Post-Mortem on the Mid-Terms

Though I don't have anything pertinent to say about it, I did want to acknowledge the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that was marked the other day 2 and a half weeks ago. I don't know how important or how much influence the occasion of the World War has had on my life and thought compared with other people, I think something at least. In any event the anniversary seemed too important to let it pass without saying anything.


A couple of days before the mid-term election I took to Twitter for a rare 5-tweet "storm" expressing my feelings at the time about that spectacle, which fortunately I don't believe anyone read, but not willing to let any opportunity for emoting pass I will reproduce it here:


(1) I have no passion for voting in this upcoming election. Nothing is going to happen as a result of it that is going to make me happy. The exultation that others may feel if results go their way is nothing I will be able to share in (2) The left are the good people, I know, and I should desperately want them to prevail, but they are grown so obnoxious and condescending that the wailing and gnashing of teeth and rage that will emit from them if they lose is the only satisfying prospect to look forward to (3) even though they are so, so good and decent and high-minded and the only bulwark against a complete moral catastrophe and collapse and such national disgrace as can never be overcome. Yet somehow their goodness is of such a repellant quality that one dreads to see them triumphant. (4) The hope I suppose is that continued defeat and repudiation will humble them enough that some degree of introspection and re-humanization in their interactions with other people can take place and we can move forward soberly with the better of their ideas without all of the (5) militant posturing, self-righteousness, cackling and demonizing and hideous moral certitude. Until there are signs that such an evolution is underway, I am unable to take any interest in the success of these so very good people. Their goodness is too opaque to me.


I'm boiling off a little frustration here. In reality nobody cares much about me or has any interest in winning me back, or over, to their side. I am not a coveted entity, politically or otherwise, in 2018. Yet I must be subjected to the endless existential drama of everyone else's passions and righteous fury. I will admit, I am jealous. If I could just pick a position and throw myself into it whole-heartedly and pour out endless and unrestrained vitriol on my opponents secure in the love of my political allies all of this would be a lot more fun. But I cannot do that because I am not secure enough that the barbs of my enemies on either side do not sting.


As to the results I guess I am glad that the Democrats won the house, though I would not have been overly emotional if they had lost. I still voted for them, though they seem in their own way awful enough that I feel some need to justify myself in doing so, though most people I know believe to do so is to be on the side of the angels. In New Hampshire, identity politics don't come into play, nor for the most part do culture war issues that elsewhere inspire outrageous demagoguery or behavior so as my overall leanings are in that direction, pro-workers, pro-keeping business interests somewhat under restraint, I am not conflicted about voting for them in state elections. I suspect that my congresswoman doesn't have any great love for men and would welcome the opportunity to be more antagonistic towards them and gloat over their comparative downfall but she has been able to maintain enough discipline in this area that I do not have any real cause for voting against her on these grounds. Overall I still suspect major political shifts and tumult are on the horizon over the next few cycles, though this election just past does not seem to be as momentous or decisive as may have been anticipated.


The prolific religious conservative blogger Rod Dreher, whom I read because he produces a lot of content and is attracted to the collapse of Western civilization narrative much like I suppose I am, had a post recently in which he encouraged people to write about their "political mental maps" by which he meant the events in one's (mostly) earlier life that had the most influence on his later political attitudes. This seemed like an interesting exercise. I never comment on other sites, but I started to write up a response to this. However it was taking so long and was so unwieldy that I abandoned it, though I thought it might be a good idea for a post here.


I was born in 1970. I do not have a focused political attitude, but if I had to describe myself as anything I think I would most qualify as a New Deal Democrat, 30s-60s era. Even in my childhood in the late 70s this model of government seemed to be so much the natural order of things that whatever complaints one might have about the system would necessarily have to be addressed within a general New Deal framework. Perhaps to my regret, I grew up in an environment where business people and anybody who appeared to care about money as a life pursuit more than the typical English professor would have found acceptable were regarded as more or less a danger to all normal people, and requiring strict oversight from the regular population to keep them in check. One of the interpretations I took from this was that I must be so firmly embedded among the anti-money grubbers that I would always be able to find some degree of protection among them from the worst depredations of capitalist society, which has not exactly happened, though at least I am not yet homeless or in prison. The AI and techno-driven future does not hold a lot of appeal to me, though as I get older and the years that I will have to try to navigate it grow smaller and perhaps more manageable, combined with the general and increasing hopelessness of huge masses of people younger than I am, I think I am less afraid of it. I don't have any idea how to specifically help my children get on (i.e., make enough money to not live in squalor) in this new age, though I guess they at least won't have some of the extreme handicaps that disadvantage other young people before they can even get in the arena. With regard to specific events/phenomena in historical time that had a big influence on me, I would say:


1. The decline of the great eastern cities and the accompanying crime explosion after 1965 which lasted through my entire childhood up to about my mid-20s. Growing up in the mid-Atlantic (predominantly just outside Philadelphia) this sense of everything having been considerably more lively and functional and cohesive until relatively recently cast a significant shadow over my youth and doubtless contributed to the propensity for nostalgia and living in an imagined past that I so often exhibit. I also feel like many of the real crime problems of that era have disappeared down the memory hole, or are laughed off now, but crime was a major election issue in every cycle I remember up to Clinton's first term in a way that it simply is not now. Our house was broken into on numerous occasions, and it would have been unthinkable for me to leave my bicycle or a football out or unattended on the lawn for two minutes, let alone ever leave a car or house unlocked. I lived in New Hampshire for years before I could get used to leaving my door unlocked when I was at home. Paranoia about being robbed especially, and to some extent being violently assaulted, though this latter never happened to me, was a mild concern of day to day life that has kind of gone away. How this influenced me politically I am not sure other than that it instilled the belief in me that the institutions and schools and social order that prevailed during the 1920-1965 period were more effective and conducive to human flourishing than what I knew in my own time. Something like the paternalistic liberalism that I identified as being predominant in that era informs my political sense to this day, though I don't think it is coming back as a force in the national life.


2. The hyperactive (hetero-)sexual environment of the 1970s and 80s, or at least my perception of it as a young person, has clearly had an ongoing negative effect on my whole outlook on and approach to life. I won't begin to get into it all today, but in general the desire (never realized of course) to be a great sexual winner in life overwhelmed every other interest and pursuit, stunted my development in other areas of life and totally warped my morals. For example I don't like Donald Trump and in theory I find some of his sexual behavior objectionable but, perhaps with the exception of the prostitutes and porn stars, which I am a little prudish about, it seems normal to me, the way any man not setting himself up as a moral paragon would behave if he could figure out how to get away with it, or could bring himself not to care about getting away with it. This affected my politics in the sense that, especially living in the northeast, by high school I had determined that the attractive girls I might have the best chance of getting any attention from tended to be the super squishiest liberals, which in truth at the time did make the prospect of leaning in that direction more appealing, since these girls I am thinking of were actually pretty nice and reasonable and didn't tend to make blanket condemnations of men and Western civilization on principle the way everybody seems to now (though judging by their social media presences some of them have definitely moved with the times in this regard).


3. The Berlin Wall falling. This was easily the most exciting political development at the time it happened that I can remember. In that fall of 1989 I was out of high school but not yet in a  college, total social isolation, misery, etc, and I remember being riveted by all of the people around my age who were shown celebrating and so on in the countries where this transition took place peacefully and being more convinced than ever that I was missing out on everything interesting that was going on in the world. This did end up being an event of no small significance in my own history since I did go to Prague about six years after that for a year or so, and while everyone assured me that already by that time it had been completely transformed from what it had been prior to 1989, I am sure life there has changed a great deal more than that since I left in 1997, since besides the changes in technology and the acceleration of the movement of peoples, a whole generation has grown up that has no direct experience of nor to the same extent the ingrained habits and worldview of the Communist era. How this influenced my politics is hard to pinpoint, but certainly the bewildering direction that the world has gone in following the collapse of the Soviet Empire has not been anything like the future I anticipated, most of all culturally, I suppose. I am well aware that change and innovation and the possibilities unleashed by the aforementioned new technologies and cultural cross-fertilizations have been invigorating for most people, but these have tended to leave me disappointed and unfulfilled in my search for meaning as an adult in this world.


4. My college, at the time I went there anyway, was pretty non-political, and if anything being any kind of fanatical partisan was discouraged. A vending machine selling The Washington Post had been installed in the coffee shop within a couple of years of my matriculation, and this had been attended with some controversy apparently as introducing worldliness and contemporaneity where it was generally considered neither necessary nor desirable. This was in 1990. The idea I took away from all of this was not that one should not have sophisticated political views to the extent that that was possible so much as that attaching oneself exclusively to a particular faction or viewpoint made it unlikely that any such nuanced understanding could possibly come about.


5. The Internet and the Iraq War. The negative effects of the Internet on the politics and general psychology of modern man cannot be emphasized too strongly. One reason for this is doubtless the awareness of the amount of hatred so many people on all sides of the socio-political divides--including many of one's friends--apparently harbor towards those they consider their enemies, which I certainly was not aware of before the internet. The constant drama and grandstanding that internet platforms seem to inspire, with their tremendous outpourings of heat and limited quantities of light, is another development of my adult years that I have found discouraging and unsatisfying.


At the time it happened I regarded the rhetoric accompanying the Iraq War buildup, which I was convinced from the beginning by the bullying tone which its promoters adopted in pressing the issue on the public was nothing that the ordinary American citizen had any reason or obligation to support, as a defining test of the intellectual strength and courage of the portion of the population at that time, in which I then included myself, whose education and upbringing should have enabled them to effectively offer some opposition to this manner of governing and the naked, unabashedly enthusiastic pursuit of war at the very least. But there was a complete failure to do this, and to establish the existence of any capable movement or opposition that had to be engaged. The political discussion has only deteriorated since, which is in part why I am kind of numbed by the whole Trump debacle. I might have hated him and his supporters more vehemently if so many people were not hating them with impressive reserves of vitriol and contempt already. There is no need for my input when most of the people I come in contact with are dropping scorched earth denunciations on anyone who even appears to be thinking about trying to defend any isolated aspect of any Trump position, or supposed position. But we have gone over this and I want after 3 full weeks to get back to my movie reviews....

Going to do a Few Movie Posts Now

I'm still about 31 behind even though I haven't seen too many in the past few months. Needless to say I don't remember most of these very well now. I will do these accounts in a formulaic fashion and see if anything comes of them:


The Westerner (1940)


Director--William Wyler


Notable star(s) (to me; every character actor in old Hollywood has his own cult on the internet): Gary Cooper. Dana Andrews apparently had a small role in this but I don't remember him
.
Did I like it? Yes. I didn't love it, but it's a Golden Age Hollywood Western, it's William Wyler, I have been weaning myself away from so many old movies because they are too comforting so any time one comes up now it is a great treat.


What do I remember most about this? The bar at the saloon and the bedroom off of it which I believe they have to shoot themselves out of at one point.'


Associated in my mind with: The Gunfighter; Destry Rides Again.

That's Entertainment III (1994)


Director--Bud Friedgen and Michael J Sheridan


Notable Stars--Many fixtures of MGM musicals. A lot of Cyd Charisse, Lena Horne, Ann Miller, etc


Do I like it? Yes. As the third installment of reminiscences about the glory days of MGM, my impression is that That's Entertainment I and II covered most of the true watershed moments in the studio's history and that this one is mopping up with its coverage of the June Allyson era and other now lesser known films. I was (am) supposed to be seeing the first two compilations as well, but they haven't come up available in my Netflix queue yet (yes, I still get DVDs mailed to me), which is what I have been working off of exclusively for about a year now, with a long backlist of stuff, mostly old, that they don't have.


What do I remember most about this? It's got a decent amount of old Hollywood "movieness" about it if you are the kind of person who has romantic ideas about Grauman's Chinese Theater and Schwab's Drug Store. At the time that they made it in the 90s a lot of the old stars of the 40s and 50s were still alive and were able to be interviewed, almost, in fact probably all, of whom have since died.


Associated in my mind with--The Band Wagon; On the Town.

No one evoked Old Hollywood nostalgia like Tammy herself, Debbie Reynolds


For Love of Ivy (1968)


Director--Daniel Mann


Notable Stars--Sidney Poitier, Carroll O'Connor, Beau Bridges


Do I like it? I found some of it morbidly fascinating.


What do I remember most? Evokes what a weird time 1968 was as well as recalling what is now very much a lost world, one that I have some memories of though from my childhood. The white family makes its comfortable living by owning a suburban department store of a type that I do remember hanging on as late as the 70s at least. The repeated attempts of Beau Bridges and his sister (the young people) to talk to Sidney Poitier in some kind of jive is equal parts painful and bizarre, but it doesn't seem to be intended as particularly satirical and emphasizes how the average sheltered white person evidently had no idea how to go about talking to black people in any kind of regular way at that time. Lauri Peters, who plays the sister, did not go on to have much of a film career but her look, clothes, voice, etc, were quite striking to me in this as being a perfect 1968 suburban babe. I was quite taken with her. All of the period touches. The loud trucks, the gas guzzling cars, the pollution, the lounge lizard inspired basements, the New York skyline looking rather grimy and shabby in an orange-ish light. I have to confess, the romance between Sidney Poitier and Ivy, Carroll O'Connor's family's black maid, which is ostensibly the point of the movie, did not excite me that much.


Associated in my mind with--Diary of a Mad Housewife. It is similar in its unintentional late 60s-early 70s weirdness.

Yes, posting a picture of the white girl is too predictable, but this chick is such a quintessential 60s babe I could not resist.


I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932)


Director: Mervyn Leroy


Notable Stars: Paul Muni. A highly respected actor of the 30s, I think this is the first movie of his I've ever seen.


Do I like it? Yes, it's great.


What do I remember most? As I frequently note, classics from the 30s, particularly the early 30s, have the most extreme variation with me with regard to holding up across the years or communicating in a cultural idiom which has become completely incomprehensible. This is an example of the former, as the major themes in it, corruption and injustice in the legal system and the brutal indifference of the greater society, are equally pressing problems today. But even aside from this realism the tone and psychological approach to the material seem much more modern than what is usual in that time. It's an unnerving movie.


Associated in my mind with: The Bicycle Thief.

It's All True (1942--released 1993)


Director: Orson Welles, primarily


Notable Stars: Welles, I guess


Do I like it? It's an unfinished documentary. The footage is interesting.


What do I remember most? Not very much. It's Orson Welles set loose in Brazil with a camera. There is a carnival, old time South American beach scenes, fishermen. The impetus behind the movie was that it was going to contribute to the war effort, Brazil being one of the Allies. I'd like to see it in a theater. It is worth seeing, but at home I found it to be somewhat sleep-inducing.


Associated in my mind with: Mutiny on the Bounty, Cruise of the Zaca.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)


Director: Alexander Hall


Notable Stars: Claude Rains


Do I like it? I found it disappointing. Given the era in which it was made, the presence of Claude Rains, and its status as a classic, I was especially looking forward to seeing it, but I couldn't get into it.


What do I remember most? This disparate ingredients of it failed to coalesce for me. I never understood whatever it was I was supposed to be getting. Maybe I'm too eternally tired to do this anymore.


Associated in my mind with: Carousel

L'Argent (1983)


Director: Robert Bresson


Notable Stars: No one I am very familiar with.


Do I like it? Yes. This was the third time I have seen it. I did not get much out of it the first time, but on both the second and third viewings I have been able to appreciate more and more how good it is.


What do I remember most? Though not exactly what the movie is about, it is always great to see Paris in the early 1980s, which is very much the city I encountered when I first went there in 1990, and which I suspect is not very much at all the city that one encounters today. There was an excellent little extra on the Criterion DVD called "Bresson A to Z" which elaborates on a number of common themes in his work, as well as a lively Q & A session from Cannes. The darkness, for lack of a better word, since Bresson would probably argue that the truths portrayed in the movie are just truths that are morally ambiguous, weighs more on me with each viewing.


Associated in my mind with: Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), French in Action TV Show.

Top ___ Pitchers Who Used September to Get Hot Going Into the Playoffs--Something That Apparently Isn't Done Anymore

I wanted to do some kind of top ten list for this post, but I couldn't think of anything inspiring, such as my ten favorite opera houses, or ten favorite hotel bars in East Asia, that I had enough variety of experience of to make a decent list from, and at the moment doing another "10 favorite gas stations" or "10 favorite McDonald's" type of post strikes me as depressing. Then I pondered why oh why have I no imagination nor anything to say and this led me back to the eternal explanation that not having a proper profession, to say nothing of multiple awesome careers, has caused me to be this way, and I thought to do a list of "Top 10 professions besides writer/generic 1960s style academic that did not require an extraordinary amount of Talent" that I might have pursued, but after coming up with "demographer" and "director of a small obscure museum that receives 500 visitors a year" I was stumped by that topic too. So then I tried to think of anything that had caused me to be angry or had stirred any resemblance of passion in recent days, and I could only think of a handful of these (ed--I started this post before the national brouhaha of the Kavanaugh hearings, which I may or may not make some comment on, if it is still a burning issue when I get around to it), one of them being my rage at the increasing coercion used by companies to make you sign up to pay bills by automatic bank draft, which besides causing a certain amount of strain on people like myself who cannot always be certain of having adequate funds on hand on the exact date of these transmissions, also represents another maddening loss of any sense of control one has over one's life; and the other was concerned with the various infuriating (to me) trends with regard to the way pitchers are used in baseball, from 'bullpenning' (the use of a tag team of nondescript pitchers for 1-2 innings from the start of the game) to the ever shrinking number of pitches and innings and games that such regular starting pitchers as remain are allowed to throw. The arrogance and self-satisfaction exuded by the new generation of managers, GMs and baseball intellectuals that has promoted and adopted these methods I find harder to take than I should as well. I am writing about baseball a lot lately. It's probably one of my phases. Now that my children are interested in it I'm paying more attention to it/watching a lot more games, etc, than I have in some years, and these extreme changes in the role of pitchers is perhaps the most jarring development to me, though not the only one...

To begin with a little backstory. On September 20, 2017, Chris Sale, the ace pitcher of the Boston Red Sox, 1 strikeout shy of 300 for the season, after having pitched 7 shutout innings with a pitch count of around 100, was sent out for the 8th inning, ostensibly to reach that strikeout milestone, which he did, completing another scoreless inning in the process with a seemingly reasonable pitch total of 111, which was his final number for the game, as obviously he did not come out for the 9th inning. The Boston sports media and fan base were apoplectic about this unnecessary and highly incautious extra inning of work, concerned that with the team starting the playoffs in approximately two weeks, it was wearing out its best pitcher. After resting for five days, Sale appeared in one more regular season game, the sixth to last, throwing 5 innings and 92 pitches (and giving up 5 runs) in a loss to the Blue Jays, after which he took 8 days off before starting Game 1 of the Division series against the eventual World Series Champion Astros, in which game he got shelled, giving up 7 runs in 5 innings (and throwing 100 pitches). 3 days later he came out of the bullpen in an elimination game and pitched well for 4 innings but could not get through a 5th, giving up what turned out to be the two decisive runs that ended the Red Sox's season. The club's manager John Farrell was fired within days of the loss, and one of the dominant themes was his mishandling of Sale, burning out the pitcher due to overuse during the season, though until recently his total of 214 innings with a high single game pitch count of 118 (as well 29 innings over 5 starts in September) would have been considered a fairly light workload. This season, with a new manager and the team being on a 110-win pace for most of the year, the strategy for keeping the ace pitchers fresh for the playoffs has gone from not burning them out early in the season to basically having them take most of the 2nd half off. There are injuries involved, I suppose, but even so the extent of the precautions taken before putting Sale and David Price, the $45 million a year duo the Red Sox are counting on to lead them to the World Series, back on the field is at the point of being ludicrous. Sale has pitched a total of 17 innings since the end of July--12 in September. While the plan was for him to hopefully work his way back into something resembling mid-season form before the playoffs started, he gave up 5 runs in 8 innings in his last two starts and has not been able to complete 5 innings in a game since August. Price has been a little more active, though a season total of 176 innings is not overwhelming, especially for a guy on a seven year contract at $31 million per annum. He made 4 appearances in September for a total of 23 innings, and is not exactly entering the playoffs on the kind of roll baseball fans of a certain age were once accustomed to in anticipating the championship series(es?). With the roster expansion in September, most of the recent games have featured endless situational experimentations with an army of relievers and onetime starters to see who can come in and get an out with 2 on in the 4th inning or whose makeup is particularly suited to the 7th as opposed to the 6th. For me all of this inevitably calls to mind the days when September was the month when the pitchers of the year were not leveling off or winding down but were rolling along like locomotives at high speed barreling towards the playoffs, or at least the Cy Young Award. Just recalling a few that especially stand out:

Orel Hershiser--1988


This is perhaps the ne plus ultra example of a pitcher who went on an unstoppable tear at the end of the season and all the way through the playoffs and the World Series. At the time Hershiser was regarded as having pretty much carried his otherwise underwhelming team to an improbable championship, though I am not sure that the new analysis would acknowledge that it was possible for a single pitcher to have that outsized of an impact. Certainly no one appears to regard this as a formula for postseason success in 2018, though the Giants pulled something of the sort off (riding a hot pitcher to the title) with Madison Bumgardner as recently as 2014.


At any rate, going into his start on August 19, 1988, according to Baseball-Reference, Orel Hershiser, already established for several seasons as one of the better pitchers in the National League, was, using the archaic statistics, 16-7 with a 3.06 ERA and had thrown to that point 185 innings. He threw complete games in each of his 3 remaining starts in August, including one shutout, though one of the other games was a 2-1 loss to the Mets. Moving into September, with his team driving towards the division championship, Hershiser made six starts, throwing 9-inning shutouts in the first five, and in his final tune-up for the playoffs, throwing 10 scoreless innings in a no-decision. That 10th inning in the last game famously allowed him to break Don Drysdale's record of consecutive scoreless innings with 59, a situation analogous to that of Chris Sale's "extra inning" to get his 300th strikeout in 2017. Naturally there was no controversy, that I can remember anyway, at the time with Hershiser pitching 10 innings in a meaningless game a week before the playoffs in a month and a season in which he had pitched 54 and 266 innings respectively already. By this point much was expected of him. There is pitch count data available for these games and the totals are actually quite reasonable, regardless of whether anyone was paying attention to them or not. In the 6 September starts the numbers were 109, 109, 103, 96, 112 and 116 (the 10 inning game), though even these modest totals are more than what almost anyone would be allowed to reach today, at least over a six game span in the course of a single month. For what it's worth his high pitch game for the year was 153 in a complete game loss on June 4, but his 2nd highest was 127, and he only had over 120 pitches in 3 of his 34 starts, in spite of which he managed to throw 15 complete games, 13 of them accomplished in 118 pitches or fewer.

As many will recall, he was so exhausted by this historic run that he went on to be the MVP of both the League Championship and World Series. Until Game 7, in which he pitched another shutout, his LCS performance was more heroic than impeccable. He started off by throwing 8 more shutout innings to open Game 1, but then the unthinkable happened in the ninth and he gave up 2 runs and ultimately the game (though his final pitch count was a still impressive 100). After a rainout pushed Game 3 in New York back a day, he came back to start that one and pitched 7 gritty innings in what I remember as a gray, windy, chilly afternoon though the Dodgers went on to lose that game as well. He then came out of the bullpen to get the final out in a very dramatic Game 4, which the team was believed to have found inspiring, before winning the aforementioned 7th game, for which no pitch count seems to be available. In the World Series he threw another shutout in game 2 (no pitch count), and threw a 4-hitter, 2 runs allowed, in the clincher in Game 5 (117 pitches).


He came back to have another fine year in 1989, posting a 2.31 ERA in 256 innings, his sixth straight outstanding year. However in the final game of that season, which was completely meaningless as the Dodgers finished well out of the playoff race, he was allowed to throw 11 innings and 169 pitches. He consequently missed most of the 1990 and 1991 seasons with an injured shoulder and when he came back he was never as good as he had been in his prime, though he did have eight more seasons as a more or less full time pitcher, until he was 40.


Mike Scott--1986


What I remember about this year offhand is that Mike Scott, after being something a bust after coming up with the Mets, went to Houston and salvaged his career, having a nice 18-8 season in 1985 before exploding as a dominant pitcher in 1986, racking up 300 strikeouts and eventually the Cy Young Award. He culminated the regular season by throwing a no-hitter in the Astros' division-clinching game, after which he pulverized the 108-win (and eventual World Champion) Mets with a 14 strikeout 5-hit 1-0 shutout in Game 1 of the NLCS (125 pitches), followed up by a 3-hitter in a 3-1 victory in game 4 (111 pitches). The Mets, desperate, so the storyline went, to avoid facing Scott again in Game 7, outlasted Houston in 16 innings in an epic Game 6 to win the Series 4 games to 2. How was his September leading up to this memorable postseason, I wonder? 6 starts, 4-1 record, 46.1 innings, 11 runs, 65 strikeouts, only 2 complete games though, including the no-hitter. Scott would go on to have three more very good seasons before his arm gave out (and by the way, it isn't like people's arms are still not giving out, and after a lot less work and accomplishment, despite being protected more than ever).

John Tudor--1985


John Tudor's incredible 1985 season has always been somewhat underappreciated, due to being overshadowed by Dwight Gooden's even more incredible season in the same division, and also because he unfortunately melted down badly in Game 7 of the World Series, a game which, if he had won, might have elevated his season to at least quasi-legendary status. I have very vivid memories of this season. I grew up as a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies, and this was the last full year when I lived in Philadelphia and really followed the season. The Cardinals and Mets were of course in the same division and had an outstanding pennant race that year, and while the Phillies finished far behind them they played both teams 18 times, and while I did not like either of their superior rivals at the time, they were both compelling teams with lots of stars, and I would often watch them when they weren't playing the Phillies on the national Game of the Week or on WOR-TV in New York, the Mets' flagship station, which we got on cable (this was my big lonely teenager year when I also began reading a lot). John Tudor started out that year at 1-7, but he ended it on a 20-1 run, and threw 10 shutouts, remaining to this day the last pitcher to attain that feat. I am aware of how much we are supposed to disdain "wins" for pitchers nowadays, and while this does make sense in terms of assessing players and handing out contracts, there is still the circumstance that the ultimate object of all this assessing is to actually win games and championships, so I am still galvanized by these kinds of streaks.

From September 1 until the end of the 1985 regular season, which ended on October 6th that year, John Tudor made 8 starts, in which he pitched 67 innings, surrendering 10 runs. His record in those games was 6-0. He threw 5 complete games and 4 shutouts, one of them a 10-inning shutout. In one of the no-decisions, he threw another 10 scoreless innings, which would have given him an 11th shutout for the season. He made his final start of the season on 3 days rest following the 10 inning no-decision and threw a 4-hitter against the Cubs. In the NLCS he did lose Game 1, again on 3 days rest, giving up 4 runs in 5 2/3 innings, but rebounded to pitch 7 innings in a 12-2 win in game 4. In the World Series he was the winning pitcher in Game 1 (6 2/3 innings, 101 pitches--I am surprised he was lifted so early) and Game 4 (shutout-108 pitches), before losing in Game 7. He went on to pitch 5 more seasons with pretty good numbers, though he would only reach 200 innings in one more season (1986). He went 12-4 with a 2.40 ERA in 146 innings in 1990 and called it a career.


Where pitch count data is available, it does seem to indicate that it was much easier and common to complete nine innings in fewer than 125 pitches in the past than it is now, at least in the National League.


Steve Carlton--1980, 1982, 1983


I choose these three seasons because, besides all of them involving pennant races, the Phillies being my team I have distinct memories of how they unfolded. One note of interest about Carlton's 1980 campaign is that is the last time anybody pitched over 300 innings in the regular season. This was not recognized at the time as any particularly notable feat, since many pitchers had thrown over 300 innings throughout the 1970s (Carlton himself had a high of 346 in 1972). If the Phillies had not clinched the division in the 2nd to last game of the season Carlton was due to start in the finale as well and would have thrown even more innings that year. As it was he made 8 starts from September 1st on, 5 of them on three days rest, going 4-2, pitching 66 innings, allowing 19 earned runs, with 3 complete games and 1 shutout, and a 4th game in which he pitched 9 innings in a game that went into the 10th. Pitch count data is not available though I suspect his numbers were often high. Carlton had what was considered at the time an extreme training regimen which included moving his arm around in a vat of rice and was widely thought by coaches and the media, at least publicly, to be indefatigable. The idea that he might ever have gotten tired on the mound was evidently inconceivable, since it was never brought up and never seems to have influenced the way managers handled him. He was good, but not dominant in the playoffs, going 3-0 and pitching 7, 5.1, 8 and 7 innings in 4 starts, with relatively reasonable pitch counts of 106, 97, 159 (OK) and 110 respectively.

In 1982 the Phillies ended up 3 games behind the Cardinals and missed the playoffs but Carlton, who as late as August was not one of the frontrunners for the Cy Young Award, went on a late season tear that year and ended up winning it pretty convincingly. He made 8 starts in September, the last 5 on 3 days rest to maximize his appearances, something that a manager might get shot for attempting to do now, going 6-2 with 5 complete games, 2 shutouts, 64 innings pitched and 13 runs allowed, and 75 strikeouts. In 1983 he finished with a record of 15-16 and that season is often remembered as the beginning of the end for him, and in a sense it was, however he did have 275 strikeouts and finished with an identical ERA to that of the Cy Young season the year before. In my memory a lot of those losses that year came late in games where he had been very strong through 7 innings and faded in the 8th or 9th. He only made 6 starts in September that year and did not complete any of them, going 3-2 with 43.1 innings and 46 strikeouts, but 20 runs allowed. He pitched very well in the LCS that year, allowing 1 run over 13.2 innings in 2 victories (pitch counts 100 and 110), and was decent in his only World Series start, a losing effort in which he lasted 6.2 innings and allowed 3 runs, throwing 107 pitches.


Curt Schilling--2001


Trying to think of a somewhat more recent example. Curt Schilling made 6 outstanding starts in the expanded 21st century playoffs, totaling 48.1 innings, which combined with his regular season work actually put him over 300 for the season. He did take 12 days off between starts in early and mid September that year but still managed to appear 5 times in the final month of the season, going 8 innings in 4 of those games as he tuned up for the post-season. He then threw complete games in his first 3 playoff starts, with pitch counts of 101, 121 and 127, followed by three starts in the World Series of 7, 7 and 7.1 with pitch totals of 102, 88 and 103, though you see by this that managers were already being more careful even with ace starters, at least on short rest.

Bob Gibson--1968


Of course it's a completely different era, and I was not even born yet, but this is one of this most legendary seasons of this type of all time. After having dominated the World Series in 1967 and racking up a 1.12 ERA and 13 shutouts in the 1968 season as his Cardinals rolled to another easy pennant, Gibson loomed like a colossus over the impending Fall Classic that year, famously the last one before the introduction of divisions and preliminary playoff series. The Cardinals effectively knew by August that they would be playing for the championship, but Gibson did not exactly shut it down to rest up for the big event. For the season he would make 34 starts and throw a complete game in 28 of them. After going 7 innings in his 1st 2 starts he would pitch at least 8 in every single start afterwards. Between May 28 and September 2 he completed 19 out of 20 starts, pitching 11 innings in the one game he was not able to finish. After his 10 inning shutout on September 2nd, his ERA actually dropped to 0.99 for the season. But he would be comparatively roughed up in September, giving up 9 runs in 52 innings over 6 starts (1.56 ERA), 5 of them complete games. In the World Series he was famously matched up in games 1 and 4 against 31-game winner Denny McLain of the Tigers and while the sabermeticians probably have a more nuanced take on the dynamic, the impression made at the time was that the intimidating Gibson personally humiliated McLain in those contests, striking out 17 hitters in a 4-0 shutout in Game 1 in which McLain bowed out after 5 innings, and whiffing 10 more in a 10-1 massacre in Game 4 in which Gibson also hit a home run, though that was not off McLain, who only lasted 2.2 innings. Of course Gibson would just as famously meet his Waterloo in a duel in Game 7 against the supposedly more game and pugnacious Mickey Lolich, when the Tigers broke through for three runs in the 8th inning to break a scoreless tie and stun the seemingly invincible Gibson, who would never return to the World Series though he did have several more fantastic seasons as a pitcher.

What is the point of all this, you ask? Well, I like the stories that the old set-up of baseball could produce, and I like seeing superstar pitchers pitch and pitch to the point that they actually decide games and pennants and championships, and the modern game is not giving me what I like (I also like the old simplified playoff system and pennant races. I can easily remember who made the playoffs and the World Series in every season from 1903 until the expansion in the mid-90s, but since then I generally I have no idea who played whom and who had the best record in the season or anything); so I have to look back to the past to feel even a little fulfilled.

Notes on Current Events

The most recent mass emotional trauma to convulse the internet was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fiasco. I wasn't going to offer any commentary on it because I am not intensely invested in the political aspect of the matter on either side, and everyone has already weighed in on it at great length, though without saying anything that is novel or interesting to me at this time in my life. In addition, given my life experience, or lack thereof, and position in society, I wasn't able to regard the controversy and all of the feminine rage being expressed as having anything to do with me. However while the immediate fervor of the days during the process has died down, it engulfed so much of the professional/college graduate social media conversation for several weeks and continues to influence it, that I thought I should try to make some note of my impressions in the case.


I have written several times that the idea of a Supreme Court made up of partisans whose opinions on cases will be predictable 90% or more of the time based on political leaning does not make any sense to me. The point of having it is not supposed to be merely to produce desired outcomes for one party or another but to subject legal questions and disputes to wise and considered judgment producing at times unexpected insights and decisions. This seems obvious, but this is not how the more energetic partisans who drive political discourse think about it at all.


Now the mid-term elections are approaching and I am least am being bombarded at all hours of the day with dire warnings that the Republicans must be defeated at all costs or unimaginably terrible things, evidently far worse even than the hell most people are already living in, are going to befall the country. I don't disbelieve this, and I certainly wish that Donald Trump were not the president. I did not vote for him, and even if the Democratic candidate in 2020 were to make skinning straight white men alive one of the campaign planks my conscience as currently manipulated would still probably demand that I vote for a third party candidate so as not to be 100% complicit in the dreadful consequences for everyone else that will doubtless follow upon a Trump re-election. The problem with all this of course is that for all Trump's awfulness the result that defeating him and his party will bring at present is the ascension to power of a Democratic coalition that appears to be out of its mind, and so hell-bent on revenging and punishing anybody who might fit the profile of a Trump supporter, that this prospect is actually more disheartening to me than even Trump is. Trump is one person who supposedly is not very organized, does not know what he is doing, and is hated by everyone who is either competent or important. This is admittedly disturbing but he will likely be gone in ten years and I doubt given the massive amount of opposition to him among powerful interests that he will be able to abolish the constitution and establish some kind of dictatorship. If anything his enemies seem almost equally likely to do this in the name of preventing someone like Trump from ever being elected again.


Kavanaugh himself seems like somebody I would probably not like if I knew him. I am not sure if jealous would be the exact word to describe the real nature of the feelings I had towards him apart from whatever popularity he had with girls, which seems like it may not have been as high as what it would have appeared to be from such a vantage as I would have had as a youth. It would have been nice to have grown up with a little more wealth and with a somewhat clearer vision of how to successfully embark on a career more in keeping with my self-perception but I got to go to pretty good schools and I was probably even handsome enough to have achieved most of my fairly modest social dreams if I had had any personality at all. I have no idea whether he is "qualified" to sit on the Supreme Court or not. The only Supreme Court Justice I have any personal experience with is David Souter, who lives near me and whom I have run across a couple of times and had occasion to speak to and to hear speak just in passing. My fleeting impression in these instances was that even in the casual exchange he spoke a very clear, precise English, with excellent diction, "proper words in proper places" such as I at least have not heard in the past twenty years. My wife and her family speak in a clipped, direct 1920s-1940s-ish idiom that when they are on is delightful as well, but the polish and fineness of Souter's speech is quite striking to come upon in one's day to day life. This may well have nothing to do with qualifications either, but it informs my idea of what a Court justice ought to sound like. I have also known a number of people over the years who went to public high school with him, and there does not appear to have been so much as a hint of scandalous, Kavanaugh-esque behavior attaching to that part of his life. Indeed to make the suggestion among people who knew him at that age generally elicits a laugh, so far-fetched apparently is the mere idea of such a thing.


But, (apart from partisan politics generally), the question hovering over this whole controversy was,  how seriously do you take the problem of sexual misconduct/criminality, and how angry are you about it? the correct answers to which of course are, Extremely seriously, and, I am furious about it, so much so that I cannot tolerate that any plausible suggestion of an instance of its having taken place at any time in the past should not have some serious consequences. Naturally I lack the full intensity of rage and enthusiasm for retribution that the times call for. Given the disparity between the number of alleged rapes and sexual assaults (and the fury these arouse) and the official police statistics on these crimes (which indicate that perpetrators can get away with their villainy 99% or more of the time in some jurisdictions), it would seem that either the legal system as a whole needs to revamp the entire way that these offenses are defined and prosecuted to satisfy the activist left and, if not send men to prison in enormous numbers, at least bar them from holding any kinds of lucrative or influential employment (what other retribution can there be?), or eventually the rhetoric and hysteria are going to lose a lot of their power, if they aren't already. I, and doubtless many other men, have long passed the point where the most obvious means of self-preservation from this ongoing crisis, for college women at least is, "how about not going to these damn frat-type parties?" But given the response any time this is suggested, one must come to the conclusion that the men at these events who are getting girls to do shots with them and go to their bedrooms at 2 in the morning--something that the overwhelming majority of men never experience--where they proceed to behave too aggressively and take things too far, are comparatively just too desirable and high status for this to be realistically considered. The object I suppose is to train these highly sought after men to behave better, or more in line at least with what the women are looking for, but what incentive is there for these guys, the absolute pick of the litter in their social worlds, to change their behavior when it has given them everything most normal boys would like to have whether they admit it or not, has done so pretty much forever, and continues to do so even in these supposedly more enlightened times. People complain that they are entitled. Well of course they are entitled. What does anybody imagine these kinds of parties are for? Why do people think that young men endure the ridiculous rituals they endure, such as drinking other people's vomit and eating grapes out of  another guy's bunghole, to get admitted to exclusive fraternities and other social clubs, for the opportunity to perform community service at a higher level? Of course not, they want access to good career prospects and to the most desirable women, that other (usually lesser) men pointedly do not have, and will never have, which is, while not a violent matter, a pretty serious one to many in the latter group as far as certain of their ultimate life prospects are concerned.


None of this, I will be told, is to the point, but unfortunately I cannot see how this is not at all times a substantial part of the point. The bad behavior, though I believe (primarily based on reading novels and memoirs from the 1960s and 70s, mainly by morally oblivious men) it to be less prevalent overall in current society, continues generation after generation among a subset of the population because for the most part it is from the male point of view rewarded by young women as far as attaining its objects goes. The movement over the past few decades to put some restraint on heterosexual male entitlement, ego, conduct, and in much of the population their comparative power and wealth, has been quite successful but I have got to think it may be approaching its reasonable limits. I am, I think, in my behavior pretty much the model of an inoffensive person and causing anybody trauma is the last thing I would want to do but still, as I get older and can see the end of the active part of my life at least in increasingly clear sight, the main regrets that I have are not having been able to more aggressively (though not violently or criminally) go after things, experiences, relationships that I would have liked to pursue. It's a big hole in my life and to have done it would have required risk, which people ultimately demand of you before giving you any respect anyway, and likely would have involved being offensive in some way to somebody. There are built-in conflicts to life, and certainly to most forms of masculine ambition, which if you forego in youth has the tendency to wither you before your time. I don't know how many more generations full of men with no role or positive expectations to fulfill, and consequently no fire or talent for living we can seriously expect to endure.


Yes, I know, this still has nothing to do with the topic in question, the women that Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted 35 years ago and whether this should have disqualified him from sitting on the court. If the accounts were true, given today's environment, and the circumstance that he does not appear to be regarded as such a superlative legal genius that there might be cause to overlook some (quibbles?--there is another word I am looking for here but I cannot think of it. I cannot remember words anymore), I would probably think it prudent to move on to someone else, though Donald Trump's own acknowledged behavior, to name but one example, seems to be considerably worse, and his followers don't care, or don't care very much, so why would he do that? But I don't have any cause to say whether they (the accounts) are true or not in the exact way and using the exact terminology which was used to recount them. So I wouldn't do it.

New Hampshire Girl of the Week

I don't usually do this sort of thing, and in the end I am not going to link to the page now, but the germ of this post came when I was doing one of my games where I do a search using random words looking for a place to go to lunch and a picture of a somewhat tough-looking but attractive woman, who is of a type that one frequently encounters in these parts, came up. So I clicked on the story and, sure enough, she lived about twenty miles from me in one of the lake towns that I end up in once a month or so. As it happened, she was being featured on a site that was mocking people for having frivolous GoFundMe campaigns. While this aspect was more sad than anything else, I was drawn in by the extensive documentation of how her life, and the lives of seemingly everyone she associated with, were such absolute train wrecks. Children by multiple fathers, drug arrests, domestic violence arrests, rehab, no one having a job, social workers taking the children away, etc, etc. This is not atypical of a large swathe of the population in many of the towns around here, though they are not, or at least don't seem to me to be, as hopelessly dreary and depressing as the hollowed out towns of the rust belt. They are minor tourist centers and have a lot of vacation homes, though I suppose the year round local population is a little underprivileged; still I do not feel uncomfortable or even particularly out of place going to most places in these towns. Perhaps it is further evidence of how my own expectations for myself, and my conception of the world that I personally inhabit, continue to shrink and shrink. I checked out a travel book on Chicago from the library last week, one of those Insight Guides with glossy bright pictures on every page, not merely of the sights, but of the paneled lobbies of impossibly expensive hotels, the sleek dining rooms of trendy restaurants, and gorgeous retro bars in renovated packing houses. But when am I ever going to have a week, or even four or five days, to go to Chicago and do any of these things? And that is just Chicago, not Spain or Berlin, or heaven forfend, Singapore or Tokyo or Nairobi or Dubai. Within a few years I'll probably be grateful if I can still go to the coastline that's a hour away a couple of times a year.


New Hampshire was featured recently (at the time I started writing this, which was about a month ago) in a New York Times article that got some attention about how the state, or some of its business leaders anyway, are seeking to attract more diverse people--evidently a lot more--to move here, mainly for the sake of the economy, of course, which, while not currently that bad by many measures--highest household income in the country, lowest poverty rate, 2% unemployment, etc--is facing some demographic problems in the coming years, and, perhaps more pressingly does not as currently constituted appear to allow as many opportunities for the ongoing accumulation of the kinds of massive fortunes that are available in other places. Naturally several people here have already commented on this article on various internet platforms, and a few have already gotten in trouble for it, so perhaps it is not really worthwhile for me, with my readership of eight people, or maybe 8 robots for that matter, to risk writing anything that is not in the correct spirit and be exiled to what a commenter on another site referred to as "the gulag of low-wage employment". But seeing as I do not actually have an agenda to push either of my own or on behalf of someone else, what would be the point of just reiterating all of the points on either the good or evil side of the issue that everyone is expected to reiterate once they have established which side they have chosen to be on? I have never persuaded anyone to do anything that I am aware of in the whole of my life, so what is going to happen is largely going to happen in spite of anything I say or do.

In the first place it is inevitable short of dramatic and unpalatable measures that I don't foresee happening that the state is going to grow somewhat more diverse in the coming years. It can scarcely grow less diverse, and there aren't enough younger white people either among the current population or in the pool of potential migrants to replace the older people, almost all of whom are white, who are going to pass on in the next twenty years. To what extent this happens, or how noticeable it is going to be, remains to be seen, obviously. I was surprised to read in one of the local newspapers commenting on the New York Times piece that in the school systems in Manchester and Nashua already something like 45% of the students are minorities. I don't have much occasion to go to Nashua, but I am in Manchester a couple of times a month and as an adult at least I don't get much sense of the presence, yet, of a minority or immigrant population anywhere close to this size, and the character of the city still seems much like it has always been, though admittedly trending older.

As is usual in these kinds of articles, the talent conundrum/shortage that hangs over every discussion involving professional politicians and business interests rears its head. In some ways New Hampshire perhaps would seem to be comparatively well-positioned in the global battle for talent and human capital, apart I suppose from having insufficient numbers, especially of younger people. The violent crime rate I believe is now the lowest of any state and its school test scores are usually in the top three in the country; if it were an independent nation it would rank in the top tier of countries I think, just behind the usual east Asian states and Finland. Of course I have learned over the years that when politicians and businessmen talk about attracting Talent they have something much more spectacular in mind than generally functional Americans of perhaps slightly above the middle rank (such as myself and my children). As with all classes of people who are highly coveted, whether by schools, cities, professions, businesses seeking customers, for the purposes either of increasing/maintaining their wealth/status, or more pitifully, as a desperate ploy for survival, there are not close to being enough of these desired souls to support more than a handful of these communities, since the best sorts tend to like to cluster together in superplaces. I don't pretend to know how competitive New Hampshire can be in this game. I suspect ultimately not very. As a place to live year round, the weather is very rough. I don't mind it, except for March and sometimes April, which psychologically wear on one, and autumn, while beautiful, is effectively over by October 20, which is a bit early--I grew up in the Mid-Atlantic, where Halloween occurs at the height of the beautiful crisp fall weather, but here it is often decidedly cold, not to mention black dark by 5 in the afternoon. The weather in Boston is admittedly dreary as well (which most of the Talent that has had to relocate there complains about endlessly), but it is even worse, or at least colder, here, and the well-known cultural and historic reasons that make Boston an important city do not seem to apply either.


One of the people interviewed for the New York Times article was a social worker who seemed to be advocating for an increase in immigrants who were likely to require a lot of services, improved public transportation options, affordable housing, and the like. Aside from racial issues this in itself would be a major cultural departure for New Hampshire, which even today is less than keen on levying taxes or funding schools or parks or providing services beyond the minimal amount required to maintain a functioning state. It is only within the last few years that we have gotten garbage pick up in my town--before that we had to haul all of our trash and recycling to the city dump ourselves--and even for that we have to put all of the garbage in special bags that cost $2.50 apiece or they won't take them. All of this stinginess heretofore has had the effect of not making the state particularly attractive to needy people. While of course there are a decent number of needy people who are homegrown they really do not overwhelm the schools, hospitals, prisons, etc compared to other places in this country. Whenever I return to my home state of Pennsylvania nowadays, especially when you get out of the nicer parts of the Philadelphia metro area, the roads and towns are increasingly reminiscent of Russia rather than the heartland of industrial age America. It is very sad, for me. It is frequently emphasized in the media that in many of these hollowed out and depopulating towns immigrants are propping up whatever is left in them that bears a resemblance to life, which is fine, though somewhat misleading, as Reading, Hazelton, Wilkes-Barre and their ilk are obviously not the kinds of places that people who are at all educated, or even imagine themselves to be educated, would consider acceptable to live in, being full of residents who are by middle class standards shockingly poor, have shockingly low test scores and employment prospects, and have astoundingly high rates of incarceration among their citizenry. And seemingly more and more of America is becoming like this, with seemingly little prospect of imminent improvement. But perhaps this impression is wrong, and they are not really very different from where I live, which I regard as still somewhat pleasant, generally functional, not yet impossibly expensive and that still has some degree of civic spirit, if not comparative to the 1940s and 50s then at least to similar sized cities in the present day. Perhaps these other formerly, or presently, All-American type cities have not fallen into this dismal state, or perhaps ours has but I have not even realized it because I am not fixated on the right things. Perhaps these changes are inevitable like they say, and they will be more wonderful than anything I could ever have imagined, though I still feel the urge to try to impress on my children that if you have been gifted with any degree of brains, you have got more than ever to make sure you develop them enough to give yourself a life that is tolerable to you, and not live perpetually in an atmosphere of squalor, hopelessness and intellectual torpor, because regardless of all the optimism and cheerleading, there is clearly a lot of that all over the place, and the means of escaping from the totality of it seem to have become more difficult than it used to be. I don't think the children grasp what I am saying at all though, and maybe that is for the good.

State of Baseball

I watched the baseball all-star game last week (ed--now two weeks ago) for the first time since probably the mid-1980s with two of my four sons. One of them, the nine year old, can I think be called at present an obsessive of the sport. The other one, who is 16, had not to my knowledge shown much interest in it until the last year or so, when he began to watch Red Sox games, and during the All-Star game he surprised me with his familiarity with players, statistics, trade rumors and the like, my surprise being both because he rarely gives any hints as to any interests he has in anything, and also because fifteen/sixteen seems to me an unusual age to become interested in baseball; if anything it seems a likely age in most cases for interest to decline, as most boys who are not relatively good at it will stop playing around this time, and things like the collecting of baseball cards, if that is even still something children do, will have tailed off even a few years before that. I would love to know why this is happening and in what his attachment, such as it is, consists, but I cannot make it out at all at this point and no useful hints have been forthcoming, as yet. One of my other sons, who is fourteen, still plays on a team, or at least he did this year, which the older one does not. He does not show much interest in following the professional leagues or watching games on TV however, unless there is an accompanying spread of snacks involved.


I make note of all this because one of the great themes of the week leading up to the game in the media was about how baseball as a sport is in grave decline with regard to its popularity and social relevance, particularly among young people, with many commentators opining on what ought to be done about it, or not done about it, in the case of those who were indifferent to or openly took glee in the prospect of the sport's further descent. Of course relative to the stature it once had, baseball has been dying for my entire life, though as a corporate enterprise it continues to grow ever larger, more complicated and expensive and presumably richer than the version of it that existed in the 1970s, let alone the 1950s or 1920s. But as with so many other things in my lifetime, this comparatively massive growth in revenue, attendance, media coverage (which is exponentially more ubiquitous than anything that existed in 1979) is experienced as not adequate, and certainly not seen as appealing to the right people in the culture, on social media and so forth.

There is a common joke that baseball fans all think the game was most ideal in the state it was when they were 12 and that it can never improve from what it was at that time. There is probably some truth in this, as I cannot think of anything about the experience of a baseball game in 2018 that I like better than that of a game in 1982--even granting that the newer "retro" stadiums that have been built are generally more attractive than the concrete astroturf bowls that predominated in my youth, most of them (the new ones) have an odd sterility of their own and aren't able to move me much. But I was an old fogey even as a kid. My cherished season that I have a memory of was when I was nine, the rather dingy campaign of 1979 (this or 1977 is probably my favorite remembered year for football also), but I regretted having missed the pre-1969 era of the classic (and really old) stadiums, before the leagues broke into divisions and World Series games were played in the afternoon. But at least I got to grow up with a Wrigley Field that still didn't have lights and pitchers who still occasionally (and some who frequently) pitched nine inning games and 250-280 inning seasons. The more obvious changes--more divisions, more playoff teams, interleague play, the micromanaging of games and pitchers, the tyranny of advanced micro-statistics--you can imagine how much I care for all of that. And then because everyone nowadays is trained to be constantly identifying ways to improve/change/disrupt everything that exists everyone has endless ideas about what baseball should do to become more dynamic in a social media/tomorrow world. I assume eventually the game will adopt to this environment in a way more or less organic to what it already is, as it has been adapting to cultural and technological changes (for the most part) since the 1840s, slowly, awkwardly, and never forward-looking or revolutionary enough for the cool people, the one possible exception perhaps being the Babe Ruth-led home run explosion of the 20s when baseball was in step to some degree with the media and cultural developments of the Jazz Age.


As far as I can discern, the main complaint which has the commentariat, or at least the hipper part of it calling for change, is that baseball has no significant following among younger demographics, particularly among minorities, and especially among black Americans, who seem to be regarded by baseball people as the most necessary segment for restoring to the game any cultural dynamism it might hope to have. The sport's being full of Hispanic stars along all points of the racial spectrum and a considerably bigger Asian presence than any of the other major sports evidently doesn't translate into the kind of excitement, buzz, what have you that is sought. Any black American player who projects as a possible star and appears to be "cool" is inevitably described as 'what the sport desperately needs', and while I do agree that modern day baseball would be enhanced by some more good black players, the way that the desire for this is expressed is so unattractive and smacking of, well, desperation, that it is probably only further driving potential black players and fans away from baseball.




I think I have written before that in general I don't like the new generation of sports announcers. There is for me too much emphasis on analysis that is not interesting, or is not presented in an interesting way. I was a fan of Bill James's books back in the 80s and 90s because at the time they were a unique way of looking at statistics but also referred constantly to the traditional lore of baseball history and the common experiences of 1960s-70s fandom. Among today's announcers references to almost anything that happened in baseball before about the mid-60s, besides being rare, are usually treated as something of a joke, with no possible relevance or interest to the present. I don't know, if you watch snippets of games on Youtube from the 60s or 70s the announcers have a conversational style that is suited to the much bemoaned slow pace of the game (which is also not quite as slow as it is now) and that seems to have been lost. This may be a personal preference, but I like the idea of the radio or TV voice as a companion, and I don't desire a continuous barrage of marginally diverting information and minutiae. There are way too many ex-players now calling and commenting on games who are not particularly smart or funny and have not sufficiently weaned themselves from their identity as alpha male professional athletes to be able to cultivate an appealing conversational style the way that some of the announcers of my childhood like Richie Ashburn, Phil Rizzuto, Ralph Kiner, etc, were able to do (and they were Hall of Fame players!).

Perhaps this is true of all sports to some extent though especially in baseball the excitement of any single game, or instance within any single game, is largely dependent on its context related to many, many other games. Most of the celebrated moments in baseball history are related to records and milestones accumulated over the course of a long season, or even a two decade career, rare single game events such as  no-hitters or 4 home run games, playoff and World Series games of course that require some appreciation of the grind of the season and sometimes the course of many seasons to fully grasp the drama of. This is one reason among many that the end of the traditional pennant races with the realignment of the mid-90s and the introduction of 2nd place teams into the playoffs was so lamented by older fans, as great pennant races, which would usually occur only a handful of times in a decade, were one of the few sources of this kind of intense interest that is otherwise not a day in, day out feature of the sport. This is obviously all way too much to ask of the attention span of most modern young people.   


Normally I would worry about my children who do seem to like baseball being outliers in this regard within their own generation, though in New England the Red Sox remain pretty universally popular and my teenage son (I am told) may even have taken up following them as a means of connecting socially with the other boys in high school. The nine year old is actually quite a good player, and, somewhat uncharacteristic of our family, a very confident and unself-conscious one, so I doubt his interest in baseball will make him a social outcast.


The All Star Game itself, as a game, was predictably dull. The only one I can remember being any good was the 1979 game, which was pretty exciting. For one thing I think there were more stars back then. Even late in the game when the starters were out, guys like Pete Rose and Gary Carter were on the field, as well as a number of other players who were long established on good teams and far from anonymous. But I don't remember any other All-Star games that were particularly memorable.


My nine year old, for whom everything is still new, actually was excited about the home run derby and was disappointed when very few big name players took part in it. Perhaps it should not be a yearly event.


I will doubtless return to these themes at some point.

Some Very Brief Movie Reviews

I am still months behind on recording the movies I've seen, though for the time being at least I have largely stopped watching any new ones, maybe one or two a month. There are a myriad of reasons for this. 1) A genuine, if ridiculous, desire to come current with my reactions on the blog before it becomes impossible to catch up, if it hasn't already. 2) I tweaked my selection system so as to bring more recent movies on the list to balance the classics that I would probably be happy enough to watch exclusively. But as I generally don't like these newer movies as much even when objectively I suppose they are very good, I am not as dedicated to watching them in a timely matter. My interest in this particular project is also not what was a few years ago. And then 3) similar to the problem that has affected my reading, as I get older (and seemingly ever busier) I find I am too tired in the evening even to watch most movies to which one might desire to apply some thought. All of this has been steadily been pushing me away from regular movie watching over the past year. Nevertheless I still have an incredible thirty-five titles to comment on, seven of which I will take on here.




At First Sight (1999)


One thing I will say about this is that it was not as thoroughly terrible as I thought it was going to be. Of course it is pretty blah, but it does have Mira Sorvino in it, whom I guess I knew I liked, but I guess I liked her better than I knew. She's one of the actresses about my age who is supposed to be quite smart too, as in, has an actual high IQ, which is not an inconsiderate matter to me. The movie is set on the east coast, New York but also some of the towns in the Catskill/Hudson river area of a type that would be familiar to me, and there is some material for 90s nostalgia as well, my being the same age approximately as the characters in the movie and having somewhat experienced the already long lost world they inhabit, in what would have been some of the prime years of my life.


Mira Sorvino really was a cutie. Contrary to what it may appear from my writings, there aren't that many actresses whom I like enough to sit contentedly through an otherwise lame movie to see, but for the moment at least she seems to be one of them. She has been making something of a public comeback lately as a prominent voice denouncing Harvey Weinstein and Trump, and perhaps others as well, and it's great to see her again even when she is angry.

Laura (1944)

While the older movies I love have not been turning up on my lists much lately, if I go back this far there are still a few I have to write about. I don't have a lot to say about Laura, though I remember liking its style and language and its overall essence. As is often the case in old movies where murders or mysterious deaths are involved, I didn't think the central plot was very convincing, but I don't care that much. This is supposed to be the movie where Gene Tierney achieves her peak of beauty, which is saying something, for she was unusually renowned in that department. Dana Andrews, who appears frequently is movies around this time, was also in this. The director was Otto Preminger, and this seems more often than not to be considered the best movie of his very long, up-and-down, never quite great career. Probably one I should see again.

West Side Story (1961)

Classic of a sort though it undoubtedly is, I had never seen this before, and my expectations were muted, because it has not been written about very much in glowing terms by the know it all types for pretty much my entire life. So I was surprised at how much I was able to enjoy it. All of the songs I have known all my life without particularly liking any of them, but they all work and seem to sound much better within the context of the movie. There is a lot of good energy in this, and, as many commentators have acknowledged, the design, the costumes, titles, colors, etc are somewhat surprisingly spritzy. This is another one I would probably have to see again to get a sense of how good it really is; on this first viewing I was reacting against what I had anticipated, which was something much more dated and limp and middle American, which, despite its erstwhile popularity there, it really is not. The gang of switchblade wielding blond street thugs that is supposed to be terrorizing New York cannot come off now as anything other than absurd, of course. There's nothing to be done about that.

Footloose (1984)

Footloose was a big hit among mainstream younger people without a ton of exposure to anything more interesting when I was fourteen, and as I was naturally such a person, I do remember going to see it in the theater at the time. I didn't like it that much then compared to other things, not because my taste was so advanced as much as that I wasn't much interested in the main romantic strain in the plot--the female lead was rather gangly as well as crude, which I guess is not my type. Also being from east coast suburbia and not knowing anyone who could be considered remotely religious, the bible-thumping adults who were terrified by rock and roll and the idea of teenagers dancing in 1984 seemed a bit far-fetched. I also didn't particularly care for any of the songs at the time, though I didn't mind hearing them now, probably because despite quite a few of them having been pretty big hits, I hadn't heard most of them in decades, and I identify them, even more than other songs that came out at the same time that you still hear constantly, with that summer before my freshman year of high school, which is a time I remember fondly. You are all potential at that age, people have some hopes for you if you have anything going for you, even if you haven't had any notable success with girls yet it is not the existential crisis it becomes when you are eighteen, nineteen, twenty. But now I am getting away from the movie...

Around the time I saw this my wife and older sons were watching the TV show Stranger Things, which is set in 1984 and indulges heavily in 80s nostalgia even down to featuring Winona Ryder in a starring role. I watched a couple of episodes though I can't commit to watching entire 50-episode TV series at this time, and I did find some of the 80s vibe, I don't know the word I am looking for, not endearing, or comforting, exactly, but something in that vein. The town and the high school were reminiscent of the ones in Footloose and John Cougar Mellencamp type songs, though my own high school wasn't like that, or any other 1980s movie high school (it reminded me more of the high school in Grease than anything else, now that I think about it. It is supposedly 30% Muslim now, mainly Somali, so I suspect that vibe has changed). The nostalgia of Stranger Things I thought had a  strikingly and self-consciously white quality about it, even more than what is usually the case, which I thought internet critics would pick up on and rip to shreds, and a few did, but not that many. It struck me as unusually (for the present day) matter of fact and unconcerned with explaining or defending itself, which is kind of what stands out to the contemporary eye about the atmosphere of Footloose. Every single person in the movie is white, and no one is particularly conscious of this or thinks it is remarkable, which is how it really was in a lot of places even in the 80s. There was a remake of Footloose in 2011 with presumably some more up to date diversity which I don't remember hearing about at all though it seems to have made a modest profit.

Hyde Park on Hudson (2012)

I think this is what they call a small movie about Franklin Roosevelt's girlfriend and what is portrayed as the desperate visit of the King and Queen of England on the brink of World War II during which they have to submit to the humiliation of eating hot dogs. There were some things about it I liked. As anyone who reads this page knows I am a fan of this time in America, so I like all of the period touches, the cars, the clothes, the furnishings. Many of the well-known and happy songs of the time make an appearance in the soundtrack. Bill Murray's turn as F.D.R. I found to be a welcome departure from his usual post-Rushmore screen persona as the curmudgeonly old guy who turns out not in fact to be a complete jerk and can be counted to do the right thing in the end. I have long suspected that Bill Murray is conflicted in his feelings about social life and order at present similar to the way I am, and playing these kinds of roles where he can appear (for a time) to still retain some asshole-ish characteristics are the way he deals with this in his professional life. Not that he exactly hates people or loves the Trump movement--I actually have no idea whether he has expressed any position on the subject publically--but I get the feeling whenever I see him now that he must be thinking back on his more youthful days and finding contemporary life rather weak in comparison, while being aware that bringing back many, if not most of the circumstances that contributed to the raucousness of that earlier era are either impossible or unacceptable. So I find him, more than most other famous actors/personalities at least, to be a somewhat interesting man out of time type figure. I wonder if it was not a relief to him to play someone from the past.

The film's modern take on the late 1930s political situation has been negatively assessed in most of the online reviews I have looked at. I did not have any strong opinion of it at the time that I remember.

  

It's Alive (1974)

Horror films, which I have for the most part assiduously avoided up to this point in my life, have of late begun to creep onto my film lists, particularly with the new system. I did watch this, but I don't remember much of it, and it had no appeal for me. I have developed a taste as I've gotten older for the sexier Warren Beatty/Jack Nicholson type of classic 70s films and imagining that they reminded me of the world of my very early childhood. This movie, with presumably a bargain basement budget, depicts that time in its more hideous aspect, though more extremely grotesque fortunately than I have any memory of. But as I said, these kinds of pictures do not speak to me in my current stage of life.

No, this is not from the movie. It is from 1974 however.

The Other Sister (1999)

Has there ever been anyone who liked this? Everything about it projects horridness to anyone the least bit sentient. Artworks about mentally handicapped people as a rule I find to be tedious. This movie also throws in Diane Keaton (though she at least is not playing a mentally handicapped character), who was annoying to me in Woody Allen phase of her career, and whom I find unbearable in that part of it that came after. This is because she looks like my mother, is about the same age, and has almost identical annoying mannerisms, both facial and in her achingly non-vibrant movements. Then there is the extremely rich but eternally dissatisfied late-90s aging yuppie/baby boomer milieu...perhaps this was the imagined audience for this painful movie.

If there was any point of interest for me in this it was that much of it appears to have been filmed in San Francisco, a city about which I apparently know nothing--I haven't even seen many of the numerous classic movies set there--but the cityscapes they used in this make it look extremely attractive, or at least as it was in the 90s.

I can see myself at some point in the near future limiting myself to some kind of pre-1980 (maybe pre-1990 for foreign films) classic film program, in part because there are so many all-time great movies that I still haven't seen and I'm starting to get old, and in part because I don't like enough newer works, and haven't found a reliable system by which to pick those newer works that I might be more inclined to like.