The NL West race tightens, Mike Trout is done, the PED morality police and stadium grifts return, and we learn that a platform of “let everyone die” is bad politics.
My theory is that Waino, Happ(less... god damn he stunk in Minnesota regardless of what Rosenth says about how he "felt"), and Lester aren't so much humans as Lovecraftian Great Old Ones, horrors of the muddy depths returning to claim the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, feeding off the joy and hope of 29 other fanbases in the process. Children of Yog-Sotthoth (Jaime Moyer).
If this interpretation is correct, the government is using replicants to hunt and kill other replicants, which adds another layer of intrigue to the story. At any rate, an awesome screenplay about looking at life from an existential perspective.
My take on the non-dispute is that if Deckard is a replicant, then that entire scene on the roof where Roy Batty saves his life is meaningless. The main question posed by the story is whether the replicants can be considered human. Thus that test to find them by asking questions designed to provoke empathy. Batty shows in that scene that yes, replicants *are* capable of empathy - even more so than some humans (like Deckard). If Deckard is a replicant, why should anyone - or another replicant - care what happens to him?
In the director's cut, the origami unicorn shows the Ridey Scott's intent that Deckard is a replicant. No gray area there at all. In the original release, the debate is legitimate.
Is the book good? I saw the movie so long ago I don't really remember it, but haven't ever read the book but wondered about how well it tracks with the movie.
ESPN has learned Buster Olney is still an obsequious coward. In a related story, the Pope remains Catholic, the sun rose in the east, and Det. Holmes remains constipated.
Seriously, have we talked about the wildcard game winner playing their NL West counterpart? It's gonna be a litttle disappointing with LA beats SD and then plays the giants, or vise versa
Typically I think liberally about personal freedoms but let’s be clear here: there are vaccine mandated in numerous other contexts. I needed to get vaccinated to go to high school and college. I needed to get vaccinated to travel abroad to certain countries. Vaccine ‘mandates’ are a common and socially accepted part of life for pretty much every disease with a vaccine…besides Covid. The idea that this is about personal freedoms is absurd. I don’t see Republicans demanding schools stop requiring other basic vaccine requirements, which means this is entirely about making Biden look bad. It’s ridiculous.
Whine about getting the jab all you want. Just like the rest of us grumble when we have to go through an annoying process which inconveniences us briefly in our generally pleasant lives. Just whine after you get the damn vaccine.
That Ohio bill I mentioned in the newsletter today that has only two of 50 needed to sign on actually rolls back meningitis and other vaccine requirements for colleges. No idea why, but I can only assume it's the performative, political anti-vaccine thing going out of control. They're likely calculating that, the broader they can make it, the more it appeals to the rabid base.
You can still call many of them outright hypocrites. Like the people "leaving" the military over the mandate who sat through MANY other vaccinations without a peep.
You can also call them stupid. Never ignore an opportunity to emphasize.
On a side note. It’s natural for reporters to talk about a players legacy at the time of his retirement. And Braun’s conduct WAS putrid, and given Buster’s comments towards A-Rod when HE retired I don’t see the comparison. If A-Rod just retired it would be fair to compare how Buster treats the two. Rodriguez retired years ago. Their cases aren’t the same.
As for treating players differently I find it infuriating if at least partially understandable. Clemens is likely a rapist and a complete jerk. Pettitte isn’t. Big Papi is a beloved star (who might have been screwed if Manfred can be trusted, a dubious prospect I know), while Sosa largely ended his career poorly. The only player I think is getting really poor treatment is Big Mac, who DID apologize and is among the few to have done so in the modern age.
I think the broader acceptance of nutrition and weight training in the 80's and 90's also had a large effect on HR rates. Teams used to have 1-2 *naturally* big doods, but now everyone has muscles on top of muscles and can hit double-digit homers. There are very few skinny up-the-middle types.
Just taking steroids wasn't going to dramatically improve your performance. It naturally makes you stronger, but to maximize the benefits you need to be a gym rat. You need to put in the long hours of training.
That's why Bonds went from being a 40 home run hitter to hitting 73. He maximized the benefits of steroids.
McGwire put on massive amounts of muscle and was able to flick home runs out of the park. He was able to stay on the field, unlike his injury plagued seasons in the early-to-mid 90s.
Most steroid users probably didn't train very hard. Steroids gave them more durability, consistency and longevity. But it didn't dramatically raise their game like Bonds and McGwire.
I think Bonds was perhaps the hardest worker in baseball history. He knew McGwire and Sosa were taking steroids, and he knew that he was way fucking better than those assholes. So chip on his shoulder decided to show the world what peak human could do in the box.
In defense of David Ortiz, he was only implicated in the leaked Mitchell report and there was no information on what drug he tested positive for. it could have been any number of things that are not steroids. It could easily have been in a legal supplement from his home country. that he never tested positive in official drug tests nor was he implicated in any scandals or rumors should give him a pass. Some of the vilified, not so much.
As a Bostonian, I agree with you. Ortiz is the Platonic ideal of both a DH and a Boston sports star. He's the best, and there's no hard evidence he did steroids.
As a Yankees fan, David Ortiz did steroids, and he's done just as much getting to the bottom of it as OJ's done at finding the real killer.
That's one more positive test than Bonds or Clemens. Listen, if someone came to me and said if you take this shot, it will make you able to do your job better than 99% of the rest of the world, I would just thank them for not making it a suppository. The hypocrisy on all sides is overwhelming.
Bonds and Clemens had lots of peripheral evidence against them (Balco, Radomski), Ortiz - no. I'm not disagreeing with the premise, just defending Ortiz.
Yeah, no other indicators except other than only hitting 58 HR in 455 as a thinner Minnesota Twin with a hat size at least an inch smaller. Dude, he was DFA'd by the Twins because he couldn't hit enough to be a DH and shows up in Boston with 50 pounds of muscle to move Manny Ramirez to the outfield from DH and just coincidentally pisses hot during spring training. What color is the sky on your world?
Exaggerate for effect much? Look at Sosa's career power numbers and Ortiz's. Could Ortiz have been a career steroid user? Sure. There just isn't any actual evidence for it nor connections to steroid cases or distributors. Craig asked why some guys get a pass and some don't, so I proposed. No need to be a dick, but if it works for you ...
Craig feels that milestones are not a reason for vilification and I disagree. And I mean reason as in cause, not valid argument. What do Clemens, Bonds, Sosa, McGuire have in common - breaking major and sacred milestones. Maris took a bunch of crap and PEDs weren't even in the argument.
You said there was no peripheral evidence, when it was all over the place. You just didn't want to look because you like David Ortiz and don't like guys like Bonds. Ortiz was a marginal player until the very year he tested positive. And he literally tested positive for steroids. In 2003, they didn't test for masking agents or greenies, only steroids. But again, you like him so he gets a pass while the guys who never tested positive don't get any breaks, because by all accounts they are a-holes.
Different career arc (Sammy had a ridiculous jump in power, Ortiz's power tracks pretty normally) and Sammy had the audacity to pass the 60 mark three times.
Would not agree that "well, he broke milestones" is a rather subjective thing to get pissed about? Using either is wrong or it's not. Evidence of using has to either be there or it isn't. There is no basis, objectively speaking, to differentiate between Sosa and Ortiz -- who, while not passing milestones, did have an age-defying career in many respects that likely has him going to the Hall of Fame -- in that respect.
Ortiz is likable and had the support of the media for various reasons. That's the difference. And it's dumb.
I wonder if we give passes to some people because they're generally "nice guys". Look at all the players who have had problems - steroid use, paternity suits, domestic violence, etc. - in their careers. The ones where we let it slide are generally likeable (e.g. Ortiz, Bartolo Colon). The ones we don't forgive are the schmucks (Clemens, Bonds, Sosa).
Oh definitely. It makes us happy to believe that a jerk is also a cheater or horrible person criminally, and if someone is nice we don't want to believe that they do awful things. Life isn't that simple but it's easier if we imagine it is.
"legal supplement from his home country," where he wintered (until the shooting mistake thingy) and PEDs were over the counter at the local pharmacy. bruh. he used, they all used. move on.
The process of that California recall vote never made any sense to me. Say Newsom lost the recall portion of the vote, getting only 48% of the vote for him to stay in office. Then Elder, winning, say, 30% of the vote, became governor.
What kind of election gives the win to a person with 30% support over one with 48% support?
Yeah, the California recall law is super messed up. There are various proposals floating around seeking to change it. The main ideas involve making recalls harder (requiring more signatures to get a recall going), changing who takes office if a recall is successful (now it's the plurality vote getter, one proposal is to change it to the lieutenant governor taking over); and another is a one-question issue: "who should serve the final X years on the current gubernatorial term, with the current governor's name being listed alongside the challengers, which avoids the problem you mention, because the 48% who'd want to keep him in office would simultaneously be outvoting the 30% who want Elder as opposed to leaving the candidate space blank.
This recall was under unique circumstances -- Newsom angered a lot of Californians getting caught maskless at a fancy dinner party with other maskless attendees. He also upset and alienated a lot of women -- women of color -- with his salon restrictions.
The last recall election was almost two decades ago -- which was successful. It's a rare occurence and history has not shown that the process has not been abused.
In a state with a one-party supermajority, a possible recall is one of the few ways voters can keep a state official honest and accountable during a term.
Giving recall voters the choice to choose the lieutenant governor as a replacement would have hurt Newsom. Instead of being a choice between a hypocrite Democrat or a radical Republican, it could have been a choice between two Democrats.
I imagine this is a big reason why Cuomo was forced to leave office -- a female Democrat lieutenant governor who was kept at arms length from the governor's office was available to step in and replace him.
Wouldn't that give gubernatorial candidates incentive to choose incompetent running mates, to make replacing them with the lieutenant governor unappealing?
Newsome made a point of telling voters to not select someone on the 2nd question to avoid people thinking about removing him and having a more moderate candidate put in his place. The real "messaging" that won this was not making it about the pandemic like was said above-it was making it about Trump.
The recall mechanism is part of the overall voter initiative process that dominates California politics. All of which was enacted at the same time in 1910-1912. The original impetus for it was to curtail the power of large business interests like the Southern Pacific Railroad which had bought off every politician in the state, so it was an end-run around corporate power.
Now, however, the process has been weaponized by corporate power, such as last year when Uber and Lyft muscled through the initiative and all of the surrounding propaganda which helped it pass, allowing it to pretend it doesn't have any employees. That's just a high-profile example. There are a number of them which are basically astroturfed by corporate interests.
On balance it thwarts the will of the people who vote their representatives in in large numbers but who do not, understandably, turn out for off-year, single issue weird referendums who don't make it all the way to the end of their ballots for proposition 44,483 or whatever.
The initiative process is a form of direct democracy. I support democracy.
If people in California are voting against their own self interests because of campaign ads from special interest groups, then I think there's something wrong with our educational system.
This is always the big takeaway in CA. The state government has largely abdicated doing anything in favor of just having big money on either side push through propositions. I voted for these reps to govern, I would like them to do that please.
Nothing is abused until it has been abused. Now, this has been abused, so it needs to be fixed.
The issue isn't the recall part, generally (although most other states with similar laws have a much higher threshold for instigating one). It's the "who takes over?" part.
There are better ways to hold a recall election though. In WI, if there are enough signatures for a recall, a special election is held including primaries. Far better than a first-past-the-post jungle election where someone can simply win with a small plurality. Do that enough times, and you can end up with someone like David Duke winning an election.
“The voters” doing a lot of work here. This was an Astroturf election funded by out of state, right wing money for the specific purpose of invalidating the will of the people.
You don’t need to look any further than the fact that more people left their second part of the ballot blank than voted for any of the back up candidates for evidence that this recall was anything but a Hail Mary by a rump minority salivating over the thought of Feinstein kicking the bucket sometime between now and next fall.
An underreported result of this idiocy nationally is that it has sparked a recall mania among the reactionary rump in CA, with progressive school boards, DAs, and city council members facing recalls boosted by a combo of tech money and the dumbest, cruelest people on NextDoor.
the law was written long ago. The requirements for getting on the ballot were reasonably tough then, same with getting a name on the ballot for the second question.
Its that in the modern era, those things are actually really easy to attain now
Not in those words (the counterfactual is bizarre), and it doesn't make anything you said less true, but, yeah, when I think Ryan Braun, I think "Guy who used PEDs, went on the offensive after he got caught, won his case, then got exposed anyway."
Does that take away from his talent or his on-field performance? No, not really. But it makes me think he's a jackass, just like you said.
Roberto Alomar is a hall of fame second baseman. His legacy is colored by him spitting on an umpire (with a dash of sexual assault thrown in, but MLB didn't start caring about that until later). Ugueth Urbina, same deal. Good relief pitcher, also a guy who attacked people with a machete. If Trevor Bauer's career ends now at age 30, the same age as Sandy Koufax, something tells me we won't look upon him with the same wistful "What could have been" frame.
Off-field stuff doesn't erase on-field stuff, but a player's "legacy" includes all of it. Rafael Palmeiro has 3,020 hits and 569 home runs, but MLB just set aside a date to recognize a guy who only had 3,000 hits and 240 home runs.
I'm not saying that everyone's treated fairly, especially when it comes to PEDs. But when it comes down to it, I strongly believe that the reason Nelson Cruz keeps getting signed and Ryan Braun can't play outside of Minnesota is due to the way they handled their PED incidents. And that absolutely affects their legacies.
Now, the big elephant in the room is "Every player makes excuses for PED use [my favorite is Melky Cabrera's], the only reason people are upset about Braun is that he won, and then MLB directed a media blitz to make him the bad guy, even though they didn't have the evidence to prove guilt, and the sample taker *did* improperly store his sample."
That's a good argument! And it's valid, and if you choose to see things that way, more power to you. And, more than that, I'd urge you to view the entire criminal justice system in that light, and encourage people to remove phrases like "got off on a technicality" from their vocabulary when they really mean "the government violated someone's constitutional rights and was unable to secure a conviction because of it."
But, for me, baseball just isn't that important. We're not dealing with freedom or rule of law here, we're dealing with people's ability to make a couple extra million for themselves. And, while I obviously understand why someone would lie when millions of dollars are on the line, the fact that they're a baseball player doesn't give them a boost over, say, Elizabeth Holmes.
Except the counterfactual changes everything. Braun's legacy: jackass who did a thing, and yeah he apologized, and that's something, but I still think he's a jackass. That: TOTALLY VALID.
Not valid: "what if things were different and he DIDN'T apologize, wow, how much worse would he be then?!" That's a very different exercise some eight years after the fact. That's looking for a way to renew old hostilities and re-litigate settled issues, not to asses a legacy.
I don't see Braun as a guy who got caught and apologized. I see him as a guy who got caught, refused to apologize, got off, got caught again, and then said "Oh, wow, yeah, I really messed up there. For the whole thing, really. Sorry."
Everything is performative, sure. I'm not going to examine tones to determine who might *actually* regret their actions, and who's just managing their brand. I'm sure 98+% of people are just managing their brand.
But I think there's something to be said for people whose first course of action is to own up and apologize, vs. people who would rather deny and fight, and only apologize when there's no other option on the table.
On a not-related, but also kind of related? note, my (very conservative) mother texted me a while ago, saying something along the lines of "credit where credit is due, at least Andrew Cuomo is stepping down," which was a surprise to me, given that she HATES Cuomo.
I had expected her to be closer to my position, which was "Don't give this guy any credit for taking responsibility for his actions when he had literally no other viable option."
Braun isn't Cuomo. PEDs aren't sexual assault. Olney was a good beat reporter turned obsequious mouthpiece, and his tweet was kinda dumb.
But I do agree with him that Braun's real crime wasn't getting popped for PEDs; it was getting off, and then getting caught again for the same incident.
The fact that we have to infer that is pretty bad from a communications standpoint, and definitely contributes to all the FUD (on everything) from the pro-MLB media, but it doesn't make the sentiment *wrong*, to me
I'm going with how annoyed we get if we use the wrong they're/there/their or your/you're because we KNOW BETTER but can't edit comments so it sits there like a spider just out of reach so we can't ignore it but can't reach to squish it either.
Me too, DMCj. Me too, Catherine. I've got an accidental pluralization in a paragraph I took some pride in today, and I'm not going to be able to get past it, but it was such a MINOR mistake plus I'm on my handheld meaning the old delete-as-edit isn't as easy.
Is there a therapist that specializes in Substack no edit function-induced trauma?
I saw Johnny Marr perform with Hans Zimmer back in 2016 -- one of the best concerts I've experienced. Definitely a more sophisticated and very dynamic form of mainstream music.
Yeah! At this point, I want to hear Johnny Marr playing his own music, not recycled Smiths. After some more or less silent years, he's made a string of solid albums over the past few years.
There was a point when Jason Giambi was looking for that edge when steroids were no longer an option -- and, for a while at least, that edge was a gold thong. If my old mind serves me well (there's a lot of old minds here) he once explained that the slight discomfort helped him to focus. Maybe Robbie Ray's tight pants serve the same purpose lol.
The Murdaugh case also puts me in the direction of the mighty Drive-By Truckers song "Goode's Field Road", off of "Brighter Than Creation's Dark". The version on the live record "It's Great to Be Alive!" with Patterson Hood's spoken interlude is definitive and connects that imagined case to this one. "The the s**t came down/and bodies started being found/floating down the Tennessee River/backing up against the locks of Wilson Dam/and people started going to jail/but he couldn't got to jail/he knew way too much/what would happen to the family?"
The most classic example of over the top hysterics is the time that Bill Madden called A-Rod the “Whitey Bulger of baseball.” I hated that because not only was it a dumb line, but it actually made me sympathize with Rodriguez.
Rock and Roll as in the 50s music genre? Those guys clearly don't listen to rock music because that's not how it's described.
As for the point about the nature of rock music, I think there's a lot of truth about the genre being centered around white young male angst. But there are bands that are devoid of angst -- Def Leppard, for example, or the David Lee Roth years of Van Halen.
And trying to claim Obama made Rock music culturally inappropriate is ridiculous. Obama has publicly criticized woke culture. I remember U2 performing at his inauguration.
I'm sorry but "Give Me Some Money" absolutely explodes with young British working class economic and class struggle angst, and "Sex Farm" is a deep exploration of the left-behind nature of the rural United Kingdom and the sexual repression endemic to the times.
I couldn't define rock and roll if my life depended on it, especially with how it intersects/overlaps with pop, jazz and soul. The crap about Obama making rock inappropriate is just crappy crap to get some unknown some crappy publicity.
Respectfully disagree/nitpick some of your points on the recall effort here in my home state, Craig. I moved to San Diego in 1995 for college. The RNC was held here in 1996. Since then, San Diego County has steadily turned more blue. There are, of course, always the north coastal affluent enclaves of Encinitas, Leucadia, Carlsbad, etc. AND, we’re certainly not, say, San Francisco, but, I believe SDC has been comfortably blue in the last handful of presidential elections.
Also, during the early returns (with the caveat that things could have changed 24 hours later and beyond) most of the counties reporting were in line - eerily so - with the percentages that voted for Biden and that orange shitbag supremacist. At last check, Newsom was expected to “win” by about 3-4 more percentage points than what he won with three years ago. I’m no Nate Silver (heh) but, when you factor in the inherently lower turnout for these special dealies…*shrug emoji*
In summary: if a judge hadn’t granted recall advocates an additional four months to procure signatures AND if our recall process wasn’t so goddam borked AND if aggrieved white folk in this state weren’t so fucking dumb about equating vaccine mandates with “segregation” and “masks” with “MAH FREEDOMS”, California could have avoided wasting $200-$300M on this whole abject fucking farce.
Democrats should be POUNDING the "failed recall cost $200M" straight up the middle of the Republican line. "Oh, you wanna call US fiscally irresponsible? Eat this!"
watch it, buddy
Ha! You've gotta be enjoying this dark horse wild card candidacy...
My theory is that Waino, Happ(less... god damn he stunk in Minnesota regardless of what Rosenth says about how he "felt"), and Lester aren't so much humans as Lovecraftian Great Old Ones, horrors of the muddy depths returning to claim the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, feeding off the joy and hope of 29 other fanbases in the process. Children of Yog-Sotthoth (Jaime Moyer).
Apologies for the edit/delete there, one autocorrect completely altered the meaning of this meaningless-in-the-grand-scheme moment
Agreed! One of my favorite movies and screenplays, an underrated masterpiece. Something I missed when I first saw the movie- Deckard is a replicant. It is revealed in the unicorn scene: https://www.cinelinx.com/movie-news/movie-stuff/is-deckard-a-replicant-or-not/
If this interpretation is correct, the government is using replicants to hunt and kill other replicants, which adds another layer of intrigue to the story. At any rate, an awesome screenplay about looking at life from an existential perspective.
I've read that Hauer wrote those lines himself, the night before they shot the scene....
But now his season is lost in time, like tears in rain.
My take on the non-dispute is that if Deckard is a replicant, then that entire scene on the roof where Roy Batty saves his life is meaningless. The main question posed by the story is whether the replicants can be considered human. Thus that test to find them by asking questions designed to provoke empathy. Batty shows in that scene that yes, replicants *are* capable of empathy - even more so than some humans (like Deckard). If Deckard is a replicant, why should anyone - or another replicant - care what happens to him?
Right, the proper question is whether Roy is still a human despite being a replicant.
In the director's cut, the origami unicorn shows the Ridey Scott's intent that Deckard is a replicant. No gray area there at all. In the original release, the debate is legitimate.
Preach! The whole point was what makes anyone "human."
yes!!
Is the book good? I saw the movie so long ago I don't really remember it, but haven't ever read the book but wondered about how well it tracks with the movie.
ESPN has learned Buster Olney is still an obsequious coward. In a related story, the Pope remains Catholic, the sun rose in the east, and Det. Holmes remains constipated.
No one wants to win the nleast. Atlanta is now 4-8 in extra innings and 1-10 in games tied entering the 9th.
I'd say the NL East winner will have a very short postseason, but baseball has a way of mocking such expectations.
Seriously, have we talked about the wildcard game winner playing their NL West counterpart? It's gonna be a litttle disappointing with LA beats SD and then plays the giants, or vise versa
Typically I think liberally about personal freedoms but let’s be clear here: there are vaccine mandated in numerous other contexts. I needed to get vaccinated to go to high school and college. I needed to get vaccinated to travel abroad to certain countries. Vaccine ‘mandates’ are a common and socially accepted part of life for pretty much every disease with a vaccine…besides Covid. The idea that this is about personal freedoms is absurd. I don’t see Republicans demanding schools stop requiring other basic vaccine requirements, which means this is entirely about making Biden look bad. It’s ridiculous.
Whine about getting the jab all you want. Just like the rest of us grumble when we have to go through an annoying process which inconveniences us briefly in our generally pleasant lives. Just whine after you get the damn vaccine.
That Ohio bill I mentioned in the newsletter today that has only two of 50 needed to sign on actually rolls back meningitis and other vaccine requirements for colleges. No idea why, but I can only assume it's the performative, political anti-vaccine thing going out of control. They're likely calculating that, the broader they can make it, the more it appeals to the rabid base.
No word on whether it covers rabies, though.
Ah in that case then I rescind my criticism of hypocrisy and simply call these people stupid
You can still call many of them outright hypocrites. Like the people "leaving" the military over the mandate who sat through MANY other vaccinations without a peep.
You can also call them stupid. Never ignore an opportunity to emphasize.
On a side note. It’s natural for reporters to talk about a players legacy at the time of his retirement. And Braun’s conduct WAS putrid, and given Buster’s comments towards A-Rod when HE retired I don’t see the comparison. If A-Rod just retired it would be fair to compare how Buster treats the two. Rodriguez retired years ago. Their cases aren’t the same.
As for treating players differently I find it infuriating if at least partially understandable. Clemens is likely a rapist and a complete jerk. Pettitte isn’t. Big Papi is a beloved star (who might have been screwed if Manfred can be trusted, a dubious prospect I know), while Sosa largely ended his career poorly. The only player I think is getting really poor treatment is Big Mac, who DID apologize and is among the few to have done so in the modern age.
I think the broader acceptance of nutrition and weight training in the 80's and 90's also had a large effect on HR rates. Teams used to have 1-2 *naturally* big doods, but now everyone has muscles on top of muscles and can hit double-digit homers. There are very few skinny up-the-middle types.
Just taking steroids wasn't going to dramatically improve your performance. It naturally makes you stronger, but to maximize the benefits you need to be a gym rat. You need to put in the long hours of training.
That's why Bonds went from being a 40 home run hitter to hitting 73. He maximized the benefits of steroids.
McGwire put on massive amounts of muscle and was able to flick home runs out of the park. He was able to stay on the field, unlike his injury plagued seasons in the early-to-mid 90s.
Most steroid users probably didn't train very hard. Steroids gave them more durability, consistency and longevity. But it didn't dramatically raise their game like Bonds and McGwire.
I think Bonds was perhaps the hardest worker in baseball history. He knew McGwire and Sosa were taking steroids, and he knew that he was way fucking better than those assholes. So chip on his shoulder decided to show the world what peak human could do in the box.
In defense of David Ortiz, he was only implicated in the leaked Mitchell report and there was no information on what drug he tested positive for. it could have been any number of things that are not steroids. It could easily have been in a legal supplement from his home country. that he never tested positive in official drug tests nor was he implicated in any scandals or rumors should give him a pass. Some of the vilified, not so much.
As a Bostonian, I agree with you. Ortiz is the Platonic ideal of both a DH and a Boston sports star. He's the best, and there's no hard evidence he did steroids.
As a Yankees fan, David Ortiz did steroids, and he's done just as much getting to the bottom of it as OJ's done at finding the real killer.
That's one more positive test than Bonds or Clemens. Listen, if someone came to me and said if you take this shot, it will make you able to do your job better than 99% of the rest of the world, I would just thank them for not making it a suppository. The hypocrisy on all sides is overwhelming.
Bonds and Clemens had lots of peripheral evidence against them (Balco, Radomski), Ortiz - no. I'm not disagreeing with the premise, just defending Ortiz.
Yeah, no other indicators except other than only hitting 58 HR in 455 as a thinner Minnesota Twin with a hat size at least an inch smaller. Dude, he was DFA'd by the Twins because he couldn't hit enough to be a DH and shows up in Boston with 50 pounds of muscle to move Manny Ramirez to the outfield from DH and just coincidentally pisses hot during spring training. What color is the sky on your world?
*455 games. Seriously, he had to make the club to get $1,250,000. For that kind of money, how does he say no?
Exaggerate for effect much? Look at Sosa's career power numbers and Ortiz's. Could Ortiz have been a career steroid user? Sure. There just isn't any actual evidence for it nor connections to steroid cases or distributors. Craig asked why some guys get a pass and some don't, so I proposed. No need to be a dick, but if it works for you ...
Craig feels that milestones are not a reason for vilification and I disagree. And I mean reason as in cause, not valid argument. What do Clemens, Bonds, Sosa, McGuire have in common - breaking major and sacred milestones. Maris took a bunch of crap and PEDs weren't even in the argument.
You said there was no peripheral evidence, when it was all over the place. You just didn't want to look because you like David Ortiz and don't like guys like Bonds. Ortiz was a marginal player until the very year he tested positive. And he literally tested positive for steroids. In 2003, they didn't test for masking agents or greenies, only steroids. But again, you like him so he gets a pass while the guys who never tested positive don't get any breaks, because by all accounts they are a-holes.
The same thing applies to Sammy Sosa, yet he's a pariah.
Different career arc (Sammy had a ridiculous jump in power, Ortiz's power tracks pretty normally) and Sammy had the audacity to pass the 60 mark three times.
Would not agree that "well, he broke milestones" is a rather subjective thing to get pissed about? Using either is wrong or it's not. Evidence of using has to either be there or it isn't. There is no basis, objectively speaking, to differentiate between Sosa and Ortiz -- who, while not passing milestones, did have an age-defying career in many respects that likely has him going to the Hall of Fame -- in that respect.
Ortiz is likable and had the support of the media for various reasons. That's the difference. And it's dumb.
Ortiz was a late bloomer -- didn't break out until he went to the Red Sox at age 27 and play with PED users like Manny Ramirez.
He led the league in OPS and slugging at age 40 in his final season.
"power tracks pretty normally" until age 27! 2003 Boston. oh, late bloomer?
I wonder if we give passes to some people because they're generally "nice guys". Look at all the players who have had problems - steroid use, paternity suits, domestic violence, etc. - in their careers. The ones where we let it slide are generally likeable (e.g. Ortiz, Bartolo Colon). The ones we don't forgive are the schmucks (Clemens, Bonds, Sosa).
Oh definitely. It makes us happy to believe that a jerk is also a cheater or horrible person criminally, and if someone is nice we don't want to believe that they do awful things. Life isn't that simple but it's easier if we imagine it is.
Agreed. If Manfred can be trusted then it was implied that’s the case
"legal supplement from his home country," where he wintered (until the shooting mistake thingy) and PEDs were over the counter at the local pharmacy. bruh. he used, they all used. move on.
The process of that California recall vote never made any sense to me. Say Newsom lost the recall portion of the vote, getting only 48% of the vote for him to stay in office. Then Elder, winning, say, 30% of the vote, became governor.
What kind of election gives the win to a person with 30% support over one with 48% support?
Yeah, the California recall law is super messed up. There are various proposals floating around seeking to change it. The main ideas involve making recalls harder (requiring more signatures to get a recall going), changing who takes office if a recall is successful (now it's the plurality vote getter, one proposal is to change it to the lieutenant governor taking over); and another is a one-question issue: "who should serve the final X years on the current gubernatorial term, with the current governor's name being listed alongside the challengers, which avoids the problem you mention, because the 48% who'd want to keep him in office would simultaneously be outvoting the 30% who want Elder as opposed to leaving the candidate space blank.
This recall was under unique circumstances -- Newsom angered a lot of Californians getting caught maskless at a fancy dinner party with other maskless attendees. He also upset and alienated a lot of women -- women of color -- with his salon restrictions.
The last recall election was almost two decades ago -- which was successful. It's a rare occurence and history has not shown that the process has not been abused.
In a state with a one-party supermajority, a possible recall is one of the few ways voters can keep a state official honest and accountable during a term.
*has been abused
Giving recall voters the choice to choose the lieutenant governor as a replacement would have hurt Newsom. Instead of being a choice between a hypocrite Democrat or a radical Republican, it could have been a choice between two Democrats.
I imagine this is a big reason why Cuomo was forced to leave office -- a female Democrat lieutenant governor who was kept at arms length from the governor's office was available to step in and replace him.
Wouldn't that give gubernatorial candidates incentive to choose incompetent running mates, to make replacing them with the lieutenant governor unappealing?
I recall this was the reason Nixon chose Ford as his vice president.
I'm not sure if this is a joke but Nixon chose Ford because he was a centrist and well liked on both sides of the aisle.
Newsome made a point of telling voters to not select someone on the 2nd question to avoid people thinking about removing him and having a more moderate candidate put in his place. The real "messaging" that won this was not making it about the pandemic like was said above-it was making it about Trump.
CA voters often choose between two democrats due to the jungle primary system. Republicans aren’t entitled to participation trophies in elections.
The recall mechanism is part of the overall voter initiative process that dominates California politics. All of which was enacted at the same time in 1910-1912. The original impetus for it was to curtail the power of large business interests like the Southern Pacific Railroad which had bought off every politician in the state, so it was an end-run around corporate power.
Now, however, the process has been weaponized by corporate power, such as last year when Uber and Lyft muscled through the initiative and all of the surrounding propaganda which helped it pass, allowing it to pretend it doesn't have any employees. That's just a high-profile example. There are a number of them which are basically astroturfed by corporate interests.
On balance it thwarts the will of the people who vote their representatives in in large numbers but who do not, understandably, turn out for off-year, single issue weird referendums who don't make it all the way to the end of their ballots for proposition 44,483 or whatever.
The initiative process is a form of direct democracy. I support democracy.
If people in California are voting against their own self interests because of campaign ads from special interest groups, then I think there's something wrong with our educational system.
And campaign finance system.
This is always the big takeaway in CA. The state government has largely abdicated doing anything in favor of just having big money on either side push through propositions. I voted for these reps to govern, I would like them to do that please.
Nothing is abused until it has been abused. Now, this has been abused, so it needs to be fixed.
The issue isn't the recall part, generally (although most other states with similar laws have a much higher threshold for instigating one). It's the "who takes over?" part.
There are better ways to hold a recall election though. In WI, if there are enough signatures for a recall, a special election is held including primaries. Far better than a first-past-the-post jungle election where someone can simply win with a small plurality. Do that enough times, and you can end up with someone like David Duke winning an election.
“The voters” doing a lot of work here. This was an Astroturf election funded by out of state, right wing money for the specific purpose of invalidating the will of the people.
You don’t need to look any further than the fact that more people left their second part of the ballot blank than voted for any of the back up candidates for evidence that this recall was anything but a Hail Mary by a rump minority salivating over the thought of Feinstein kicking the bucket sometime between now and next fall.
An underreported result of this idiocy nationally is that it has sparked a recall mania among the reactionary rump in CA, with progressive school boards, DAs, and city council members facing recalls boosted by a combo of tech money and the dumbest, cruelest people on NextDoor.
I just got an anti SF DA mailer yesterday trying to scare me that crime has risen 534% from last year
my god they think we are dumb
Recall elections in general are stupid. Not least because EVERY election with an incumbent candidate is effectively a recall election.
But California's recall process is just epically dumb on top of that.
the law was written long ago. The requirements for getting on the ballot were reasonably tough then, same with getting a name on the ballot for the second question.
Its that in the modern era, those things are actually really easy to attain now
^The kind of election that fascists like.
I'm just here for the Smiths talk...
*shrug* I kind of agree with Olney?
Not in those words (the counterfactual is bizarre), and it doesn't make anything you said less true, but, yeah, when I think Ryan Braun, I think "Guy who used PEDs, went on the offensive after he got caught, won his case, then got exposed anyway."
Does that take away from his talent or his on-field performance? No, not really. But it makes me think he's a jackass, just like you said.
Roberto Alomar is a hall of fame second baseman. His legacy is colored by him spitting on an umpire (with a dash of sexual assault thrown in, but MLB didn't start caring about that until later). Ugueth Urbina, same deal. Good relief pitcher, also a guy who attacked people with a machete. If Trevor Bauer's career ends now at age 30, the same age as Sandy Koufax, something tells me we won't look upon him with the same wistful "What could have been" frame.
Off-field stuff doesn't erase on-field stuff, but a player's "legacy" includes all of it. Rafael Palmeiro has 3,020 hits and 569 home runs, but MLB just set aside a date to recognize a guy who only had 3,000 hits and 240 home runs.
I'm not saying that everyone's treated fairly, especially when it comes to PEDs. But when it comes down to it, I strongly believe that the reason Nelson Cruz keeps getting signed and Ryan Braun can't play outside of Minnesota is due to the way they handled their PED incidents. And that absolutely affects their legacies.
Now, the big elephant in the room is "Every player makes excuses for PED use [my favorite is Melky Cabrera's], the only reason people are upset about Braun is that he won, and then MLB directed a media blitz to make him the bad guy, even though they didn't have the evidence to prove guilt, and the sample taker *did* improperly store his sample."
That's a good argument! And it's valid, and if you choose to see things that way, more power to you. And, more than that, I'd urge you to view the entire criminal justice system in that light, and encourage people to remove phrases like "got off on a technicality" from their vocabulary when they really mean "the government violated someone's constitutional rights and was unable to secure a conviction because of it."
But, for me, baseball just isn't that important. We're not dealing with freedom or rule of law here, we're dealing with people's ability to make a couple extra million for themselves. And, while I obviously understand why someone would lie when millions of dollars are on the line, the fact that they're a baseball player doesn't give them a boost over, say, Elizabeth Holmes.
Except the counterfactual changes everything. Braun's legacy: jackass who did a thing, and yeah he apologized, and that's something, but I still think he's a jackass. That: TOTALLY VALID.
Not valid: "what if things were different and he DIDN'T apologize, wow, how much worse would he be then?!" That's a very different exercise some eight years after the fact. That's looking for a way to renew old hostilities and re-litigate settled issues, not to asses a legacy.
I think we have to agree to disagree.
I don't see Braun as a guy who got caught and apologized. I see him as a guy who got caught, refused to apologize, got off, got caught again, and then said "Oh, wow, yeah, I really messed up there. For the whole thing, really. Sorry."
Everything is performative, sure. I'm not going to examine tones to determine who might *actually* regret their actions, and who's just managing their brand. I'm sure 98+% of people are just managing their brand.
But I think there's something to be said for people whose first course of action is to own up and apologize, vs. people who would rather deny and fight, and only apologize when there's no other option on the table.
On a not-related, but also kind of related? note, my (very conservative) mother texted me a while ago, saying something along the lines of "credit where credit is due, at least Andrew Cuomo is stepping down," which was a surprise to me, given that she HATES Cuomo.
I had expected her to be closer to my position, which was "Don't give this guy any credit for taking responsibility for his actions when he had literally no other viable option."
Braun isn't Cuomo. PEDs aren't sexual assault. Olney was a good beat reporter turned obsequious mouthpiece, and his tweet was kinda dumb.
But I do agree with him that Braun's real crime wasn't getting popped for PEDs; it was getting off, and then getting caught again for the same incident.
The fact that we have to infer that is pretty bad from a communications standpoint, and definitely contributes to all the FUD (on everything) from the pro-MLB media, but it doesn't make the sentiment *wrong*, to me
"I think we have to agree to disagree."
"But lemme just get the last 5k words in before we stop."
I don't know why you put up with us...
y'all literally pay me to! :-)
I'm going with how annoyed we get if we use the wrong they're/there/their or your/you're because we KNOW BETTER but can't edit comments so it sits there like a spider just out of reach so we can't ignore it but can't reach to squish it either.
I have already several times deleted an entire comment in order to kill a typo and try again.
Thanks, Obama.
Me too, DMCj. Me too, Catherine. I've got an accidental pluralization in a paragraph I took some pride in today, and I'm not going to be able to get past it, but it was such a MINOR mistake plus I'm on my handheld meaning the old delete-as-edit isn't as easy.
Is there a therapist that specializes in Substack no edit function-induced trauma?
I saw Johnny Marr perform with Hans Zimmer back in 2016 -- one of the best concerts I've experienced. Definitely a more sophisticated and very dynamic form of mainstream music.
This comment section makes me read "I saw X..." in a completely different sense, and your earnest use of it really threw me for a loop just now.
Was he opening for Industrial Shithouse?
Yeah! At this point, I want to hear Johnny Marr playing his own music, not recycled Smiths. After some more or less silent years, he's made a string of solid albums over the past few years.
There was a point when Jason Giambi was looking for that edge when steroids were no longer an option -- and, for a while at least, that edge was a gold thong. If my old mind serves me well (there's a lot of old minds here) he once explained that the slight discomfort helped him to focus. Maybe Robbie Ray's tight pants serve the same purpose lol.
Maybe he's just a big fan of Will Ferrell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv7Ts4v5_Bs
Annie Savoy was right, as usual.
The Murdaugh case also puts me in the direction of the mighty Drive-By Truckers song "Goode's Field Road", off of "Brighter Than Creation's Dark". The version on the live record "It's Great to Be Alive!" with Patterson Hood's spoken interlude is definitive and connects that imagined case to this one. "The the s**t came down/and bodies started being found/floating down the Tennessee River/backing up against the locks of Wilson Dam/and people started going to jail/but he couldn't got to jail/he knew way too much/what would happen to the family?"
The most classic example of over the top hysterics is the time that Bill Madden called A-Rod the “Whitey Bulger of baseball.” I hated that because not only was it a dumb line, but it actually made me sympathize with Rodriguez.
Rock and Roll as in the 50s music genre? Those guys clearly don't listen to rock music because that's not how it's described.
As for the point about the nature of rock music, I think there's a lot of truth about the genre being centered around white young male angst. But there are bands that are devoid of angst -- Def Leppard, for example, or the David Lee Roth years of Van Halen.
And trying to claim Obama made Rock music culturally inappropriate is ridiculous. Obama has publicly criticized woke culture. I remember U2 performing at his inauguration.
I'm sorry but "Give Me Some Money" absolutely explodes with young British working class economic and class struggle angst, and "Sex Farm" is a deep exploration of the left-behind nature of the rural United Kingdom and the sexual repression endemic to the times.
Shit sandwich
YOU CAN'T POST THAT! You can't post that can you?
I couldn't define rock and roll if my life depended on it, especially with how it intersects/overlaps with pop, jazz and soul. The crap about Obama making rock inappropriate is just crappy crap to get some unknown some crappy publicity.
Respectfully disagree/nitpick some of your points on the recall effort here in my home state, Craig. I moved to San Diego in 1995 for college. The RNC was held here in 1996. Since then, San Diego County has steadily turned more blue. There are, of course, always the north coastal affluent enclaves of Encinitas, Leucadia, Carlsbad, etc. AND, we’re certainly not, say, San Francisco, but, I believe SDC has been comfortably blue in the last handful of presidential elections.
Also, during the early returns (with the caveat that things could have changed 24 hours later and beyond) most of the counties reporting were in line - eerily so - with the percentages that voted for Biden and that orange shitbag supremacist. At last check, Newsom was expected to “win” by about 3-4 more percentage points than what he won with three years ago. I’m no Nate Silver (heh) but, when you factor in the inherently lower turnout for these special dealies…*shrug emoji*
In summary: if a judge hadn’t granted recall advocates an additional four months to procure signatures AND if our recall process wasn’t so goddam borked AND if aggrieved white folk in this state weren’t so fucking dumb about equating vaccine mandates with “segregation” and “masks” with “MAH FREEDOMS”, California could have avoided wasting $200-$300M on this whole abject fucking farce.
Well, if all that sounds fun to you SD is still looking for a new Registrar of Voters!
https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/hr/jobs/Registrar_of_Voters.pdf
Democrats should be POUNDING the "failed recall cost $200M" straight up the middle of the Republican line. "Oh, you wanna call US fiscally irresponsible? Eat this!"
As far as the GQP is concerned, spending money, like presidents golfing, is only an issue when Democrats do it.