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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/31/07)

It’s not only the Mets who are showing their years.  The median age of baseball fans is 45, a sign the sport has limited growth potential.  And the world’s great powers are in a similar demographic bind.  Declines in birthrates and increases in longevity over the last century have led to the graying of several major nations – Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the U.S.  Where the Mets’ problem is immediate: veterans wearing down in the season’s homestretch, the great powers face an imminent challenge -  an aging out of the most productive part of their work force and an inevitable slowing of economic growth. .

Mark Hass, a former fellow at Harvard’s International Security Program, has documented the situation in an article in the Boston Globe.  He says America’s comparatively high immigration and fertility rates gives it an edge over the other aging powers.  But to maintain that edge, he prescribes strong medicine:

“To pay for the massive fiscal costs associated with its aging population, the United States… should reduce Social Security and Medicare payments to wealthier citizens, raise the retirement age to reflect increases in life expectancies, maintain largely open immigration policies, and, above all, restrain the rising costs of its healthcare system.  A defining political question of the 21st century is whether US leaders have sufficient political will and wisdom to implement these and related policies.”  

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On the subject of old people, indeterminately ancient Orlando Hernandez has been a revelation.  Notwithstanding his performance yesterday, he has made doomsayers who predicted he would miss at least a third of the season (as was done here) look foolish.  At least, so far:  there’s still all of September for El Duke to hurt himself, as he did last year.

The Mets obviously inflicted a deep hurt on themselves, losing four of four to the Phils (who were minus their ace Cole Hamels).  Since the NYM’s never do well in Atlanta, it is hard to be optimistic as they open a three-game series with the Braves.  With Philadelphia meanwhile playing at Florida, it’s not unrealistic to think in terms of a new NL East leader by Labor Day.

Going from an eight- to a five-game lead as the Red Sox did, losing three to the Yankees, is obviously a different ballgame from what the Mets wound up doing, slipping from a six- to a two-game margin.  Boston now faces a Baltimore team at home that will be without its ace Erik Bedard.
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Lob from Left field:  “The Iraq debate is over, at least from the perspective of actual results.  It has been over for some time.  The Congress is never going to force Bush to withdraw from Iraq…  The real issue of grave importance that remains unresolved is Iran, and it is hard to find causes for optimism there either.

There are, of course, significant steps that the Congress could take to impose at least some restraints on the Bush administration's ability to attack Iran unilaterally.  It could make clear that (there is no) authorization to attack Iran inside Iranian territory. It could enact legislation requiring Congressional approval before an attack on Iran is authorized.  It could make clear that no funding will be available for any such attack in the absence of a Resolution authorizing a new war.

   But all of that is exceedingly unlikely.  The Bush administration is obviously aware of how weak the Congress is.  Even the most mild of those measures -- an amendment which would merely have required Congressional authorization before the administration attacks Iran -- was meekly withdrawn by Democratic House leaders back in May.”  - Glenn Greenwald, Salon __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

   We’ll know more after Seattle comes to the Stadium for three games next week, but it’s next-to-impossible as of now to consider the Mariners a serious wild card threat.  Not with a schedule that takes the M's through Toronto, New York and Detroit on their current road trip and has them playing four more times with the LA Angels and three more with Cleveland before the season ends.    

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(The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
to dickstar@aol.com are welcome.  Previous Nubs can be found by scrolling below.)

  

(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/30/07)

Oh, those fluctuating end-of-summer standings:  the Yankees and Padres poised to grab part of the lead in the wild card and NL West races…And Israel brushing aside Britain to take over fourth place in the lineup of world arms merchants (behind the U.S., Russia,  and France).

Naomi Klein, author of the forthcoming book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, wrote in a recent Nation column about what’s behind the surge in arms sales, generally, with specific reference to Israel:

“Much of the growth has been in the so-called ‘homeland security’ sector: high-tech walls, unmanned drones, biometric ID’s, video surveillance, air passenger profiling systems, the training of border guards and interrogators.  Before 9/11 ‘homeland security’ barely existed as an industry…(Now) Israel has turned endless war into a brand asset.”    

Predictably, the U.S. has led the league in alertness to the economic advantages of endless war.  Since 9/11, our arms production has grown to almost Cold War levels.  We  now provide nearly half of all weapons sold in the developing world, a large percentage in places like the Middle East, where tensions and conflicts already exist. The latest example: $20 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and five other Persian Gulf states, $13 billion to Egypt, and $30 billion to Israel.  The head of nonpartisan Arms Control Association deplored what he called an arms sales policy that consists of “sell, sell, sell.”  He added that, far from insuring security, such deals are “like throwing gasoline on a brush fire.”

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Why are the Yankees and Mets going in different directions as “meaningful games” time approaches?  One obvious answer:  Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes as compared to Brian Lawrence and Dave Williams.  The Yanks’ farm system is producing good young arms in abundance.  The Mets are reduced to using retreads.

And while we’re on the subject, here is a gimlet-eyed view of the deal-making prowess of Omar Minaya:  He excels when it comes to nabbing helpful salary-dump pickups like Luis Castillo and Jeff Conine.  He doesn’t do so well on straight off-season deals.  Oh, how the Mets could use reliever Heath Bell now.  They received outfielder Ben Johnson for Bell from San Diego.  Bell is setup man for Padres closer Trevor Hoffman.  He has registered more than a strikeout an inning while recording 2.39 ERA.  Johnson has spent most of the season in Triple-A New Orleans, much of it on the DL.  Then there is the oft-mentioned (here) exchange of starter Brian Bannister for KC reliever Amborix Burgos.  Bannister leads the KC staff with an 11-7 record.  He’s won six of his last nine decisions and has an ERA of 3.27.  Burgos, like Johnson, has played most for New Orleans with long stints on the DL.

If it's any consolation, there’s a contending team in deeper trouble than the Mets.  The Tigers have lost two in a row to KC since taking three of four from the Yanks.  Cleveland, meanwhile, has won five straight, leaving Detroit four-and-a-half games behind in the AL Central and trailing both Seattle and NY by three in the wild card race.

The Cincinnati Reds took the field against Pittsburgh Tuesday, having won 10 of 13, only six-and-a-half games behind in the NL Central.  They were looking ahead to six games each against the Cubs, Cardinals and Brewers, a schedule offering the opportunity to move into contention.  They should have focused more on the Pirates, who beat them twice, knocking them eight games behind and all but ruining their impossible dream.
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(The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
to dickstar@aol.com are welcome.  Previous Nubs can be found by scrolling below.)

  

(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/29/07)

America’s reckless embrace of guns grazed baseball nearly 60 years ago in Chicago, where today the Brady Campaign will stage a protest, one of 20 in U.S. cities, against the lack of control over the deadly weapons.  In June 1949, a female stalker shot Eddie Waitkus, former Cubs first baseman then with the Phillies, ending his career. (The incident inspired Bernard Malamud to write “The Natural,” a landmark baseball novel published 55 years ago.)

Jesse Jackson, one of the co-organizers of the Chicago protest, rallied the city’s residents with an article in yesterday’s Sun-Times.  Here is an excerpt: “Gun violence now violates basic civil rights.  It terrorizes people on their own streets and in their own homes. It is time to crack down on gun traffickers.  It is perverse that politicians respond more to the extremist arguments of the gun lobby than to the common sense of their own communities.”

The problem is being felt with particular intensity these days in Detroit, where the fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager by a police officer moonlighting as a security guard continues to stir emotions seven months after the killing occurred.  The controversy surrounding the victim, 16-year-old Brandon Moore – he was shot while being ejected from a video games store – occurs against a backdrop in which eight young people, 19 and under, are killed by firearms in the U.S. each day.  An additional reason  Detroit is the focal point of the ferment connects to its prominent liberal Democratic Congressman.  Rep. John Conyers, new chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has pledged to protect handguns from any attempt to ban them. 

That the Democrats have determined to peacefully coexist with the gun lobby is hardly news.  But the spectacle of progressive Dem legislators going to bat for the firearms industry is shameful.  Especially so in Conyers’ case since his fellow African-Americans are the main victims of gun violence. 

The Nation columnist Gary Younge referred to that reality it in a recent issue:  “Gun control may have been removed from mainstream political conversation, but the guns are still out there…When guns claim lives in areas where any middle-class child might be…Americamourns.   When they are used in projects, barrios and trailer parks, it yawns.  The shots ring out just the same.  But no one can hear them in a moral vacuum.”

Baseball is indirectly involved in promoting the use of guns.  An Academy of Pediatrics  survey of commercials shown during the several MLB post-season series in previous years found an average of 10 violent commercials per game, 69 percent of which featured guns.  Indeed, a random survey of local television fare discovered that the threat of gunplay or actual shooting comprise a crucial part of the plots of close to half the films shown on the major premium TV channels.  The appearance of guns being a subversively simple way of raising the stakes in whatever story is being told.

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The multitude of (justifiably) faint-hearted Met fans who avoid watching their team -“they never play well when I do” - were vindicated last night.  The “out-of-town scoreboard” flashed during the Yankees-Red Sox game showed the Mets ahead, 2-0, early on and into the seventh inning.  When the ninth-inning score of 2-2 was shown, defeat seemed, and was, inevitable.  The only consolation: it wasn’t Billy Wagner who blew the lead.  Then again, maybe the closer really is hurt. 

After Joba Chamberlain dispatched the Red Sox in the eighth inning, Gary Sheffield was quoted on the possibility opposing teams would develop a “book” on the rookie.  “Ninety-eight-mile-an-hour fastballs at the knees,” said the usually skeptical Sheffield. “Ain’t gonna be no book.”  

Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci suspects that, widespread doubts notwithstanding, Arizona and Seattle will remain among top playoff contenders through September.  Here’s why, as of yesterday, he was a believer:

“If there's one common denominator to the surprising success of the D-Backs and Mariners it is that they almost always win games that come down to bullpens.  Seattle is tied with St. Louis for the best bullpen record in baseball (24-8). Arizona is next best (25-13).  In both cases, the Mariners and Diamondbacks rely on young, relatively cheap relievers. Both teams leave the key late-game outs to pitchers 30 and younger.”

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(The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
to dickstar@aol.com are welcome.  Previous Nubs can be found by scrolling below.)

  

politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/28/07)

Florida’s defense-challenged phenom Miguel Cabrera is too good a hitter to be forced off the Marlins’ roster.  But Alberto Gonzales - an error-prone leader in the political field -  has paid the price for his inability to field questions without dropping the ball.   Cabrera has the lowest fielding percentage - .943 – of any major league regular with at least 110 games of playing time.  That represents almost one error for every 17 chances.  Marlins manager Fredi Gonzalez  keeps running Cabrera out to third base despite his liability with the glove.  Gonzales’ manager George Bush has let him hang in since early spring, when the Justice Department’s political firing of several state attorney generals was disclosed.

Bush has apparently yanked the AG now because he sees the Democrats gaining on the  politicizing-of-government issue as the 2008 presidential playoff approaches.  Whatever the reason, the departure of Gonzales vindicates House Ways and Means Chair Charlie Rangel, who predicted Alberto would be gone last April and again in May.  Some of his constituents began to think Rangel had made an error of his own with that prediction. Happily, he now is owed an apology.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has this post-Gonzales lineup of things to do for Senate Democrats:  “The unexpected resignation of Gonzales provides a truly critical opportunity to restore real oversight to our government, to provide advocates of the rule of law with a quite potent weapon to compel adherence to the law and, more importantly, to expose and bring accountability for prior lawbreaking.  All of the investigations and scandals, currently stalled hopelessly, can be dramatically and rapidly advanced with an independent Attorney General at the helm of the DOJ.

“That is not going to happen if the Democrats allow the confirmation of one of the ostensibly less corrupt and “establishment-respected” members of the Bush circle —Michael Chertoff, Fred Fielding or Paul Clement or some Bush appointee along those lines. The new Attorney General must be someone who is not part of that rotted circle at all…since it is that circle which ought to be the subject of multiple DOJ investigations.”
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“That was an 81-mile-an-hour fastball,” said Al Leiter last night on YES.  ”That’s not good.”  He was talking about Mike Mussina, who couldn’t come close to getting the job done for the third straight time in the game against the Tigers.  It will be a surprise if Joe Torre leaves Mussina in the rotation for the homestretch.  Barring a sweep of the Red Sox beginning tonight, the Yanks will have to narrow their focus to overtaking Seattle for the wild card.  The Mariners lost to the LA Angels last night.

The Mets haven’t had an acceptable fifth starter all season.  Brian Lawrence clearly didn’t fill the bill as he demonstrated, again, last night.  The back-to-back performances of John Maine against the Dodgers and Lawrence against the Phillies illustrate why Met fans have every right to feel nervous as the “meaningful games of September approach.  After playing three more with the Phillies on this road trip, the Mets play three with the Braves in Atlanta, then three with the red-hot Reds in Cincinnati.

Both MLB Eastern Division races may tighten up, but for the moment there is no more crunchier time than in the NL Central.  The Brewers and Cubs, a game-and-a-half apart in Chicago’s favor, begin a three-game series at Wrigley tonight, while the onrushing Cardinals, only two games out, play in Houston.  After what happened last season, who would dare bet against the defending world champions?
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(The Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments to
dickstar@aol.com are welcome.  Previous Nubs can be found by scrolling below.)

(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/27/07)

What do the Democratic Congress and Milwaukee reliever Scott Linebrink have in common?  Answer:  A 14 percent success rating.  Success for a closer is based on number of saves.  Linebrink has one save in seven, the lowest percentage of any closer with five or more tries.  (J.J. Putz of Seattle has a 37-2 save record; his 95 percent rating is best in the category.)  Success for Congress is linked to its “confidence” rating with the American people.  That rating – as measured in a Gallup survey – is five points lower than the Republican Congress received a year ago.

The Nation’s Alexander Cockburn has this take on why the Dems are getting the rating they deserve:

“The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it’s escalating.  The Democrats voted the money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget.  The(y)…provid(ed) enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wiretapping…The Democrats control the House.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she wanted to.  But she didn’t.  The Democrats’ game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base to their failure(s)…

   “A war people hate, Gitmo, Bush’s police state executive orders…the Democrats have signed the White House dance card on all of them.  And guess what?  Just as their poll numbers are going down, Bush’s are going up, by five points in Gallup from early July.”     
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Back in April, remember, Duke Snider said “We’ll know how good the Mets are after they’ve played Arizona, San Diego and the Dodgers.”  Well, the final regular season returns are in:  Those three NL West teams won 12 of 23 from the Mets, another sign that despite its healthy margin over the Phillies and Braves, the home team is not all that good.   Newsday’s Shaun Powell puts it this way, implying the Mets will make the playoffs but not advance very far:

“This is not a great team. Let's not get all 1986 here. Mostly, the starting pitching makes you wonder about what Chipper Jones said a few months back, that the playoff-untested members of the staff could very well doom the Mets.  Already, we've seen signs that the magic dust inhaled by Oliver Perez and John Maine is wearing thin.  That puts a lot more importance on … relief than the Mets would like… The ace could be a coin flip between Orlando Hernandez and Tom Glavine, who are nice enough but were tougher before they became baseball senior citizens.”
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Lob from Left field:  Former NY Times correspondent Chris Hedges on Israel/Palestine –

“The tactic is clear: Israel and the United States will strangle Gaza…reduc(ing)e one of the most densely populated places on the planet to an impoverished ghetto.  Hunger and anarchy, they hope, will motivate Gazans to turn on Hamas, and the anarchy will perhaps be used to justify a reoccupation by the Israeli military and see the return of the quisling President Mahmoud Abbas, who was ousted after he led an abortive coup to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas government…

“Violence begets violence. Iraq should have taught us that… Hamas is not going to vanish because of Israeli repression.  Radical organizations, on the contrary, count on this repression to build a militant base and silence the voices of reason within their own societies. These two apocalyptic extremes - represented by Hamas and the Israeli right wing - need each other to further their frightening visions.  The Israeli right wing dreams of a broken and compliant Palestinian population living on impoverished reservations surrounded by the Israeli military.  Hamas dreams of destroying the Jewish state. Neither dream is based on reality. Neither dream will work. But a lot of people will suffer and die to find this out.”                                                     
                               -Truthdig.com
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 Seattle’s Yankee-like weekend stumble, losing two of three to Texas, took a bit of the sting out of the Bombers’ 1-2 disappointment in Detroit.  Whatever happens tonight against the Tigers, the Yanks know a midweek sweep against Boston will be needed to keep the AL East title a realistic possibility.                           
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(The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
to dickstar@aol.com are welcome.  Previous Nubs can be found by scrolling below.)

  

(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/24/07)

It’s great to have experts support notions we’ve long held, confirming their rightness.  In politics and baseball it happened recently, two experts giving substance to what we already suspected.  The subject is “hits” – hits taken by taxpayers and batters.

Investment superstar Warren Buffett, who has flirted with buying a baseball team, talked on CNBC about the federal tax code:

“I think that our tax system could use a major overhaul. I think that in a country where prosperity just showers on the super-rich... I mean, the abundance in this country for the kind of people who are our customers…is just fabulous…But a lot of people in this country are just not doing well. And a lot of times, it's not because of them, it's just because they've fallen further and further behind while members of the Forbes 400 have galloped upward .  It used to take $180 million twenty years ago to get into the Forbes 400.  It takes a billion now.  But the rest of the population has not made the same kind of progress.”

In “Baseball Economics,” a new book by Kennesaw State University (GA) professor J.C. Bradbury, the measured dynamics of hit-by-pitcher incidents is laid out, beginning with “the simple economic insight that hitting batsmen is more likely to occur when the costs are lower”:  

“Lousy batters are less likely to be hit—why put on base a guy who will have a tough time earning his way there? Teams that are losing are more likely to plunk the other team, and the larger the run deficit, the greater the likelihood that the pitcher will hit a batter.  As the chance of winning a game falls, in other words, the price of plunking, in terms of contributing to a loss, also falls.”

- Review by Robert Whaples in Books & Culture magazine

Where does Hillary Clinton stand on the federal tax code?  Does she stand with Warren Buffett?  Would she support tax revision, fight for return a to progressive tax system, if elected to the White House?  We don’t know.  Her central focus has been to project an image of toughness.  Perfect Pitch pollster Bob Sullivan amplifies his views (quoted in yesterday’s Nub) on how that image has turned Hillary’s polling negatives into positives.  He says a couple of categories of voters have contributed to the transformation:  “First, there are those who think she is a harridan, a bitch of a wife.  On reflection, they concede that makes her a formidable person for ANYONE to handle.  Then there are those who believe that, although humiliated by the philandering of Bill, she has had the iron resolve to persevere to achieve her ambitions. They see in that cold and unyielding steel the mark of a great leader.  Paradoxically, Hillary’s bitchiness takes her out of the box labeled ‘girls’ and puts her in a non-gender-defined category that makes her equal or superior to male competitors.  These, I think, are the bases for the contradictory perceptions of Hillary that somehow redound to her benefit at this early stage of the game.”

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Jorge Posada had three hits, two of them doubles, and two RBI’s Wednesday night against the Angels.  His BA is now .336.  The media have been insufficiently attentive to his performance this season.  Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci helped rectify the situation in his column the other day:

“Lost amid the spectacle of Alex Rodriguez's Most Valuable (and Visible) Player season, the molten-hot second-half run of the Yankees and the fascination with phenom Joba Chamberlain, Posada is having not only his greatest season, but also one of the greatest ever for a catcher of his age. A free agent after this season, he will make the Yankees pay for waiting to sign him -- either in the money they'll fork over or the trouble they'll have replacing him.

“Posada, who never hit better than .287, and who turned 36 last week, began this week batting .332. His OBP (.412) would also be a career-high and his slugging (.525) is near his career best. ‘Every game I've watched this season Posada has been right on everything,’ said one AL GM. ‘He's been locked in from Day One. It seems like the only way you get him out is to hope he hits it at somebody.  It hasn't been a fluke’."

The Mets, 2-4 for the season (after last night) against the Padres, another possibly playoff-bound team, now face the Dodgers, who took two of three from the Phillies and have won four of seven so far against Willie Randolph’s team.  With Mets’ bullpen performances becoming as problematic as those of their starters, the team is fortunate the Phils and Braves are hurting and faltering themselves.                                     
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(The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
to dickstar@aol.com are welcome.  Previous Nubs can be found by scrolling below.)

  

(baseball and politics, politics and baseball – 8/23/07)

Detroit’s Justin Verlander and Cincinnati’s Aaron Harang are two examples of pitchers whose coaches describe as “pleasingly wild”.  Verlander has uncorked 16 wild pitches and hit 16 batsmen – nearly one each per nine-inning game – this season.   Harang’s numbers in a league where there’s no need to brush back the designated hitter are 11 and eight. 

That Verlander is 13-5 (after a loss last night) and Harang 12-3 do not surprise their coaches.  The combination of occasional wildness and high velocity keeps batters from digging in at the plate.  They’ve turned lack of total control from a negative into a positive.  A similar transformation is evident on the political field: terrorism, a negative to the party in power when it happens (why the lack of foresight?) becomes a positive when it is a constant threat.   

Just as the Bush Administration can get away with suspending civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism (who can object if it will keep us “safe”), so presidential candidates can make points by emphasizing how tough they would be on terrorists and on all of our enemies.  Rudy Giuliani has ridden that approach to the front-running position in the Republican primary.  Hillary Clinton’s consistent militarism, which got her into trouble with many Democrats after her vote on war powers in 2002, is no longer the negative it once was.  Perfect Pitch pollster Bob Sullivan explains what’s happening this way:  “The tough image Hillary conveys underlies the idea of ‘strong leader.’  The complaint that she is a ‘tough ambitious broad using the husband who once humiliated her’ seems to be helping her generate a sense of stubborn power.  This twist is as mysterious and counterintuitive as a back-door slider.”

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 Newsday’s David Lennon seems to be a squib overconfident about the Mets’ playoff chances.  Before the team ran into Jake Peavy last night, Lennon said John Maine was dropping fast on the rotation chart.  With that in mind, Lennon speculated about the October pitching lineup: “If Pedro Martinez looks halfway decent in his return from shoulder surgery -- he's likely to make his 2007 debut against the Astros (Sept. 7-9) -- the Division Series rotation will be Orlando Hernandez, Tom Glavine and Martinez in that order.”  “Will be”?  How about that?

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President Bush’s confident assertion yesterday that “a Free Iraq” is within reach was disputed earlier this week by a group of troops on the ground in Iraq.  Here is the nub of what they said, published in the NY Times:

“To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched.  As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press reports portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.”

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Although reliable Andy Pettitte was the star performer in Anaheim last night, Joba Chamberlain of the supporting cast should not be overlooked.  Registering three strikeouts in an inning – while yielding a meaningless hit – further indicated that he’s the goods.

                     - o -
(The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
to dickstar@aol.com are welcome.  Previous Nubs can be found by scrolling below.)

  

(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/22/07)

In Cuba, where baseball is king much of the year, and admission to Cuban League games free (“Sports is a Right”), they scoff at U.S.-touted “free” elections.  “If whoever has the money wins, that is not a ‘free’ election,” Cubans say. 

That money skews fairness on political and professional athletic fields in our country is indisputable.  Ask Dennis Kucinich, outfinanced more than 50 to 1 by the two money-raising leaders in the eight-person Democratic presidential primary.  Everybody – almost certainly even he – knows that he has no chance in that race, despite his broadly appealing progressive message.  It’s a message ignored by the mainstream news media, in large part, because Kucinich has no money.

We know that being at a financial disadvantage in baseball is not necessarily fatal.  The San Diego Padres, in town for a series at Shea, have a payroll half the size of the Mets. Yet they are in the thick of both the wild card and NL West races.  San Diego can’t compete with big spending teams this time of year.  Second baseman Marcus Giles has not been hitting and they could have used Taduhito Iguchi, whom the White Sox offered before the July 31 deadline.  But the team couldn’t afford to take on Iguchi’s $1.8 million salary; he went to the Phillies.  Nevertheless, no one on the West Coast is betting against the Padres winning a third straight division title. 

Willie Randolph says Carlos Beltran, who has been on a tear since returning from the DL,  is in a “nice little rhythm” (.351, 6 HR, 18 RBI since 8/10).  More likely that performance signals Beltran is healthy after spending more than half the season pleading – through the media – for a chance to let nagging injuries heal.  

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 Lob from Left field:  “It is th(e) new confidence of Venezuela’s “invisible people” that has so inflamed those who live in suburbs called Country Club.  Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South Africans. Venezuela’s wild west media is mostly theirs; 80% of broadcasting and almost all the 118 newspaper companies are privately owned... Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA in spirit if not name. ‘We had a deadly weapon, the media,’  said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The TV station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow the elected government, lost only its terrestrial license and is still broadcasting on satellite and cable.

  If you stay up tonight to watch the Yanks-Angels game, here’s something to look for, thanks to Bill Plunkett, of the Orange County (CA) Register:

“Angels manager Mike Scioscia has a routine when he goes out to the mound to take a pitcher out of the game. Just as he gets to the mound, he claps and reaches to take the ball…It's the number of times Scioscia claps that says it all. Here's the grading system:

** No claps -- Not good, not good at all. There are probably multiple runners on base and at least one crooked number next to the opposing team's name on the scoreboard.
** 1 clap -- Satisfactory. You did your job ... but probably not that well.
** 2 claps -- Good job. If things were going bad, you didn't make them any worse.
** 3 claps -- Outstanding. You can walk to the dugout with your head held high and expect your teammates to be waitingt at the top step.
** 4 claps or more --- Rare and elusive. You must have really done something special.”

Yankee fans didn’t have to stay up too late last night – 7-1 Angels after two innings, 12-5 after three.  Looked like Mike Mussina was throwing batting practice (“With all due respect, Mussina is bad”, said John Sterling on WCBS).  Good night.

                  - o -
(The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
to dickstar@aol.com are welcome.  Previous Nubs can be found by scrolling below.)

  

(baseball and politics, politics and baseball – 8/21/07)

“We’re going to have to step up if we’re going to win this thing.”

“We gotta start hitting.”

“We’ve gotta do a better job of catching the ball.”

“Our pitchers have gotta get people out.”

The bane of the baseball fan, the sports writer, and journalists in general:  a manager – or any notable interviewee - who states the obvious.  It’s a rare day when Joe Torre or Willie Randolph say something unpredictable about their team.  And for progressive Democrats, a day when Hillary Clinton speaks daringly on any subject is inconceivable.

Clinton’s latest weak-but-safe rhetorical swing came in connection with the recall of toys:  “How dare these Chinese manufacturers send lead in toys,” she told labor leaders in Iowa.  “We’re going to stop them.”

If her polling numbers mean anything, Hillary can say “You don’t have to like it” to  party progressives.  She’s pulling ahead in Iowa and has an 18-point lead over Barack Obama nationally.  Perfect Pitch pollster Bob Sullivan looked at an ABC/Washington Post survey that found Clinton, Obama and John Edwards in a virtual dead heat in Iowa.  He said Hillary’s significant strength came from the perception of those questioned that she was a “strong leader.”  If she wins, Sullivan suggests, it will be because of voters’ belief in her “leadership” qualities.

                            -     -     -
The Yankees surprised a lot of people when they released Miguel Cairo the other day.  Cairo has attracted a legion of admirers among fans and media people in New York for his valuable play as an all-purpose utility guy with the Yanks, the Mets, and Yanks again.  Radio broadcasters John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman expressed the hope during a Tigers-Yanks game last week that Cairo would go back to Triple-A and return when the Bombers can expand their roster on September 1.  And yesterday in the Daily News, Adam Rubin said it would be “sensible” for the Mets to grab Cairo now for their pennant push.

Lob from Left field:  (On criticism of the book “The Israel Lobby”:)  “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make the argument in a convincing way that anyone who criticizes the lobby or Israel is an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.”(JM) 

(Lobbying for Israel) is (part of) the way American politics work. Sometimes powerful interest groups get what they want, and it’s not good for the country as a whole.  I would say that about the farm lobby and the Cuba lobby.” (SW)

- Co-authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in NY Times
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________     

The Yanks are now 3-2 on the tough 14-game stretch pitting them against the Tigers, Angels, Tigers again, and Red Sox through a week from Thursday.  Last night’s extra-inning loss notwithstanding, Newsday’s Mark Herrmann says Joba Chamberlain gives them added reason to be upbeat: “Chamberlain makes the Yankees more intimidating than they already were. Their footsteps are loud. You could see how shaken the Tigers looked this weekend. Since the Yankees started their current run, aside from the Mariners, the clubs competing with them have seemed as jittery as the other golfers get when they see Tiger Woods' name on the leader board.”

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(baseball and politics, politics and baseball – 8/20/07)

Pitching and defense: the traditional way good baseball teams are put together. Baseball Prospectus says that, since 1972, six times as many teams with that obvious emphasis won the World Series than did offense-oriented teams.  And in the geopolitical field, with a few exceptions, the traditional way the U.S. carried out its foreign policy - using diplomacy, the equivalent of “pitching”, and military defense of our borders and interests, paid off as well.  The firm but non-aggressive posture won America international respect, if not the affection.

Both the Mets and the Yankees are trying to win this year with offense their major weapon.  So it is with candidates and their teams in the presidential race, on both the Democratic and Republican sides.  The aggressive strategy of the Bush Administration has received a bipartisan embrace, at least during the primaries.

Paris-based International Herald Tribune columnist William Pfaff deplores what is happening on this side of the Atlantic.  He sees Barack Obama’s proposal to make a preemptive strike into remote parts of Pakistan as emblematic of the misguided change taking place here:  

“Invading Pakistan presumably was not an idea originated by the likable and idealistic Chicago community organizer and former Illinois state senator.  It is the kind of thing he and other politicians are told to say by the supposed policy experts of the cross-party Washington political class, for whom the world is a playground for American arms and action cinema.”

Salon columnist Gleen Greenwald amplifies Pfaff’s point:

“It is an implicit, unexamined belief among our foreign policy elites that the U.S. is entitled, more or less, to use military force even in the absence of being attacked or threatened with attack.

“This orthodoxy is not merely passively accepted, but actively enforced. The principal goal is to ensure that it remains a bi-partisan view so that, in turn, the question of America's role in the world is never subject to any real debate. The three "crazy, insane, wacko, fringe" presidential candidates are Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, and Dennis Kucinich. Yet the only thing they have in common (other than having been elected multiple times to the U.S. Congress) is a belief that the U.S. has been using its military force illegitimately by using it against other countries that are not attacking us. But that belief, standing alone, is enough to eject one from the mainstream.”

                      -     -     -
Yanks radio announcer John Sterling on how the Mets are doing: “They’re playing .500 ball, but the Phils and Braves lose a lot…”

The LA Angels escaped with a split of their four-game weekend series with Red Sox in Boston.  Playing .500 ball at Fenway is an accomplishment for Mike Scioscia’s team.  They’d won only four of 19 games in Boston since May 2003.  Center fielder Gary Matthews, who only joined the team in 2006, implied to LA reporters that rabid Red Sox fans had something to do with the Angels’ poor showing:

"They're loud, they're drunk, they're obnoxious," he said. “They're one of the few places you'll hear racial comments . . ."

Matthews went on to compare the scene at Yankee Stadium favorably with that at Fenway: "Yankee fans are passionate about their teams, but they're a little more couth. They have a little more class than Boston fans.  At least in New York they appreciate guys who play the game hard and play the game right and they let you know it. "In Boston, they just smack you for three straight days. They're just dogging you there the whole time.  It’s a different place.”"

The Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo, who relayed the interview content, said Matthews nevertheless made clear he enjoyed playing at Fenway.

With just a little over six weeks left of the regular season, it’s time to be arbitrary: any team trailing by more than single digits in their division is out of the race.  On that basis, half of the 14 AL teams still have a good, fair or long shot at the playoffs: Boston, the Yanks, Cleveland, Detroit, Minnesota, LA Angels and Seattle.  Two-thirds of the 18 NL teams are still arbitrarily in the chase: the Mets, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Milwaukee, St.Louis, Houston, Cincinnati, Arizona, San Diego, LA Dodgers, Colorado.  Cincinnati and Houston, nine-and-a-half and eight games behind the Cubs are in the most precarious positions.  If the Reds and Astros slip into double digits as Cincinnati would have had the Cubs won and not been rained out last night, they will no longer be recognized as playoff possibilities here.  That’s the way it is. 

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(baseball and politics, politics and baseball – 8/17/07)

Reflections on the visit of the Detroit Tigers to Yankee Stadium: Besides matching two contending teams, the series brings together two popular managers.  Jim Leyland and Joe Torre are apparently liked by their players, and certainly liked by the media and the fans.  Why?  Torre is low-key and his teams usually win.  The affection for him is understandably strongest in the NYC area.  Leyland, a winner like Torre, but more animated, has won admiration everywhere.  His popularity offers a lesson to those in the political field – the value of straightforwardness, of saying what you think, no matter how controversial.

Dr.Drew Westen, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University, has elaborated on the lesson in a new book called “The Political Brain.”  His message is particularly pertinent for Democrats.  Were the presidential candidates to heed it, they could transform the dull   round of campaign appearances into a lively exchange of ideas:      
“Voters don’t like pollster-driven politics or politicians”, Westen says, “and with good reason: They want to know what their leaders’ values are, because if they know their values, they know how they’re likely to represent them — not just on today’s issues, but on tomorrow’s, about which we may have no inkling today.  Political scientists have found that people prefer to vote for candidates who share their values, but they prefer a candidate who is strong in his or her convictions — even if they don’t share those convictions — to one whose convictions are hidden in the fine print. Being strong and principled isn’t about being left, center, or right. The fact that voters associate values with the right reflects the fact that conservatives wear their values proudly on their sleeves, and they display their principles in their voting records. Conservatives don’t vote for bills they don’t believe in.  If the public associates principles and values with the GOP, it’s time Democrats start showing voters that there’s another set of principles and values out there: their

  - From interview with Arianna Huffington, of HuffingtonPost.com

Leyland, seldom predictable, had praise after last night’s victory for Detroit’s losing pitcher the night before.  Newly arrived rookie Jair Jurrjens had pitched seven innings against Cleveland, giving the Tigers’ bullpen some rest.  “Those are big factors people don’t look at a lot of times.  It was huge.”

It may not have been huge, but starter Brian Lawrence’s yielding of four runs in five innings was the most disturbing factor in the Mets’ ugly loss last night.  If Lawrence can’t hold up his end as the fifth man in the team’s shaky rotation, staving off the Phillies and Braves will take an offensive miracle.        

More on the Tigers, from Sports Illustrated’s Jon Heyman:

“Bud Selig is said to be livid over the Tigers' record $7.3 million deal for prep pitcher Rick Porcello. Yet, the commissioner's well-known sentiments on the subject weren't about to stop the Tigers from doing what they do best, which is to spend for talent and take chances, especially in the draft.

“With the blessing of their pizza king owner Mike Ilitch, the Tigers' front office has done what it took to quickly rise from an all-time dregs team with 119 defeats to rank among baseball's elite teams and it isn't about to stop now. The way they have engineered the turnaround is to identify young talent and pay for it. Good for them.

“Porcello's four-year, major-league deal surpassed Josh Beckett's $7 million contract eight years ago as the biggest for a drafted high-school pitcher.”

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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/16/07)           

   Team USA:: Will it be batting from the left or right side of the political plate, if the Democrats take total control in Washington next year?

The righthanded London Economist took a swing this week at that seemingly hittable question and produced this European slant on the answer:

“Some of the changes that would stem from a more Democratic America would be unwelcome.  The Democrats are moving to the left not just on health care, but also on trade; and a more protectionist America would soon make the world's poor regret Mr Bush's passing.

“(But) America, even if it shifts to the left, will still be a conservative force on the international stage.  Mrs Clinton might be portrayed as a communist on talk radio in Kansas, but set her alongside France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany's Angela Merkel… or any other supposed European conservative, Mrs Clinton is the more right-wing.  She also mentions God more often than the average European bishop. As for foreign policy, the main Democratic candidates are equally staunch in their support of Israel; none of them has ruled out attacking Iran; Mr Obama might take a shot at Pakistan; and few of them want to cede power to multilateral organizations.”

   The Economist apparently expects Hillary Clinton to win the presidency, and current poll results support that expectation.  Hillary has edged ahead of John Edwards in Iowa and is seven points in front of Barack Obama in New Hampshire.   And in a survey of how a national face-off involving her and Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani would go, Clinton comes out on top, albeit by the slimmest of margins.

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In taking their third series of the season from the Yankees yesterday, the Orioles did something no Baltimore team has done in a quarter of a century – that is, since 1982.  Michael Kay made that observation on YES before Shelly Duncan hit a two-out, game-tying three-run HR in the ninth, and the Orioles raked Mariano Rivera for three winning runs in the 10^th.

The defending world champions are coming on strong: The Cardinals, having won seven of 10 while both the Brewers and the Cubs were faltering, have moved to win three-and-a-half games of the NL Central lead.  Three-team races (at least) are thus shaping up for the homestretch of the three NL divisions.

ESPN’s Steve Phillips predicts neither the Mets nor the Yankees will make the playoffs.  He says – as we’ve observed all season – the Mets have “pitching issues”, and that the Yankees offense will certainly cool off.  Atlanta will win the NL East, he says, and Colorado take the wild card along with Seattle in the AL.   Met fans, remembering how Phillips gave Jason Isringhausen to Oakland and Melvin Mora to Baltimore in terrible deals when he was team GM, are entitled to say “What does he know?” 

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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/15/07)

Quiz for record-savvy baseball fans:  Who is Sammy Khalifa, and what is his claim to diamond fame?  Answer: Khalifa is the one Arab-American who played major league ball, albeit for only two-and-a-half seasons.  He played shortstop for the Pirates in the mid-eighties, batting no better than .237 in his best season (’85).  Khalifa’s obvious distinction is that he helps fill out the racial/ethnic/cultural mosaic which makes baseball such an attractive sport.  He left the game 20 summers ago, at just about this time. 

Khalifa’s anniversary is coincidental with the latest disturbing development in the effort to launch an NYC public school dedicated to the study of Arabic language.  Stories in the New York Post and The Sun have stirred up fears in the two Brooklyn communities – Park Slope and Boerum Hill – where the middle school was, and now is supposed to open this fall.  Both papers, and Fox TV stations, seem to equate anything Arabic with radical Islam.   As a consequence, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein worries publicly that the Arabic language school’s “viability” has been “endangered.”  Local elected officials have maintained low profiles on the matter.  Mayor Bloomberg continues to express support for the school but he, too, has clearly been shaken by the media rabble-rousing.

A revealing sidelight to the hysteria: the Department of Education has not been able to find an Arabic-speaking principal to replace the woman forced to resign because of her connection to the word intifada.  The need for more Arabic speakers – in the city and nation – is obvious and urgent.  The term madrassa has been used in various media accounts to describe what the school could become:  allegedly a training center for potential terrorists.  In fact, the Arabic word madrassa simply means a school.  Similarly, intifada does not denote violence in Arabic but – according to native speakers interviewed by “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman Monday morning - a “shaking off of pressures”.  That this fear-based malaise should fester in a city of proud diversity is particularly dismaying.

                                -     -     -      
In this week’s New Yorker, Roger Angell dismisses any questioning of Barry Bonds’ role as baseball’s new home run king.  And he does it from a seldom cited perspective:

 “(My) hope is for… a shift in the altogether mystifying popular notion that the lifetime home-run mark is somehow sacrosanct—“baseball’s most hallowed record,” as the news reports called it the other day.  Hallowed but hollow, perhaps, since home-run totals are determined…most of all, by the outer dimensions of the major-league parks, which have always varied widely and have been deliberately reconfigured in the sixteen ballparks built since 1992, thus satisfying the owners’ financial interest in more and still more home runs.  Bonds has been called a cheater, but the word should hardly come up in a sport whose proprietors, if they were in charge of the classic Olympic hundred-metre dash, would stage it variously at a hundred and six metres, ninety-four, a hundred and three, and so forth, and engrave the resulting times on a tablet.”

This is for Mets fans, who think their team has troubles.  Imagine what Dodger fans are thinking.  Columnist T.J. Simers gives us an idea in yesterday’s LA Times:

“The Dodgers have become a Los Angeles embarrassment. One playoff win since 1988, and now sitting in fourth place.  Behind the Rockies.

”This season, in a league void of standout teams and a division featuring nothing special in Arizona and San Diego, the Dodgers have played like Choking Dogs. They have lost seven straight series, crumbling against the sub .500-likes of Houston, Cincinnati, San Francisco and St. Louis.”

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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/14/07)

The stock market is behaving these days with the volatility of the AL East race, the Dow Jones losing ground as fast as the Red Sox to the surging Yankees.  What should a baseball fan who is a raw rookie as an investor do amid the turbulence?  Stay cool, says investment wizard Warren Buffett, the way Derek Jeter does as he steps to bat in a tight situation.  Or, more specifically, the way one of the game’s greatest hitters did.  Here is how Buffett put it in an interview with the New York Times:

“The most important thing in investing…is what (Ted) Williams said was the most important thing in hitting” — waiting for the right pitch.

“What’s nice about investing is you don’t have to swing at pitches.  You can watch pitches come in one inch above or one inch below your navel, and you don’t have to swing.  No umpire is going to call you out. You can wait for the pitch you want.”

Buffett, a longtime resident of Omaha, Nebraska, on investing in baseball franchises:

“Up until the age of about 20, I probably did think if I got rich I would buy a baseball team…Then I got rich, and I changed my mind…

   “If I was in a major league city, who knows?  But…no, I will not be buying a major league team.

“Bill Gates asked me if he should buy into (the Seattle Mariners).   I said: ‘If you love baseball, buy it. But if you buy and you don’t win every year, you’ll be a bum.’ (Gates did not buy)…

“If you buy teams at present prices, you will not do well, in my view, in terms of the actual income that will result from that ownership compared with the price you pay. But as the super-rich get richer and there are a limited number of teams, they love the sport, and just like they buy paintings, there will be more of those people who buy teams.”

                                  -     -     -
Newsday’s Wallace Matthews, telling it like it is about the Mets:

“A year ago at this time, the division lead was 14 games and the only doubt left seemed to be whether Jose Reyes, David Wright or Carlos Beltran would be the MVP.  The entire second half of the season, it seemed, was a waiting game. Waiting for October.

”Now, despite the gaudy payroll and the presumptuous slogan, the Mets seem to have finally realized that October is guaranteed to no one, and that by Labor Day, the current NL East standings - Mets on top of Phillies and Braves - easily could be reversed.

”They now head to Pittsburgh for three, then Washington for three more, but after that comes a stretch that will tell us just how good these Mets really are. Three each against the Padres and Dodgers, then four in Philadelphia before three in Atlanta.

”The 2006 Mets essentially passed through the season without a test until Game 7 of the NLCS, a test they failed. This year they are experiencing something new, a pennant race, and it remains to be seen how they will bear up under the pressure.”

One pitcher from an NY team made the top four “most intimidating” list in a survey of 469 MLB players by Sports Illustrated.  The four: Randy Johnson, D-backs, 15 pct., Jake Peavy, Padres, 13 pct., Johan Santana, Twins, 12 pct., Roger Clemens, Yanks, 10 pct.                                         

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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/13/07)

A question that must be faced:  The Inevitability of Hillary?

Several weeks ago, The Nub likened Hillary Clinton to the Boston Red Sox.  Both were favorites to go all the way in their respective races.  The only way the other Democratic candidates could hope to stop Clinton, it said here, was to win an equivalent of a presidential primary wild card – in Iowa or New Hampshire.  The “bounce” from such a victory might – with a shaky “m” – lead to an upset.

Today, a new analogy:  More certain than the Red Sox winning the AL East championship is the prospect of the Yankees making the AL playoffs, one way or the other.  Hence, a linkage between the Yanks and Hillary based on what seems to be their shared inevitability.

Reinforcing the sense that Hillary may well have become unstoppable is this Los Angeles Times report on her growing appeal to conservatives:

“National Review Editor Rich Lowry… has had strangely respectful thoughts lately about Clinton. In a July 27 column, he expressed genuine admiration for her political skill, especially in managing to placate the left wing of the Democratic Party on Iraq without repudiating her vote for the war nor making herself patently unacceptable as a potential commander in chief. It was "brilliant politics," Lowry conceded.

”Clinton's unwillingness to pander to her own party's base on Iraq has won her grudging respect from another unlikely source as well: William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. On Aug. 7, he was quoted in the Washington Post saying that compared with Sen. Barack Obama, who is trying to energize the left to raise his falling poll numbers, she is looking quite presidential.

"Obama," Kristol said, "is becoming the antiwar candidate, and Hillary Clinton is becoming the responsible Democrat who could become commander in chief in a post-9/11 world.”        
                                                          - Bruce Barnet

                                     -     -     -
Games this past week put into focus a key reason why the Yankees are forging ahead of the Mets in W-L percentage:  a superior farm system.  Exhibits A & B: Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain.  The Mets have had nothing to compare with those two.  Indeed, as has been said here before, except for sophomore Lastings Millidge and injured rookie Carlos Gomez (both still in the “potential” category), the Mets’ system has yielded little since the Jose Reyes and David Wright promotions, now some four years old.  Oh, there was also Scott Kazmir, but it is too painful to talk about him.  The record indicates that Omar Minaya, while an excellent judge of other teams’ players, is insufficiently attentive to the Mets’ minor league development program.

Back to the Yankees’ new gun Chamberlain:  the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo relayed this assessment of him by an AL scout:

"You take notice in a hurry.  On his first pitch, it's 97 [miles per hour].  Normally a guy builds up to it. But then he gets up to 98 and he comes in with a slider at 88 or 89. You start thinking of this kid like you did when you first saw [Jonathan] Papelbon.  You can see he's got that fire in his eyes.

"But he's very young, so we'll see how he reacts being in the thick of a pennant race in New York.  Just watching him… he seems to be able to handle things.”
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(baseball and politics, politics and baseball – 8/10/07)

   Patriotic excess:  No subject elicits more mail than that of the regular seventh-inning “support-our-troops” spectacle at Yankee Stadium. 

Murray Polner, whose book “Branch Rickey: A Biography” has been updated and recently reissued, makes a telling point – “Our diamond and gridiron ‘heroes’ are still praised in some quarters as ‘warriors’.”  In fact, he says, most notably today (Pat Tillman is a pro football exception), “baseball players stay home while their bosses…wave the flag.”

The hint of a warrior image associated with baseball, it says here, stems from the exploits of one man, Ted Williams.  Remembered most for his .406 batting average in 1941, Williams joined the Navy in 1942 and served as a flight instructor in World War II.  As such he was out of harm’s way, as were most major leaguers in the military then, playing baseball for service teams.

Baseballlibrary.com tells the subsequent Williams-as-war-hero story:

“Williams was called up to active duty in the Korean War after six games in 1952… Williams was a pilot and flew combat missions over Korea.  Hit by small-arms fire during one run, Williams crash-landed his crippled jet and escaped from the flaming wreckage. Shortly thereafter he contracted pneumonia and was sent stateside after thirty-nine missions.”

How far from the Williams tradition has baseball come?  Polner, quoting a published source, says there were apparently only four major leaguers who served in the Vietnam War.  And in Iraq today, none – a perfect game of avoidance for the home team.

                                    -     -     -
The Mets are heading for the NL East showdown with a Russian roulette rotation –sometimes their regular starters squeeze off bullets, as did Tom Glavine and Orlando Hernandez, sometimes blanks – Oliver Perez and John Maine.  The season-long unpredictability on display again this week does not inspire confidence in the team’s chances, especially with offensive firepower reduced by the continuing absence of Carlos Beltran.   

The Yankees, we know, will persevere into the playoffs, with no worse than a wild card spot.  The comfort in that certainty is what makes Yankee fans so enviable.  On the other hand, if suffering ennobles, Mets fans can wallow in a feeling of moral superiority over their materially more fortunate brethren. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
 Lob from Left field:  Author/documentarian/journalist John Pilger provides a different perspective on the history of the U.S. media, dating back 80 years with the establishment of “corporate journalism” -

“(The)history…began with the arrival of corporate advertising.  As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment - -objective, impartial, balanced…

“What the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism…Think of the role Judith Miller played in the New York Times in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work became a scandal, but only after it played a powerful role in promoting an invasion based on lies…

“Consider how the power of this invisible government has grown.  In 1983 the principle global media was owned by 50 corporations, most of them American. In 2002 this has fallen to just 9 corporations. Today it is probably about 5.”                                                       
                        
  - From text of speech printed on CommonDreams.org                                                                                                                                                   __________________________________________________________________________________________________

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(baseball and politics, politics and baseball – 8/9/07)

Music history lesson (national pastime division):

“He started baseball's famous streak
That's got us all aglow
He's just a man and not a freak,
Joltin' Joe DiMaggio.

Joe, Joe DiMaggio
We want you on our side…”

It is doubtful that popular songwriters will compose lyrics and melody to celebrate Barry Bonds’ record-setting performance as they did Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941.   It’s not just the steroids controversy; it is surely also that contemporary music doesn’t lend itself to such subjects as baseball heroics. 

Popular music had changed when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974.  And, lest anyone link the fact that Bonds and Aaron were black to the real and presumed musical silence about their feats, let’s recall a modest 1949 hit about another African-American player:

“Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball?
Did he hit it boy, and that ain’t all.
He stole home.
Yes, yes, Jackie's real gone.”

Americans stopped singing about both individual baseball players and war in the 1940’s.  U.S. participation in World War II felt “right” to most Americans.  They did not feel the same about Korea, Vietnam or either of the two Iraq wars.  A 1966 song “Ballad of the Green Berets” was the lone exception over the past six decades.  In an unpopular war - Vietnam - it achieved noteworthy success.   Similar notable exceptions on the subject of baseball were Dave Frishberg’s and Terry Cashman’s tributes to groups of players and the game itself, including, respectively  - “Van Lingle Mungo” and “Talkin’ Baseball: Willie, Mickey and the Duke.”

                                                     -    -    -
Why last night’s squeaker win over the Braves was extra-sweet music for the Mets and their fans:  it sets up a must-win situation today, not for the Mets but for Atlanta.  If John Maine is on, the home team could move six games ahead of the Braves in the loss column.  Of course, as with any member of the Mets’ rotation, that’s a big “if.”

Gordon Edes wrote in yesterday’s Globe of “Bostonfans wishing their vehicles were not equipped with rearview mirrors.”  Such fans saw a stumble by the streaking Yanks last night, but they can’t take too much comfort from it: Facing Toronto ‘s Roy Halladay (13-5) means a potential loss for any team on any given day or night.

 Orange County (CA) Register columnist Mark Whicker on why fans’ preoccupation with the home run is misguided:

“No American League (team) home run leader has won the World Series since the 1984 Detroit Tigers. No National League home run leader has won the Series (after a 162-game season) since the 1976 Cincinnati Reds.

“From ’76 until today, just 10 NL teams have even qualified for the playoffs after leading the league in bombs.  From ’84 until today, just five AL teams have done so.

“Manny Ramirez of the Red Sox led the AL in 2004, and his team was a world champion. You have to reach back to Oakland’s Reggie Jackson for the previous time — in 1973. No HR leader in the National League has popped the final champagne bottle since Philadelphia’s Mike Schmidt in 1980.

“At the end of (Tuesday’s) games, there were 23 players who had 20 home runs this season. Only Prince Fielder of Milwaukee played on a division leader.”

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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/8/07)

   The seventh-inning patriotic excess at Yankee Stadium this past weekend inadvertently called attention to heroic comparisons on the baseball and battle fields.  Alex Rodriguez established himself as a member of MLB’s pantheon of heroes with his 500^th home run within hours of similar heroics by Barry Bonds and Tom Glavine.  But where are our individual military heroes? 

We’ve taken to refer to all our “heroic” fighting men and women.  Two specific instances of actions “above and beyond the call of duty” were reported and celebrated.  They involved Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq and Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.   Unfortunately, as we know, in both those cases, the actions were fabricated.  Lynch, depicted by the Pentagon as “Little Girl Rambo who went down fighting,” was wounded while on non-combatant patrol and rescued from an Iraqi hospital.  She publicly deplored the “hype” that distorted what she experienced.

In Pat Tillman’s case, an army release described the former NFL star as having died while storming a hill to take out an enemy.  Five weeks later, the Pentagon conceded Tillman had probably lost his life, not while attacking, but by getting hit with friendly fire.  Medical examiners speculated that fellow Rangers shot him from as close as 10 yards away.

The nature of the wars being fought – against an elusive enemy in terrain planted with mines and roadside bombs – militates against legendary heroes emerging, as did Army Sergeant Alvin York in World War I and Air Corps Captain Colin Kelly in World War II.  The lack of such heroism is especially inevitable when a central assignment given many troops is to make sure they stay alive.
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It was send-a-message night, the opening game of an important Braves-Mets three-game series.  And the Braves did the sending last night.  Not a good time for the Mets to have to face John Smoltz, which they’ll be doing tonight.

Remember when the cry used to be “Break up the Yankees”?  Well, it may be recycled soon, with the five-of-five, eight-of-11 Yanks apparently about to take control of the AL wild card race.  

Sports Illustrated’s Jon Heyman predicts that Mike Piazza will clear waivers and go to a contending team in need of a bat.  Mike can pick and choose where that will be since he has a no-trade clause in his Oakland A’s contract.
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(baseball and politics, politics and baseball – 8/7/07)

   “How did they let Barry Bonds get away with it?”

   The e-mailed query from a Nubbite about the co-holder of baseball’s home run record  triggered a like question relating to the current political game: “How did the Democrats let the Republicans get away with expanding eavesdropping in Congressional votes over the weekend?”

The answer in both cases, it says here, has to do with clinging to a satisfactory status quo and an unwillingness to risk change.  Baseball learned in 1998 how popular the race to set a new home run record for a season was with the public.  Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who hit 70 and 66 homers, became national celebrities, and attendance, owing mainly to their mano-a-mano battle, soared:  it went up more than 11-and-a-half percent over the 1997 total..  Rumors abounded that both players were using steroids.  But baseball – the owners and players union – decided not to mess with a good thing.

On the expanded eavesdropping bill, 41 Congressional Democrats joined 186 Republicans to insure passage by a 227-183 score.  In the Senate, 18 Democrats (including one Independent) joined 41 Republicans and Independent Joe Lieberman to pass the bill’s upper-chamber version by 60-28,   Just as those complicit in baseball’s inaction feared the consequences of challenging the trend toward bigger bodies and home run totals, the complicit Democrats were afraid of the consequences of being targeted as soft on terrorism.  The final total score: Team Anti-Terrorism 287, Team Pro-Civil Liberties 211. 

Both the baseball player and the new surveillance law could face a change in status reasonably soon.  A federal grand jury is looking into a possible indictment of Bonds in the next several months.  And the eavesdropping law may have a temporary duration.  It could be allowed to expire six months from now… if the Democrats can be persuaded to stand together.  

A potential problem: Six of the nine Democratic women in the Senate who voted joined the Republicans in support of the bill.  Hillary Clinton voted no (as did all her fellow presidential candidates).  Two women – Barbara Boxer of California and Patty Murray of Washington – did not vote.  So eight of the 11 female Democratic senators either voted with the Bush Administration or not against it on this issue.  Those numbers suggest a stronger-than-expected security-mindedness on the part of that Democratic contingent. 

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Mariano Rivera seldom looked stronger than he did blowing away Toronto’s two, three and four hitters – Alex Rios, Vernon Wells and Frank Thomas – in the ninth inning of yesterday’s 5-4 NY victory.  Mariano was mixing 96mph fastballs in with his put-away cutter. 

At the other end of the Yankees relief corps spectrum, lefthanded batters were hitting .312 against Mike Myers, the team’s get-lefties-out specialist.  So Myers, who looked and sounded like a good guy, is now gone.    

Willie Randolph says he’s “hopeful” Carlos Beltran will be back off the DL tomorrow, making him available to play in the second game of the three-game Mets series with the Braves.  That’s also the night John Smoltz is scheduled to pitch for Atlanta.  It would thus be especially helpful to have Beltran back.  But Willie knows Carlos, knows that his all-star center fielder is not noted for being a quick healer.
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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – update 8/6/07)

Although Tom Glavine’s feat was the big news last night, Luis Castillo’s heat prostration near the end of the Cubs game was the symbolic, overarching story of these summer days.  The heat is on…politically, journalistically and athletically, and it shows:

To recapitulate what’s been happening - Barack Obama is believed by many Democrats to have made a pressure-prompted “rookie mistake” in portraying himself as a Bush-type pre-emptive attacker who would send forces into Pakistan uninvited to flush out terrorists.

And the contest between Joe Bruno, at bat, and Eliot Spitzer in the field is the only game the NY political press has to cover, so it is being reported with feverish intensity.  That superfluous coverage comes despite the absence of a single sign that laws were broken or that anyone except party insiders really cares.

Baseball teams are showing wilting signs as the pennant races start to sizzle – ineffective pitching, sloppy defense, and double-digit hits and scores becoming more and more frequent.   Example: With day games dominating on a sultry Thursday last week, five of 12 contests ended with at least one of the teams scoring in double digits. 

Rudy Giuliani inadvertently reinforced the sense – conveyed through unflattering press – that wife Judith was not ready for prime presidential campaign time.  Rudy called her “rookie of the year” as a political spouse.  Another heat-of-battle mistake.

Newspapers are bursting these dog days with non-news.  Of the six stories on the front page of yesterday’s Times, two were informational concerning Congressional developments, one was propaganda on the British military in Afghanistan, two were features of less than urgent interest and one was a less-than-totally-positive report on an interview with Judith Giuliani conducted days ago.  Today the score is information 6, news – something unearthed that somebody wants to suppress – 0.    

While the Yankees have moved to within only a half-game of Detroit and a virtual tie with Seattle for first place in the wild card race, Minnesota has reentered the AL Central battle, pulling to within four-and-a-half games of division-leading Cleveland.  Meanwhile, the White Sox, having won four straight and seven of 11, are edging back into long-shot contention, 10 games out.  And you gotta love the late-season surge of the Washington Nats, led by former Mets coach Manny Acta.  The Nats have won six straight and nine of 11, and – would you believe? – they’ve overtaken the Florida Marlins in the NL East.  Washington just swept the no-pushover Cardinals.   

Johnny Damon is a surprise name on Nick Cafardo’s list of players whom teams tried to move at the trade deadline.  The “help unwanted” list included several predictable names; among them: Kyle Farnsworth, Jose Contreras, Sammy Sosa, Richie Sexson, Adam Dunn and Willy Mo Pena.  Here’s Cafardo’s take on Damon as it appeared in yesterday’s Boston Globe: 

“ Injuries really took their toll.  Normally there would be teams lined up for him. Now the Yankees are using him as the designated hitter and playing him in left and have no plans for him to return to center, where Melky Cabrera is established.  Damon is upset. Could the Red Sox wind up looking good on this one?”

Amid the Mets’ impressive victory last night – and the completion of a 4-2 road trip against two tough teams – there was a sense of the changing of the guard.  Shawn Green is a liability in right field; his batting average has fallen under .270 and he’s shown little power.  Lastings Millidge is coming on strong – three for four last night to bring his BA to .305, and a key stolen base.  Millidge is no Carlos Beltran in center field, but would be an upgrade in right, where the Nub suspects Green’s days as a starter are numbered.  

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   (The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/6/07)

The heat is on…politically, journalistically and athletically, and it shows:

To reiterate - Barack Obama is believed by many Democrats to have made a pressure-prompted “rookie mistake” in portraying himself as a Bush-type pre-emptive attacker who would send forces into Pakistan uninvited to flush out terrorists.

And the contest between Joe Bruno, at bat, and Eliot Spitzer in the field is the only game the NY political press has to cover, so it is being reported on with feverish intensity.  That superfluous coverage comes despite the absence of a single sign that laws were broken or that anyone except party insiders really cares.

Baseball teams are showing wilting signs as the pennant races start to sizzle – ineffective pitching, sloppy defense, and double-digit hits and scores becoming more and more frequent.   Example: With day games dominating on a sultry Thursday last week, five of 12 contests ended with at least one of the teams scoring in double digits. 

Rudy Giuliani inadvertently reinforced the sense – conveyed through unflattering press – that wife Judith was not ready for prime presidential campaign time.  Rudy called her “rookie of the year” as a political spouse.

Newspapers are bursting these dog days with non-news.  Of the six stories on the front page of yesterday’s Times, two were informational concerning Congressional developments, one was propaganda on the British military in Afghanistan, two were features of less-than-urgent interest, and one was a less-than-totally-positive report on an interview with Judith Giuliani conducted days ago.    

While the Yankees have moved to within only a game of Detroit and a half-game of Seattle for first place in the wild card race, Minnesota has reentered the AL Central battle, pulling to within four-and-a-half games of division-leading Cleveland.  Meanwhile, the White Sox, having won four straight and seven of 11, are edging back into long-shot AL Central contention, 10 games out.  And you gotta love the late-season surge of the Washington Nats, led by former Mets coach Manny Acta.  The Nats have won six straight and nine of 11, and – would you believe? – they’ve overtaken the Florida Marlins in the NL East.  Washington just swept the no-pushover Cardinals.    

Johnny Damon is a surprise name on Nick Cafardo’s list of players whom teams tried to move at the trade deadline.  The “help unwanted” list included several predictable names; among them: Kyle Farnsworth, Jose Contreras, Sammy Sosa, Richie Sexson, Adam Dunn and Willy Mo Pena.  Here’s Cafardo’s take on Damon as it appeared in yesterday’s Boston Globe:  

“ Injuries really took their toll.  Normally there would be teams lined up for him. Now the Yankees are using him as the designated hitter and playing him in left and have no plans for him to return to center, where Melky Cabrera is established.  Damon is upset. Could the Red Sox wind up looking good on this one?”

Another upset player is the Mets’ Paul Lo Duca.  On SNY the other day, Ron Darling told of asking the benched first-string catcher how he was feeling after being injured last weekend.  “Well enough,” Lo Duca replied.  Darling speculated that the reply meant Lo Duca was 90 percent, which the catcher felt should be good enough for Willie Randolph to play him.  Lo Duca wanted to catch Tom Glavine’s possible 300^th victory last Tuesday and again last night.  It adds up to unconcealed ill will between catcher and manager.

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   (The  Nub is a team effort skippered by Dick Starkey.  Comments
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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/3/07)

At the end-of-July trade deadline, Team Obama made a little-noticed move: it added a new persona.  Joining captain Barack, he of soft-but-soaring rhetorical line drives was a hard-hitting alter ego: Obama, the tough anti-terrorist.  The new Obama launched long-range verbal bombs Wednesday at Pakistan and its president..  “There are terrorists holed up in (Pakistan’s) mountains who murdered 3.000 Americans,” he said, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President (Pervez) Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

Barack’s slugging mode has disconcerted many fans in America’s Left field.  They see it as a sign his team feels opponent Hillary Clinton scored with her charge a week ago that Barack would be an inexperienced lightweight as president.  Another possible motive for the wild-swinging change: the unavoidable fact that Hillary’s poll margin over Obama has widened to roughly 2 to 1.

Former White House Counsel Theodore Sorensen, comparing JFK and Obama, and suggesting, by implication, why Obama – despite his campaign’s inability to gain traction - would be a stronger candidate than Clinton:

“Some Catholic political leaders … thought (JFK’s) candidacy might raise unwanted controversies…But, in time, Kennedy's speeches and interviews strongly favoring traditional church-state separation reassured all but the most bigoted anti-Catholics. In the end, despite his ethnic handicap, Kennedy proved to be less divisive than his major opponent, fellow senator Hubert Humphrey. Obama may prove the same.
                                                                                            - New Republic

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In yesterday’s wild White Sox-Yankees game, Joe Girardi on YES said switch-hitting Wilson Betemit’s power was to left center.  Moments later, Betemit hit a three-run homer on his first AB with the Yanks.  The ball went almost exactly where Girardi said the former Dodger would be likely to hit it.  In his debut with the Dodgers, Scott Proctor got an SF out with one pitch and left the game with an 0.00 ERA after one-third of an inning.

As is often the case, revealing news at July 31 trade deadline time emerges from deals not made.  The Mets offered their former top draft pick Philip Humber to Washington as part of a deal for reliever Chad Cordero.  Humber is registering fairly good numbers at New Orleans in this, his first season of organized ball.  He is 10-6 and has won seven of his last nine.  He owns a middling 4.21 ERA and a better-than-three-to-one strikeout/walk ratio.  He seems to be a good prospect, just not an outstanding one.  Which is probably why the Nats didn’t bite.
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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/2/07)

Onetime Pittsburgh Pirate farmhand Mario Cuomo advanced the Spitzer Scandal story a base the other day when he offered at a pitch thrown by the New York Post.  Asked what the current governor had to do to blow away the Get-Joe Bruno brouhaha, the former governor could have said “hang tough.”  Instead, Mario said if Eliot really wanted the rhubarb to end quickly rather than fade slowly, he should be ready to testify under oath.  In short order that’s what Spitzer has decided to do – but not with Mario’s son, AG Andrew, serving as umpire for the proceedings.  The governor will go instead before the State Ethics Commission, whose chief umpire is John Feerick, whom he appointed.

One sure way this will turn out is to keep the game going longer than it might have.  Law-breaking does not seem to be an issue.  But Spitzer’s willingness to testify about whether he knew his teammates were plotting against Bruno could open an equipment-bag full of stuff containing politically embarrassing traces of dirt.   So the governor looks to be committing an error; his best option, it says here, would have been to stay cool and let the story run its frenetic hot-weather course, leaving him with little worse than a mud-spattered uniform. 

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Take it from The Nub, before the pre-July 31 trade deadline the Mets had a slightly better than even chance of making the playoffs.  Now, with the Braves much stronger than they were in offense and pitching (and the Phils tough as ever), the Mets have a provisional 50-50 shot.  The proviso has to do with Carlos Beltran.  If Beltran can return to the lineup healthy next week, the team should be able to stay in the three-team NL East dogfight until September, when Pedro Martinez may finally return.  If Pedro has anything left – a second big IF - the Mets might become playoff repeaters, after all.  

The Yankees are fortunate Cleveland did nothing to upgrade deal-wise, except to add Kenny Lofton.  The veteran former Yank may make more of a difference to the Tribe than Wilson Betemit will to the Bombers, but not that much more.  Detroit, struggling to stay ahead of the Indians in the AL Central, made no trading changes, so the Tigers, too, are there to be overtaken in the wild card competition.    

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lob from Left field – on the Bush Administration plan to provide billions in advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia and other Mideast countries to deter Iran’s growing influence:

“While the $20-billion weapons package will no doubt be supported vigorously by lobbyists for a defense industry that stands to make a financial killing from the deal, it is expected to meet opposition in Congress, particularly from those who fear the impact of this new weaponry on the security of Israel. No problem-”senior officials” in the White House assured The New York Times that the Saudi arms package would be balanced with a $30.4-billion military aid package for Israel. Then, of course, some large amount of military “aid,” to the tune of $13 billion, will also have to be extended to Egypt to keep the dictator in Cairo on board.”

“What a deal! The Saudis pony up billions in cash, American taxpayers come up with an amount more than twice as high to keep the Israelis and Egyptians happy, and U.S. war profiteers, Bush’s most reliable core constituency group, make out like bandits. Hey, it’s only money, and the only real cost might be to folks who get caught in the line of fire of those weapons in wars to come for generations. But not to worry, most of them don’t vote in U.S. elections anyway.”

         - Robert Scheer, truthdig.com __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
When Mets reliever Guillermo Mota faltered Tuesday night against Milwaukee, as Pedro Feliciano did a few nights earlier against Washington, thoughts here turned to Duaner Sanchez.  Remember that in the first three months of last season – before he injured a shoulder in a taxi accident - Sanchez was a set-up man extraordinaire.  The reliever, who seemed on the road to recovery in March, suffered a setback…and has since been on the missing persons’ list.  He’s now a full-fledged mystery man on the 60-day DL.  The Mets once had a second-string catcher named Jesse Gonder.  He could hit but seldom was used.  Joe Garagiola was asked why Gonder saw so little action.   “He doesn’t want to play.  He wants to sit on the bench and collect his paycheck.  He’s what we call a ‘dead body’.”  Let’s hope Sanchez isn’t in that category.

                                                         - o -
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(politics and baseball, baseball and politics – 8/1/07)

If he were a baseball player, Charlie Schumer would be a left-leaning right-handed pitcher with a deceptive delivery.  Energetic, he would move around the mound making it difficult for opponents to get a fix on his mechanics.  He would pick his spots, a fiery ace against some opponents, an absentee from his team’s rotation against others.

The senior New York senator’s latest performance, pitching for, not against, tax breaks for certain financial industries, has caused progressive NY spectators to say “What do you expect?”  They’ve watched Schumer work against their agenda on Iraq; after voting to give President Bush war powers in October 2002, he kept quiet about the invasion and occupation until the conflict started going badly more than a year after “shock and awe.”  These same spectators, hopeful that Schumer would stand against Bush’s appointment of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general in January 2005, heard their senator call the nomination of the White House’s torture-policy enabler “encouraging.”   

In fairness, Schumer had some good stretches, too; he was the true ace of the 2006 Democratic vote-getting team, pitching brilliantly in the fields of fund-raising, recruitment and strategy.  The effort, we know, led to a decisive party victory and a regaining of control of Congress.  But he had everybody asking “Where’s Charlie?” last May when the Senate voted on the latest round of Iraq war funding.  While his New York colleague Hillary Clinton voted against the bill, Schumer stayed on the bench, nursing a case of Lyme Disease.

 “You have to be careful,” the senator says about his involvement in the current tax-break contest.  That’s the way he’s pitched since the start of his career, fooling the fans with his daring demeanor and dazzling windup.

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Eric Gagne to the Red Sox makes it just about official:  the Yankees have only one playoff hope, the wild card.  Yankee fans have reason to be puzzled: the Red Sox didn’t give up that much – a marginal starting pitcher, a journeyman Triple A outfielder and a lower minors prospect.  Where was Brian Cashman?  Could he not have matched  Boston’s offer?  Is the answer that, all things being equal, the Rangers would prefer not to deal with the Yankees?  In any event, a grudging hats off to Theo Epstein and the Red Sox…

…And to Braves General Manager John Schuerholz for following up the blockbuster deal for Mark Teixeira by obtaining reliever Octavio Dotel from Kansas City.  The Mets may have solidified their infield with the addition of Luis Castillo, but they still need to improve their pitching and outfield defense as the pennant race homestretch nears.

Yankee fans have some reason for post-7/31 satisfaction:  If they’ve been watching Scott Proctor over the past few weeks they have to be thrilled at the deal that sent him to the Dodgers for Wilson Betemit.  Proctor’s body language did not inspire confidence, and his numbers since July 5th – 13 hits and seven walks in 10 innings, with a 3.48 ERA – bespeak his visible shakiness.  Getting 25-year-old Betemit for Proctor (who is 30) seems a modest steal.  Betemit has a power bat – a home run for every 15-plus AB’s, with half of his 36 hits for extra bases.  The only caveat: the Yankees are his third team in less than two-thirds of a season.  There could be a reason.
                                            - o -
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