongs in a museum!"
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It’s hard to beat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series being played in the early part of a century.
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That mega-trade involving mega-millions of dollars last year between the Dodgers and the Red Sox-- a major salary
add-on for L.A. and a major salary
dump for Boston, created an extraordinary impediment to other MLB teams trying to win the World Series.
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Quote of the day: Russell Brand, 10/24/13, in the New Stateman,
"Now there is an opportunity for the left to return to its vital, virile, vigorous origins. A movement for the people, by the people, in the service of the land. Socialism’s historical connection with spiritual principles is deep. Sharing is a spiritual principle, respecting our land is a spiritual principle. May the first, May Day, is a pagan holiday where we acknowledge our essential relationship with our land. I bet the Tolpuddle martyrs, who marched for fair pay for agricultural workers, whose legacy is the right for us to have social solidarity, were a right bunch of herberts if you knew them. “Thugs, yobs, hooligans,” the Daily Mail would’ve called them. Our young people need to know there is a culture, a strong, broad union, that they can belong to, that is potent, virile and alive. At this time when George and Dave pilfer and pillage our land and money for their oligarch mates, at this time when the Tories are taking the EU to court to stop it curtailing their banker pals’ bonuses, that there is something they can do. Take to the streets, together, with the understanding that the feeling that you aren’t being heard or seen or represented isn’t psychosis; it’s government policy.
"But we are far from apathetic, we are far from impotent. I take great courage from the groaning effort required to keep us down, the institutions that have to be fastidiously kept in place to maintain this duplicitous order. Propaganda, police, media, lies. Now is the time to continue the great legacy of the left, in harmony with its implicit spiritual principles. Time may only be a human concept and therefore ultimately unreal, but what is irrefutably real is that this is the time for us to wake up."
On life's little obstructions
The Red Sox lost Game 3 of the World Series in one of the toughest ways imaginable-- the winning run against them getting gunned down at home plate on a beautiful return throw from left field, and then, oops, not noticing that the runner had already been awarded the base by the third base umpire because the third baseman obstructed the runner trying to score.
Boston fans (and starting pitcher Jake Peavy) can blame the umpires, but they're only showing their ignorance of the rule book. It's a good thing we have trained and experienced umpires on the scene. The defensive team is not allowed to set up an obstacle course for the runners to have to navigate. Did Will Middlebrooks attempt to obstruct Allen Craig? It's common to see defensive players try to keep a sliding runner from getting up quickly, but even considering that, it didn't look to me at all like he was trying to do anything but stay laying down. Still, as the umpires explained after the game, by rule, intent means nothing.
If Middlebrooks made a mistake, it was diving for an uncatchable ball. Would you or I have laid out to catch the pass? Absolutely. He's giving his all on the field. That's why it's such a crappy way to lose. But it's not that way because the umpires blew a call. Think instead about a batter who comes up with the bases loaded, two out, and hits the ball on the screws, only to have it go straight into the glove of a defender. He did everything right, but sometimes baseball just ain't fair. Bloops fall in. Line drives die in leather. "All-out" defenders obstruct runners. The shame is that the third baseman drew the obstruction, and the formal "error," when it was the catcher who threw the errant ball.
Imagine if the obstruction had not been called. As a Cardinals fan, I recognized that game to be won as soon as the catcher Saltalamacchia (I've been so focused on nailing down his last name that I didn't catch his first) threw that ball wide of third base and down into the left field corner. We're going crazy at Busch Stadium, or next to our generally-disinterested spouses in our living rooms, only to see Middlebrooks' legs come up at third causing the already-hobbled Craig to take a spiller in the basepath. If next year's instant replay could have potentially changed anything in this situation, it could only have been if the umpires somehow had missed the obstruction originally, and then added it on (correctly) after the fact. And if you think that the Red Sox were angry last night, imagine what the scene would have looked like if the obstruction had not been called until after Cardinals manager Mike Matheny threw his red flag.
In the meantime, Allen Craig becomes the new Kirk Gibson-- the broken-down, but valiant hero delivering World Series theatrics. And he was maybe even more Gibson than Gibson. The gimpy Dodger had the luxury of jogging around the bases after he swatted Dennis Eckersley's back-door slider into the right-field pavilion of Dodger Stadium 25 years ago this month. Craig had to barrel home like a crazed mad man. Despite the obstruction, his run was not in vain because the rule states that the play continues, and Craig has to get close enough to home in that situation to prove that he would have scored without the obstruction. The Red Sox forced our wounded hero through an obstacle course during his journey, which they're not allowed by rule to do, but you won't hear the Cardinals or their fans complain about it today. We know that sometimes baseball just ain't fair.
Stan
Tonight, St. Louis hosts a World Series without Stan Musial for the first time since 1934. Thanks again, Stan.
World Series Notebook 2013
It’s funny how one game can change your outlook. Game 1 of this year’s Fall Classic was a disaster for the Cardinals and their fans-- a comedy of defensive errors, a potentially-devastating injury to Carlos Beltran, an embarrassing blow-out defeat (8-1) at Fenway Park that not only extended Boston’s World Series winning streak to nine games (dating back to Game 7 of the ’86 Series), but made it five in a row in October against the Cardinals. And the Cards never led in any of those five games.
For all the Cardinals’ success since 2000
and before, another showing against the Red Sox like the one in 2004 that still haunts us all, would not only allow the Red Sox to even up their all-time WS record against the Birds, but give them their third championship of the new century, one more than St. Louis. After Wednesday night’s game, I felt like I had been stabbed by Jerry Remy’s son.
But then the Cardinals got a Game 2 standout performance each from pitchers Michael Wacha, Carlos Martinez, and Trevor Rosenthal, whose combined ages,
Will Leitch points out, are less than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. They got hero at-bats in the 7th inning from David Freese, Jon Jay, and Daniel Descalso in a manner that recalled a 2011 season that will never be topped.
Even if the Cardinals fail to win another game this season, 2013 will be memorable, of course for the National League pennant, and also for being the year that the Cardinals were thrust into the role of national villain. They first punched out the media mascot Pirates and then the media favorite Dodgers. The website Deadspin declared war on the Cardinals, and in particular, Cardinals fans. To trolling Deadspin editors, Cardinals fans are arrogant not just about their team but about themselves. The website mocks the Cardinals’ “Best Fans in Baseball” label and claims we invented it for ourselves, rather than simply wearing humbly the label that has been given us by the media at large and by the players.
Frankly, I don’t understand the hate. If Cardinals fans tend to puff out our chests, it’s because the team has never in its history been given attention from the national sports media that it didn’t have to earn. If the Cardinals were the Cleveland Indians, an ancient franchise that rarely wins, instead of an ancient franchise that frequently wins, they would be as far off the media radar as the Indians are. To me, the much more annoying fans are not the ones that claim to be the “best,” but the ones, like those of the Dodgers, that lay claim instead to being the “coolest” fans.
"Those Cardinals fans are so annoying with their polite cheering of the other team, their rhythmic clapping as horsies run on the field before the game, and those goofy Midwestern grins. Don't you know you need to carry a cool detachment from the game, embrace the snarky new social media, and high-five without flaw? How can Cardinals fans be so self-congratulatory while lacking hyper-self-awareness?
The Cardinals, for your information, do not lay exclusive claim to a team method of playing baseball (i.e. the brutally-mocked, so-called “Cardinal Way”). Their version goes back as far as any of them, but as a child, I distinctly recall hearing, for example, about the Oriole Way, an organizational philosophy of teaching baseball fundamentals that led to three World Championships and six American League pennants for Baltimore's team between 1966 and 1983, and seemed to end with the managerial firing of organization-lifer Cal Ripken Sr.
At 700 Clark Street in St. Louis, there are specific organizational philosophies, physical and mental, that govern the team. Physically, the hitters approach to all fields and keep their strikeouts to a minimum. If there’s a roster need for a veteran power hitter to come off the bench, they’re not going to fill the slot by signing a strikeout machine like Mark Reynolds, even if the package comes with prodigious power. Cardinal pitching philosophy is even more defined, at least in the shadow of the legendary pitching coach Dave Duncan, and it’s in complete opposition to the pitching elements of “Moneyball” featured at a theater near you. Generally speaking, “sabremetrics” promotes strikeout pitching. There’s a newfangled statistic called fielding-independent pitching (FIP), whose proponents believe that pitchers should be measured only by what they can “control.” That is, home runs, strikeouts, and walks. Anything else is considered an unreliable measure as it relies upon defensive performance in back of the hurler. This is a silly calibrator. If I’m building a pitching staff, I want ground-ball pitchers. Fewer pitches, more innings pitched, more double-play rally killers, a more-alert defense behind my horse. The best pitching in baseball has never been the pitching that’s done most powerfully, it’s the pitching that’s done most efficiently. That’s why Justin Verlander has been worthless against National League opposition in the World Series and even in the All-Star Game. Against the best clubs and the best sluggers in the biggest games, you’re not going to get the large strikeout totals. The approach of the hitters has changed.
The mental approach to the game is even more controversial because the Cardinals make an overt claim to searching for “character” players. This is with the continued theme of organizational efficiency. The Dodgers' Yasiel Puig is an extraordinarily-talented player, and his outward emotion is healthy, but nobody has taught the man how to play the game. When he embarrasses himself on the biggest stage of the sport, as he did repeatedly and increasingly earlier this month, Cardinals players and fans shake their heads not because he’s showing emotion, or because they feel somehow that he’s not allowed to show emotion or celebrate, but because he’s pounding his chest one half-inning after playing a single into a double in the outfield, and then later throwing to the wrong base and allowing three runners to move up 90 feet. The wide gulf between energy and maturity is what gives other teams (not only the Cardinals) the naked perception that Puig, when celebrating, is celebrating himself and not his contribution to the team goal. His immature behavior in NLCS Games 1 through 5, towards his opponents, teammates, and umpires, would have never been tolerated by the Cardinals or allowed to then spin completely off the charts to the team’s final and lasting detriment in the decisive Game 6 of the series, and we can be sure it wouldn’t be the manager that would have to police this behavior either, it would be the pitcher, the catcher, the right fielder, and others.
You’re quite right that the Cardinals do not consider baseball to be a “kids game.” It hasn’t been a kids’ game since it went pro in Cincinnati four summers after the death of President Lincoln. Maybe
your baseball is a kids’ game, but my Cardinals baseball is a man’s game, played by professionals, with that word “professional” considered an adjective of tremendous compliment.
The Cardinal Way is for real, yet I understand why most baseball fans that have never heard of George Kissell doubt its existence. Baseball fans are nurtured to believe that baseball is entirely unlike football, in this particular way: On the gridiron, coaches are all-important. They develop the “system,” the offensive and defensive schemes that will often supersede even the talent level of the player roster. But in baseball, if it’s not the pure talent of the players that determines success, it’s considered to be the ability of the support staff to sign or draft great players. When the Cardinals “steal” a Michael Wacha with the 19th pick in the draft, or pull an Albert Pujols or Matt Carpenter out of the 13th round, or an Allen Craig in the 8th round, or a Trevor Rosenthal in the 21st, or a Matt Adams in the 23rd, they’re supposedly getting “lucky.” Because, after all, if they really knew Albert Pujols would turn out to be that good, why did they draft twelve other players ahead of him?
The Cardinals of late clearly have had a special eye for potential, but the primary factor in the Cardinals’ success-- as their typical season rarely rewards a series of high draft picks-- is that they
teach the game of baseball better than other teams. Baseball coaches, it turns out, do matter. Second baseman Matt Carpenter, who led the NL this year in hits, doubles, and runs, had already turned 24 years old before he was drafted, and he came up through the system playing a different position than the one he played all this year, his second full season in the bigs. St. Louisan David Freese, acquired from San Diego when he was a minor-leaguer, had given up on baseball during college and was still playing at Double A when he turned 25. By 28, he had become arguably one of the top five World Series stars of all-time. Slugger Allen Craig didn’t debut in the how until he was 25, and didn’t stick until he was 26. And that’s another element of the Cardinal Way that contradicts sabremetrics—the idea that players might actually still possess tremendous potential even after their early “metrics’ have painted the picture of a low “ceiling.” Maybe the Cardinals didn’t luck out so much in the draft last year with Michael Wacha as Michael Wacha lucked out to be drafted by a team with great teachers of pitching.
On this topic of Cardinals minor leaguers, I love the notion that Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester was caught on television Wednesday night with a potentially-illegal and somehow lime green substance on the inside of his glove, and the first person to tweet the photo of the “slimed” glove was an obscure Cardinals minor leaguer watching the game at home on TV. Left-handed pitcher Tyler Melling spent the 2013 season at Palm Beach in the Florida State League, compiling a record of three wins and four losses.
There IS a “system.” There has to be one. The success is not due to any one player or a couple players. If the Cardinals wind up with three or four championships in this “era,” and they’re knocking on the door of their third, there won’t have been a “nucleus” of players like the one the Yankees had from 1996 to 2009 with Jeter, Rivera, Posada, and Pettitte. On this year’s World Series roster, only Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright have rings dating back to the Cards’ ’06 Series championship (and Wainwright missed the entire 2011 championship season due to injury). And the ’06 championship came on the heels of a six-year period (2000-2005) in which the Cardinals
averaged 96 regular-season wins per year. The manager position changed out in 2012, the pitching coach in 2011, the general manager in 2008. Only the tenure of club owner Bill DeWitt Jr. traverses this entire modern era of success. With a group of partners, he purchased the Cardinals from Anheuser Busch, Inc. in 1995.
Having an effective system we call the Cardinal Way doesn’t mean the team is fundamentally perfect. This pennant-winning club makes plenty of mistakes-- for all to see this very week. The defense can be especially poor, the hitters subject to long standing naps, but having a system in place that is equal-parts mental focus, discipline, and character means a better handling of mistakes when they inevitably pop up.
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ESPN Boston seems to be getting nervous about the Red Sox’ chances. ESPN St. Louis had no comment about Games 1 and 2 because it doesn’t exist.
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I enjoy Tim McCarver and Joe Buck and their excellent work on FOX. Tim will be missed next year even though he’s starting to run out of things to tell us that he hasn’t already. He did have one of his all-time great moments last night (right up there with the time he predicted Luis Gonzalez’s sawed-off, opposite-field, game-winning single off Mariano Rivera in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series) when he set up David Ortiz’s at-bat in the eighth inning. He pointed out that Ortiz didn't move a muscle in the on-deck circle when everybody on the planet, including Ortiz, thought that the left-hander Randy Choate would be brought in to face him. That made it especially dramatic when Cards’ manager Mike Matheny decided to
stick with the uber-confident 22-year-old right-hander Carlos Martinez. C-Mart had been so sick with his stuff on the mound for the previous 1 2/3 innings that I was guessing after the fact that Ortiz possibly didn’t move a muscle because he was
hoping Matheny would opt for Choate. Ortiz ended up grounding a single into the deep infield shift, but Martinez was still on-hand one batter later to force an inning-ending pop-up and to write his name for the first time into World Series history. It was a beautiful verbal set-up to that entire sequence by both Buck and McCarver, a pair of great “professionals” if ever there were any. I’ll look forward to re-living the moment forever on DVD if the Cardinals wind up winning this thing. If they lose, I’ll probably never watch any of the games.
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I have no clue who might replace McCarver in the FOX booth next year. Troy Aikman?
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Unless you’re betting on it in some form or another, I don’t understand how in the world one can actually believe tackle football to be more exciting than the championship baseball action we see every October. Less excruciating, perhaps. Very little sticks in my craw like somebody telling me they think baseball is “boring.” What I’m hearing when they tell me this: “I don’t understand baseball,” and also, usually, “I’m legitimately sad that I had nobody to teach the game to me.”
Fifty years from now, when I am quite old, baseball will still be the masterpiece of performance art that it is today. There may be another fad sport that has surpassed it again in popularity, but baseball will be the thing that it is today. That other sport won’t be football, I’m sure of that. The patriarchy is dying so the concept is fated. More importantly, what playing baseball does to right and left arms, playing football does to brains, and that’s simply not sustainable. In 50 years, high schools and colleges will be out of the football business for medical and legal reasons, and football will be more of what boxing is today.
If anything has the ability to kill baseball, though, it's the length of Red Sox games. Holy Christ, get in the box already.
Why we almost defaulted
The tale of the Ted Cruz/Koch Industries government shutdown just may be the least-complicated major American political story since George Wallace stepped in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in 1963.
If you’ve read Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine,” then you know exactly what this plot is all about. It’s the shock and burn tactics of Milton Friedman finally coming home after being endeavored first throughout South America, in Iraq, Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Poland, South Africa, and points beyond. It’s about unchecked capitalism and the purposeful liquidation of the government so that the consent of the governed might be steamrolled, and social programs ultimately gutted.
The Republican power structure, generally-speaking, wants to disown this band of neo-confederate insurrectionists, yet it’s imperative that they face the fact that they share a party with them and a major culpability. The natural human tendency is to try to make peace with those that wish to make trouble, but with this shutdown, we were distinctly past the “party crasher” stage. Cruz and Co. were up on the proverbial kitchen table and squatting over the punch bowl.
The wrong presumption to make is that all parties involved in the shutdown want what’s best for America. They don’t. The disaster capitalists desire the full destruction of the government and for its corpse to be re-animated only with piecemeal programs they support, which are decidedly few. They are “hoarders.” If they were packing away burned-out light bulbs or back issues of Popular Mechanics, we would have no problem identifying them as such, but what these guys hoard is money. They want as much as they can get, philosophically and in practice, and they don’t care if anybody else on the planet or in the country has any. They would rather burn the country down than share it with anyone else.
They believe that Obamacare is unconstitutional not because it’s a massive taxpayer giveaway to Big Pharma, which it is, but because they believe it to be a constitutional crisis any time an elderly, infant, or infirm human is provided life-saving medical attention without first paying for it.
The worse things get, and the deeper we slip into Banana Republic standing, the easier they feel their mission becomes. The “shock” events of 9-11, the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, and now the risk of a national default push us only closer to their authoritarian pillaging. If we’re talking about Greece or Spain, then we see the big banks raid the national pension programs, pin the blame of economic depression on the citizens that earn a living wage, and then the International Monetary Fund swoops in and orders the tearing of whatever strands of the social safety net still exist, but in the United States… well, actually the plan is pretty much the same here.
But the elevated difference is that the United States serves as the last and ultimate destination for the neoliberals’ assault. We’re the white whale. The culmination. Friedman’s deepest and sweatiest wet dream arriving in human form at his doorstep in the person of the first Hispanic Senator in Texas history.
Their elected representatives are very unpopular nationally. It’s irrelevant. They are errand boys. Gerrymandered errand boys. Their strategies have become so radical and dangerous that even the capitulator-in-chief is forced to stand tall. The president could never have struck a compromise with John Boehner because Boehner wasn’t authorized to accept a compromise.
The Affordable Care Act is a shitty piece of legislation, far afield from socialism in that it actually forces Americans to buy the product of a private corporation, a product they have despised for years, incidentally. But despite that reality, and the reality of a corporate media state, Obamacare has come to symbolize the potentially-positive relationship between the government and its citizens. If Americans collectively decide once again that the government is not their enemy in respect to providing vital social services like health care, than the whole of Reaganism unravels. Look what happened with Social Security originally. Despised early on, it became such a runaway success, even Republicans voters now won’t give it up.
The candle of effective government must be extinguished before people are able to focus in on the smaller print. It's a return of the military strategy in Vietnam also-- destroying the village in order to save it.
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A smidgen of noted sexism that needs to be added to the official record before it slips back too far into history: It's clear that Paul Ryan deserved to have been thrown into the same national category as Sarah Palin, the one for pretty-faced but dimwitted vice presidential candidates. This week Ryan cast a vote to default the United States federal government and destroy the global economy.
Baseball's best fans
Yes, Cardinals fans are the best in baseball. Let’s stop pretending that’s not a thing. And the conclusion is absolutely quantifiable. Cards rooters directly impact the outcome of entire seasons. Running 3.4 million per year through the turnstiles helps the 7th smallest TV market in the league translate into the 10th largest payroll. The six markets smaller (Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, San Diego, Kansas City, and Baltimore) are all perennially smaller-budgeted, and usually a lot smaller-budgeted, teams. (Yes, four of the seven smallest markets in MLB play in the same division, one that boasted three 90-win teams this year among their five teams.) Unconditional support of the Cardinals allows the front office to always make “baseball” decisions, not decisions based upon appeasing the fan base. Case in point was the decision to let the Angels outbid them for that once-in-a-generation player, “Stan Musial II,” Albert Pujols; or consider the Cardinals, in the heat of a pennant race this year, not parting with high-end minor league talent for the sake of a “win-at-all-costs” 2013 run.
It’s the players that routinely vote Cardinals fans the best in surveys (and fans do what we do in service of the players). When signing with the team, they routinely make the point to say that they signed with the purpose of playing in this particular baseball environment—and it’s not the facilities, or the weather, or the media spotlight that is drawing them. All fan bases are passionate, but Cardinals fans are also compassionate towards the team. Cheering great plays made by the other side may be aw-shucks corny too, but players on both sides don’t seem put off by the behavior.
Visits to Cardinals games being played in Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, hell, even New York and Los Angeles also speak to how red our blood runs. The powerful signal of KMOX Radio built the beast originally, and MLB franchises for Kansas City, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Atlanta have been scissored out of what were formally garrisons of Cardinal Nation.
You don’t have to hear a highly-partisan California cousin openly concede how impressive it is to see a packed house at Busch Stadium on a Wednesday afternoon in early May to recognize this, but it helped. The third baseball venue called Busch is unquestionably the heart of the metropolis. All you have to do is visit once to see this. Even the globally-famous Gateway Arch downtown suffers currently from neglect. One of the yardsticks I’ll use to further the city’s claim to baseball superiority is that each year, TV ratings for the World Series and the All-Star Game are typically higher in St. Louis than in any other market outside of the host cities.
The backlash against Cardinal Nation is loud and growing strong. The Cardinals have morphed into possibly baseball’s most-hated team as they pile up postseason wins. Fans of large-market teams resent the feelings the Cardinals engender in them about their team having to buy their championships, and fans in small- and mid-level markets resent the Cardinals for puncturing the long-held myth about a competitive disadvantage. (Certainly, Pirates fans would have much preferred to lose to the Dodgers this year.)
This is the kind of statement that really pisses people off but Cards’ fans loyalty is also a tribute to the human character that resides with specific intensity in America’s Great Midwest. Cards fandom is specifically generational because every generation of Cards fans has been able to boast a series of winning teams, but loyalty is also more generational in this part of the country, if for no other reason than some basic facts about North American population migration over the last century. There is here a stronger sense of region. There’s a cultural powerlessness connected to living outside the large media centers and being constantly derided for alleged hicksterism, lack of sophistication, and cultural prejudice.
Another negative refrain heard when the Cardinals are winning is that the town is a crappy town. (Not true, it’s gorgeous. It is, thanks to its location, variously, wonderfully “northern,” “southern,” “eastern,” and “western”—its history, its culture, its essential makeup.) It is, admittedly, one of the American industrial cities that has lost much population and prestige since the 1950s. Maybe that’s also why residents cling tighter to their great parochial sports success story than, say, Los Angelinos cling to the Lakers. If Cardinals fans are seen as shockingly defensive, especially me, with my rant here, again look to this feeling of cultural powerlessness.
If Cardinals’ fans are not providing the competitive advantage for their team, at least in combination with some wise club management, what else explains the obvious competitive advantage over many decades? I’m all ears.
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Dodgers fans are tying themselves in knots this month trying to convince the rest of baseball fandom that they are not the New Yankees. My favorite argument is the one that says the new ownership group is only buying talent now until the farm system can be re-stocked, as if we will ever see a Dodgers’ team payroll drop to anything below the second- or third-highest in the game. You know that Dodger fans, starved for even a single pennant over the last quarter-century, hate to root for “that type of team” that’s comprised entirely of mercenary players, yet here we are still. The team’s $8 billion TV deal should assure that money will always be as readily available in LA as celebrities willing to announce the starting lineup at Chavez Ravine.
Meanwhile, for purposes of contrast, the Cardinals have 18 drafted players on their 25-man NLCS roster (plus two more, Wainwright and Freese, acquired when they were still minor leaguers). Ten of those 18 players are also rookies. (Does that make 2013 technically a rebuilding year for the Birds?) It’s not as if the Cardinals are awarded top picks in the draft every June either. Their year-in, year-out success on the field has set afire any hope of using that as a strategy. The Cardinals have not held a slot higher in the draft than 12th since 1998 (J.D. Drew). There are no Gerrit Coles, Bryce Harpers, Stephen Strasburgs, David Prices, Justin Uptons, Delmon Youngs, Joe Mauers, Josh Hamiltons, or Adrian Gonzalezes in this bunch, and that’s just a list of some of the #1 overall picks over the last 15 years, to say nothing of the list you could compile using each year’s top 11 picks. No team in North American professional sports can match this recent record of player development. Yikes, even I’m starting to hate the Cardinals.
Wainwright and champagne
The Pittsburgh Pirates, dispatched from the 2013 MLB postseason tournament last night by the team and pitcher pictured above, had a wonderful baseball season. Playing in the world’s toughest division in the toughest league, they won more than 90 games and gutted, poised, through six tense and competitive postseason games. I had to laugh when TBS announcers kept repeating that the Pirates hadn't been in the postseason in 21 years, which is true enough, but the reporters kept missing the larger story, which was that they were in the playoffs this year after not having a
winning record for 21 years. Considering that, they were competing this fall in some pretty rAARRRRified air.
Like the Cardinals team that bested them, the Pirates of Pittsburgh have some pretty good young AARRRRRRms. Third baseman Pedro AlvAARRRRez drove in a run in all six games the team played, although Neil Walker and StAARRRRling MAARRRRRte combined to go only 1 for 38 for the entire NLDS. To say nothing of Clint BAARRRRRmes. The team probably could have hit better, in general, against Adam Wainwright, Michael Wacha, and company if they had removed their eye patches before heading to the plate. Now Buccaneers executives and players have only one piece of business left on the 2013 baseball calendar—salAARRRRRy AARRRRRRRRR-bitration.
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It was back to regular business in Pittsburgh the day after. On the front page of the Post-Gazette’s sports site already this morning at 9am Eastern, the top headline was this: “Bill Cowher knows how Mike Tomlin, Steelers feel.” Below that, a photo of the two football coaches and six NFL story links, Below that, the headline: “Cardinals’ prowess on the mound, at the plate doom Pirates in NLDS clincher.” I guess there's no use dwelling on the old for even 12 hours.
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Among the many impressive Cardinals’ postseason statistics since 2011, this one hardly gets a notice, but the Birds have now won Game 4 and 5 of the Division Series two times in the past three years. This achievement may not seem all that remarkable until you realize that only one other team has done this even one time in the last decade.
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Quote of the day: Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Passan: “The big, scary Los Angeles Dodgers embody everything about baseball that turns people’s stomachs here in the Midwest. It goes beyond the whole
pee-in-the-pool incident, though it is safe to say, after watching the St. Louis Cardinals celebrate their National League Division Series victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates with a party that registered a negative-20 on the 1-to-10-get-leaky-like-the-Dodgers scale, the Cardinals save their business for the urinal.”
RISPectful record
Baseball's postseason is in mid-swing (sorry about that, I just can't resist a good pun), but let's not move too quickly past the regular season. If we don't focus enough on the first season, there's little point in being a Cubs fan. The Cardinals posted an offensive number during this year's summer campaign that is absolutely astonishing. The team's
collective batting average with runners in scoring position (on second and/or third base) was the highest of any club in baseball's recorded history. Play-by-play data that tracks this statistic only goes back to roughly World War II, but the Cards' 2013 number is far and away the top one ever posted. Here are the top 5 all-time...
1. 2013
ST. LOUIS .330 (447 out of 1,355)
2. 1950
Boston (AL)
.312
3. 1996
Colorado
.311
4. 2007
Detroit
.311
5. 2000
Colorado
.309
Look at that gap, would ya'?! For what it's worth, the 18 point difference between number one and number two on the list is larger than the one between number two and number 40. The next highest team average in the league
this year was .282. The Cards could use more of that magic in NLDS Game 5 tomorrow night. Their unique talent in this regard has not been much on display during the current series, but some of that may have to do with the absence of Allen Craig (pictured above), who is off the roster for this round with a sprained leg. He tops all of his teammates with a .454 average with runners poised to score.
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We all know that there's an ingrained plantation mentality when it comes to college athletics, but it’s especially creepy to me when coaches refer to the athletes on their team as “kids.”
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Quote of the day: "The Amazing Sneijderman," Deadspin commenter, in response to a suggestion by a writer on the site to read the entire text of the lawsuit filed by Alex Rodriguez against Major League Baseball and commissioner Bud Selig:
"I'm sure it's really great stuff, Barry, but with so few games left to attend, will anyone actually have time to finish the whole thing?"
Normally, I get annoyed when people call baseball boring, but that’s a funny line.
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Quote of the day II: Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon, talking about the dramatic ending to an important game played in the other league last night,
"I swear, I was looking down on my card, and you're preparing for what's going to happen. Their pitchers are so good. And then I hear that thing you hear on the radio back in the day, when you're listening to the Cardinals on KMOX, lying on the floor in Hazleton, Pa., that knock. And I look up and the ball is going toward the tank -- whock! -- nobody hits home runs there. Nobody does. How about that? That's incredible."
Maddon name-drops the Cardinals more often than Jon Hamm does.
Moeller TV Listings 10/8/13
On this night of stasis wedged between Cardinals/Pirates playoff games, bask in St. Louis sports fever by tuning to ESPN for "30 for 30"'s short film "Free Spirits," about the colorful ABA hoops team of the 1970's, the St. Louis Spirits. Take copious notes on Marvin "Bad News" Barnes and James "Fly" Williams during its first airing on ESPN at 7 pm Central and/or on ESPN2 at 9, and then get yourself a good night's sleep.
Sinatra stunner?!
Mia Farrow suggests to
Vanity Fair magazine that her son with Woody Allen, Ronan, may not be Allen's son at all, but Frank Sinatra's. No DNA tests have been done. Ronan is 25 years old, which would mean he was the product of an encounter long after the Farrow/Sinatra marriage, which lasted from just 1966 to 1968. He was born in 1988, the year Frank turned 73 and the 12th year of Frank's marriage to the former Barbara Marx.
Of course he's Frank Sinatra's son. Look at him.
Baseball's 2013 postseason begins
Increasingly,
we're hearing that the one-game "play-in," sudden-death Wild Card game is unfair. Baseball, some argue, is a competition that can't be decided in just nine innings. I agree. The system is not fair. The St. Louis Cardinals, with a mad September dash, beat out the Pittsburgh Pirates to win the National League Central Division after both teams competed over six full months and 162 games. Now the Pirates earn a head-to-head, best-of-five-games meeting with the Cardinals simply by winning a game against the division's
third-place team? It's ridiculous.
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I don't understand
the impulse for fans to root for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Yes, they have endured two decades-plus of historic futility, but it's not as if they've been playing under any sort of competitive disadvantage. They play in the same size TV market as St. Louis, yet they claim higher draft picks every year and, unlike St. Louis, have pocketed millions in luxury tax money.
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The Pirates' streak of 21 seasons finishing below .500 has come to an end, but their streak of finishing below the Cardinals in the Central continues. That one's up to 14 years.
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As new "hot" teams go, at least I'll credit them for having their own colors. During the last generation, we've seen the Angels, Rangers, Astros, Diamondbacks, and Expos all go "red." Sure, it's flattering, but please.
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As this is the year to remember Stan Musial, it's nice that his hometown team will meet the Cardinals in the Division Series.
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You might remember from a year ago that when the Mets' Johann Santana no-hit the Cardinals, the second-division Madoff Mets had the audacity to sell, after the fact, the remaining, unsold tickets to the game as commemorative keepsakes. What an insult this gesture was-- and still is-- to the fans--
their fans-- that actually paid for tickets
before the game was played.
Well, the Miami Marlins demonstrated the same level of audacity this week when they announced they would be selling, for $15 each, the 9,100 unpurchased tickets to the season-ending game on Sunday in which Henderson Alvarez no-hit the Tigers. But here's the kicker: They
printed the wrong date on the tickets.
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The National Hockey League season begins tonight? Really? Climate change is hardly calling for an
earlier start to the hockey season. Why can't they just wait their turn?
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"Breaking Bad" Spoiler alert: I feel like the creative team behind the show is selling us on the idea of a clear ending to the series as a point of contrast to the rather-unpopular finale of “The Sopranos,” yet I still have plenty of questions unanswered about the narrative of the popular AMC show. Was the last episode a dream sequence? It felt like one from the early moment when Walt asked the Omniscient to get his frozen car to start and then the keys to the ignition dropped from the sun visor. Everything that followed was so unrealistic and fantastic, and could have served alternately as total wish fulfillment on behalf of the Walt character. The fate of Jessie is actually still entirely up in the air at series end, at least as far as his legal entanglements go, same with Skyler, while the fate of Walt Junior’s inheritance is still more than a little in doubt, and even though creator Vince Gilligan declared Walt dead of his own gunshot wound on the AMC discussion program “Talking Bad” only moments after the final episode ended, I didn’t find that interpretation to be abundantly clear from the episode itself. He was only gut shot, with the police and presumably some members of a law enforcement medical team moving in around him. He hadn't even passed out yet. Maybe if David Chase had appeared on HBO only seconds after “The Sopranos” ended and declared that his lead character had been shot by an assailant walking out of the diner bathroom, he would have saved himself some hassle with critics and fans.
I always thought that “The Sopranos”’ brilliant ending was less inconclusive than people believe it to be. If creator David Chase had simply ended his seven-year series only one scene earlier, with Tony paying that final poignant and bittersweet visit to his Uncle Junior in the psychiatric hospital, the public debate over the episode's merits would have been almost non-existent.
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There's not much to say about the government shutdown except to say that we're now pretty much living in a failed state.
