The Annual Baseball Rant

This year, rather than my usual mid-season-All-Star-Break rant, I decided to wait until the Brewers season was over to compose the rant.

Oh, I suppose mathematically there’s some way they could sneak in….as a wild card….if they sweep the rest of their games with the Pirates and the Cubs….and the Pirates collapse….but, it’s not gonna happen. And this year’s rant will have more of a tone of resignation and disgust, rather than the usual anger and brimstone.

 

First of all, the guy on the right should have fired the guy on the left in July. Or early August at the latest. Just like he did to Ned Yost, in the middle of September 2008 – when the Brewers actually were in contention.  Nedly told the media back then he never saw it coming.

I would have fired Roenicke weeks ago. Back in the early part of August you could sense the slide coming, and RR did NOTHING – at least nothing which I can glean from the popular prints and blogs and chatrooms – to get his players to motivate themselves to play like it meant something.

I’m of the school which believes you can’t motivate people, they have to do it for themselves – but you can try to create the circumstances and climate under which they will have an attitude (motivation) adjustment.  And sometimes, as any baseball fan knows, firing the manager causes the players to motivate themselves.

Kinda like ranting at an ump and getting tossed out of the game does, once in a while.

This guy should have been fired on the spot Thursday night for the unforgivable error in the 8^th inning against the Cards when he “forgot” how many outs there were. For those not close followers of the team, his name is Mark Reynolds.  His mistake cost them the game. In a contest their playoff lives depended on, Reynolds head was clearly not in the game.

At the conclusion of that debacle, before the pitcher stepped on the rubber and started the next play, RR should have called time out, removed Reynolds from the game, put someone else on first, sent a team functionary to retrieve Reynolds’ street clothes and wallet from the locker room, told Reynolds to catch a cab to the airport and make his own way home, and that any other personal affects would be boxed up and shipped to him at whatever his seasonal address is, and inform him that his services would no longer be needed by the Milwaukee franchise of Major League Baseball.

But such things never happen. I can only dream them. It’s like my late father taught me so many times: there are mistakes you can recover from, and mistakes you can’t recover from.  This is one of those mistakes that’s so egregious that it should have been a career-ender.

This guy should be given a fat salary bump and a nice non-negotiated bonus. Not because Jonathon Lucroy hits a ton of doubles, but because he consistently plays with spirit and enthusiasm, performing at the highest level of his profession. It’s a shame that the other teammates don’t follow the lead of Luc, who “plays like he means it”.

Carlos Gomez is not a leadoff man. I think everyone in baseball knows that, except RR and Gomez. The job of the leadoff man is to get on base. Yet, if you’ve watched the Brewers in the past month, every time Gomez takes to the plate – and, not just the first at-bat of the Brewers’ half of the first inning, when the role of the leadoff man is so clearly defined –he tries to hit a homer. And usually falls down at least once in EVERY at-bat because his swing is so undisciplined and goofy.

It’s become a joke at the Morrissey Compound. My wife and I will be sure we’re tuned in to the game at the very beginning, so we can see Gomez try to kill the ball in his first at-bat and fall down. For the uninformed, my bride is a true fan and student of the game, and has been since her wasted youth as a teenage pain-in-the-butt malingering daily, all summer, at the old Comiskey Park and at Wrigley Field. She claimed she was a fan of both teams, a claim no other Chicagoan has ever made.

Doesn’t anyone ever sit these guys like Gomez down and say “now, Carlos, we’re going to put you in the leadoff spot – all we want you to do is get on base. Whether you just meet the ball and put it in play, or take a base on balls, all we need you to do is get on base”.

This is the second year (last year was the first) that my bride and I attended NO major league baseball games. I’m not sure why.  We had plenty of opportunity; even though I insist in my advanced age (65.25) on sitting in very expensive seats right behind home plate, we’re fortunate that the cost isn’t really a consideration; I’m not sure why both of us just don’t seem to want to pull the trigger, buy some great seats on StubHub, and go to a game.

Part of the reason is advancing age; part of it is the glot of stupid, drunken, self-indulgent yay-hoos who always seem to have seats near the ones we buy (Section 117 or 118 at Miller Park, to be exact); and part of it is our media room is equipped with a 66-inch HDTV and a 500-watt outboard sound system and some VERY comfortable chairs.

Usually the annual rant takes a shot or two at baseball in general, but, with all the crap going on in the NFL right now, I just didn’t feel the desire to say crappy things about baseball. I still love the sport. But I’m just so disappointed in my home team this year.  A collapse comparable to the swoon the ’69 Cubs took.

I'll watch the playoffs and the world series as I always do, but from this point on, my attention will be focused on the Green and Gold, until Spring Training.

It Was A Simpler Time

If you’re a baseball fan and haven’t seen the recently discovered video of the last few innings of a 1965 baseball game telecast by WGN, do yourself a favor, and when you have an hour, watch it.  You can find it lots of places, but there’s link on Deadspin that’s also got some other neat stuff.  The link is here.

It’s a great game; a ten-inning no-hitter Jim Maloney of the Reds hung on the Cubbies the afternoon of August 19^th, 1965, and Jack Brickhouse and Lloyd Pettit are calling the game for WGN-TV.  My wife IDOLIZED Lloyd Pettit, not only for his Cubs broadcasts, but for the way he called the Chicago Blackhawks games.  Pettit is a hero to Wisconsinites, of course, not because of his connection to Chicago sports, but because of the tremendous gift he and his wife gave to the people of Wisconsin: the Pettit National Ice Center, an Olympic training/hockey facility at State Fair Park in West Allis.

I digress.

My friend Jim Bartlett wrote a great blog-post about this “ancient” TV footage recently unearthed, and pointed out how different televised baseball was back in the 60’s.  To paraphrase Jim, he referred to Brickhouse and Pettit as being like a couple of knowledgeable baseball guys who came to the park to watch the game and talk baseball.  They didn’t overanalyze, they didn’t preach, they treated the viewer with respect, and assumed you were following the game and didn’t have to be told every little thing that happened on the field.

Several weeks ago I wrote a post about my formative years in baseball. I grew up listening to a couple of the best “minimalist” sports announcers of the 50’s and 60’s: Earl Gillespie (and later, Merle Harmon) doing the Milwaukee Braves games; and the great Ray Scott doing the Packers’ telecasts on CBS during the glory years.  There was no “color” or “analysis”; just the announcer, describing the action.  Laconic doesn’t even begin to describe Scott. His patter consisted of stuff like “………Starr……….to Dowler……….Touchdown.”  Or “........second and six……Starr hands to Taylor….Thurston and Kramer leading the sweep………….first and ten.”

You really didn’t need much more than that.

And during my years in LA, I had the privilege of listening to Vin Scully call the Dodgers games.  What an icon!

The soundtrack of the “ancient” footage of the Cubs/Reds game at Wrigley in the 60’s with Brickhouse and Pettit really isn’t that different from the kind of announcing that WGN-TV has had for decades on the Cubs broadcasts, whether it was the colorful Harry Carey with Steve Stone, his grandson Chip with Stone, or Len and JD. Like most “local” guys…I’m thinking here of Brian Anderson and The Rock on the Brewers telecasts…they don’t wear out their welcome motor-mouthing, and the production elements are actually pretty basic.

But the network broadcasts of Baseball and Football…..whether on Fox, ABC/ESPN, NBC, or CBS – talk about OVERKILL.  There are so many graphics, so many sound effects, so many things on the screen at the same time including the “crawl” at the bottom of the screen updating scores of other games, that it can drive you batty.  And there's nonstop talk - much of it inane - as if a few seconds of silence would cause everyone to lose interest in the game and change the channel.  

I'm comfortable with silence, or simply "crowd noise".

Fox has this one sound effect they play every time they change the graphic on the screen, and on our “big” home theatre system in the media room at the Morrissey Compound, it’s enough to drive you batty, a combination of the sound of a 747 taking off and some other electronic element that causes the bass speakers in our system to move enough air to create a breeze.

I know, they’re aiming the broadcasts at my kids (who are 30 and 28 years of age), who “watch” a game while texting andsurfing the net on their smart phones, confident in the knowledge that if anything big happens, the TV will replay it a dozen times from a dozen angles so they don’t really miss anything by not truly paying attention to the broadcast.

Enough with my nostalgic rambling.  Bookmark the link and enjoy the old broadcast….when you have time to just savor the unhurried pace and un-hyped announcing.

It was a simpler time.

The Second Annual Baseball Rant

I was beginning to think the baseball rant I put up last year in July was going to be a one-time only thing.

My friend Jennifer Miller, like me, a former news anchor and inveterate baseball fan, went to a Brewers game in late June last year and was annoyed by so many things that she spewed forth a great Facebook rant (the substance of which can be read at the link above) that prompted me to launch into my own rant, sort of riffing on the themes she laid out in her masterful rant.  Not exactly Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody On A Theme of Paganini, but on re-reading, I think I did a creditable job of ranting about my displeasures with the Great American Pastime, most of which had to do with the fans in the stands. Much of the material was hers; much was mine; and I threw in a couple of sage observations from my tuba-playing friend and student of the Game of Baseball, Tom Plummer.

That’s Tom’s smiling countenance at the top of this post, in a photo I stole without his permission from his Facebook page.  He’s holding up the Iowa Cubs t-shirt he caught (blasted from an air cannon) at an I-Cubs home game a few weeks ago, a game which featured back-to-back-to-back home runs (3 in a row) from the hometown Triple-A sluggers.  (Brief sidebar: the Iowa Cubs address is 1 Line Drive, Des Moines. I love that! Line Drive!  I suppose they couldn’t have gotten “1 Screaming Line Drive” past the Postal authorities.)

To me, that photo captures much of what’s great about the game.  Nice facility, attentive fans, fun and games (t-shirts shot from air cannons), and exciting, competitive baseball from guys who really hustle. Take a look at that crowd behind Tom: without trying too hard, you can see people from every stage of life, from children to teens to young adults to middle-aged folks to senior citizens, all drawn to the ball park on a beautiful evening to enjoy the game. America.

Finally, last week, after another of her many annual treks to Miller Park, Jennifer issued forth with another Facebook rant (the entire context of which I’ve copied and pasted below, at the end of this rant), in which she essentially taunts me to reprise last year’s rant with this year’s fresh material.

Shortly after publishing her rant, she sent me a private message, apologizing for attempting to bully me into “immortalizing” her latest rant by blogging about it, and let the record show that I was about to bully her into issuing forth with another rant this year.

Jennifer ranted about the ineptitude of this year’s Brewers efforts, culminating in the suspension of the man who was deemed the Face Of The Franchise, and the Brewers’ masterful stroke of PR in handing out ten-dollar vouchers to every fan through the turnstiles for several weeks, and a few nights ago, bringing back Brewers greats like Robin Yount, Rollie Fingers, Hank Aaron to observe the 20^th anniversary (note to annoying broadcasters: it’s not “20-year Anniversary” as so many of you dweebs said) of retiring Yount’s jersey number.

She also ranted about some of the disgusting behavior displayed by fans seated near her (a huge theme in last year’s rant) and mentioned Zack Greinke’s quote about Ryan Braun: “The closer he got to anyone, the more he used them.”

I could rant about PED’s  and suspensions this year, but everyone else is doing that.  Instead, I’ll focus (although a true rant is unfocused) on three things: fans, announcers, and errors.  By the way, how can you be suspended from major league baseball (A-Rod) and still be in uniform, on the field, playing? We need a new word or phrase to describe the difference between the other players’ suspensions and A-Rod’s.  You ain’t suspended if you’re out there being booed at every at-bat at the Cell, baby.

Rant focus number one: the fans.  Far too many of them are entitled, boorish, sloppy, noisy a-holes.  People who spend the big bucks (as I do) to get the seats right behind home plate, and all they do is text or talk on their phone, or constantly wave and mug to the camera so their friends at home can see them exhibiting their self-absorbed childish behavior.  “Look at ME, look at MEEEEEE!!!!!”  Or the fans who must constantly impart their loud opinions to everyone in the section they’re seated in: “Me and 8 guys from the nearest bar could beat these bums!!!”  And the parentless children who have no interest whatsoever in the game, who race around the ball park annoying everyone.

I think a reasonable solution to the fan problem was suggested by an anonymous commenter on last year’s baseball rant on this blog, who suggested that there be in essence three types of seating at the ball park: the Baseball Fans Section, where presumably people who follow the game and truly enjoy the sport would be seated; the Family Section, where the undisciplined brats and their clueless parents could plant their behinds; and the General Admission Section, where the drunken riff-raff would be confined to entertain each other.

Rant focus number two: announcers.  I’ve been no fan of the late Jack Buck’s son, who for reasons which are not evident to me (talent is certainly not one of them) has ascended to the highest echelon of Fox Sports Announcers, and is the blatherer-in-chief at whatever game Fox has deemed most important. And this year I’ve also been hypercritical on social media posts of the Brewers own Brian Anderson, who says some of the dumbest things imaginable.  He’s a pleasant enough fellow, with certainly none of the obnoxiousness of Joe Buck, but he is wont to making crazy, thoughtless statements.  One of my favorites from a few years ago, which my baseball-fan wife and I have mimicked countless times, is BA’s pronouncement during the Ned Yost years that “once the game starts, the manager’s job is done. He might as well be a fan in the stands, because once the game starts it’s up to the players”. 

If there was a YouTube video of Anderson saying that, it would have gone viral because of the sheer idiocy of the comment.

He’s motor-mouthed scores of inane comments again this year, but none as laughable as the comment he made (wish I could remember the exact game and the player involved) about an on-field injury to one of the Brewers, when he said “You don’t want to speculate, but it looks like an ankle or lower leg injury”.  Thanks for not speculating, BA.

Most of the guys doing the announcing are really good at it. They don’t say stupid things, they freely speculate (without saying “I don’t want to speculate, but….”) but their speculation is based on experience and insight; they don’t shill for the home team, but are understandably partisan, without hyping; they love the game and respect it.  And there are a very select few – Vin Scully to name my favorite – who are great artists and their account of the game is nearly poetic.

The third and final focus of this year’s rant: errors.  They’ve largely disappeared from baseball.  Not because errors are not committed with less frequency than, say, 40 years ago; but because apparently scorers have decided that errors are bad for baseball: bad for the player who commits the error, bad for the batter, bad, bad, bad. Try to find out how many errors a fielder has, and you’ll have to go through a lot of web-pages before you find one that will actually tell you how many errors a player has committed.

 At my age (64) I’m really old-school: to me, a sharply-hit ball muffed by a fielder is not a hit, it’s an error.  My high school baseball coach, the great Russ Tiedemann, always said “if you can touch it, you can catch it”…and that’s still my mantra.

There was a play in Sunday’s Cubs game where the ball was sharply hit to Darwin Barney; he muffed it, even Len and JD seemed to think it was an error, but – the official scorer said “hit”.  Barney’s not prone to errors; last year he broke Ryne Sandberg's NL-record 123-game streak without an error at second base and was three outs from breaking Placido Polanco's major league record of 141 games without an error.  I’m not going to throw bricks at Barney, Sandberg, or Polanco.  All I’m sayin’ is, there are an awful lot of plays scored as hits now, which would have been recorded as errors a few decades ago.

That’s my rant; your comments are welcome.  Jennifer’s wonderful 2013 baseball rant is below.

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The Second Annual Brewers Baseball Rant.

 (The first was immortalized in Tim Morrissey's blog. Will the gods be so kind this year?)

 1. Since they clearly can't/won't hold a clinic on the game of baseball this year, the Brewers nonetheless gave a tutorial in public relations this weekend. What do you do when your franchise player is suspended? Not only do you give the fans vouchers for free food, drinks, merchandise, you haul out the greats of yore: Robin Yount, Rollie Fingers, Hank Aaron. Ok, maybe it was a coincidence that it's the 20th anniversary of the retirement of Yount's number, but their appearances served as a reminder of what was great about this team, and what can be again.

 2. Speaking of the vouchers, I still think that is extremely gracious. What other owner/organization would do that? Now considering that the cheapest foodstuff is around 5 bucks, $10 dollars doesn't get you too far. But by combining our four vouchers, we ended up only spending $4.25 on food and beverages--plus we got a ticket for a free drink just for parking! Can't beat a deal like that.

 3. The girls and I were immortalized a second time on the video board. This time for our Bernie's Bongos prowess. (The first time was a few years ago when Summer fell asleep during the 7th inning stretch. The double-dose baseball loving gene completely passed over her.)

 4. The guy sitting next to me, who coincidentally also has a son who is a senior at UW-O, turned to me and said, "So, you're a Rickie Weeks fan?" I replied, "Yes. Sometimes it's just me and his mama." Then he went on to tell me that the Brewers were THIS CLOSE to trading Rickie to the Orioles just before the trading deadline, but the deal fell apart. I figure the guy had to be drunk or misinformed.

 5. Speaking of misinformed drunks, where do I begin with the group seated behind us? Besides one of them perpetually kicking my seat, and their racist mimicking of Carlos Gomez's accent, one of them repeatedly noted that he had seen the former Attorney General. He knew this, he said, because he came across his name while he was filing briefs last week. (This is where we're supposed to be impressed that he's a lawyer, I guess). I just happened to turn around while people watching, and lo and behold, seated in the box two rows behind us WAS the former Attorney General. Some people also know him as the former GOVERNOR, Jim Doyle.

 6. I don't care what your personal beliefs are, when the National Anthem is played, you will at least stand, remove your hat, and be quiet.

 7. I counted about a dozen people wearing Braun jerseys. (I also saw a few Weeks jerseys, a lot of Lucroy's, and one misguided Turnbow). It put me to wondering whether it's the only Brewers gear they own, or if they still support Braunie. I was in the "let's see the evidence" camp, until I read a terrific column by Michael Hunt in the Journal Sentinel. In it he quoted the pathologically stoic Zack Greinke, who stated: "The closer he (Braun) got to anyone, the more he used them." But, boy, didn't we want to believe that he was all that and a bag of chips!? By the way, Braun's restaurant is having a pizza special.

 8. You guys can't even score Rickie from third with one out! That's pathetic! As the pinhead lawyer behind me said, "I didn't spend $50 to watch a Triple-A team!" Triple-A? I've seen home talent teams play better. Mercifully, September is just around the corner.

Baseball, Hot Dogs, and the 4th of July

Baseball is the great American pass-time, tightly woven into the fabric of our lives, part of daily conversation for tens of millions of us, and – unfortunately – reflective in many ways of our changing society.  There seem to be so many more morons and idiots among us now, compared to when Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball.

That’s right – it’s an oft-repeated urban legend that Abner Doubleday invented baseball, but he didn’t, and as a matter of fact never claimed he did.  A bunch of jocks and politicians got together and decided that Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.  Doubleday was never in Cooperstown.  And, it may shock you to learn he is NOT in the Baseball Hall of Fame there. The jocks and politicians even “ruled” that Doubleday invented the word “baseball”, but that’s just more baloney.

Sorry to shake your beliefs, if you weren’t aware of this.

But, like American politics in 2012, the method used by the Mills Commission in 1908 (which cooked up the Abner Doubleday story) apparently followed the maxim that if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it.

One of the many things that attracted me to my wife was her love of sports, in particular, baseball (although I think she’s actually a bigger hockey fan).  Above is a shot I took of her with her mother and late father, at a Sox game at Comiskey Park in July of 2002.  We have gone to countless baseball games together, and have taken our kids to scores of Cubs, Sox, and Brewers games.

We used to go to at least one Cubs game at Wrigley Field every year – often to several each season – but we haven’t been to Wrigley for at least five years.  It’s expensive, it’s a long drive there and back, and the last time we went, there were so many morons around us that it just made the entire experience unpleasant.  We were surrounded by idiots in thousand-dollar-suits, who had apparently won some sales contest for some mutual-fund peddling outfit, and the lot of them spent the entire game on their Blackberries, calling their pals and saying inane stuff like “Guess where I am?! Wrigley Field!!!!”.  By the third inning they were drunk, and more obnoxious than I’d care to describe, dispensing at full-volume such baseball wisdom as "you gotta hit it where they ain't!!!"

The last five years or so, we’ve gone to plenty of Brewers games, but we spend the big bucks and get seats directly behind home plate, about ten rows up in section 117 or 118, where we have been surrounded every time by people who actually pay attention to the game and leave their bratty kids at home (rather than waste a hundred bucks to buy a seat for them).  We have also been spared from the typical drunken boorish behavior that’s exhibited at Miller Park, just as it is in ball parks around the nation.  At least in our experience at Miller Park, the folks who buy the good seats behind home plate are there to see the game.

My friend Jennifer Miller, who, like me, was a news anchor for the past couple decades (although, of course, Jennifer is MUCH younger than me), and is a huge Brewers fan, went to a game at Miller Park a few days ago and was so off-put that she wrote a great rant about it on Facebook.  She made several cogent points, including “the Diamond Dancers add NOTHING to the Miller Park experience” – THAT, Jennifer, is very much a matter of opinion….and she said “The more beers the drunk behind you has, the more he thinks he’s an expert on the game of baseball.  Sober up and shut up, though not necessarily in that order.”  But Jennifer’s next two points both made me laugh out loud.  She wrote “Awwww, you brought your baby…..to the ballpark.  I have 3 kids so I am more than qualified to tell you that no one under the age of 3 ever got anything out of a major league baseball game.  Never mind that you’re bringing your infant into a loud, hot, germ-infested environment filled with tens of thousands of people (many of whom are drunk), when babies do what babies do (cry and poop), it’s no fun for you or those around you.  In my day, you got a sitter or you didn’t go.  Sorry.”

True dat, sister!

And the last point of Jennifer’s rant: “Hey you.  Yeah, you 20-something in the short shorts and the way too tight Brewers’ t-shirt.  Give it up!  Ryan Braun is not going to marry you.”  (By the way, the game Jennifer was at was the one where the Brewers smoked the D-Backs, featuring two Braun round-trippers and two runs scored by “Rickie Darnell Weeks, Jr”.  I love that Jennifer knows his full and proper name!)

Jennifer, Ryan Braun may not marry that 20-something, but…he just might show her a night on the town.  You will need to discuss this further with my wife, who dated a lot of ballplayers and essentially lived at the ballpark on the south side of Chicago in her checkered youth.

There are way too many unsupervised brats at ball games these days.  Kids who have no interest in the game, who are apparently dragged there by their parents, who allow these hellions to annoy the other fans, unfettered.  My tuba-playing friend Tom Plummer, who loves kids and has been an Iowa high school band director essentially all his life, took his adult son to see a Cubs-Twins game at Target Field a couple weeks ago.  Tom is one of those die-hard Cubs fans who thoroughly understands every aspect of the game (“a student of baseball”, as they used to say), follows it religiously, and is up-to-the minute on news and opinions regarding the team.  His Facebook report on the game said “Target Field was awesome. Soriano crushed two home runs.  I got to see the Budweiser Clydesdales. The down side was that it was “Undisciplined Kids Night” and “Moron Night” at the ballpark also.”  Tom is far too much of a gentleman to call them “brats and drunks” – but again, another example of a major league baseball experience diminished by people who can’t control their drinking, and can’t (or don’t) control their kids.

Regardless, baseball is our national game, and after I watch the hot-dog eating contest on ESPN the afternoon of July 4^th, my wife and I will tune in the Brewers-Marlins game from Miller Park.  But we’ll do it from the air-conditioned comfort of our media room, undisturbed by drunks and brats, with the American flag flying proudly over the Morrissey Compound.

Bad behavior at the ball park has become as American as apple pie.  Happy 4^th of July!