Nolan Ryan and the Death of Baseball

Put it on Pallid Puddle/Porridge-Faced Nolan Ryan! Fox Producers Hasten the Death of the Great American Game

That baseball has a lot of problems we all know.  For those of us who love the game, those problems are mostly situated with other people, who don’t get its beauty.  I saw Fox throw up a graphic about one of the teams, pointing out how there were a bunch of Hispanics, on one team, anyway, and how that made this “World” (oh the cringeworthiness of Americans, selling the sizzle and never the steak) Series really international.  May-be, but was there even one black American on either team?  I mean, on the playing field, as a regular?  I don’t know.  But I do know that 20-30-40 years ago, you’d sure see one hell of a lot more black Americans playing the game.  Somebody needs to break the barrier, again.  The last couple of World Series’ of baseball, involving Japan and Cuba, and Japan and Korea—man, now that was some baseball.  My lord that was good ball.  This 2011 World Series was such a joke, in terms of execution, that you really had to wonder if anyone out there knew how to play this game.  Abner Doubleday wouldn’t turn around in the street if somebody called his name after this fall classic. It sure looked as if Americans had handed the game over to those who cared more about it; hell, Canada shut down the U.S. at the Pan-Am games.  A little hustle and a little heart, which Canadians possess (forget talent), is enough to do in America now.

Anyway, I love the game, and, yes, sure, baseball has problems.  One is that it isn’t a very good tv sport, but that has everything to do with producers.  One can, of course, beg the question of just what is a good “tv sport,” and maybe Americans would have to travel before they realized the basic oxymoronic nature of the phrase “tv sport.”  How about we watch guys on couches watching sports?  ** wait—I just trademarked that.  It’s called: “real guys watch tv.”  Done and done.  That patent has pended. Baseball always shows us pitcher throwing at catcher, which is weird when you consider the number of players on the field.  Then, in that Sunset Boulevard death-in-life way American tv producers have, we get the 1 camera go-to of pudgy porridge-faced Nolan Ryan.

This, this was a series I just wasn’t much interested in.  When it began, I found myself in the impossible situation of kind of cheering for Texas, a team I never could have imagined cheering for.  But, for personal fan reasons, I just always had the hate on for Tony La Russa, whatever his baseball genius and tenacity (and then there’s the McGwire taint, etc.).  But as time went on, and I grew so completely sick of seeing camera 1 on Nolan Ryan every 10 seconds, well, I shifted my allegiances.  In the end, perplexing to me as it was, I had become a Cards fan.  By not being Nolan Ryan, the Cards seemed to become a symbol of baseball for people like me—people who like the game, not fat, ossified billionaire celebrities sitting next to brittle, evidently bored and uncomfortable wives, and ex-presidents who couldn’t spell “millionaire” despite being one.  The Fox camera 1 on Nolan Ryan puts many things about the state of the game in a nutshell.  A complete disinterest on behalf of Americans and tv producers regarding anything else but vapid wealth and celebrity, etc.  I mean, consider other sports.  When your go-to moment is, dozens of times per telecast, a picture of a fat, dull man in a black overcoat rubbing his eyes (many of these times well after midnight on the east coast), well, I think you could say that that black overcoat is a-coming to get your sport and yank it into history, where they only had black and white, and often not even the black to give the white any perspective whatsoever.

Baseball has so much to show us.  Defensive alignments that shift with virtually every pitch, to say nothing of every batter; batters warming up, signs being given—really there are endless ways to try to interest people in the game.  But we get fat puddle-faced Nolan.  “They say he threw 95 back in the day.”  Yeah, I remember that, very well.  But that was then.  That and five bucks will get me a coffee, today. 

Hockey has become infected with the same hopeless bug, too.  Now, instead of looking at anything on the ice, producers are ordered to lock on pictures of GMs, gleaming beneath the hideous fluorescent glow of upper booths, amidst the styrofoam diet-pop detritus of the end of the day; they might as well give us a downcast Willy Loman coming up the walk and mopping his brow and loosening his tie and wondering how he’s going to trade in that Chevy, or that fridge.  Or that Kotalik.

Anyway, this is merely a ragged rant that evidently has not got a lot in terms of constructive criticism (unless one draws from and *builds* upon it and so forth).  Maybe I’ll say more.  Others will.

I’ll just finish by saying what I started out to say.  This was a colossally badly played World Series, from every aspect (as they often are).  If you want to see real baseball, see the World Series played every four years, involving countries that really give a damn about baseball, the game.  Going in, I couldn’t believe it, but I probably did want to cheer for Ron Washington and the Rangers. ????  But it didn’t take me long, after watching Nolan Ryan every couple of seconds, to decide that, well, my allegiance was with baseball, not fat ol’ Nolan.  So I became a Cards fan.  And the Cards won.  Somehow I don’t feel really happy that my team won, but in the sense that fat ol’ Nolan didn’t, and baseball maybe did, I, as a fan, feel less bad than I could.

**[And a footnote.  All those who say, well, you could turn off the tv.  Duh, of course I did.  Most of the time I had Shulman, Valentine, and Hershiser coming through my computer or radio as I was raking leaves.  Those guys were mostly better than Sutcliffe and Horne – Thorne? – the tv talking heads were ok.  But surely to goodness every now and then you must go to the tv to see the most dramatic play—the home run, the inning-ending double play, and so on.  Surely you must see that!!  But no, you’ll see fat ol’ Nolan sitting there, like Pete Rose’s wife, inscrutable and unviewable.  Illusions shattered, you’ll go back to raking leaves, too, baby.]

Cards win! Cards win!  Bleh.  Whatever.  Minor victory for the game over dubya n’nolan, though.

If you love this game. . . .

zr

Kidsupfrontcalgary.com – An Ultimate Sleazeball Organization

Check ‘em out—under “About Us” and “Our Story,” you will find “no page could be found at this address.”  One could substitute “morals” for “page,” but I digress. 

“Kidsupfront” that, endearingly, has no story, nevertheless has some big corporate contributors.  The idea is that poor kids, offered free tickets by rich corporations so that those corporations can show they’ve really got a heart, can see a sporting event.  In this way, corporations can use *children* to suggest, by vast media advertising (on kidsupfront’s website and in the mainstream media, for example), that those corporations are really good people.  It’s just about the most disgusting form of child use you can imagine. Do the kids know it is happening?  Does kidsupfront gather in money and use it to advertise on mainstream media like CHQR? Do “supporters” eagerly advertise themselves on kidsupfront’s website?  This is just beyond disgusting.

Once upon a time, a pro sporting event might have been accessible to an average family.  Now it isn’t.  “kidsupfront,” with its corporate sponsors, has taken upon itself to urge others to sponsor its classist mandate.

For shame.  For shame.

zr

Hockey Season Is Here Again, and It’s Time for Combat Corner, with Don Cherry

Hockey Season Is Here Again, and It’s Time for Combat Corner (Coach's Corner), with Don Cherry

Back in the day, when I was a kid (like one of the ones Don addresses weekly), Coach’s Corner used to be about hockey.  Since Canada entered Afghanistan, though, Coach’s Corner has been transformed into Combat Corner.  Links between the military and sports, especially in North America, have always been prominent.  But of course, historically, links between sports and arts and culture have always been prominent.  Crushing someone with force is part of sports, but so has been deploying finesse, discipline, training, practice, intellectual flexibility and mental stamina . . . and – the ineffable occasional outbursts of pure magic that result, utterly inexplicably, from all of the foregoing.

I’m a Don fan, and always have been.  We are at polar opposites, but he is very often right and has the shrewd eye for the game that those who loved and played it but weren’t good enough to be stars often do (think a Kubek, say).

Don is all over the news right now because he accused former fighters (Chris Nilan, Stu Grimson, etc.) of going against fighting now, despite the fact that fighting was what gave them a paycheque.  Now those former fighters are speaking back. 

Well, anyway, all of that is tedious.  I’m not sure what I set out for on this post, and that you may be able to tell, but I’ll write it by offering a few wishes:

1) that he doesn’t die or go to a cable network or whatever.  Although, again, Don and I are polar opposites, I can’t imagine life without him, and I know for sure my watching of hockey would be diminished in his absence.  Essentially because the NHL lost a golden opportunity to gradually reshape itself by enlarging slightly its ice surface when every team in the league got new arenas, the sport has become somewhat unwatchable.  Why are World Juniors and Olympics tournaments often popular?  Duh;

2) that Don and his handlers somehow learn to drop his petty insistence on his often being presciently right.  Live long enough, and you will be.  Week in, week out, Don looks more and more like what he isn’t—a petulant, childish, old man regressing into childhood.  Don’s right maybe 50% of the time, but nobody logs that.  I’d like to see someone take up the issue of Vinnie Lecavalier’s being the greatest player in the world with Don someday, for example.  It will never happen, but Don’s unchallengeability actually ages him and makes him look older and more pathetic than he really is.  Shame.

3) that Don didn’t have to address every remark to “you kids out there.”  Yes, I realize it’s a tic, like “hold it, hold it, don’t show it yet!” but boy is it tiresome.  Does Don think he really is addressing kids?  Possibly, but I don’t hold much with that.  Do kids watch Combat Corner?  Of course they do.  Don is aware of his pulpit.  Fine.  But again, that diminishes him.  Every time he yells: “you coaches out there!!”, he diminishes his own show which, inaccurately or not, is named “Coach’s Corner.”    If Don were really a man, and a hockey man, and his handlers weren’t pantywaists, then Don could just talk about hockey.  If Don just talked about hockey, he might actually get himself into _less_ trouble than if he kept pontificating as if he were hockey Dad to a nation.  The more he wants to extricate himself, often, the deeper he gets.  Nasty Swedes.

4) we could just have two different segments, finally, Coach’s Corner and Combat Corner.  It’s a truth universally known that the last refuge of a scoundrel is nationalism, and Don bucks this one up in ways that would make his ancestors turn away in shame.  True patriotism is something you feel on an almost divine and ethereal plane, and to speak of the flag, or to use a telecast as a teary opportunity to beat your own breast is the saddest desecration of the memories of the fallen.  You don’t touch the Cup until you’ve won it, and you don’t make ratings out of the deaths of servicepeople unless you’ve fought with them.  I’ve certainly never met anyone who didn’t “support the troops,” though I do know many who are against the war in Afghanistan.

Sadly, Don’s momentarily felt sentimental gushes have been popular enough with CBC brass fearful of being pantywaists that they have allowed him now to cut his hockey commentary back even further, so that he can hail police officers and firemen and just about anyone he can’t remember once he gets in his Lincoln outside the ACC at 8:35 p.m.  Let’s put one or two things in perspective, even if only for just a second.  To a much greater extent than it is in the U.S., or many other countries, military service in Canada is a _choice_.  You don’t have to serve, and you probably aren’t in a community so desperately dirt-poor, as in America, such that really there’s no choice but to enlist.  In Canada, too, minimal education can also be a gateway to astonishing wages and pensions and benefits as police officers or firepeople that most Canadians, often with notably greater training and education, cannot even dream of.  It is trotted out endlessly that the war in Afghanistan is to “kill scumbags” (to use Canadian General Rick Hillier’s term—a cut and runner if there ever was one, who cut out and took his pension after barely finishing the word “—bags” and getting hailed for it) and protect women.  But yet, if you look at the police and firefighters, and/or even the military, where are the women, the minorities, the small of stature?  Organizations such as the police and firefighters have constantly fought as hard as they could against any kind of recognition of other people—precisely what Canadian troops are supposedly fighting _for_ in Afghanistan.  Some irony.  If you filled out an application to be a police officer or a firefighter in Canada today, you would see precious little recognition of the fact that, every day, across the world, women and men of every age and colour and size and orientation and whatever are—actually—fighting crime and putting out fires and making their communities stronger.

zr

CHQR AM 770 Steve Norton's screwups - ongoing

Well, as I indicated in a post earlier, it's at once funny and sad.  Say your daughter had been abducted and the media were charged with getting the message out.  And Steve, good ol' Steve, just couldn't manage as much.  That'd be a problem.

Anyway, what the hell.  Not like CHQR AM 770 cares.  I mean, if I were a CHQR AM 770 personality, or one of their advertisers, what the hell would I care if they had a clue what their employees were saying?  I mean, it's that old-timey feel, right.  It's like homes by Abi.  I'm in there for sure. I hear good ol' Steve only now and then, normally when he takes over at 1 a.m. to do the 4-min. newsbit to top the hour.  He goes on through the wee hours until 5 a.m., and I don't think he starts at 12 a.m., but I'll clarify.  Anyway, for the hell of it, I'll just start noting here the howlers I hear when I hear them and can be bothered to note them.

Steve--take it away!!!!

duh-WAR - Paul Dewar - the Ottawa politician, a longtime parliamentarian whose mother was a significant Canadian political figure and mayor of Ottawa.  His name is pronounced like "do-er," as in three-term Calgary mayor Al Duerr.  Or the Scotch.  Or. . . .  Just to be living in this world is not to be living around Steve Norton.

Bar-lee-UH - Chris Baryla.  A **Calgary-born** long-time member of the PGA and Nationwide golf tours.  His name, as it is spelled, is pronounced "Barillya."

McQuinlan - Matt McQuillan.  Another Canadian golfer who has played on the PGA and Nationwide golf tours.  As you can see from the last two, maybe CHQR AM 770 could just spring for a pair of eyeglasses for good ol' Steve Norton, and then maybe Calgarians could get something approaching accuracy in their news.

--couple days ago, Steve said Dany Heatley scored one for the Sharks.  Yes, Heatley used to play for the Sharks.  He plays for the Minnesota Wild now. Man like Steve, all he's gotta do is pull the spool like Bobby Troup on _Emergency 51_.  But no, Steve, having realized his error and bumbling and fumbling over it, continued nevertheless!!  Now _THAT_ is when your daddy really works for CHQR.  When you can brazenly screw up and know it, and then brazenly keep on screwin' up.  If Steve Norton were in charge of letting me know if there was a rapist on the loose, CHQR would have no ass left to sue.

--last night Pekka Rinne became "Reen-UH"; I thought it was Steve's prom date, but he did a double salcow on the second turn.  It's clear that sports are troublesome for Steve; he's only got 45 seconds or so of news to do, so if the Toronto Astronauts are playing, then blast off!!

It occurs to me, though, that maybe Steve really is developmentally delayed.  Maybe CHQR is giving an opportunity to a slow person.  If this is really the case, and CHQR is giving an opportunity to someone who (can barely stay awake but) really wants to do what he's doing, then I'll take this post away in a second.

--lately:

Referring to Raptors Italian player, Steve came up with Barn-yanni, as opposed to "barn-jhonni.  Yanni--hee hee, CHQR AM 770 says to its Italian listeners.

It's key, though, if you're CHQR, to really amp up your disrespect for other people, so CHQR has been lately pilin' it on, with, say, Peter Haight (hate?), who came up with Teemu Seleenee for Teemu Selanne, and the aforementioned Josie Fotah, who came up with "Randing Cunningworth" for Randy Cunneyworth, and, again, "Teemu Shelanee" for "Teemu Selanne."  Who would have thought reading would have been so hard?  But lo, it is, and a joyous disrespect for Canadians of all backgrounds mounts all CHQR AM 770 programming.

If anyone lets Steve Norton out of the building attempting to pronounce Milos Raonic, who is pretty much on the verge of the greatest tennis player this country has ever produced, then clear the area and I'll call the cops and bring in the traffic 'copter myself.

--Lately Steve came up with Pekka Ryne, for Pekka Rinne.

--During the recent Australian Open, Steve observed that the women's semifinals were still taking place, and that Maria Sharapova and Petra Kvitova were still "on the court."  The match had ended 20 mins. or more before he started his "newscast."  But hey, maybe I'm too critical.  Maybe Steve was broadcasting from Hawaii that night. 

--good ol' Josie (not Steve) came up with "Darn-eye-ay" for Canadiens forward David Desharnais.  Canada does have a couple official languages, and obviously CHQR would be outraged at having to know even one, but even in America, I've just kinda got a funny feeling most Americans wouldn't call it San Josie.

--new guy John Happy (?) came up with "Car-ta-Gee-Nuh" for Cartagena.  No doubt his parents are very prowd of him for his ignorance, and CHQR AM770 Program Director John Vos is thrilled at his new charge.  Ain't no sense being a dorcque if you can't be prowd of it.

--tonight on a couple of occasions Steve tried to call Martin Hanzal "Hazel."  I wouldn't point it out unless Steve-o didn't just keep doing it.

--Steve also came up with "Vuhberta" for Radim Vrbata.
--and in the same night, "Veh-barta."  And Petrangeloh for Frank Pietrangelo.  And "Incarnashun" for Edwin Encarnacion.  All in all, just a standard screwup night for what would take 1-2 mins. to verify on the web.

Reading Robert Carver - The Accursed Mountains - Albania

Reading Robert Carver’s (I know, he’s thrilled just to see his name) _The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania_ (Murray, 1998).

Well, I have to agree with the general consensus on this one.  Carver approached the country with studied scepticism that determined his writing before he even opened his notebook.

It may be that much has changed in Albania between when Carver was there in the mid-90s and I was there around 2010, but I doubt that the change can have been all that huge.  Besides, if you read Carver, he will tell you that the country was never not and could never not be in a state of complete tribal chaos and corrupt political intrigue from start to finish, so . . . .

I think the travel books that tell you to steer clear of Carver are right, but still it’s worth reading Carver for his (distorted, snotty, public school) portraits of individuals, and his notations of other characters now gone.

What debilitates Carver most of all is his unironic stance and his lack of humour; these prevent him from gaining comprehension.  For example, I would say that Albanians are honest and helpful and hospitable, and I really—despite what is in his book—doubt that Carver would argue otherwise.  Yes, it is a corrupt society and so forth, but what one isn’t?  It’s a matter of learning the rules, and Carver, in very short pants when it comes to travel, can’t grasp as much.  It wouldn’t matter if _The Daily Telegraph_ had sent Carver to Mars; he ought to have been able to have a look around at the situation and adjust himself accordingly.  Sadly, nothing in his training or background had prepared him to meet other humans on their own terms.

Carver is essentially at war with himself.  There are bits of scenery, bits of girls, bits of values that he glimpses in Albania and that attract him.  Still, though, it’s a hopelessly backward place (you can’t sell books if you can’t make it grotty).  And yet he’s the great fearless (and here is does get a bit comical--~British~ intrepid man in the mountains—sometimes, you really want to say to him, ‘er, Roderick, I say old chap, do you not think you could just throw a rock, maybe?’).  Carver’s estimation of *his* importance to Albanians is just constantly comically completely out of whack.  He tries to pitch his narrative as a dangerous journey into a fearsome land populated by bumbling diplomats behind urban barricades while he sallies out red-eyed into the hinterlands, but. . .for Christ’s sake, come off it—who but a Brittwit toff would really, in a million years, think that his skinny white ass meant anything to any Albanian??  Good lord.  People—the British are still hard-up to find out—have other things on their minds than (hate to say it) Brits. 

But that’s the problem of Carver’s narrative.  He _has_ to pitch himself as an intrepid daredevil.  But he regards all those around him as sycophantic, lazy, useless scum.  He regards the country as utterly primeval, but, to buttress his sense of himself as a conquistador, he must allow himself magnificent moments in which he, say, sees a moon rise over a mountain, and he exults, “Imagine, I was the first man since Columbus to see. . .” or “I was the first Westerner to penetrate. . .” or “Not since WWII had a foreigner. . .”.  I mean, really, Roderick.  Maybe shooting tied-down rabbits was your vocation, after all.

It’s a pretty foolish book, and one that Carver is probably pretty embarrassed about now.  He was probably operating on the age-old imperial schema he’d imbibed in his youth, that, so long as no-one finds out what you’re up to, you can say whatever you want.  He couldn’t see the future because the past had dictated to him what he’d write in the present.

But I’m not lying—I read the book.  At first, I was amused by his faux-Greene (Carver himself would admit this) weary cynicism and the characters he introduced me to.  Increasingly, though, as he continued his travels, and went to places I’ve been to, too, I found myself reading to hear about him, though not in the way he’d intended (the intrepid traveller).  I started to read through him, and see his attempts to make himself seem bold and uncanny as silly or tired.  Carver’s book is predicated on a north-to-south terrible adventure, but even he apparently tired of that and gave in to petulant phrases when it became apparent that those were all he’d be able to work himself up to.  Give him another 150 pages, I say, and this turns right into Pickwick in the Balkans.  It would have been bloody hilarious, seeing him either attempting to sustain his Bond-ish persona or keep on mustering evil amongst peasants for whom evil was much less interesting than a bowl of yoghurt.

z-r

Pat Boone and George Noory – Pushin’ for Hatred

Good ol’ Pat Boone was on George Noory’s Coast-to-Coast the other day, and Pat did kind of charm with his ol’ I’m just an aw-shucks kid routine. 

But then Pat went on to reveal something pretty telling.  He was struggling as best he could to attempt to point out that those without faith were unhappy—so he said that “psychologists and psychiatrists” (in Pat’s wisdom, things that start with ‘p’ kinda just go together like that) just, they all tended to commit suicide more than others.

Well, you could smell the smoke burning (could be a devil, no doubt) as he said that he heard one time that. . . .  Look, far be it from me to attempt to get into the hateful religious mind of Pat Boone.  I think what Pat started out to say was fairly simple enough, that people who had faith had a kind of beatified presence that made them immune to the tough and dark situations humans face.  This is if I’m being really, really charitable.

But Pat had to keep ‘er goin,’ and, well, wouldn’t you know it, right out there on George Noory’s Coast-to-Coast AM, Pat had to relate his joke about how a “mousey” (check George’s logs) woman went to a psychiatrist, and she complained “I feel so inferior.”  Gol’ darn’ if that psychiatrist (I thought he’d shot himself) didn’t say “you are inferior!!”  Yuk, yuk.  George Noory of Coast-to-Coast AM listened with rapt enthusiasm, as is recorded on his show.

On the one hand, you would like to think that religion—any religion—could be a force for good in this world.  You’d even like, just being white and being located somewhere on a gps and so on, to hope that that religion would be Christian.  That’s what you’d hope.  On the other,

Hope denied, howsabout just starting to act a little bit more humanely to those very close to you, religious or not?

Pat Boone made millions of dollars off of it; George Noory is making millions now, fostering hate; is there anyone out there willing to step up and say, hey, I’m willing to take one for the team and _give up_ a few dollars to make the world a better place?

You’ll never make as much money as George Noory, but when you die, your mind won’t be criss-crossed with the knowledge of the hate you’ve engendered.  If you really believed that you were going to live again, then wouldn’t you want to do something good now?

zr