The Happy Recap

Here is John Benjamin PineTar.  Born at 12:18pm by c-sec 10 pounds, 1.6 oz’s, 22 inches.  He’s perfect.  Mother is doing great.  We thank God and thanks to anyone who prayed for this boy and/or (gasp!) us, even.  Now Tommy has a little buddy; a playmate.  I told my wife that with 3 boys, counting me, we are just going to destroy the house playing ball–and we are! hoo hoo hoo hoo…

I can’t wait to read Sandra Boynton books to him; or watch Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.  Nothing but high culture over here!  And I will teach him to absolutley revere Carl Kolchak, as I do.  Ahh, parenthood…

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.

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.

XM 175 Destroyed

Why did I cancel my 3 radios?  Easy.  They fired Mark Patrick, for one thing.  But they also showed me who they are.  After XM merged with Sirius, they not only fired Patrick but they completely revamped the 175 channel lineup.  After destroying the morning lineup, they split up Dibble and Kennedy and ruined the afternoon drive show as well.  They did this all WITHOUT ONE WORD TO THEIR CUSTOMERS.  It was like they tried to sneak it in without anyone noticing.  They treated loyal paying customers like dirt–like kids.

I was a 3+ year subscriber and I was such a steady customer that I would re-up by the year and it had been so long since I logged on to my account, that I didn’t remember my password or even my user name.  This made dropping the service today, a bit of a chore which angered me further–to the point where I might have kept a radio but after the great “customer service” I received, I never want to deal with them again.  They are rockheads.  It isn’t worth it.

When I first called, I was put on hold a long time.  Ok, no problem.  Then, when I reached a person, it was clearly an offshore call center.  Now I’ve been to call centers in India for business and worked with those folks and they are the nicest people you can possibly imagine.  They are nicer than folks from Oklahoma!  It’s almost ridiculous how nice they can be.  It’s to the point that you wonder what they’re “on”.  But it’s their way.  Well I got maybe the only one who was a little obnoxious.  Trust me when I say that I know how much of a long shot that is.

So they transfer me to a person in the states and I tell that person that I may have auto-reupped without the knowledge that XMSirius was going to pull the rug out from under me and rip apart the one reason I subscribe.  She didn’t really even understand me when I told her that.  As soon as I thought she might have a brain, she went right into canned, scripted come-ons about how Sirius was working to improve things and that I should hang in for all the great changes.  “I’ve seen the change and that’s why I’m leaving-thanks”, I told her.

On she went about the improvements and so forth and I said “decline”.  Then she started throwing free months at me.  First it was 3-free months for the main radio and then she moved to 3-free months across all radios, to which, I said, “decline” a couple of times.  I finally got what I wanted but yet the clincher is that these bastards don’t have a CLUE why they just lost three radios that were basically permanent.  They don’t get it.  They don’t WANT to get it.  I hope they fail.  I hope the whole company comes down like a ton a bricks and I hope that Mark Patrick NEVER sells out and becomes that which he so deftly mocks.  I hope Patrick ends up on the MLB channel or some such place where they leave him alone and let him work his craft.

You are clowns XM-Sirius!  CLOWNS~!

(my wife doesn’t know it yet, but with the money we save on the stupid sat-radio, we are getting the season package for baseball~!  woo hoo!)

Firsts

Would that I

Jack in his earliest full figure mode.  We’re a bit beyond this point by now.  Other statues have had the “second-story, box-construction”, but none have been done as well as this one.  After a few attempts and some wasted wood, I have gotten it right.  Not only the size but the fact that you leave the back out, and do that as a separate piece–a third peice, to be joined later.  I’ve finally gotten smarter and gotten over my monolithic thinking.

While it’a about wood, it’s specifically about 4 equations:  Wood=$.  Wood=LBS.  Wood=Time.  Time=$.

The project at my IT job is going full bore.  I’m 12 hours a day on site every day and I haven’t even looked at Jack Roosevelt this week.  And a time when I was cruising too!  Hurts, but what can you do.

I am working with a project manager from the vendor who is challenging every fiber of my self-restraint.  And this vendor has already pushed us back 4 months on this project on basically, a whim.  I got a call from the VP of Client Services saying, “…ahh, we can hit our Sept go-live and training dates, but you won’t have the best experience.  If you want to push back to Jan, we can recommend that will be better.”

I was dumbfounded.  I was also impressed with their honesty, but overall, they were telling me flat out: “You aren’t a big client and/or you don’t mean a whole hell of a lot to us right now.  Your gig, is peanuts–we have bigger irons in the fire and we’re pulling the resources from you to deal with that, and you will probably be better off listening to us”.

It’s like a waiter saying, “you don’t really want the lamb (something that actually happened to me in Toronto once)”.  You listen to that because you KNOW it’s difficult for them to say, so you KNOW that there’s a damn good reason that they are saying it!

My one feeling after agreeing to table the project to January, was that, “…boy, after pulling that, they are going to really overdeliver in Jan on the professional services…”

Ha!  WRONG!  I would want to overdeliver to a client after pulling that stunt, but THEY see it differently.  They gave me not just the junior varsity, they gave me the freshman squad.  You know when a project manager is so clueless, that they don’t even know they’re bad?  They still have that dopey, annoying, high-opinion of themselves while they happily waste your time, money and resources.

On their leaving the data entry portion of the project, on Thursday, this woman said to me, “…don’t worry, as your people key in more charts, the folder with the charts to be keyed, will go down, and the completed folder will grow”.

She took a few more words to say it than that, but it was essentially that same message.  At the point I was hearing it and realizing what captain-obvious thing she was saying to me, it was all I could do to not laugh out loud in her face.  And this was after her lying and unpreparedness, cost me a few grand earlier that day–to which she instantly blamed another vendor.  You can’t make this up.

How to argue with Yankee fans

[sigh] I have to go over this one more time, because I just heard it again.  I was lamenting the Yankees (and to a MUCH lesser extent the Mets) just spending ridiculous amounts of cash and rendering MLB a joke on a lot of levels.  Anyone who reads The Pinetar Rag is well aware of this, and probably tired of it too.

So a guy I know accuses me of being “Socialist” because I complain about the bigger market teams out spending the small market teams by 10-1 at times.

Here’s the correction:  “Socialism” is the situation when GOVERNMENTS heavily tax their population under the guise of providing goods and services that would otherwise be provided by the private sector.  So instead of choosing the item and paying for it out of your pocket, the government takes the money out of your pocket, in the form of taxes, and provides their government version of the service.  You no longer make the choice–the politician and the voters who stamp it, make that decision for you.  Once it’s made, you have no other options.

Now in baseball, it’s a professional sports league.  The league is holding out to the public, the concept that their contests will be fair contests among the teams.  If the contests were not viewed as “fair”, by the paying public, they would not pay money to see them–would not waste their time.  This is the concept behind the anti-gambling stance of Major League Baseball; to keep the game’s on-the-field-fairness-and-integrity sacrosanct, because everyone’s lively hood rests on that cornerstone.  A guy mixed up in gambling might be willing to “sell” games, as Hal Chase of the Yankees did with abandon in the 19-oughts and teens.

When I advocate that the league do something (salary cap) to prevent the Yankees from just buying up players and spending over 200 million while the lesser clubs have to get by on 30, 40 and 50 million, I advocate it because I don’t think the on-field contests are fair anymore.  How can they be?  I think the integrity of the game is compromised when the Yankees can do what they have been doing with all that money.  The Yankees’ spending is antithetical to fair contests.  It SHOULD be viewed with great alarm, but somehow, it isn’t.

The person who called me “Socialist” for wanting to cap or curb the kind of spending the Yankees do, is mixing up the contexts.  I don’t want the government to steal my freedom (taxes) and force me to take or leave their sub-par “services” whether I like it or not–with no “opt-out”, like with Social Security.  I’m not a Socialist.  That’s governments, got it?

But when I invest my time in a baseball game, I want some assurances that the deck isn’t just RIGGED with CASH, like it is now!  I want the league to address it themselves so I don’t have to think about it; so I can just enjoy the game.

The league is an artificial contrivance; a closed system.  By limiting the Yankees’ cash-sledgehammer, they are not being “Socialist”, they are actually delivering the product that they promised me; a fair product.

Anyone with a modicum of intelligence can look at a demographic map of the USA and see plainly, that all metro areas are not created equal, and thus, teams in those areas are not on equal footing with regard to generating cash!

Kansas City has 1.9 million souls.   Click here to bring up numbers in a new window

NY/NJ/CT metro area has about 19 million.

Only an idiot would set up a system where these two areas are considered “equal” in terms of cash generation.  You’re supposed to have a fair contest on the field but you are going to ignore these numbers?  My goodness.

So don’t advertise a “fair” fight on the field, when anyone who thinks about it knows it isn’t that way.

By this time in the fact-pattern, (usually from Yankee fans) I hear the talking points recited from memory, as if the Steinbrenners sent out a memo from their war-room, deep in the bowels (or the vault) of Yankee Stadium.  I’ll address the more common ones:

(1)  Money isn’t everything: look at the [names most recent high spending team that didn't win]

It doesn’t invalidate the Yankees’, cash-sledgehammer model if some other team wastes a lot money.  My goodness; anyone can blow through money!  Just because a fool squanders his money doesn’t decrease the VALUE of money, and the mountains it can move, for everyone else!  All it does is prove that one team and its management, was foolish that particular season, and no more.

The thought process is because the 1997 Orioles blew a ton of money, the Yankees can spend 100% more than the league mean, every year, and no one is supposed to notice?

Guess what?  We noticed.  The Orioles were stupid, but we’re not!

(2) The Yankees pay lots of luxury tax, and the “cheap” owners just pocket it

They do pay this but it is a pittance.  This money can not lift a Pittsburgh, KC or Cincinnati out of where they are: in small cash markets.  What it amounts to, in my opinion, is a line item on the MLB (and Yankees’) Public Relations Income Statement.  It is MLB’s way of fooling it’s customers (remember the fans?) into thinking, “see, we have addressed the spending disparity in our sport).”

No you haven’t!  Not even close! Since this thing went into action in 2003, the Yankees have paid out about 20 million per year.  During that same time, they outspent the league by an average of about 110 million PER YEAR!  So, even if you gave the FULL Yankee luxury tax to ONE average team spending 90 million dollars, the Yankees would STILL have outspent them by a whopping 90 million dollars, or, about DOUBLE.

Does that sound like they addressed it to you?  Me neither.  I’m not buying this.  But be fair, it’s wonderful PR, because many, many fans buy in 100% to this nonsense that the system is somehow fair.  And the media aids and abets the deceit, as they usually do in cases such as this.

(3) Owners like Pollad of Minnesota are billionaires who could easily write some checks and keep up with the Yankees.

This is my favorite because of it is the most “Candyland” of them all.  The premise is, “…the guy’s rich, so what if his team is in a small market, if he wants to compete with the Yankees, he can write checks out of his personal bank account!”

Listen closely to what’s being said. The owner, because others feel he “has the money”, should just DONATE his own PERSONAL money to his business, to keep up with the Yankees, otherwise, he is, somehow, not a “sport”.   This concept could be the height of Yankee-fans’-arrogance and stupidity.  For the honor of spending like a lunatic Steinbrenner, owner-X should PAY.  Pay for it himself.  Even if his business LOSES money in the process.

They want to tell another man how to run his business, and, basically, that he should run his business AT A LOSS, so that the Yankees and their fans don’t have to feel self-conscious about out spending the league by over a 100 million dollars every year!  I guess the Kool-Aid is: It’s ok that we spend like pigs because Pollad has untouched money in the bank.  [shaking my head] My goodness…

(4) The Yankees won with home grown guys like Bernie and Jeter and Posada.  It wasn’t money!

Because George Steinbrenner was banned from baseball and couldn’t trade them all away (he tried very hard to dump Bernie–read “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty” by Buster Olney), they DID have a home-grown nucleus, I’ll grant you.

But why did they win 4 titles in 5 years?  MONEY.  They payroll was the highest in baseball EVERY ONE of those championship years.  And the nucleus was young and not making the obscene money yet, so SOMEONE must have been paid to come in and help, and they were.  Mostly the big ticket pitchers.  The Key’s and Cone’s and Clemen’s and so forth.  So while yes, there were home-grown guys on the roster, don’t be fooled: the dynasty was resting on cash; lots of it.  Cash that towns like KC and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati don’t have access to.  Make no mistake.

(5) See?  Small market teams CAN win. [referring to 2003 Marlins]

Yes, it’s true, in 2003 the 150 million dollar Yankees lost to the 49 million dollar Marlins.  It can happen.  That’s because home field in baseball is only a 4% edge and the biggest edge you’re ever likely to see in the post-season is only about 65%, which means that 35 times out of 100, the lousy team will beat the juggernaut in a series.

But let’s examine what’s really behind this talking point.  Yankee fans throw this one out there as if to say, “sure we spend a lot, but you don’t have to spend to win…”  This is supposed to deflect attention from their massive cash outlays each year.

But there are 30 teams in MLB.  And the mean payroll in 2007 was 80 million. [click to see numbers] So let’s call 10 of them, the bottom third, truly “small market”.

Here are the last 10 world series winners:

2008 Phillies, 2007 Red Sox, 2006 Cardinals, 2005 White Sox, 2004 Red Sox, 2003 Marlins, 2002 Angles, 2001 DBacks, 2000 Yankees, 1999 Yankees

I can really only call the Marlins truly, “small market”.  So let’s double it and say that twice every 10 years, a small market team scales the heights.  So you might be tempted to think that, “…sure, about every 5 years, we have a puncher’s chance to run-out in the postseason”.

But not so fast!  There are 10 small market “trials” EVERY season!  That’s 10, different small market teams placing their small bets and spinning the wheel every year!  And out of all 10, only ONE of THEM scales the heights every 5 years or so.  But if you are one particular small market team, then you might have to wait longer.  You might have to wait 10 times 5 years = 50 years for your number to come up.  That’s the difference between referring to the population, and a given team IN the population.  Neat trick there, Yankee fans, but we ain’t buying it.  Being a fan in a small market stinks.  We watch our good players hit arbitration and then end up on the Yankees and coming back into town to kick the snot out of us.

Sure PNC park is the nicest place on Earth to watch a ballgame, but don’t blow the Yankee smoke up our bippies.  Please. –Fog

Shatner Undermiked

Well, last night was the first of Shatner’s new TV talk show.  My wife and I laughed pretty hard at some of Shatner’s antics.  But we also agreed that he had some pretty salient and pithy things to say at times.  A Shatnerian mix.  Who knew?  And he trotted out some big words; from McGill in Montreal, no doubt.

My mom, my wife and I all agreed that he looked very uncomfortable in the big, bloated jacket with the shoulder pads.  They lost the jacket for segment two, so, we weren’t the only ones.  I mean, you have a big, bloated guy with a big, bloated ego (but we love it!) and you put him in a big, bloated jacket, to boot?  Whoahh.

I thought that Shatner was ridiclously under-miked in the Valerie Burtanelli segment, but then, as if they adjusted for it, I had trouble hearing Tim Allen in the second leg.  Geez, Shat’s guys, get the miking right.  We’re trying not to wake up the baby.  So I pot up the TV to hear Shats and Vallerie B blows the speakers out! Oy.  And how great was it when Shats was acting like a Catholic Priest?  Mozel-Tov, Bill.  You go.

Vallerie B surprised me too, as she was not an “oh-wow” girl at all.  She clearly has her wits about her and her give and take with Shatner was pretty good.  It was as if the producers told her to “get on” Shats as much as he, her.  And you found out at the end that they are back-fence neighbors, so that explains Shat’s conmfort zone with her.

All in all, I’ll watch again.  The potential is still there for him to go where no talk show host has gone before.

Just because I can…

And  because it may not last very long.  Since I’ve been following, just after the Sunderland FA Cup win in 1992 was it?  I haven’t seen them top that I can recall, this late in the season (and it’s not even really late).

Mrs. Pinetar and I are going over possible names for the March baby and last night I suggested “Steven Gerrard xxxxxxx”.  She didn’t like that one.

The other approach has been to go through a big-old copy of the 1984 Baseball Encyclopedia.  Names like Tristram Speaker (she didn’t like that although wasn’t so against Tristen-bleah~!), or Hall of Famer Eppa Jeptha Rixey (not even I like that one).

Some things become apparent while thumbing the BBencyc.  Like Cy Young’s real name is “Denton True Young”; the “Cy” is for Cyclone, because, apparently, he blew apart a guy’s fence with his fastball.  Why would you heave a fastball at a wooden fence?

Then, there is the famous Hall of Famer who has the exact, same name as my grandfather.  Due to cyber stuff, I think it’s best not to go into that one.

You have these great, old names like “Grove Cleveland Alexander”, who went by “Pete”, yea, go figure.

My favorite’s are deadballers like “Ice Box Chamberlain” and “Piano Legs Hickman”.  There’s the dead giveaway “Highpockets Kelly”.

You look them over and you get to “Harmon Killebrew” and you wonder, “WHAT were the Killebrews THINKING!?”

Mostly though, the book is filled with Joe’s and Mike’s and John’s and Bob’s, which is probably how we’ll handle it.  And we are not sure it’s a boy, either, so that could be a curveball in the deck.

You look at names that go out of fashion and stay that way.  Look at your Western-themed names: You don’t meet any “Bat”s, as in “Bat Masterson”.  Cody made a comeback, but due to Kathy Lee Gifford, we’ll stay off that one.  Come to think of it, “Bat” is a cool name.  It’s like “Rod”, which has also lost favor, as has “Chemical”, for obvious reasons.

The trend now is for last names to become instant first names.  My wife recently met a little girl named, “Kennedy”, at one of Tommy’s playgroups.  I’m waiting for one these uber-moms to just up and name their kid “pretentious”.  As in, “…and here’s our boy, Pretentious Affected Smith”.