Yup! And even in the "good old days" of 1918, people would mask for the influenza pandemic. A Google Image search of "1918 flu" pulls up dozens of pictures of widespread mask usage (with of course some asshats with their noses hanging out--there has never not been asshats).
I once chaperoned a middle school field trip to Harper's Ferry, WV, and part of it involved a cemetery data gathering like Paper mentions.
The kids were supposed to note if there was a cluster of deaths and speculate as to why, and it was my job as a chaperone to facilitate the discussion.
We noted that there were lots of headstones with 1918 as the recorded death date, and so I asked the kids what they thought caused so many deaths at the same time. I was expecting "flu" or "World War I" or both as an answer.
Harper's Ferry sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, and this confluence was visible to us as I remember. One boy looked at me, looked at the rivers below, turned back to me, and in all seriousness said,
Doh, too slow deleting and fixing my typo. I'd pay for a VP subscription with an edit function.
Yes, that's why I would favor moving the fences back and maybe having a livelier ball so homerun rates don't crater. Rewarding speed is fun for a lot of reasons. I'm fine with empirical testing of moving the mound in the minors.
Yup. I’ve spent too many ATPs thinking about solutions, and I can’t get past trading strikeouts for walks. I think reining in spin rates via sticky stuff bans may be helping a touch. But otherwise, how do you incentivize contact. Move fences back 20 feet or so and liven the ball? That might be fun.
My pair of suggestions is to increase the pitching distance, to lower perceived velocity, and to move back (where practical) and raise fences, to discourage home runs.
I hate weighing in here, but I'm American so I'm used to weighing in on topics I don't know much about. It seems to me that two things would work:
1. Seriously crack down on PEDs. Never gonna happen.
2. Deaden the baseball. Make it harder to hit it out.
Fences in most parks can't go back any farther than they are now, even if the distance is short. If the ball is changed, pitchers can still pitch from 60' 6", the strike zone can remain the same, and bases can remain 90 feet apart. Now, feel free to shoot holes into this because I'm really only looking at this from one angle right now.
It was the longest streak of games without back-to-back wins or back-to-back losses in the history of major league baseball. Unfortunately, that record will retroactively be lost as in the midst of it there is a suspended game against the Padres that, when made up, relates back when the first half dozen innings were played in July. Drat and darn. It is almost as if someone today went back into the record books and found an Orioles' box score from the middle of 0-21 record and noticed: hey Cal Ripken wasn't playing. No Iron Man record for you crabboy!
"What Karin knows, and what Ray never understood, was that it’s not the job of children to spend their lives pleasing their parents and carrying out their wishes. To believe that is to believe that we should always be beholden to ghosts. Rather, it’s the job of parents to do what they can to put their children in a position to achieve their dreams."
We like to say that we "give" life - which is an insanely selfish way to describe it. No one asks to be born. I like to say that I "inflicted" life on my children.
Life is joy and suffering and there is -nothing- wrong with that. It's important to teach our kids that. And it's our job, as parents, to teach them that life is a gift, and demonstrate why that is through our own values, and give them the tools necessary to hopefully have greater joy than suffering through their own lifetime.
I wish! More like old furniture, dorm kitchen stuff, books/photos etc. "they might need someday" - you know, the same stuff of mine that my folks have started bringing over because they're cleaning house ;)
My daughter is a little more than a week away from heading to college. She is starting to clean out her room and I we've discussed several times that there should be bags of garbage and boxes of things to go to the local thrift stores. My assumption is that I will have nothing but boxes marked "must keep" when all is said and done.
Our last move, each of the four girls (HS and college age) were given two big Rubbermaid bins and told “that’s all we keep for you”. Parked a dumpster at the end of the drive and watched them enjoy a full day of nostalgia, smiles, tears, and in the end, decisions.
Seriously, did I NEED three different Frontier Fort re-creations in my attic?
Heh, I'm still presiding over a garage full of porcelain, silver and the like --from my wife's parents, who passed away in Glendale over thirty years ago.
I'm 45 and a month from having my first kid. My parents have started sending me my baby stuff they've kept for 45 years. I wonder if, when the kid hits 5, I'll get my stuff from when I was five and so on?
The answer is always yes. If you send me your mailing address I have several boxes of 90s-era Gymboree clothes that your new child can wear regardless of gender.
If so, I need you to decide if you want that microwave and the other stuff in the basement because Daddy's *thisclose* to going Marie Kondo on that mess.
“We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes and our burdens upon them, and we haunt them as ghosts. Or, we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chains of our own flawed behavior, and as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, assisting them to find their own way, and some sense of transcendence.” - Springsteen
I'm not using a NYT freebie to read that article, but I wonder if any of them are there for their *historical* significance. Like the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center.
Thank you! I guess blockish concrete monstrosities never appealed to me. I was surprised the World Trade Center was not there. The tallest buildings at the time, their use of an exoskeleton as a design factor was amazing for their size. They represented American achievement and economic power, a symbolism that sadly made them a target.
I agree that was weak sauce from Hutchinson, but one problem he has is that the Arkansas legislature can override a veto with a simple majority. So yes, he should have vetoed it, but he isn't completely wrong in acting as if it was out of its hands. Indiana has the same setup, and our R general assembly overrode our R governor three times in this year's session. This is going to become an increasingly common issue in one-party R states: conservative governors who nonetheless have to govern being hamstrung by MTG-like legislatures.
Iowa here, and yeah, just increasingly nutty measures designed not to govern but instead to anger and block any semblance of any liberal agenda, like following simple medical guidance. It’s sick and costing lives.
Yep, same thing here in Pennsylvania, although I don’t think the R’s have a veto-proof majority yet. They’re insane. That d-bag insurrectionist, Big Lie pusher Doug Mastriano is a rising name for a potential governor run. I’d normally be optimistic he’s too crazy to win a state-wide race for governor, as the trash man Scott Wagner found out last time, but with all the anti-democracy bullshit the R’s are pushing (including Mastriano) I’m a bit nervous. Having a fucking fascist like him in power with a minority rule, alternate reality dwelling legislature rubber stamping all his bullshit is terrifying.
The thing there is that in order for those types of laws to be enacted they need the governor's signature, and as long as Wolf is in the chair that won't happen. So the Republicans need to win the governorship first, and that seems incredibly unlikely with the loonies they have running right now.
Greg Abbott in Texas is apparently trying to call another special session of the legislature to pass a bill replicating his executive order banning mask mandates. I'm wondering if some plucky attorney is putting something together challenging the EO as ultra vires (please, I hope one is).
That's hilarious. I can't believe* the Chancellor who hired him asked that. It's not like it was a big secret that Bobby Knight had a rage issues at IU.
*Knowing my fair share of Chancellors, it's actually not that surprising.
Mound distance: I think that players have outgrown the size of the field and pushing the mound back is something that should be done. Moving it a full foot in one year is too abrupt and distorting though. An inch a year until we are at perhaps - complete POOMA number - 63' will keep from harming elbows and will be barely noticeable in the records.
Pair it with other changes to impede offense or we will see an explosion in walks and homers that goes along with the decreased Ks. Outfield walls pushed back some. Perhaps bases at 92.5". Bat construction altered. Tweaks to the size of the strikezone. Move the batter's boxes away from the plate to limit outside corner coverage.
The key is that I aesthetically want a game that has scoring in the same general ballpark as now centered around 4.5 r/g but want it done with more balls in play.
For the record, I'm a subscriber and a lifelong Reds fan, so in that respect, the recaps are not always pleasant to read. Especially because I'm an Orioles and Nationals fan too. Some years are tougher than others...
As a Pirates fan who has had my interest in baseball ground out of me by this point from the endless mediocrity and Bob Nutting’s indifference to that mediocrity, I always get a good laugh from Craig’s near-daily quips about the Pirates’ shittiness in their game recaps.
I was cruising along happily enjoying life as a Astros/White Sox fan (long story), when my kids got me an Ancestry DNA test kit for Christmas, 2018. I had been adopted as an infant, and had wonderful, loving adoptive parents, and couldn't have asked for a better home, so finding my biological relatives was never really on my radar as something that could be done (or which I wanted to do). When filling out the Ancestry paperwork, I checked the box allowing for genetic matches to contact me - naively thinking I wouldn't get a match, outside of maybe a fourth cousin or something. Three weeks later, I'm going through my emails at work, and... I get the notification that I've been matched with immediate family members, and messages started coming in from them.
Some people learn their biological parents/sibliings are criminals, or drug addicts, or Trump supporters, or broke and looking for a windfall from their new DNA match. Not me... I learned that my biological family are all Pirates fans, and over the past two years they've dragged me into that misery with them, and now even my kids and wife have Pirates hats and t-shirts. That DNA test, man, what a wreck it's made of my life...
(Joking aside, my biological family are all incredible. My bio parents were married about seven years after I was adopted, and had two more kids, meaning that after 43 years as an only child, I welcomed a full brother and sister into my life, and my kids finally had first cousins, and I had a grandparent in my life for the first time in fifteen years. There are SO many weird connections between us all, in terms of career choices, interests, mannerisms, etc., which don't seem explicable through biology, but also aren't the result of environment... it's been beautiful. Well, apart from the Pirates thing.)
Funny to think about the bit parts actors have to do to get their foot in the door. I happened to re-watch the 1998 Denzel Washington movie Fallen on a plane last week, and I'm sure the first corpse-facedown-in-a-bathtub is Jeremy Renner, though he's not in the credits. Doesn't have a speaking part- heck, he doesn't even have a *breathing* part - but it's definitely him.
Since we have a Field of Dreams day here, we can note that one of Kevin Costner's first roles in a major release was in The Big Chill where he plays a cadaver, the suicide victim whose death brings together the old classmates.
Looking forward to another day of the Nats’ propaganda organ (aka Instagram feed) showing me the home runs from all the young guys as if the team won in a blowout… and ignoring the fact that Hero of the Nats People Paolo Espino got rocked for the first time last night. (Dude wore it and still went 5 innings - well done, Comrade Paolo.)
PS I always thought that Bryce Harper was miscast as a “face of the franchise“ type… he thrives much more in semi-obscurity a la Mike Trout. I also think the “flashy“ version of him seems forced; he strikes me as a pretty simple and even boring guy who loves his family and is really good at baseball. Philly appears to suit him.
PPS Speaking of “faces of the franchise“, it was another good night to be at the tennis tournament in DC… Rafael Nadal is a little rusty right now but he is still the real deal, y’all.
I'm trying not to be offended by your thinking that being the highest paid member of the Phillies amounts to "semi-obscurity". Your point about Harper being a guy who just loves baseball and his family does strike me as spot-on. I would feel better about him if not for the sneaky suspicion that he's one of the guys leading the, "Don't get the vaccine" charge in the clubhouse.
As a player, he's a lot of fun to watch. I hope the obscure Philadelphia market is enough for him.
Fair point - I mostly mean that he isn't at the Tatis/Soto/Guerrero/Ohtani hype level. For awhile it seemed like he wanted to be a media star but he seems to have decided (or had it decided for him) that sticking to baseball is a better bet.
Based on what I've seen from Bryce while was in DC, I'm guessing he's gotten the shot because he loves his family and doesn't want them (or himself) to die but he's such a baseball lifer that he can't bring himself to tell anyone else what to do - and might even be keeping mum lest he be seen as "woke".
My goodness, the discourse that would explode out of the ground from having a Field of Dreams that dared challenge the messaging (and supremacy) of the original.
And I didn’t win the ticket raffle, but when my MIL asked me if I won and it cost $375 per, I blurted put an epithet and laughed. These tickets should have been $15-30. Tops. What a cash grab from a state that has SIX blacked out teams and settles for a AAA club to determine state allegiance.
Pro Tip: I went to a Northwoods League game on Saturday. Plenty of social distance spacing, three tickets and snacks and drinks for everyone throughout was maybe $70 ($60 without beer). So I’ll go to 5 of those and keep the extra $5 instead of one ticket to a gross publicity stunt. Plus parking.
7-8 years ago there was a Northwoods team for sale in Alexandria, MN (home of the Big Ole the Viking statue) ... I daydreamed about that for months - and then the team was sold to an ownership group that folded the team less than two seasons later. I think that franchise is in Rockford, IL now as the Rivets. I'd like to think I'd have done better but who knows.
I'm old enough to remember the original Tony LaRussa experience in Chicago. He wasn't quite closer in age to Anna than to Craig when he took the helm, but it was close. He was also considered to be cutting edge in what we'd now consider to be the early Sabermetric revolution where he computerized the Earl Weaver note cards and pushed towards a more TTO oriented approach.
Looking back, he had already started his love affair with older players. Importing Carlton Fisk was a key to the team. Fisk, even when young, was already a grumpy old man and by the time he changed his Sox he was no longer young. (An aside: is this this first of LaRussa's many, many examples of managing players using PEDs while he looked the other way? Fisk had a remarkable career as an old catcher and completely remade his body through weightlifting.) LaRussa's young players, like Baines, Walker and Kittle, tended towards old player skills and he kept playing old players with old player skills like Harrelson's long time partner Wimpy Paciorek. Plus of course the one-day circus show for Minnie Minoso. (Who absolutely should be in the Hall of Fame, but that is an unrelated story.) He got better than expected results from pitch to contact hurlers like Dotson, Hoyt, and Bannister.
One thing that I keep getting messed up by collapsing memory. Bobby Thigpen's record setting saves season came as LaRussa was at the forefront of the move towards the one-inning only reliever, but it came for LaRussa's successor and not while Tony managed the team. It is too easy to put all the blame for the aesthetically displeasing but perhaps strategically sound current bullpen model at LaRussa's feet. But he's a jerk, so facts be darned, let's just blame him!
I don't know if you talked about the biggest issue with the partner leagues and the mound experiment but it is the banning of players who opt out from baseball entirely.
I saw that yesterday and asked MLB about it. A league spokesman told me that that report is not true. Now, I do not know if the denial is true -- there are a lot of ways to parse things and MLB isn't always straight up -- but in the face of a quick, explicit, and unequivocal denial, I was loathe to run with that angle myself.
Fair enough. Still until I see a player opt out and sign elsewhere I am not going to believe MLB. It is enough of a report to believe that there is likely a hollow threat to players, maybe made with MLB plausible deniability, to discourage protest.
Anyway at least you got a denial on this but that's to be expected. MLB certainly hasn't fostered an environment of trust however.
Heck, even in the MIDDLE AGES people covered their faces and tried to isolate themselves.
Yup! And even in the "good old days" of 1918, people would mask for the influenza pandemic. A Google Image search of "1918 flu" pulls up dozens of pictures of widespread mask usage (with of course some asshats with their noses hanging out--there has never not been asshats).
I once chaperoned a middle school field trip to Harper's Ferry, WV, and part of it involved a cemetery data gathering like Paper mentions.
The kids were supposed to note if there was a cluster of deaths and speculate as to why, and it was my job as a chaperone to facilitate the discussion.
We noted that there were lots of headstones with 1918 as the recorded death date, and so I asked the kids what they thought caused so many deaths at the same time. I was expecting "flu" or "World War I" or both as an answer.
Harper's Ferry sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, and this confluence was visible to us as I remember. One boy looked at me, looked at the rivers below, turned back to me, and in all seriousness said,
"Sharks?"
Doh, too slow deleting and fixing my typo. I'd pay for a VP subscription with an edit function.
Yes, that's why I would favor moving the fences back and maybe having a livelier ball so homerun rates don't crater. Rewarding speed is fun for a lot of reasons. I'm fine with empirical testing of moving the mound in the minors.
Yup. I’ve spent too many ATPs thinking about solutions, and I can’t get past trading strikeouts for walks. I think reining in spin rates via sticky stuff bans may be helping a touch. But otherwise, how do you incentivize contact. Move fences back 20 feet or so and liven the ball? That might be fun.
My pair of suggestions is to increase the pitching distance, to lower perceived velocity, and to move back (where practical) and raise fences, to discourage home runs.
Liked for the adenosine triphosphate reference.
I don't even notice doing shit like that anymore. Apologies from my Ivory Tower.
Lowering the mound made a huge difference in the 60s….maybe lower it some more? Combine that with moving the fences back?
I've seen some data suggesting that lowering the mound may actually reduce pitcher injuries. Worth testing in the minors IMO.
I hate weighing in here, but I'm American so I'm used to weighing in on topics I don't know much about. It seems to me that two things would work:
1. Seriously crack down on PEDs. Never gonna happen.
2. Deaden the baseball. Make it harder to hit it out.
Fences in most parks can't go back any farther than they are now, even if the distance is short. If the ball is changed, pitchers can still pitch from 60' 6", the strike zone can remain the same, and bases can remain 90 feet apart. Now, feel free to shoot holes into this because I'm really only looking at this from one angle right now.
It might be. At least the games would be faster and you’d bring small ball back.
Agree that rules should be designed to encourage contact and short ABs.
Atlanta's results since the All-Star break:
LWLWLWLWLWLWLWLWLWW
I'm not a gambler. But if I were, I would have noticed the pattern yesterday morning, and then bet on a loss. That's how the gambling industry works.
It was the longest streak of games without back-to-back wins or back-to-back losses in the history of major league baseball. Unfortunately, that record will retroactively be lost as in the midst of it there is a suspended game against the Padres that, when made up, relates back when the first half dozen innings were played in July. Drat and darn. It is almost as if someone today went back into the record books and found an Orioles' box score from the middle of 0-21 record and noticed: hey Cal Ripken wasn't playing. No Iron Man record for you crabboy!
"What Karin knows, and what Ray never understood, was that it’s not the job of children to spend their lives pleasing their parents and carrying out their wishes. To believe that is to believe that we should always be beholden to ghosts. Rather, it’s the job of parents to do what they can to put their children in a position to achieve their dreams."
This, 1000%.
We like to say that we "give" life - which is an insanely selfish way to describe it. No one asks to be born. I like to say that I "inflicted" life on my children.
Life is joy and suffering and there is -nothing- wrong with that. It's important to teach our kids that. And it's our job, as parents, to teach them that life is a gift, and demonstrate why that is through our own values, and give them the tools necessary to hopefully have greater joy than suffering through their own lifetime.
Our job as parents is to give our kids roots, wings - and a place to keep their stuff. (That last part is our share of the suffering.)
I wish! More like old furniture, dorm kitchen stuff, books/photos etc. "they might need someday" - you know, the same stuff of mine that my folks have started bringing over because they're cleaning house ;)
My daughter is a little more than a week away from heading to college. She is starting to clean out her room and I we've discussed several times that there should be bags of garbage and boxes of things to go to the local thrift stores. My assumption is that I will have nothing but boxes marked "must keep" when all is said and done.
Our last move, each of the four girls (HS and college age) were given two big Rubbermaid bins and told “that’s all we keep for you”. Parked a dumpster at the end of the drive and watched them enjoy a full day of nostalgia, smiles, tears, and in the end, decisions.
Seriously, did I NEED three different Frontier Fort re-creations in my attic?
Heh, I'm still presiding over a garage full of porcelain, silver and the like --from my wife's parents, who passed away in Glendale over thirty years ago.
I have a box of mom's china. Ive never opened because its never been used and I have heard it is probably too fragile because of that.
Yep - we are entering a dangerous era at my house in which the crap is inbound from both generations.
I'm 45 and a month from having my first kid. My parents have started sending me my baby stuff they've kept for 45 years. I wonder if, when the kid hits 5, I'll get my stuff from when I was five and so on?
The answer is always yes. If you send me your mailing address I have several boxes of 90s-era Gymboree clothes that your new child can wear regardless of gender.
I don't know if we're the same person, but this comment makes me think there's a small chance you're my dad.
If so, I need you to decide if you want that microwave and the other stuff in the basement because Daddy's *thisclose* to going Marie Kondo on that mess.
“We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes and our burdens upon them, and we haunt them as ghosts. Or, we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chains of our own flawed behavior, and as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, assisting them to find their own way, and some sense of transcendence.” - Springsteen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPixa6CgBeM
I guess I am a philistine, but I really don't like about 20 of those 25 most significant buildings.
I'm not using a NYT freebie to read that article, but I wonder if any of them are there for their *historical* significance. Like the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/vehicle-assembly-building-at-kennedy-space-center
Thank you! I guess blockish concrete monstrosities never appealed to me. I was surprised the World Trade Center was not there. The tallest buildings at the time, their use of an exoskeleton as a design factor was amazing for their size. They represented American achievement and economic power, a symbolism that sadly made them a target.
I agree that was weak sauce from Hutchinson, but one problem he has is that the Arkansas legislature can override a veto with a simple majority. So yes, he should have vetoed it, but he isn't completely wrong in acting as if it was out of its hands. Indiana has the same setup, and our R general assembly overrode our R governor three times in this year's session. This is going to become an increasingly common issue in one-party R states: conservative governors who nonetheless have to govern being hamstrung by MTG-like legislatures.
Iowa here, and yeah, just increasingly nutty measures designed not to govern but instead to anger and block any semblance of any liberal agenda, like following simple medical guidance. It’s sick and costing lives.
Yep, same thing here in Pennsylvania, although I don’t think the R’s have a veto-proof majority yet. They’re insane. That d-bag insurrectionist, Big Lie pusher Doug Mastriano is a rising name for a potential governor run. I’d normally be optimistic he’s too crazy to win a state-wide race for governor, as the trash man Scott Wagner found out last time, but with all the anti-democracy bullshit the R’s are pushing (including Mastriano) I’m a bit nervous. Having a fucking fascist like him in power with a minority rule, alternate reality dwelling legislature rubber stamping all his bullshit is terrifying.
The thing there is that in order for those types of laws to be enacted they need the governor's signature, and as long as Wolf is in the chair that won't happen. So the Republicans need to win the governorship first, and that seems incredibly unlikely with the loonies they have running right now.
Just to add, the Southern simple majority vetos were historically borne out of the fear of possibly electing Black Governors.
Greg Abbott in Texas is apparently trying to call another special session of the legislature to pass a bill replicating his executive order banning mask mandates. I'm wondering if some plucky attorney is putting something together challenging the EO as ultra vires (please, I hope one is).
Looking forward to your daily contemplations on the real reason Harrelson fired LaRussa.
That's hilarious. I can't believe* the Chancellor who hired him asked that. It's not like it was a big secret that Bobby Knight had a rage issues at IU.
*Knowing my fair share of Chancellors, it's actually not that surprising.
It was clearly a Freemasons thing.
If you know, you know.
(I don’t know.)
Mound distance: I think that players have outgrown the size of the field and pushing the mound back is something that should be done. Moving it a full foot in one year is too abrupt and distorting though. An inch a year until we are at perhaps - complete POOMA number - 63' will keep from harming elbows and will be barely noticeable in the records.
Pair it with other changes to impede offense or we will see an explosion in walks and homers that goes along with the decreased Ks. Outfield walls pushed back some. Perhaps bases at 92.5". Bat construction altered. Tweaks to the size of the strikezone. Move the batter's boxes away from the plate to limit outside corner coverage.
The key is that I aesthetically want a game that has scoring in the same general ballpark as now centered around 4.5 r/g but want it done with more balls in play.
Always wondered what the physics say about lowering the mound instead of pushing back?
Sure is easier on the grounds crew…
For the record, I'm a subscriber and a lifelong Reds fan, so in that respect, the recaps are not always pleasant to read. Especially because I'm an Orioles and Nationals fan too. Some years are tougher than others...
You can sure pick 'em. It would be too forward of me to ask how your love life has worked out.
I hate that I'm now perversely wondering the same thing. Thanks (O)Bombo!
As a Pirates fan who has had my interest in baseball ground out of me by this point from the endless mediocrity and Bob Nutting’s indifference to that mediocrity, I always get a good laugh from Craig’s near-daily quips about the Pirates’ shittiness in their game recaps.
I feel your pain.
I was cruising along happily enjoying life as a Astros/White Sox fan (long story), when my kids got me an Ancestry DNA test kit for Christmas, 2018. I had been adopted as an infant, and had wonderful, loving adoptive parents, and couldn't have asked for a better home, so finding my biological relatives was never really on my radar as something that could be done (or which I wanted to do). When filling out the Ancestry paperwork, I checked the box allowing for genetic matches to contact me - naively thinking I wouldn't get a match, outside of maybe a fourth cousin or something. Three weeks later, I'm going through my emails at work, and... I get the notification that I've been matched with immediate family members, and messages started coming in from them.
Some people learn their biological parents/sibliings are criminals, or drug addicts, or Trump supporters, or broke and looking for a windfall from their new DNA match. Not me... I learned that my biological family are all Pirates fans, and over the past two years they've dragged me into that misery with them, and now even my kids and wife have Pirates hats and t-shirts. That DNA test, man, what a wreck it's made of my life...
(Joking aside, my biological family are all incredible. My bio parents were married about seven years after I was adopted, and had two more kids, meaning that after 43 years as an only child, I welcomed a full brother and sister into my life, and my kids finally had first cousins, and I had a grandparent in my life for the first time in fifteen years. There are SO many weird connections between us all, in terms of career choices, interests, mannerisms, etc., which don't seem explicable through biology, but also aren't the result of environment... it's been beautiful. Well, apart from the Pirates thing.)
This is both very cool and very very funny :)
Funny to think about the bit parts actors have to do to get their foot in the door. I happened to re-watch the 1998 Denzel Washington movie Fallen on a plane last week, and I'm sure the first corpse-facedown-in-a-bathtub is Jeremy Renner, though he's not in the credits. Doesn't have a speaking part- heck, he doesn't even have a *breathing* part - but it's definitely him.
Since we have a Field of Dreams day here, we can note that one of Kevin Costner's first roles in a major release was in The Big Chill where he plays a cadaver, the suicide victim whose death brings together the old classmates.
"where he plays a cadaver" sums up his acting skills fairly well. Waterworld anyone?
How do we select, like, five hearts to that one???
Jack Nicholson and Roger Corman.....
According to this article, you are right about Renner. It cites IMDB, but I could not find it in either his bio or the cast listing.
https://www.joblo.com/horror-movies/news/the-test-of-time-fallen-1998-408
Looking forward to another day of the Nats’ propaganda organ (aka Instagram feed) showing me the home runs from all the young guys as if the team won in a blowout… and ignoring the fact that Hero of the Nats People Paolo Espino got rocked for the first time last night. (Dude wore it and still went 5 innings - well done, Comrade Paolo.)
PS I always thought that Bryce Harper was miscast as a “face of the franchise“ type… he thrives much more in semi-obscurity a la Mike Trout. I also think the “flashy“ version of him seems forced; he strikes me as a pretty simple and even boring guy who loves his family and is really good at baseball. Philly appears to suit him.
PPS Speaking of “faces of the franchise“, it was another good night to be at the tennis tournament in DC… Rafael Nadal is a little rusty right now but he is still the real deal, y’all.
I'm trying not to be offended by your thinking that being the highest paid member of the Phillies amounts to "semi-obscurity". Your point about Harper being a guy who just loves baseball and his family does strike me as spot-on. I would feel better about him if not for the sneaky suspicion that he's one of the guys leading the, "Don't get the vaccine" charge in the clubhouse.
As a player, he's a lot of fun to watch. I hope the obscure Philadelphia market is enough for him.
Fair point - I mostly mean that he isn't at the Tatis/Soto/Guerrero/Ohtani hype level. For awhile it seemed like he wanted to be a media star but he seems to have decided (or had it decided for him) that sticking to baseball is a better bet.
Based on what I've seen from Bryce while was in DC, I'm guessing he's gotten the shot because he loves his family and doesn't want them (or himself) to die but he's such a baseball lifer that he can't bring himself to tell anyone else what to do - and might even be keeping mum lest he be seen as "woke".
Nailed it: https://twitter.com/nationals/status/1423338638230835203?s=21
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSLL8R6r4HA/
My goodness, the discourse that would explode out of the ground from having a Field of Dreams that dared challenge the messaging (and supremacy) of the original.
And I didn’t win the ticket raffle, but when my MIL asked me if I won and it cost $375 per, I blurted put an epithet and laughed. These tickets should have been $15-30. Tops. What a cash grab from a state that has SIX blacked out teams and settles for a AAA club to determine state allegiance.
Pro Tip: I went to a Northwoods League game on Saturday. Plenty of social distance spacing, three tickets and snacks and drinks for everyone throughout was maybe $70 ($60 without beer). So I’ll go to 5 of those and keep the extra $5 instead of one ticket to a gross publicity stunt. Plus parking.
7-8 years ago there was a Northwoods team for sale in Alexandria, MN (home of the Big Ole the Viking statue) ... I daydreamed about that for months - and then the team was sold to an ownership group that folded the team less than two seasons later. I think that franchise is in Rockford, IL now as the Rivets. I'd like to think I'd have done better but who knows.
I'm old enough to remember the original Tony LaRussa experience in Chicago. He wasn't quite closer in age to Anna than to Craig when he took the helm, but it was close. He was also considered to be cutting edge in what we'd now consider to be the early Sabermetric revolution where he computerized the Earl Weaver note cards and pushed towards a more TTO oriented approach.
Looking back, he had already started his love affair with older players. Importing Carlton Fisk was a key to the team. Fisk, even when young, was already a grumpy old man and by the time he changed his Sox he was no longer young. (An aside: is this this first of LaRussa's many, many examples of managing players using PEDs while he looked the other way? Fisk had a remarkable career as an old catcher and completely remade his body through weightlifting.) LaRussa's young players, like Baines, Walker and Kittle, tended towards old player skills and he kept playing old players with old player skills like Harrelson's long time partner Wimpy Paciorek. Plus of course the one-day circus show for Minnie Minoso. (Who absolutely should be in the Hall of Fame, but that is an unrelated story.) He got better than expected results from pitch to contact hurlers like Dotson, Hoyt, and Bannister.
One thing that I keep getting messed up by collapsing memory. Bobby Thigpen's record setting saves season came as LaRussa was at the forefront of the move towards the one-inning only reliever, but it came for LaRussa's successor and not while Tony managed the team. It is too easy to put all the blame for the aesthetically displeasing but perhaps strategically sound current bullpen model at LaRussa's feet. But he's a jerk, so facts be darned, let's just blame him!
I don't know if you talked about the biggest issue with the partner leagues and the mound experiment but it is the banning of players who opt out from baseball entirely.
https://twitter.com/indyballpod/status/1420535017785241602?s=19
I saw that yesterday and asked MLB about it. A league spokesman told me that that report is not true. Now, I do not know if the denial is true -- there are a lot of ways to parse things and MLB isn't always straight up -- but in the face of a quick, explicit, and unequivocal denial, I was loathe to run with that angle myself.
Fair enough. Still until I see a player opt out and sign elsewhere I am not going to believe MLB. It is enough of a report to believe that there is likely a hollow threat to players, maybe made with MLB plausible deniability, to discourage protest.
Anyway at least you got a denial on this but that's to be expected. MLB certainly hasn't fostered an environment of trust however.
Any lawyers here who can weigh in on whether such a rule would be enforceable? [I'm saying yes on lawyers and no on enforceability.]
Can we crowd fund this movie? Because I’m freaking in.
I'm in on crowd funding too! Just a small $20 surcharge on top of your regular CoC subscription price to get the script written. :-)
I am 100% here for the people are "literally dying to own the libs. Have a great day, everyone" vibe.