News from home
There was a major development in the Condo Association this month: I was elected its president. For those of you that don’t understand the implications of that, it means I have to start practicing my signature (or at least start taking more pride in it). The first item on my agenda is to fly to Kentucky and pray publicly with Court Clerk Kim Davis.
I doubt my neighbors are aware that their unanimous voice vote electing me to the support was support for an anarcho-syndicalist.
I didn’t want the job for myself. I wanted my wife to be First Lady.
In other property news, we bought a garage today for our unit. There were still a couple available for purchase after several years on the market. Ours is not heated, and it’s detached from the house, but it’s the first time I’ve had a garage in 22 years-- since I parked in the shed back on the farm.
FLOTCA (the First Lady of the Condo Association) is enjoying her first garage ever. She got to pick the security code. I’ll still be parking outside incidentally-- her car will go in the garage. So I don’t know why I’m excited.
Allow me to provide you a description of our garage: Unit G-13 and the corresponding undivided percentage interest in the common elements, all as shown in the Declaration of Submission to Horizontal Property Regime for Sherman Hill Condominiums, (a Condominium) recorded in Book 12010, Page 752 in the Office of the Recorder of Polk County, Iowa, and as may be amended and/or supplemented, being a Horizontal Property Regime pursuant to the provisions of Chapter 499B, Code of Iowa, located upon the real estate described in said Declaration of Submission, as may be amended and/or supplemented.
It does increase the Moeller tax burden by $22 a year, but such a thing is subject to result from the pursuit of adventure. We’re going to sleep out there tonight.
"It's not as easy as it looks"
The arthouse films of Ingmar Bergman and Bernardo Bertolucci are subject to frequent misinterpretation, but it’s possible that the most misunderstood flick of all-time is Robert Zemeckis’
Back to the Future II. This particular movie has been very much in the news this month because today, 10/21/15, marks the one 30 years into the future that Michael J. Fox’s character travels in the high-grossing sequel to 1985’s
Back to the Future.
The second film in the trilogy, released in 1989, predicted that the Chicago Cubs would break their World Series championship drought, which stretches back to 1908, on that exact date. As fortune would have it, the Cubs have been playing for a trip to the World Series this month, reaching the National League Championship Series, but being swept out on the precise date tonight by the New York Mets.
The movie had been treated as a harbinger of good hoodoo by championship and pennant-starved Cubs fans, thinking that this call from an earlier generation portends an end to the team's generations of unique suffering.
Here’s what those fans don’t get. It was all a practical joke at their expense. Zemeckis’ writing partner on BTTF II was Bob Gale, a native of the St. Louis suburb of University City and a Cardinals fan. If there was any successful foreshadowing at all, it was that Gale would see the Cubs beating the Cardinals in a playoff series-- an on-field development that was forced to transpire in order to allow the Cubs postseason to stretch this year to October 21st. [Let’s not forget the part the Cardinals played in the Cubs destruction, by the way. The Mets won seven fewer games than the Cubs (90 to 97) during the regular season but enjoyed home field advantage against them in the NLCS because the Cards (100) beat the Cubs in the Central Division.]
Back to the Future was, after all, a comedy, and the author certainly knew that his prognostication was as outlandish a concept as a hovering skateboard.
Now to the series itself. Game 3 of the NLCS at Wrigley was the Billy Goat’s magnum opus, the most Bartman-like of Chicago postseason games since the first and last public appearance of Steve Bartman 12 years ago. In a 2-2 game in the 6th inning last night, the go-ahead run for the Mets scored on a two-out, third-strike wild pitch to Michael Conforto. In describing his failure to block the pitch after the game, Cubs catcher Miguel Montero summarized his dereliction of duty, along with 180 years of baseball, with his comment, “It’s not as easy as it looks.”
On the play that followed, Cubs outfielder Jorge Soler played a single into a ground rule double by face-planting Wrigley’s lovingly-manicured lawn and allowing the ball to bounce to the wall and get lost in Bill Veeck’s famous vines. And isn’t the ivy lovely in autumn? Incidentally, do you suppose the Cubs are planning to leave that ball in the leaves and encase it beneath Plexiglass like they did with Kyle Schwarber’s home run ball off the scoreboard against Kevin Siegrist and the Cardinals? The Cubs haven’t won a game since they pulled that stunt.
Now down a run in the 7th, and with Mets standing on first and third, a fly ball was lifted to left field. The play was routine, and was headed to a spot a good 50 feet away from any would-be-Bartmans, as the slugger Schwarber stood beneath it. The man has some eye- and ear-catching experience in
high school show choir, and he can sock the baseball a mile with a stick, but alas, nobody ever taught the man how to
catch a ball. In this instance, it caromed off his glove and landed at his feet as an insurance run scampered safely home for the New Yorkers. (A criminally-merciful scorer ruled this a hit.) In a less celebrated action, Schwarber then threw to the wrong base, allowing the trail runner to move to third, and subsequently score on a ground ball out that followed as Schwarber shouted expletives into the inside of his glove. Presumably it caught those.
In retrospect, Joe Maddon’s decision to assign Schwarber to the field for any extended period of time in the postseason was like putting it on the proverbial tee for the baseball gods. (He Schwarbered two more fly balls tonight in Game 4.) It echoed John McNamara’s decision 29 years ago to leave the hobbled Bill Buckner in the field in the 9th inning of a clinching World Series game for Boston. This would be a great name for a horror film about American League-style players imprisoned under National League rules-- “The Ball Will Find You.”
Cubs fans will deny being torn up over this season-ending defeat. The team has young players they say will allow them to “compete for the next decade.” Of course, that’s what they said in 1984 when Sandberg, Dernier, Moreland, and Durham were young bulls; in 1989, when Jerome Walton and Dwight Smith finished first and third in the Rookie of the Year voting; and in 2003, when Mark Prior and Kerry Wood were baby aces.
This time it’s different, they say, because they have Maddon at the helm, largely considered baseball’s most relaxed and “coolest” manager, he of the zoo animal menageries before the game and the charter flight costume parties after. But remember the Cubs have already tried a “cool” boss in an attempt to end their suffering. Maddon’s not even close to matching the general coolness of Dusty Baker, who
invented the high five as a player in the 1970s and once
smoked pot with Jimi Hendrix. As skipper of the Cubs, however, Baker is linked in history really only to the early flame-outs of Prior and Wood, and, of course, to Mr. Bartman.
The Cubs still haven't won a championship since a time-- seriously-- when Geronimo, chief of the Apaches, was still living. Their pitching rotation still has three big holes in it, and since the days of top five draft picks appear to be gone for a while, those holes would have to be filled with nine-figure free agent contracts and the loss of high-end compensation draft picks. As the Cubs and their fans have trained us to do, I’ll “wait ‘till next year” to see what there is to see, but for 2016 and seasons beyond, if the Cubs hope to win it all now, they’ll be defying even the imaginations of Hollywood scriptwriters.
Hillary Clinton explains privacy for us
"I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so."
Which corrupt American politician said that? Answer: then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the day that Chelsea Manning's court-martial was scheduled to begin.
Clinton herself conducted classified foreign policy business on a personal email account untethered from secured federal government servers. She was required by law to preserve emails sent to and from her personal account, and she didn't do that either, deleting 32,000 of them, including some that had been stamped as classified, according to Reuters.
Hillary has alternately apologized and claimed she did nothing wrong in this case. On July 7th of this year, she claimed she had the full authority of her predecessors to use the private server. On September 9th, she said she was "sorry for that" to ABC News, Then on September 27th, she claimed again on
Meet the Press that she had the authority. She first made the claim that there was no classified information on her server, but those claims ended when hundreds of classified documents were discovered.
This case involving her time spent as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 seems to be getting sidetracked by the fact that Clinton is currently running for president. (It's not the other way around.) Unfortunately, during this party primary portion of the race, partisan Democrats also don't seem to think the issue is important, including her opponents. A Clinton spokesperson has called the issue "nonsense," but it was the State Department, not politicians, that alerted the issue to the FBI's counterintelligence office, and a U.S. District Judge (Emmet Sullivan) appointed by Clinton's husband that ordered State and the FBI to work together on the case, stating that "we wouldn't be here today if this employee had followed government policy." The current U.S. President, Clinton's former boss, called it "a legitimate issue" last week on
60 Minutes, even as he confusingly also said that criticism of it was "ginned up" because of politics.
Clinton knows about "ginning up" security issues. Again this week, one of the signers of the first-round U.S.A. Patriot Act repeated her criticism of Edward Snowden, perpetuating a smear against Snowden that his files had "fallen into a lot of wrong hands" (or by "a lot of wrong hands," does she mean the American people?) and insisting incorrectly that Snowden could have substituted his actions by taken his concerns about NSA overreach instead to his superiors, when in fact he and others had already done so multiple times and to no avail.
In
this link, the Federalist has a list of some of the statutes Clinton has violated with her private email actions. They include sending classified materials over an unsecured, unclassified system, and disseminating classified materials to private citizens (such as Sidney Blumenthal) that do not have security clearances. Notice the last paragraph, a factual statement: "The 2009 executive order signed by Obama states that U.S. officials who negligently disclose classified information to unauthorized individuals are subject to any and all federal sanctions provided for by law." Obama has prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous administrations combined, including NSA whistle blower Tom Drake who was accused of "mishandling" information that was not considered classified
at the time, and a Naval Reserve officer who "mishandled" classified military materials even without an intent to distribute them to anybody. Clinton's getting a major hall pass here, considering these two sorry individuals. She might also be guilty of perjury. She signed an affidavit on August 10th, "under penalty of perjury," that she had turned over all government-related emails.
The woman Glenn Greenwald has called "the ultimate guardian of bipartisan status quo corruption" appears to have created, at her former post, a personal computer system designed to shield the details of her public actions from ever being accessed by the public. Her sinister motives seem clear enough to me. If a member of Congress, journalist, or private citizen were to file a Freedom of Information Act request in a matter involving Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State-- and many of them have, there's a good chance that the item of public record no longer exists. The State Department has acknowledged that Clinton's private email account "shielded" her from these requests. Americans (Democrats) should remember that this was not just a private email account she was using for government business, it was a private email account maintained
on a private server. The entire matter marks her as a better fit for a prison jumpsuit than the presidency. Chelsea Manning's motivation was whistle blowing a war crime and she got 35 years at Leavenworth.
Chase Utley, pay for our sins
Major League Baseball now has its Roger Goodell and the man is Joe Torre. The Hall of Fame manager currently serves the commissioner as “discipline czar,” and he apparently learned nothing from the Tom Brady court verdict.
Torre, last night, issued a two-game suspension-- to be served during the NLDS-- to Los Angeles’ Chase Utley. The Dodgers’ second baseman slid hard and late to break up a double play Saturday night in a game against the Mets. The contact led to a broken leg for the Mets' shortstop Ruben Tejada. The umpires not only-- correctly-- ruled it a legal slide, but the replay challenge revealed that Tejada never touched the bag at second, and Utley was ruled safe as well. The play kept the inning alive for the Dodgers, who trailed 2-1 at the time, and led to a four-run 7th inning, a 5-2 victory, and a leveling at one game apiece of the best-of-five series.
Torre’s verdict is wrong on so many levels. One is that Torre should have no place in that post as it is. The czar is going to be ultra-sensitive to charges of favoritism having been in five different uniforms over the years. He managed
both the Mets and the Dodgers during his career, but while L.A. fans would be primarily ambivalent about him, Mets fans certainly already view him, first, as the long-time skipper of the cross-town Yankees. His tenure in the Bronx was marked by a famous rhubarb between the two teams, a bat throwing incident involving future Hall-of-Famers Roger Clemens and Mike Piazza. Former commissioner Bud Selig named Torre to the post because he believed that MLB fans view him as an unimpeachable personality, a false assumption to be made. More than a dozen of Torre’s former Yankees players saw their names on the Mitchell Report regarding the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Why does Tony LaRussa always get sullied by the media for supposedly “allowing” steroids in his clubhouse, but Torre doesn’t? Jose Canseco was added to the Oakland roster when nobody knew he used steroids. He was added to the Yankees roster when half of baseball knew he was.
Most importantly, Utley’s slide was completely legal. The umpires ruled it so on the field. He went directly towards the bag, however late, and, as Doug Glanville pointed out on ESPN Saturday night, Tejada was pirouetting to still go to first base for a relay throw so the slide was not only clean, but justified. Disgruntled Mets fans cannot argue that the umpires should have ruled the play a double play if there had been no movement towards first. The commissioner's office wanted instant replay and now it needs to deal with the consequences when infielders are forced to stay on a play longer where once a phantom tag of the base was common.
While this whole mess gets sorted out, what are competitors in the four divisional series to do on the base paths? They’ve been trained for their entire baseball lives to go in hard (the best ones always do), and now Torre has created a climate in which he, unilaterally, decides which clean plays are too rough and which clean plays are not. He even acknowledged in his babbling comments Sunday in Houston to Ken Rosenthal that the umpires did not err on the ruling (huh?), and that historical precedent for this type of play doesn't matter. Is there anybody in the world that thinks Utley would be getting suspended if Tejada had not gotten hurt on the play? There was an identical play Friday in the Rangers/Blue Jays LDS, but nobody came up limp. In the middle of September, the Cubs’ Chris Coghlan ended the season for the Pirates’ Jung-Ho Kang in a play in which the runner slid even further away from the bag, and there was no punishment. Because Tejada was injured, the Mets are allowed to replace him on the LDS roster, but if Utley loses his appeal, the Dodgers will be forced to play with 24 men.
What was really crippled on the play was the Mets’ chances of winning Game 2, and that's what has the New York-dominated sport media whipped up? (Did you know that Utley so tormented the Mets when he was with Philadelphia that a part of Citi Field is referred to as "Utley's corner"?) The break-up slide was perfectly executed—and timed. It actually led directly to the Dodgers winning. If the next Dodger hitter had popped out, I again believe that Utley would be getting the leniency typical of the first century and a half of baseball. It’s similar to the infamous Steve Bartman play in 2003 in that it didn’t take on everlasting meaning until two or six other things went wrong.
Is Major League Baseball worried that they’re going to be targeted by litigators in regards to player safety the way the National Football League has been? Because I have yet to see a medical study demonstrating that repeated dust-ups at second base leads to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
Torre is acting the Goodell part in that he seems to forget there’s a Collective Bargaining Agreement, and that’s a shame because Torre, as a player in the 1970's, was an early union rep under Marvin Miller's direction of the MLB Players Association. Sadly, United States history is littered with these types of instances of union advocates later going to work for management. Does Torre, acting in this particular post for the sole purpose of keeping commissioner Rob Manfred out of the fray, not get that these overreaching decisions on player punishment get blown out of the water in court every time when there’s no precedent in place (which Torre, again, admits) and when there’s no clearly defined rule? For his appeal, Utley's agent is reportedly preparing a video of similar baseball plays in which no punishment was handed down (let alone during the postseason), and I'm sure Torre's office can stay busy until tonight' first pitch watching it. It's up to Utley to take the case, like Brady, to the next level if the appeal goes against him.
If Manfred and his underlings want to change the rules, change the rules, but you don’t start issuing penalties before the rules have been put on paper. There is a rule in place, and since Utley went directly into the bag, he acted consistent with it. As usual, MLB is stepping into the game where it shouldn't. If the umpires let the teams police themselves, you would have far fewer of these incidents. You frequently see umpires now issue warnings to both teams when one team plunks a batter. Those warnings are pointless, and sometimes even detrimental. It keeps the two sides from establishing the equilibrium of the game for themselves, and by the way, the umpire has the authority to throw a pitcher out of a game for intentionally throwing at a batter even if a warning has not yet been issued, so what’s the point of the warning?
Same thing in this case. Pending the appeal, Utley has to step to the plate again multiple times in this series against the Mets. Already, Mets manager Terry Collins is grumbling that the umpires won’t allow the teams to pitch inside during tonight's Game 3 while, out of the other side of his mouth, implying that the Mets will seek retribution. Might this result in one pitcher or two being sent to an early shower by the home plate umpire during a pivotal game. Joe Torre and Major League Baseball have created that potential mess, not Chase Utley.
October surprise
Cardinals and Cubs. In the playoffs. The same year. That has never happened before, let alone a head-to-head series between the two. And yet, we have it all starting tomorrow. The winner doesn’t advance to the World Series. That’s the only way it could be better. But maybe next year, right? Because the Cubs are only going to get better, we’re told, because of their many young stars. (Statistically, the Cardinals are actually younger.)
You know, I don’t want to call Cubs fans dumb, and there is no other historical precedent for this one way or the other, but they have to be the only fan base that could be deprived of a World Championship for more than a century and yet still be persuaded by the team that the team is succeeding one year
ahead of schedule.
Cardinals/Cubs is a fantastically-unique rivalry-- in the dynamics of its lopsidedness. Yankees/Red Sox is so blatantly a big brother/little brother relationship. New York is the great big city and its Yankees have their 27 World Series titles to contrast the Red Sox’ infamous 86-year drought. But now that the Red Sox have ended the drought with three World Titles in a decade, you would think it would be more exciting, but George Steinbrenner is dead, the Red Sox stink, and we're all bored of it.
Chicago is more than triple the population of St. Louis. Makes them the big brother, right? But wow, what a doormat baseball team the Cubs have been. The big brother, in this case, might try to bully, but he's so unsuccessful in life. A raging alcoholic, maybe. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how
difficult it is to go 107 years without a championship in Major League Baseball. For roughly half of those years, there were only 16 franchises. Throughout, the Cubs have also had almost every financial resource available to them at a given time-- large city, unique ballpark that’s also a cash cow, national television reach. Considering, I think the loyalty of the fan base gets overstated. The Cubs haven’t always boasted the attendance they’ve enjoyed for most of the last three decades. The 1908 champion Cubs outdrew the Cubs teams of the early ‘60s. The team didn't draw a million fans at Wrigley Field in any season from 1953 through 1967. Last year they averaged only 32,000 fans a game in the smallest stadium in the league, but one that holds 40,000. The Cardinals haven't averaged so few since 1997, and did I mention the population difference?
It’s all a strange feeling for Cardinals fans, especially here in the hinterlands of the fan base. A trip to the National League Divisional Series is familiar enough-- 12 times in the last 16 years, thank you-- but this year we have Cubs fans as an added audience. Weird. More so, I’m sure, for their side. They normally think of this as football season. That’s also why I’m convinced that Cubs fans don’t really “suffer.” Suffering is getting close and losing, not switching your interest to football on Labor Day weekend. Any time I hear somebody in the Midwest refer to this time of year reflexively as football season, I know I’m talking to somebody that's not necessarily a Cubs fan, but conditioned by the fact that the two baseball teams housed in the Midwest’s largest city never make the playoffs. Putting aside then even the well-played narrative of “the Curse,” it’s good for baseball anytime the Cubs are in the playoffs.
Also in this topsy-turvy world, if they win the long-awaited crown this year, they’ll make history in a second way by becoming the first third place team to do it. Sorry about those Pirates.
Guns and ammo
This is “promise to liberals” season in the Democratic primaries, and I don’t think Hillary Clinton has any intention to deliver on at least one of her gun control promises, but there are some very common sense solutions out there that can be enacted that will still protect the rights of gun owners from their government and black people from police.
One of these is the concept of the mandatory waiting period for purchase combined with criminal background checks. This is a no-brainer. All tragedies cannot be prevented, but this is a sensible way to limit them. In some locales, the waiting period and background checks are already written into the law, and simply need to be enforced, but this does no good when it is not universal.
Another winning concept is the outright ban on assault rifles. The right to own firearms is not absolute. It certainly does not extend to any type of weapon the manufacturers can dream up. You can’t possess a firearm that shoots a rocket or a nuclear device.
Any dispute about this? So now we're just deciding where to draw the line.
The best idea, championed now by Clinton but which I don’t think she actually plans to fight for because it’s an “anti-business” measure, is to end the
immunity from liability that gun manufacturers enjoy under a 2005 law.
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How can a land of such great opportunity and grand principles be so frequently victimized by gun violence? It's one of the great mysteries... Oh shit, now we're bombing hospitals?
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Doctors Without Borders better watch itself. It's one thing to accuse the United States of a war crime, but a Democratic administration during an election cycle? I fear the good doctors are going to get "Nader-ized" by the Democrats if they don't zip it.
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Only three days after the U.S. military bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan killed 22 patients and aid workers, the story has already fallen off the front page of the Huffington Post. I wonder if that would be the case if George W. Bush was still president.
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Getting a court conviction in the case of an African-American being killed by police is like getting a conviction in the South in the 1950’s and 60’s when a white person killed an African-American. It happens on occasion, but is exceedingly rare.
The charade of reinstatement
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred says he'll have a verdict in a Pete Rose reinstatement request by the end of the calendar year, but the consideration period is disingenuous. The first-year boss has already denied a request by the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum to reinstate that all-time great player banned from baseball for gambling in 1921, and just as Fay Vincent and Bud Selig had to deny Rose to effectively preserve the legacy of Bart Giamatti, Manfred has to deny Rose to preserve the legacy of Vincent and Selig.
Rose can't win now because of MLB's greed. Murderers get out of prison in less time than the 26 years Rose has now served in the form of a "lifetime ban" from the game he clearly worships, and to which he has given so much to the fans. The irony is that Major League Baseball
didn't have
a gambling problem at all when Rose was suspended in 1989, and nobody would come away from the fact of a quarter-century of punishment thinking that baseball was now somehow being too lenient for the crime of betting on baseball, but probably every ballpark today displays multiple advertisements for casinos and/or state lotteries, and lucrative baseball television and radio broadcasts are littered with ads for betting--
on baseball-- in the form of the now-multi-billion dollar industry of daily fantasy sports.
Rose may or may not be reformed, but he's certainly cleaner today than the institution that persists in denying him entry. Manfred might have a hard time keeping a straight face when he makes his announcement regarding Rose's continued discipline, which will likely happen in the month that follows the postseason. When he does, glance down at his podium and take notice of how fat his pockets are.
My favorite Republican
Republicans have an obvious choice as their presidential nominee. I’m not usually in the business of offering them advice but the top man for the assignment, though he’s not one of the 35 petitioned GOP candidates, is St. Louis Cardinals majority owner Bill DeWitt Jr.
Forget Donald Trump. It’s DeWitt who knows how to run a business. A registered Republican active in party fundraising, he runs an unimpeachable baseball club that serves as the model for all other organizations, headed to the playoffs for the 12th time in 16 years (and not that one-game Wild Card crap either—the real thing, best-of-five or best-of-seven). He seems to have the admiration of his employees from the top rung to the bottom, famous and non-famous. They routinely express that they are treated like family by the DeWitt family. (Bill's son, Bill III, is the team president.) Each year the team outdraws in attendance the population of greater St. Louis, and it typically outdraws nearly all other MLB clubs despite playing in only the 21st largest U.S. television market.
DeWitt had the decency to offer jobs in uniform to Mark McGwire and Jhonny Peralta when they were considered league pariahs because of the use of "performance-enhancing drugs" (*There is no proven link between use of these substances and baseball achievement.) DeWitt presides over a business culture that would never produce a scene like the one seen in Washington D.C. this week between two star players (DeWitt is a true Washington outsider), or the similar scene that erupts at every Trump campaign rally.
DeWitt's skill in fiscal responsibility should be his main selling point to voters. Donald Trump promises a $10 trillion tax cut, but DeWitt, or DeWallet, as he’s known in this respect, has produced a club with the most wins in 2015, and the most wins in the last five years, without the club spending in the top 10 of the 30 clubs. He avoids the popular strategy of bidding for free agents when they are at auction prices, developing talent instead from within, and investing in scouting. DeWitt was a business partner of George W. Bush when Bush’s Texas Rangers hustled the Ballpark at Arlington from Texas taxpayers, but in St. Louis, DeWitt's Busch Stadium III is one of the few majority privately funded MLB stadiums. The deal with the city came with a lot of cushy tax breaks, but DeWitt invested his money again three years ago into the construction of “Ballpark Village,” a stadium-adjacent entertainment complex that has significantly grown the Cardinals’ footprint in an otherwise-thinning downtown St. Louis. DeWitt's group purchased the Cardinals for $150 million almost two decades ago. This year, Forbes appraised the Cardinals outright for $1.4 billion.
The national sports media is bored with DeWitt’s team, despite its 100-59 record this year and 11 division titles (and two Wild Card titles) since DeWitt and his partners bought the team following the 1995 season. All the baseball headlines this summer have been about the Cubs, the Yankees, the Mets, the Nationals, the Blue Jays, the Royals, and the Astros. DeWitt’s Cardinals are “same ole’, same ole’.” Passe. Not worth writing home about. The powerhouse you expected. You know, what the U.S. economy used to be.
Donald Trump inherited his fortune from his father. So did Bill DeWitt Jr., but his inheritance was a comparative pittance built on soda and beer sales at old Sportsman's Park in St. Louis (Browns) and Crosley Field in Cincinnati (Reds). Trump slaps his name on every product he sells. DeWitt prefers staying in the shadows and employs men much more famous than him. In his early business career, Trump settled with the Justice Department over accusations he violated the Fair Housing Act. In his early business career, DeWitt was the batboy for the St. Louis Browns and lent his uniform to the midget slugger Eddie Gaedel for his one and only career plate appearance. Four of Trump's businesses have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. DeWitt made a successful businessman even out of serial loser George W. Bush. Trump denigrates Mexicans. DeWitt has paid Reynosa-born Jaime Garcia over $27 million since 2008 to win 52 games against 31 losses. Trump would build a wall. DeWitt’s outfield wall at Busch Stadium is perfectly distanced from home plate to insure contests fair to both hitters and pitchers, and it features the images of 12 Cardinals greats that have had their uniform number retired by the team. Trump has questioned the birthplace and United States citizenship of President Obama. DeWitt invited President Obama to throw out the first pitch of the 2009 All-Star Game in St. Louis. Trump has ridiculous hair. DeWitt has the hairline that befits a 74-year-old man. Trump destroyed the United States Football League. DeWitt elevates Major League Baseball. Trump got his TV reality show and beauty pageant run off the air by NBC and Univision. DeWitt's team has the highest local TV ratings (7.7) in Major League Baseball. Trump is twice-divorced. DeWitt, despite public perceptions at the time that it would be his downfall, knew exactly when to part company with Albert Pujols.
