Extortion of the press

I've always been a fan of Bob Costas, the legendary sportscaster that wrote a book on baseball back in the early 2000s that made me think he is the one guy in the world who could solve all of MLB's problems if he became baseball commissioner. He might be a little too Yankee-centric, but he's a pro's pro and he always knows what he's talking about when he's on screen.

Costas was awarded the Mirror Award for “distinct, consistent and unique contributions to the public’s understanding of the media” last Monday and used the platform of his acceptance speech to scold the news media in general and several media outlets in particular for failing to commit journalism.

Most of his address surrounded the sports news business, which included this beauty: "Network TV sports is the only business I can think of where the buyer must continually flatter the seller. 'Here's your billion dollars or more, and if we pulled the Brinks armored truck up to Park Avenue and haven't delivered it in the proper denominations, we apologize profusely and we'll be right back.'" Broadening his focus to news generally, he deplored the reluctance of (primarily) TV news from "identifying and acknowledging the elephants in the room."

"Beyond sports," he went on, "the free press is under attack." Excoriating ABC and CBS for "paying ransom" in the form of settlements to frivolous lawsuits brought against them by President Convicted Felon, Costas articulated what to most of us is the blindingly obvious but to news organizations apparently a novel concept: Journalism is about reporting fact, not propagating two sides of an argument. Especially when one side is completely nonsensical BS.

“What’s happening now are not matters of small degree,” Costas said, citing "ongoing assaults on the basic idea of a free press."

Costas approached the close of his speech with this:

Donald Trump’s view of the world ... is through a prism of what benefits him, there are no higher ideals. There are no principles at work other than what benefits him.

...Because he is the president, what he does and what is done in his name has been normalized so that "responsible journalists" have to pretend that there’s always two sides to this. There really isn’t two sides to much of what Donald Trump represents.... If someone is contending that the Earth is flat, in order to appear objective, you are not required to say, “Well, maybe it might be oblong.” No, it’s not. Certain things are just true.

And regrettably, something that’s true in America right now is that the President of the United States has absolutely no regard, and in fact has contempt, for basic American principles and basic common decency.

Seems like a good place to close this post as well.

Tagged Baseball, Politics, President VonClownstick, Bob Costas, Posted on June 12, 2025 at 5:28PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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History break

Society continues to crumble around us, as Secretary of Terrorism Kristi Noem considers Hunger Games-style reality TV competitions for immigrants and the Speaker of the House says crime is OK so long as it's done openly. What a time to be alive, eh?

With all this happening one has to find other things to occupy one's mind or else go utterly mad, so I've been reading a book about baseball in the 1970s. My personal baseball fandom didn't really begin until maybe 1978—that's the first World Series I think I watched any of (Yankees-Dodgers, FWIW)—so most of what I've been reading so far is new-to-me anecdotes and bits of history along with more details to things I sort of knew about already in the broad strokes.

Like Astroturf. Though the synthetic green grass substitute was basically created for the Astrodome after the newly-rechristened Houston Astros moved into the world's first indoor baseball facility and discovered that a) a ceiling made of clear lucite panels makes for a great deal of glare and heat during the day; and b) remedying that by painting the lucite panels gray meant grass won't grow on the field. Hence, Astroturf. They incidentally also discovered that plastic grass was way cheaper to maintain than real grass, so when the plethora of new, multipurpose municipal stadiums started opening up they all featured Astroturf. Even the nice one—Royals Stadium in Kansas City, still in use today despite misguided efforts by some to fund a replacement—used the fake stuff, at least until 1995 (when the trend was moving to the retro-style baseball-only ballparks in fashion today). Candlestick Park in San Francisco wasn't one of these new behemoths, having opened in 1960, but it too converted to Astroturf for ten years. Horrible surface to play on. Well, "surface"; the surface was not terrible—though watch out for rug burns if you dove for a fly ball on it—it was the concrete underneath that made it truly unpleasant. Hard, unforgiving on knees and ankles, and then the extra fun of playing on it on a summer afternoon when it just reflected all the heat back up and made for field temps of 140 degrees (often in Midwest humidity). Thankfully bean-counters were ultimately defeated by players and aesthetics. Nowadays there are five teams that use artificial grass (oddly, the Astros are not among them) in their parks—all indoor or convertible facilities—but it's not the Astroturf of old, it's a rubbery grass-like surface atop a sandy subsurface that promotes drainage and doesn't feel like running on stone, and it's only used because growing grass is a challenge/impossibility in those stadia.

Anyway, the Astroturf train of thought brought me to the Philadelphia Phillies, who moved into their concrete and Astroturf home of Veterans stadium in 1971. That I knew. What I hadn't known was that they were desperate to do so because of their prior digs in Connie Mack Stadium, which the Phils had shared with and rented from the Philadelphia Athletics until the A's moved to Kansas City and which was apparently a nightmare of sunk costs. But it was the tale of the last game at Connie Mack that I wanted to share here today. Construction of Vet Stadium had been delayed a year, so the Phils had to tough out a final season at Connie Mack in 1970, the final game of which was marketed to fans with lots of promotions, giveaways, parts of the ballpark would be raffled off, and a helicopter was to fly down, pick up home plate, and fly it to The Vet at the end of the postgame ceremonies.

However, this was in Philadelphia.

It may be known as "the city of brotherly love," but Philadelphia sports fans are ruthless. (Go to any Phillies game and you'll see.) Throughout the game, fans could be heard hammering things, prying stuff out of foundations, basically stealing anything they could get their hands on as souvenirs of Connie Mack Stadium. When the game ended fans overwhelmed the field to take sod, dirt, the pitching rubber, advertising signs, pieces of the outfield wall, bullpen rosin, anything not bolted down and quite a few things that were bolted down. (After Oscar Gamble singled in Tim McCarver to win the game in the bottom of the tenth, he saw the crowd coming and yelled to his teammates, "Run, man, run like hell. We’ll be happy later.") Only home plate was spared since it was surrounded by officials who still needed to take it to Veterans Stadium. No postgame ceremonies happened, the stuff that was to be raffled off had all been stolen, the giveaway seat-slat replicas had been used as prybars and bludgeons, the emergency room at Temple University hospital was filled with Connie Mack Stadium chaos injuries, and the ballpark was in shambles.

It's a fun story, detailed here as "a day that would live in infamy."

A section of Connie Mack Stadium post-carnage

Tagged Baseball, History, Posted on May 19, 2025 at 7:24PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Worst. Commissioner. Ever.

The baseball commissioner is a corporate right-wing toady who doesn't give a damn about baseball

As if we needed more reasons to despise Commissioner of Baseball Robert D. Manfred Jr.—and former Commissioner Bud Selig, for that matter—he provided us with one by reinstating Pete Rose and all other permanently-banned-from-the-game individuals under the fig leaf excuse of, "well, they're dead, so let's say permanent bans end at death."

This action pulls the neat trick of both being wholly about Pete Rose and not really being about Pete Rose at all. It's about Rose because a comment about Rose was the impetus for this, it's not about Rose because of who the comment came from. It came from the cruel, corrupt, and incompetent fascist now occupying the office of President of the United States.

POTUS47 wants Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame for some reason. Why? Far as I know, POTUS47 is not particularly fond of baseball or versed in its history. But he does know the name Pete Rose, knows that Pete Rose was a supporter of his in 2016 and 2020, and he very likely knows that Pete Rose was the kind of man he likes best: selfish, criminal, and in love with his own "greatness."

I don't know if Rose and POTUS47 ever met personally or not, but since they're totally birds of a feather—well, except for one of them being a professional athlete with a standout career and the other being a failure in every business venture he ever undertook—it totally tracks that President Convicted Felon would stick his nose into this comparatively trivial matter.

There are a lot of horrible things among the autocratic agenda of the present administration, many of them shared by the Republican party as a whole, many of which have been on display over the past couple of weeks, many of which deserve far more attention than they're getting. But one of the underlying foundational elements of the POTUS47 mindset is not just racism and misogyny, but their corollary: glorification of despicable behavior by white dudes.

POTUS47 is himself a despicable white dude guilty of some of the worst behavior humanity has to offer, so he needs society to approve of other despicable white dudes guilty of terrible behavior so he doesn't stand out as the festering boil on America's face that he is. So all the January 6 insurrectionists get pardons (and perhaps get called upon to be thugs for him again), Jeffrey Epstein was "a terrific guy," Pete Hegseth gets to be Secretary of Defense, neo-Nazis are "very fine people," RFK Jr. and Elon Musk are "genius" level specimens, and Pete Rose should be idolized on and off the field.

Pete Rose was banned form baseball in 1989 by then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti (otherwise known as the last commissioner worth the title, apologies to Fay Vincent who let himself get steamrolled by Selig and company). Not for general assholishness (or for being a statutory rapist or for tax crimes, both of which were still not widely known about), but for specific affronts to the integrity of the game by way of gambling. Rose denied at the time but later admitted that he not only bet on big-league baseball games regularly, but that he also bet on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, for whom he was player-manager. This violated baseball's Rule 21(d), misconduct through gambling, which mandates a year's suspension for betting on games the bettor has no part in and a permanent ban for betting on games he participates in.

There have been arguments ever since over whether or not Rose's punishment was appropriate; of late, the arguments favoring his reinstatement center around how gambling has become normalized to the point of offensiveness, with sponsorships galore from gambling enterprises throughout the game. There have also been debates about others that are now, thanks to Rob Manfred's capitulation to one of the most heinous people on Earth, also re-eligible for the Hall, particularly Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was swept up in the Black Sox scandal of 1919 that ended up creating the position of commissioner in the first place (those unfamiliar should immediately go see the fine John Sayles film Eight Men Out). At first I sided with the pro-reinstate Jackson crowd, but upon reflection I will instead side with Bart Giamatti.

Giamatti was asked about reinstating Jackson shortly before he died later in ’89, and his reply was that the 1919 Series "and its aftermath cannot be recreated . . . I, for one, do not wish to play God with history. The Jackson case is now best given to historical analysis and debate as opposed to a present-day review with an eye to reinstatement." In other words, applying present-day judgments to events that occurred within their own historical contexts will inevitably miss key nuances and/or taint or sanitize history in ways that can't be predicted.

I would apply the same to Pete Rose now, particularly since we now know about some of his other gross behavior. I expect Giamatti would too, despite the idiotic remark by the guy who previously held the title of Worst Commissioner Ever, Bud Selig, who said, "I believe Bart would understand and respect the decision [to reinstate Rose] as well." Fuck you, Bud, Giamatti said he would only consider reinstating Rose if Rose worked toward living "a redirected, reconfigured, rehabilitated life," which he never did; Rose was unrepentant until the day he died last September. As Stephanie Apstein wrote in Sports Illustrated, "It’s hard to imagine a less savory character to whom to extend this grace. Rose agreed to the ban in the first place, then spent the rest of his life insisting he'd been wronged. He lied about betting on baseball until it became profitable to tell the truth."

Manfred, of course, isn't fit to lick Giamatti's loafers. The Rob Manfred era has been a nightmare of rule fuckery and greed and labor strife and greed and scandals and greed and, yes, more greed. Integrity of the game doesn't even make the top 20 in Manfred's list of priorities, all he wants to do is make more and more surfaces available for ad space (we now have ads on uniforms, ads on pitcher's mounds, ads on the grass in foul ground...), bully TV providers, and, yes, mingle with gamblers. When asked about Rose and gambling and the changes in baseball's attitude, Manfred tried to defend his office's relationship with gambling by saying "we sell data and/or sponsorships, which is essentially all we do, to sports betting enterprises." I leave it to the reader to decide if he meant, "we don't do any betting, we just encourage others to bet," or if he meant, "my job is first and foremost to sell data and ads to gambling outfits." No reason it can't be both, I guess.

But his job also, apparently, includes kowtowing to wannabe autocrats. I've seen one take that actually reflects well on Manfred, relatively speaking—that he reinstated Pete Rose as a sop to POTUS47 in hopes that it would get MLB some goodwill when it comes to immigration/deportations/renditioning of foreigners, that Major and minor-league ballplayers would be spared from ICE and HSI gestapo goons kidnapping them off the street or arresting them at airports. Maybe. I kind of doubt it, though. Even if that was the calculus it just means Manfred is as stupid as we all think he is, since you cannot appease the Bully-in-Chief, if you give him an inch he will take a parsec. Just ask Columbia U or the law firm of Paul, Weiss.

Pete Rose may or may not be bad for the Hall, depending on your metrics, but Rob Manfred is surely bad for baseball. Just as POTUS47 is bad for America and the world. All three deserve plaques in the Hall of Human Stains and Horrors.

 

Tagged Baseball, Politics, President VonClownstick, Rob Manfred, Posted on May 15, 2025 at 9:31PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Signal to noise ratio

This post's headline could easily apply to other things going on in the world, some of which I've been meaning to write about but haven't yet, but right now I'm just on about a smaller-scale annoyance than the unfolding destruction of the United States.

This is about the slow destruction of our eardrums.

I've been to a couple of Mariner games this past week, and for whatever reason, I was even more irritated by the inexcusably high volume used by the stadium sound system.

I wish this was something unique to the Mariners and the ballpark by Elliott Bay, but it isn't; pretty much any large-scale PA system is like this, and I don't remember it being this way back in the Kingdome days. Maybe I'm wrong and it was just as bad, but I don't think so; almost nothing about the Kingdome was superior to the current facility, but the one thing I can think of was is the ability to hold a conversation with your seatmates. You just can't do it in the current place without shouting unless you're seated in the first few rows near the field. Even out in the bleachers the speakers drown out normal conversation.

Between innings is the natural point in the game to focus on your conversations, but that's also the point when the PA blasts music, goofy scoreboard antics, and so on. Which would be fine—if it was at a volume that didn't feel like an assault. It's so loud that it even drowns out the PA announcer him/herself—without fail, any announcement made at the beginning of a half-inning cannot be understood because it is made while music is still blasting. During the action, there will sometimes be sound effects, implorations from Pavlov's Scoreboard to "get loud," or other gimcrackery that is at the same level of attack that between-inning music is.

Makes me crazy.

It's always been like this for things like rock concerts, at least if we confine "always" to the last four or five decades (no way for me to know about earlier, but I suspect you could go back further), and that may be the reason everything is too fucking loud now.

The generation of kids in the ’70s and ’80s that not only went to lots of concerts and music clubs wherein the standard operating procedure was to deafen the audience, that pioneered headphones and used them to drown out arguments their parents were having or ambient noise on the bus, that made big hits out of album tracks with titles like "Come on Feel the Noize" and "Bring the Noise" and "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" that are designed to be overwhelmingly loud are today running the facilities that use these sound systems. And those habits as kids means they have hearing loss as adults.

That's my working theory, anyway, that we have to endure these ridiculously loud sound systems in arenas, stadiums, anywhere really, because they're run by people who don't understand how terrible it is because they themselves have already significantly damaged their hearing. Not being able to converse with the person sitting next to them because the sound system is drowning them out is just life to them.

So now we're all subjected to the assaults, we're all at risk for hearing damage, because of what came before in our society. Which, not for the first time, makes me wonder:

Who originally thought, in their infinite wisdom, that when setting up a venue for an event to be mainly enjoyed as an auditory experience, such as a concert in a club or arena, that best practice would be to make it so loud that the audience would be expected to bring and use earplugs? That's the way it is, and why I have never enjoyed such shows, regardless of the band. My first such concert was the band Yes, at the Tucson Community Center Arena (admittedly not a good accoustical venue), which I came away from absolutely befuddled because the whole setup made it impossible to enjoy the band's performance. I saw the Jayhawks in a club once; couldn't wait to get out of the place. Even when I went to see/hear one of my favorite bands, Fountains of Wayne (RIP Adam Schlessinger), I absolutely hated it, both with and without earplugs, because though the assault might be lessened with the earplugs, so is the ability to discern the music. Makes. Zero. Sense.

I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, I don't know if there was some event that caused it or not. But I do know it feels worse when I come out of a baseball game, which is a damn shame because I love going to baseball games. And apparently society is going to continue like this in perpetuity since the half-deaf folks are running the systems which will in turn encourage more people to go half-deaf and so on and so on.

Yay.

Rant over. Go M's.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Society, Health, Posted on May 1, 2025 at 8:45PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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野球を見ます

As mentioned the other day, I've been under the weather for a while. Today was the first day in over a week that I've felt relatively normal, that after losing most of yesterday to sleep. I mean, I know I'm wont to stay up late and sleep late, but going to bed at 1:00am and sleeping until 5:00pm is a bit much even for me. I guess I needed it, though "sleep-deprived" is not something I'd ever claim to be these days. It's likely that I set my fight against this whatever virus back a ways by trying to work three games Monday night.

Anyway, the upshot of that for these purposes is that I've spent even more time than usual watching TV. Handmaid's Tale is back, Black Mirror did a follow-up to their great USS Callister episode, and I'm going to do a whole post on Daredevil: Born Again at some point. But mostly it's been more Japanese shows and, of course, baseball. (Hence the title above.)

Before getting to my early-season take on Your Seattle Mariners, a few random observations from around MLB:

• Jon Miller is the best. When you're feeling listless and doped up on NyQuil and just want to escape into a ballfield, I recommend tuning into a San Francisco Giants game. Giants play-by-play man Miller makes even the dullest game interesting and enjoyable. I had the Giants-Yankees game on the other day when it was pouring rain at Yankee Stadium and the Giants were winning handily, but Miller gave us drama by creating tension around the rain and whether the game would get enough innings to be official before the umpires stopped play. Doesn't really matter what the circumstance, Jon Miller is the best in the business in the post-Vin Scully broadcaster world.
• When watching games I like to sample the various teams' broadcasters, but now that many of the teams that used to be on the now-defunct Diamond Sports Group cable stations are on the now-rebranded FanDuel networks, it isn't worth it. I'd like to check out the Cincinnati Reds' announcers, but when the on-screen graphics are inundating us with gambling odds and prompts to throw away your money on bets I'll take any other option, even if it's Joe Buck and drunk Harry Caray.
• How have the Dodgers lost six games? They're on a pace to end the year with a record of 113-49, a whole three wins shy of the big-league record for victories in a season. I mean, I thought they were supposed to be good. (That was sarcasm, for those who missed it.)
• How have the White Sox won four games? Yeah, sure, they're still on a pace to lose more games than they did in their record-breaking 2024 campaign, but come on, the Rockies are outdoing you guys for futility! Where's that Chicago pride? (Only some sarcasm there.)
• Those same Colorado Rockies have a run differential of -51, and they've only played six games so far at altitude. The White Sox are really going to have to work hard to repeat as worst of the worst.

OK, the M's. At this moment, the Mariners are 10-9 after taking two of three in Cincinnati (and doing it in very entertaining fashion, at that). They may have started out in the first week looking like the 2023-early 2024 version of the Mariners, but maybe we can chalk that up to rust in the opening week. March is too early to start the season anyway, right?

It's still super early and no definitive conclusions can be reached yet, but new manager Dan Wilson has changed the character of this team and I am here for it, y'all. This bunch still clouts homers, yes, but the home runs are coming incidentally—I'm not seeing anyone step into the box looking to hit one out, I'm not seeing the Joaquin Andujar school of hitting ("swing hard in case you hit it") from them anymore. I see guys going with the pitch, using the opposite field, taking their walks, making productive outs. It's so refreshing after years and years of Scott Servais-led lineups going for optimal "launch angles" and crap like that.

I'm also seeing small ball when it makes sense. The M's have more sacrifice bunts three weeks into the season than I'd bet they had in an entire Scott Servais year (pause while I check that on baseball-reference ... almost: in 2023 the M's had four successful sac bunts, the same number they have so far in 2025). And my favorite thing, Dan Wilson has a running game.

The Seattle Mariners are second only to the Chicago Cubs in stolen bases thus far this year, and that's because the Cubs have played three more games. By steals per game, the M's lead the big leagues! This time last year, only two Mariners, Dylan Moore and Julio Rodríguez, had any stolen bases. This year almost everyone has one, even the catchers have four between them. The M's are on pace to steal 264 bags as a team for the year. They're a long way from being my 1985 Cardinals (that team had 314, with three guys combining for 200 bags all by themselves), but by modern standards this is awesome.

The ’25 Mariners are fun, even when they lose, because they're never out of it. The only game they've played so far that was a snoozer happens to be the only one I've been to in person, game two of the season, which they dropped 7-0. Otherwise, it's been exciting. The starting pitchers continue to be terrific, Luis M. Castillo's bad inning the other day notwithstanding, and Dan's making things happen at bat. It's only the bullpen that seems shaky: The middle relievers have been pretty sad, save for Principal Snider and maybe Gabe Speier. We've already had increasing traffic on the Tacoma Shuttle and there figures to be a lot more as more relievers get tried out. That worries me more than the low batting averages do; the averages will tick up, particularly for Julio, Luke Raley, and Randy Arozarena. Arozarena especially looks like a new man in the early season, that .212 average is not telling the story.

It's a good year for the M's to be fun. We need something to balance out the nightmare of the rest of the news.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Posted on April 17, 2025 at 11:26PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Free radicals

I've been having a pretty good week, which is unusual for post-January 20, 2025. I think the huge turnout at the protests last Saturday (I went to a small suburban one for a short while) and the apparent impact they're having in DC has helped a lot, and my general attitude has been more free and easy, as it were.

I'm also buoyed somewhat by the actual good-if-not-ideal news out of the Roberts Court today—the ruling that Secretary Noem, DHS, and ICE must "facilitate the release" of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the El Salvadoran torture prison he was rendered to by ICE without even the patina of due process of law. It remains to be seen if President Convicted Felon's regime will obey that court order, which has to go back to the originating court for "clarification" of the term "effectuate," as that court's order called on the government to "facilitate and effectuate" Garcia's release and return to the United States. That seems like a stupid delay tactic on Roberts' part, but fine, OK.

This should have been a foregone conclusion, but then it also should have been so obvious a call that the Supreme Court should have opted to not even hear the argument and say the prior order stands well and good. It's also on the heels of Roberts and company declaring that class actions against ICE for their illegal and extrajudicial kidnappings of people off the street are not allowed and that each of the kidnappees can have their due process only if they each get a lawyer (from detention/foreign prison?!) and file a habeus petition within the local jurisdiction that they were abducted in. So you can't predict how far the Roberts Court will go to protect the man they already granted immunity for "official acts" or criminality and his staff of thugs and goons.

Anyway, I bring up the Garcia case mostly because I kind of hope my uncle is reading this. You may have noticed that he left a comment on my post about the Dodgers tarnishing their reputation by visiting the White House.

Bob, I know that your comment was at least partly tongue-in-cheek, and I do take it in that fashion (though it's often difficult to parse MAGA attempts at humor, there's always an element of cruelty in them) but really, man, I do hope you poke your head up from the right-wing propaganda bubble and see what's really going on every now and then.

Anyone who thinks opposing this POTUS47 regime is something "radical" needs a remedial vocabulary lesson:

Radical (rad•i•cal): A person advocating thorough or complete political or social reform; a member of a political party or bloc that pursues such aims.

We are living under a regime now that is literally criminal. The president himself is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist and fraudster, has admitted to being a tax cheat, has gotten away with violations of the espionage act only because he has a corrupt Florida judge in his pocket, has a history—which may well include this week—of securities fraud, and uses extortion as a primary means of "negotiating." His cabinet of corrupt incompetents is also a mass of humanity steeped in moral, ethical, and intellectual deficiencies.

And that's just the criminal aspect. Then there's the un-American aspect. The despotic aspect. 

The Department of Justice is being reorganized to be, essentially, a base for the Joker's henchmen to operate from. Congress is a thing to be circumvented. Treaties are for suckers.

In a mere three months—not even, in fact—this criminal regime has not only done the typical Republican stuff of trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and make middle-class and poor folks pay more taxes so the filthy rich can hoard more money; demonizing immigrants and making policy based in racism and misogyny; and rhapsodizing about how government is by its nature bad. They've also gone out of their way to decimate public health infrastructure—on the heels of a global pandemic!!—and utterly destroy the United States' standing and reputation in the world, alienating (former?) allies and perhaps intentionally wrecking the global economy. 

All of it—ALL OF IT—illegally.

On this matter in isolation, my position is conservative while the regime's position—and that of the Republican party writ large, at least so far—is radical. A radical attempt to fundamentally alter the nature of the United States, to take it from a representative democracy revering freedom and the rule of law to an autocratic dictatorship ruled by a small cadre of oligarchs and the whims of one idiotic pathological liar.

I support retaining the societal adherence to equal justice under the law and the protections of the U.S. Constitution. The regime supports decimating the rule of law and trampling the Constitution.

There are other areas where you might call me radical, depending on your interpretation of normal. For instance, I support national health insurance (e.g. Medicare for All), strict gun control measures, a return to an 80+% marginal tax rate, and substantial reforms to our election laws that ban the unfettered influence corporate wealth. Personally, I think that's pretty mainstream and I think polling would back me up, but I can see were even a 20th-century version of a rightward Republican would consider those things somewhat radical. But none of those things defy the basic tenets of American society. President Convicted Felon's regime defies those tenets multiple times every day.

Regarding the Dodgers and their contributions to normalizing this in-progress fascist takeover, I can make some allowances for many of the guys that made the trip. Because (a) they are largely quite young men, (b) living the lives of professional athletes and thus paying scant if any attention to any news outside the sports press, and (c) the duration thus far of this administration has been while they were busy with Spring Training and concerned about making the team and traveling to Tokyo. Plus, (d) they travel in their own bubble of protection and do not have to worry about the harassment and other dangers the general public—especially brown-skinned and non-English speaking members of the public, like many of the Dodgers—does now when traveling in this country. So there is an ignorance that can be assumed. Non-players, though, should know better. Including manager Dave Roberts, who has studied history and is smarter than this. Owner Fred Wilpon is filthy rich and probably hasn't figured out yet that the leopards will eventually eat his face too, but there are plenty of people involved in the decision to go to the White House and shake the hand of the man who let Los Angeles burn not so long ago and who would happily rendition a bunch of them to a Salvadoran gulag who knew better.

Opposing this regime is not radical. It's at its core what this country was founded upon.

Tagged Politics, Baseball, President VonClownstick, Posted on April 10, 2025 at 11:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The Dodgers trash their image as the country descends into chaos

A disgusting image of Clayton Kershaw (left) and Dodger owner Fred Wilpon flanking the most dangerous person in the world and having a blast doing it

The Los Angeles nee Brooklyn Dodgers are a revered franchise in professional sports in no small part because of their association with civil rights. By adding Jackie Robinson to their team in 1947, the Dodgers gave a metaphorical middle finger to the racist mores of the day and began integrating Major League Baseball, and for that the organization deserves accolades. Yesterday, however, the Dodgers spat on that reputation and honorable history by visiting the White House and allowing themselves to be used as propaganda by a hateful fascist white supremacist who likely thinks Dodger manager Dave Roberts doesn't deserve his job and was merely a "DEI hire."

This shameful decision made by the Dodgers not only angers their fan base and brands the team with a staggering hypocrisy, it was also a big swing and a miss on an opportunity to solidify their previous reputation and reach out to new fans and tie "America's pastime" to American idealism.

Imagine if, instead of doing the customary thing of accepting the invitation traditionally given by the White House to the prior year's World Series winners, the Dodgers respectfully declined but then used the time to record a short video of the team visiting other significances in DC.

Picture the video: Members of the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers in front of the White House, with someone—Roberts or Mookie Betts or Tyler Glasnow or whomever—talking to the camera. "We're here at the White House in Washington, DC. We were invited to visit the president, but instead we're choosing to visit some of the things that actually make America great."

The camera then follows the team around, maybe on one of those open-air tour buses, to the Lincoln Memorial, where we see Betts or Teoscar Hernández reading aloud from the emancipation proclamation engraved there. Other players are seen paying their respects to relatives whose names are on the Vietnam and/or Korean war memorials. A stop at the Capitol building with a brief conversation between a Dodger or three and maybe Senator Adam Schiff or Congressman Jimmy Gomez or Ted Lieu who explain the separation of powers and how they represent the Los Angeles area. Maybe Roberts and some players stroll through the FDR memorial while Roberts talks of his mixed African-American/Japanese parentage and how his existence is a consequence of FDR (and then Truman) winning World War II and that base where his parents met existing in Okinawa. Some other Dodgers recount some personal/family history at the MLK memorial.

We see Chris Taylor and Enrique Hernández and Shohei in the Museum of American History checking out the baseball exhibit and maybe the presidential timeline. A scene with Betts at the African-American History museum. Arlington National Cemetery, maybe the JFK grave; the U.S. Mint, where the players can joke about their contracts; a humorous drive-by of the Watergate hotel; a stop at the steps of the Supreme Court, maybe the Dodger manager makes an offhand remark about how sometimes it sucks to have the same surname as someone else; and a stop at the National Archives—while at the White House, Roberts commented that he was thrilled to get a photo in front of the Declaration of Independence; how much better an image would it be for Max Muncy to show the founding documents to Yoshi Yamamoto and Miguel Rojas but apologize about not being able to see the Declaration of Independence because it's no longer available for public viewing since President Convicted Felon had it moved to the Oval Office because reasons.

Cap it off with the team arriving at Nationals Park for their series against the Nationals and someone else—Clayton Kershaw, Will Smith, maybe Shohei if his English can handle it—summing up the experience with a bit of patriotism and recounting what really makes America great: governance of, by, and for the people, where everyone is equal under the law and all have freedoms under the Constitution. "It's why we can all be here, enjoying baseball together in a free country."

You wouldn't have to even mention POTUS47 if you wanted to avoid "controversy," though I think a brief note that the White House invitation was declined because of who currently lives there and the note about the Declaration of Independence are warranted. Noting at the outset that the team chose to do the video rather than the White House visit might be enough to communicate by implication that it was in protest, but history would look kindly on calling POTUS47 out by name (or title). Especially if they included some LA-centric remarks about the recent fires and the stupid magic water spigot thing and climate change policy.

Anyway, that's what I would have done if I were the Dodgers head honcho.

Instead we have photos and video of Kershaw and Betts and Ohtani and Roberts and others just beaming as they shake the hand of someone who is perhaps the most hated person in the world.

Enrique Hernández said of Dodger fans who were upset with the team's choice to visit this president, "they have the right to an opinion," not quite understanding that the man whose hand he shook would prefer they did not have that right.

Betts said of those fans that it was another instance of being Black in America: "No matter what I choose, somebody is gonna be pissed." I realize that I am not Black in America (or anywhere else) and cannot comment on that greater context with any validity, but I think it's safe to say that in such cases it would be helpful to consider which somebodies would be pissed with which decision; I mean, how concerned are you with pissing off Nazis? Maybe in this climate it's a real concern, maybe you'd rather be on the side fighting the Nazis regardless.

Kershaw was unmoved by criticisms, saying, "At the end of the day, getting to go to the White House, getting to see the Oval Office, getting to meet the President of the United States, that’s stuff that you can’t lose sight of, no matter what you believe." I would argue to the pitching great that what you can't lose sight of is what those things—the White House, the Oval Office, the presidency—represent, and agreeing to visit this President, this autocrat, this fascist wannabe-dictator that stands opposed to those very things, shows that you have indeed lost sight of that.

 

Tagged Baseball, MLB, President VonClownstick, Posted on April 8, 2025 at 5:48PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Odds and ends

Cory Booker, giving his party a 25-hour kick in the ass

Just a post to catch up on a few disparate things over the past week or two. I'm a bit scatterbrained, have been for a few days, and am having some trouble keeping a train of thought going long enough for a coherent topic-focused post. Usually this sort of foggy-brain stuff is an indication of a Black Hole episode looming or in progress, but by 2025 standards—read: in the midst of existential dread from the fascist takeover of the government—it's been relatively OK of late. Still, being aware of this is sometimes half the battle, so I'm on my guard.

Anyway, onward with a hodgepodge of stuff:

• Hats off to Cory Booker. His marathon speech, disrupting the usual business of the Senate for over 25 hours, was something all prior filibuster-like holding-the-floor events were not: completely substantive. And while holding the floor for 25 hours plus—on his feet, no breaks, no food, talking continuously except for brief periods colleagues asked questions—was undeniably difficult, coming up with 25 hours' worth of substantive material to speak on was not, because this speech was about the abuses and corruption and illegality and treachery of the POTUS47 regime. There was no recitation of "Green Eggs and Ham" (Ted Cruz) or apple pie recipes (the fictional Howard Stackhouse) or aloud readings of Alexis de Tocqueville (Strom Thurmond). No need, the litany of POTUS47 crimes and destruction could fill twice that time or more.

  Naysayers have downplayed Booker's speech as meaningless, wholly performative, and a "stunt," but they're wrong. I mean, yes, it was a stunt, but stunts are cool, that's why we have action movies. In this case, the stunt was meaningful and the performance purposeful—it served to galvanize Booker's Democratic colleagues into actually doing shit.

  It's been just over ten weeks since President Convicted Felon took office again, which to be fair, is usually about how long DC pols take to move on anything, but in this case we all knew before those ten weeks even began that a clusterfuck was coming and staunch opposition was required. Thus, for ten weeks plus, we the greater public have been pleading for Congress to act and instead the Republican majority of both houses chose to abdicate their authority and suck up to the fascists while the Democratic leadership, while outraged, did very little.

  That's changing now. Is that all thanks to Booker's stunt? No, not entirely, but Booker has spurred his fellow Dems on by commanding attention. The reaction to Booker, added to the increasing action in the streets with the Tesla Takedown protests and the large turnout in special elections, has seemingly done more than all the letters constituents have sent to their representatives put together in prompting action. Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego have declared they'll be throwing as much sand in the gears as they can to block destructive nominees to the Justice department and Veterans Administration. Schiff and Jamie Raskin are convening "shadow hearings"—with Republicans in the majority, these aren't official Congressional hearings that come with subpoena power, but they'll still serve to get information and put it on the record and in front of the public—regarding the decimation of the Justice Department.

  It's not impeachment, but it's a start.

• I sure am glad I converted all my meager investments in the stock market to a simple money market account last month, because look what happened today. Again, this was predictable. In fact, it was predicted. Repeatedly. All through the 2024 election campaign. But the American voter is, in the aggregate, willfully ignorant and so here we are.

  It is truly astonishing that the Republican party is not only allowing this to happen but championing it. This is the party that supposedly supports free markets and free enterprise and yet here they are taking a blowtorch to the global economy. Why? Because their leader is an imbecile that does not know and cannot be bothered to learn that a tariff is not what he thinks it is, that "trade deficit" is a term of art and not actual debt, that recklessly pissing off every nation in the world except Russia and North Korea is not a sign of strength, that making it impossible to import raw materials does not in fact help American manufacturing, and that driving inflation through the roof is actually a political loser. And they support their leader no matter how stupid and destructive and treasonous he is.

  Here's how our old friend Craig Calcaterra put it using clearer phrasing than I did: "Trump did this because he's a big stupid fucking idiot who doesn't know anything and because he has surrounded himself with cowards and idiots who are afraid to tell him anything he doesn't want to hear and who refuse to exercise their considerable power to rein him in."

• Yet, the economic catastrophe isn't the worst thing in the news. It's not even close. Jockeying for the top spot in the ranks of Worst Thing Happening Right Now is the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE has always been a problematic agency, but now, under this regime, it is essentially the Gestapo. Not a joke, as our former president (the good and decent one of just three months ago) might say. ICE, sometimes identified as such and sometimes not, is kidnapping people off the street and sometimes interning them at for-profit domestic detention hellholes and sometimes rendering them to a Salvadoran hellhole, all with no due process whatsoever (or, as of today, interrupted due process). This is being done under the pretense of an "invasion" of the U.S. by a Venezuelan gang and the separate pretense of removing anti-Semitic troublemakers.

  Via Mary Trump, at least six people rendered to the El Salvador gulag have been definitively identified as having no ties to any gang, Venezuelan or otherwise, and that doesn't count the Maryland resident that ICE admits it sent to El Salvador due to "an administrative error" but has no intention of bringing back. It's not just brown people with tattoos or hijabs being swept up, either. This chaos even puts Canadians at risk of abuse and disappearance.

  This cannot stand. President Convicted Felon's American Gestapo must be stopped, and god bless the courts for doing their job in trying to right these wrongs, but without support from Congress I fear that isn't going to matter.

• Let's move on from the disasters sweeping the nation and by extension the world and talk baseball.

  Despite opening the season against the better-than-you-think-but-still-not-very-good formerly-Oakland A's, Your Seattle Mariners are just 3-4 after a week of play. Sadly, their performance thus far, even in the wins, resembles early 2024 far more than it does late 2024—good starting pitching, but anemic hitting and a whole lot of striking out. On the other hand, the sac fly rate is already double what it was under Scott Servais last year, so there's that. Anyway, early days, one week is hardly an adequate sample size to draw any conclusions from. I mean, the Padres are 7-0 and I figure they're going to end up around .500; Atlanta is 0-7 and they'll be in the thick of things.

  Some observations: The M's now have an ad on their sleeves, which sucks but isn't a surprise. Aesthetically it looks worse than the ads on some other teams' sleeves because it's bright orange. Come on, you couldn't get [video game company] to agree to use a navy or silver background, it has to be orange? On the other hand, the terrible uniforms from last year are history and the jerseys are much more professional looking again, with actual silver instead of dull gray and more standard lettering on the nameplates and heavy enough that you can't see what's being worn underneath.

• Softball has continued for me as an umpire and is approaching as a player, with my Smiling Potatoes of Death team readying to start a season next month. This is in two different leagues, obviously, and there are loads of differences between them. I much prefer the rules and setup of the league I ump for to the one I play in, I can't think of a single thing the latter does better than the former. I got drafted into a co-captain role with the Spuds this year, so I was on the conference call with the league and other team reps earlier this week talking about rules and such, and I was disappointed to learn that a lot of what I don't like is mandated by the organization the parks department contracts with so there's not much room for variation: it's mandatory to start with a 1-1 count, it's mandatory to have that stupid-ass no plays at the plate rule. Where there was argument over things we do have a say in was in roster and lineup construction, something again my umpiring league does much better than the other one, but at least there's small positive change there—we'll no longer have the alternating one-lineup-for-men, one-lineup-for-women thing in the city league, which wasn't exactly smooth.

  This week's ump shifts didn't provide much in the way of good stories to tell, I'd say six of the eight games I did were pretty standard. Though Sunday was a five-gamer, and those are brutal. By the time the fourth game is going I'm ready for it all to be over with and I've got no patience left for any tomfoolery. Fortunately, the fifth game was drama-free and ended early. Still, I had to do three more the next night and I wasn't in the mood for it. Plus, the first game on that schedule was between teams that have a history of, let's call it antagonism, so I was going in thinking more about how to deal with potential trouble than keeping my head in the game itself and it showed. There was some trouble to deal with, but it was minimal and came rather late; before that I was off my game a bit but really only made one mistake (prematurely calling a foul pop out of play that turned out not to be, and sadly when one of the few people on that team that annoys me sometimes was up so I got lip from him about it and a later call that properly went against him). Still, it wasn't fun and I was glad when that game ended and those teams—whom I usually quite enjoy when they aren't playing each other—got the hell off the field. Fortunately, the night ended with a palate cleanser game played by people with mostly excellent attitudes and good cheer.

  One thing about that Monday night, though—if I'd had a Capitol Hill Softball bingo card it would have been pretty full. Lots of, let's say, environmental color. I'm there again on Sunday, we'll see if I can get a bingo then.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Softball, Umping, Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Posted on April 3, 2025 at 6:49PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Baseball is coming

It's getting closer to Julio Time again!

Lots more chaos and catastrophe to talk about over the past couple of days, but let's take a break from that, ever so briefly, and talk about baseball broadly and Your Seattle Mariners in particular. Because spring training has begun, my season ticket group is prepping for our draft, and even the bad stuff on this subject is so, so much happier than anything occurring in our ongoing POTUS47 national nightmare. So to take my mind off our new fascist FBI director, our new pro-measles HHS secretary, our pro-plane-crash DOT head, the fact that the president is owned by the Kremlin, and that Phony Stark (h/t Joanne Carducci) is now sabotaging Social Security and the IRS, I dove into stats, quotes from camp, and other such frivolities. Here goes.

 

As always happens at the start of spring camps, people in the sports press act like they know what will happen and predict final MLB season standings. Most of these prognosticators seem to be pegging the 2025 Mariners as an 85-win team. ZiPS gives them 86. But these forecasters have not been paying attention and don't understand that the M's were massive underachievers the past four years because of their field manager, their approach to batting, and their alleged "hitting coach," who was so useless that any player wanting help with a slump or a mechanical issue or anything, really, had to seek outside aid on their own time—which there isn't a lot of during a season. People don't seem to get this, even after a way-too-late regime change in the dugout last August exposed it to the world.

The other day I did a little I-told-you-soing in regards to former Mariner infielder Ty France, now with the Minnesota Twins, who told reporters without naming any names that his last two seasons were ruined by the former Mariner "braintrust." Today I see similar remarks from Julio Rodríguez.

Julio, talking about the Mariners' disappointing 2024, said, "The beginning of the year was like, ‘It is what it is.’ But I feel I definitely took with me those last six weeks, what we did as a team, what we did as an organization and just kind of how we continued to push forward." I readily admit that I may be reading too much into this with some confirmation bias, but what I get from that is, Julio and the rest of the lineup were doing precisely what the team's manager and alleged hitting coach had asked of them, it wasn't working, and therefore "it is what it is" and complacency reigned as it had for years—the entirety of Julio's big-league career, in fact. Then with six weeks left in the season, upper management belatedly realized they had a crap field manager and an even crappier batting coach and philosophy. Those people were fired and actual smart people, namely former Seattle players Dan Wilson and Edgar Martínez, took their places and the team took off.

The M's were a .500 club before the changeover, a .618 club after. (The World Series champion Dodgers had an overall .605 winning percentage.)

The M's as a team batted .216/.301/.365 before, .255/.347/.417 after, with little difference in personnel. (MLB average: .243/.312/.399; champion Dodgers: .258/.335/.446.)

If this team could win 90, 90, and 88 games the prior three seasons (2021-2023) under their former utter garbage manager and batting instructor, they should be able to do at least that well in 2025 under Dan Wilson and the batting team of Edgar Martínez and Kevin Seitzer.

Yes, the M's completely whiffed on improving their infield. Yes, depending on Jorge Polanco to be an everyday presence is anxiety-inducing. Yes, first base is not a position where you typically find a platoon situation. Yes, the term "designated hitter" could quickly become a laugh line in the Seattle lineup.

Still.

I mean, I'm looking at the guys the M's will be counting on the most this year and noting the difference pre-changeover to post-changeover:

Top line: before regime change Bottom line: after regime change
	BA/OBP/SLG	K%	BB%	HR%	RBI%
Randy Arozarena	.214/.331/.383	25.3	12.1	3.2	8.3
	.236/.336/.407	28.7	8.4	2.8	12.6
Cal Raleigh	.212/.302/.436	29.4	10.8	5.6	16.3
	.246/.345/.437	23.6	12.2	4.7	14.8
Luke Raley	.233/.307/.426	30.6	5.4	4.2	11.0
	.276/.366/.598	26.5	7.8	6.9	18.6
Victor Robles	.256/.330/.369	20.9	7.3	1.6	6.8
	.407/.475/.558	12.5	6.7	1.0	14.4
Julio Rodriguez	.260/.310/.364	27.1	5.5	2.4	8.4
	.313/.364/.537	21.0	8.0	5.6	18.6

Aside from Arozarena, those are massive changes. A couple of guys—J.P. Crawford, Polanco—didn't improve, and others didn't have enough at-bats to give a decent sample. But then I look at guys that had terrible ’24s that were good in ’23 in Crawford (.266/.380/.438 in ’23) and Mitch Garver (.270/.370/.500 in ’23 playing about half-time). Throw Arozarena, who was a ’23 All-Star, in with that group too. It's actually a pretty good lineup. Nobody expects Victor Robles to bat .400 or Julio to carry a .360+ on-base all season long, but without spending all their time fretting about barrel rates and exit velocity these guys will put up good numbers.

That said, if they can find some more depth for third base, I wouldn't complain. Polanco doesn't inspire any confidence in me, even after his having knee surgery over the offseason to deal with injuries that hampered him last year, but he's the best available option and this club can carry him even if he turns out to just be an adequate-glove-no-hit type at this point. But it'd be nice to have someone on the bench to step in once in a while besides Dylan Moore. Maybe Donovan Solano can be that guy? Occasionally? When he isn't needed at first base?

Oddly, my biggest concern with the Mariners right now is relief pitching. Once can always hope that Dan Wilson will trend a little more old-school and use his starters for 6-7-8 innings on the regular, but assuming he doesn't things are fairly iffy beyond fireballing Andres Muñoz. On the other hand, the pitching side of things has been quite competent even when the batting sucked, so perhaps they'll do well with another crop of who's-that-guy and never-heard-of-hims alongside Muñoz and maybe Matt Brash.

Will they be good enough to win the division? Well, that one's hard to say. Houston isn't as good as they have been, which helps. The Rangers have a decent offense but, as usual, very questionable pitching. The A's and Angels will stink. It'll be a three-team race, and at this point there's no reason to think the M's can't finish atop the pile.

 

Meanwhile, Commissioner Rob Manfred managed to insult ESPN while announcing MLB was breaking its contract with them after this season. The league issued a statement that read, in part, "in recent years, we have seen ESPN scale back their baseball coverage and investment in a way that is not consistent with the sport’s appeal or performance on their platform." Really? That seems to be outside of MLB's authority to declare. And probably irrelevant. ESPN is a cable station, and cable as a business model is dying an ever-quickening death. As such, ESPN requested a renegotiation of some of the terms of the deal and MLB threw a hissy fit. "Given that MLB provides strong viewership, valuable demographics, and the exclusive right to cover unique events like the Home Run Derby, ESPN’s demand to reduce rights fees is simply unacceptable," the statement continued, before basically saying they'd take their business to other services in a manner that reminded me of Eric Cartman from South Park whining "Screw you guys, I'm going home."

If Manfred and company can recover from their little tantrum, they should recognize that this is probably for the good—getting away from the cable model is a necessity, as if the ongoing problems with regional sports networks going bankrupt hasn't made that clear already. Short term, they'll have to take less money from more distribution models to replace ESPN's playoff coverage and, if anyone continues to care, Home Run Derby/All-Star Week programming. Losing the ESPN exclusive Game of the Week is a financial hit, sure, but get creative. MLB already has smaller deals with streamers Apple TV+ and Roku for games throughout the season. Maybe investigate going back to a broadcast TV Game of the Week beyond the Saturday Fox game; broadcast TV is losing out to streamers, they might want back into the mix, and for years MLB had shared broadcast rights between ABC and NBC. Maybe don't try to replace the ESPN weekly game at all, maybe investigate a whole new system that fully embraces streaming options for every viewer wanting to watch their teams.

But no, that would require admitting the cable model is doomed and being proactive with individual teams about jettisoning their cable contracts.

Clearly the league will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future as more cable arrangements bite the dust from RSN bankruptcies or the staving off of such ruin, as ESPN seems to be doing here.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Posted on February 20, 2025 at 11:44PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The world sucks, and other observations

Quality TV as an escape from the world crumbling around us

It's been a rough week. Following a rough few weeks. I mean, in the world. I've already mentioned how it's been influencing my state of mind, and it continues to. But there is life beyond the chaos and destruction raging all around us. For now, anyway.

Some stray items and thoughts on the past week or so:

• I had some folks over the other night for food and conversation and general socializing, which was good. It was good in that some of these folks I hadn't seen in a long time and it's always good to catch up a bit; it was good that some people got to meet some other people that had only existed as faceless anecdotes before; it was good in the very base sense that human interaction is necessary. I've not had as much of that as I'd like of late.
• Some of the human interactions of late weren't good, though, including a near-fistfight at one of my umpiring shifts the other day. It made no sense to me, was based entirely, it seems, on some machismo bullshit carried over from prior seasons—the sort of Phil Nevin/Anthony Rendon/Jesse Winker-type posturing I have no patience for even on the best of days—and it ruined an otherwise decent afternoon/evening. I had to stop being Fun Umpire Guy on a dime and immediately shift into Guy In Charge With Authority, warn players, and was a hair's breadth from ejecting multiple men and women (!! it's almost never the women, but this time...) before one of the team captains settled his crew down a literal instant under the wire. There are on occasion days when I half-expect some sort of nonsense to occur during a shift, but never in the winter time. The teams that sign up for winter league are the die-hards that play all the time, that are so familiar to each other and to we the umpires that it's generally easy-going. (The real assholery tends to happen in the summer, when guys that are bitter about not making their JV teams in college sign up for a slot and ruin things with uber-competitiveness.) Fortunately, my relationship with the involved teams is good enough that when I saw a bunch of the players the next night everyone was cool and ready to play a conflict-free game, but hoo-boy was I not receptive to being told by rec-league softball players in a stakes-less environment that I needed to abide by some macho code of utter crapola because they were pissed off about a guy on the other team lining one back through the box. Half a dozen f-ing Phil Nevins in my face at the end of that game. Get a grip.
• Apple TV has some really good programming. If you've got budget for only one streaming service, that's probably the one you want—not just the best-of-the-best Ted Lassos and For All Mankinds, but there's great stuff in Severance, Silo, Shrinking, The Big Door Prize, The Morning Show, Sunny, Dark Matter, and the two shows I binged through in the past week: Constellation and Shining Girls. Both are just single-season, eight-episode series; the former deserves a renewal and more but won't get it, the latter wrapped up at an end point. Constellation—I had to watch it with that name, right?—is a mind-bending story following an astronaut who survives a massive accident on the ISS and returns to Earth to find things not as she left them; we learn over the course of things that two other former astronauts experienced much the same thing in years past and it's a WTF sort of mystery and psycho-thriller sci-fi exploration with quantum physics. Shining Girls is a more gritty, Earthbound murder-mystery sort of thing that also hinges on mind-bending quantum physics weirdness that stars Elisabeth Moss and only disappoints a little bit when it gets to the end and the source of the mind-bendiness is located but remains unexplained. Ambitious and well-done, both of them.
• Ty France has a job again. The former Seattle Mariner first baseman signed for the upcoming season with the Minnesota Twins and explained to reporters why he's coming off of some bad seasons. Spoiler warning: I was right. France had some smallish injury issues last year, but as he said to the press, it wasn't really the injury. He doesn't name-drop former Mariners manager Scott Servais or former Mariner "batting coach" Jarret DeHart, but he said that after he hit a rough patch early in 2023, he focused on analytics—Stacast-type nonsense like launch angles and barrel rates—which are the only things DeHart seemed to know anything about or care at all about. “There was a lot of it—the analytical side—where I tried to tap into, that I shouldn't tap into,” he said. “I should just worry about being a baseball player and hitting the ball.” After leaving the Mariners and the Servais/DeHart school of not-hitting, France started coming back into his own with Cincinnati. “When I’m at my best, I’m not focused on analytics. I’m just simplifying hitting ... the last year or two hasn’t been fun baseball for me. I think my time in Cincinnati last year, having that reset, I found that joy again." Do I still think Ty France is going to win a batting title or two? Well, I'm not as sure as I was when he first came to the M's, but if he can stay away from Jarret DeHart and keep from getting hurt too much, then...yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all.
• And, back to the collapse of the nation, I thought last night's "A" block form Rachel Maddow was worth passing around. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and though it's not like Hanford is in my back yard, it is in my state. And similar issues are rampant across the country now that POTUS47 and his boss Elon are taking a blowtorch to the government. It just astounds me that this is allowed to happen—every single elected Republican, it seems, is on board with destroying the United States. The Senators just confirm these dangerously unqualified and destructive cabinet officers without objection, the Representatives in the House have the power to impeach all of these agents of chaos and disaster but don't see any need. They've all got to go. All of them.

Tagged Politics, TV, President VonClownstick, Baseball, Rachel Maddow, Umping, Posted on February 19, 2025 at 2:21AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The offseason of suck

He's baaaaaack...

The atrocities of the POTUS47 administration continue today, of course, that's just a given now, but we'll talk about those later. For the moment I turn my attention to the failures of the Jerry Dipoto regime with Your Seattle Mariners.

The Mariners, who have finished three of the last four seasons no more than two games out of the playoffs and made it in by the skin of their teeth in the fourth, have severely underachieved in this, the alleged "window" for contention envisioned by Dipoto when he began tearing down and remaking the roster after the 2018 campaign, and it's not hard to see why: the offense has been obsessed with launch angles, exit velocities, and other Statcast-era nonsense and neglected the basics. Had they been even just a little bit more competent with fundamental offensive tactics (e.g. scoring a runner from third base with 0/1 out), they would have won anywhere from three to ten more games in each season, plenty to score a playoff berth.

Finally, finally, moves were made late last season to replace manager Scott Servais and alleged batting coach Jarred DeHart and results were positive (.618 winning percentage post-change); but it was too little, too late for that year and hopes were placed on a carryover from the new guys and some roster improvements for 2025.

Following the ’24 season, a decision was made to cut loose three quarters of the infield. Only shortstop J.P. Crawford would remain, the other spots would be upgraded. Not a bad idea, as Josh Rojas (though inexpensive and versatile, letting him go was slightly iffy), Jorge Polanco, and Ty France all had poor years, combining for an on-base mark of just .303 and a 26% K rate. (France's replacement late last year was Justin Turner, who did well enough, but he wasn't brought back either.) France I still believe will produce, for whatever team he ends up with, now that he's out from under the yoke of the useless DeHart, but regardless there were three holes to fill.

Then nothing happened.

Attempts were clearly made to acquire upgrades at the infield corners, at least, but all failed. Ownership has hamstrung Dipoto with a strict budget, so free agent options were nearly nil; dreams of landing Pete Alonso or Christian Walker were never viable. Trade offers, like one for Phillies 3B Alec Bohm or another rumored to have been for the Cubs' Nico Hoerner, were all countered with requests that were unreasonable and/or unaffordable. And now we're just a couple weeks away from the start of Spring Training and have to take what's left in the remainders bin.

As one of the softball players I was umpiring last week put it, this has been the "offseason of suck."

Today came what reads to me like an official declaration of surrender, as instead of getting any sort of upgrade the M's re-signed Polanco—whom no other team really wanted (marginal interest from the Yankees and Astros in a kick-the-tires kind of way)—for another year with a vesting option for 2026. Polanco's 2024 line of .213/.296/.355 hardly seems to justify his 1.3 WAR rating (I will never fully accept/understand Wins Above Replacement as a legitimate stat given its inherent subjectivity) and there is no split for which he put up decent numbers unless you count "ahead in the count," which is a split that favors everyone.

But Polanco was apparently the best Dipoto could do at this point with his limited financial flexibility. The hope now is that last year was a down season for him because of nagging minor injuries he was playing through and that he's over them now. And, of course, having Kevin Seitzer as batting coach instead of negative-impact-DeHart won't hurt.

The M's are also moving Polanco to third base, a position he has played for just 2% of his time as a big-leaguer. That seems like a dubious choice, but again, who else is there? (And he might be OK there defensively as the M's have the god of infield coaches in Perry Hill, he who turned error machine Eugenio Suárez into a stellar defender at third.)

So, here is your likely Mariner lineup for 2025, at least to start:

1. Victor Robles, RF
2. Julio Rodríguez, CF
3. Randy Arozarena, LF
4. Cal Raleigh, C
5. Mitch Haniger/Dom Canzone, DH platoon/OF rotation
6. Donovan Solano/Luke Raley, 1B platoon
7. Jorge Polanco, 3B
8. Ryan Bliss, 2B
9. J.P. Crawford, SS
   Dylan Moore, Mitch Garver on the bench with the non-starting platoon partners

I'm not saying this is terrible. It actually has the potential to be a solid group, but only if Seitzer works some coaching magic and manager Dan Wilson continues to get his guys to play as a team rather than as swing-for-the-fences solo artists. But it is a failure in that the goal was to upgrade the roster, and what we have is exactly the same group minus Rojas & Turner and plus Solano.

Is this another failed gambit by Dipoto or is it fairer to put the blame on tight-fisted ownership that wouldn't open their wallets? Or will it pan out that the restrictions were fine and this group turns everything around thanks to Wilson and Seitzer being that much better than Servais and DeHart?

I'm optimistic. But not as much as I'd have been if the M's landed a third baseman with a consistent record of getting on base more than 30% of the time.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Posted on January 30, 2025 at 8:59PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Miscellany

Weird but fun, Interior Chinatown is worth a watch

Today's post: A random assortment of disjointed stuff!

• The dishwasher saga is over, with a new one purchased, delivered, and installed and the old one carted away to whatever scrap heap such things are taken to. I hadn't initially planned to replace the broken one so quickly, but holiday sales at Lowe's convinced me I was better off spending $600 now, on a good one on sale, than later on a cheaper one at regular price. It works, it's quiet, and most importantly, it doesn't leak into Rachel's kitchen downstairs.
• I've spent a chunk of time doing maintenance on this here website, including recreating the sketches page and beginning to populate it with stuff readily available, i.e. mostly stuff from the last few years that was either already scanned into my computer or at hand in my currently in-use sketchbook. There's other stuff in my hard drive already digitized, things that were on prior versions of my blog, but they were posted in the olden days of the Internet when nobody had a screen resolution bigger than 800 pixels and are thus pretty lousy scans. I'll have to find the originals and rescan them at some point. Anyway, the current format has clickable icons that produce a fullscreen image and a button to continue to "notes and comments" that takes you to a page for that individual sketch and any blathering I may have done about it, plus a commenting form just like a blog post. Click anywhere other than the button to close the fullscreen image and return to the sketch menu.
• I had my Christmas the other night at K&E's place, enjoying delicious food and talking about the world and also TV. All three of us love the Hulu show Interior Chinatown, starring Jimmy Yang and Chloe Bennett. It's a wacky comedic sendup of action movies, the Law & Order franchise, and meta-storytelling that takes place both within a Law & Order-style TV show and around a mild-mannered Chinese-American's family in a fictional Chinatown neighborhood. Recommended. We also agree on the greatness of Michael Schur's A Man on the Inside (Netflix), which I discussed briefly earlier but deserves a second recommend. The Diplomat (Netflix) also works for all of us, and we commented on the overlap of cast and crew from The West Wing on it (even though neither of them have ever really watched West Wing, which is really a bummer for them). Shrinking (Apple TV+) wasn't something they'd seen but which I think is terrific; they liked Slow Horses, which I've not sampled to this point. I'm very much into Silo (Apple TV+) and, naturally, the just-concluded (boo) Star Trek: Lower Decks, but know better than to try to convince K&E to watch those.
• I was gifted the book What's Next on that early-Christmas evening, and though I've yet to start into it, I am anticipating some great West Wing reflections and truly wonder how it will feel to revisit the details of the fictional Bartlet Administration while living in the impending nightmare of Trump 2.0, Now With More Oligarchy.
• I just learned that baseball Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson died today. One of the all-time greats, Rickey was a fantastic character with is arrogant self-assuredness, his speaking in the third person, and his generosity to others. Despite being exactly my kind of ballplayer—the stolen base king! Consistently walked more than struck out!—he was never one of my favorites, maybe because he took the steals record away from one of my faves, Lou Brock, or maybe because he spent his career primarily with the Oakland A's and the hated New York Yankees. He did spend part of one season in Seattle as a Mariner, in 2000, in the waning days of his very long career, and was always fun to watch no matter who he played for. My two favorite Rickey Henderson anecdotes come from other players. One, from former Seattle Mariner Harold Reynolds, who won the stolen base crown in 1987 with 66 steals (because Henderson was injured that year) and got a postseason call from Rickey congratulating him but also containing Rickey-style mockery, with Henderson ending the call with "Rickey would have had 66 by the All-Star break." Two, from fellow Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, who was Rickey's teammate with the New York Mets; Piazza recounted how Rickey voted when teams would be divvying up the postseason bonuses among the support staff. “Rickey was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people—whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant—Rickey would shout out 'Full share!' We’d argue for a while and he’d say, 'Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!'” Apparently Rickey died from pneumonia, less than a week shy of 66 years old. Bummer.
• Earlier this week, Craig Calcaterra referenced a Washington Post article called "America's Best Decade" in his newsletter. The article analyzes results from polling 2,000 American adults on which decade was best for 20 different things, like best movies, best economy, best music, best reporting, and so on. There are some interesting (though not surprising) things, like Republicans are twice as likely to think the 1950s were awesome as other people are (hey, Republicans, that being the case, let's go back to the 90% marginal tax rate that existed then, which made for a lot of the circumstances you say you want!), or that people think the "best music" is the music they listened to in their formative years. But Craig's takeaway was surprise at the generational consistency of people liking their own youth (not just the music, but everything). "Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age," says the article. "The good old days when America was 'great' aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices." There's a handy graph to illustrate:
  

  

  
  If they'd polled me, I might have skewed the results just a smidge. I mean, if I followed the pattern, I'd have my bests coming in the 1980s, and frankly there was a lot about the ’80s that wasn't all that. I mean, sure, those years were largely good for me (well, not ’89), but thinking big picture not so much. I'd say... Best Music? 1970s. Best Movies? I'm not really big into movies like some people, so I don't have a real feeling on this, but I guess the 2000s? Best Fashion? Hell if I know, but certainly not the ’80s; maybe the ’60s, since it spanned a lot of stuff. Happiest Families? Again, WTF do I know, but I'd say maybe 1990s since (a) women had far more agency than in prior decades, and (b) economically things were stable and good throughout. Most Moral Society is a question that inevitably tracks one's politics and I'd be tempted to say the 2020s if not for what happened last month to show us how many millions of Americans are still racist, misogynist, cruel asshats. Most Reliable News Reporting? 1970s again, though it really depends on how you quantify; there's a lot of fine reportage more recently, but also increasingly widespread BS from the dawn of cable TV forward. Best Economy? 1990s. Best Radio? I've no proper context for this, but given how much more radio was a thing the further back you go, maybe the 1940s or ’50s? For me, again the ’70s. Best TV? Right now, man. So much great TV being made even as the TV delivery system is transmogrifying. Least Political Division? Um...never? I mean, now is the worst in ages, but there's always been a lot; maybe the ’40s, what with the war being a unifying purpose. Best Sporting Events? For me, that's limited to baseball, really, and in this area I fit the trend—1980s baseball was great and I wish we could exhume Bart Giamatti to be Commissioner again. Best Cuisine seems like a dumb category, as food doesn't change, really, it's how we eat that changes. I like good food whenever it's eaten. Anyway, kind of an interesting survey.

Tagged Site issues, Politics, West Wing, Baseball, TV, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on December 21, 2024 at 8:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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