the_nub.html
(politics
and baseball,
baseball and politics – 9/28/07)
“A
world in which Democrats have a 20-point advantage on
making ‘the country prosperous’, a
10-point advantage on Iraq, a five-point
advantage on ’protecting the country from international
terrorism’ and a
30-point lead on healthcare is a world where Republicans have very
little room
to maneuver.”
A Democrat, reading that report of the latest Gallup Poll in the
Congressional newspaper The Hill, can take as a cautionary tale this
baseball-related paragraph that essentially was – or could have been -
written two
weeks ago:
“A
season in which the Mets have a seven-game lead with 17
to play…is a season in which the second-place Phillies have very little
room to
overtake them.”
The obvious message: In politics, as
in baseball, the late Grace Paley had it right when she wrote of
“Enormous
Changes at the Last Minute.” The sudden
rash of injuries (El Duque’s foot, Billy Wagner’s back) and tired arms
(the
entire pitching staff) kindled the Mets’ historic meltdown. A palpable change in direction of the economy
and the war could turn the GOP into a political version of the
“Fightin’
Phillies.”
The Republicans will almost certainly try to refresh the apparently
tired
terrorism argument – that under their management the enemy has been
shut out
since 9/11. But President Bush’s former
Secretary of State Colin Powell minimizes the importance of terrorism
as an
issue in the current edition of GQ magazine:
"What is
the
greatest threat facing us now? People will say it's terrorism. But are
there
any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or
our
political system? No. Can they knock
down a building? Yes. Can they kill
somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only
we can change ourselves. So what is the
great threat we are
facing?"
- -
-
“It’s like witnessing a spectacular accident. And
watching with morbid fascination.” No
question what that fan was talking
about. With a feisty Florida team coming in – the Marlins
have
just taken three from the Cubs – the comment of another fan, quoted
some days
ago, applies: “The Mets are done.”
All their injuries notwithstanding, a third comment, sent last
night, is
applicable as of now: “The team has no heart.”
We can truly call them the “Miracle Mets” instead of (with
gallows humor)
the “Amazin’s”, if they retrieve that heart this weekend.
Meanwhile, the three-way battle for division and wild card in the NL
West
offers a wooly weekend sideshow. Arizona
trying to hang on to it’s one-game lead over San Diego, which is trying
to do
the same over Colorado. The D-backs go mano a mano with the streaking Rockies
in Denver. The Padres play in Milwaukee against a Brewers team that
–
unlike the Mets, alas - can be expected to fight to keep its slim
division
chances alive.
- 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 – 9/27/07)
Why
do baseball fans care so much about their team? And
why do political junkies care so much
about what’s happening in government?
The question arises for Mets fans who don’t sleep well these
nights
after wrenching losses. And for
Democratic activists who are in a constant state of exasperation over
the
country’s direction and their ineffectual representatives in Congress.
Baseball is the antidote to politics. How better to escape the grim reality of war,
terrorism and divisive policy issues than to invest in a game first
played as a
child and now by professionals representing us.
What an addictive anesthesia, soothing us intensively
from mid-February to the end of October each year.
Politics is a preoccupation that usually
develops when people become aware that the country/state/city/locality
is not
being run the way they think it should be.
Heroes are a common thread – Derek Jeter in baseball, possibly
environmental
champion Al Gore in politics.
Where the ball fan’s central interest
is in wins and losses
and his team’s progress (or lack of) toward the World Series, the
attentive
political observer has a more complex game to play.
He displays, in historian Gore
Vidal’s
words, “an interest in public matters and a fascination with the lies
that
power tells us.”
Some of the possible lies government is
pitching today have
to do with the threat posed by Iran. Such
assertions have triggered a fear that
George Bush intends to go to war with Tehran. Former
Ambassador Peter Galbraith says that
fear is unfounded. Here is the nub of
his rationale, published in the latest NY Review of Books:
“After
seeing the US
go to the United Nations with allegedly
irrefutable evidence that Iraq
possessed chemical and biological weapons and had a covert nuclear
program,
foreign governments and publics are understandably skeptical about the
veracity
of Bush administration statements on Iran. The Iraq experience makes many countries
reluctant
to support meaningful sanctions not only because they doubt
administration
statements but because they are afraid President Bush will interpret
any
Security Council resolution condemning Iran as an authorization
for war.
“With so much of the US military tied up in Iraq, the Iranians do not believe the US
has
the resources to attack them and then deal with the consequences. They
know
that a US attack on
Iran would have
little support in the US—it
is doubtful that Congress would authorize it—and none internationally.
Not even
the British would go along with a military strike on Iran.
President Bush's warnings
count for little with Tehran
because he now has a long record of tough language unmatched by action.
As long
as the Iranians believe the United States has no
military option, they have
limited incentives to reach an agreement…”
- -
-
Re the Mets, Sports Illustrated’s John Donovan yesterday: “ I have absolutely no
faith in the Mets… You don't have to be rolling
into the postseason, as the Cardinals proved last season. But for Pete's sake, show us something!”
Last night, they showed more of the
same: Since a week ago last Sunday, the
Mets pitching
staff has given up more than eight runs a game.
Said Newsday’s David Lennon after last night’s debacle: “ It's
not all Philip Humber's fault. By rushing
him to start for the first time in
a month, the Mets should have sent him to the mound with a blindfold
and a
cigarette.”
Thank you, Omar,
Willie, and Rick
Peterson.
With Pedro pitching tonight against the
Cardinals, and John
Smoltz going against the Phillies, there’s, let’s say (nervously) a
50-50
chance the Mets will still be a game ahead going into the weekend. That means home team fans must pray that
Manny Acta’s Nats play against the Phils tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday
as they
have against the Mets. It is probably our only hope.
In which division is there the most
homestretch
excitement? The NL West, without
question. Three teams vying for two
playoff spots, and only two games separating first-place Arizona
from third-place Colorado. After one more game with the Dodgers, the
streaking
Rockies will host the D-Backs for the
final
three. Second-place San
Diego has four games in Milwaukee
against a team that still has an outside chance of overtaking the Cubs
in the
Central.
The Yankees have nothing to do now but
wait to see if Cleveland holds on to
the best AL
record, meaning the Bombers will be
spared facing the LA Angels in the first playoff round.
- 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 – 9/26/07)
“A litter of pussycats”: that’s a
Newsday columnist’s way of
identifying what he suggests is the key ingredient missing from the
Mets: leadership. What came through during
the anti-Bush
protest at the UN yesterday was a lack of any “name” the marchers could
rally
around. All the leadership in the world –
pace, Wallace Matthews - would not
conceal the Mets’ basic problem, pitching.
But someone with political stature, an influential public
official,
could have transformed what was a game effort at the UN into an event.
Progressive Democrats are the most
logical candidates for
leadership roles in the anti-war, anti-Bush movements.
But, except for a couple of appearances by
Dennis Kucinich, whom the NY Times no longer considers a mentionable
presidential candidate, and Michigan warhorse John Conyers, liberal
Congressional
members have kept clear of demonstrations like the one yesterday. Some of us expect better of Jerry Nadler and
Charlie Rangel, to mention two local luminaries who could have lent
significance to the proceedings at UN Plaza.
“AHMADINEJAD IS BAD, BUSH IS WORSE” -
the message on many
signs – expressed the theme of the rally.
Only the Iranian president’s provocative remarks at Columbia Monday
- on gays, on lack of
sufficient research confirming the Holocaust, etc, - received play from
the
major NYC media outlets. Here
is something he said on Muslim attitudes
in the Middle East that generally
went unreported:
“We
need to question whether the Palestinian people should
be paying for (the Holocaust) or not. After
all, it happened in Europe.
The Palestinian people had no role to play in it. So
why is it that the Palestinian people are
paying the price of an event they had nothing to do with?
“The
Palestinian people didn't commit any crime. They
had no role to play in World War II. They
were living with the Jewish communities
and the Christian communities in peace at the time. They
didn't have any problems.
And
today, too, Jews, Christians and Muslims live in
brotherhood all over the world in many parts of the world. They don't have any serious problems.
“Why
is it that the Palestinians should pay a price…five
million people, displaced or refugees… Is this not a crime?” (recorded by Democracy Now)
- -
-
Tonight’s game at Shea – given the precariousness of the
Mets’ lead over the Phillies – is crucial enough to warrant Pedro
Martinez
taking the mound. But Willie Randolph
wants
untested Philip Humber to try to tame the Nationals so Pedro can get
five days
of rest instead of four. Willie
would
probably be second-guessed either way, but he’d be better off pleading
guilty
to going with Pedro than with the rookie.
Furthermore, he may need Pedro in Sunday’s possibly decisive
regular-season finale. Having him ready
then
with three days rest is clearly
preferable to asking him to pitch with two.
The Mets’ troubles can’t compare to
those plaguing San Diego,
fighting for
its wild card life. Injuries have cost
the Padres the services of two starting outfielders, ex-Met Mike
Cameron and
former Indian/Dodger/Athletic Milton Bradley.
Cameron can pinch-hit but Bradley is through for the season. Meanwhile, Colorado
has joined Philadelphia just a game
behind San Diego.
The Yankees, when
they clinch, will have gained a playoff spot for the 13th
straight
season, putting them one behind Atlanta
in that category. The Yanks began their
streak in 1995, the Braves’ skein ran from 1992 to 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.)
(baseball and
politics,
politics and baseball – 9/25/07)
On Sunday, New
York offered
the president of the Dominican
Republic what the NY York Times called
“one
of (its) highest honors: he threw out the first pitch at Yankee
Stadium.” At the same time, another
visiting chief of
state, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was getting what could be
termed
the John Rocker treatment: being vilified by some New Yorkers for,
among other
things, criticizing the U.S.
and calling the Holocaust a myth.
Rocker’s sin, you may remember, was to make negative comments
(in 2000)
about the experience of riding the number 7 subway line to Shea Stadium. He was razzed in the media and at the
ballpark when his team, the Atlanta Braves, came to town.
History indicates that we in the NY
area do not do
inhospitality well. Our record,
according to Columbia
U. historian
Kenneth
Jackson “is one of toleration of difference.” That tolerance often is
not
exhibited by political candidates or office-holders. In 1995, Mayor
Rudy Giuliani barred Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat from attending a
UN-sponsored concert at Lincoln
Center. In 1983, Governor Mario Cuomo prohibited
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko from landing at an NYC airport. Both political decisions received much media
attention but did little to enhance the reputation of a great
cosmopolitan
city.
In the context of the Ahmadinejad
visit, the
less-than-hospitable responses of Mayor Bloomberg and elected officials
like Congressman
Anthony Weiner, Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Queens Councilman
David
Weprin, among others, smack – it says here – of pandering unworthy of
them and
of the people they represent. More
reprehensible is the threat of Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver to
withhold
public funds from Columbia
University as
punishment
for inviting the Iranian president to speak on campus.
Perhaps the most craven panderer was
Ahmadinejad’s host yesterday, Columbia
president Lee Bollinger. He shares the
booby prize with much of the NYC media which were mainly responsible
for
whipping up the anti-Ahmadinejad hysteria.
Time magazine columnist Michael Kinsley
talks this week
about a related political reaction, involving the Move-On ad concerning
General
Petraeus (Petraeus/Betray us):
“The
constant calls
for political candidates to prove their bona fides by condemning or
denouncing
something somebody else said…are a tiresome new tic in American
politics…
“The last thing that
supporters of
the war want to talk about at this point is the war. They'd far rather
talk
about this insult to General Petraeus.
It just isn't done in polite society, it seems, to criticize a
general
in the middle of a war. (Although, when else?)”
-
- -
The Yankees
sleepwalked through their loss to Toronto
yesterday afternoon. The only one who
seemed keyed up was Joe Torre, standing on the dugout platform much of
the
time, trying to will his team to show some life.
The loss means that, if Boston
goes 3-3 in the final six games, the
Yanks must win five of six to tie the Red Sox and win the AL East title
on the
basis of a better head-to-head record.
The Mets blew a chance to gain
breathing room on the
Phillies, who are now just two games back in the NL East and tied with San Diego for
the wild
card. Who would not bet even money that,
one way or the other, the Phils will be in the playoffs?
Meanwhile, in the words of Newsday’s Wallace
Matthews, the “Mister Softee“ Mets are “a
team with nothing to look forward to but winter vacation.”
- 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 –
9/24/07)
How aggravating can life be?
Ask a Democrat who is a Mets fan.
In November a year ago, with their party having taken back
Congress, Dem
activists expected quick reversal of Bush team policies, beginning with
the
war. Just a week ago, Mets supporters
thought the team would run through Washington
and Florida
to lock up the division title. In both
cases, fans and teams took the opposition lightly and failed to allow
for
internal weaknesses.
Congressional Dems found themselves
facing solidly united
GOP members with their own unity undermined by fear of looking weak on
any bill
remotely connected to the war or terror. (One of several recent
examples: last
Thursday, 20 Democratic senators joined Republicans in voting down a
measure -
sponsored by Russ Feingold - that would have required withdrawal of all
combat
forces from Iraq
by the end of next June.) The Mets,
faced with the fired-up opposition of the Phillies, evinced fear
themselves,
faltering in three of seven games against Washington
and Florida.
Now they confront what should be a
reasonable
task: If the Mets can win four of seven again – this time from the
Nats, Marlins
and once from the Cardinals - the Phils will have to win all six of
their final
games to finish in a tie with New
York. Despite that
advantage, Mets fans must brace for a gut-wrenching week.
Whether or not they get to play in
October, the Mets will have
the chance to regroup early in 2008, providing their fans with the
renewed hope
that is a spring training staple. Under
the best of circumstances – victories in the presidential and most
Congressional
races – Democratic supporters will have to wait l5 months to see their
team ready
(they hope) to make good on the promise that went unfulfilled in 2007. In the meantime, there seems to be no
alternative to a three-word strategy for Dem fans: suck it up.
Iraq
apparently has little alternative but to accept terms of a U.S.-drafted
oil
agreement. George Lakoff, author and
professor at the University
of California, Berkeley,
says the agreement tends to confirm suspicions that the war, to a major
extent,
was about oil:
“The contracts that the
Bush
administration has been pushing the Iraqi government to accept are not
just
about the distribution of oil among the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. The
contracts call for 30-year exclusive rights for British and American
oil
companies, rights that cannot be revoked by future Iraqi governments. They are called ‘production sharing agreements’
(or ‘PSA’s’) - a legalistic code word. The
Iraqi government would technically own the oil, but could not control
it; only
the companies could do that… The profits are estimated to be in the
hundreds of
billions of dollars. And the Iraqi people would have no democratic
control over
their own major resource. No other Middle East country has such an arrangement…
“None
of this will work without military protection for
the oil companies. That is what would
keep us there indefinitely.” –
Commondreams.org
-
- -
Red Sox, Yanks, Indians, Angels – the final four in the AL playoffs are
pretty much set. In the NL, Arizona and the
Cubs look like locks in the
West and Central Divisions. The Mets we
know are a good, but far from sure bet to win in the East.
That leaves the Phillies and San Diego
fighting for the wild card, with Colorado coming on
strong. Both the Phils and Padres have
tough final-week schedules. The Phillies
(only a half-game behind SD) play three of six at Atlanta,
the Padres close with four at Milwaukee. As for the Rockies
(a game-and-a-half behind SD), they must play three with the Dodgers
and three
with the Diamondbacks – uphill all the way.
The Yanks still have a shot at overtaking Boston for the division title. They trail the Red Sox by only a game in the
loss column. If they can come close to
running out the table against Toronto
today and Tampa Bay
and Baltimore
the rest of the week, the title could be theirs. Boston’s final
six games are with potentially troublesome Oakland
and Minnesota.
-
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 – 9/21/07)
The sight of Jose Reyes or Carlos
Beltran blowing a grateful
kiss skyward after getting a hit has become as familiar in baseball as
Mets relievers
failing to do their job. Most fans see
it as a touchingly innocent religious practice, one engaged in by many
Latino
players. But some fans have grown to
resent the ritual: “With so much
religiosity around us,” grumbled one the other day, “we should be able
to get
away from it at the ballpark.”
The complaint, however anecdotal, can
be seen as a symptom
of a growing discomfort among progressives, in particular, with what
former
Catholic priest James Carroll calls a “super-Christianity.”
which is informing our
foreign policy as well as our domestic existence. Carroll,
author and Boston Globe columnist,
discussed the background and seriousness of the problem with Tom
Dispatch of
Truthout.org:
“The idea of America
as having a mission to the
world…in biblical terms…is implicit in
George Bush’s war to establish democracy – or ‘freedom’ – everywhere. When Americans talk about freedom, it’s our
secular code word for salvation. There’s
no salvation outside the church; there’s no freedom outside the
American way of
life…
“Since
George W. Bush came to power,
the religious right has been set free to use overt religious language,
missionizing language that actually moves from ‘freedom’ to ‘salvation’
as a
justification for American power. We
cast ourselves against Saddam Hussein entirely in terms of an
evil-versus-good
contest. Bush’s appeals to evil were a
staple of his speechmaking from the earliest days of this war. The purpose of his war was, he told us, not
just to spread democracy, but to end evil.
You see what’s happening. We’ve
moved into specifically religious categories and that was all right in America.”
- -
-
“The
trying campaign has cost (Willie) Randolph points with both his
superiors and
his players.” - Ken Davidoff, in Newsday.
Randolph has certainly lost points with the
fans, as well,
perhaps unfairly. He didn’t sign
Guillermo Mota or Scott Schoeneweis, two well-paid underachieving
relievers, or
Aaron Sele, a low-cost, over-the-hill long man.
The manager has had to defer to Omar Minaya on personnel, and
trust in
the judgment of Rick Peterson on the use of pitchers.
Willie’s been forced to juggle the staff
without decent farm-system pitching reinforcements.
The Mets’ scouting operation is clearly
suspect, something Minaya should have addressed. Maybe
the buck stops with Fred Wilpon for
being unwilling to spend like George Steinbrenner?
In any event, Willie, Omar et al will be
forgiven if the Mets protect their now-thin margin and make the
playoffs.
“It’s
hard to
believe this is happening.” - Tom
Glavine, after last night’s loss.
Getting easier by the day.
- 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 – 9/20/07)
Stat City: Yankees, Mariners, Angels, Hillary, Edwards,
Obama. The first three are the top
hitting ML teams, the second the leading Dem players in the Iowa contest,
according to polls. The Yankees (.288 BA)
and the Angels (.286)
are on a much-anticipated collision course: they figure to meet in the
opening
round of the AL
playoffs when there should be offensive fireworks aplenty.
Political insiders say Hillary Clinton (26%)
can eliminate John Edwards (23%) with a victory in Iowa.
Edwards has made clear how important winning the first-in-nation
contest
will be to his presidential hopes.
The Yankees could upset the one-three
symmetry by overtaking
the Red Sox (#5, .278), thus qualifying to take on comparatively
hitting-challenged Cleveland (#16, 268)
while Boston
is left to face
the Angels. Historically, nothing is
sure in Iowa
until caucus members go to the polls – this time on January 14. The last three weeks of the campaign are when
pre-game standings often shift.
Some national stats likely to be thrown
into the Iowa
mix:
- 33 percent of all Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans
and 27
percent of Democrats, believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in
the
9/11 al-Qaeda attacks.
- Half a century ago, corporations paid 45 to 50 percent of the
income
tax. Today they pay 6 or 7 percent.
- -
-
YES announcers Ken Singleton, Michael Kay and Joe Girardi identified a
forgotten hero of the Yankees’ post-All-Star-break surge: Miguel Cairo. “He filled in at first base or wherever,” Kay
said last night. “They really started to
move with him in the lineup.” Cairo was
released in
August to make room for younger players.
It’s the second time over the past few years the Yanks
surprisingly let
him go. The Mets had Cairo for a year and did likewise,
also
surprisingly. Girardi noted that the
probable key to the Red Sox tailspin was the absence of one player: Manny Ramirez: “They’re a different team
without him.”
While Willie Randolph gives his only two close-to-reliable starters
Tom
Glavine and Pedro Martinez an extra day’s rest at crunch time, Lou
Piniella plans
to use his two top pitchers Carlos Zambrano and Ted Lilly on a
three-days
schedule. The Cubs have a huge
scheduling advantage over Milwaukee,
whom they now lead by a game. Where Chicago plays Pittsburgh,
Florida and Cincinnati
over the last week-and-a-half, the Brewers have to deal with Atlanta,
St.Louis and San Diego.
Orel Hershiser (on ESPN) offered a scintilla of hope to Mets fans
last night:
“One win can give a struggling team new life.”
- 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 – 9/19/07)
For the Mets it all came apart two
weeks before the windup;
Howard Dean’s downfall began three weeks before a key 2004 campaign
season
vote. The two homestretch leaders who
foundered – one in a baseball, the other in a political race – have
much in
common. A term used to describe Dean’s
early domination of the ’04 Democratic primary – “mirage” – certainly
applies to
the Mets’ season-long lead in the NL East.
The flaws in the Dean campaign –
similar, like-minded people
talking to each other, a candidate who wasn’t particularly good on the
stump –
were obscured by the glitz and buzz resulting from media attention;
that
attention partly the result of slow-starting opponents.
The Mets’ flaws were obscured early by the
media playing up the contrast between theirs and the Yankees’ won-lost
records,
and for most of the season by the inability of their major challengers
– the
Phils and Braves – to get untracked.
Both the Dean team and the Mets deluded
themselves into
thinking they could get by with what they had; after all, they were
winning. Example: the Dean campaign
stinted on reaching out to working people, the party’s traditional base. The Mets felt they could fill the gaps
in
their traditional strength, pitching, with retreads.
At a fund-raiser in NYC, Dean was asked how
he proposed to enlist the support of people who were not
internet-savvy. “The unions
supporting us will do that,” he
said. Omar Minaya’s fallback was
“scoring four or five runs” when a journeyman like Brian Lawrence was
filling
in.
In the pressurized last weeks before
the Iowa
caucuses. Dean found that, owing to his
team’s hitherto concealed deficiencies, he couldn’t score enough in the
“electability” game to match the oncoming John Kerry.
The combination of pressure and general
fatigue on one side of the field, and the late-meshing Phillies on the
other, has
exposed the Mets for what they’ve been all along, a fairly good team
with holes,
fortunate to have gotten as far as it did.
Flaws are seldom imputed to Bill
Clinton, the last Democrat
with successful presidential electability.
Author and former NY Times correspondent Chris Hedges says Clinton should
have been
exposed as a traitor to the progressive tradition of his party:
“The misery sweeping
across the
American landscape may have begun with Ronald Reagan, but it was
accelerated
and codified by Bill Clinton. He sold
out the poor and the working class. And Clinton
did it deliberately to feed the pathological hunger he and his wife
have for
political power. It was the Clintons who
led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. The Clintons
argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of
votes or
power, as a political ally. Workers
would vote Democratic anyway. They had
no choice. It was better, the Clintons
argued, to take corporate money and use government to service the needs
of the
corporations. By the 1990s, the
Democratic Party, under Clinton’s
leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.” - TruthDig.com
- -
-
If misery indeed loves company, Mets fans can look to their Dodgers
and Tigers counterparts for comfort. LA
was swept by Colorado, the Tigers
lost yet
again to Cleveland. In the words of a NYM fan – perhaps
prematurely - about the home team:
“They’re done.”
- 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 –
9/18/07)
The combination
of Derek Jeter’s clutch home run Sunday night against Boston and a
Chicago
Tribune article lining up Barack Obama’s “All-Star team” prompts again
a connection noted in the first Nub last
April.
Derek and
Barack have similar multi-cultural backgrounds – they even
bear a vague resemblance to one another.
Obama, a supporter of the home town White Sox, is certainly a
Jeter fan
– who isn’t this side of Red Sox Nation?
The junior senator from Illinois
needs a Jeter-like political hitter to add to his team, which lacks
authentic
star quality. Key members of the Obama
squad include Anthony Lake, Bill Clinton’s original national security
adviser; Susan Rice, former assistant
secretary of state under Madeleine Albright, and Eric Holder, a former
deputy
attorney general. Not exactly a murders
row.
Obama’s
strength is off-the-field support from the likes of Oprah
Winfrey, in particular, and from Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s
national
security adviser, and Theodore Sorensen, JFK’s top assistant. It is
unrealistic to expect an apparently apolitical Jeter to lend his name
to that
lineup. But, as was said here in early
April, “Obama can benefit from a transfer of th(e) admiration (for
Derek) if he
handles himself in the political field with the same unruffled
assurance that
Jeter exhibits when he steps to the plate.”
So far, Barack has made un-Derek-like rookie mistakes in his
presidential
campaign, mainly overreacting to rhetorical brush-backs from opponents. But, unlike the Mets, Obama has time to
settle down; the primary season still has some months to go.
-
- -
Willie Randolph surely befuddled many Mets fans when he announced
journeyman
Brian Lawrence would replace the still-injured El Duque in last night’s
game
against Washington. Every one of the team’s last 14 was a
must-win game; didn’t Willie know that? Lawrence lasted
three-and-a-half innings. When the Mets
scored three runs in the top of the first, one apprehensive viewer
clicked over
to the comfort of the Orioles-Yankees game.
When the Yanks fell behind 2-0 in the first, he knew they would
catch
up, just as he wasn’t overly surprised to learn that the Nats had
overtaken the
Mets, 5-4, in the fifth. The message,
Willie: This is no time to take any team lightly and give members of
the
regular rotation extra rest. There’ll be
plenty of rest when the regular season ends and, the way it looks now,
the team
goes home.
- -
-
What are we to think of Michael Mukasey, Bush’s nominee for attorney
general - a Reagan appointee and former chief judge of New York’s
Southern District? Salon’s Glenn Greenwald
puts in a surprising
good word for the selection:
“I
want to highlight one extremely relevant consideration concerning Judge
Mukasey -- the impressive role he played in presiding over the Jose
Padilla
case in its earliest stages. After Padilla was first detained in April
2002 and
declared an "enemy combatant," he was held incommunicado, denied all
access to the outside the world, including counsel, and the Bush
administration
refused to charge him with any crimes. A lawsuit…demand(ed) that
Padilla be
accorded the right to petition for habeas corpus and that, first, he be
allowed
access to a lawyer. That lawsuit was assigned to Judge Mukasey, which
almost
certainly made the Bush DOJ happy.
“But
any such happiness proved to be unwarranted. Judge Mukasey repeatedly
defied the demands of the Bush administration, ruled against them,
excoriated
them on multiple occasions for failing to comply with his legally
issued
orders, and ruled that Padilla was entitled to contest the factual
claims of
the government and to have access to lawyers.”
-
- -
The
Dodgers, now three games behind San Diego
and a
game-and-a-half behind the Phillies for the NL wild card, need a sweep
of two
games at Colorado
today to stay in the playoff race. It
won’t be easy; the Rockies, two games
behind
LA, still haven’t quite given up.
- 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 – 9/17/07)
A ballgame
from which national
significance could be drawn? No, not involving the Yanks or Mets. It was played Saturday in Washington,
where the lowly Nats defeated Atlanta
at DC Stadium. The stat that stands out
is not the score - 7-4; it's the attendance figure, 27,000. That's more than twice the estimated
number
of demonstrators who protested against the war nearby earlier in the
day.
The game, of course,
had zero
pennant ramifications. The issue of Iraq - that is, of war or
peace,
life or death - could obviously not be more serious. The
comparatively paltry
turnout of protesters provided further evidence that the
peace
movement has lost its early numerical clout. Consider
that
nearly five years ago, on October 26, 2002, more than 200,000 anti-war
marchers
gathered in Washington
to denounce a war still in its planning stages, and that a larger
number
returned three months later in a vain effort to stop the inevitable.
The lineup
of reasons why the
movement is bogging down has been listed here before: lack of prominent
political leadership, absence of a military draft, divisiveness among
key
organizing groups ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice, general
public
fatigue. But Boston Globe columnist
James Carroll suggests and additional reason – that too many Americans
have
come to believe in the righteousness of what we’re trying to accomplish:
“(There
is a) universal impulse to
regard individual US
soldiers as innocents. It is
hard to conclude that United States policies are
bad if the people
carrying them out are only good…The real purpose of such (thinking)… is
American self-exoneration.
“Why
do they hate us? Perhaps an answer is embedded in
this visceral insistence on innocence as the defining note of the
American
character.
“If the United States
finds a way,
eventually, to withdraw from Iraq without ever having reckoned the war
as an
expressly American evil, then the world will be at risk for its savage
replay.”
- -
-
Stating the obvious: Just as it was how
the Mets lost over the
weekend – is there any way of avoiding the “c”-word? – that puts their
season
in question, so it was how the Yanks won – did anyone doubt Derek Jeter
would
come through in the clutch? – that says they are playoff-bound.
The Mets, still four games up in the loss
column with 14 to play, have an apparently easier schedule than Philadelphia. But Willie Randolph and co. must be badly
psyched. They will play seven games with
Florida - the same Marlins who all but
eliminated
Colorado from the NL wild card race -
and six
with Washington. The Phils have seven games with Washington
and three each with the Cardinals and Braves.
The Mets play one game more than the Phils, a makeup date with
the
Cardinals at Shea.
The Yankees
are three loss-column games
up on Detroit
with
13 to go in their wild card race. The
Yanks have six games with Baltimore,
four with Toronto and three with Tampa Bay. The
Tigers face the bigger challenge of 12
games – three each with Cleveland, Kansas City, Minnesota
and the White Sox.
The Mets
should be even more intimidated
by the thought of the Phils making the wild card than the Red Sox
probably are
with regard to the Yanks. Alas for the
Mets, the Phillies have a good shot at the league’s second prize
because the NL
West contenders figure to be taking turns knocking each other off.
-
- -
(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 – 9/14/07)
More
of Journalism 101:
The baseball careers of George
Steinbrenner and Peter
Angelos illustrate why serious news people are leery of labels. Steinbrenner, who bought into the Yankees in
1973, was vilified in sports pages for years over his handling of the
team. Then, about a decade ago, the
media began to acknowledge his willingness to spend to win, his
successful
leadership of the Bombers. Angelos was
hailed at the outset (1993) of his ownership of the Orioles for his
willingness
to invest heavily in bringing a winner to Baltimore. As
long as he succeeded, into the late 90’s,
he remained a popular fan figure. Today,
with the franchise in disarray, Angelos has become a sports-page
villain.
Under traditional rules, journalists
know it is risky to
lionize or demonize individuals, or to accept anyone’s word that a
particular
nation is either a paragon of good or a “rogue” state. They
have learned that, almost always, there is more than one side to the
story.
Author Rob Draper, mentioned yesterday
in connection with
his book “Dead Certain”, has provided a balanced look at George Bush
believed
here to be particularly useful to progressives.
How many of us are – were – ill-prepared to give Bush the
benefit of any
doubt? In an interview with Salon’s
Rob
Patterson, Draper challenged that way of thinking:
“I think
that his adversaries have caricatured Bush at their
peril, not at his. Bush has made a
living off of being, as he puts it, ’misunderestimated.’
And it ill serves his opponents not to
concede his strong points. Not for
nothing is this guy president of the United States.”
Nevertheless, to objective news
people, Bush’s labeling of nations as part of an “axis of evil”
violated a
basic principle of their craft. It is
therefore
reasonable for them to find a way to suggest that such an assertion –
and
similar ones concerning the evils of Iran, Hamas, Hugo Chavez,
Fidel
Castro, etc. – must be seen as unproven accusations rather than
verified fact. But challenging such assertions is
something the media seldom do.
Fox News’
Bill O’Reilly, who likely
would challenge the validity of these principles, wrote for a memorial
service
for Molly Ivins this week about a pertinent exchange he had with the
legendary
Texas liberal not long before her death earlier this year: “I said
something
she wrote ‘sounded like socialism’. ‘So!’ she
said.”
-
- -
The Yankees came out of last
night’s game in Toronto
with a fortified pitching corps for the playoffs – Ian Kennedy
confirmed that
he will be an asset. But it was a key
loss that undercut anticipation of the series with Boston beginning tonight. As Michael Kay put it on YES, “There’s a big
difference between being three and five games behind in the loss
column." The Red Sox’s come-from-behind
victory over Tampa
Bay
Wednesday coupled with the 2-1 NYY defeat now shifts the focus to the
wild
card. Detroit
will have its hands full playing at Minnesota. By late
Sunday night the Yanks should have the wild card ready for the
pocketing. The Mets, like the Twins, have
a spoiler
mission: theirs is to push the Phillies farther out of wild card
contention
than they are now (a game-and-a-half behind San Diego).
Telling it
like it is: “The
names are Sosa and Feliciano, Schoeneweis and Sele, and most
of all, Mota. They occupy the same wall
of the clubhouse, a veritable Murderers' Row, their specialty the
killing of
well-pitched games.” - Shawn Powell, Newsday
-
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 – 9/13/07)
“He
(Bush) is like a
baseball umpire who feels like if you call a ball a strike, you've got
to stick
to that. Otherwise people will question
you. They will think that your
equivocation is a sign of a lack of certainty.”
Robert
Draper, quoted
above about the president, has attracted attention here to his new book
“Dead
Certain” not just because of the baseball reference.
He is a rare journalistic specimen
these days, one who tries to maintain
objectivity – not imposing his “own belief system” – on his story: Who is George Bush and What Makes Him Tick?
Another
excerpt from
an interview with Salon’s Robert Patterson suggests how objective
Draper
managed to be:
“Beyond
the fact
that Bush is charming and there's this incredible loyalty that is
cultivated
between him and his subordinates, he has a surprising intellect…A guy
who can
listen to an economist talk about a tax scheme and just eviscerate the
guy
because…there's a loose thread in his argument cannot be intellectually
lazy. I think that what's difficult to
reconcile is
this man's brightness with his capacity for incuriosity.”
“Journalism is a series of judgment
calls,” Draper
says toward the end of the interview. He
calls Bush “out” – for his refusal to admit mistakes, but “safe” for
his
willingness to risk in what he honestly sees as a worthwhile cause:
“This is
a guy who
really possesses a lot of insecurities, and I think that's why he
evinces this
sort of incuriosity. There are only
certain kinds of challenges that he can deal with. What is admirable
about Bush
is also part of his insecurity. I think
because his insecurity drives him to want to be relevant and want to do
big
things, he's willing to throw the ball long. And
I think that because of that, history is
not going to judge this man with indifference.”
-
- -
In the SNY booth the other day, Keith Hernandez was saying that
something
akin to indifference overtakes teams out of contention these days. “They stay back on their heels for just a
second too long,” he said. “It’s hard to
maintain concentration when you’re out of it.”
Tony La Russa says “strained relationships” with players could keep
him from
returning as Cardinals manager. He
doesn’t name Scott Rolen as a strain-ee (he doesn’t have to) or any
others. The one name dropped is a plug
for a friend; it comes as La Russa speculates for the St.Lous
Post-Dispatch about
the future: “ People wonder where
I'm going to manage. The real question is
where is Dave (Duncan)
going to be the
pitching coach? And find out if they
need a manager. Because
I want to sign on there." - (Quoted
by Derrick Goold)
La Russa’s Cardinals are among teams still in contention but
perilously
close to dropping out. On the bubble with
two-and-a-half weeks to go, St.Louis has lost six in a row and are four
games
behind Milwaukee
and the Cubs. The Dodgers and Rockies have both moved to within two-and-a-half
of the
Padres for the NL wild card. The Tigers,
four games off the wild card pace, can’t seem to gain on the Yanks.
- 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 – 9/12/07)
In Anaheim
the other night, ESPN’s Jon Miller, Joe Morgan and Peter Gammons were
discussing baseball’s latest performance-enhancing drugs scandal. Pointing to (a) the lack of a vigorous
response by either MLB or the players union to the drug problem in
general, and
(b), rising fan attendance, the three concluded that “The only ones who
seem to
care are the media.”
Rich Ankiel, the Cardinals’ comeback
kid, apparently
cares. His BA has slipped from .358 to
.303 since the Daily News broke the story Friday. He’s
gone one for 18, striking out four times
in four at bats against the Cubs Monday and once against the Pirates
last
night. Meanwhile, the Cards have lost five
straight.
On Bill Maher’s HBO program last
weekend, author-scholar
Cornel West and Maher suggested that few attentive Americans were
buying
reports of progress – either military or political – in Iraq. The only ones buying, they agreed, were the
“mainstream media.”
What’s behind this double play? Baseball reporters, forced into lockstep with
their colleagues covering the same performers and statistics-based
events,
pounce on any story that gets them out of their own crowded batting
cage. That’s not to say the drugs
story is
unimportant. It’s just not what sports
page addicts want to read.
Washington-based political reporters
are like their baseball
counterparts; they are embedded with the home team, in this case the
government. But news people throughout
the country are, practically speaking, in the same bind.
They have a job to do in an increasingly
cost-conscious industry. The government
has a huge quantitative advantage over opponents as it disseminates
information. That always available info
makes it easy to get the day’s work done.
Example: On the first anniversary of the Iraq
war, MSNBC was planning to
review, minute by minute, developments during the war’s first hour,
beginning
with the president declaring Saddam Hussein’s time was up.
As the hour’s segments were being lined up,
someone said “What about the statements and actions of those who
opposed the
war?” There was no such material
available, only words and pictures celebrating the lead-up to, and the
“shock
and awe” over Bagdad.
- -
-
John Maine will be auditioning for a spot in the Mets’
playoff rotation tonight against the Braves.
The odds of his earning such a spot are not good, especially
considering
these words about him from an MLB scout:
"Maineis an
enigma for
me. I know he's not throwing well, but I
don't know why. You kind of worry when a pitcher like Maine starts
getting smacked around because
you wonder if guys are figuring him out."
- quoted by Ken Davidoff
in Newsday
Of
course, Maine
can’t do much worse than Orlando Hernandez did last night, giving up eight
runs in three-plus innings. That makes a
total of 13 runs in six innings, and an ERA of 19.50 over El Duque’s
last two
starts. An injury made him unavailable
at the end of last season.
Unavailability may be the better option this year if Hernandez
continues
pitching with what seems to be a tired arm.
- 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 - 9/11/07)
In baseball, it’s the general manager,
not the field
manager, who dictates the direction the team will take.
In election politics, it’s the presidential
candidates, not the Congress, who establish the party line on key
national
policies.
As a baseball example, Willie Randolph
made clear, after
Julio Franco had been released, that he did not like having the Mets
roster
saddled with a 48-year-old utility man given a two-year contract by GM
Omar
Minaya. But Omar refused to give up on
the faded Franco for a long season-and-a-half.
In politics, the three major Democratic
candidates – Hillary
Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama – have called for phased
withdrawals of
our troops in Iraq. In so doing, they have been more conciliatory
than confrontational with the Bush Administration on the war. (Edwards has been the most forceful, calling
for withdrawal of all troops “within a year.”) The Democratic Congress
has followed
their cautious lead, and taken most of the blame from progressives for
not
standing up to the president.
One of the latest examples, from
Sunday’s Salon:
“Democratic Congressional leaders — due
either to
illusory fears of political repercussions and/or a desire that the war
continue
— seem more supportive than ever of the ongoing occupation (or at least
more
unwilling than ever to stop it). They are going to do nothing to
mandate
meaningful troop withdrawal.”
- Glenn Greenwald
The Mets decision makers –
Randolph, by implication - were
criticized here this season for calling on inadequate stopgap pitchers
to fill
the fifth spot in the rotation. On
Sunday, after Pedro Martinez’s victory, Minaya indirectly owned up to
having
been responsible for the bad choices:
"This
is the kind of game that in the past, we'd have some fifth starter --
and I'm
not going to name the guy or two -- and we knew going into the game we
had to
score four or five runs."
–quoted by David Lennon in Newsday
Back
on the subject of
presidential candidates, human rights author Joan Chittister sees
widespread
religious hypocrisy in their campaign rhetoric:
“The
question is not:
What do each of these candidates tell us about how religious they are?
The
question is: What do each of these candidates plan to do to make the
corporal
works of mercy a living sign of (a caring government)?
“In
fact, how conscious are we of the silent erosion of
each of these works of mercy in the society around us while we define
“religion” as single-issue politics? After
all, food and education and decent housing and support services are
exactly the
things that take the strain off families and make abortion unnecessary.
“From
where I stand, it may well be our own unawareness of
the loss of these services that’s making it so difficult for us to make
a
distinction between what is really “religious” about our candidates and
what is
only religion being used as another kind of slippery election strategy. God save us all from that kind of religion
again.”
-
National Catholic
Reporter
- 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 – 9/10/07)
It wasn’t so long ago – 2003 and 2004 –
that the Montreal
Expos shifted their focus from French-speaking Canada’s
largest city to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The
idea was to find
a more supportive base for the team, which hadn’t been doing well,
fanwise, in Montreal. It’s a long way from that comparatively
trivial relocation exercise to the similar but serious strategic effort
under
way today in Iraq;
the U.S. military
focus is shifting from the core of
Bagdad to outskirts and beyond, to
Anbar and
other provinces.
Major League baseball just couldn’t
make it in Montreal; our major military
buildup – the surge – has
clearly failed to make much of Bagdad
secure. Reports concerning Anbar from
our ambassador Ryan Crocker and other U.S. officials say that
things are
going well there; the once adversarial Sunnis are now allies against Al
Quaida. In 2003, baseball officials
reported that San Juan
fans had opened their hearts and wallets to the Expos and the city
could
qualify as the team’s new home. That
enthusiasm dwindled with time and MLB moved the team to Washington, DC,
in 2005. Journalist Nir Rosen, who
researched his book “In the Belly of the Green Bird” in Iraq, put the Anbar trend into
perspective when
he said Bagdad has lost its fan base among U.S.
decision makers:
“Bagdad used to be the
most
important city in Iraq, and whoever
controlled Bagdad controlled Iraq.
These days, you have a collection of
city states: Mosul,
Basra,
Bagdad, Kirkuk,
Irbil,
Sulaymaniyah. Each
one is virtually independent, and they
have their own warlords and their own militias. And
what happens in Bagdad
makes no difference.
- Interview with Amy
Goodman on
“Democracy Now”
Perfect Pitch pollster Bob Sullivan,
observing the Anbar “success”
through the prism of softening public opinion on the occupation, says
surveys
connecting the surge with the what’s happened in Anbar are misleading: “The
'Anbar System’ was in place and working well before the surge
began,”
notes Sullivan. “Anbar was successful
because of U.S.
payments of cold cash and weapons to the local Sunni chieftans. These same chieftans had been busy killing U.S.
soldiers
before this. What brought the Sunnis around was the Congressional
Democrats’
loud - but ineffectual - demands for a withdrawal of U.S.
troops. The Sunnis, aware that once the
Americans left
they would be outnumbered 3 to 1 by revenge-seeking Shia, did an
about-face: they’ve decided to play ball
with the U.S.
until they have enough arms to protect themselves.”
So much for the validity of the Anbar
showcase.
-
-
-
Baseball has seldom had as attractive a September showcase
as this one. Especially in the National
League, where Milwaukee, the Cubs and Cardinals are bunched together,
with only
three games separating the first-place Brewers and third-place Cards,
and only
one separating the Brewers and Cubs.. Arizona and San Diego, three games apart, figure to duke it
out for NL
West title but, the Dodgers and Rockies,
five-and-a-half
and six games behind, respectively, are not totally out of the picture.
The Mets’ victory over Roy Oswalt and
Astros yesterday puts
them in a commanding position as they prepare to play three games
apiece with Atlanta and Philadelphia
over the next seven days. If the Mets
lose all six while the Phils win of six of seven games they’ll be
playing over
that period, the home team will still be a half-game ahead at the end
of the
week-long stretch. Projecting on a more
realistic long-term basis, if the Mets play .500 ball over the last 20
games, Philadelphia
would have to
win 17 of 20 to beat them for NL East honors.
In what is realistically the last AL
race - for the wild card – Yankee victories in only nine of their last
19
games, would require Detroit
to win 14 of 19 to overtake the Bombers for a playoff spot. For either team, a not-impossible, but
not-terribly-likely scenario.
Economic underdog teams in contention
and therefore, it says
here, worthy of support: Arizona, $52
million
payroll; Colorado, $54 million; San Diego, $58 million; Cleveland
$61 million; Milwaukee,
$70 million.
- 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 – 9/7/07)
Two remarkable bounces have made an
elected official and a
ballplayer potential Nub-acknowledged comeback-of-the-year performers. Idaho Senator Larry Craig is the official, Kansas City
pitcher Brian Bannister the player.
“With powerful lawyers now defending
him,” says the NY
Times, “Craig intends to wage a fierce fight…to defend his honor and
that of
his family.” If he succeeds in getting
his disorderly-conduct guilty plea withdrawn in Minnesota, Craig could hold on to
his Senate
seat for the rest of 2007, and perhaps longer.
Bannister, formerly of the Mets, spent most of an injury-riddled
2006
season in the minors –after going 2-1 with the big team - and was twice
demoted
by KC this year before making his current run for rookie (as well as
our comeback)-of-the-year
honors.
There is no question of Craig running
for re-election; too
much negative fallout from his toilet-stall outing in Minneapolis has
precluded him from trying for
a third term in 2008. But if, in defiance
of determined GOP colleagues, he can hang on for the rest of this year,
he will
have earned a Comeback Kid designation.
At very least, his keeping the story alive should qualify him
for an Involuntary
Assistance Award from the Democratic Party.
The only way Bannister could be more
embarrassing to the
Mets GM Omar Minaya, who swapped him for the benighted Amborix Burgos,
would be
if the NYM’s fail to make the playoffs for want of solid starting
pitcher. Bannister, 12-7, will try to
buttress his
best-comeback bona fides when he faces the Yankees in KC on Saturday.
A look at the AL
standings makes clear it will take a dramatic comeback – or collapse –
by some
team to upset the likely playoff matchups in early October. As of today, the wild card Yankees figure to
be playing the Angels, with the other series matching the Indians and
Red
Sox. The matchups could change between
now and the end of the month. If Clevelandovertakes LA in the W-L column, the Indians will face the Yankees, with
the
Angels meeting the Red Sox. A change in
the identity of any of the four teams is unlikely.
In the NL, the only thing obvious is that the
playoff picture remains blurry…and exciting.
- -
-
Follow-up: Robert
Reich (quoted in last Tuesday’s Nub): “The realization of the
workers’
dream occurred (in) the 20th century, when regulated capitalism made
its
adjustments, and a vast population of working people was able to lay
solid
claim to the middle class. But
affluence had an inherently co-opting
effect…when the labor virtue of solidarity (dissipated).”
Commuters (quoted in NY Times during NY Taxi
Workers
Alliance strike 9/5): Tax lawyer – “I’ll pay the (non-striker) whatever
he
wants.” Health care associate - “I’ll
usually pay $12 for this. Now I’ll pay
$20.”
- -
-
What has fueled the Cardinals’ surge to within a game of the
NL Central lead (shared by the Brewers and Cubs)? It’s
a “who”, not a “what”: Rich Ankiel. Since
his call-up August 9th,
Ankiel has driven in 29 runs (compared to 11 by Albert Pujols), has hit
9 HR’s
and is batting .358. The
most impressive overall stat: The Cards
were 52-59 before Ankiel. They are 17-9
since.
- 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 – 9/6/07)
“They’ve learned the fundamentals. They execute.” High
praise in baseball. Grudging tribute in
politics (if from the opposition
party). Colorado’s ability to catch the
ball and make the plays is a good reason the Rockies, with baseball’s
best
fielding percentage (.989), are
contending for the NL West title (five games out of first place). At the other extreme, the inability to play
tight defense is a major reason the worst-fielding Florida Marlins and
Tampa
Bay D-Rays are last in their respective leagues.
Republicans have “out-fundamentaled”
the Democrats for most
of this decade, finding issues and candidates that attract voting blocs
in
larger numbers than their opponents. That
is changing, writes veteran political
journalist Albert Hunt, not just because of Iraq,
but owing to the
not-unrelated defections of young voters (18-29) from the GOP.
Still, says Hunt, there’s a more crucial voting bloc pulling away
from the suddenly
fundamentals-challenged Republicans:
“The
fastest-growing major ethnic voters in America
are Hispanics. Several years ago, there
was Republican optimism that the party's promotion of a can-do
entrepreneurial
spirit and fealty to old- fashioned values were winners with these
voters; in
the last presidential election, George W. Bush got 40 percent of the
Hispanic
vote, a significant increase from earlier contests.
“The
ugly fight over immigration, with prominent
Republicans leading the bashing, has set back these hopes, perhaps for
years.
In the midterm elections last November, the Republican Latino vote
dropped to
30 percent.
“’If we get the
same type of Hispanic support in the next election cycle that we did in
the
last, there is no way we could elect a Republican president,’' says
Florida
Senator Mel Martinez, chairman of the national Republican Party.” (Bloomberg News)
-
-
-
It is true the Mets might have lost yesterday anyway.
But Willie Randolph’s practice of denuding his
lineup of productive hitters on day-after-night games at the end of a
series is
too often predictive of defeat. It has
happened a handful of times this season, games quasi-conceded that
could
possibly have been won in order to rest regulars (often in advance of
an
off-day). Thankfully, the Braves kept
the Phils from moving to within four games with 23 left.
On the other hand, John Maine (six runs in
four-and-a-half innings) is lately looking like the throw-in Baltimore was
willing to give up on when it
traded Jorge Julio for Kris Benson. ____________________________________________________________________
Lob from Left field (lofting a final union reference on this Labor
Day week): Salon’s Juan Cole reported on a
tough
grilling Fox’s Chris Wallace gave Karl Rove the other Sunday:
“First,
(Wallace)
asked Rove about the decision of the White House to turn the "war on
terror" into a campaign issue in the 2002 midterms. He
cited as an example the Republican attacks
on Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia (a Vietnam war quadriplegic)
as…a
traitor…
“… Rove
responded by attacking… (Cleland) for
having wanted to allow employees of the
Department of Homeland Security to have a union. He did
not explain why such stances made Cleland a menace to the Constitution,
unless
one holds that unions are unconstitutional.”
_____________________________________________________________
The Yankees got a big assist from umpire Greg
Gibson during
their seventh-inning rally against Seattle
last night. He made two key “ball four”
calls against Mariner relievers George Sherrill and Sean Green on
belt-close
pitches the overhead replays showed to have hit the corners. Sherrill couldn’t believe the call and
spoke
to Gibson about it. “He told
me that he was
thinking of giving me the call but that Joh (catcher Kenji Johjima)
moved his
glove too much. I think (Gibson) needs
to read the rulebook again." (SeattleIntelligencer). Given the circumstances,
it was surprising how M’s manager John McLaren kept his cool. His team’s wild card chances are now going,
going
- 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 – 9/5/07)
Post-Labor Day melancholy (2) The gloom
suffusing pockets of
people in progressive Minnesota and
conservative Idaho
could have been included in yesterday’s list of setback-sufferers. After going 1-3 over the holiday weekend, the
defending division champion Minnesota Twins fell into a double-digit
hole in
the AL Central, signaling that there would be no repeat this year. And Larry Craig fans in Idaho
lost their U.S.
senator when Craig announced he was resigning his office after his
botched toilet-stall
play.
The Idaho Republican is reportedly
reconsidering his
decision, but whatever he decides, Perfect Pitch pollster Bob Sullivan
believes
that, among politicos, Mitt Romney will take the biggest political hit
from the
Craig miscue. Not because Craig was
co-chair of Romney’s presidential campaign in Idaho, but because Romney
“condemned Craig in the coldest, most merciless language…He publicly
threw
Craig under a truck…I think many Americans will see in Romney a cold,
calculating executioner of hapless and pathetic old friends who are in
his way:
a vicious putz.”
- -
-
After losing to Cleveland for the fifth time this season,
Twins ace Johan Santana told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune his team had
lost its
edge: “We’re not giving everything we
have…We’re supposed to be one of the best teams on fundamentals; we’re
not
(showing it). If you don’t do that,
you’re not going to win.” The Twins lost to Cleveland in 11 innings last night to
put
them 11-and-a-half games behind the first-place Indians now.
While the Mets were beating Cincinnati
Monday, Keith Hernandez said David
Wright had turned a corner as a hitter: “He’s
learned how to pull. Young players
usually hit to the other field. It takes
awhile for them to feel comfortable digging in at the plate. David is finally feeling comfortable.”
In
the YES booth at the Stadium,
Michael Kay and Al Leiter were bemoaning the MLB’s expanded-roster
policy in
September. “Joe Torre should be trying
to get Seattle
to use up its players,” Kay said. “But
this time of year that’s not possible.
That shouldn’t be. And a player
who won’t even be on the playoff roster shouldn’t be the reason a team
makes
the playoffs. That’s happened.” Said Leiter:
“There are a lot of teams that agree with you.”
Neither mentioned another reason bringing
players up September 1 is a dubious policy:
Playoff-bound minor league farm teams (and their fans) are
deprived
of star players when they most need
them.
______________________________________________________________________
Lob
from Left field: Further thoughts on
Labor’s decline from
Boston Globe columnist James Carroll: “The
realization of the workers’ dream occurred (in) the 20th century,
when regulated capitalism made its adjustments, and a vast population
of
working people was able to lay solid claim to the middle class. But affluence had an inherently co-opting
effect, as was powerfully displayed during the American civil rights
movement,
when the labor virtue of solidarity was trumped by racism, and union
members
mostly found themselves on the wrong side of history. The curious
phenomenon of
‘Reagan Democrats’ saw workers recruited into a reactionary political
movement
that undercuts their own interests.”
Until now, Orlando Hernandez has made doomsayers
who
predicted he would miss at least a third of the season (as was done
here) look
foolish. But it’s September, and El Duke
has hurt himself, as he did last year.
Willie Randolph is vague enough about when Hernandez will return
to
warrant concern among worrying Mets fans that we may have seen the last
of him
this year.
- 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 – 9/4/07)
Post-Labor Day melancholy:
it strikes the usual suspects, teachers and schoolchildren (many
of
them), summer-lovers in general. Then
there are special categories – people or organizations feeling bad for
statistical reasons. One pertinent
example: members of labor unions and their would-be recruits. Another: ballplayers on teams like the
Phillies Braves and the Yankees.
The percentage of union workers in the U.S.
has gone from 35 percent in
the fifties to 12 percent today – less than eight percent if you
include only
the private sector. A gloom-generating
stat if ever there was one. And how
about what happened to the Phillies:
Going into Labor Day weekend games, they were fresh from a
four-game
sweep of the Mets and had moved to within two games of the NL East lead. As of today, they are five games off the
pace set by the Mets after having lost two of three to Florida
and one yesterday to Atlanta. Similarly, the Braves had crept to within
four-and-a-half of the Mets and seemed primed to gain ground in a
three-game
series with the reeling division leaders.
After being swept, they are now seven-and-a-half games behind
the NYM’s. The Yanks were on a roll,
having taken three
from the Red Sox. They were only five
games behind as of early Friday night.
Now, following a 1-3 weekend, they are seven games off the pace
and must
concentrate on turning back Seattle
for a wild card berth.
What happened?
The
teams faltered under the intensifying pennant race pressure. Energized by rookie roster additions, the
Yanks are a good bet to bounce back. The Phils and Braves have to hope
Billy
Wagner has really lost it and there will be a couple of more Mets
tailspins.
Some say unions folded under pressure
from President
Reagan. When he fired the nation’s
striking air traffic controllers in the early eighties, they say, he
legitimized union-busting in the private sector. In
any event, for most of the quarter-century
since then, the federal government and corporate aggressiveness have
combined
to keep unions down.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich
says we don’t have to
look that far for the culprits:
“Don’t
blame Ronald Reagan or corporate greed. Blame
us - you and me. You see, starting about
30 years ago and with
increasing efficiency, technologies have given us consumers a world of
choice -
low priced goods and services that often depend on low wages here and
elsewhere…
“We
as a nation have traded off lower priced goods and
services, in place of a unionized workforce with the bargaining clout
to get
higher wages. So now, a lot of us get
good consumer deals and lousy paychecks.
“No
one trumpeted this choice. It’s happened gradually. But
is it the right choice? That’s what we
ought to be asking ourselves - at least once a year…” - Commondreams.org
Some people believe setbacks, like those suffered
by the Phils,
Braves and Yanks are blessings in extremely effective disguise. Humorist Garrison Keillor became a believer
after experiencing a physically painful setback:
“A good hard bump is a
moment of
truth which announces that 1) the world does not conform itself to our
impressions of it, and 2) even if you duck and weave your way through
the jungle
of life, there is an overhang with your name on it, and 3) it is good,
at a
time of Gay & Lesbian Literature and Women's Literature and red
states and
blue and persons of color and non-color, to get a simple universal
experience
that is available to everybody (BONK! Arghhh!), and 4) I forget what
the fourth
point is. Something about suffering.” -
Salon
With the Mets rebounding
from their disgraceful showing in Philadelphia last week,
it may be churlish to bring up, yet again, the saga of Brian Bannister,
whom
Omar Minaya traded to KC for soon-to-be minor league reliever Amborix
Burgos. Bannister has won four straight,
is now 12-7 with a 3.16 ERA. Here is
what former Red Sox pitcher and current Royals radio broadcaster Mike
Boddicker
said about him (quoted by the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo):
"(Bannister
is) like [Greg ]
Maddux but
he doesn't quite have the movement on his pitches
quite yet, but he's very smart and really knows how to pitch. You can tell his dad [Floyd Bannister]
was a major league pitcher… He's got a good breaking ball and he's very
good
with his location."
An added potential embarrassment
stemming from the
trade: Bannister is considered a candidate for AL Rookie of the Year.
-
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.)
the_nub archive
