Month: July 2018

Play Ball

Almost worse even than the Trump regime are the New York Mets. Jacob deGrom pitches another 8 scoreless innings and the Mets do what? They get 2 hits and no runs for him again.
By now, if he pitched for the Red Sox he would be 16-0. I think he may become the first Cy Young winner with 10 wins or less. He’s 5-4 but his ERA is 1.687. I doubt the Mets have scored 20 runs for him in his 16 or 17 starts.
The METS are a crime scene. The announcers are the best, including Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez. Like tonight they’re talking about this player Rosario and how the coaches have been trying to teach him to lay off low and outside pitches and shorten and control his swing but he keeps swinging for the fences and what — and popping up.
Sorry, that is something you teach in Double A. The guy is a Double A ballplayer. When I was a kid baseball had 16 teams, 25 players to a roster. That’s 400 players. You had to be the best.
Now they have what, 30 teams with 24 players each? That’s 720 players. There are not 720 major league ballplayers in the world, never mind the country. There are 400. There were 400 then, there are 400 now, which is why you get teams like the Mets with rosters filled with AA players who have no business ever getting near a major league clubhouse.
The Mets announcers, who include Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, who are really great and insightful, were talking about this guy the Mets have at Las Vegas, a 2nd baseman hitting like .360 in AAA but they won’t bring him up because? Because they have a 2nd baseman and they don’t see him at 3rd. At 3rd or short? Where they have Jose Reyes playing regularly and hitting .166. Duh Mets figure it out, bring the guy up.
They said he’s 26. The Phillies waited to bring Chase Utley up until he was 26, boy did they blow that and at least 4 years he could and should have been in the major leagues.
The Mets have to be the stupidest organization in baseball, which covers a lot of territory these days. But if you were Jacob deGrom, you’d probably look as pissed as he looked tonight and you would be right to be.
Baseball is eternal. You pitch the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. In between you run and slide, play a little chess when the count changes and you get a guy on first.
Look up Pete Reiser, one of the greatest ballplayers who ever lived except he kept running into walls. He played mostly for teams managed by Leo Durocher so Pete got to play the day after a concussion probably a dozen times, on broken angles, with a broken arm I think once. Today, if they have a sore pinky they go on the 10 day list. If they have sinus trouble it’s the 30 day list.
In the off-season Carl Furillo, the great Dodger right fielder of my “Boys of Summer”, who won the batting title I think in ’53 or one of this years and had “a rifle arm” nobody ran on? He went back home to Pennsylvania every offseason where he was an ironworker to make a living.
In those days if you missed a game, someone took your job so they played really injured and no one counted the pitches and I am pretty sure I remember “Preacher” Roe pitching both ends of a double header, when they played eight of those a year on the regular schedule with an hour or so between games for a hot dog and a beer (for the players, never mind the fans). But I am wrong as my friend Jim Zurer (Hobart ’63) corrected me. It was Don Newcomb who on Sept. 6, 1950 started both ends of a double header against the Phillies. He pitched a 2-0 shutout in the first, went 7 innings in the 2nd, gave up 2 runs but the Dodgers came from behind to win 3-2 in the second game.
Please, let baseball be baseball.
This I remember when I was growing up in Brooklyn and L.I. The Yankees were sponsored by Ballantine Beer and Ale; the Giants by Piels, and the Dodgers by Schaeffer, “The one beer to have, when you’re having more than one.”
For all of that and this, you can have football. Baseball is the American game and has been since 1840-something; when it is said a game was played at the Elysian Field in Hoboken (there’s an historic marker in Hoboken at Washington Avenue and 11th St. that marks the spot).
Play ball.

NATO

Why does NATO exist?
Because 407,000 Americans died in WWII and nearly 600,000 were wounded. They fought alongside British, French, Norwegian, Polish, Dutch, Belgian, and Czech armed forced among others in Europe (and alongside many other nations in the Pacific).
They fought against Germany and Italy in North Africa and Europe and then in 1947 our country created NATO and brought those former foes into its fold to create a common interest in peace and strength with them in a Europe divided between East and West, between democracy, or the hope of it, and totalitarianism.
To denigrate NATO and what the alliance stands for is to denigrate the blood shed to make a world in which it is a foundation block.
It is to spit on the graves of 407,000 Americans and rip open the wounds of 600,000 more of those guys — and they were some kind of guys, and yes, gals.
There are armies and there are armies in history, great and courageous armies on the right side of history (just as there have been so many armies on the wrong side).
In our history there have been more good armies than not or as good as armies can be with some exceptions caused by confused national purpose or wrong national purpose as in 1847 in Mexico. But mostly our armies have served the greater or even greatest good of history.
They begin with Washington’s Army, the one that crossed the Delaware on Christmas Eve 1776, a third of whom made the 7-mile march to Trenton barefoot in the snow and ice or with the barest of foot cloths to bind their feet; to the army that served, died and is buried in the hallowed ground at Gettysburg commemorated by the address that beings, “Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.
On to the hastily created army of soldiers and marines that fought at Chateau Thierry and at Belleau Wood in 1918; to the more than 5,000 who died at and retreating from the Frozen Chosin on the North Korean border with China; to the 58,000 who died we know not quite what for in the mountains, on the plains and wading through the rice paddies of Vietnam; and, in recent years, the several thousand volunteer forces dying in the mysteries of the Near and Middle East.
But of all armies, of all our armies, that which served in WWII — and in this sense an army is all the armed forces and there were 16 million who served in the Army, the Marines the Army Air Corps and the Navy in WWII:  in the American army that won and gave the world if not peace then at least surcease from another worldwide conflict, who bequeathed in their blood and service a world that could be reconstructed, could be protected by international structures like NATO the one we made and sent to fight in WWII is the best there ever was.
That army was the best ever. It was a citizen army, disbanded almost entirely within 18 months of its victory to return to civilian life secure in the knowledge that every American president who came after would know what they did, who they were, why they fought, against who and what they fought; and the kind of world they intended to guarantee all their generations to come.
Untold numbers of them had nightmares for years ever after, what we now call PSTD. What would they dream now with a U.S. government ready to undo what they won?
And now this? And now this. While he is in Europe the president should go to one of the American cemeteries in Normandy — Normandy where we had almost 7,600 casualties on D-Day including over 2,600 dead, the majority on Omaha Beach.
He, five times deferred from the draft in the 1960s, should stand on the heights above Omaha Beach and then walk on it, close his eyes and imagine what that beach sounded, smelled and felt like that day, how the ocean tide carried American blood to and from the shore all that day — and think how NATO unites both sides of that vast ocean in mutual
security.
Just once he should think and learn. Just once. Just this once.
I don’t expect it to happen.

Happy Birthday, United States of America

Happy Birthday, United States of America. Happy 242nd Birthday to you.

You were born in strife, rebellion and uncertainty; in a duality of freedom and slavery; declaring rights to free speech, free association, freedom to worship (or not); freedom to assemble, with rights to a free, fair trial and to belong to an armed militia yet still in a dichotomy that allowed, without using the word in your foundational document, the importation of slaves for 20 years from the moment your charter, the U.S. Constitution, became ratified.

You have survived the Alien & Sedition Acts, the Know Nothings of mid-19th Century, slavery, slavery and slavery. You have survived the Klan, the Palmer Raids, the McCarthy and HUAC hearings and the Red Scare, Dixie and Dixiecrats, segregation, assassination of four presidents, of a would be and would have been president and of a prophet of Civil Rights.

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The Piece Politico Declined to Publish

The first paragraph of a Wikipedia article about the assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado describes how, on Nov. 27, 2015, a lone gunman attacked the facility resulting in three dead and nine wounded.

This happened as the Republican presidential primary debates were under way with a cast of thousands — well ok — not quite that many, but still over 20 sought that party’s nomination for the White House that year.

Continue reading “The Piece Politico Declined to Publish”