Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

As the current situation continues to worsen because Trump continues to deploy his anonymous stormtroopers and rip up America and the Constitution, we will remember who chose not to stand up for this country but to stand against it. The New York Yankees have chosen poorly, very poorly.

The fact that I have been a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees makes this one extra tough: The New York Yankees have chosen to provide Herr Donald Trump with what will amount to a Trump rally for an audience of millions of TV viewers. They have invited the fascist who is burning America to the ground, both figuratively and literally, the dictator wannabe who leads what amounts to the biggest death cult in American history, to throw out the ceremonial first ball of a Yankee baseball game. The original date was to be Saturday August 15th and you can bet that, since that game is on a Saturday, arrangements would have been made to feature it as the FOX Sports "Game Of The Week" in addition to being broadcast on their own network.

As it stands now, however, there has been enough blowback, even from the highly suspect Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz to force The Orange Menace To Society to at least temporarily back away. You can read Diaz's comments at the link I've provided. Late Sunday, Trump tweeted the following:

Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduling meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won't be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankkees on August 15th. We will make it later in the season.

There he goes again with "China Virus." The idea of "make it later in the season" is really up in the air now since at least several games have already been postponed, with more probably about to be postponed, due to an outbreak of positive tests for COVID-19 among the Florida Marlins players and staff. I guess it's not surprising that it's a Florida team we're talking about but the MLB (Major League Baseball) has taken every precaution to prevent such a scenario. They have used the best technology and medical protocols available to ward off what has happened and it has not worked. Within a few days, we may even hear that the MLB season is kaput after only 3 o4 4 games. None of this, however, should distract us from the simple fact that the NY Yankee invitation to Trump is yet another MLB scandal. This is a bigger scandal than the Houston Astros cheating scandal. It's bigger than the betting habits of Pete Rose. In fact, it's the biggest MLB scandal since their decades-long banning of all black players from the major leagues.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I do not blame the players or coaches. I'm sure that among them, they have a variety of political viewpoints. Management and ownership of the team has always been another matter. I mean, George Steinbrenner, the late owner? He was such a fuckhead that he gave an illegal campaign contribution to Nixon. 50 years later, the team is still owned by the Steinbrenner family. Team management also includes flaming Trump supporters in President Randy Levine and General Manager Brian Cashman.

The Yankees have built a great new stadium and put millions into player development and salaries in order to have a great team. Knowing which side their bread is buttered one, they allowed that team to express their solidarity for social justice on last week's opening day of the season; free speech and all that. The question now is what to do when ownership and management invite a virulent racist anti-free speech totalitarian monster who is the embodiment of being against social justice and against free speech to throw out the first ball of a game. It's about symbolism and more. It's a "We're down with white supremacy and fascism" marketing statement. Yankee ownership is pushing its own right to free speech over the edge and in doing so they are showing their desire to be a bigger part of pushing this country off a cliff and into the abyss of inhuman totalitarianism. Apparently, they don't even see the irony of inviting the cretinous monster responsible for there being empty stadiums across the entire country. What pro-fascism event will the New York Yankees permit their stadium to be used for next? Nixon once had thousands of protesters swept up, beaten and imprisoned at Washington's RFK Stadium. Trump would no doubt go further than that and use what happened in Chile's Estadio Nacional in 1973 as a guide.

Take a good look at those corporate logos in the meme above. Now picture the insane Orange Menace To Society standing on that pitcher's mound to throw out a first ball with all of those logos, the biggest of which is the Yankees logo, as a backdrop. Maybe there'll even be MAGA spelled out on the giant video screen or maybe he'll be wearing a special New York Yankee MAGA Edition hat presented to him by Brian Cashman himself. There may be no better photographic illustration of Fascism with a capital F defined as the total merger of Corporations with Totalitarian Government than that backdrop. Yes, the money generated for the Yankees by the display of those logos pays for the lights and the player salaries, but this is much, much bigger than that.

One final thought: If Major League Baseball, with all of the organization, money, and medical science it has at its disposal, can't protect its players, how are our woefully underfunded schools going to protect our children and their teachers?


Addendum:

The story just keeps getting more and more curious, and our insane president just keeps on providing layers of wackiness. To the alleged, (emphasis 'alleged') surprise of both his White House staff, and the Yankees, Trump announced last Thursday that he would be throwing out his ceremonial  pitch on Saturday August 15. Thursday was the day that Dr. Anthony Fauci threw out the first pitch at the NY Yankees and Washington Nationals opening day game and Trump, as usual, didn't like all of the favorable attention that someone else was receiving. It especially mattered that it was Dr. Fauci who was receiving the attention.

Apparently, President Mental Case decided he would take Yankees president Randy Levine up on a Yankees long standing heinous offer to go throw a first pitch. Said President Mental Case:

Randy Levine is a great friend of mine from the Yankees, and he asked me to throw out the first pitch, and I think I am doing that on August 15 at Yankee Stadium.

The funny thing about the Yankees here is that it took them 4 days, count 'em, 4 days, to deny that they had invited Trump and for Trump to issue his orange face-saving tweet. This is where it would be natural for anyone to conclude that either Trump or the Yankees are lying. Here we have a case where it appears that both are lying. The whole episode is disgraceful in multiple ways.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Blood in your lungs and blood on their hands. The death toll grows exponentially by the day. At least if Kushner & Trump was your law firm, you'd be in jail instead of in an I.C.U. Although, with the way pandemics work, being in jail wouldn't be a good prospect either. Either way, America's #1 family of sadists is happy. When this is all over, the Trump's should have a sicko TV show like the Duck Dynasty assholes. Each episode would deal with new ways that the fabulous Trumps find to enthusiastically spread human misery and death. Each show would end with Donnie Head Case playing his air accordion while commanding Mike Pence, Moscow Mitch, and Lindsey Graham to dance in their skimpy elf costumes. Of course, if there actually was any justice in this country, they'd all be tried and hung for their crimes against humanity.

I'll put this another way. I am a hugely devoted baseball fan. It's a lifelong thing with me, and not having the new MLB season underway has me jonesing for baseball like a junkie joneses for smack. OK, not quite as bad, but you get the picture. So, look at it all this way: If Trump or any inept Trump family member was your starting pitcher in the World Series, and Pence was the catcher, you, as the manger would have yanked them both out of the game and sent them to the showers as early as the first inning. That's how much better baseball is than our political scene. Not only that, but the jeering home crowd would have demanded their removal and, if they didn't get that, they would have rioted like a soccer crowd. Or, at the least, they would have pelted the team with hugely filled cups of beer and mustard-covered hotdogs. If it just happened to be Bat Day, I can think of an even better scenario.

Instead, America sits in the stands quietly and doesn't even put bags over their heads to disguise their personal embarrassment and the fact that they bought a ticket for the fiasco in the first place.

The Strangest Bedfellows

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

Anyone who’s had the pleasure of knowing Tom Dunkel knows he’s an adept and fair observer of unique Americana who readily turns phrases that do his subjects justice. His book Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line, about a Depression-era integrated semi-pro baseball team out of North Dakota, is regarded as a top-tier sports book deftly matching cultural insight with entertainment. Catch a chapter here.

Tom’s most recent offering, in the May 21 Washington Post Magazine, opens cultural veins some of Washington’s shakers and movers might prefer most people didn’t see leaking. Locked and Loaded for the Lord, reveals a sub-culture that readers skimming a paragraph here and there might conclude is embedded in a satirical fiction that should have published on April Fool’s Day. Alas, there’s no fiction in this look at a rebellious splinter off-shoot of the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Just when one thought Moon’s creation was the last word in weird, a couple of his sons, Sean and Justin, have gone him one better, creating the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, also renowned in rarefied circles as the Rod of Iron Ministries. One of the church sacraments is the blessing of the guns, in particular the AR-15. That weapon is embraced by the congregation, which sees its role as enforcers doing double duty-- protecting the Constitution while helping a returning Christ keep order in his kingdom.

Pastor Hyung Jin "Sean" Moon in one of photographer Bryan Anseim's jaw-dropping photos, with Sean's gold-plated AR-15 and bullet crown

Pastor Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon in one of photographer Bryan Anseim’s jaw-dropping photos, with Sean's gold-plated AR-15 and bullet crown.

I don’t want to detract from article pleasures with too many spoilers but believe it or not, Eric Trump takes a break from SNL to make an appearance:

In December 2013, Justin Moon paid $2 million in cash for a 620-acre industrial site north of Newfoundland. On Aug. 30, 2016, he held the grand opening of Kahr Arms’ Tommy Gun Warehouse showroom-store, the place to go for rifles, pistols, knives and the Brooklyn Smasher steel baseball bat that in an emergency can be used to club an intruder or a deer to death. The grand-opening guest of honor was Eric Trump. “That came about because God made it happen,” Justin told me. Somebody from the Trump campaign had called him out of the blue and said, “Eric wants to come.”

So Eric came, and Sean introduced him by saying: “It’s my opinion that we must elect a president that will protect and expand the right to bear arms. … I hope we can all agree that Hillary Clinton should never be the president of the United States... God bless the U.S.A., and please buy some guns and ammo!”

Eric, in an open-collar shirt and dark sports jacket, stood in front of a wall of rifles and next to a U.S. flag. “This election for every gun owner is a huge thing. It will be the difference between adding to our Second Amendment freedoms or not adding to our Second Amendment freedoms,” he said, then switched to the topic of America hemorrhaging jobs. “We don’t make anything here anymore. That’s why Justin deserves a tremendous, tremendous round of applause... Our government does not make it easy on you, either from a shooting perspective or from a manufacturing perspective.”

The elder Moon’s creation, the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, has long illustrated just how strange politics’ bedfellows can be. For many years Moon hemorrhaged many millions sustaining the Washington Times as the conservative/Republican press organ in the nation’s capital. Throughout much of its existence the paper included many capable journalists, and arguably had better metro coverage than the Washington Post. Those writers not affiliated with the church seemed able to ignore the paper’s bizarre underpinnings. As could the politicians who let its editorial page be their voice, proving once again that the bedrock of Washington psyche survival is compartmentalization. Shrinks do a land-office business in Washington.

The church creations by the Moons continue to illustrate a seamless web of odd bedfellows and distortions, incorporating President Trump, the NRA, the Gun Owners of America, FOX News, and who knows how many tangential players behind the scenes, abetted by bipartisan sellouts. The End of Days figures in. Just as it has in Middle East horrors, with some evangelicals and Netanyahu confederates manipulating such myths to mutual advantage and/or ruin. President Trump is viewed by some as an instrument of God. If Trump’s imperfections overwhelm him and he slips up, so what, the fallback position is End Times, so it’s win-win. Meanwhile ignore the cruelties to Gaza. Higher purpose.

Want something entertaining? Do a search on YouTube for The King’s Report and watch Sean Moon working in Rudy Giuliani, Laura Ingraham and other hoodwink luminaries in between martial arts demonstrations. Seemless web.

The Moon Sanctuary reveals where the continuum of gun absurdity ultimately goes, beyond revising the meaning of the Constitution to raising gun worship to a religion, a cult legitimized by political expediency.

(For an earlier rant on guns gone wild, including fine levity by The Yes Men.)

Active Shooter by Nancy Ohanian

Yogi Berra (1925-2015)

NYT caption: "George Steinbrenner, right, with Yogi Berra in 1985 before Steinbrenner made 'the worst mistake I ever made in baseball,' firing Berra as manager."

by Ken

I wish I could remember which game it was, exactly, because in my memory it was just a couple of games ago that Yogi Berra's name came up in the course of a Yankees telecast, in connection with one of the vintage Yogi-isms, and announcer Michael Kay sent along best wishes to Yogi, explaining that he knew Yogi watched every game. So the first thing I thought of when I heard this morning that Yogi has died, was whether Yogi had been watching that game.

If there was anybody who didn't love Yogi, I've never heard about it.

Lawrence Peter Berra was 90 when he died late last night, and I guess you can't complain about that. His health had been fading, and his wife, Carmen, died last year, at 85, and that must have been hard on him -- and on their three sons and their families. Still, he had, as far as I know, a pretty darned good life. For sure he had a great career, one of the all-time great baseball careers, starting with his 19 years as a player -- I saw a reference to him as the "backbone" of all the great Yankee teams he played on, and that seems right -- and continuing with his in-uniform stints as a coach and manager (of the Mets as well as the Yankees) and his sunny presence once he was out of uniform for good. Even a small dose of Yogi reminded you of what you loved about the game.

The stats, both team and individual, are pretty staggering, even without considering that he looked less like a possible professional athlete than just about any guy you could think of. Which always makes me think of his growing-up story.

He grew up in St. Louis, the youngest son of Italian immigrants, including a father whose whole life was work, and who expected the same of his sons -- if they weren't in school, they were expected to be laboring to contribute to the family's upkeep. By all accounts Yogi's older brothers (he had three, and also a sister), unlike Yogi himself, were natural athletes, and splendidly gifted ones who in happier circumstances would have had legitimate shots at pro careers. The story goes that when their baby brother's turn came, they made an apparently forceful case to their father that Larry was going to get his shot.

Yogi always credited his brothers for making possible everything that followed.

(Another bit of magic from Yogi's growing up: Living across the street from him was a friend -- I seem to recall the friend clarifying once that it was across the street, since the story comes in various variants -- another Italian-American immigrant son, nine months younger, who would also become a big-time Major League catcher, and later broadcaster: his lifelong friend Joe Garagiola.)

The darkest time I'm aware of in Yogi's adult life was when he declared Yankee Stadium off limits to him after George Steinbrenner fired him as manager of the Yanks. As I recall, it wasn't so much the actual firing as the cold, impersonal way George did it. This was hard on Yankee fans, because Yogi had been for so long the heart and soul of the Yankees, and had always seemed to be around. He came to spring training every year and was frequently seen at Yankee Stadium -- and always at team events. But of course the person who suffered most during those years of self-imposed exile was Yogi himself. How much pain that must have caused him, to be cut off from the organization that had for so long been such a central part of his life.

Eventually peace was brokered, and Yogi was once again a constant presence in the life of the team. The Yogi remembrances are pouring out and will no doubt continue to do so, but I was happy to see New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton focus on the rapprochement in this beautiful appreciation (links onsite).

Yogi Berra’s Second Act, as Elder Statesman, as Glorious as the First

By HARVEY ARATON | Sept. 23, 2015


After his return to the Yankees, Berra formed a lasting friendship with Ron Guidry, left, during their years at spring training.

The overdue and gloriously unscripted sequel to Yogi Berra’s wonderful Yankees’ life began on a cold Tuesday evening in January 1999, when the Hall of Fame catcher stood slightly hunched at the back-entrance doorstep of the recently opened museum named for him. He awaited the arrival of the man whose impulsive behavioral and operational tendencies had sent him into a 14-year self-imposed exile from his most cherished workplace in the South Bronx.

Berra, at 73, wore the stern look of a father counting the seconds his son was late with the car, but also fidgeted just enough to resemble an expectant boy awaiting the return of his father from a long day’s work. Even in his geriatric years, Berra had the fascinating capacity to appear proudly venerable in one moment and childishly playful the next.

Across the near decade and a half that Lawrence Peter Berra had refused to step into Yankee Stadium in protest of the way George Steinbrenner had fired him — through an intermediary — as manager in 1985, the Boss, five years younger, had come to represent both sides of the generational divide. Berra was furious and disappointed. He had expected more from Steinbrenner, the imperious owner who liked to lecture folks on the virtue and value of being a Yankee.

Berra, who died at 90 late Tuesday night on the 69th anniversary of his major league debut, stubbornly lived by that overriding doctrine. If he had to stay away from Yankee Stadium for the rest of his life to prove it, he absolutely would. Along with his three American League Most Valuable Player Awards, 10 World Series rings and interesting way of explaining things, Berra might also be remembered for one of the most principled stands — a virtual call for the worker to be treated with common decency — in the history of the game.

Not without trepidation — a person who rode with Steinbrenner that day in 1999 said he had never seen him so nervous — the Boss finally arrived at Berra’s museum on the campus of Montclair State in New Jersey. Berra had agreed to receive him only after some family pleading and with one stipulation. His wife, Carmen, had to be in the room when Steinbrenner said he was sorry.

“The worst mistake I ever made in baseball,” Steinbrenner told them in one of his finest moments and — make no mistake — smartest business decisions. In the process of bringing back Berra, Steinbrenner humanized himself and helped create one of the great second acts, symbolically launched later that year.

On July 18, Yogi Berra day, with his perfect-game battery mate Don Larsen in attendance on a piping hot afternoon, David Cone threw another one.

“Can you believe it — a perfect game on my day?” Berra said over and over to Carmen on the way home after the game.

Those who knew Berra best, who marveled at how this unpretentious and unimposing man somehow became one of America’s most successful and beloved athletes, would essentially say, well, of course.

The return to the Yankees was timed coincidentally but perfectly to the opening of the Berra Museum and Learning Center. There, Berra would hold court, greeting the community power brokers who created it, the baseball stars and insiders who enthusiastically would show up to promote it, and the students from schools all over North Jersey who benefited from the educational programs that sustained it.

Books recounting Berra’s history and his famous sayings began to appear on a fairly regular basis, a few on best-seller lists. Berra’s sons Tim and Dale launched a memorabilia business from the museum, though at this stage of life, the commercial benefits were of no great interest to Berra.

It was the uniform he craved, the baseball life recreated. The opportunity to return to spring training and work with the promising young catcher, Jorge Posada, the chance to hang around the clubhouse, kid around with the coaches, down his daily shot of Ketel One from the bottle that Joe Torre and later Joe Girardi kept reliably stored in a desk drawer inside the manager’s office.

Berra’s return to spring training formed the basis of the most enduring and endearing friendship of his post-exile years: a relationship with the former pitcher and spring training instructor Ron Guidry. Berra the coach had looked after Guidry when he was navigating the minefield that existed for young Yankees hurlers during the early Steinbrenner years in the 1970s. In return, Guidry became the aging Berra’s constant spring training companion in the early 21st century, his dining and golfing buddy.

It was Guidry who had talked Carmen Berra — who died last year — into agreeing to let her husband go to spring training in 2011 even as his health had become an issue. On the way to Carmen’s favorite salon in advance of Old-Timers’ Day in July of the previous summer, Berra had tripped outside his home and fallen, face down.

Ever punctual, he arrived for his appointment, bleeding profusely, with a towel pressed against his nose, insisting on his haircut and manicure.

He wound up in the hospital after that, missing the big event and later another of his favorites, Hall of Fame weekend in Cooperstown, N.Y.

He was 85, slowing down. Of his spring training time with his pal, Guidry would say, “Someday this is going to have to end.” But he also suspected that the end might come sooner if Berra couldn’t again have that live connection with the game, to the people around the Yankees and other teams who delighted in his presence.

So with Guidry promising Carmen that her husband would be in good hands, Berra returned to spring training in 2011 and was back at Old-Timers’ Day, and again the next year, and even after moving to a nursing home with enough strength to stay only for the ceremony. When he returned home that day, pushing a walker through the lobby, still wearing his Yankees jersey, some of the attendants told him they had seen him on television and that he’d looked great.

“Thanks,” he said, softly, only wanting to get to his room, watch the game.

First and foremost, he was still and forever a Yankee, making up for lost time.

We hear that phrase "giving back" in life a lot. For all that baseball gave Yogi -- thanks to his own hard work, of course -- he gave back at least as much.

Obviously we've known that this day would come. That doesn't make it any less sad. Thanks, Yogi.

#

Probably nobody but A-Rod thought he could come back at 39 -- it's been a sweet story

Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander said afterward that he knows Alex Rodgriguez likes the outside pitch, and this one wasn't quite where he wanted it. Soon enough it was where Justin really didn't want it -- in the seats, for A-Rod's 3000th career hit.

by Ken

It's a different A-Rod who against most oddsmakers' predictions, after two seasons lost to that combination of injury and legal woes, staged a comeback this year at the age of 39 (he turns 40 on July 27). For once in his, er, "mature" career (by which I mean to separate out the early years when he was finding himself as a major leaguer, and doing things that nobody ought to have been able to do at that age, and not many players have been able to do at any age, seemingly effortlessly and with all that youthful joy) he has handled himself impeccably. Fans elsewhere may assume that the hometown crowd cut him some slack, but in fact nobody could have been harder on him than Yankee fans.

And he's handled it -- handled the hostile crowds, a not much friendlier cast of teammates, and the long layoff, by sticking to business. Manager Joe Girardi, faced with the job of overseeing A-Rod's return, had made the decision in spring training that Alex would exclusively DH, that he wasn't going to ask, or let, him complicate his comeback by returning to third base. It should be remembered that he racked up those prodigious stats as an infielder, and in fact for much of his career as a shortstop, and an outstanding one -- until he came to the Yankees and made the transition to third, alongside Jeter, and he made himself a pretty good third baseman. There were people who insisted they couldn't play together, but they did.

Age seemed to start to slow him down, and then all the drug investigations, and the hip injury. If there was anyone besides Alex who thought he could make it back, they kept it to themselves. As he said after the game, a year ago it wasn't at all clear that he was ever going to get a shot at No. 3000. Well, he earned that shot, and has looked better at the plate than he has in a number of years.

Last night wasn't his first shot at No. 3000, at least theoretically. He had another at bat Thursday night after notching Nos. 2998 and 2999, but buttwipe Florida Marlins pitcher Sam Dyson walked him on four virtual brushback pitches. So he came back last night against the Tigers' Justin Verlander, one of the game's great pitchers, but wearing down the last few years after his really heavy career workload, and making only his second start since returning from the disabled list. A-Rod, batting third, came up with two outs in the bottom of the first.

Verlander said afterwards that he really didn't think Alex would be swinging on the first pitch, and that the pitch -- a 95mph fastball -- wasn't quite where he wanted it, especially knowing that Alex can handle the outside pitch. Alex handled it, all right, lofting it over the wall in right-center field and joining Wade Boggs and Derek Jeter as the third player to hit the ball out of the park for his 3000th hit.

The great Hank Aaron homered for his 3001st hit in the same game in which he'd gotten hit No. 3000, which is pretty impressive but not the same thing. Speaking of Hammerin' Hank, Alex's 3000th put him in a club with just Aaron and Willie Mays as the only players to have at least 600 home runs and 3000 hits -- but add in at least 2000 RBIs, and it's just Hank and Alex. (If we're talking numbers, though, Aaron racked up 3771 hits, 755 HRs, and 2297 RBIs in his stupendous career, while maintaining a .305 career batting average.)

After the first-inning wallop, Alex hugged each of his teammates. It looked pretty genuine to me. Winning them over may have been the toughest hurdle of the comeback. For what it's worth, he also won me over. He was blessed with extraordinary physical gifts, no doubt. Still, he had to work awfully hard and play awfully smart to make the career he's made. The career blemishes are no doubt also there, and I suppose will kill his shot at the Hall of Fame. But the things he had to overcome to restart his career at his age, and the way he's pulled it off -- that's a heckuva story too.

#

Frank Torre (1931-2014)

Joe and Frank Torre in 1977, kid brother's rookie managerial season, as player-manager of the New York Mets. (Frank's seven-year Major League career ended with the Phillies in 1963.) It was Frank who, at age 20, stood up to their violently abusive father.

"When I was a teenager and my brother Frank was in the World Series in '57 and '58 against the Yankees, Braves winning in '57 and the Yankees in '58, little did I know the next time these two teams would meet in the World Series, I would be managing the Yankees."

-- Joe Torre, in his Baseball Hall of Fame induction speech, July 27

"One win­ter, when I was 12, my older brother Frank (20) said to my father, 'We want you out of the house. We don't want any­thing other than the house we live in. We don't want any­thing from you. Just leave.' And he left."

-- Joe Torre, on his Safe At Home website

by Ken

For most people, Frank Torre, who died Saturday at his home in Palm Beach at 82, was Joe Torre's older brother. Surely everyone who lived through it remembers the high drama of Frank receiving a desperately needed heart transplant while Joe was managing the New York Yankees to their first World Series title together in his first season as Yankees manager. As Richard Goldstein recalls in his NYT obit of Frank, two years later he told the Times: "I got a chance to live again. The next night, I was able to see the winning game in the World Series."

And Frank lived to see his baby brother finally inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, on July 27. Their oldest brother, Rocco, the oldest of the five Torre siblings, died of a heart attacke suffered while watching a Yankees game during Joe's first season as Yankees manager, while Frank was languishing and hoping for a new heart. Frank remained active as an advocate for transplants, and was a second-time beneficiary -- a kidney transplant in 2007.

However, for a kid in Milwaukee at the time that Frank was the first baseman of the Braves team that won first the NL penant in 1957 and then the World Series in 1958, Joe was Frank's pudgy baby brother. He was first heard of when he turned up with Frank at the Braves' training camp one spring, supposedly also a baseball player, though what position could he have played but catcher? (Eventually Joe, already an All-Star Major League catcher, would slim down and reinvent himself as an All-Star third baseman, even though, as Dodgers Hall of Fame pitcher Don Sutton recalled to Fox Sports' Zach Dillard, "he won a batting title and he couldn't run out of sight in two days." Sutton says he "hated him as a player, for all those line drives he hit up the middle. Sutton describes Joe as "a gamer," who "made himself into a good third baseman," and "a guy that's mastered so many facets of our game from the front office to the grunt work in the dugout.")

That same kid, by then transplanted from Milwaukee to Brooklyn, where he (along with Howie) attended Frank's alma mater, James Madison HS, had the thrill of an assembly visit from the man he considered the school's most distinguished alum -- although Frank was pretty much unknown to most Madison students. By then Joe was a rising star with the Braves, but he was not a Madison kid. He went to a Catholic high school, St. Francis Prep.

Of course it was hard not to be won over by Joe, first as a player -- an incredibly hard-working player who forged a great career playing for teams that never won anything -- and eventually as a manager, generally known as one of the most decent people in sports. And we could go on and on with inspiring Torre family memories.

But as I expect most people know, those memories include a lot of horror from the five siblings' childhood, when their father, Joe, an NYPD detective widely esteemed on their home turf in Brooklyn, was physically and psychologically abusing their mother, Margaret -- up until the day in 1952 that Joe recalls in the quote I've put at the top of this post. By then two of the five Torre siblings were out of the house. Brother Rocco was married with a family of his own, and in 1951 sister Marguerite had left to become, literally, Sister Marguerite, as she remained until her retirement in 2007, the last 27 years spent as principal of Nativity BVM School in Ozone Park, NY.

Which left it to 20-year-old Frank to stand up to their father, Joe, an act of almost unimaginable courage for such a closely knit, strictly Catholic Italian-American family in Brooklyn in the early '50s. (Margaret Torre never did divorce the senior Joe.)

JOE TORRE TELLS HIS STORY

For decades the Torres didn't talk outside the house about what happened inside their house. Joe has said that he never talked to schoolmates about it. Not having a father in the house must have been extremely difficult for a teenage kid in the early '50s, when the only acceptable excuse for not having two parents at home was that one or more had died. Here's how the story is told on the Joe Torre Safe At Home Foundation website:

Joe Torre, for­mer pro­fes­sional base­ball player and man­ager of the Los Ange­les Dodgers, grew up the youngest of five chil­dren in Brook­lyn, New York. His father was a New York City police detec­tive and revered in his com­mu­nity. He was the cop that made every­one feel safe. Every­one except his own family.

Joe, Sr. ruled his home with an iron fist. He was a phys­i­cally abu­sive hus­band and an emo­tion­ally abu­sive father. The vio­lence that had besieged the Torre house­hold for so many years was a well-kept fam­ily secret and stayed a fam­ily secret for gen­er­a­tions. How­ever, in Decem­ber of 1995, Ali and Joe Torre attended a sem­i­nar called Life Suc­cess. As a result of Joe’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in that sem­i­nar, he began to talk openly of his child­hood expe­ri­ence with domes­tic vio­lence. He went pub­lic with his fam­ily secret in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Chas­ing the Dream: My Life­long Jour­ney to the World Series.

Ali and Joe Torre wanted to edu­cate chil­dren about the issue of domes­tic vio­lence. In 2002, they cre­ated the Joe Torre Safe At Home® Foun­da­tion. The mis­sion of the Foun­da­tion is “edu­cat­ing to end the cycle of domes­tic vio­lence and save lives”.

"My dad was a bully. He controlled my mom, whether it be the paycheck, physical abusing, intimidating her, bullying. . . . The one thing I knew was that I didn't want to be my dad."

In the video, Joe goes on to say that he was lucky, both to have had an outlet in baseball and to have had different sorts of male role models in his older brothers, Rocco and Frank. In 1996 Frank and Joe's sister Marguerite (yes, Sister Marguerite) told People magazine: "I think Rocco was like the father image to Joe. Frank, of course, was his hero. I would say he almost worshipped Frank."

"There were five of us, and he's our baby," the other Torre sister, Rae, told Nj.com's Randy Miller on the day in July when Joe was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. "We spoiled him rotten."

Marguerite chimed in: "Spoiled but precious. We had to run if he spoke or he cried. My mother -- ohmygosh, 'Go get what he needs.' "

Here's Joe telling the family story, again on the Safe At Home website:

I grew up in Marine Park, Brook­lyn. I am the youngest of five chil­dren. My father, Joseph, was a New York City police offi­cer. When I was grow­ing up, my father was a bully. My mother faced ver­bal and phys­i­cal abuse from my father. If he didn’t like the food mom made, he would throw it against the wall. He used to make her get up in the mid­dle of the night to cook for friends he brought home.

Although I did not get phys­i­cally abused myself, I grew up in fear because my mom did. I was shy and dad would make fun of me. When­ever I saw his car in the dri­ve­way, I didn’t want to go home. One win­ter, when I was 12, my older brother Frank (20) said to my father, “We want you out of the house. We don’t want any­thing other than the house we live in. We don’t want any­thing from you. Just leave.” And he left.

Grow­ing up in a home where there was domes­tic vio­lence was very dif­fi­cult and left last­ing scars. Although I didn’t real­ize it then, I used to feel like the abuse was my fault. I felt help­less and alone. For many years, I felt ashamed and worthless.

In those days, no one in my neigh­bor­hood knew what was hap­pen­ing in my home, or if they did, nobody talked about it. I did not talk about it because I was afraid. I didn’t know who to turn to for help.

But today, things are dif­fer­ent and there is help for you. The way we can con­quer and stop domes­tic vio­lence is to form a team. If we grow up respect­ing one another, we will even­tu­ally end domes­tic vio­lence. The more we talk about it, the more we’ll be likely to pick up a phone and tell a rel­a­tive, a teacher or a counselor.

Once Joe, with Ali's assistance, came to grips with his family history enough to go public, he and Ali became warriors in the fight against domestic violence. So it was hardly surprising when the Dallas Morning News 's Sarah Mervosh wrote yesterday in a piece headlined "":

Baseball Hall of Famer Joe Torre says the video of Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancée unconscious with a single punch accomplished one good thing: The footage ripped off the cloak of secrecy that typically emboldens domestic abusers.

“What’s gone on here recently has certainly caught people’s attention and, I want to say, in a positive way. Everybody’s reacting the same way — that we need to do something about this,” the former New York Yankees manager told The Dallas Morning News. Torre is scheduled to visit Dallas this week for a previously planned luncheon for The Family Place shelter. . . .

VIOLENT HOME LIFE

Despite Torre’s storied baseball career, which includes leading the Yankees to four World Series championships, he said he suffered from paralyzing insecurity as a child. He said he didn’t try out for the high school baseball team his first year because he feared failure.

His insecurity, he later realized, stemmed from the violent environment he grew up in. Torre remembers the way his father threw dishes in anger, woke up his wife to cook for him when he came home late, and once, reached for his gun when his daughter held a knife up to protect her mother.

Torre’s older brother eventually forced his father out of the house. But the memories stayed with Torre. In 2002, he established the Joe Torre Safe at Home Foundation, which uses education to end the cycle of abuse and provides safe-rooms at schools for children to seek help.

Given Torre’s emphasis on education, he said he wonders about Rice’s past and whether anyone spoke to him about how to treat women. While Torre said the NFL was right to make an example of Rice, he hopes the running back will get treatment, too.

“Have him understand what he did and why it’s not the right thing to do,” Torre said. “He’s got more of a life to live than just the NFL.”

That's Joe for you. But then, he's got his share of experience living that life. This is surely not a happy moment for the extended Torre family, but then, they have some pretty good family to fall back on for support.

#

Don Zimmer (1931-2014)

Joe and Zim in the dugout -- where else?

"Our universal affection for Zim is complicated, beginning as it does with our childlike joy in his bald cannonball head and stumpy bod and jack-o'-lantern grin, but encompassing as well, I think, a deep trust in and respect for his decades of exemplary competitive service, without stardom or contemporary distraction."

-- The New Yorker's Roger Angell, in "Zim"

by Ken

For anyone who lived in one of the towns that was one of the way stations on Don Zimmer's journey through organized baseball -- and that list could simply reduce to Baseballtown USA -- the news of his passing Wednesday night at 83 brought daily life to a brief standstill. It's a measure of a life not too badly lived that it inspired this affectionate remembrance by Roger Angell.

Roger describes Zim as "an original Met and an original sweetie pie," and says, "His sixty-six years in baseball were scripted by Disney and produced by Ken Burns."
And he sketches that life in baseball:

As a stubby, earnest third baseman and utility infielder, he compiled a .235 batting average over twelve seasons for six teams, including the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, the Chicago Cubs, those 1962 ur-Mets, and the Washington Senators. In the off-seasons, he played ball in Puerto Rico and Cuba and Mexico. Turning coach, he was hired eleven times by eight different teams (there were three separate stints with the Yankees) and along the way managed the Padres, Red Sox, Rangers, and Cubs. Two championship rings as a player with the Dodgers, four as a coach with the Yanks. He finished up with the Rays, in his home-town Tampa: a coach, then a local presence.

"But never mind Disney," Roger says. "Only baseball could have produced a C.V. like this, and it’s not likely to happen again."

I think Zim is best remembered as the guy right next to manager Joe Torre on the right-hand side of the Yankees dugout in the good years: a motionless thick, short figure, heavily swathed in Yankee formals. The bulky dark warmup jacket and the initialled cap neatly and monastically framed his layered white moon-face, within which his tiny, half-hidden eyes remained alive and moving. He could also run and yell, of course. Boston fans—no, fans everywhere—will not forget the night he charged Pedro Martinez on the mound in that Fenway Park playoff fracas in 2003—and instantly wound up on his back, like a topped-over windup toy. Zim burned hard, and the hoots and yells and laughter that ran through the fiercely partisan Back Bay stands were familial and affectionate.

Yes, Zim as Joe Torre's right-hand guy with the Yankees is how I remember his best too. Only Roger has not just a way better memory than me, but a richer sensibility.

Zim sitting is the way he comes back to mind, for me. Like a few other old coaches, he had converted clubhouse silence and immobility—elbows on knees, hands folded, head aimed forward and downward, lips zipped—into something like a regional religious practice. If he caught your gaze as you walked past the coaches’ little anteroom on your way to Joe Torre’s office after another late game—he was down to sweats and clogs by now—he might manage an infinitesimal nod of recognition. Yep … same old.

Our universal affection for Zim is complicated, beginning as it does with our childlike joy in his bald cannonball head and stumpy bod and jack-o’-lantern grin, but encompassing as well, I think, a deep trust in and respect for his decades of exemplary competitive service, without stardom or contemporary distraction. He was a baseball figure from an earlier time: enchantingly familiar, tough and enduring, stuffed with plays and at-bats and statistics and anecdotes and wisdom accrued from tens of thousands of innings. Baseball stays on and on, unchanged, or so we used to think as kids, and Zimmer, sitting there, seemed to be telling us yes, you’re right, and see you tomorrow.

#

Hats off to Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas!

by Ken

If you're thinking that the Mssrs Maddux, Glavine, and Thomas fall outside DWT's normal purview, I think I can explain why it seems to me important to celebrate them by means of a simple analogy to our more familiar political and journalistic spheres.

Take "Mo" Dowd -- please! (Ha ha!)

If you looked at the NYT e-roundup this morning, you saw this:


The sensible response would have been to mutter, "Oh, the horror!," and move quickly on. But let's say that instead you allowed yourself to wonder whether our Ms. Mo based this brilliant observation on actually having watched Downton Abbey or just heard about it. You could, of course, expend a free NYT click to take you to the column in question and then read it. But that would be crazy. I can say, though, that my own hope is that she hasn't seen the show. This would of course be more reprehensible journalistically. However, the thought that she might actually have watched some of it and come away with the idea that it's "a British soap opera of manners" is impossibly scary. It would mean she's even dumber than I thought she was, and I find it hard to imagine that anyone could be dumber than I thought she was.

The point I'm trying to get at is that I find myself even more impressed with the passage of time by people who do things well. I guess I should specify "things that are worth doing," which opens us up to a whole other discussion. I guess it's my position that writing a good NYT column, as opposed to the kind Ms. Mo does, would be worth doing. It's settled in my mind that being able to pitch the way Greg Maddux or Tom Glavine did, or to hit and field the way Frank Thomas did, is something eminently worth doing.

There was some thought that the amazing Mr. Maddux -- described by ESPN's Tim Kurkjian this afternoon as one of his six top pitchers of all time -- might outpoll Tom Seaver in his first year of Baseball Hall of Fame eligibliity, but when the results were announced today, it seems that no, he was only named on 97.2 percent of the ballots. ("Only"! The real wonder is those other 2.8 percent. I assume those are predominantly voters who fetishize never voting for players in their first year of eligibility. But a Hall of Fame that didn't include an eligible Greg Maddux would have been a travesty.)

Not far behind, at 91.9 percent, was his longtime pitching-staff mate Tom Glavine. Just saying those names together conjures visions of those awesome Atlanta Braves pitching staffs of the '90s. And going into the Hall with them, also in his first year of eligibility will the aptly nicknamed "Big Hurt," the Chicago White Sox' Frank Thomas, an outstanding first baseman who's no doubt better remembered as one of baseball's truly punishing hitters. Already chosen to enter the Hall this year are three legendary managers: Bobby Cox (who managed Maddux and Glavine with the Braves), Tony La Russa, and Joe Torre. That's going to be one huckuva day, July 27, when the baseball world gathered that weekend in Cooperstown witnesses their induction.

Now of course Glavine and Thomas belong in the Hall. But it's hard not to focus on Maddux, whom Washingont Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell describes in an extraordinary piece, "Greg Maddux: A Hall of Fame approach that carried an average arm to Cooperstown, as "an average-sized nondescript everyman who could pass for a math teacher, but a tenacious Mad Dog on the mound," who in the clubhouse was (here quoting former Braves president Stan Kasten) "funny," "totally nuts.”

I actually started writing a whole piece about how nice it was to read Boswell on his great love, baseball, as a reminder that back when that was what he did, he was one of the great baseball writers. I mostly threw that out, though, and merely want to commend the Maddux piece to you. Well, I'll share a chunk of it, perhaps the meatiest part of it.

Maddux should be one of the most-copied pitchers ever, yet few would even know where to begin, because he seldom opened up about what he believed about pitching and why.

First, Maddux was convinced no hitter could tell the speed of a pitch with any meaningful accuracy. To demonstrate, he pointed at a road a quarter-mile away and said it was impossible to tell if a car was going 55, 65 or 75 mph unless there was another car nearby to offer a point of reference.

"You just can't do it," he said. Sometimes hitters can pick up differences in spin. They can identify pitches if there are different releases points or if a curveball starts with an upward hump as it leaves the pitcher's hand. But if a pitcher can change speeds, every hitter is helpless, limited by human vision.

"Except," Maddux said, "for that [expletive] Tony Gwynn."

Because of this inherent ineradicable flaw in hitters, Maddux's main goal was to "make all of my pitches look like a column of milk coming toward home plate." Every pitch should look as close to every other as possible, all part of that "column of milk." He honed the same release point, the same look, to all his pitches, so there was less way to know its speed -- like fastball 92 mph, slider 84, changeup 76.

One day I sat a dozen feet behind Maddux's catcher as three Braves pitchers, all in a row, did their throwing sessions side-by-side. Lefty Steve Avery made his catcher's glove explode with noise from his 95-mph fastball. His curve looked like it broke a foot-and-a-half. He was terrifying. Yet I could barely tell the difference between Greg's pitches. Was that a slider, a changeup, a two-seam or four-seam fastball? Maddux certainly looked better than most college pitchers, but not much. Nothing was scary.

Afterward, I asked him how it went, how he felt, everything except "Is your arm okay?" He picked up the tone. With a cocked grin, like a Mad Dog whose table scrap doesn't taste quite right, he said, "That's all I got."

Then he explained that I couldn't tell his pitches apart because his goal was late quick break, not big impressive break. The bigger the break, the sooner the ball must start to swerve and the more milliseconds the hitter has to react; the latter the break, the less reaction time. Deny the batter as much information -- speed or type of last-instant deviation -- until it is almost too late.

But not entirely too late: Maddux didn't want swings and misses for strikeouts, but preferred weak defensive contact and easy outs. He sought pitches that looked hittable and identical -- getting the hitter to commit to swing -- but weren't. Any pitch that didn't conform to this, even if it looked good, was scrapped as inefficient.

No, that's not a math teacher and his son, it's Greg and Chase Maddux watching the UNLV basketball team defeat Radford 81-62 last month in Las Vegas.

#

The First Openly Gay Baseball Player?

Who was the first active professional male athlete in a major American sport to come out? Conventional wisdom would point to NBA player Jason Collins, who has played for the Celtics, the Hawks, Timberwolves, Grizzlies, NJ Nets and, most recently, the Wizards and apparently not to soon be on the Detroit Pistons. The 7 foot tall center, a 34 year old Stanford grad, penned a cover story for Sports Illustrated in April talking about being gay. "I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay. I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport." That's good, because Wednesday's L.A. Times makes the case that, at least technically, he wasn't. Glenn Burke of the Dodgers was.

Better known as the "inventor" of the high-five, Burke played for the Dodgers for just two years but he was a trailblazer for something far more significant than the high-five.

In thanking all the people who came before him, Collins never mentioned Burke, who never held a news conference to say he was gay. He neither hid it nor advertised it. He spent his playing career as a guy who could keep the clubhouse light, make teammates laugh and make friendships that would last.

Burke was hardly the only gay athlete in the 1970s.

David Kopay didn't come out until his NFL career ended. He wrote in his 1977 autobiography, The David Kopay Story, that playing pro football would have been "impossible" as an openly gay player.

Diver Greg Louganis, born in 1960, won Olympic gold medals at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics and was already a star when the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Games. Tom Waddell, who finished sixth in the 1968 Olympic decathlon, was openly gay when he competed in Mexico City. Waddell went on to organize the first "Gay Olympics" and died of complications from AIDS in 1987.

Even as early as 1920, tennis player Bill Tilden toured the world as an openly gay athlete. But in the world of baseball, where so much of an athlete's time is spent in the close confines of the clubhouse, before and after games, it was more difficult.

Cyd Ziegler, a co-founder of a website, outsports.com, that writes about and keeps track of gay athletes, said that there has been a huge cultural transformation since Burke's athletic days.

"Let's face it," Ziegler said. "We live in Hollywood, one of the most liberal places in the world, and Liberace went out of his way to claim he was straight. Rock Hudson too. The idea that a pro baseball player would be welcomed if he became publicly gay is just not true.

"At that time it was still totally accepted for someone to say, 'I hate gay people.' That was a legitimate position. Today that is simply not a legitimate or respected place to be."

Since Burke's revelation, the only other major league player to make the same acknowledgment has been Billy Bean, who played for the Detroit Tigers, the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres before he announced he was gay in 1999.

Yet Burke's Dodgers teammates seemed to know, accept and understand him.

Dodgers broadcaster Rick Monday, who started in center field when Burke was with the Dodgers, described a moment in 1977 when the team was playing in Philadelphia during the National League playoffs.

"I remember a championship [series] game in Philly," Monday said.

"It was cold and rainy and he put on an overcoat and hat and had the entire locker room rolling on the floor laughing. He could take any moment in time and make it fun. There was no better guy in the clubhouse, I'll tell you that. There was no one who didn't love having Glenn around."

Burke can no longer tell his story. He died at age 42 in 1995 from AIDS-related pneumonia.

Lutha Davis, Burke's sister, said she had no idea her brother was gay when he was growing up in Oakland.

"Glenn just ate and slept sports," she said of one of two boys in a family of eight children. "Baseball, basketball, it didn't matter. He was a late bloomer and I always thought of Glenn as a man's man. He was the kind of young man most men desire to be."

...Burke wrote in his 1995 autobiography, Out at Home: The Glenn Burke Story, that it wasn't until after high school that he understood why he didn't want to date, even though he was often pursued by girls.

"I know I was different," Burke wrote. "I wasn't dating either men or women. [It] just wasn't part of my life. Period."

During his 1974 minor league season in Waterbury, Conn., Burke wrote, "I realized my homosexuality. I was 23 at the time and wanted to begin my life as a gay man, albeit a closet(ed) one."

Burke describes searching out a high school teacher he had a crush on back in Oakland. The man responded. "I was relieved because for the first time I was sure of who I was," Burke said.

In 1976, Burke was promoted from Waterbury to the Dodgers. It was clearly the pinnacle of his athletic career, but, yet, he couldn't be himself.

Davis sensed a change in her brother once he started professional baseball.

"Glenn was never really able to live his life openly," Davis said.

Davis said that during the off-season her brother would come home to the Bay Area and live in the Castro District, an area well-known to being the home for many gay men. "He was living right there in the Castro," Davis said, "but I wish it would have been a different time for him. He had great potential.

"I believe he was happy, happier playing the games he loved. It must have been awfully lonely at times, but he weathered the storm with all the dignity and character he could."

According to Burke, Dodgers general manager Al Campanis, who died in 1998, offered him $5,000 to pay for a honeymoon if he would be part of a fraudulent marriage. Burke was the only unattached player on the team.

That account was contradicted by Ross Newhan, who covered the Dodgers for the Times. Newhan said that he never believed the story about the "sham" wedding and said that Burke never seemed bothered by such talk.

"Outwardly Glenn never seemed to let what anybody said about him bother him. Inwardly, we can't know how he handled it," Newhan said.

Burke's roommate at the time was Marvin Webb, an infielder, who said Burke was well-known for keeping the clubhouse loose.

"He could make everyone laugh, but then, after the game, he'd always want to go off by himself," Webb said. "Maybe some of us wondered why, but it didn't really matter."

Newhan described Burke as "a great, gregarious person who made up poetry and danced around in the clubhouse. The players loved him."

"There were always questions about Glenn's lifestyle," said Doug Harris, producer of a 2010 documentary: Out: The Glenn Burke Story.

"Glenn was trying to jump from the minors to the majors, then trying to stay in the majors, so he didn't want that stuff around."

Dodgers manager Tom Lasorda had a different view of Burke's time with the Dodgers.

"Why wouldn't he come out?" Lasorda asked. "Why keep that inside? Glenn had a lot of talent. He could have been an outstanding basketball or baseball player. He sure was good in the clubhouse. What happened? I don't know what happened. He just wasn't happy here?"

According to Burke's autobiography, Lasorda didn't like Burke because he was having a relationship with Lasorda's son, Tommy Jr. Lasorda has denied there was ever such a relationship, although the two knew each other.

In May 1978, Burke was traded from the Dodgers to the Oakland Athletics to play for volatile manager Billy Martin, who, according to Davis would call Burke by a common pejorative for gays. Martin died in 1989.

"The day he was traded to Oakland some guys were actually crying," Newhan said. "He was immensely popular as a player. I think it was later on that rumors started to percolate."

But Burke's lifestyle was probably better known in the clubhouse than the press box.

Longtime Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, 85, said he recalls so little about Burke, "I couldn't tell you if he was a left-hander or right-hander. But he was shy with a nice smile."

Teammate Davey Lopes, now a coach with the Dodgers, said: "I knew... It didn't matter if he was gay or not. No one cared."

Lopes said that when Burke was traded to the A's: "I was devastated."

After a year and a half in Oakland, Burke said he wasn't treated fairly and chose to retire. He had played 225 games in four seasons with a career batting average of .237 and two home runs.

"The person I remember was always reinventing the normal," said Monday, who Burke backed up in center field for his two years as a Dodger.

In 1982, Burke's onetime romantic partner, Michael Smith, wrote an article for Inside Sports magazine that outed the retired player.

"As a fan, the first time I knew he was gay was the Inside Sports story," said Mark Langill, the Dodgers' historian. "He was a big prospect coming up and after reading that, it made sense what happened. Growing up with the Dodgers and always being tuned in to the next prospect, there were glowing stories about him. It just made more sense."

The Giants are in the Super Bowl, and I don't give a damn -- who'd-a thunk it? (Is it finally time to attack those DVR-stored "Portlandia" episodes?)

Anything that causes "my" hometown Giants' head coach, Tom Coughlin, agita is OK in my book. It's hard not to have some grudging professional respect for Patriots coach Bill Belichek, who has successfully invented and reinvented the team a bunch of times in his tenure, but he's pretty much a prick too.

by Ken

Maybe it's a function of getting old, though from what I observe, old folks make up one of the more rabidly gung-ho-er elements of the NFL fan base, or maybe it's a matter of my having absorbed the lesson that "my" sports teams aren't in any sense "mine," but are the playthings of super-rich elite types and corporations who think I should be grateful for the privilege of serving them as a customer base. But where the prospect of a Giants Super Bowl appearance would once have had me strung out with excitement and expectation -- the first two certainly did -- this one doesn't mean anything to me. I paid hardly any attention this season, except to enjoy the discomfiture of that dreadful scumbag coach Tom Coughlin when the Giants were suffering one of their now-standard spells of sub-crap playing. Anything that gives Tom Coughlin agita is A-OK in my book.

I might add that, with respect to my hypothesized reasons for loss of interest, the second one interests me, because I've noticed how drastically my interest is waned in the sport I once really cared about, baseball. I think maybe I've never recovered from the season in which I paid my first (and now, in all likelihood, last) visits to the then-new "New" Yankee Stadium and Citi Field (new home of the New York Mets). Even before I managed to set foot in either joint, the message came through loud and clear that these palaces weren't built for the likes of me -- they were built to separate suckers from their dough, with certain obligatory allowances made for the necessary nuisance of having baseball games played on the premises.

Probably there are other Americans used to not giving a damn about the Super Bowl, but I wasn't prepared for how alienating an experience it is, while so much of the rest of the country is building to such a fevered pitch. Meanwhile I haven't even been able to enjoy what I used think was the most entertaining media week of the year: that second week before the Big Game, when there's only one game left to be played in the season and by then everything that can be said about it has already been said about 16 million times, and the reporters are reduced to interviewing one another. Oh wait, I'm forgetting one thing: Tthere's always the day's update to the teams' injury reports.

Lost in my grumpiness, I was temporarily buoyed by a piece circulated by Nation of Change: "Four Reasons to Watch the Super Bowl: Joe Hill, Joe Pa, Tebow, Wee Brains," by Robert Lipsyte, whom I know to be a serious person with a serious background in writing about sports. I'm going to have to say, though, that Bob's reasons didn't help me.

Most Americans won’t need a justification to watch Sunday’s game, but if you’re a TomDispatch.com reader you might think, even in passing, that celebrating the holiest day of violence, consumerism, and class warfare on your couch is a betrayal of your values or a waste of your time. You might even imagine that it would be better to take a hike, read a book, or meditate.

Not this Sunday, buster. It’s an election season. You need to watch this game to fully understand how jobs, religion, leadership, and healthcare dominate every American contest.

I'm already dubious, but let's take them point by point.

1. Joe Hill will be playing

Where else will be you be able to watch more than 100 young men, most of them African-American, working for high wages in a totally unionized shop? True, their jobs are dangerous (more on that later) and relatively short-term (typically three or four years), but they are also high profile. They can lead to TV gigs, even political office. . . .

Even with a progressive attitude, watching the Super Bowl, which seems to float on rivers of oil --- think car ads -- and beer, is not exactly like holding a OWS-style general assembly in the red zone. Nevertheless, it’s a terrific visual of the American class divide. In their skyboxes, usually in jacket and tie, eating, drinking, and high-fiving -- or scowling -- are the one-percenters who own the team, which is usually not their only source of income.

Below them, on the field, are their employees (many of them temporary one-percenters, given the median league salary of at least $560,000), using up the capital of their bodies. If you want to root for the Patriots or the Giants, fine. I’ll be rooting for the working class.

Huh? How do you do that, root for the working class? However the game unfolds, the working class wins up to a point, but (a) the upper echelons of the players (Tom Brady, say) aren't working class by any stretch, and (b) as you've already pointed out, the game belongs to the one-percenters. How do you manage to not root for them? (Perhaps by not watching the damned game?)

2. Tim Tebow will not be playing

Thank God. The season’s most hyped player -- the NFL published its first magazine last month with Tebow on the cover -- has the looks, personality, and backstory of the clean-living, principled, athletic role model we’ve been told we need to help raise our children. . . .

This past season, as a Denver Bronco rookie quarterback, Tebow carried his team to the division playoffs despite his shortcomings as a passer and field tactician. As the saying goes, all he could do was win. . . . While his aggressive evangelism turned off some people, no one could deny his confidence and fierce competitiveness on the field, and his humility and niceness off it. . . . Tebow is too true to be good. His religious principles may eventually even get in the way of money-making. . . .

If he were playing Sunday, it undoubtedly wouldn’t be the Super Bowl, but the Tebowl.

Granted, but as you say, he's not playing tomorrow. And while the guy kind of annoys me, I don't care about him.

3. JoePa will be there

Once held up as the gold standard of college football coaching, now as the hero of a classical tragedy, the late Joe Paterno will be represented on Sunday by three players and his successor as head coach at Penn State. They will be reminders of what Paterno really represented beneath the iconic image. . . .

Yeah, but one thing you don't mention in connection with "what Paterno really represented" is what's always claimed to have been his great stress on his players' academic performance. Was that maybe not so? Perhaps that's worth saying.

4. You can occupy the Super Bowl

One of the Penn State trustees who voted to fire Paterno, Kenneth C. Frazier, said this: “[E]very adult has a responsibility for every other child in our community. We have a responsibility for ensuring that we can take every effort that’s within our power not only to prevent further harm to that child but to every other child.” . . .

This metamorphoses into a discussion of the heightened concern about the physical punishment absorbed by football players.

[I]f you believe in taking responsibility for “every other kid,” go organize in your community against helmet-wearing tackle football -- at the very least until high-school age. (If you let your own kid play peewee football, you should be charged with child abuse.) It’s hard to go up against Jock Culture, which you’ll be watching in its full power and glory on Sunday. Then again, it’s hard to go up against the banks and the war machine, too. It’s time, in other words, to occupy football.

Yeah, I guess, but again, I don't see how that's a reason for me to watch the game. And no, I don't want to hear a word, not a single effing word, about this year's Super Bowl telecast commercials, or about the too-long pregame yawnorama, or any wardrobe malfunctions or any other damn make-believe event that may happen.


BY COMPARISON, AN EVENING'S WORTH OF PORTLANDIA
EPISODES THAT'VE BEEN STACKING UP ON MY DVR . . .

. . . may be Thrill City. Maybe I just haven't found the right attention wavelength, but after entirely missing the first season of this much-heralded show, I found the first couple of episodes of the second season all but unbearably tedious. It's not that I hold much of a brief for the people who are New Age artsy-type people being made fun of, but can anyone figure out from the show why they're being made fun of? No, wait, "fun" isn't the right word -- if I could detect any fun happening, I would probably already have watched those piling-up unwatched episodes.

Portlandia creators-stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein portay two among their tediously infinite number of, er, zany characters, and you just know that with hilarious characters like these, this scene has to be a laff riot.

(And what's the deal with that show with that show with David Cross, who's usually at least somewhat interesting, which IFC is show afterwards? Is there supposed to be something amusing about that? I've got episodes of that piling up too, and find it hard to imagine ever watching another.)

#

Nate Silver Is a Randian Libertarian, and The Latest Darling of an Incompetent National Media

- by Doug Kahn

A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.
–Bill Grey

Nate loves playing with numbers, adding then dividing them, aggregating then regressing them, lining them up then projecting them, possessing them. They must be his numbers, no one else’s. Consider the probability that the 2010 election will produce a House of Representatives controlled by Republicans. Today, Nate says this is 84%, or 5-1 odds. A few days ago, it was 80%, 4-to-1 odds. Two weeks ago, it was 75%, 3-1 odds. Common sense says this is flim-flammery. If there were a person who made money by betting on the outcomes of elections, they’d be an instant celebrity. I challenge you to find me that person.
 
Silver’s success in the world of baseball stats is probably due to the lack of intelligent competition. Baseball management used to be populated by former baseball players and rich owners and their families. Higher education is not a necessary qualification for either group. A large portion of players become professionals right out of high school. Many of those who attend college are recruited by the athletic departments, and end up at a school (like I did) where you can pass the physical science requirement by taking Introductory Astronomy. (By the way, the night sky in the Everglades due west of the University of Miami is beautiful.) 

Before Nate, no one had done an exhaustive job of crunching the compiled statistical records of baseball games from the past. Possibly he just came along when the efforts of hundreds of fanatics finally reached critical mass. Look at baseball-reference.com and find play-by-play analysis of games from as far back as the 1920s. Pitch sequence and all.  

Anyway, Nate’s work was invaluable to general managers and their assistants who wanted to use statistical analysis of recruits and trade prospects. It’s the kind of knowledge that can help a manager avoid a crucial mistake, like trying to get a sacrifice fly out of a hitter who almost always hits ground balls against the pitcher who’s on the mound.
   
Nate decided he knew how much each player contributed to each run, each win. Maybe you remember when he decided Barry Bonds was the most valuable baseball player ever? At this point I forget which side he takes on the Derek Jeter question: great taste, or less filling? Wait, that’s something else. I mean, high fielding percentage or pathetic range? 

And Nate is always, always right. Numbers don’t lie! If you don’t believe me, look back to his Most Valuable Democrat rankings of U.S. Senators and Representatives of 2009. Which had Ben Nelson as the most valuable Democratic Senator. You practically have to be drooling to agree with that analysis. 

So being accustomed to Brainiac stature in the world of baseball, Nate now appears to think of himself as the Sun, and all other statisticians and political consultants revolve around him. Playing the part of lesser celestial bodies, the various moons and planetoids, are the actual pollsters. What about the individual people who answer polling questions, and the voters they are supposed to represent? Space dust blown by cosmic wind. They’ve been rendered virtually nonexistent by statistical categorization, and by the footnoted qualifier: results are likely to be within hailing distance of the actual honest-to-God truth, most of the time. I use ‘virtually’ in the old sense; I guess now you’d say that polls count ‘virtual’ voters.  

The essential uncertainty of polling nags at Nate, leads him into permutations that corrupt data beyond significance. You cannot get rid of the last caveat of every poll: this poll is accurate to within x.y%, but only 95% of the time. And this assumes the sample actually mirrors the electorate, which it doesn’t.  

Nate’s predictions are self-referential, necessarily; if a baseball team is losing by a score of 10-0 in the 2nd inning, it’s more likely they can come back to win than if it’s the 7th inning. So if Democrats are ‘losing’ (in the polls), then ‘coming back’ grows more unlikely the closer you get to election day. When Nate’s analysis is off to start with, his errors accelerate out of control, particularly because he includes as factors the predictions of people like Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg and Larry Sabato, who no doubt read Nate Silver’s daily output of tripe, which is partially based upon the Congressional Quarterly’s Teagan Goddard, and so on and so forth.
 
Arguably, the accuracy (in hindsight) of Nate Silver’s so-called ‘model’ is anchored in the deliberately biased partisan polling done by both sides, which ends up cancelling out, but provides stacks of extra data, smoothing out the trend provided by more reputable pollsters. This trend is necessarily choppy, messy, and bothers Nate too much to leave alone. Because it’s random variation, good buddy, not rational; any method you propose to get rid of it corrupts the truth. 
 
Alan Grayson will win on Tuesday


 That will apparently come as a shock to Nate. His numbers say it’s not possible.
 
The New York Times’ official rating of Grayson’s district is “leans Republican.” Some districts are “solid Republican [or Democrat],” and these terms better describe the reality of actual people casting actual ballots. According to Nate, though, the Republican’s chance of winning is exactly 82.3%. The national media says Grayson’s a goner. The independent expenditures against him have stopped, probably because they’re not seen as necessary.
 
So an incumbent with almost 100% name recognition, one who has done everything he can to fire up the Democratic base, whose Progressive fire must have generated a mass of loyal volunteers, in a district that is Democratic, with a well-funded ground campaign that cranked up well before early voting started, who will end up spending $5 million on his reelection campaign, is a 5-1 longshot. So says the savant’s magic eight-ball. 

When Nate feeds numbers into his ‘model’, his reality generator, that’s what it says, and Nate is a slave to his mathematical formulas. They don’t represent reality; to him, they are as real as the earth and the sky. Consider the logic, and language, of this paragraph: 

Our model projects that Republicans will win the average Congressional district by between 3 and 4 points. In recent years-- because turnout is generally heavier in Republican districts-- the aggregate House popular vote has been 3 to 4 points more Republican than the result in the vote in the average district. Thus, our model seems to imply that Republicans will win the House popular vote by 6 to 8 points, which is roughly consistent with current averages of generic ballot polls.

“Thus”??!!! Why not just say “ergo”; Nate obviously believes he has presented a mathematical proof. Actually, his basic assumption about the aggregate House popular vote is wrong, as in not factual. The winning margin for the Republican is typically higher in Republican districts, too. Relying on the existence of an “average Congressional district” or “current averages of generic ballot polls” is okay so long as you keep in mind the essential concept of error.

Republicans may roll up huge margins in the South; does this imply anything about districts in New England? Nate’s model says it does. Whenever a poll comes out that says the Republican is way ahead in, say, Alabama, Nate’s model reduces the winning probability of every Democrat everywhere in the country, even if the poll is one of Rasmussen’s confabulated specials.

Nate’s logic leads to him saying that his model is as real as real reality: “our model seems to imply” etc. The rest of us would use a verb like predict or forecast.

The Generic Ballot is a Mystery This Year

The generic ballot polling is all over the map this year, for various reasons having to do with the methodologies of the various pollsters, with Gallup saying the Republicans have a 15% edge, and Newsweek calling it a Democratic edge of 3%, McClatchy/Marist having it dead even. Some of it has to do with the younger electorate: will younger voters turn out, and can you accurately poll them, given their almost ubiquitous use of cell phones (and no land lines).

There’s another developing problem with cell phone users. More and more young voters aren’t using phones to talk any more. They seldom answer incoming calls, and never answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize. Don’t bother leaving a voice message for someone like this. You have to admit, it is more respectful to send a brief text message, rather than leaving a 30-second recording that has to be listened to all the way through. Which means increasing numbers of young voters can never be polled at all.

Look at the likely voter models, and the recent criticism of them, chiefly the Gallup methodology. They’re based upon a person’s answer to the question, “are you going to vote this election?” Not one of these statisticians seems to understand that the numbers that result from this question are not as reliable as the answer to the question “who would you vote for?” It’s actually a different type of answer. We don’t base our decisions on absolute certainty; people with injuries to a particular brain region can become unable to act, they lose the ‘executive’ function. They’re unable to initiate action because they can’t proceed beyond the nagging uncertainty of consequences. The rest of us have a standard; if you can reduce uncertainty below a certain level, you act. Careful people set this much below 10%.
 
Try it yourself on a congressional race in your area. If I ask “if the election were being held today, who would you vote for,” I imagine you won’t think twice before answering ‘candidate x,’,‘candidate y,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ If I ask ‘do you want to vote on election day,’ your answer is similarly simple. But answer this: “Will you go to your polling precinct and vote on election day?” It’s not what do you want to do (vote), nor what would you do (if you were at your precinct), but what will actually happen at a time certain in the future. It’s been demonstrated time and again that voters’ stated intentions are unreliable; I suppose you can argue that’s covered by the term likely voters, who are not certain voters. But the unreliability of this designation doesn’t show up in the pollster’s caveat “accurate to within x.y% either way, 95% of the time.”
 
How many times can you consecutively manipulate the actual sample you take (to get a final ‘topline’ number) before you end up turning out crap? If every two years I say I’m definitely going to vote, and in reality that means I end up going to vote four out of five times (80%), the math says that every third time I say it, there’s a 50/50 [that is, 1 minus .8x.8x.8, or .488, 48%] chance that I won’t vote. There is no “average me,” there’s no way to smoothe out these curves, get rid of inconsistencies, and that’s what Nate is trying to do. 

The ‘enthusiasm gap’ measures the fact that it’s more likely that tea-baggers will say they’re going to vote. It also measures the increased likelihood they’ll respond rather than refuse to answer a phone survey, or respond to an online poll request. These things naturally overweight teabaggers; then when their responses are extrapolated to come up with an actual Republican turnout number (because the pollster hasn’t spent enough money to actually fill out the various quotas of interviewees), you end up with the average Republican being excessively dippy, yet pretty much guaranteed to do his or her civic duty and vote. 

Am I the only one who sees this?
 
In a way, Nate sees future occurences as inevitabilities that he observes through a window in his mind. Such a person will necessarily come off as pontificating and pompous. When Nate stands very still, and looks very far away through that window of his, he can see himself on a distant hilltop: Nate Silver, the Legend.