the_nub.html
(politics and
baseball –
11/30/07)
“Baseball
and politics have much in common, the chief
thing being passion.”
The New Yorker’s former City Hall
reporter Andy Logan made
that connection not long after 1969, when the “Miracle Mets” won the
World
Series, kindling a pro-NY passion that helped get GOP renegade John
Lindsay
elected mayor and on to the national presidential scene.
Passion in presidential politics hasn’t
been doing so well
in recent years. Howard Dean was
passionately opposed to the Iraq
war in 2004. But his vehemence wore thin
in Iowa,
where Democrats turned to John Kerry and left the Dean campaign noisily
despondent. Dennis Kucinich is by far
the most passionate candidate, Democrat or Republican, this time around. But his progressive anti-war fervor has
struck a responsive chord so far with few party members.
Hillary Clinton is careful, Barack
Obama cool. John Edwards shows sparks but
an inability to
start a bonfire. Joe Biden has more verve than passion.
Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd are
more measured than spirited. On the
Republican side, there is much commotion
but little substantive passion, Rudy and Mitt playing “gotcha” as close
as they
come.
Judging from audience reaction at the
several presidential
debates, it is the people – the voting public – who feel passionately
about the
issues, whether matters of fairness among Democrats, or a broad range
of values
among Republicans. Candidates’ demeanor
aside, it figures to be a passion-filled election.
Default winners- it
says here - in Wednesday night’s dust-up
of a debate among GOP hopefuls: John
McCain for his civilizing influence, and Mike Huckabee, if, for nothing
else, his admonishing Mitt Romney “We’re a
better
country than that” (on the issue of punishing children of illegal
aliens for
what their parents did). The Republicans
might do worse than choose a McCain/Huckabee ticket.
-
- -
The complexity of the issues involved has taken some of the
heat out of baseball’s steroids controversy.
An illustration from a forum Tuesday night staged by the Museum
of the
City of New York: When moderator Jeremy
Schaap asked Marvin Miller, first head of the players union, and Jim
Bouton,
onetime Yankees ace, what should be done about the
performance-enhancing drugs crisis,
here is what they said –
Miller: There
has been no scientific proof anywhere in the world that these
drugs enhance performance…If I were still connected with the union, I
would
recommend that players not talk to George Mitchell (head of MLB’s
investigation). Under our laws, you
cannot ask a man to convict himself.
Bouton: The evidence is all
around us.
If I was still playing I would demand that the union get tough
on this
so I wouldn’t have to compete at a disadvantage.
There
are few more passionate – or outspoken – Mets than closer
Billy Wagner. Tell-it-like-it-is Billy used the team’s website to say
he wasn’t
happy with the loss of Tom Glavine and Paul Lo Duca from the roster: “Losing Tom is big. It’s a lot more than the 13 games he
won. It’s what he did for John Maine and
Oliver Perez and how professional he was…Paulie competed.
He battled every day and we had some guys who
didn’t show up every day. They were
satisfied if they got a hit and we lost.
Paul was pissed if he had four hits and we lost.
And every one of the pitchers trusted
him. He was a big part of what we did,
and now he’s gone, too…It just worries me that we’re missing some
important
guys.”
The Yanks and Mets sent three
lower-minors players each to
the Hawaiian Winter League. One
distinguished himself: outfielder Austin Jackson, a 20-year-old NYY
farmhand on
a fast track – he rose from Class A - .345 in 67 games at Tampa - to
Triple A, where he had a cup of
coffee with Scranton-Wilkes-Barre. In
the Winter League, his BA was a mediocre .271, but 18 of his 36 hits in
39
games were for extra bases, and he finished fourth in RBIs with 22. Jackson is
already being mentioned as a chip in a possible Yankees deal for Minnesota’s
Johan
Santana.
- o -
(The Nub is a team
effort skippered by Dick Starkey.
Comments
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(baseball and
politics – 11/27/07)
You’ve heard Yankees’ radio
play-by-play man John Sterling
say it a hundred times: “A base-hit now will bring the Yanks to within
four,
which means with a grand slam we could have a new ballgame.”
Media eagerness to see a runaway
transformed into a contest
applies to politics as well as to baseball.
A current example: the spate of stories suggesting Barack Obama
could be
an upset winner over Hillary Clinton in Iowa. A
recent Wall Street Journal headline encapsulates
the trend: “CLINTON HITS ROUGH PATCH/AS
IOWA SHOWDOWN NEARS”. The article, by
Jackie Calmes, is typical of the “we’ve-got-a-horserace” type:
“As Hillary Clinton huddled with advisers not
long ago, she
was pressed to stake a position popular with the party's left-leaning
voters on
one issue. But the presidential
front-runner resisted. It wasn't her position.
![[Hillary Clinton]](../../../AppData/Local/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image001.gif)
"’If I do
what you all want me to do, I'll look
great for the next couple
months," she said, according to
one
insider's account. ‘But
what if I'm the
nominee? I'll be ripped apart by the
Republicans. And what if I'm the president? My
hands will be tied.’
“The
New York
senator's response captured the tension at the core of her 10-month-old
presidential bid, and helps illuminate why she has hit a dangerously
bumpy
stretch as January's first nominating votes near. Sen. Clinton actually
is
running two campaigns at once…”
In last week’s New Yorker, meanwhile,
was an example of the
simultaneous pro-Obama genre. The
magazine’s Ryan Lizza quotes Obama taking this not-so-veiled shot at
Hillary in
response to a suggestion that he be more conventional in his policy
proposals: “What
I think you’re asserting is that it makes sense for us to… not tell the
American people the truth - to not tell people what we really think?”
Then, in last
Saturday’s Washington Post, Michael Kinsley gave the junior NY senator a dynastic reason to worry:
“In an odd way, the deep
unpopularity of George
W. Bush has hurt Hillary
Clinton,
as people think: ‘Enough with relatives already’."
And yesterday,
The Politico published this report from Des Moines:
“In a
reversal of fortune, Sen. Barack Obama
(D-Ill.) is barnstorming Iowa
with a front-runner’s swagger while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
(D-N.Y.)
scrambles like an underdog.”
It is no
longer
clear how the Iowa
contest will turn out. It is clear,
however, that, thanks in great part to the media, we do have a contest.
In case you
missed it, columnist Roger Cohen made this strong pitch in yesterday’s
NY Times
for a balanced U.S.
mediation role in the Israel-Palestine dispute:
“Bush
faces Palestinian weakness
and compromised Israeli strength. He
must offset weakness by standing with the Palestinians on core demands. He must insist on Israeli sacrifice —
territorial and ideological — in the name of U.S.-guaranteed security… Israel is
powerful, but Palestinian humiliation is an Israeli and Jewish
nightmare. I feel it; many
American Jews feel
it.”
-
- -
Attention Fred
Wilpon and Omar Minaya: Andy MacPhail,
new president of the Baltimore Orioles, has this advice (quoted by the
Boston
Globe’s Nick Cafardo):
“You
(must
be) a scouting-and-development-based organization.
I told our guys when I first sat down with
them that this is an area where you have to excel. You
can't be adequate or average."
Unlike the
below-average
Mets, the Dodgers have developed a superior farm system.
Two 23-year-old products who played with the
team part of last season: first baseman
James Loney, .331, 15 HRs, 67 RBIs in 96 games; outfielder Matt Kemp,
.342, 10
HRs, 42 RBIs, 10 SBs in 98 games. LA,
with a solid starting rotation led by Brad Penny, is not experiencing
Mets-like
desperation to make off-season moves.
Says owner Frank McCourt (again quoted by Cafardo):
"We
don't have to make a deal. We made the
biggest move we needed to make in signing Joe (Torre).”
There is a squib
of good news for the Yanks and Mets: One
NYY and one NYM farmhand finished among leaders in the final rundown of
Arizona
Fall League performances. Outfielder
Brett Gardner led the league in stolen bases, swiping 16 in 26 games. The 24-year-old Gardner, who stole 21 in 45
games with Scranton-Wilkes-Barre last season, also batted an impressive
.343 in
Arizona. Outfielder Caleb Stewart tied for the
league’s home run title with six despite having been injured for more
than half
the season. The 25-year-old Mets
prospect hit his half dozen in only 44 ABs, a productive one HR per
seven-plus
ABs.
- o -
(The Nub is a team
effort skippered by Dick Starkey.
Comments
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are welcome. Previous Nubs can be found
by scrolling below.)
(baseball and politics – 11/23/07)
“Everyone
knows steroids saved baseball while (Commissioner Bud) Selig hid under
his desk
and pretended not to know.” -
Greg Couch, Chicago Sun-Times columnist
It is hard to blame Selig for
distancing himself from the
hot performance-enhancing potato and wishing it would go away. The rash of home runs in the period following
the baseball strike year (1994) certainly did help to bring fans back
to the
sport. For him to throw cold water on
the revival could have put the major leagues on life support as well as
cost
him his job.
We see the same reticence on the
political field regarding
explosive issues like gun control, the range of anti-terrorism
policies, and in
foreign affairs, the Israel-Palestine dispute.
The imminence of Monday’s Annapolis Conference seeking to
resolve that
conflict may elicit statements at last from the presidential
candidates, but
Jimmy Carter says we shouldn’t hold our collective breath:
“It would be almost
inconceivable,” the former president told The Nation’s John Nichols, “for any…person
campaigning for president, Republican or Democrat, to make the
statements that
I’ve made concerning the plight of the Palestinians…”The reason I
continue to
talk about these issues (is because) I saw a complete dearth of any
sort of
substantive debate. For…seven years,
there hasn’t been a single day of substantive negotiations between Israel and either Syria
or the Palestinians.”
The
problem, Carter said during promotion of his 2006 book
“Palestine Peace Not Apartheid”, is that any candidate urging an
even-handed U.S.
role in peace negotiations would be branded anti-Israel.
And such a charge, he needn’t have added,
would cost said candidate a chance at a job much more important than
Selig’s.
Attentive readers may have
noticed that the NY Times did not
have a line in its print editions this week about the president’s
former press
secretary Scott McClellan saying Bush was “involved” in lying to the
media
about the Valeria Plame leak. Why that
happened was implicitly explained at a Times on-line site.
It quoted the publisher of the memoir in
which McClellan makes the charge back-pedaling this way:
“(Bush)told him
something that
wasn’t true, but the president didn’t know it wasn’t true.
The president told him what he thought to be
the case.'’
In
other words, the president was misled as he had been
about WMDs in Iraq. How can one be skeptical when the Times seems
to believe it?
-
- -
Johnny Estrada a worthy replacement for Paul Lo Duca?
Omar Minaya must be kidding. The GM
can’t get away with minimizing the
plight of the Mets after this sobering assessment of what happened to
the team
last season and where it stands now. The
source: the respected publication Baseball America:
“The
Mets faltered in part because they got old in a hurry…More
disconcerting,
however, was that some of New
York's
young building blocks struggled. Franchise
cornerstone Jose Reyes wilted in the second half, hitting just .251
after the
all-star break and .205 in September. Mike
Pelfrey, who signed for a club-record $3.55 million bonus as a
first-round pick
in 2005, went 3-8, 5.57 and failed to keep the No. 5 starter's job. Philip Humber, a first-rounder whose $3
million bonus ranks second in club history, got hammered by the
Nationals in
his lone start during the season's final week.
”Scouts from other organizations
say the Mets have little immediate help
on the way in the farm system….The lack of talent reflects New York's
decision
not to wield its large-market resources to acquire talent the last two
years,
particularly in the draft. The Mets have surrendered their first-round
choice
as free-agent compensation in each of the past two drafts, and haven't
tried to
compensate by exceeding MLB's bonus guidelines with other picks.”
The
team’s “decision not to wield its large-market resources
to acquire talent” is the nub of the Mets’ present sad situation.
-
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, etc. –
11/20/07)
Two hard hitters in the mainstream
media league - Paul
Krugman and Ron Brownstein - have launched differing literary line
drives in the
political field. NY Times columnist
Krugman hit to left with a book entitled “The Conscience of a Liberal”
while the
National Journal’s Brownstein aimed his authorial shot - “The Second
Civil War”
- to center. Krugman says the only
way
the Democrats can hope to reverse the Republican-right political tide
is to be
fiercely partisan themselves from the left side of the plate. Brownstein says a bipartisan centrist stance
is the only way to end the unproductive.
divisive blue-red competition.
Judging from two persuasive assessments
– one in the New
York Review of Books, the other in the NY Times Book Review –
Brownstein’s
approach appears to be the way the game will be going in the immediate
future. While praising Krugman in his
review of “Conscience”. Michael Tomasky points out why Democrats have a
distance to go before they can begin to end the present political
imbalance:
"(Unlike Krugman) too
many people
who are…granted valuable journalistic space spent the early Bush years
in
denial about the evidence that was accumulating right before their
eyes,
whether about official lies, or executive overreach, or rampant class
warfare
waged on behalf of the richest one percent against the rest of us. Mildly deploring some of these excesses while
accepting others is what is meant by bipartisanship today.” (NY Review of Books)
Alan Brinkley says overcoming that
right-controlled “bipartisanship”
is neither on deck nor even in the dugout; thus Brownstein’s centrist
future is
the best Democrats can realistically hope for soon:
“Many Democrats might
wish that
their party leaders would emulate the aggressively partisan style of
the
Republican right. But it would be hard
to argue that they have come even remotely close to the ideological
purity of
their conservative counterparts. More often, they have seemed cowed and
timorous in the face of Republican discipline, and have over time
themselves
moved increasingly rightward; their recapture of Congress has so far
appeared
to have emboldened them only modestly.” (NYT
Book Review)
-
-
-
How bemusing is it that anti-tax-cuts-for-the-rich investor
Warren Buffett advised Alex Rodriguez to go around agent Scott Boros
and make
the successful approach that led to his return to the Yankees? A-Rod, who agreed to a $27.5 million per
salary rather than the $30m-plus Boros was seeking, thus benefited
indirectly
from Buffett’s belief in what has been described as “rational
capitalism.” To some of us, the $25.2
million per the
Yankees had been paying A-Rod was dubiously rational enough.
There’s been positive news from
Mets-land this past week,
although it may look negative: the deal for catcher Yorvit Torrealba
fell
through, and, oh, yes – an overlooked old story - Ricky Henderson will
not be
asked back as a coach.
Everyone saw that Torrealba was less of
an asset than Paul
Lo Duca; their offensive and defensive statistics bore out that
estimate (he
was cheaper, however). As for
devil-may-care Henderson,
the midseason signing of him and the shift of the legendarily
undisciplined
Howard Johnson to the role of batting coach were two signs the Mets had
lost
focus when they needed it most. So those
two non-developments are plusses.
Although now, with Lo Duca apparently gone and Tom Glavine
rejoining Atlanta,
the Mets are
immeasurably weaker than they were a year ago at this time.
With the likelihood that the Yankees
will persuade Mariano
Rivera to re-up for three years at $15 million per, the team is shaping
up as
the AL’s
wild
card favorite. If Andy Pettitte returns
to NY, you might even consider the Bombers a long shot for the division
title. Make that a long, long shot.
- 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 –
11/16/07)
Back on May 10, we listed a potential
nine-person Democratic-team
lineup card for the 2009 mayoral contest:
In alphabetical rather than batting order - Tony Avella, Adolfo
Carrion,
John Liu, Marty Markowitz, Christine Quinn, Al Sharpton, Scott
Stringer, Billy
Thompson, Anthony Weiner. Some of those
prospects will go on the inactive list because, as in first-term
Manhattan BP Stringer’s
case, the timing is not right. But most
will pull out because they can’t put up the fundraising numbers
necessary to
make the first team.
One of the only two officially
announced candidates – Queens
Councilman Avella – is in the financially strapped category, but he is
attempting to compensate for the lack of campaign cash by barnstorming
tirelessly throughout the five boroughs.
In one brief period, Avella came across as a cogent progressive
at a
political club and a preservation event, both in Manhattan.
The scouting report from around the city: “Avella is everywhere.”
Avella surely knows it will take more
than an energetic
grassroots effort to beat the other official candidate, Weiner, the
Congressman
from Brooklyn/Queens who replaced Charlie Schumer in the House. Weiner not only has the advantage of money;
he has earned party gratitude, having taken one for the team in 2005. You may remember - he declined to seek a
mayoral primary recount that could have put him in a divisive runoff
with
Freddy Ferrer.
Avella can be expected to run to the
left of Weiner, who was
the most conservative of the major Dem candidates in ’05.
But at a breakfast organized by Manhattan
Media early this week, Weiner struck a populist stance.
He expressed concern for African-Americans in
marginal public schools and for the preponderantly minority residents
of East
New York and Brownsville,
who must deal with parkway traffic-caused air pollution.
- -
-
The mystery deepens:
Rather than re-sign Paul Lo Duca, the Mets are going after Colorado free
agent
Yorvit Torrealba to fill the role of first-string catcher.
Torrealba batted 15 points less and threw out
a lower percentage of base-stealers than Lo Duca. The
alleged explanation - that Lo Duca will
be 35 in April compared to the 30-in-July Torrealba - is unpersuasive. The organization badmouthed Lo Duca through
the media for much of the season without ever making clear the source
of its
grudge. Fox Sports News calls the
imminent move a “stunning repudiation”.
One word, it says here, will do: stupid.
The Yankees’ in-process re-signing of
A-Rod for $275 million
throws into dramatic relief the penny-pinching approach of the Mets. Fred Wilpon and Co. clearly decided that their
splurging a couple of years ago would have to do for awhile. Since the signings of Lo Duca, Pedro
Martinez, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, etc., the team has been
adding
bargain-basement players, who, like Torrealba, do not constitute a
much-needed roster
upgrade. As for the Yanks and Rodriguez,
it says here they should have stuck to their decision not to let him
exact a
higher wage than the one he was already receiving.
- -
-
From the Huffington Post comes this report of an implied,
but nevertheless noteworthy presidential endorsement from a prominent
political
observer, who spoke to a class at the University
of California, Irvine:
“Barack Obama represents ‘the only
hope for the US in
the
Muslim world,’ according to Pulitzer-prize winning investigative
reporter Seymour
Hersh. Because Obama's father was a
Muslim, he ’could
lead a reconciliation between the Muslim countries and the US.’ With any of the other candidates as president,
Hersh said, ’we're facing two or three decades of problems in the Mideast, with 1.2 billion Muslims’."
- 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, etc.
– 11/13/07)
Senate Republicans have established –
in the words of one
political observer – a filibuster “league of their own” during this
Congressional
season. With unprecedented consistency,
GOP players have stopped passage of substantive bills whenever the
Democrats
could not rally the 60 votes needed to overcome that obstructionist
game.
The Democrats might have turned the
tables when the
Republicans (with Dem help) could muster only 53 votes to confirm
Michael
Mukasey as attorney general. But they
declined
to filibuster despite the fact that the issue was torture.
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald suggests that
the Dems were playing
a game of their own:
“Is
it that a filibuster was not possible because a large number of these
Democratic Senators were willing to symbolically oppose confirmation so
they
could say they did -- by casting meaningless votes in opposition
knowing that
confirmation was guaranteed -- but were unwilling to demonstrate the
sincerity
of their claimed beliefs by acting on them?... Apparently, they wanted
to
oh-so-meaningfully ‘register their displeasure’ but not actually stop
confirmation.”
- -
-
How are Yanks and Mets prospects doing in the
Arizona Fall
League, which winds up its regular season this week? Fairly
well, thank you. As of the weekend,
outfielder Brett Gardner,
who played with the NYY’s triple-A team at Scranton-Wilkes-Barre last
season,
was running away with the stolen base title, having swiped 15 in 23
games. Caleb Stewart, sent to the league
from the
double-A Binghamton Mets, was tied for the home run lead with five in
only 32
at bats. Second baseman Juan Miranda,
who played with the Yanks’ double-A team in Trenton, also hit five in 78 ABs. On the other hand, of 10 pitchers under
consideration for the “pitcher of the year” award, three belong to the
Orioles,
two to the Rangers, one each to the Phillies, Braves, Cardinals, Twins
and
Giants. No pitching help there in sight for the Mets, or additional
help for
the Yanks.
Johnny Damon demonstrated he has a
future in public
relations at the meeting of GMs in Orlando
last week. The Boston Globe’s Nick
Cafardo quoted Damon’s self-promotional riff at length:
“(Joe
Girardi) told me I was going to
be his leadoff hitter and left fielder," said Damon, who had been
hearing
trade rumors. "I know teams would want a player like me. A
guy who keeps the clubhouse loose. A guy
who has been very durable and will be
durable next year. I think everyone
realized how important I was to the team last year once I got healthy.
When I
was in the lineup every day, I think our winning percentage was around
.700. I
think that's a testament to the type of player that I am and the kind
of stuff
I can bring to the table. I think
someone would have to [dazzle] them with an amazing offer."
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lob from Left field: The
mainstream U.S.
media is dotted these days with criticism of Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez
for expanding his powers in an authoritarian way. By
our lights, Chavez appears to be
overreaching, so some of the negativity is justifiable.
But Naomi Klein in The Nation puts the Chavez
and Latin American picture into a perspective seldom addressed in our
major
news outlets:
“Washington
has always regarded democratic socialism as a
greater challenge than totalitarian Communism, which was easy to vilify
and
made for a handy enemy. In the 1960s and
’70s, the favored tactic for dealing with the inconvenient popularity
of
economic nationalism and democratic socialism was to try to equate them
with
Stalinism, deliberately blurring the clear differences…”
Labeling Chavez a dangerous socialist – abetted by the media – has
been only
marginally successful. So, it says here,
the Bush Administration, again with media help, is emphasizing Hugo’s
totalitarian tendencies. The good Chavez
is doing for Venezuela’s
poor is described as political opportunism or gets no shrift at all.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Other ballteam nubbits: Anybody who
saw the revised edition of the Boston Celtics against the Nets Saturday
doesn’t
have to be told: there’s a new, tough
kid on the block in the NBA Atlantic Division.
As if transplanted stars Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and
returning
sharpshooter Paul Pierce aren’t enough weapons, sophomore pistol Rajon
Rondo
gives the 5-0 Celts fast-break energy to go with fire power. Boston
may remain undefeated for awhile.
- 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, etc. – 11/9/07)
The hot stove season is here, with the
political heat
particularly high in the international league.
Turkey and Pakistan
are
playing potentially explosive games as Team Bush watches and worries
about the outcomes
in both bailiwicks. Columnists James
Carroll and Robert Scheer look at the counterproductive U.S.
role in
both places and confirm that things are not going well on either field:
“The conditions that created the
terrible prospect facing Turkey
- an immediate war with rebel Kurds based in Iraq
-- have been wholly manufactured in Washington… Turkey,
a staunch US ally, urged restraint
four-and-a-half years ago when Bush rolled his dice in Iraq.
But when the gamble was lost,
it was nations in the Middle East - not America - that paid. Turkey's
turn
to pony up has come.” –
JC, Boston
Globe
“So, (Pakistani) Gen.
Pervez Musharraf, treated ever so respectfully by
George Bush…has turned out to be just another crummy dictator. But he was our dictator, kind of a modern,
even westernized one who could stand up to all those bearded Islamic
terrorists. Well, not exactly. Not
that
anyone bothered to remember, but Musharraf seized power in Pakistan,
ending
democratic rule, two years before the 9/11 attacks and did nothing to
end his
nation’s support of the Taliban rulers next door, who were harboring
Osama bin
Laden and his al-Qaida…
“So
where did the $10 billion go… that Bush gave Musharraf
to beef up his military to better combat the terrorists? Well, clearly
the
Pakistani army is very strong - just look at the martial law it has
been able
to impose…” – RS, TruthDig.com
-
-
-
Florida’s
young stud of a third baseman Miguel Cabrera has joined Alex Rodriguez
on the
pedestal of players likely bound for new teams.
Unlike free agent A-Rod, Cabrera would have to be traded, which
is what
the payroll-conscious Marlins apparently plan to do.
The Yankees could use Miguel at third base,
the Mets could switch him back to the outfield, where he’s played
before. But neither NY team figures to be
a finalist
in the Cabrera sweepstakes; the Yanks don’t want to give up any of
their top
prospects, and the Mets don’t have enough young talent to make a
persuasive offer. The best current guess
is that Cabrera will
wind up with one of the LA teams.
“Trying to
sign a
free agent here and there and Band-Aid this thing is not a strategy
that has
really worked out.”
That could be Omar Minaya, commenting on what happened to the Mets
this
season. But it was Orioles GM Andy
MacPhail, who faces a much bigger challenge than the NYM’s next season
by dint
of being in the AL East.
- -
-
In case you missed it, George Bush has outscored Richard Nixon in
the
“strongly disapprove” league. A recent
Gallup
Poll found that 50 percent of participants strongly disapprove of Bush,
compared
to 48 percent, the previous presidential unpopularity record, achieved
by
Nixon. Humorist Garrison Keillor says
Nixon is getting a bad rap:
“Say what
you will about…Richard Nixon, (he) was never in favor of
torture. He never strutted on a stage
and said, ‘If I knew that America
was in imminent danger…I would not hesitate for one moment to drive
red-hot
needles under (some evil) person's fingernails’ - that sort of thing
did not
pass for political discourse back in Nixon's day. But
times have changed.” - Salon
- 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, etc.
– 11/06/07)
New York’s
left-leaning right-hander Charlie Schumer showed again the other day
why for
many NY Democrats he is not a true team player.
In announcing he would vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as
attorney
general, Schumer not only turned away from confronting torture, he gave
cover
to Dem Judiciary Committee teammate Diane Feinstein, who followed his
lead and
clinched the win for water-boarding fans.
Attentive New Yorkers remember it was
their same senior
senator who backed away from low-bridging Alberto Gonzales when he took
over as
attorney general in 2005. Schumer called
the appointment of the White House’s torture-enabler “encouraging.”
As NY Times’ David Herszenhorn pointed
out last week,
“Schumer…likes to take credit”: for pitching the Dems to electoral
victories in
2006, for rallying the public against the politically motivated
dismissals of U.S.
attorneys,
etc. But, as happened with the Mets’
rotation in last season’s homestretch, Schumer has a tendency to
disappear at
key moments. His silence on Iraq
until the war he helped approve went bad is legendary among NY
progressives,
and everybody was asking “Where’s Charlie?” last May when the Senate
voted on
yet another round of war funding. While
NY colleague Hillary Clinton voted against the bill, Schumer stayed on
the
bench, nursing a case of Lyme Disease.
Schumer says Mukasey has persuaded him
that he would
overrule the White House and declare water-boarding to be illegal if
Congress
passed a bill to that effect. That
stance, however, does not address the likelihood that the president
would veto
such a bill or, if not, go on to declare executive privilege, putting
him above
the law. To paraphrase Judiciary chair
Pat Leahy, Charlie is ‘in a pickle.”
Los Angeles Times media monitor Tim
Rutten says that, in
assessing Mukasey, major news sources have taken a euphemistic approach
to
torture, which puts them in an ethical pickle, as well:
“What we
have here is a president and vice president who want to
install as the country’s chief law enforcement official a man who
refuses to
flatly say that the United
States of America should not torture
people.
Putting aside the surreal question of
how our elected officials ever equivocated themselves into a debate
over
whether to torture, the descent of most of the press into comfortable
euphemism
this week has been a stomach-turning experience.
”The New York Times, for example, reported that Mukasey’s confirmation
is ‘ in
doubt over his refusal to state a clear legal position on a classified
Central
Intelligence Agency program to interrogate terrorism suspects ...’ Yet
nothing
about this impasse has anything real to do with … intelligence work; it
has
everything to do with whether we now wish to place our nation among
those that
ignore basic human rights and elemental moral decency as a matter of
state
policy. Meanwhile, this newspaper and
others repeatedly described waterboarding as a “harsh technique” or as
a “coercive
measure.” It is neither of those things. It
is torture, and the refusal to make that
point each and every time this repugnant practice comes up is a form of
rhetorical squeamishness indistinguishable from moral cowardice.”
- -
-
Re the hype about the Mets’ possible
interest
in signing Alex Rodriguez: It would be a
classic team mistake, it says here.
Never mind the money, which could be better spent; adding A-Rod
would
mean moving someone, probably David Wright, out of the position. That’s
what
happened, we remember, to Jose Reyes when the Mets signed Kaz Matsui.
The switching
around made everybody uncomfortable – Reyes at second, and Matsui at
short,
knowing Jose could do a better job there than he. The
Mets don’t need another self-created
mess.
Highly regarded baseball analyst
Bill James has two Mets – Wright and Reyes – in the top ten among what
he
considers the 50 most promising 28-and-under players in his soon-to-be
published youth talent inventory. Wright
is rated number four, Reyes number seven.
The only Yankee in the top 50 is Robinson Cano, at number 40. (The Yankees’ Phil Hughes was presumably
sidelined too long to qualify. And the budding star trio of Joba
Chamberlain,
Ian Kennedy and Edwar Ramirez didn’t arrive in the majors early enough
to make
the cut, which means James’ book will be
at least partially outdated before publication.) With
their young pitching studs out of
consideration, the Yanks finished 27th on the list of 30 MLB
teams;
the Mets were 17th. Both NY
teams had two “grade A” or honorable mention players on James’ list: Melky Cabrera, Chien-Ming Wang, John Maine
and Oliver Perez.
- 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, etc.
- 11/1/07)
Hillary Clinton worried Tuesday night
about her Democratic
presidential teammates giving the Republicans home-field advantage. How? By
reacting to GOP initiatives rather than taking positions of their own. Moments later, she had something else to
worry about: the team was taking batting practice with her as target.
Hillary was hit, mainly, for her 2002
war powers vote and
recent support of a bill labeling the Iranian elite guard terrorists. Some of the rhetorical swings were familiar –
“obfuscating”, “changing positions.” But
Barack Obama dropped a subtle point that seemed to squib past the
moderators
and participants. He said one reason he
objected to Hillary’s vote setting up a U.S.
confrontation with Iraq’s
neighbor was that it gave her a post-facto “rationale” for supporting
the 2003
invasion.
Salon’s Walter Shapiro summarized the
debate in a way to
make Democrats smile:
“What the
debate demonstrated is the volatility of the Democratic
race. Clinton's
caution may still prove galling, despite her political artistry. Obama's blandness could cost him his featured
role as the designated giant slayer. Edwards retains the potential to
mount a
major breakthrough, though his is a high-wire act of smiling and
snarling at
the same time…
“Judging
from the collective performances… Democratic voters
have reason to be uncharacteristically upbeat about their presidential
choices
-- seven candidates who come across as anything but dwarfs.”
-
- -
Grady Little’s 2007 leadership of the LA Dodgers – an 82-80
record, and a finish eight games out of first place behind Arizona,
Colorado
and San Diego – was disappointing. But,
given the key injuries he had to overcome, Grady didn’t deserve the
treatment he
received from his team. The Dodgers have
a rep for being a classy organization.
The way they removed Little – telling him, first, that he’d be
back next
season, then (with the Joes available) getting him to “resign” – was
unclassy
in the extreme. Little, the good soldier
to the end, insists the resignation was his idea. Few
will salute that story.
The Mets were 88-74, finishing, we
remember only too well, a
game behind Philadelphia. The team might do well to finish with those
numbers in 2008. We know that, as of
now, the Mets’ pitching is a shambles – Tom Glavine almost certainly
gone,
Billy Wagner with health issues, etc.
Consider further that, of the 28 players – 18 position, eight
pitchers –
who made Baseball America’s
first and second 2007 minor league all-star teams, not a single one was
a Mets
farmhand. The Yankees had three – their
touted pitching call-ups Joba Chamberlain, Ian Kennedy and Edwar
Ramirez. The Devil Rays had the most minor
league stars,
five.
The absence of standout minor league
Mets in 2007 follows a
remarkable related failure in 2006: Among
the 84 players chosen by Baseball America for all-star teams
at the
six levels of competition, there was, you guessed it, not a single Mets
farmhand.
Welcome, Joe Girardi.
Going to miss your occasional gigs in the YES broadcast booth. But the Yanks made the sensible choice. Don Mattingly will get to manage some day,
perhaps succeeding Torre at LA. And most
baseball people agree that Tony Pena deserves – and will receive -
another shot
after the managing job he did at Kansas City (2002-2005).
- 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.)
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