Stuff Phil Mushnick should write about:

Since Phil Mushnick has to grind out his column every Monday, Friday and Sunday, and that’s not counting the TV columns for Sunday, he HAS to have trouble from time to time finding topics to tee off on.  With that said, I have a few that I’d like him to tackle, although I realize he may be somewhat ideologically opposed to some of them:

(1) Do the Mets tend to indulge over-celebrators?  Why will K-Rod just be seen as one in a long line of this?  Why was Milledge punished for doing what all the others have been doing for ages?

(2) Why is Darryl Strawberry this big Met hero?  Why is it ok for him to be in recovery and yet revel in his (and the Mets’) bad-boy past?  Why do the Mets keep hiring him and having him around?

(3) Why is it so loud at big league ballgames?  How loud will CitiField be?  Do baseball fans really pay big money to have their eardrums bleed?  WHERE are the fans that think this noise adds to the experience?  Could the Mets host a handful of “quiet games” on the schedule?  You know, like it was 1908–NO PA at all.  Have guys in straw boater hats walk up and down the foul lines with old-fashioned megaphones and announce the substitues.  Ask the fans how they liked it.  I know, I know, asking the Mets to go 24 hours without a Salsa or Ranchero band is a tall order, but can we just TRY it?
(4) How about making fun of that ESPN guy who does the announcements: [Super cool guy scratchy voice] “…Brought to you byyyy, blahblah”.  Can you imagine if you talked that way at work?

(5) With all of his crying about how Bud Selig sold out MLB to TV interests, how about an expose on MLB prices and how much influence George M. Steinbrenner has had on them?  I don’t think the average fan understands just how ridiculous the Yankee spending has been over the years.  How childish.  But it affects us all because all prices are higher because of it–perhaps by as much as 25% across the board.  But it’s excused because they don’t win it all every year–that is supposed to make it all ok.  If I hear one more Yankee fan tell me how Pittsburgh is just “pocketing” all that revenue share money, I’m going to be sick!

But on this item, I don’t think a NY writer would have the guts to go after the Yankees, because, after all, who is buying these tabs?  Uber-Yankee fans mostly.  And they don’t want to see their team ripped this way.

(6)  Mushnick is all over the big, bloated ego of Mike Francesa but what about the ridiculous anti-Met stuff that pours out of him.  Why are the Mets so willing to have the key guy at their flagship station just brutalizing them every day to a huge audience?  That’s dumb.  I’d raise heck and threaten to pull out of the deal.  Even if I wasn’t successful, I would want my fanbase to know that this guy hates them and you probably shouldn’t listen to him.  Ditto Michael Kay, who WORKS for the bloody Yankees and yet tries to act like an impartial journalist.  How, exaclty, does that work?
Tell us again boys, what a boy-scout Andy Pettite was for “coming clean” on HGH.  He didn’t take any PED questions at his “press conference” after his statement, but that’s ok, isn’t it?  hahahah.  Go get them, Phil.

(7) As a corollary to #5, I’d add this topic: Gambling is illegal in baseball because the most dangerous thing is for the public to feel that the games are rigged.  Then, the logic goes, they won’t buy tickets (TV subscriptions etc.).  So Rose and Joe Jackson go out for life.

But the Yankees pay their squad 100 million dollars over the league mean and that’s somehow ok?  Nothing rigged about a Yankee game, is there?  I guess, folks just like it that way.  They like to root on the bully when he beats up the nerdy kid in the playground.  They never tire of it.  But really, when year after year, the Yankees play teams that pay their squads 1/5th what they do; how is that “contest”, a fair contest?

It isn’t.  But it’s ok.  Just don’t gamble, got it? –Fog

Royals will win central in 2009

MLB prediction time: (I’ve colored my more unorthodox picks)

KC wins central.  That’s my big prediction.

NL East:  Marlins, Phillies, Mets, Braves, Nats

NL West:  Dodgers, Giants, Arizona, Rockies, Padres

NL Central:  St. Louis, Cubs, [Reds], Brewers, Houston, Pirates (WC=Cubs)

AL East: Boston, TBRays, Yankees, Toronto, Baltimore (WC=Rays)

AL Central: KC, Twins, Detroit, Cleveland, WhiteSox (most balanced division in baseball)
AL West: Oakland, Anaheim, Seattle, Rangers

This is what it’s all about

Jackie Robinson In 3-D

With perhaps days/hours to go before the baby, I’m doing a big push on Jackie Robinson to see how far I can get before my life changes so much.  I had a big day in the shop yesterday and took these stereo photos.

Together, they can be viewed in 3-D.  If you were one of those who could left your eyes relax and see those old 3-D, computer-generated drawings, then you SHOULD be able to do this the same way.  I can do it.  But it takes a few moments to get it.

The trick, for me, is to get far enough away from the two photos, so that they are a little smaller than a postcard, held at arms length.  Then you stare, allowing your eyes to relax and not truly focus.  When your eyes are relaxed correctly, you should see double–that’s 4 images.  Keep trying different pressures on your focus until the two center photos become 1 photo and it will be 3-D.  It’s eerie.  When you get it, you will KNOW, so if you are wondering, then you don’t have it.  Remember: Try and make the middle two images merge into one, so that overall, there are 3 photos, and only concentrate on that middle photo–that’s the one that will become 3-dimensional.

How did I take this photo?  With a 3-D camera?  Nahh, with my own camera.  Since I’m working with a tripod, and nothing is in motion, the time lapse between photo1 and photo2 can be ignored.  You couldn’t do this trick with live action, because p1 and p2 would not match.  But in the studio, you just take one photo and then move the tripod 80mm to the right and take another one.  80mm is about the distance between people’s eyes.  The “interpupillary distance”.  Actually, in the population, it’s much smaller for most and is smaller for women and bigger for some ethnic groups.  It runs between 65 and 83 mm.  At 25.4 mm per inch, you do the inch-math.

With the two photos of EXATLY the same thing and yet from two slight different (80mm apart) vantage points, they are about what your brain takes in and processes into one, 3-D image.  The slightly different perspective means that the right eye sees a little further around Jackie’s left side, than the left eye can see.  That info is used by your wonderful brain to give you all sorts of depth and distance information.  Imagine trying to golf without it!  “How far to the pin?”  “Where’s the 150 yd marker?”

And for you Liberals out there, remember, the beauty of the eye and the brain and the depth is pure chance–we’re talking NO INTELLIGENT DESIGN, right?  Don’t even think those words in a public school.

Before you go thinking I’m some kind of techy person, realize that 3-D cameras and looking at “stereo-images” like we are here, originated at about the time of the Civil War.  Stereo view photos were all the rage from about 1870 to 1910.  They looked like this:

They were viewed in a viewer that looked like this:

The slides were available as canned, commercially produced photos of current events and famous places and landmarks.  Think GAF-viewmaster from the 1970’s:

I’m not sure why they fell out of favor.  Perhaps WWI, which destroyed so much of what good was happening in the world around 1914.

Anyway, they did commercially produce stereo cameras for the home-gamer and here is one:

All you need is the ability to take TWO images simultaneously, one interpupillary distance apart.  Now if you search for these things, you will only find, I believe, film cameras from yesteryear.  There doesn’t seem to be any digital stereo cameras available.  There are a couple of guys who have hacked together two digital cameras, but the hack is never simple and the mounting and alignment is never easy.  Both lenses have to point at the same focal point out in space, or the pictures will look hokey–like mine!

What I want to know is why doesn’t SOMEone produce a decent digital stereo camera?  WHY?  With PC’s bringing down photography prices and giving us all sorts of exotic ways to display them, it’s a perfect marriage!  I have searched, but not recently, so it’s possible that there is something out there now.  If anyone knows of a product, comment in please.

For Jackie fans, Jackie may be getting his first paint today on the lower legs and shoes and pants.  It’s always the single biggest, quickest change in the statue and for a medium that goes crawling by in the hundreds of hours, this is a welcome thing.

Your crazy old uncle

Heard yesterday that Tommy LaSorda was going off about the steroid guys and how they should be banned for life and their records expunged from the book and so on and I thought to myself, “…when does LaSorda cross that line and just become your crazy old uncle who everybody just kind of laughs off, you know?  Like, ooh, that’s just Uncle Blabby–don’t really pay attention to him, he’s crazy as batpoop…”

Has he crossed that line already?

Although, to be fair, he is outspoken about things that are taboo.  Take this snip of a Hannity interview:

HANNITY: One time you said about Darryl Strawberry, it’s a character flaw because he was using drugs.

LASORDA: Absolutely. Anybody that takes drug and they try to pass it off as a sickness, that is a lie. They take drugs of their own free will, put it in their body of their own free will, realizing that: No. 1, it’s against the law, No. 2, it’s harmful to their body and No. 3, all it will do is lead you down the path of destruction.

Or these gems from a Pepperdine speech:  “There are three types of people in this world,” Lasorda said. “The person that makes it happen, the person that watches it happen and the person that wonders what’s happening.

“I hope that by talking to you today, you will all become the people that want to make it happen, or else it was a waste of time for me to battle the last hours of traffic to see you today.”

“I don’t know why kids take drugs,” he said. “They don’t make you smarter or prettier. Darryl Strawberry could have been one of the best players ever in this game, but he let drugs take over his life.”

Draw your own conclusions

Mark Simon of ESPN Research compiled these numbers (and I added in Ramirez, who still needs to pass his physical). From Simon: “I would note that when you look at what the Yankees committed compared to the other American League teams, it’s a little unusual [the Yankees have $441 million in commitments, the other 13 AL teams have $176.28 million in commitments].”

I’ll have a draft

Last night I got a call from one of the 3 dad’s in town who want to draft 9 year old Max for their rec baseball team.  Last year, he was an unknown 3rd grader amazing everyone by closing the tight games in the playoffs and world series, striking out Big Phil, the top 4th grader on the A’s.  Now, he’s not a secret anymore.  They all want him.

And I was hoping that his coach from last year, Mr. H, ended up with him again and put in place the same staff we had last year.  It was great.  All the guys just jelled and had a good time.  It was a blast, and, as you may know, the photo above, of Max running off the mound after winning the world series, represents just one of the handful of nicest moments in my entire life.  It was so great to see that boy do his magic under the pressure.

So one of the coaches calls me up and asks ME for names of good players in town.  I like this guy. He’s a great, a-1 guy and he has asked me to coach with him.  I had to tell him “no”, because I don’t know how much time I’ll have with the new baby and if I don’t have a lot of time, I want to see Max’s travel games too.

But when I realized that his draft prep, was to call me 10 minutes before running out the door, I knew then that I wanted his old coach to snag him.  The reason we won is because he knew to pick the 3rd graders who had played football and weren’t on the baseball radar.  No one could understand how we won with really no 4th graders.  It was all Mr. H.  And I’ve no doubt that he’ll do it again.

I told Max about the draft and he got excited about it.  He borrowed his dad’s cell phone so I could call him late.  About 5 minutes after he got the cell phone, I got a text saying, “hi”.  They a minute later, I got one saying, “Anything yet?”.

This went on for a few hours while I sculpted on Jackie Robinson in the stinky, filthy cellar.  Then , as I was leaving and had given up on hearing anything, I got a 3 word text: “H got Max”.

That’s it.  The 2008-09 Dodgers defense has begun!  Awesome!

Jack In A Block

Jackie’s hands are in that block.  Although I’m not quite there yet, I’m dreaming of the moment I can begin to cut up that block.  My wife thinks I should be dreaming of our impending baby–on or about March 17th…

Do Away with Baseball Commish Office

With all the talk about Selig, I got to wondering why they bother to have a baseball commissioner at all anymore. It’s almost bad PR by now. In 1921, it was a crucial thing to prop up the public’s perception that the league had an impartial judge acting as overseer, so that the public wouldn’t sour on the idea that many of the games, including the 1919 world series, were rigged.

When Landis took that job, he held out for powers and got them.  Understand that it KILLED the owners to have to give-away ANY powers to Landis, but the felt they had no choice. Landis’ insistence that he get real power to act, was what made him more than just a shill for the owners. He’s probably the first and last and ONLY Commissioner that has had any real autonomy.

And realize that when Landis became the first Commissioner, there was no union. With no union, if the owners wanted something (including paying Joe Jackson and Eddie Cicotte peanuts) they got it! Instant gratification. Now, with the strong union being the final decider of any moves that have any gravity, the office of Commissioner is moot. He’s an owner’s shill and really, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Selig is actually the first honest pick as Commissioner! That’s right, the job is for a mouthpiece for the owners, so why pretend? Pick an owner. When the players need a team player-rep, they don’t go out and try and fool people into thinking that it’s “impartial”–they pick a player!

So in a way, Selig’s tenure has been the first one to openly acknowledge what the cognoscenti have always known–he’s the owner’s man, through and through. Trouble is, whenever he tries to come across as impartial and invokes the “spirit of a Landis”–he’s blowing smoke and needs to put a cork in it. I don’t see ANY shame in the owners having a point-man who speaks with one voice for them in business matters, really I don’t. It is, after all, their business and their money.

The owners take a hit in the public’s eye EVERY time someone mentions that Selig is an ex-owner (and probably is still running his old club). The owners are being stupid. They need to dispense with the office of Commissioner once and for all. Don’t hold the office out as being something it’s not–impartial. There’s nothing wrong with having a spokesman, which is what Bud Selig is. Call him the “Chairman of the Owners”, and say the office of Commissioner is going away permanently.

It actually never really was what people were led to believe. The only significant decision that came out of that office was Landis blocking Bill Veeck from buying the Phillies to stock it with Blacks, long before Branch Rickey brought Robinson to Montreal. In fact, The first thing that happened when Landis left was that Rickey went to Happy Chandler and said, “…would you have a problem if I sign Robinson?”. Chandler said, “go ahead”, and the evil was on its way out.

That’s the legacy of this fundamentally bogus office. Only one Commissioner ever had anything close to real power, and he used it to preserve the racist status quo. On that basis alone, I’d dispense with the PR-ploy that the office of Commissioner is.

On another note, with respect to steroids and Fehr, the union head is supposed to be acting on behalf of the down-trodden rank-and-file. So what did this guy do? He pursued the DMZ-don’t-ask-don’t-talk-about-it policy on steroids through the 1990’s and oughts. Ask yourself: who did that help? Who did that hurt?

It helped the top 10% mostly; the mega-rich A-Rods and Bonds of the union. Who did it hurt? The rank-and-file. Sure, let everyone risk their health so the top 10% can set records and make obscene amounts of money.

Additionally, it hurt kids and young men, many of whom would never be members of Don Fehr’s union; never would they see a penny of the dirty money, if, they couldn’t make a roster and left their “dream” to work at the linoleum counter at Home Depot. Good going, Fehr. You’re all about the little guy, eh?  –Fog

Open Apology to Phil Mushnick

Recently, I had done a piece on Mushnick, a guy I admire and respect.  I went over how I thought it was perhaps unfair to rip Bud Selig without mentioning the union.  I posited that Selig isn’t omnipotent–he’s locked in a dance with Fehr and the union and basically, “it takes two to tango” re steroids.

Mr. Mushnick and I exchanged a couple of emails over this and he mentioned that perhaps I had not read the many column inches over the years that he devoted to doing just that–giving it to the union as much as he did, to Selig.

And I apologized to him for not having acknowledged these items, citing the new baby, and the fact that in the last 1.5 yrs, for the first time in a decade, I wasn’t reading every column like I had been–so, sure, I could easily have missed some items.

I think he is a fair man and realizes the big picture.  I was railing a bit at the media’s tyipcally liberal-and-therefore-always-going-to-take-Labor’s-side-even-though-in-this-case-Labor-is-a-bunch-of-super-rich-guys-complicit-in-a-drug-problem-in-their-ranks-in-the-interest-of-making-money.  To my mind, Labor always seems to get away with things.  Selig is low-hanging fruit, if you will.  It’s easy to bash Selig.  My 9-yr-old nephew can rip Selig.  But newspapers are always reluctant to go after the union guy; the Labor guy; after all, we’ve all been conditioned by Hollywood and the news media to revere the unions–they’re supposed to be for the “little guy”.  How can you bash that?  That’s why we bail out the big 3 auto companies and don’t write enough about how the UAW is driving production costs so high, they just can’t compete with other companies.  The union is for the little guy, got it?

And with a “rich” owner like Selig, we have no respect.  He’s a shill for the other rich guys, so let’s go after him.  Since the time of Charles Dickens, we’ve all been conditioned by Hollywood and the media to hate the rich.  It’s too easy and per formula.  Only it’s not the full story.  The full story is more akin to what Phil Mushnick has published this morning in the New York Post: Click here to launch the piece in a new window

The fault for the look-away, non-confrontational stance on PED’s, has been a dance of BOTH the Commissioner and the Union head.  Selig AND Fehr.

Nice work Mr. Mushnick.  I have never enjoyed a column of yours as much as this morning’s.  Please accept my apology.

***

As an addendum, I was telling Mrs. Pinetar that now I’m a big player in the news business! haha.  I said, “…but honey, think of it!  I’m like Winchell–I should have a booth at the Stork Club…”, to which she said, “…Dear, give me a break~and you DO have a booth–at (Ciro’s) the pizzeria down the steet.”

***
Addendum #2: While going over the Selig thing, I got to thinking about the 200 baseball books I have read since about 1980 and I thought about the Commishioner’s office and just what it was–and wasn’t.  Originally, in the 1920 environment, the game was under a cloud.  It was feared that people would not buy tickets to a game that was not a true contest.  The fear was that if gamblers could rig the world series, then the public would start to stay away, more and more.

And it wasn’t just the 1919 series that was rigged.  There is real strong anecdotal evidence that the 1903, 1911, 1912, 1914 and 1917 series were rigged.  Connie Mack lost the 1905 series partly because he would not pitch Hall of Famer, Rube Waddell, because he knew that gamblers had gotten to the simple, but brilliant man.

Connie Mack also broke up a juggernaut team: the 1911-1914 A’s, because he believed they had thrown the 1914 series to the lowly Braves.  Grover Alexander may have thrown many regular season games.  Cobb and Speaker were almost banned for life.  John McGraw tried to bribe the umps in the replay of the Merkle game in 1908.

The stink was so bad, that baseball knew it had to act.  They had to “appear” to the public to be trying to fix the problem.  They hired Judge Landis as a figurehead, but he knew he had leverage and he didn’t want to just be a figurehead, so he held out for sweeping powers.  Sweeping powers that kept blacks out of the game for decades.  Landis had power because of his unique bargaining position–but he was probably the only Commishioner who wasn’t a straight-up shill.  Remember, all the owners wanted originally was a shill.  And Landis wouldn’t go along.  The position is ultimately a shill position for the owners, and saps like us (via the sappy media) lend credence to the myth that the guy cares, or that he has autonomy.  The reality?  He has very little autonomy.  He was, and is, a shill for the other owners.  Why look at him any other way?

***

Final shot: You’ll Never Walk Alone, Yossi Benayoun.  That an Israeli is scoring a big goal for a staunchly English (and Scouse) club in the Champion’s League, is just a nice thing, dontchathink?  All around.

And I can not recall a goal that made me happier in a very long time.  Gerrard’s goal at the end of the FA Cup Final?  The goals in Istanbul?  This one may not be in THAT zip code, but it’s up there.  Mazel Tov, Yossi #15.