The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
This ballot counts for nothing except the Hall of Fame in my head. I’d vote for:
Tim Raines
Bert Blyleven
Rich Gossage
Alan Trammell
Mark McGwire
That’s it. Post your hypothetical ballots – remember, yours count as much as mine does! – in the comments.
This one’s interesting, from a Newsday review of The Kite Runner film:
“The Kite Runner” is the latest in a spate of smash bestsellers that have been transferred to the screen with a cautiousness usually reserved for the conveyance of holy relics and eggs. It’s generation-spanning plot combines one of the season’s favorite themes (the guileful acts of children) with one of its trendiest (turmoil in Afghanistan). And it premieres on the heels of nettlesome publicity involving stage-parent outrage and threats of bodily harm targeted at its youngest stars. … Like it’s author, “The Kite Runner’s” morose protagonist is the son of a Kabul diplomat who relocates to California as the Russians begin their incursions into Afghanistan.
I deleted one paragraph in the middle, but in the span of five sentences, Jan Stuart manages to use the correct “its” twice and the incorrect one twice, even though every instance called for the same word (“its” without its apostrophe). This has to be one of the easiest grammatical rules to remember, and I see it screwed up all the freaking time. All Stuart had to do was remember Strong Bad’s helpful song:
If you want it to be possessive, it’s just “I-T-S.” But, if it’s supposed to be a contraction then it’s “I-T-apostrophe-S,” … scalawag.
From an Associated Press story on the death of Ike Turner:
But over the years they’re genre-defying sound would make them favorites on the rock ‘n’ roll scene, as they opened for acts like the Rolling Stones.
Who the hell wrote this? A third-grader?
I’ve said many times that my favorite American-born author is F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night
Appointment in Samarra
The book opens with an epigraph from W. Somerset Maugham, which provides the novel with its title and the reader with a clue as to how the plot ends:
DEATH SPEAKS:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the market place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go on to Samarra and there Death will not find me.” The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture,” I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
The novel tells the story of the self-destruction of Julian English, a happily married man who owns the Cadillac dealership in his small Pennsylvania town, but whose temper and tendency to drink to excess lead him into a three-day spiral where he destroys just about everything in his life. By limiting the scope to just 72 hours, O’Hara gives us a deeper level of detail into the lives of English and some of the book’s secondary characters, and his dialogue crackles, bringing life into mundane conversations, where every phrase seems to open the window into its speaker’s character just a few millimeters more.
Comparing O’Hara’s prose to Fitzgerald’s is unfair; the latter was a master of using beautiful phrases to describe even the most harrowing sequences, unparalleled in American fiction. O’Hara works with a greater economy of words, and his prose is often more jagged, in line with the plot but not up to Fitzgerald’s impossible standard. Appointment in Samarra would otherwise fit comfortably in Fitzgerald’s canon, right alongside the similar story in The Beautiful and Damned
I have closed comments on the prior thread and they’ll be closed on this one as well.
I’ve had the opportunity to speak to several people involved in the BBWAA’s decision. It appears to me now that there is (are?) a lot of politics involved in that group and I’m just not aware of all of the angles people are playing. I intended my last post to try to calm things down, and instead, I have clearly inflamed matters. At this point, I think it’s best for everyone if I close this part of the discussion.
I want to thank all those of you who’ve offered your support. As I said in the last post, I’m confident this is all going to work out at some point down the road. But I’m not comfortable with the turn the discussions have taken, to an “us vs. them” mentality. The comments I’ve been getting on the prior thread are getting slightly more nasty with each turn, and I don’t want that here. I’ve also been told by a few people that some supporters of Rob Neyer and myself are emailing BBWAA members with some strident and occasionally nasty comments. Please, please, don’t do this. It helps no one. And since I don’t like it when ESPN.com readers are nasty with me, I don’t want to encourage anyone to be nasty with anyone else.
Let’s hope the next time you hear from me on the subject, it’s a post with a photo of me holding a BBWAA membership card. Until then, I’m not saying anything more on the subject.
I was not inclined to comment on this whole mess, but I think at this point it’s probably a good idea to set a few things straight.
First and foremost is that yes, I do attend MLB games on a regular basis. I couldn’t do my playoff advance reports without actually going to see the teams play live; on the season’s final Saturday, I hopped in the car and drove from Boston to Philly because I hadn’t seen the Phillies play and wanted to get at least two games with them before writing them up. I’m not even sure why this was in question, since I mention being at games all the time. (Seriously, did they think that I sat at home and pointed the radar gun at the television?) I watch games from the scouts’ section, not the press box, because the view is better, and I usually eat before going to the park, not in the press dining room, because the food is better.
Second, Bob Dutton, the president of the BBWAA, has said this:
Some board members informally contacted folks at ESPN with this question and were told neither Rob nor Keith regularly attend big-league games and do not need to do so in order to do their jobs.
To the best of my knowledge, this isn’t accurate. Jack O’Connell, the secretary of the BBWAA, has my full contact info (including cell phone #), and he has the contact info for the ESPN.com baseball editor, who submitted the list of nine names. Neither Jack nor anyone else on the seven-member committee contacted me or the baseball editor to ask if I attended big-league games regularly. We were also both in Nashville in the hotel at the time of the meeting, but again, we weren’t contacted. In fact, we can’t figure out who the board members “informally contacted” at ESPN, because there was no one else with the authority to speak about Rob and myself. I have expressed this concern to Bob, although I won’t reprint any of his private responses to me here.
There are various statements out there on blogs and in blog comments (by the way, thank you all for your support) saying that ESPN somehow told the BBWAA that I didn’t need to be a member. This is false.
Third, the rank-and-file were presented with a binary choice on the motion to admit these Internet writers: Yay, which admitted the 16 who got in and rejected Rob and myself; or nay, which would have admitted no one. There was a little floor debate, but the names could not be unbundled, and I was told by more than one member that they felt there was “no room for discussion.” Given that scenario, I would have voted “yay” as well. Better to get Gammons and Stark and Verducci and Passan and the others in than to get none in at all.
I only know two members of the committee: Dutton, whom I just met for the first time after the vote and who seems for all the world like a great guy; and Bob Elliott, whom I’ve known since 2002 and whom I respect as a person and a writer. I do sort of know Tracy Ringolsby, who isn’t about to nominate me for the Spink Award, but I’d like to give him the credit to think that his personal feelings about me didn’t affect his professional judgment here. I’m told he also voted against the general proposal to admit the 16 who did get in, so this is probably as much about the Interwebs as is it about me. I’ve only exchanged emails with O’Connell and with Phil Rogers (the latter exchange coming years ago), and have never had any interaction with Paul Hoynes or David O’Brien. I’m not sure if any of them would recognize me if they saw me at a ballpark or at the winter meetings or anywhere. Would it have helped if anyone on the committee besides Bob Elliott was more familiar with how I go about doing my job? Perhaps. (NOTE: Ringolsby disputes the accuracy of parts of the preceding paragraph. His objections are in the comments below.)
Either way, I’ve been encouraged by a steady stream of positive comments (support, sympathy, righteous indignation) from the BBWAA’s rank and file to reapply next year. It has now been brought to their attention that I do attend games regularly, and I’ll be going to more games next year anyway. Bob Dutton explained to me that this was the obstacle, and he was one of those encouraging me to reapply. So while I appreciate all of your support, the best course of action for all of us is to just wait until next year. Thanks.
So I was at my in-laws this Sunday and was roped into spending the late afternoon in the living room in front of the TV with the family. No football, although my father-in-law is a fan; there were three figure skating events on their DVR, and someone made the decision to hold a marathon viewing of all three, by which point I was already duct-taped to the sofa and couldn’t escape. As a result, I’m going to try to explain this bizarre series of competitions called the ISU Grand Prix, second only to the BCS in needless complexity.
The Grand Prix comprises six events, one held each weekend for six weeks, to qualify skaters for a seventh event, the Grand Prix final, which moves every year. The six qualifying events are held in the U.S. (“Skate America”), Russia (“Cup of Russia”), China (“Cup of China” – aren’t we so fucking clever), France (named after some French guy), Japan (“NHK Trophy”), and Canada (I forget). There was a German competition until 2003 when the ISU realized that the Germans sucked at figure skating. The Germans should stick to things they’re good at, like killing bloggers. (Or beer. They’d probably rather be known for beer.) Anyway, that’s when the Cup of China started up, although judging by all the empty seats, I’m going to say that figure skating has not quite grabbed the interest of the Chinese public yet.
As an aside, the Grand Prix events are by and large held in really cool places to visit. This year’s qualifying events were held in Moscow, Paris, Harbin, Tokyo, Québec city, and … Reading, Pennsyvlania. Really? That’s the best that we could offer? What, Camden was booked? My wife said Reading was better than Detroit … I’m not sure I have a witty comeback for that. She makes a good point.
So each skater or pair of skaters enters two of the six events, and after all six are held, the ISU looks at the combined points totals (not the actual scores) of all skaters (or pairs) and chooses the top six in each category – men’s, women’s, pairs, and “ice dancing” – not making this up, people – to go to the finals. The winner at each competition gets 15 points. As far as I can tell, the runner-up gets 13, the bronze medalist gets 11, but then at some point the points stop dropping by two for each spot and drop by one. It doesn’t matter if your score led the competition by 0.01 points or by 30 – you get two more Grand-Prix points than the runner-up. No one actually explained this in any of the telecasts, and you can’t tell at any point who’s leading or who has already qualified; if you’ve got 28 points already, you’re in the finals, but I never saw any standings or heard any indication of who had how many points. Then there’s the actual scoring of skating, which is never explained and seems to me to be purposefully obtuse so that casual fans can’t obviously spot official corruption, as they did in the last Winter Olympics (prompting a big overhaul of the scoring system). There’s no such things as a perfect score. The announcers obsess over who got a “personal best,” except that there are no awards for getting a “personal best,” only for getting the best score in the damn competition.
The worst part is that a skater (or pair) who skates in two separate competitions in this series uses the same routine both times. This makes for dreadful television. We were also treated to lengthy explanations of the “meaning” – again, not making this up – of various skaters’ and dancers’ routines. When the (very attractive) Tanith Belbin and her partner started up one of their ice dances, the female announcer started to explain that the routine is about “love and…” which is where I fell asleep, and when I woke up an hour later, she was still explaining what the routine was about. Really? It’s about love? I thought ice dancing was about skating in circles and waving your arms like you’re playing charades and the word is “seagull.” But I could be wrong.
I did learn a few things about what’s important in figure skating and ice dancing:
• It’s important that your skating is “sincere.”
• It’s important to “believe” in your abilities.
• And it’s really important to not fall on your ass. Or, if all of your competitors fall on their asses, just to fall on your ass less often than they do.
Another major problem, at least in terms of getting men to watch skating without having someone prop my eyelids open and tie me to the couch, is the fact that the best female skaters in the world are all either teenagers or just look like them. The top American skaters were Kimmie Meissner, who is about 16 and looks 14; and Caroline Zhang, who is 14, looks about 10, and sounds like she’s 8. Even Sasha Cohen, now in her early 20s (and not in any of these events), still has the figure of a preteen. This is not appealing.
Other than Belben, who is definitely good-looking, the hottest skater in any of the three events I was forced to endure was Finnish skater Kiira Korpi, who’s just 19 but has a great figure and is pretty in that sort of generic-Nordic-blonde way. (Nothing wrong with that.). Sadly, she’s not that good, finishing in 16th in the last Olympics and finishing well out of the money in the two Grand Prix events in which she skater. (To be fair, she suffered from a “stomach ailment” all summer, so she may not be on her game right now. Still looks hot, though.) But she identified, for me, the real reason for the lack of sex appeal at these events: There are no Swedes. Or, for that matter, no Danes, Norwegians, or even Icelandic skaters. If MLB is willing to pour money into China or Africa or South America to try to develop baseball there, shouldn’t the ISU be willing to pour money into the Nordic countries to try to develop some hot female skaters to give (straight) men a reason to watch this crap? The fact is that the countries currently producing skaters are not producing their fair share of attractive female skaters. This must be addressed.
Marilynne Robinson wrote exactly one novel during the period covered by the TIME 100, her 1980 book, Housekeeping
Housekeeping is a scant story and most of its prose takes place in the narrator’s head; there’s as little dialogue as you’ll see in any book this side of Robinson Crusoe, and there’s very little action in the plot, which sort of jumps along like a tired frog with no particular destination in mind. But its prose itself is brilliant, often beautiful, and manages to be both rich and sparse at the same time, with powerful images used to convey strong emotions, notably those of loneliness, fear, and destiny:
Edith found her boxcar and composed herself in it, while the trainmen went about the jamming and conjoining of cold metal parts. In such weather one steps on fossils. The snow is too slight to conceal the ribs and welts, the hollows and sockets of the earth, fixed in its last extreme. But in the mountains, the earth is most unceremoniously buried, with all its relics, against its next rising, in hillock and tumulus.
The story itself revolves around two sisters, Ruth (the narrator) and Lucille, who are orphaned as young children and then live with their maternal grandmother, then two eccentric great-aunts, then finally their mother’s sister, Sylvie, a lifelong transient who engages in various small tasks (such as hoarding empty tin cans and magazines) because that, in her mind, is how one keeps house. The book is almost completely devoid of male characters; their grandfather dies in the book’s first few pages, their father is completely absent, and only one man speaks any words at all, and those only briefly in the story’s last three chapters to bring the plot to its climax.
Ruth and Lucille both react differently to life with Sylvie in the rural town of Fingerbone; Lucille eventually craves stability and seeks it out in conformity, while Ruth (apparently taking after her mother as well as her aunt) is complacent to live a quiet, solitary, sad life without the trappings of society that might serve to pin her in one place. Lucille shouts at the dinner table one night, “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to leave this place! … I think I’ll go to Boston,” and when asked why Boston, she replies, “Because it isn’t Fingerbone, that’s why!” (The passage seems like it might have inspired Augustana’s song about the city I call home.) Yet in the end, it’s Sylvie and Ruth who leave Fingerbone first, and Lucille stays behind to pursue her unknown destiny.
It’s odd to find a novel with this kind of depth and thematic complexity despite having just three major characters, little dialogue, two settings, and almost no action until the book’s final stages. It’s a remarkable feat of language and of thought, and perhaps even more remarkable that I, an avowed plot-first reader, enjoyed and even appreciated the work.
Here’s what is about to happen in college football, recast with a baseball analogy.
Imagine that a team in the weakest division in the majors – we’ll call it the “NL Menstrual” – was able to set its own schedule. They decided to play 108 games within their cupcake division. Then they added 40 games against teams from the International League (that’s AAA for you non-baseball fans). Then, just to be good sports, they decided to add 14 games against the second-worst team from another major-league division, one that’s better than their own. And, of course, they rack up a pretty strong record against that competition.
So now imagine that, due to the fact that everyone recognizes that the NL Menstrual isn’t playing the same caliber of ball as the other divisions, our mystery team is told on October 1st that their services won’t really be required for the rest of the year. Several other teams playing tougher schedules go into the postseason and beat the crap out of each other for two weeks, at the end of which, it’s not really clear who the best team is. (The fact that someone knocked off the “best” team – and that this has happened twice – doesn’t matter.) So the powers that be – we’ll call them the Network for Cheating Amateur Athletes – decide to call up our mystery team before the World Series starts and ask them to participate. Our mystery team hasn’t won or even played a game in several weeks, so how could they be better now than they were when their season ended?
This is what’s about to happen with Ohio State. Playing the 43rd-strongest schedule in Division I-A – excuse me, the Football Bowl Subdivision – they beat the snot out of several weak opponents, beat an unranked Michigan State team by one score, and lost to Illinois. They never played a team ranked in the top 20 in the country. Their nonconference games were a joke: Washington, the last-place team in the Pac 10; Akron and Kent State, the bottom two teams in the Mid-American Conference’s East Division; and Youngstown State, which I can’t even find on the Division I-A Football Bowl Subdivision standings page … oh, wait, they’re not in that division at all! They’re the 16th-ranked team in the next division down! Isn’t that like a big-league club playing a team from the Midwest League?
I don’t like college football and I don’t follow it, so maybe everything I wrote above is wrong. Maybe Ohio State actually is one of the two best teams in the country, even if they’re too scared to try to prove it by scheduling a halfway decent opponent every now and then. But tell me this: If playing a weak-assed schedule isn’t that big of a problem, why not just put Hawai’i – who played an even weaker schedule, ranked 118th in the country, but who always have scheduling problems due to cost and distance – in the damn championship game? At least they had the courtesy to not lose.
