How to save baseball

On April 29, 2015 one of the greatest natural experiments in the history of professional baseball was unknowingly carried out, and the results have profound implications for the future of baseball as we know it.  At last we have an explanation for why baseball games are so long, and what Major League Baseball can do to shorten game times.  MLB may not like the answer.

One game took place in Cincinnati, where the Brewers beat the Red by the final score of 8-3.  There were 23,012 fans in attendance, and the game took nearly three hours to play (2 hours and 58 minutes, to be precise).

Meanwhile, 519 miles to the east, The Chicago White Sox lost to the Baltimore Orioles by the nearly identical score of 8-2.  The game time was a mere 2 hours and 3 minutes, nearly an hour shorter than the game played in Cincinnati.  The attendance in Baltimore?  Zero.

Two baseball games were played on the same day, with nearly identical scores, one taking a full hour less time, and the principle difference between the two contests was that there were no fans to slow things down.  MLB played the game without letting fans into the stadium in order to allow Baltimore’s strained police force to concentrate their attention elsewhere.  Apparently cancelling the previous two games maxed out how many games could be rescheduled with the White Sox, and playing at the National’s ballpark in DC was not an option.

The Orioles’ next three games with Tampa Bay would be played in Florida, which should be an interesting natural experiment about whether home field advantage comes from sleeping in a familiar bed or getting to bat in the bottom of the ninth.

So, based upon a sample size of one game, we can conclude that having 23,000 fans in attendance will create a one hour delay in how long it takes to play a baseball game.  Why should this be?  Are ballplayers more efficient without fans to play to?  Do batters not feel the need to step into and out of the box when there are no fans to impress?  Do relief pitchers work faster when there is nobody there to be enthralled by their scowling and posturing?

Speeding up the game has been MLB’s primary mission this season.  So far game times are down by nearly nine minutes, from 3 hours and 2 minutes last year to 2 hours 54 minutes so far this season.  But imagine how far the average game time would drop if we could shave 56 minutes off a game merely by not letting anybody into the stands to watch it.

This is, admittedly, a radical solution.  Obviously the biggest flaw in not allowing anyone into the stadium is the loss of revenue for the owners.  But maybe that’s a good thing.  One problem football is facing is that now it is preferable to watch football games in one’s own home on a large plasma TV screen than freezing in a stadium a mile away from the field.  Now with instant replay and new “stat-cast” games that display statistical information like pitch speed, batted ball velocity, and the angle the ball was struck at, maybe watching baseball on TV is a better fan experience.

Build much smaller parks with limited seating, televise every home game, and live off of the TV revenue and ancillary money streams (like selling the seats from the old stadium you tore down to build the new smaller one).

MLB may have finally identified the biggest problem facing professional sports: the fans.  Getting rid of the fans is the first step towards improving sports in America.  Why go to a crowded stadium, get through security, pay $20 for a beer and a hot dog, and put up with the loud-mouthed yahoos around you when you can enjoy Vin Scully waxing poetic on a big screen TV at home? 

Of course once the fans are eliminated, owners will work on developing a way to get rid of the players.  You can’t stop progress.

Bruce Campbell and Nathan Fillion: Two Paths Diverged

I have some relatives who are child actors; very good ones, by all accounts, starring in big budget movies and Emmy-winning TV shows.  They say they want to be actors when they grow up, which is nice but let’s see how marketable they are after their voices break.  I suppose I should be encouraging (as if their success isn't encouragement enough) but I have on occasion said that one of the things I know about success in Hollywood is this: looks aren't enough; talent isn't enough; luck isn't enough; heck, looks, talent and luck aren't enough.

The career of almost every successful actor or actress begins the same way, finding the right agent who got them to the right casting person who put them in the right role.  Even then Hollywood is full of dead ends, one hit wonders who had a big role and then had no second act.  Remember the guy who played Urkel?  I've seen him on TV, but not playing a character I remember by name.  I thought Emma Caulfield was going to be the breakout star from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; she had looks, she had comic timing, so she’ll find a role requiring both those things and take off.  I forgot one small detail—because there are so few actresses who are gorgeous and can do comedy, there are very few roles requiring actresses who are gorgeous and can do comedy.

One actor who’s had success but I felt should have been a bigger star is Brice Campbell.  He had rugged good looks, with a distinctive lantern jaw separating him from the standard Hollywood hunk.  He had talent, great comedic timing combined with a palpable intelligence.  And he had luck—in college he was buddies with Sam Raimi, who became a notable director in Hollywood, from his low-budget, Evil Dead origins to big-budget blockbusters like the Spiderman series.  Few neophyte actors have as good a debut as Campbell did playing horror icon Ash in The Evil Dead trilogy.

His big shot at the brass ring was playing the lead in the TV series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. on the then-developing FOX network in 1993.  It was a rare case of hard-to-cast role meeting the perfect actor.  Brisco County utilized Campbell’s rugged visage, self-deprecating sense of humor, and physical skills perfectly as he played a bounty hunter in the late 1800’s tracking down bad guys and occasionally crossing paths with a mysterious “orb” that was ultimately revealed to be from the future. The show developed a cult following, but FOX cancelled it after one season even though they made the unusual decision to order five additional episodes after the original standard order of 22. (I've written more on Brisco County elsewhere; it was a brilliantly conceived show undone by the fact that few writers in Hollywood knew how to write westerns in the 1990's).

Campbell had some success working in New Zealand on Hercules, Xena, and Jack of All Trades,  took surprisingly small roles (cameos, really) in Raimi’s Spiderman movies, and eventually achieved some steady success in Burn Notice as the main character’s best friend, a washed up, boozy ex-Marine.  He survived to have a long career, but he never had the breakout success he deserved.

Compare Campbell to an actor with very similar gifts, Nathan Fillion.  Fillion is also handsome but not gorgeous by Hollywood standards, with a gift for light comedy.  Fillion early on fell in with a horror auteur with a future, Joss Whedon, appearing in Season Seven of Buffy as an evil priest.  And he was perfectly cast in a TV series, Firefly, that was quickly cancelled despite the devoted following of millions of fans.

Where their careers diverged was that Fillion got a second bite at the apple.  He was cast in Castle, an ABC light mystery series.  Castle, about a best-selling crime novelist who consulted with the NYPD, was initially dismissed by critics as “Murder, He Wrote,” a pale imitation of Murder, She Wrote, the long running CBS mystery show about a crime writer who solved murders.  But Castle allowed Fillion to do his light banter shtick with his gorgeous cop partner, played by Stana Katic.  Their chemistry, combined with eccentric plot lines and an engaging supporting cast, turned the show into an inexplicably long running hit.

From everything I've heard, Fillion’s success is well-deserved.  He is invariably described as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood, and he is a full member of the Whedon-verse (his Dogberry is one of the highlights of Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing) and Joss Whedon, another of the nicest guys in Hollywood, does not work with jerks (at least not more than once).

Bruce Campbell has had a great career, but he was capable of more.  He just never got the chance.  There was a recent tongue in cheek feature at The Nerdist where he jokes that he was up for the leads in Iron Man, The Matrix, and Oliver Stone’s JFK.  I can’t imagine him going “Whoa!” better than Keanu Reeves, but it is interesting to imagine.

Casting is one of the biggest mysteries in Hollywood.  No one can predict when two actors will have “chemistry.”  How can a small budget film like American Graffiti feature future stars like Harrison Ford and Suzanne Somers in microscopically small roles? Luck doesn't even begin to explain it.

Angels to pay Hamilton to play for the Rangers

I once read a mystery short story where the plot revolved around a baseball owner who signed an aging star to a multi-million dollar contract, only to have the star suffer a career ending injury.  The owner’s solution?  Pay a hit man a million dollars to kill the player, saving the team millions.  It’s would be a good thing if that story didn’t get passed around the table at the next owners’ meeting as it might be tempting to some of the participants.

There’s been a lot of confusion about the Josh Hamilton situation in Los Angeles (or is it Anaheim?), but one thing is clear: Angels owner Arte Moreno is a liar.  He claimed that the contract he signed with Josh Hamilton had a provision that voided the contract if Hamilton succumbed to one of his myriad addictions, and therefore the Angels owed Hamilton nothing.  At the time nearly everyone is the sports talk industry derided the comment, pointing out that such a clause was directly contrary to the players’ collective bargaining agreement and would never be approved by the players’ union.  Now the Angels have announced they will continue to pay Hamilton the bulk of his money even though he will play for division rival Texas Rangers.  So, what happened to the claim that they didn’t owe Hamilton any money?

The clause was probably a dream Moreno had, or some kind of fantasy that he ruminated on so long he thought it was real. This is the biggest problem with owners of baseball teams; they always insist on signing players to contracts that only make sense if the player continues to play at a high level or even improves over the course of a time period where age and injury will almost inevitably produce decline.  The contracts only make sense if the player’s career works out in a best-case scenario; anything less is a disaster.

Part of the Angels’ problem in dealing with all of this is the cognitive dissonance they feel over the arbitrator’s ruling that Hamilton did NOT violate league drug policy, despite admitting to having a relapse.  News of Hamilton’s relapse was leaked to the media, and Baseball Commish Rob Manfred (man, that looks weird) declined to investigate.  But it must be clear where the leak came from: there were only three possible sources, and there is no reason to suspect either Hamilton or the Commissioner’s office.  The Angels knew about the relapse, and they had the incentive of hoping that Hamilton would get suspended and let them off the hook for his salary.  Releasing the information was only proper if Hamilton had been found guilty of a drug violation; I think the Angels just assumed that Hamilton self-reporting would count.  When the arbitrator found that it is only a violation of the MLB drug policy if you get caught, not if you confess, the Angels refused to accept that logic and just continued to act as if the MLB drug policy had been broken.

This is probably the right decision, from an “addiction is a disease not a crime” perspective. However I hope that MLB doesn’t get into another Steve Howe situation, where a player tests positive over and over and over (and over) and always gets another chance because “it’s a disease.” 

Hamilton is not blameless here.  He knew, and accepted more than any other player I can recall, that he had addiction issues.  He managed to build a career in Texas because his behavior was highly monitored and the team created an environment that minimized the possibility of a relapse.  So when his contract was up, what did Hamilton do? He turned down the millions offered by Texas and decided to accept a few more millions to move to Southern California.  Because we all know that addicts won’t have any temptations in Southern California.  Hamilton says the Angels knew the risks when they signed him; true, but Hamilton knew the risks as well and disregarded them.

So, the Angels send a former MVP to a division rival while paying him about $70 million.  Hamilton, at age 33, probably has had his best years behind him.  But maybe being back in the environment that let him thrive will invigorate his career once more. 

If it is any solace to the Angles, the Mets will pay Bobby Bonilla, who retired in 1999, more this season than they will pay Matt Harvey.  So maybe this wasn’t quite the stupidest contract in baseball history.  But it is up there.

Movie review--Furious 7

As I stepped out of the theater after watching Furious 7, I wondered what legendary Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein would have thought of the movie.  I had no doubt that he would have been impressed by film makers whose muse was unfettered by concepts such as logic, traffic laws, or the laws of physics.

Lest you think I am being derisive about the latest installment in the most improbable movie franchise of all time, think again.  The Fast and Furious franchise has done something remarkable—most franchises get steadily more derivative as they go along; F&F has gotten increasingly creative. The first movie was a small little film about an undercover cop (Paul Walker) infiltrating the street racing milieu of Los Angeles through its ringleader (Vin Diesel), then the series evolved into something with international crime capers and black ops in the Caucus Mountains.

Furious 7 finally clarifies the loop-the-loop time line of the series, explaining (at last) why the guy who died in film #3 (the abominable Tokyo Drift; if that movie couldn’t kill the series, it was unkillable) was around in movies 4, 5 and 6.  Surprisingly, it doesn’t involve time travel but a series of plot devices that are only slightly less plausible.  Furious 7 pays homage to Die Hard 3 by having the brother of the bad guy in Fast & Furious 6 seek revenge; naturally he starts by traveling to Tokyo to take out the least memorable member of the team he holds responsible for his brother being in the tender care of the British medical system.

Fast Five invigorated the series by introducing the character of Hobbs, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson; Fast & Furious 6 added Gina Carano to the mix.  Furious 7 puts Johnson mostly on the sideline (along with, once again, Jordana Brewster, who hasn’t gotten to do anything other than hold babies for three films) but adds Nathalie Emmanual from Game of Thrones, Jason Statham as the bad guy, and Kurt Russell as “Mr. Nobody.”  I can’t remember the last time I saw an actor so clearly enjoying himself as Russell does here; he fully embraces the ludicrousness of his characters and just runs with it, with a twinkle in his eye.

It is too bad Staham is relegated to being the bad guy; he does “menace” well, but as with Jet Li in Lethal Weapon 3, it means he inevitably has to lose a fight to a character who is a much less skilled fighter.  In fact, throughout the film he is described as “unstoppable” but he always gets stopped.  His go to move when losing a mano-a-mano fight is to chuck a grenade at his opponent and assume that he’ll be clear of the blast radius when it goes off.  The really weird thing is that he keeps trying to kill the team that put his brother in the hospital while they are engaged in acts that would probably result in them being killed anyway, if he just let nature take its course.

My favorite line from Fast & Furious Six was when Diesel’s character, Dom, caught his amnesiac girlfriend Letty in mid-air and they land on a car, and she asks, “How did you know there would be a car to break our fall?”  Only in the F&F universe is a car made of metal and glass considered a soft landing place for people falling from a great height.  It is hard to even consider the good guys to be in peril when there is always the option of driving a car off a cliff, or out of a skyscraper, or off a parking garage, and then walking away.

Again, I do not mean this as criticism exactly. The difference between a good action film and a stupid action film is the width of a hair, and Furious 7 clearly falls on the “good” side.  All action films are stupid and implausible, a fact accurately but inartistically made by the movie The Last Action Hero.  When a bad action movie has a stunt that makes no sense, it irritates you; when a good one does it, you write it off to artistic license.  In The Mummy 2 the main characters outrun the sunrise to get inside a building; Roger Ebert correctly pointed out this meant they were running at more than 1,000 miles per hour.  He’s right, but I liked the film so I didn’t care.  Besides, nothing in Furious 7 could possibly be more ridiculous that the scene in Fast and Furious 5 where two cars dragged a safe weighing several tons through the streets of Rio at high speed.

My biggest criticism, and this is personal, is that Lucas Black wasn’t allowed to join the main cast, other than a brief cameo.  Black was the star of the Walker-less and Diesel-less F&F Tokyo Drift, and when I tried (and failed) to watch that movie I suddenly realized where I had seen him before—he arched an eyebrow at a certain angle, and I suddenly remembered him as a child actor in the one season wonder TV show American Gothic.  It somehow would have made sense to have him jump from F&F 3 to F&F 7 and join the team.

I didn’t care for the direction of Furious 7, which lacked the smoothness and grace of former director Justin Lin (fun fact—Lin’s prior directing gig before Fast and furious 5 was the legendary paintball episode of Community, possibly the best directed episode of a TV comedy ever). But the stunts were well-executed and the pace never flagged, which is important when cars are flying out of buildings.

If I was a blurbmeister I’d call Furious 7 the high octane movie of the summer, except in came out in early spring.  Never the less, it delivers what you paid your money for.  It is destined to be the biggest hit in cinema history, at least until Age of Ultron debuts next week.

Idiots, Damn Idiots, and Statistics

One problem with being a cynic, Lily Tomlin once opined, is that you just can’t keep up.  I work in the policy area where I am exposed to a lot of numbers, projections, estimates and guesstimates.  I’ve seen so many that my standard for what passes the “giggle test” is impossibly high. I can take almost any absurd numeric estimate and be willing to accept it at face value.

Or so I thought.  Then I came across this article by Anthony York, reposted from his blog the Grizzly Bear Project.  The article, about the astonishing increase in administration at the University of California, demonstrates an astonishing gullibility about data.  I looked at the numbers and started laughing; the author, alas, did not.

Let me focus on just one data point: Mr. York claims the number of managers in the administration of UC Davis in 1993 was (drum roll please) nine.  Really?  I find that amazing.

A quick peak at the UC Davis catalog that year indicates (on page 4) there is a chancellor, an agricultural school, an engineering school, a college of Letters and Sciences, a Division of Biological Sciences, Graduate Studies, a law school, a Graduate School of Management, a School of Medicine, and a veterinary school.  That’s nine different sub-schools, so I guess each had one person in administration to handle admissions, calculate financial aid, administer the faculty, arrange courses, keep track of student progress, and do all those things that need to be done to run an institution of higher education.

I was at UC Davis in 1986 and I can assure you that the idea that the campus had a grand total of nine people working in administration is laughable.  Farcical.  Ludicrous. Absurd. Ridiculous.  Please consult a thesaurus for more synonyms.  There were 17,900 undergraduate students, 5,400 graduate and professional students, and 1,700 teaching faculty.  The college of Letters and Sciences offered over 50 different majors.  And, according to Mr. York, all of this was administered by NINE PEOPLE. 

Mr. York is correctly citing the data provided by his source, The National Center for Education Statistics.  But let’s look a little deeper.  I ran the search for administrators at UC Davis for odd numbered years up to 2009 and got the following data:

Amazing how the number of administrators skyrocketed in 1996, going from 9 to 256.  Obviously there is something seriously wrong with their database going back to 1993 and 1995.

The data on the number of administrators at other UC Campuses is equally flawed.  17 at UC Irvine? There were probably 17 administrators in the dean of undergraduate admissions office alone.  Frankly, even the 439 at UCLA strikes me as significantly low.

Mr. York’s research is pure, unadulterated hogwash, and anyone with a modicum of common sense (and a moderate understanding of how large campuses are organized) should have looked at the 1993 data and laughed.  Davis probably had more than 9 administrators when it was the UC Berkeley Agricultural Extension Farm in 1913. 

But Mr. York’s nonsense is now published nonsense, which means it is irrefutable.  Except to people like me, who still know how to laugh at the absurd.

In Joss We Trust

The summer blockbusters seem to come earlier and earlier each year.  It used to be you had to wait until July for a good space opera, now they come in April.  Marvel’s The Age of Ultron comes out next weekend; I don’t know if you’ve heard about it because they’ve been trying to keep it a secret. Shhh.

It is hard to believe that there were those who were uncertain about The Avengers.  It was written and directed by Joss Whedon, who up to that time had 1) written a bad movie about vampires, 2) created a low-rated TV show based on the bad vampire movie, 3) created a low-rated spin off of the vampire TV show; 4) created a space opera that was cancelled after 13 episodes, and 5) created a show about attractive people programmed to be other people that lasted two seasons but didn’t set the ratings world on fire and was basically a star vehicle for Eliza Dushku.  Would he crumble under the pressure of a big budget and big expectations?

As a huge Joss Whedon fan back to the beginning of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series), I never had a doubt.  Only a genius like Joss Whedon could take all the prequel movies (Iron Man 1 & 2, Hulk, Captain America, Thor 1 & 2), all the disparate plot lines and character personalities, and (pardon the pun) assemble them into an entertaining movie that transcended its comic book origins. One of his recurring themes in Buffy was the notion of family (especially in the episode titled, um, Family), the idea that family is not who you share DNA with, it is who you share your life with.  Only Joss Whedon would realize that The Avenger team was not a group of heroes with super powers, they were a highly dysfunctional family (in spandex).

Any doubts about Whedon’s ability to helm a big budget motion picture were dispelled by Avengers. There are two types of people thinking about Avengers: The Age of Ultron; those who think it will gross $2 billion, and those who think it will gross a lot more than $2 billion.  In an age where even Tom Cruise can churn out a couple of clunkers in a row, Age of Ultron is the surest bet there is.

Why do I have such faith in Joss Whedon?  Listen to the man.  In an interview in Entertainment Weekly he says, “The first rule of making a sequel: take the best moments and do something else.”  No one else in Hollywood thinks that way.  Look at how many sequels have gone the route of “The same, but bigger.” Even successful series like The Dark Knight Trilogy seem to reprocess material.  Only the original Mad Max trilogy seemed to gain creative steam as it went along (we’ll see how the reboot does this summer).

The above quote is similar to something he said about an episode of Angel that ran too long; in the commentary for Waiting in the Wings he said when you need to cut something, take the thing you the writer love the most and toss it. Hollywood is full of artistes who would rather churn out a 3 ½ hour snooze-a-palooza than trim one tiny scene that they created.  Whedon, despite being a genius, is incredibly humble yet self-assured, a rare combination anywhere but almost unheard of in La La Land.

He has the reputation of being the nicest guy in the world.  Actors who work with him will follow him anywhere; Nathan Fillion said he accepted the role in Dr. Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog because when his phone rang and the caller ID was “Joss Whedon” he answered the phone saying, “I accept.”

Andy Hallett, who played the green-skinned horned demon Lorne on Angel commented once that Whedon told him he was making him a regular on Angel after over 100 guest appearances because “it would look better on his resume.”  Hallett was amazed that a guy who was still overseeing Buffy, trying to save Angel from cancellation, and had several other projects in the works would take time out to worry about what Andy Hallet’s resume looked like.

I am also heartened by Whedon’s pledge that Ultron will be his last Marvel/Avengers movie.  I hope he pens an occasional episode of Agents of SHIELD, but I will welcome even more the creation of new characters like Buffy, Angel, Dr. Horrible, and Malcolm Reynolds.  More small projects like his Much Ado About Nothing will be welcomed as well.  Joss has the financial freedom to do whatever he wants; that kind of freedom has destroyed auteurs like Orson Welles, but somehow I don’t see unlimited options being a burden on Joss Whedon.

Defense and the Baseball Hall of Fame

Defense and the Hall of Fame

Jim Kaat was on the Keith Olbermann show recently, and Olbermann repeatedly made the claim that Kaat deserves to be in Cooperstown.  I agree, but for a rather unusual reason, and one that simultaneous takes umbrage at something Olbermann said about David Ortiz and the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Kaat pitching numbers are admittedly marginal Hall-worthy.  I’m not saying they’re NOT Hall-worthy; I’m saying they are right on the fence.  In his analysis of Kaat’s candidacy for Cooperstown, Bill James noted that Kaat had the bad luck of having his best years when a) there was only one Cy Young award for both leagues and b) Sandy Koufax was pitching.  Kaat won 282 games, the most of anyone from the 20^th century not in the Hall of Fame except for Tommy John (who should go in for having his name attached to elbow surgery).  On the other hand is lifetime WAR is 45.3, which rates 127^th all-time, just behind Steve Rogers and Brad Radke, who aren’t Hall-worthy by a long shot.

But what tips the scale in favor of his induction for me is this fact: he won 16 Gold Glove Awards.  I would say that no one with that many Gold Gloves is NOT in the Hall of Fame, but the only two people that would apply to are Greg Maddux (18) and Brooks Robinson (16).  If his lifetime stats were mediocre I wouldn’t say winning 16 Gold Gloves alone should gain you entry to Cooperstown, but with close to 300 wins it makes a difference in my book.

Which leads me to Olbermann’s second comment of note, his response to David Ortiz’s claim that Jim Palmer was trying to “get famous” by poking fun at Big Papi for getting ejected after arguing a check swing call.  Olbermann pointed out that Palmer was a first ballot Hall of Famer with a lifetime WAR of 68.1, and that Ortiz was destined to be a retired designated hitter who didn’t understand why he was never inducted into the Hall of Fame.

DHs have not fared well in Hall of Fame voting.  Paul Molitor made it in, but he played several positions before transitioning into the DH role late in his career.  Edgar Martinez, universally hailed during his career as one of the best hitters in baseball, has never broken 36.5% in Cooperstown balloting.  The criticism is that he didn’t contribute anything with his glove, therefore he doesn’t deserve enshrinement.

This argument is as illogical as keeping Ray Guy out of the Football hall of Fame because he was a punter.  Maybe he didn’t take as much punishment as other football players, but every net yard gained by punting was the same as a yard gained running or passing.  If punting doesn’t matter, why do all teams have a punter on their roster?  If DHs don’t contribute as much as “real” baseball players, why don’t pitchers bat in the American League?

Besides, is Harmon Killebrew in the Hall of Fame because of his glove?  Ted Williams?  Willie McCovey?  There are very few players in the Hall exclusively because of their fielding—Bill Mazerowski, Ozzie Smith, Tinker/Evers/Chance, and Brooks Robinson.  Sure, a lot of great hitters, like Willie Mays, also flashed the leather.  But I suspect more are in the Hall despite their fielding, not because of it (let me take this opportunity to point out that certain first-ballot Hall of famer Derek Jeter has been called the worst fielding shortstop of all-time based on advanced metrics).

I think Ortiz belongs in the Hall of Fame; his hitting stats are certainly in the ballpark, and his post-season performance is extraordinary (lifetime post-season numbers of .295/.409/.553; 2013 World Series stats are other-worldly at .688/.760/1.188).  So he only played 270 of 2,125 in the field; at least on the bench he wasn’t booting ground balls or making errant throws.

Jim Kaat should be in the Hall of Fame because of his fielding, and David Ortiz shouldn’t be kept out despite his lack of fielding ability.  You shouldn’t have to be a five-tool player for induction into Cooperstown, as long as you did very well with the tools you had.  Maybe the Veterans’ Committee will see the light with Kaat; we’ll have to wait until five years after his retirement to see what the Baseball writers think of Big Papi.

TV Review: Daredevil

I am not the best person to be giving an opinion about the new Netflix series Daredevil, because I am one of the few people who LIKED the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Garner version (the sequel, Elektra, was a total disaster).  I thought Affleck was good in the role, had undeniable chemistry with Garner (unusual for an off-screen couple) and Michael Duncan Clarke was an inspired choice to play Kingpin.  Okay, maybe Colin Farrell was a tad “off” as Bulls-eye, but I enjoyed it.

It would be wrong to say Netflix has “reimagined” the story, because it’s still produced my Marvel and they don’t need to reimagine anything (unless you count the parallel universes and all the other alternate versions of things).  It is still the story of a blind lawyer who fights injustice by day and criminal thugs by night.

Charlie Cox plays Matt Murdoch, the son of a tough but not very good boxer who is blinded as a child in a chemical spill.  He loses his sight but gains enhanced other senses, even more than Master Po on Kung Fu.  After graduating top of his class from Columbia Law School he joins he friend Foggy (really?) in opening a law firm in Hell’s Kitchen, where he grew up. His main opponents are gentrification and urban development, which of course are evil.  God forbid we tear down some slums and put up condos.

The showrunner is Drew Goddard, who worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as Angel, Lost and Alias, so he knows dark and violent.  When I say the show is dark, I don’t mean metaphorically.  I mean you will be tempted to adjust your TV settings and bump up the Brightness to 9.  The look is unique to television, where even shows set at midnight have to make every actor’s teeth visible.

What distinguishes Daredevil (although he isn’t called that, at least not in the first three episodes) from the other Marvel superheroes is that he does not have superpowers.  After an encounter with a gang of criminal that set a trap for him, he is barely able to move.  What he does have is his father’s ability to take a licking and keep on ticking, but he can’t ignore all the blows he takes like Thor or Captain America do.  In fact one of the least credible things about the show is not that a blind guy can beat up seven burly criminals, but that he can go into work the next day and not look like a walking bruise.

The fight choreography is spectacular.  Several reviews have singled out a sequence in the second episode where Daredevil takes on a half dozen thugs in a hallway in a scene shot in a single take.  This is beyond movie fight arrangement.  My only complaint about the fight sequences is that they are usually too dark to make out who is punching or kicking whom.

While I admire the first three episodes, I do have a number of issues (in addition Murdoch fighting a dozen guys and looking okay the next morning; even the magazine ads show him sporting raw knuckles and a split lip).  The character of Foggy, as in the movie, is such an obvious second banana it is hard to take him seriously as a character.  The actor makes in painfully clear he knows he is the comic relief, something that completely escapes a character such as J. Jonah Jameson.  Also, would you hire a lawyer named Foggy?  Maybe these guys would do more good by getting six-figure jobs at the firm in Suits and giving money to stop the developers in Hell’s Kitchen.

I am not sold on Vincent D’Onofrio as Kingpin, known here by his proper name Wilson Fisk.  D’Onofrio is a great actor, but even with a shaved head he lacks Duncan’s physical presence.  But I’ve only watched three episodes and he’s only been on screen for less than five minutes, so I’ll wait.

I suspect a lot of people will find the reality-based superheroics of Matt Murdoch preferable to the elevated machinations of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, and I understand that.  It’s just that I find reality concerns slipping in, where on Agents of Shield I turn my logic circuits off and accept it.  How does he know where to go?  Why doesn’t anybody shoot him?  If he gets stabbed and his lung collapses, should he be okay the next day?  It’s entertaining, but ultimately the questions start impinging on my enjoyment.

But not eliminating it.  I will finish out the 13 episode run, and see if Matt Murdoch comes back for more.  Maybe the vicissitudes of being on a non-broadcast medium will do what all the thugs in Hell’s Kitchen can’t do—stop Daredevil.

Woe is Spiderman

I know I am late to the party on this, but I just saw Spiderman 2 on DVD.  Ooops, I mean The Amazing Spiderman 2, not the original Spiderman 2.  Sometimes Hollywood’s lack of creativity can be confusing.

I didn’t rush out to see Amazing Spidey 2 at the local multiplex because the reviews were not enthusiastic (Metacritic score of 53) and the first one had basic problems with things like the plot.  Apparently my opinion was shared by many, many people and so now they are going to reboot the whole thing yet again.  That’s it, keep on trying until you get it right.

The one thing I regret about this is that I actually really like Andrew Garfield’s interpretation of Peter Parker.  He does a far better job that Tobey Maguire of capturing the teenaged angst and smart-alec sensibility that defines Spiderman.  Superman was too much of a stick in the mud to pick fights with J. Jonah Jameson, and can you imagine Batman calling himself “your friendly, neighborhood caped crusader”?  Maguire, a fine actor, played Peter Parker as a mopey sad sack; why Mary Jane Watson even paid him the time of day was a mystery.  Garfield, a decade too old for the role, captured Parker’s wisecracking attitude perfectly.

Amazing Spiderman had the same problem as Spiderman, namely it took too long laying out the origin story that most everyone already knew (everybody out there who did NOT know he was bitten by a radioactive spider raise your hands).  Amazing Spiderman was leavened not only by Garfield’s performance but also Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacey, plus Denis Leary as Gwen’s father, but undermined by the fact that the Big Bad was a large lizard.  Godzilla sort of has that plot element to itself.  The plot also had basic “duh” plot holes, like the fact that Peter Parker sneaks into security conscious Oscorp simply by taking someone else’s ID badge for a conference; wouldn’t someone ask to see some ID?  And would science genius Peter Parker be going to this conference anyway?  And why would security throw out the guy who pointed out his badge had been stolen?

This level of stupidity is continued in Amazing 2.  Oscar winner Jaime Foxx (it all seems like a bad dream, doesn’t it?) plays a schmuck who idolizes Spiderman after he is rescued by him, but then becomes a supervillain when he receives an electrical shock at work (why was the power on where he was working? He asked someone to turn it off but they declined because it was 6 o’clock and check out time.  90% of Marvel supervillains are created due to basic violation of OSHA regulations). Why does he now hate Spiderman?  Um, because if he didn’t, there would be no plot.

Amazing 2 has the same problem as Spiderman 3, too many villains and too convoluted a plot.  Spiderman 3 had Sandman, Green Goblin 2, Viper, dark Spidey, and I think Al Capone.  Of the five movie Spiderman oeuvre, only Spiderman 2 rises above the dross to be, in my opinion, the best superhero movie of all time, the Citizen Kane of the spandex set.  It has a great villain, Doc Ock (with a neat retcon of his origin that makes way more sense).  The interaction between Doc Ock and the second green Goblin seems organic and not forced by plot contrivance.  The fight scenes are well choreographed and actually play out in three dimension.  In the end, Spiderman wins not by physically overcoming Doc Ock, but by restoring Otto Octavius’ humanity, a plot twist worthy of Shakespeare.

Marvel Studios has been firing on all cylinders recently.  The pre-Avenger films were successful, and when Joss Whedon assembled the Avengers it was a blockbuster.  Only Whedon could have written the script that wove the characters together instead of merely assembling the pieces.  Whedon also helped start Marvel’s Agents of Shield on ABC.  It took a while to warm up, but Agents is now a neat weekly dose of Marvel between big screen releases.  Daredevil recently debuted on Netflix to mostly positive reviews (Metacritic score of 75).

So, can Marvel fix its biggest franchise, the one where they have screwed up four of the five films they’ve produced?  Third time’s a charm, right?  Can they find an age-appropriate actor who can project Peter Parker’s teen angst and Spiderman’s plucky sense of humor?  Can they find a scriptwriter who isn’t a complete moron?  Time will tell.  AV Club had a notice that they’ve announced that the next Spidey will be back in high school.  I just hope they won’t go through the origin story again; I can only watch Uncle Ben die so many times.

What hath Indiana wrought?

There’s an old axiom in legislative drafting—any law with more than 50 words has at least one loophole.  Actually, laws with far less than 50 words can have loopholes too.  The recently adopted law in Indiana called “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act” has way more than 50 words but is nothing but one big loophole.

Generally speaking, the law states that the application of a generally applicable state law cannot abridge the exercise of anyone’s religious freedom. “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened . . . by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation . . . as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding . . .” So if you follow your religious tenets and you get sued, the fact that God told you to do it is a defense.

Thus far the media focus on Indiana’s law has been on whether the law authorizes businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation on religious grounds.  Indiana Governor Mike Pence has denied this was the purpose of the law, but if it wasn't then it is hard to see what purpose the law serves.  Reaction to the law, prop and con, has been entirely focused on the effect on gay rights.

But why stop there?  What’s to keep businesses from discriminating on other grounds?  A mixed race couple shows up at a hotel—sorry, the owner’s religion forbids racial mixing.  It may not be spelled out in the Bible, but he feels REALLY strongly about it, and he feels really strongly about God, so it’s the same thing.  The same reasoning could be applied to denying access Jews, Mormons, Scientologists, or any racial, ethnic, or religious group.

On This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Indiana Governor Mike Pence refused to answer a question about whether the law would allow discrimination, by stressing it was about a limit on governmental exercise of power, not individual rights.  But the two are linked—some people in this country, actually a majority of people in this country, only achieved civil rights through what their oppressors would call “government overreach.” Many people in the South (and elsewhere) justified slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination as “God’s will.”  To say the government cannot interfere with the exercise of such religious beliefs is to gut the Civil Rights Act and a host of other government protections of civil liberties.

But why stop there?  Maybe my religion forbids me from giving money to organizations that promote sin and decadence, so paying taxes is against my religion.  Maybe the Bible commands me to kill non-Christians (read Deuteronomy 13 verses 6-10 and 17 verses 12-13), so arresting me for murder is a violation of my religious freedom.  I can justify any action I take by saying it’s a requirement of my religion, and the government can’t touch me.  Welcome to anarchy.

Of course it is unclear exactly why religion needs to be restored in this country.  Despite the First Amendment, our money says “In God we trust.”  The last time I checked, not a single jurisdiction in America has replaced English Common Law (or the Napoleonic Code, if you are from Louisiana) with Sharia Law.  The number of non-Christian Presidents is exactly zero, despite what Fox News says about Barack Obama.  Yet once again White men insist that they are the victims here and everyone has it better than them, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

If this episode has demonstrated anything, it is how far this country has come on LGBT issues in a short period of time.  You know you are on shaky ground when NASCAR accuses you of being a bigot.  Maybe Michael Sam can’t get a spot on a pro football team, but it is just possible that him being an undersized linebacker has as much to do with that as him being openly gay.

There is another old saying—never attribute to malice what can be reasonably explained by stupidity.  I tend to believe Governor Pence when he says he thought the law wasn't intended to allow discrimination, even though the author says the exact opposite.  Judging from his bumbling demeanor on television, maybe he thought this was merely a symbolic act and not an attempt to expand the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision into a legal principle that the Bible trumps the US Constitution and the US Code. 

Indiana is taking a huge financial hit by supporting the rights of businesses to refuse to do business with gays.  Governor Pence says that the law will be “fixed,” but the people behind its passage say it isn’t broken. Anti-gay bigots will have to be willing to be boycotted, or find ways of being a little more subtle.  For people who say they are in favor of marriage, you’d think they’d want more weddings in Indiana, not fewer.