Bill Polian says something stupid

Even smart people say really stupid things sometimes.  Indianapolis Colts GM and Hall of Famer Bill Polian said this week that neither Terrell Owens nor Randy Moss deserve to be in the Football Hall of Fame. Why?  Terrell Owens wasn’t a good team mate, and Moss didn’t give 100% effort.

Really?  And I suppose Babe Ruth doesn’t deserve to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame; sure, he hit 714 home runs, but he was drunk a lot and didn’t give 100% effort.  Mickey Mantle doesn’t belong either, because he boozed it up as well.  And Jim Brown shouldn’t be in Canton; he quit after only nine seasons!  That’s not giving 100%.  Why is Lawrence Taylor in Canton?  He wasn’t a very good teammate from what I hear.  Polian apparently believes entry to Canton should be based on saintliness, not statistics.

Look, if Randy Moss didn’t give 100% effort, then how many yards, receptions, and touchdowns would he have had if he did?  He got over 15,000 yards and scored 156 touchdowns, but Polian wants him to have at least 30,000 yards because he only gave 50% effort.  If that’s your standard, then every receiver who ever played the game is disqualified.  Oh wait, I forgot about Lee Folkins; he only had 80 career receptions for the Cowboys in the 1960’s, but he gave 100%!  Put Folkins in the Hall of Fame, but keep Randy Moss out!

Did Terrell Owens help his teams?  He made it to the postseason eight times, and his 16,000 yards and 156 TDs certainly did help.  Owens took a lot of flak while he was in Philadelphia, but who played better in the Super Bowl?  Terrell “I have metal pins in my hand” Owens, or Donovan “Would you like to see what I had for lunch” McNabb?  Owens had nine receptions for 122 yards and was probably the MVP for the losing Eagles.

Okay, we get it, Bill Polian doesn’t like players like Terrell Owens or Randy Moss.  He’d rather have players with less . . . talent.  If he thinks Terrell Owens should not be in Canton because he was a bad teammate, then why does Canton induct individuals instead of teams?  Football may be a team sport, but individuals are singled out, individuals who have the most talent.  If Owens and Moss were marginal hall choices, he might have a point.  But Owens and Moss are, statistically, the second and third best receivers OF ALL TIME.  Of course their combined 31,000 yards and 300 touchdowns helped their teams FAR MORE than any locker room incidents or spats with the media.

There is also the fact that these are receivers—almost all receivers are divas.  This is such an accepted truth that now a days a receiver would have to say that he thinks his team throws to him too often t get any attention.  Owens and Moss were just ahead of their time.

Either Randy Moss made an effort in practice and in games, or else it is incredible that he could have been as successful as he was coasting on only 90% effort.  No one gets to be that good with a lot of effort; no one is that naturally gifted.  Did Owens’ gift for self-promotion really negate 16,000 yards of offense?  I doubt it.

Bill Polian is too smart to believe what he just said.  Of course Moss and Owens deserve to be in the Football Hall of fame in Canton.  They are two of the three greatest receivers in NFL history.  Does Canton select its inductees on merit, or on Bill Polian’s list of player who showed proper deportment?  I think it should be a meritocracy, but Bill Polian apparently thinks the definition of a Hall of Famer is to be well-behaved.

Music Review--The Mannix Soundtrack

I have never attempted a music review before, for the simple reason that I know nothing about music.  Yes, I did travel with the choir in 6^th grade, but my duties were confined to turning the tape recorder on and off.  But I will attempt to express some thoughts on a surprisingly lively soundtrack, to the TV series Mannix.

Frankly, I didn’t know TV series had soundtracks before Miami Vice or Ally McBeal.  Oh sure, I was familiar with the legendary Henry Mancini score for Peter Gunn, and the exquisite soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas which answered the question, “Can Christmas music be jazzy?”  But in a pre-digital, all vinyl age, I wasn’t even aware that TV shows produced soundtrack albums.

For those of you who don’t remember, Mannix was the story of a private detective who got beat up a lot (IMBD Trivia says Mannix was knocked unconscious 55 times in 8 seasons).  I don’t frankly remember it that well, but I do know that it was considered one of the most violent shows on TV at the time.  I was surprised to see how well thought of it was at awards time—the series won four Golden Globes including Best Drama and Best Actor (star Mike Connors, who thankfully stopped using the name “Touch” Connors after a few years in Hollywood), Gail Fisher won a Supporting Actress Emmy (the fact that a private eye having an African-American secretary was considered a major step forward for civil rights is depressing), and it even picked up an Edgar award for Best Mystery TV series.

The theme music is by Lalo Schifrin, the genius behind one of the greatest theme songs of all time, Mission Impossible.  The Mission Impossible movie series has jettisoned every vestige of the TV show except those latex masks that allows anybody to impersonate anyone, and Schifrin’s jazz-infused theme that perfectly melds with the show’s dynamic pacing.  He’s been nominated for six Oscars and four Emmys, picking up one (and a Grammy) for Mission Impossible.

The album contains various styles of jazz—the theme and some early tracks are very kinetic be-bob, there is some Big-Band-sounding numbers with large brass sections, there are some Kenny G-esque numbers that I imagined were titled, “Music while Joe Mannix buys groceries” or “Music while Joe Mannix cleans his apartment.”  There are a couple of up-tempo soundtrack numbers that are possibly titled, “Music while Joe Mannix tails a kidnapper” or “Music while Joe Mannix gets beaten up by three underworld goons.” 

There is one track on the album I am not sure what to make of; a progressive, discordant piece that uses electric guitar, Moog synthesizers, and I think a Theremin.  It starts to segue back to a Big Band sound, then the Moog synthesizer kicks in and it sounds like Jimi Hendrix on cream-of-wheat (Jimi Hendrix on acid would sound like . . . Jimi Hendrix).  It’s obviously experimental and I’d be interested in seeing how it was used in the context of the TV show.

The Mannix Soundtrack is an obvious throwback to when TV was innovative and unafraid to challenge viewers with a generic detective drama that had a hoppin’ jazz score.  With scores like this, Peter Gunn and Mission Impossible, I now feel like searching for other groundbreaking scores from that bygone era of television.

In Praise of Gina Torres

The entertainment industry is exactly that, a business.  And it is a business where there isn’t a lot of longevity.  Even talented performers often find their employability flagging after one hit TV show or a couple of successful movie.  Not everyone can be Tom Cruise, whose track record from Risky Business in 1982 through Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol in 2012 (his post-2012 productions—Jack Reacher, Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow—show uncharacteristic missteps) was infallible.

It is even harder to maintain longevity when you don’t have a lot of long-lived projects on your resume.  Kelsey Grammer had a great run, but when you’re on Cheers for nine years and Fraiser for eleven, it’s easy to keep busy; or David Boreanaz, who played Angel for 8 years and has been on Bones for twelve, managed to work for two decades on only two jobs.  Some actors never have that security.

Therefore what Gina Torres has accomplished is remarkable.  Her IMDB profile says she started acting in 1992, and she has kept busy for 25 years playing action heroes, evil entities, Cuban spies, and even lawyers.  The fact that she’s done all this while also being African-American, female, and gorgeous makes it that much more impressive.  Halle Berry is all that, but after she won an Oscar her career went nowhere; Torres never hit that height, but she’s been steadier.

I wax poetic because of the news that after leaving the USA show Suits she'll be starring in a spin off. I know she’s been in a lot of science fiction/fantasy shows, but her greatest acting challenge has been making it believable that a high-powered Manhattan law firm would have a managing partner that looked like her.

Torres had the good fortune to fall in with Sam Rami’s troupe Renaissance Pictures making low-budget TV shows in New Zealand, first playing Cleopatra (of course she’d be the most beautiful woman of legend) on Xena: Warrior Princess, then playing a different role on nine episodes of Hercules.  She then got the lead in Renaissance’s next series, Cleopatra 2525 (she didn’t play Cleopatra this time). 

Cleo 2525 only lasted 28 episodes, but with a solid background in fantasy/SF she moved on to a season on Angel as the evil Jasmine, followed by her most iconic role, Zoe Washburn on Firefly.  In the commentary for the movie Serenity Joss Whedon says that the biggest problem in trying to set up the movie for people who weren’t familiar with the TV series Firefly was explaining that the gorgeous Amazonian woman was married to the scruffy-looking ship’s pilot.

She had lots of jobs—a seven episode run on 24, a bit in the last two Matrix movies, a memorable role as Sydney Bristow’s nemesis on Alias (her fight scene with Jennifer Gardner is one of the great woman-on-woman fight scenes in screen history).  She finally settled in for a long run as Jessica Pearson, the high-powered managing partner of the law firm in Suits.  She had great chemistry with co-star Gabriel Macht, yet they never went for the will-they-or-won’t-they tease that would have been so easy (or was it because Macht had even better chemistry with his legal secretary played by Sarah Rafferty?).  She quit the show because she tired of filming in Toronto, but supposedly her desire to live in Los Angeles has been accommodated for her new, as yet untitled series.

No major awards, no Emmies or Oscars, but steady work for twenty-five years.  Plus she’s been married to Laurence Fishburn since 2002.  It’s an impressive resume for any actor, but especially one given her ethnicity, gender, and now her age.  And apparently, it is going to continue for a while longer.

Maybe her husband can get her a guest role on Black-ish.  She hasn’t done much comedy, but I think she’d be good at it.

Baseball has the best All-Star game

Okay, maybe baseball is no longer the National Pastime it was in the 1920’s, when Babe Ruth strode the world like a colossus, or in the 1950’s when kids all over America debated who was better, Mantle, Mays, or Snider, never mind that they all played in New York City and no games were televised nationally.  Football now controls the consciousness of most American sports fans, and the NBA produces bigger, more recognizable stars.  But you must give baseball this—they have the best All-Star game.

The most recent evidence of this is the recent NBA All-Star fiasco, which ended with the Western Conference beating the East 192-182.  Yes, these were the best players, and presumably the best DEFENSIVE players in the league, and yet both teams came close to posting a double century.  Bob Ryan on ESPN harkened back to Woody Allen, saying, “It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.” 

Yes, offense is fun, but if no one plays defense, like Bill Murray in Space Jam, then it isn’t basketball, it’s . . .  just a bunch of tall guys jumping around.  The All-Star game in no way resembles actual basketball, because actual basketball games don’t have scores of 192-182.

The NFL Pro Bowl is worse.  The entre concept of the Pro Bowl is ridiculous; football is such a team sport that the idea that you can take a Right Tackle from one team, a Right Guard from another, and a Center, Left Tackle and Left Guard from three other teams and they’ll be the best offensive line ever, is absurd.  Given the game’s violent nature no one wants to risk injury, they put in all sorts of safety rules like no blitzing, and QBs and receivers have no time to work together, and the result is a hyped-up flag football game.

I suspect the NFL would like to just do away with the game except that in our football besotted country, even the crappy Pro Bowl gets great ratings.

Let’s talk about the National Hockey League, whose 2017 All-Star game was won by the Metropolitans.  You read that right.  The NHL All-Star game is now in a 3-on-3 round robin format with players representing their divisions.  As with football and basketball, the hockey All-Star game in no way resembles the game that is actually played during the season.

This brings us to baseball.  The All-Star game took a lot of grief after the debacle in 2002 when the game ended in a tie (Mon dieu!) and Bud Selig decided to avert a national catastrophe by declaring that thereafter the game would NEVER again end in a tie and that the winning league would have home field advantage in the World Series.  This decision was mocked mercilessly until they finally got rid of the rule this year.

In December 2016 MLB announced that home field in the World Series will be decided by the team with the better record.  Of course this makes even LESS sense, since the team with the better record will be the team that played in the weaker league, and why should the weaker league get home field advantage?  Of course I never understood the usual alternative, that the AL should host in even numbered years and the NL in odd numbered years, or vice versa.  I never believed numerology had any validity.

But the baseball All-Star game still looks like the game played during the regular season.  Pitchers pitch, hitters hit, and fielders field.  Because of the individualistic nature of play in a team environment, you can watch the best pitchers and hitters do what they do best.  It used to be that starters played most of the game, which doesn’t happen anymore, but that just means everyone gets to play!

There are still things to complain about the baseball All-Star game, but mostly it’s about who gets chosen and we all know about the flaws inherent in democracy.  But as long as the final score does rise to 25-23, or they don’t switch to a 5-on-5 format with pitchers throwing underhand, it will continue to look like the game in celebrates.

So suck it, football!  Bite me, basketball!  I won’t even dignify hockey’s All-Star game by mocking it.  Baseball still has the best All-Star game of the major American sports.

The stupidest idea in the history of the world (this week)

One of the best books about baseball I’ve read is The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by WP Kinsella.  Kinsella is more famous for another baseball novel he wrote, a little something called Shoeless Joe  that was adapted into the movie Field of Dreams.  Confederacy is another baseball fantasy about a mythical game between the titular nine and the Chicago Cubs in 1908.  The game is cursed by a native American, and as a result . . . it never ends.

All sorts of weird stuff happens, and at some point both Teddy Roosevelt and Leonardo DaVinci make an appearance.  Like I said, it’s a fantasy.  But the key plot point is an exhibition game ends in a tie, and in extra innings every time the visiting team scores, the home team scores the same number of runs, meaning more extra innings.  The game goes on for days, even weeks.  This must be the stuff of nightmares for Joe Torre.

Torre, one time beloved manager of the New York Yankees, now MLB executive in charge of stupid ideas, hates extra-inning games.  I mean hates them.   Nothing makes him madder than fans paying to see nine innings of baseball and getting 10, 11 or 12.  And he has a plan to stop it.

Baseball will test an idea in the Gulf Coast League and the Cactus League designed to make game last less long.  Once extra innings start, each team will begin with a runner on second base. Because . . . excitement!

My first question is this—who is the runner?  Does the team get to choose?  Is it the player who was supposed to lead off?  Or the batter who made the last out the previous inning?  Does he get credit for hitting a double?  If not, then how did he get on second base?  A number of questions need answering.

Actually, I am getting ahead of myself.  Do too many baseball games last too long?  According to one statistical analysis, roughly 10% of major league games get to the 10th inning. The same source says that the average extra inning game has 2.126 extra innings.  So it’s not like a lot of 15 inning games are being played.

The problem Joe Torre is trying to solve is the “problem” of watching non-pitchers pitch.  "It's not fun to watch when you go through your whole pitching staff and wind up bringing a utility infielder in to pitch.” said Torre.  First, he’s wrong’ it is GREAT when a team gets so desperate they bring in the second baseman with a knuckler to pitch.  Second, if a team runs out of pitchers, maybe the manager shouldn’t have used three pitchers in the seventh inning against the bottom of the order.  And third, last year only 8 games out of 2,428 went 15 innings.

So this is NOT a problem.

But what if it was?  Would starting the inning with a runner on second solve the problem?  According to my copy of The Hidden Game of Baseball by Thorn and Palmer, at the start of an inning a team expects to score .454 runs; with a runner on second and no outs, the expectation rises to 1.068 runs.  So in the top of the 10^th, the visiting team’s chance of scoring increases significantly.

The problem is this: the home team’s expectations rise the exact same amount!  Instead of both team’s failing to score, now they both score one run, and the game goes on.  The only way to make games end faster is to give one team an advantage in scoring.  Giving both teams an edge does nothing to reduce the probability that the game will end sooner.

Look, if we decided this was a problem, there are better ways to resolve it that debasing the game by inventing base runners.  Calling the game a tie after 12 innings would be better than arbitrarily changing the rules after nine innings.  Allowing pitchers to re-enter the game is another option, although there might be some safety problems.

But that assumes there is a problem, which there isn’t.  Less than 10 games a year go to 15 innings, and getting free baseball and watching infielders pitch is GOOD, not bad.

This is unbelievably stupid.  This reminds me of an idea years ago (the 1980’s), when the Yankees were dominating free agency and someone proposed that small market teams could raise revenue to compete by selling advertising space on their uniforms.  That’s a great idea until you realize that the Yankees, the most watched team in the world, would be able to raise more money selling ad space on their uniforms than the Milwaukee Brewers. 

Long games are fun.  Managers should manage their bullpens better.  There aren’t that many long baseball games.  Starting with a runner n second in extra innings won’t make games shorter.

Okay, Mr. Torre, you’re dismissed.  Find another crisis to resolve.

What post-Super Bowl bounce?

There are a lot of traditions concerning the Super Bowl; the two weeks of unrelenting hype, the 10-hour pre-Super Bowl pregame show analyzing every possible match up, the dramatic coin toss that for some reason does NOT determine the winner.  One of the oddest is the idea by the network hosting the Super Bowl to use the humungous audience tuned into a football game to either launch a new series or bolster and existing one.  I don’t think it is a good idea, but it keeps happening.

This year, Super Bowl LI (I keep thinking it’s an homage to Jet Li) is nothing more than a diversion from the real TV experience—the debut of 24: Legacy, a reboot of the successful TV show starring Kiefer Sutherland that has been off the air for at least a couple of years.  This is where creativity in Hollywood lies, rebooting stuff that hasn’t been gone long enough for anyone to miss it.

Anyway, Fox thinks that the best way to have 24: Legacy hit the ground running is to schedule its first episode immediately after a program that will have an audience in the hundreds of millions.  Everyone will be to weary and overfed to pick up the remote and change the channel, so they’ll have no choice but to watch 24: Legacy and be enthralled.  What could go wrong?

First of all, no one is ever quite sure when the Super Bowl will end, so those odd people who may want to watch the show but not the Super Bowl will have no idea when to turn in, or even set their DVR players.  Okay this year the Super Bowl went into overtime (and why hasn’t that happened before?), but disregarding that the game often comes down to 4^th quarter possessions that require lots of time outs, lots of clock-stoppages, and lots of strategy that all takes time.  Plus, the Super Bowl half time show always requires an indeterminate amount of time to set up and take down the stage.  So the game may supposed to end at 7, but the final whistle won’t be for long after that.

Then there is the endless pomp of the awards ceremony, followed by endless analysis of what the key plays were, who is the MVP (sometimes it isn’t the QB of the winning team!) and so on.  So good luck knowing when the game will end.

Except that we do know it will end around 11 PM Eastern Time.  Since 2000 no Super Bowl lead-out has begun before 10:15 PM Eastern Time, and 5 times they have begun at 10:45 or later.  So, no one on the East Coast (who has to go to work or school the next day) can stay up and watch the show.  And this this ties back to what I said about the difficulty of DVRing the show with an indeterminate start time and end time.

The post-Super Bowl time slot does tend to pull a greater than a 20 share in the ratings, but again look at the time slot on the East Coast and ask, what is the competition?  Do new shows get a ratings bump and go on to be successful?  Ask the producers of MacGruder & Loud, which followed Super Bowl XIX in 1985, or The Last Precinct which followed the Super Bowl in 1986, or Grand Slam which followed the Super Bowl in 1990.  Other shows debuting after the Super Bowl include such long running classics as The Good Life and The John Larroquette Show (a good show actually, but it wasn’t around for long).

Recent shows have had better runs after their debuts, but that’s because the networks finally caught on that running an episode of an existing show was less of a gamble.  Frankly the only post-Super Bowl episode I recall is the one for Alias in 2003 which began with a Sydney Bristow lingerie show that was leaked to the media before it was shown on TV.  I don’t think men that had just watched the Super Bowl stayed tuned for the excellent plotting and well-crafted dialog.

We’ll see how successful 24: Legacy turns out, but if it succeeds it won’t be because Super Bowl fans were too numb to change the channel with the remote after watching Tom Brady exact his vengeance on Roger Goodell.