End the beanball wars

There is one argument that I hate more than any other, and that is justifying some policy just because of “tradition.”  The name of the football team in Washington is obviously racist, yet the owner and thousands (millions?) of fans refuse to change it because of tradition.  Homophobes hide behind religion to mask their bigotry, all the while saying they support “traditional” families.  The argument is basically that just because were done a certain way yesterday, they should be done the same way today despite all of the ways the world has changed since yesterday.

Baseball, the sport steeped in the greatest amount of tradition, is the one most susceptible to accepting tradition as an excuse for idiocy. For 150 years batters have been commanded to stoically trot around the bases after a home run, lest they be found guilty of “showing up” the pitcher.  It used to be even worse—I remember when a player would hit a home run, and then next batter would inevitably get plunked.  The pitcher had to punish the next batter because the previous batter had somehow insulted the pitcher by doing his job.  Hey, pitcher, you don’t want to be “shown up”?  make better pitches.

I also recall the furor when a Mets rookie named Lastings Milledge came up in 2006 at hit his first home run in his home ballpark, and he high fived fans in the stands as he went to his position in right field. “That young man will learn how to play the game right,” intoned the announcer, who couldn’t have been more disgusted by this spontaneous outpouring of exuberance if it had included photos of Roseanne Barr naked.

Things may be on the verge of changing.  Reining AL MVP Josh Donaldson hit a home run against the Minnesota Twins.  Obviously this was an insult to pitcher Phil Hughes, who greeted Donaldson with an extremely inside pitch in his next at bat.  Hughes next pitch was behind Donaldson, but plate umpire Ripperger didn’t even issue a warning to Hughes.  Donaldson’s manager John Gibbons came out f the dugout to complain and was ejected for his efforts.

Maybe, you say, Hughes wasn’t deliberately throwing at Donaldson. Maybe the two pitches just “got away” from Hughes.  Right.  Hughes is a professional pitcher, someone who makes his living throwing a baseball accurately, but after Donaldson hit a home run off of him he threw a pitch four feet off the plate behind Donaldson?  I’ve heard of nibbling at the corners, but missing a target by four feet is more than a little “off.”

Of course the Blue Jays aren’t innocent; later in the game they hit Minnesota catcher Kurt Suzuki in the bottom of the inning.  That’s always the way with these beanball wars; you always HAVE to retaliate.  The logic is this: if I throw at you, you will be intimidated, but if you throw at me, I’ll retaliate.  It never occurs to anyone that if they would retaliate if they were thrown at, then the other team will retaliate when THEY are thrown at.

A baseball is a weapon. Using a weapon against another person is wrong.  If you want some idea of what a baseball can do when thrown, look at what happened to pitcher Ryan Vogelsong when he was hit by a pitch (not intentionally).  Okay, pitchers want the inside part of the plate, but Hughes apparently wanted the batter’s box to count as a strike zone.

If pitchers insist on enforcing “the code” and throwing at players who run out a home run too slowly, or too quickly, or admire their homers for too long, or not long enough, then they deserve to have the inside part f the plate taken away from them by the umps.  Managers ordering retaliatory plunkings should be summarily ejected. 

I know there was one umpire who didn’t believe in enforcing the rule to eject pitchers who “intentionally” threw at batters because, he said, how could I possibly read the pitcher’s mind? The rule says “intentionally” so it must assume it is possible to infer intent.  Did the batter homer in the previous at bat?  Did the prior batter homer?  Was one of the pitcher’s teammates hit by a pitch after homering?  It isn’t rocket science.  And if occasionally a pitcher is ejected for a pitch that did get away from him, well, he should be a good enough pitcher not to let that happen.

It is time to end the beanball culture in baseball.  Maybe pitchers used to know how to throw at batters, hitting them with a change up near the rump, but today’s pitchers do seem to have less control; throwing behind a batter is extremely dangerous (batters tend to instinctively back up when they see a pitch coming inside).  Knock off the macho posturing and play ball.

TV Review--Houdini & Doyle

TV Review—Houdini and Doyle

When a TV show is an unexpected hit, there is a rush to replicate it.  Lost triggered a deluge of TV shows with confounding mysteries and vaguely sci-fi happenings, and they all had one thing in common; they failed rapidly.

The X-Files debuted 23 years ago, and its basic premise—two investigators, one a Believer, one a skeptic—still shows up in the DNA of series hoping to mine the same vein that Chris Carter has been milking for 23 years (and is still milking, if the moderate success of the six-episode X-Files arc is any indication).

The latest is a Fox series called Houdini and Doyle, and yes, that is Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle.  The latest manifestation of the “quirky companion to law enforcement” meme has well-known debunker Houdini teaming with spiritualist Doyle to investigate crimes dealing with the supernatural.  They are aided by a female constable who is so integral to the plot that I shan’t mention her again in this review.

Houdini and Doyle fails on a number of levels, but let’s start with casting.  Steven Mangan plays Doyle with all the seriousness of a music hall comic.  He completely lacks the gravitas necessary to play the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who was as quick witted as Holmes and pompous enough to think he could kill off Holmes to concentrate on “serious” writing.  The same problem plagues Michael Weston, a fine actor in small roles who can hardly fill Houdini’s larger than life persona.  Oscar winner Adrian Brody did a much better job playing Houdini in a TV movie last year; it is probably unfair to compare character actor Weston to an Academy Award winner, but that’s what happens when you take the role.

The script is confusing, hemmed in between having to appear to be a crime with supernatural elements to draw Doyle’s attention, while being ultimately mundane to satisfy Houdini’s belief.  A medium gives Doyle a clue that seems to be legitimate, but then later she is shown to be a fraud.  A ghostly apparition appears to Doyle, but it’s revealed to be Houdini’s assistant on a wire even though the ghost was clearly transparent.  It all makes very little sense. 

Better examples of mystery TV shows set in the same era abound, from the BBC’s Ripper Street (apparently resurrected from cancellation) and CBC’s Murdoch Mysteries, about to enter its tenth season.  These shows try to recreate the Victorian era; Houdini and Doyle are content to put modern characters in funny clothes and have them speak the occasional aphorism that sounds olde-timey.

I cut pilot episodes a lot of slack, but I don’t foresee Houdini and Doyle getting much better.  As someone once said (I can’t remember who), casting is the one mistake you can’t fix in post-production.  Mangan and Weston are both terribly wrong for their roles, and the fact that the roles are written as a modern buddy comedy with lots of quips and banter just makes it worse.  As we enter the doldrums of summer, I may give some more episodes a try just because, well, Lucifer is off until next season.  When you make Lucifer look good by comparison, your TV show is not long for this world.

A Risky Draft for the Rams and Eagles

There is a line from the move Citizen Kane (most of life’s situation can be summarized by a line from Citizen Kane) where someone says a news story isn’t worthy of a banner headline, and Kane replies, “If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.”  The Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles are apparently applying this philosophy to quarterbacks—if you pick someone at number one or number two in the draft, that MAKES them deserve a number one (or number two) pick.

Supposedly The Rams and the Eagles expended a truckload of draft picks in order to draft Carson Wentz of North Dakota State and Jared Goff of Cal with the first two picks of the NFL draft.  This despite the fact that ESPN rates both prospects outside of the top ten in potential.  Both the Rams and the Eagles apparently believe that taking Wentz or Goff at the top of the draft will magically turn a moderate pro prospect into another Peyton Manning or Andrew Luck.

First of all, prospects who WERE in the top two often turn out to be busts; exhibit A is Ryan Leaf.  At the end of the college season neither Wentz nor Goff were considered top flight talent; neither was invited to the Heisman Award ceremony, and neither competed for the national championship.  But now two teams desperate for a quarterback have traded away their futures on these two athletes being able to not only succeed in the NFL, but succeed immediately despite never working with a pro-style offence.

This is logic born of desperation.  The Denver Broncos proved you really don’t need a quarterback to win it all in the NFL (a lawn gnome could have played as well as Manning did in the Super Bowl), but the QB is still the most important cog in any NFL machine.  If you can’t acquire one through free agency, the only other avenue is the draft.  But what do you do if there is no quarterback project in the draft?  Instead of taking a QB prospect with the 15^th pick, at which point Goff might have been available according to ESPN, the Rams gave a bunch of picks to the Titans and now will draft Wentz or Goff number one. 

This is an example of what economists call the “greater fool” theory.  In some economics experiments, people will bid more than a dollar for the right to own a dollar, if they believe there is a bigger fool than them who will bid even more.  The Rams believed someone else (the Eagles) would take Goff or Wentz too high, and then neither would be available at 15, so they traded to be number one.  This proves that they are an even bigger fool than the team that considered taking Goff in the top ten.

Goff was not a terribly successful QB at Cal, and North Dakota State didn’t exactly play Notre Dame or Alabama.  Yet these two quarterbacks will be drafted one and two and be asked to immediately step in and lead an NFL team to a winning record.  Both Marcus Mariota and Jameis Winston, two QBs who earned the #1 and 32 draft slots, struggled to adapt to the NFL, so how will two supposedly less qualified QBs adapt?

And this is coming at a time when Sports Illustrated has run a couple of pieces on why there is a chasm between the college game and the pros.  Could Wentz really run a wide open offense at North Dakota State (school motto: yes, we are part of America) and then learn to run a complex pro-style system?  If he was the 12^th pick in the draft and had time to learn the system, that would be one thing; to pick him #1 and let him start on day one, that would be a huge set of baggage for him to carry.

Okay, stranger things have happened.  A gangly back up QB from Michigan State drafted in the sixth round is now considered one of the best QBs of all time.  But as Damon Runyon warned, “Remember, the battle is not always to the strongest, nor the race to the swiftest; but that’s the way to bet.” 

The Cleveland Browns, surprisingly, made a smart choice to trade away their #2 pick.  They need everything, so multiple picks will help.  And if you are going to take a chance on Robert Griffin III as a free agent, there is no need for a backup plan; if he succeeds, you don’t need a QB, but if he fails you’ve got a high draft pick in next year’s draft.  If this is Hue Jackson’s influence, then he just may be the coach to turn the Browns around.

Goff and Wentz may prove worthy of their #1 and #2 draft statuses.  One or the other or both may show un-demonstrated skill at checking off pass rotations or reading NFL defenses.  But neither has done so yet.  And doing it with the burden of expectations that come with a high draft pick for a quarterback?  That has crushed more promising prospects (seriously, you do remember Ryan Leaf, right?).  There haven’t been many of these mega-deals to move up to the top of the draft, mainly because they almost always help the team collecting the draft picks.  It will probably be a frustrating, but exciting, season for the Rams and the Eagles.

The many Mr. Holmes

It has always fascinated me that two of the most popular characters in popular fiction are Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Spock.  Both are idolized for their ability to perform logical analysis, yet this is a capacity every human being has, save for the mentally ill and the brain damaged.  It’s as if the world decided to embrace a superhero whose superpower was to distinguish right from left.

The character of Sherlock Holmes was created nearly 130 years ago in 1887 with the publication of A Study in Scarlet.  The next story, The Sign of Four, began the series in earnest and also displayed Arthur Conan Doyle’s incredible laziness as to details—he has Watson say he was shot in the shoulder during the Afghan campaign in A Study in Scarlet, but in the leg in the sequel.  Watson says Holmes knows nothing of philosophy, then later says Holmes discussed current philosophers like an expert.  The mistakes became more egregious when Doyle had resurrected Holmes after his attempt to kill him off failed, and he resigned himself to cranking out Holmes tales for the money.

There are currently two television series with Sherlock Holmes as a character, the CBS show Elementary with Johnny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as undoubtedly the most attractive Dr. Watson ever, and the BBC series Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Watson.  Both series have proven quite popular, and the BBC version has won several Emmy awards.  But how accurate to the original text are the remakes?

The quick answer is, not very.  In both series Holmes is portrayed as misanthropic, ill-mannered, curt, insulting, and contemptuous of nearly everyone.  In Elementary his addiction to cocaine has Holmes label himself as an addict; he comes into contact with Watson when she is hired to be his “sober companion.”  The BBC production has not focused on his drug use, but in several episodes Holmes refers to himself as “a high-functioning sociopath” (in one episode he makes this declaration immediately before he shoots someone on the head). 

A reading of the original canon reveals a completely different Holmes.  Yes, he is sometimes smug, but mostly at the incompetence of Scotland Yard’s Lestrade and not at his own superiority.  He is unfailingly polite, solicitous of his clients, and is able to extract information from strangers through flattery or subtle cajoling.  His drug use is only mentioned in passing, and then rather sparingly.

Are these differences wrought by those updating the series to reflect modern society?  Cocaine was legal and seen as medicinal in 1880’s London; would Holmes today indulge in an illegal narcotic today, as he does in Elementary, or would he find a more socially acceptable outlet for his addictive personality, as Holmes seems to do in Sherlock?  For the definitive discussion of Holmes’ drug use, see the wonderful film “The Seven Percent Solution” written by Nicholas Meyer.

Is Holmes abrasive personality in the two current TV shows a commentary that we live in a time that is far less civil than 1890’s London?  Is the Holmes of Elementary and Sherlock more flippant with insults because in these days being insulting is such socially acceptable behavior that Presidential candidates can trade venom that would give Don Rickles pause?  Only the showrunners can say how much they have deliberately altered the character to fit in with modern society.

Some of the changes made for the TV shows are obvious, Watson being a woman being one of the slightly more noticeable changes in Elementary (interestingly, there is no sexual subtext in Elementary while over on Sherlock everyone assumes Holmes and Watson are gay).  Other changes may be deliberate, while others may be due to an unfamiliarity with the original canon.  Over the years Holmes’ personality has steadily coarsened; Basil Rathbone’s portrayal was polite but icy, while Jeremy Brett (the definitive interpretation, I believe) was more aloof and detached than the fictive original.  Portrayals in individual movies have tended to use a Holmes that is a carbon copy of a carbon copy until little of the original is left except his logic and his inhumanity.

I have watched the four seasons of Elementary, but I am becoming increasingly tired of Johnny Lee Miller (a wonderful actor who should have received an Emmy nomination for his work by now) presenting Holmes as a series of tics and idiosyncrasies that increasingly bear little resemblance to the eminently civilized sleuth in the books.  Sherlock is one of the finest shows being produced, and count me among the frustrated that are unhappy that Cumberbatch and Freeman are so popular that this year they only had time to make a single episode.  Of course, if they made more episodes, the quality would diminish. 

Elementary and Sherlock have their place, but for a representation of Holmes closer to the original you have to stick with the Jeremy Brett version.  Sherlock showrunner Stephen Moffet is a genius, but his Holmes is increasingly similar to the central character on Doctor Who, another show he was the showrunner for.  Better yet, I am re-reading the original canon.  Doyle really was a masterful storyteller, and there is no substitute for going back to the original source.

Fridays just got more Grimmer

Success in the television industry is a mercurial thing.  Sometimes a show can look like it will run for decades, but it is cancelled after 12 episodes (although Firefly is more prominent now in popular culture than when it was on TV in 2002).  Other times, a show about a bunch of sots in a bar in Boston (Cheers), or in Philadelphia (It’s Always Sunny) will debut with abysmal ratings and end up running for years.  You never now.

Five years ago NBC debuted an unpromising horror show from a former writer f Buffy the Vampire Slayer and gave it the Friday Night Death slot. The show had a clever premise, but a lead actor who was as uncharismatic as they come, a lead actress who was even blander, a backstory that wasn’t fully thought out, and they never did figure out what to do for the opening credits.  But here we are five years later and Grimm is being renewed for a sixth season.

When Grimm started it had two things going for it: a premise that put a modern spin on ancient fairy tales, and Silas Weir Mitchell, the sidekick Monroe who was a Blutbaden, a sort of wolf that looked human.  David Giuntoli, the titular Grimm who was a Portland detective by day and slayer, er, killer of monsters by night, was a dull character with a dull partner (Russell Hornsby) and a dull live in girlfriend (Bitsie Tulloch).  Mitchell was the only actor able to show any kind of emotion when strange things started happening and dead bodies started piling up.  The relationship between Giuntoli’s Nick Burkhardt and Tulloch’s Juliet Silverton (I didn’t know her last name until I looked it up just now) bugged me a lot; they were the typical TV couple who had absolutely nothing in common except they were both good looking, yet we were supposed to accept on faith that they were deeply in love.

Through the first two years of Grimm I longed to give the creators some advice, especially David Greenwalt who had worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.  I wanted to tell him that the secret to Buffy’s success was that the audience loved Buffy and didn’t just want her not to die, but to be happy, have a boyfriend, and enjoy herself.  Nick Burkhardt wasn’t given enough personality to root for.  The scripts were often clever, but while the monsters were excellent the human element was missing.

Grimm made some smart decisions.  The backstory involving some strange Middle European royalty made the stakes much larger, and also integrated Nick’s police captain (Sasha Roiz) to a greater extent.  The belated decision to let police officer Drew Wu (Reggie Lee) (possibly the worst character name in history) in on Nick’s secret life paid huge dividends.  And if you thought they couldn’t write romance, they added a love interest for Monroe (Bree Turner’s Rosalee) with whom he had real chemistry.  The stories were less about a case of the week and more about the maneuverings of secret societies on a global scale.  Tulloch was dispatched (temporarily) and replaced with long time guest star Clare Coffee, who’s character had a child with both Nick and Nick’s captain (don’t ask about the details).

Grimm still isn’t close to the Buffy/Angel comparisons in aspires to.  But the plotting has become faster paced, the characters deeper, and the monsters more imaginative.  However, the is still not much of an emotional connection with Nick, despite him now having a child and a much more promising relationship.  Nick is a homicide detective but relies on Monroe and Rosalee’s help far too frequently to solve his cases; just once I’d like to see Monroe look at his caller ID and ignore Nick’s call.

Grimm just passed its 100^th episode threshold, which is a milestone in television. An additional season makes it one of the longer running fantasy/horror shows in television history.  Not bad for a clever little show that never figured out how to do opening credits. 

The Balkanization of media

Believe it or not, there was once a time when television brought people together.  Once TV began being broadcast into everyone’s home, it was one of the few universal realities in everybody’s lives.  There were only three networks (and ABC barely counted for a long time) so the entire nation was subject to the same experiences.  And when there was a special event – the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, the moon landing, the final episode of MASH – the entire country shared a unifying experience.

The first crack in the façade was the debut of cable.  While many people had access only to the three broadcast networks (plus syndication, plus FOX eventually), other had access to basic cable channels that couldn’t be picked up no matter how much you adjusted the rabbit ears.  Braves games on TBS, MTV, and home shopping were mysteries to those who got their TV over the broadcast spectrum.

Cable was so different that to wasn’t allowed to compete for Emmies at first.  Many high quality TV shows had to compete for the prestigious Cable Ace award, like the late Gary Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show.  By the late 1990’s enough people had cable that there was no point in the distinction, and cable shows were allowed to compete for Emmies (recently, almost no broadcast shows are even nominated in categories like Best Drama and Best TV Movie).

But there was another rift, between basic cable and premium cable. Premium cable like HBO played by different rules; they didn’t care about rating because sponsors didn’t buy air time.  They didn’t try to fill three hours of programming every evening because they reran everything repeatedly.  And they were able to spend more and do more daring stuff, like have a series starring the head of a mob family who was constantly whacking people.  So American had people with rabbit ears, people who watched basic cable, and people who paid for HBO.

But they were all united once DVDs came out.  I may not subscribe to Shotime, but I can rent Dexter from Netflix or Blockbuster (when those still existed).  Sure, I may have to wait a year to see Game of Thrones, but I had access.

But that is crumbling.  Streaming media is creating new schisms in American culture.  There are TV shows I want to watch that only stream on Hulu; Emmy winning shows are inaccessible to me because they stream on Amazon Prime.  My Netflix subscription is no longer enough to assure me access to all of media.

The VCR war between VHS and Betamax was won by VHS, to the great regret of those who still insist Beta was better.   But that was a battle of competing technologies.  Hulu and Amazon Prime can co-exist.  There is a financial barrier, like there was when premium cable separated haves who could watch Cinemax’s soft core porn and the have nots who couldn’t.  You can have access to all media, but you’ll have to subscribe to multiple platforms.

Of course some argue that it is actually cheaper to cancel your cable and merely subscribe to Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, and whatever sports cable channel you fancy; stream all broadcast and cable shows off their network websites, and if there is nothing on choose from the on-line content.  This may be correct, and you can call me old fashion but I don’t want to choose.  I want to turn on my TV and be entertained, not decide what streaming platform to subscribe to.

The trouble with all these platforms?  500 channels and nothing on.  Maybe fewer choices is a good thing.  I have enough to choose from on Netflix; why do I need Hulu? 

But I lose my connection to those people who chose Hulu.  TV is no longer unifying America.  Maybe that explains Donald Trump.   No, nothing does.

Cuba and baseball

Something happened this week that has only happened once in the past 25 years: an American baseball team played a game in Cuba.  The last time was in 1991, and the event is easily forgotten today.  This time is different, as an American President accompanied the team and met with the leader of Cuba.

Not everyone is happy about this.  Dan LeBatard, who is usually ESPN designated buffoon, wrote an eloquent piece on the pain felt by many Cuban immigrants—exiles, not immigrants, as he points out—at the sight of anything resembling regular relations between the United States of America and the island nation 90 miles away that we have refused to acknowledge for 60 years.  There may be changes in US/Cuban relations, he points out, but there are no assurances of changes in Cuban domestic policy.  How does this thawing of international relations help the Cuban people?

The pain felt by Cuban emigres is real and sincere.  However, it is important to remember one thing; the relationship of Cuban with the United States is not normal.  Other countries are run by cruel despots who inflict punishment on their populations for nothing more than their own enrichment, and we recognize them.  China commits atrocities on a population far, far greater than Cuba’s, and yet we import low cost consumer goods manufactured by forced labor.  About the only other nation on Earth that we do not recognize is North Korea, and that is by their decision.  And they are not 90 miles away across a narrow strip of water.

The Cuban exiles who speak out against the normalizing of relations between our country and Cuba want to remind us of the pain they, and other Cuban have felt.  But that pain isn’t going away, so we should normalize relations . . . never?  A hundred years ago the Ottoman Empire tried (unsuccessfully) to exterminate all Armenians, and today the descendants of Armenian immigrants have tried to mark the 100^th anniversary by urging public pension systems to divest of investments in Turkey, the nation that was left after the Ottoman Empire was no longer an empire.  After 100 years, would an apology really help?  “Sorry we tried to wipe out your family, please invest in Turkish bonds.” 

Relations between America and Cuba should be normalized.  Note the word—derived from the adjective normal.  The current situation is abnormal.  Cuba is in a time warp circa 1955, and opening Cuba up to American trade and tourism would bring them into the last half of the 20^th century while the rest of us are in the 21^st.  A small state like Cuba would find it difficult to do what a large nation like China does to keep the forces of liberty at bay.  Cuba would get more freedom; the US would get more baseball players like Yasiel Puig, without him having to deal with underworld smugglers to come here.

Cuba’s proximity to the United States, and the vestiges of the Cuban Missile Crisis (and the Bay of Pigs fiasco) have left us with a foreign policy aberration that should be fixed.  Cuba will not go away if we plug our ears and yell “La la la la la la” very loudly.  If baseball, the one American import that Cuba has embraced, can help the process along, so be it.  The pain suffered by those people whose families were torn apart by the Castro regime, and whose family members were tortured and imprisoned, should not be forgotten.

But they should also not drive US foreign policy after 60 years.