Babe Ruth Grave Robbers

It used to be that if you were famous, you’d be buried in Westchester, NY.  The place is crawling with cemeteries.  Right across the street from my workplace is Kensico, where Lou Gerhig is buried and on the other side of the valley is the Catholic burial ground where Babe Ruth and Billy Martin are buried.  I was on the website for the place and noticed that even though they are Roman Catholic, Arthur Flegenheimer is buried in there.  Anyone know who that was?  That’s right, it’s Dutch Schultz.  Schultz was perhaps one of the worst mass murdering gangsters the USA has ever harbored, and, by the way, he was Jewish.  Go figure.

When I did my Yankee talk at the home, many were surprised that I hadn’t been to Ruth’s grave.  I’m not into graves, what can I say?  I DID carve a life size statue of the guy, however, and am carving another, so I thought that someday I’d go over there.  Yesterday was that day.  It took 5 minutes to drive over.  What fascinates me about this stuff (besides the unbelievable ornateness of the cemeteries up there) is what kind of stuff people think to leave at the grave.  We saw quite a few bats and balls and weird stuff at Gehrig’s grave and so I thought this would be no different.  It wasn’t.

This is the view as you walk up a sharp hillside from the access road.  Behind you is a fantastic view of the valley.  It’s a shame that they waste the view on the stiffs. 

At first, Ruth’s stone looks overblown, but it gets lost in the grandeur of the other monuments and mausoleums in this place.  We’re talking top shelf.  In fact, all in all, I’d say the Bambino estate has shown some restraint, believe it or not. 

 

The first thing that you notice is the flags.  Little Yankee flags.  Not too bad.  Go Yanks, right?  Then it gets better. 

 

I love this.  There were maybe 5 different of those little “helmet Sundae” helmets.  You know, the kind that the ice cream comes in?  The 9 dollar ice cream is great and apparently, they make a great tribute to the Babe.  The “K” hat?  I have no idea.  The stones?  Anyone know who does this or why?  Gehrig’s grave and Martin’s grave all have the little rocks on them.  I do not understand that.  DaVinci Code?  Harry Potter?  Col. Potter? 

 

I wonder if Cardinal Spellman knew how many professional girls that Babe took up with?

I love this one: Sunflower seeds!  Haha, as if the Babe can enjoy them!  Sure, he’ll love that.  I don’t think they even knew what those seeds were in the 1920′s, but hey, go for it.  Score some posthumous points with the Babe.  Another little sundae helmet. 

 

The baseball cards strew around were another puzzling one.  There were dozens of them.  And almost no Yankees of any kind.  Guys like Marcus Giles and Joe McEwing.  Guys who had NO POSSIBLE connection to the Babe or the Yanks or the Roaring Twenties or baseball greatness.  I mean, we’re talking Joe McEwing!

And there were all manner of balls left there.  Mostly baseballs but a few softballs and several plastic whiffle type balls as well.  Most of them were signed by the leavers.  Some just said things like “To: Babe From: Maria” as if Ruth would know and appreciate Maria’s gesture.  Some of it was kid handwriting, so you can give that a pass, but others were definitely left by adults. 

 

Here’s a good one: A Yankee Schedule and soggy.  Perhaps the Babe needs to KNOW who the Yankees are playing today?  Now, he can reach up and thumb through the soggy schedule.  How thoughtful.  And the Yo-Yo was a nice touch.  Maybe the Babe would get bored in there and need to “walk the dog” with the light up YoYo.  Note the sunflower seeds as well.  Hey, a guy can’t YoYo without some chaw, right?

 

The usual: balls, rocks and cards but I really love the Yankee beer-stand concession cup.  Only 10 bucks for a beer and wouldn’t George Herman love a beer about now?  Hoo Yea.

 

Here’s a mixed bag: A 1979 penny, deliberately placed there, no doubt.  No idea re significance.  A Rockies baseball card–because you know, Ruth played a lot of games in Denver.  The bracelet is one of those Lance Armstrong jobs but another color.  The Cigar is classic.  You KNOW he’d want to take a haul off of that, having died from oral cancer from smoking those things!  And the ticket on the right is apparently from the recent Hall of Fame inductions as it has Oriole/Ripken overtones and says Cooperstown Hall of…you know.  On the bottom is the ball point pen inscription, “Babe, you are better than Hank Aaron and [unintelligible]“  No words on Bonds but it’s a safe bet that if they didn’t like Aaron, they weren’t digging Bonds’ act. 

 

There you have it.  A snapshot of the flotsam and jetsam that people actually take the time to leave on the grave of a person that they have never met and do not know, although each and everyone THINKS they know him.  The lesson?  If you get mega-watt famous.  Really, really famous.  We’re not talking Paris Hilton, flavor of the month famous, but really, really Winston Churchill famous, people will leave odd things on your grave.

How about this for a measure of fame.  If, after everyone who you physically met in the flesh while you were still alive had passed away, and people were STILL visiting your grave, you were famous.  But even that if fleeting.  Mary Pickford was by far the most famous female human in the world for over ten years and she couldn’t get arrested now if she came back to life.  –fog 

Beatles on Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, Joe Garagiola

There was a post recently and someone asked about the Beatles Lennon/McCartney appearance on The Tonight Show while Joe Garagiola was the guest host. I have never seen the bit and would guess that it doesn’t exist or it would have turned up somehow, somewhere. I seem to recall that much of the early Carson 1960′s era shows were not saved. That stuff always amazed me but I guess it was considered too expensive. You can buy every show Jack Benny ever did from 1938 to 1960 on ebay for about 10 dollars. Go figure.

But this had come up and I wrote the original post from memory and the memory was reading a book by Craig Tennis called “Johnny Tonight”, published in 1980. I was at my parent’s house last night and I found the book in a desk and opened it right to the Beatles page. Weird. So since I was photographing old family photo albums to digitize the shots, I took shots of the story from Tennis’ book. His words:

 

 

This is what it’s all about…

A lamb chop, Cowboy Charcoal and the Navy Jack. Kind of gets you right there, doesn’t it?

Actually, it can get better. Here is the finished product of dad’s evaporator this Spring. He made a few quarts of real maple syrup by tapping his Maple trees right in his yard and boiling it down himself. It is very tasty with the pancakes and the Hasselnuss coffee there in my souvenir mug from the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. You should start every day with home made syrup and Nixon. –fog

Ants Will Not Cross A Chalk Line

Mrs. Pinetar hates bugs. Any bugs. Now I’m not thinking I want them in my house, but I realize that we share the world with these things and you will end up seeing them from time to time. So recently, we have ants coming in the house. Big carpenter ants. One here or there, nothing big really. But Mrs. Pinetar can’t stand them.

So she puts a chalk line down on the doorjams. Because apparently, “Ants will not cross a chalk line”. Period. They are incapable. No one knows why! Could be a good PHD thesis in there somewhere. Why don’t these little industrious ba*tards cross chalk?

I was just walking through the chalk at first and then I got yelled at. I didn’t notice it. But the ants did. Apparently, they are polite and actually use the door areas to enter the dwelling and that’s right where Mrs. Pinetar has the chalk down. So I keep hearing the “Ants will not cross…” line and I finally I google and wikipedia the daylights out of it and it’s a widely held belief! Also, it is pretty well held that ants can’t stand the smell of Peppermint and they are killed outright by baking soda. Another entry said that you can kill a fire ant nest by pouring 3 gallons of boiling water on it. Think of that. What geniuses! The scale there says that ants can’t stand a boiling lake of liquid raining down their hole. Could you? Could Bin Laden?

What about the Champagne region of France? The soil is notoriously chalky. Do they have no ants there because the ants just can’t get around? The White Cliffs of Dover are chalk, no? Ants? Guess not. It may work because I actually haven’t seen a single ant since the “Edict of Chalk”. And if you have an ant farm, do those guys actually grow anything?

***

Chris Carpenter throwing BP the other day and more recently threw his curve for the first time. Unsure if it was off of “flat ground”. Pavano swears by the flat ground. Carps was my second overall pick in fantasy in a big bet on starting pitching. Oswalt was number one. Oswalt’s WHIP is nearly a buck forty. League average is 1.37 so any day now, I’m expecting to hear of “stiffness” in Oswalt’s bulldozing-driving shoulder. If was the Yankees, I’d just BUY Johan Santana and Carlos Zambrano and be off.

Incidentally Yankee fans, how’s that cash plan working? The one where you spend way north of 200 million dollars? A game under .500 as we speak?! Oof!

And Ozzie Guillen, as I predicted in this space, preseason, is on the bubble and may get “done” any day now. If Ozzie goes, you can almost HEAR the ground under Torre get softer…hoohohohohoooo…

*** As promised, I will outline my plan to make XM sat radio’s traffic actually something I can use. Guys, Phoenix has it’s own traffic channel! What for? I’ll do the traffic for Phoenix for the next 10 years: I-10 is jammed. Done. That’s it!

New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Long Island have 1 lousy, raggety-a** channel! That’s about 50 Phoenix areas in headcount and roads and pi**ed off guys who pay money to hear a dedicated traffic channel on XM in New York and end up flipping on the free stuff: 88AM on the eights and 1010 WINS on the 1′s. Even Bloomberg on the 5′s. They have better traffic. You s**k XM.

Here’s what you need to do. Make 4 channels for the NY-Metro area. Lose Phoenix and the Spanish Language soap opera channel and a few of the dopey hip-hop channels. There ain’t enough Zeppelin anyway. What are there? 3 Classic rock stations?

That’s right, 4 NY channels.

(1) Manhattan and River Crossings

(2) Westchester and Connecticut

(3) Long Island

(4) New Jersey

There you go, geniuses. And realize that if someone is in Westchester, they need to know about the Tappan Zee Bridge (the forgotten bridge of NY traffic) the GWB, the Tri-Boro, the White Stone and the Throgs Neck. Did I miss any? And the Cross Bronx should be mentioned, good or bad, every minute and a half!

And don’t put ADS on the f****ng traffic channel. I don’t want to sit in my car and wait out the f****n Zocor spots while waiting to take the Tappan Zee or risk the XBronx to George Washington. I need it NOW. Don’t make me wait. And don’t introduce it. I know WTF I’m listening to and swearing at. Just info. Info. Info. Don’t sell me anything.

And instead of telling me every minute who the traffic is brought to me by, try UPDATING IT! When I’m blowing down the Cross Bronx doing and unheard-of 55mph, don’t be telling me about the jam that’s obviously not there anymore! 

And lose the goofy color scheme, would you?  I’ve never ever heard it green, ok?  When it’s red, I don’t care about red, I just want to know where the tractor-trailer, chemical spill is before I’m driving into the jam!  It’s always yellow.  97% of the time it’s f****n yellow.  The jam alert in NY, is yellow.  Oh f***n boy.  That’s too much information.  Slow down, I can’t process it fast enough.

You could easily cut 1 minute and a half out of the loop and lose no information whatsoever.  Maybe then, I could use it and wouldn’t have to listen to WINS or CBS.  At CBS, Dan Rather can type up and xerox the jams 20 times before XM has anything on it.

–fog

Now it’s “Dr.” Sheffield?

I knew it. I predicted it. Today, as predicted, people are bending over backwards to characterize Sheffield’s remarks as anything other than what they are: racist hate speech. They are being spun and reworked on various media outlets. On XM radio, both last night and this morning, I heard these disgusting racist views being turned into a veritable doctoral dissertation on baseball economics.

Really? I didn’t know that Sheffield was that deep. I didn’t know that he cared so. Because when I read the remarks, I got the distinct impression that I was hearing the raw anger of a bigot. But now I find out that I’m wrong. Gary was misunderstood. I’m told the situation he was remarking about is “complex”.

He was commenting on the economics of baseball player development. Yea, apparently, it’s cheaper to “develop” players in the West Indies than in the American inner cities. And this pains Dr. Sheffield.  Apparently he’s just “frustrated”. This twisted, second-guess, morning after logic says that racially insensitive Major League teams would rather “develop players” (whatever that means) overseas than “develop” them here in the USA, and while that doesn’t hurt the numbers of whites in the game, it somehow hurts AOAD. Ok, sure. Got it. And with that line of reasoning, does anyone care to comment that while 13.3% of America is AOAD, the NFL and NBA are way north of 60% AOAD? I guess Professor Sheffield will be coming out strong any day now, calling that “reverse racism”?

It’s funny, because I don’t see any of these deep socio-economic thoughts in his comments.  But like a very Liberal judge “finding” things in the US Constitution that no one else can see or has ever seen, people keep “finding” these nuggets in the text while I can’t for the life of me, see them.

There’s an elephant in the room and he might just as well be wearing a white sheet and a pointy hat. But no one will go NEAR it. That’s a big problem for baseball and for America. This garbage has to stop. It’s NOT OK. This guy needs to apologize fully as well as any print or broadcast “journalist” types who are blowing smoke up our collective bippy on this item.

I don’t recall anyone bending over backwards for John Rocker or Jimmy the Greek or Al Campanis. Those situations weren’t viewed as “complex”. It was real simple. Those people were eviscerated and hounded out of jobs and careers overnight. No explanations. No second chances. They apologized, in some cases groveled. They apologized over and over and over and over, but it was NEVER enough. The Liberal media and disingenuous Liberals everywhere needed a scalp and they would stop at nothing until they got it. And you may like that brand of harsh, Old West justice. That’s great.  Good for you. But then it should work both ways, no? And it CLEARLY doesn’t work both ways. And that’s wrong.

Ask yourself this question: If you made comments of this ilk, would you still have a job today? Would you have, at least, been called down to Human Resources for “further review”? Be honest.

One last thought: Why is it so important to your politics; your world view— that some people are allowed to talk like this and others are not? What greater good flows from that exactly? –fog

stray rod on pole position

A-Rod is still the story.  Now it is the “bush league” play of yelling at the third baseman.  The takeout on Pedroia.  The slappy play on Arroyo.  This guy has a little AJ Pierzninski in him.  He is not a good PR man.  There is something about him that rubs you the wrong way.  I can’t articulate it but it is there.  I don’t think even Yankee fans dig this guy.

And running around with broads and taking them to strip clubs while your wife is home.  Not cool.  I know that a lot of ballplayers do this and there is a time-honored DMZ for the beat writers but this is more of a papparazzi thing.  And I’m surprised that it has taken this long to come to our shores.  In the UK, this stuff has been fever-pitch for decades.  The media eviscerated Liverpool’s Robbie Fowler over oftentimes, nothing.  They made things up at times.  Fleet Street is bad and now it is here.  And look, if you’re Joe McEwing, no one cares if you are out with a Hooters girl but stray rod, you have to know that you are fair game now.  There’s a certain ignorance and/or arrogance about this guy.  I’m sure that in a few years, this broad will teach stray rod’s daughter a few moves on the pole, you know?  She’s what?  Three now?  Great pal. Classy.  Your daughter will understand.  Don’t give it a second thought because with kids, it’s all about you dude.

Watching ESPN2 and I see Orestes Destrade there.  Oy.  At least he’s not on MLB This Morning with Mark and Buck anymore (and haunting my commute).  They haven’t added a third guy to that mix and I think that is wise.  Don’t rush.  Test out some people first for chemistry like Regis did in finding Kelly Rippa.  Run some guys through there and eventually, the winner will make himself clear. That show, was ALL ABOUT chemistry when Bowa was on there so chemistry is the number one, two and three attribute you are looking for there.

My nephew has his first traveling league game tomorrow and I, for one, am stoked.  This is going to be fun.  He may get to pitch.  He went 3 innings in their last tuneup match and has been throwing strikes.  One of his little understated fist-pumps when he gets a strike is worth it’s weight in gold to me.  He even changed speeds on a big kid and I yelled to him, “nice change” and he gave this incredible smile and did it again.  The kid swung out of his shoes at it.  I asked him later if he did the changeup on purpose and he said, “…no, but when you said that, you reminded me that I did it and so I did it again…”

He’s 7.

–fog 

XM signal is weak

Yesterday, both my wife and I noticed that the XM signal is terrible!

Orestes Canned XM 175 Baseball This Morning

Well, the thing I’ve been emailing XM about for a year has come to pass. Orestes Destrada has been “let go”. The station manager came on today to say that it was sad and that it had something to do with his “personal life” and that several things had come to a head simultaneously and he needed to “deal” with all of that. Ok, fine. I’m sure he’s a decent man and I feel bad for him if, in fact, he is in some bad stretch. I don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone. Good luck O.

But I will not pretend that I enjoyed him on the best radio show I’ve heard in years–Baseball This Morning in XM Channel 175. The year before Orestes; the year with Larry Bowa, Mark Patrick and Buck Martinez was a thing of beauty. The perfect blend of personalities. I mean a CLINIC in radio. I felt, every morning, as if I was a fly on the wall of a big league clubhouse as the guys were coming in in the morning and having their coffee and talking about the games of the previous night. They had so much rapport, it was even spilling over onto the CALLERS! You didn’t mind the habitual callers because they all seemed to “GET” what was happening there. Mary from Cleveland and all the rest. It was awesome radio. But Bowa went to the Yanks and it had to end.

They brought in Orestes and from the get-go, he didn’t “get” the show. Not once, not ever. There was ZERO chemistry. He left his sense of humor somewhere else and never found it. He didn’t play off the other guys at all. He would mostly just rephrase the question to buy time to respond and then he would repeat what had just been said by Mark or Buck or the CALLER! He spoke in baseball platitudes and generalities and didn’t really bring too much new information to the table. If you’re not bringing in new info, you need to do two things: (1) be brief and (2) be funny. He was neither. You could HEAR him making up what he was going to say AS it was coming out of his mouth.

Whatever momentum Mark and Buck had built up, he would bring to a screeching halt by taking 30 seconds to say nothing at all when all they were looking to do was give him an opening IF, IF he had something, which he never did. Still, he ALWAYS took the opportunity to grab the Mike-Time and take the show down to snooze level. It must have grated on Mark Patrick, especially, because he is not an ex-player, but rather a deftly skilled funny-man and host and I’m sure that he bent over backwards to help this guy get going. But it never happened.

In the last two weeks, you could hear Patrick resign himself that it wasn’t working and he was NOT going to suffer the guy another year and he really took the verbal “gloves” off and gave it to Orestes, when Orestes said goofy things or didn’t “get” it. And it was such a mismatch to hear! You KNEW that for the last year, Patrick could have just eviscerated the guy with his sharp wit but that he obviously did not excercise that, he being a gentleman. I feel personally, that Patrick considered the show ruined and didn’t care if it got ugly. I think he was looking to shake something loose come hell or high water and I’m not so sure that O wasn’t pushed out finally. I don’t think we’ll ever know but I am glad that he isn’t there anymore.

As I said in my many emails to XM, I felt that Orestes was put into the show not for any chemistry but for his demographic. I think the suits sat at a conference table and ate sticky buns and thought that a dark-skinned man who spoke Spanish and Japanese would be a great demographic fit for the show. They didn’t understand the property that they had. Orestes might be a great asset when used properly, but he wasn’t an asset to THAT show. And I have said many times that there is no shame in not fitting a particular format. You tried. You get an “attaboy”, and you move on. And I would cite that I work in The Bronx with many Spanish and AOAD guys, and NOT ONE of them got an XM radio to hear this guy on this show but I can tell you that both my boss and I absolutely adored this show when Bowa was on and for the entire year that O was on, we listened at about 20% of what we had.  It got to the point where he would call me on his cell phone in the car on the way to work to say, “Fog, Orestes isn’t on today, the show is great!”, and I would tune in.  This happened many times.

It is interesting when you listen enough to personalities and get to know them a bit insofar as you can in that fashion. I have definitely heard a “spring” in Mark Patrick’s audio step this past week and now I know why. And I can not say I blame him. I think he was mighty professional to put up for a year, with what he put up with. He worked hard to build up that property to what it is. They were so popular in 2005 that virtually every announcer in baseball was using their catch phrase “stay-hot”. I just hope that they consider the chemistry first and the demographic not at all. I do not tune a radio show in for the skin color or ethnicity of the people talking and how dare XM to ever think that I would.

Now all the rest of you who don’t have it, pick up XM and enjoy every pitch of every Major League game from Spring to the Woil Serious. And enjoy Dibble and Kennedy, another show that is waaay up there in originality and candor and information and just plain listen-ability.

Good luck Orestes. That format was not a fit for you, plain and simple. –fog

XM MLB Channel 175 Morning Show

Two years ago, the XM satellite radio had one of the best talk shows I have ever heard in my life–on any topic.