Bye, bye, 2008

The year in review covered here.

My favorite moments appear at 2:59, 4:25 and 6:29.

It's about time!

In a rare and belated display of sensibility, the BBWAA has elected the great Jim Rice to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I'll grant you that I'm prejudiced -- Rice was the first baseball hero of this reporter, growing up in mid-coast Maine in those crazy late-70's -- but I really have to wonder what the BBWAA is looking at to delay it this long.

For some reason, they'll "automatically" put in marginal players who stayed around to accumulate arbitrary milestone numbers, yet continually overlook great players who truly struck fear into opposing teams. Rice was flat-out unbelievable for 12 seasons, rarely injured, and steroid-free.

So, it's great that he finally gets in, but the fact that Robin Yount, Paul Molitor and Kirby Pucket got there first somewhat diminishes his election. In any case, a great excuse for a summer road trip to Cooperstown.

Now, about Luis Tiant...

2-3-2

One of the many lingering images in my mind from Super Bowl XXXVI -- an image which, unfortunately, I am unable to find in print -- is of Kurt Warner staying on the field during the hysterical postgame celebration to congratulate the Patriots players and coaches.

Even though it must have been an excruciating loss for him, he had the class to stick around and give credit where it was due, not run off and hide in the locker room.

It says something about his character; and perhaps it's that character that has kept him in the game this long and one win away from a return to the big dance.

I really don't care who wins on Sunday, but it would be kind of cool to see a stand-up guy like Kurt Warner make it all the way back.

So Favre Away

Eric Mangini is likely to be fired and Brett Favre is hopefully going to retire. Good riddance to both. The Dolphins were clearly the best team in their division and deserved to win on the final game of the season (and thus win the division), but poor decisions by both Mangini and Favre in the fourth quarter cost the Jets a chance at victory and thus the Patriots a chance at the playoffs.

First, some basics -- when you have 4th-and-2 on your opponent's 43 and you're down by four points in the fourth quarter, you go for it. Unless you can get a perfect punt, at best you'll gain 20 yards of field position by giving up the ball, and you're facing a team that has run the ball effectively all season, particularly in the fourth quarter. The fact that the punt was blocked is immaterial -- the call to punt in the first place was idiotic.

Second, why are you running a hurry-up offense with a full five minutes left? You have two timeouts and you're on the opponent's 29. What's the rush? Favre was apparently trying to catch the Dolphins in the wrong defensive formation, but isn't it better to execute the play properly? Even his (intended) receiver was surprised.

This isn't sour grapes -- The Patriots lost their all-world quarterback early in the first game of the season, yet rebounded to finish 11-5 and lost the division on a tie-breaker. They had winnable games against the Jets and the Colts (and, to some degree, the Steelers) which would have made this discussion moot had they executed.

New England's defense -- already aging and depleted entering the season after having been manhandled back in February -- was their true Achilles heel (pardon the expression) this season, a problem which was exacerbated by the loss of stalwarts Rodney Harrison, Adailus Thomas and many others. With Tom Brady's status up in the air, they've got some work to do in order to contend in a suddenly improved division.

We'll see what that brings. In the meantime, congratulations to the Dolphins on a well-deserved division title. As for Mangini and Favre, we'll see you on Monster.com.

Year in Review

All in all, this is a year I'd rather forget. We had disaster in February, catastrophe in April, cataclysm in August, calamity followed by heartbreak in October, and a complete debacle in November. We lost Bill Buckley, Ivan Dixon, Jesse Helms, Charlton Heston, Van Johnson, Bill Melendez, Tony Snow, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Sir John Templeton, and Paul Weyrich. I had to replace my cell phone, my car, my assistant, my laptop, my starting quarterback, my television and my right Achilles tendon. There was no shortage of underwriters to debate or of clients to placate. Yet, with seven days to go, we appear to have survived, and we have something to look forward to in May 2009. A few somewhat random thoughts to wrap things up...


Quote #1 -- Hogan's Heroes, episode 96
Newkirk: The first thing we must do is not panic.
Kinchloe: I already have -- what's the second thing?


Quote #2 -- Johnny Most, 1986
"The Boston Celtics are the World Champions for the sixteenth time. They have come back from all kinds of adversity, and they have shown the world what a great ball club they really are."


Quote #3 -- attributed (erroneously) to Winston Churchill
"Never give up.
Never give up.
Never, never, NEVER give up."


Quote #4 -- George S. Patton
"Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."


Quote #5 -- Ronald Reagan, 1989
"My friends, we did it."


Quote #6 -- Apostle Paul, Ephesians 3:20
"[God] is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think."

Quote #7 -- from Saving Private Ryan
"I'll see you on the beach."

Deep in the heart of Texeira

The signing of Mark Texeira by the New York Steinbrenners is not the apocalypse that commentators are making it out to be. Not even for the Red Sox. The Yanks have been over-paying for players (not "talent," players) for the past eight years and it's gotten them nowhere. Mike Mussina. Carl Pavano. Kevin Brown. Jarret Wright. Jason Giambi. And, of course, Pay-Rod. And they finished third last year.

Now they've opened their checkbook for another National League pitcher (see Brown, above); another injury-prone pitcher (see Pavano, above), and a young slugging first-baseman (see Giambi, above).

It might just work out for them, but I'll believe it when I see it. Had the Sox signed Texeira, they would have been faced with the dilemma of trying to fit four all-star-calibre players (Tex, Youk, Lowell and Ortiz) into three positions (1B, 3B & DH). One of them (probably Lowell) would have had to go, yet it was his absence -- far more than Man-Ram's -- that contributed to the Sox ultimately falling short last year. If this gang is healthy, I'll take them over any team that money can buy. If they're not healthy, well, that's the chance you take. However, I'd rather take that chance with less than $400 million.

As has been written here before, the dynastic Yankees of the 1990's had even this observer's grudging admiration, as they had built their teams the right (or the traditional) way -- a strong farm system, a core group that had played together in the minors, and complementary, second-tier players signed to reasonable contracts to plug the gaps year-to-year. They now have a weak farm system, an aging core group, and a host of over-paid, under-performing free agents. It hasn't worked yet.

1983

Twenty-Five Years Ago. Hard to believe. The picture was actually taken in 1985, but it was near that location two years earlier that me (the sunburnt guy in the back row) went on a hike with Tim (the guy in the yellow shirt) and got lost in the boondocks, a somewhat harrowing experience that entailed two dicey river crossings without a bridge.

This was on Christmas Eve, folks.

And, yes, we made it back...

Ode to George

A fellow Blogspotter posts some additional commentary on IAWL; I particularly concur with the two paragraphs and find the SNL video link embedded therein to be a more satisfactory ending, although I might have skipped the pile-diving at the end...

It's a Wonderful So-Called Life

NBC presented its annual rendition of the perennial Christmas special It's A Wonderful Life recently. It wasn't that long ago that you could see this movie pretty much 24/7 during December on various channels; then NBC got exclusive rights to show it once a year. Apparently NBC doesn't think that people have VCR's, let alone DVD players.

Anyway, a good enough movie with some memorable performances, but I find it hard to watch because, like several of Capra's other pictures, the conclusion just isn't complete. Why does Mr. Potter have to keep the money and go from the hard-core, aggressive businessman he has been throughout the film to a downright crook? If Potter had given the money back -- and he clearly knew he had it and where it had come from and that it wasn't his -- maybe after the wild rally at the end, that might have made sense.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, unfortunately, isn't much better -- the last ten minutes make absolutely no sense at all, as if Capra knew he had to get the thing done within 129 minutes?

In both cases, the overall themes are solid (what life would be if you'd never been born; political corruption), but the sequences are contrived and the endings are unsatisfactory. Fortunately, both Capra and Stewart gave us plenty of solid work elsewhere. It's just odd that these two pictures get most of the notoriety. I must be missing something...

Kerrying On

I saw this book for sale at a salvage store. If I hadn't been in a quasi-public place, I would have been ROTFL. I could barely hold my Blackberry still to take the picture. I seriously thought I'd need visual proof of what I had seen.

John Kerry: A Portrait. You have got to be kidding. Does this guy have a Kennedy complex or what? First we have the initials (middle name - Forbes). Then the haircut. Now we need a coffee table book of intimate photographs? Starting with a picture of him on his private yacht? No doubt, the book goes out to expound on his well-known charm and charisma and his early years pulling double-shifts in the meat packing plant. What's next -- an MTV special? A DVD of his best-received stand-up? An audiobook of Theresa's favorite bedtime stories? Good grief.

Amazon shows an issue date of September 2004, and of course ever presidential election year produces its share of literary buffoonery, but someone should have been fired for this. Maybe they were. If I hadn't seen this in person, I would have thought it was a 4-year-old gag from Saturday Night Live.

I wonder how many copies actually were sold. I mean, other than the ones Theresa scooped up to get it into Amazon's top 1,000.

Halp us Jon Carry -- we R stuk hear @ Ollies...

Name that Scandal

Mark Krikorian has a few suggestions.

Van the Man

The great Van Johnson (1916-2008) has died at age 92. He's worth commemorating for at least two reasons --

Primarily, his portrayal of PFC Holley, the central character in Battleground, perhaps the best WWII movie ever made. I typically watch Battleground around this time each year, and was just getting ready to pop in the DVD when I heard the news. There are, of course, a number of great WWII films (and plenty of lousy ones), but Battleground stands out for its believable and eye-level portrayal of a band of brothers (before the Band of Brothers) during a difficult turn in the war. I particularly like how it molds each of the characters into distinct, identifiable, and (most importantly) genuine roles with whom it's easy to connect.

If you haven't seen Battleground, rent, borrow, buy or steal it NOW (okay, don't steal it).

The second reason is a little-known fact -- Van Johnson was actually given serious consideration for the lead role in WWII television classic, Hogan's Heroes. Don't ask me how I know this; just trust me...

His full credits are here. RIP.

Bailing Away

I have to admit, I'm not a person with a great deal of sympathy for the so-called American automobile industry (I say "so-called" because many "foreign" cars are actually built in the US).

My first car was a 1985 Chevrolet Cavalier, and as such, it has a special place in my heart. I had it for just over eight years and it got me through college, into marriage, several moves and job changes, and up until almost exactly a year from the birth of my first child. Nonetheless, I can't overlook the fact that both the engine and the transmission blew out at around 70,000 miles. I paid a fair sum of money to get all that fixed, and it lasted another 50,000 until the engine went again.

The first car my wife and I bought together was a 1993 Mercury Tracer. That transmission went at 40,000 miles. I was infuriated -- I wrote several letters to the good people at the Ford Motor Company stating, in sum, that warranty or no warranty, there's no way that should ever happen. They feigned sympathy but of course did nothing, and I swore off ever buying another Ford product again.

Several years later, we needed a van and, despite my earlier pledge, we settled on a 1998 Mercury Villager and traded in the Tracer. This time, however, I took the plunge and bought the extended warranty. A short time later, I was glad I did -- that engine blew at around 38,000 miles. The warranty paid for almost all of it, but I had steam coming out my ears both on the principle and the inconvenience of the whole mess. Inexcusable, I fumed. That would be my last Ford vehicle. This was on top of a number of nagging mechanical and electrical issues that the dealership seemed incapable of repairing (the intermittent air conditioning was a particular irritant). And while we kept it a few more years, it was ultimately replaced with a Honda Odyssey.

To replace The Mighty Cavalier, we purchased a 1993 Mazda Protege, which we would keep for more than ten years. It was in that vehicle that I brought both of my children home from the hospital. This was and remains to date the best car I ever owned -- It was a 5-speed 1.8 DOHC with a fair amount of firepower. At around 100,000 miles, the body was starting to give way, but the engine could have run forever. It finally got to the point this year that it was too expensive to maintain, as the parts were become both scarce and expensive, and when the AC compressor went, it was time for a trade at 108,000 miles. But it still ran great.

We now own two Hondas -- the aforementioned 2005 Odyssey, and a 2007 Honda Fit that succeeded the Protege. Yes, we paid a little more for them, but (knock on wood) no mechanical or major maintenance issues. With my track record, I got an extended warranty on both, but we haven't had to use it yet.

I realize that the American Automobile industry is populated, by and large, with good, solid, hard-working people at all levels of parts, manufacturing and service, and I sympathize with them that the collapse of their industry in general and their employer in particular will adversely affect them and perhaps the country overall. But it's not my fault that they've produced inferior products at inflated prices for the better part of four decades. Any industry needs to keep up with the times or go away. We've seen this before -- ever hear of Bethlehem Steel?

The Price is Wrong

Sports and Game Show guru JB provides this link from a c. 1983 airing of The Price is Right. You can also guess the date by the appearance of the Los Angeles Raiders.

Note that the prices shown are for a pair of season tickets.

Of course, the Raiders have moved back north. Whatever happened to the Kings?

Post-Mortem cont'd

The great Dr. Victor Davis Hanson provides his analysis on NRO in this piece, What Went Wrong?

Following the 1992 elections, in which the Republicans not only lost the presidency that they'd held for 12 years (and 20 of the previous 24), but could not capture either house of Congress, there were many cries and recriminations. Pete DuPont was a voice of reason at the time, writing that for Republicans and conservatives (not always synonymous) to return to power, they didn't need to move to the left, as some were saying, but become more adept at articulating their agenda.

2008 may be a more comprehensive defeat than 1992, but Hanson's thesis is similar.

I mean it

Seriously, Collinsworth is dreadful. Whoever gave him a job on television should be shot by a firing squad and then forced to apologize.

Thursday Night Pain

The NFL Network is a standing monument to the excesses of American television. But that's another post. Meanwhile, we're forced to watch an important game between the Pats and New Jersey Jest. It's halftime and the Jest are ahead, but my complaints have nothing to do with that:

First, who did Chris Collinsworth pay off to get a job on network television? This guy is awful. I mean, if he ever produces an original thought his head will probably explode. If the NFL Network and NBC won't dump him, maybe somebody can invent a mute button that screens out his voice.

Second, it's somewhat telling that while the Patriots are honoring at halftime perhaps the classiest, most unselfish player ever to wear their uniform (Troy Brown), we don't get to watch -- we can hear some of it, but we can't watch it, because the 17-person halftime panel is interviewing the anti-Troy Brown, Chad "Ocho Cinco" Johnson of those dynamic Cincinnati Bengals.

I wonder if this game is on the radio...

Michael Barone

As usual, Michael Barone -- the walking encyclopedia of American elections -- nails it in his analysis of 2008.

Well, you may not agree that he "nails it," but he says much of the same stuff I was saying. He just says it better.

Final Thoughts

Nearly twenty years ago in the early years of the first Bush administration, I was conversing with a friend who was somewhat older than me, also an evangelical Christian, but something of an old-style liberal originally from Minnesota. He expressed skepticism both about the enduring value of the Reagan years ("did he mortgage your future?" I remember him asking me) and what his successor would amount to.

Nonetheless, he had voted for Bush (senior), noting that in 1988 it had come down to a single issue for him -- abortion.

We haven't heard much (in my view, not enough) about the differences between the candidates on life issues, having been overshadowed in large part by economic-related banter and secondarily (again, a distant second place) by national security. Fair enough -- priorities have changed.

Politics and history move in cycles. Candidates and parties move in and out of power. Eight years of a Republican administration, most of which were accompanied by a Republican congress, combined with the challenges we face today and in the immediate future, and it's easy to understand the desire many have for that ill-defined "change."

But with those challenges in mind, and given the choice between someone with experience building consensus and confronting problems and someone who hasn’t done anything, between a legacy of national service and a resume that would struggle to fill a quarter-page ad, I have a hard time seeing why people would consider the latter.

As an amateur presidential historian, I recognize the importance of intangibles, but substance is needed to back it up. The Bushes had plenty of substance, but communication problems; Clinton was the opposite. Carter had neither. The great ones -- including that guy who allegedly "mortgaged my future" twenty-plus years ago -- had both.

Regardless of the outcome, the Republicans nominated the candidate who probably stood the best chance of winning, and a running mate who energized a previously lukewarm base. Perhaps if John McCain was 52 instead of 72 the dynamics might have been different, but age hasn't been anything more than a subliminal issue in this campaign, so that's hard to gauge.

Anyway, we'll see you on Tuesday. Keep your eyes on Pennsylvania. Hopefully they'll wait and call it after the polls actually close.

Philadelphia Freedom

A quick note to congratulate the 2008 World Series Champions Philadelphia Phillies. They played well down the stretch and through the playoffs and are a deserving winner.

One comment, however -- since when is waiting 28 years (or 25, depending on how you measure) an unbearable long time for a championship? The Red Sox waited 86 years; the White Sox 88 years; the Cubs...well, forget the Cubs, but what about Cleveland? Even the Boston area, which has ruled this decade in sports, went over 15 years (including the entire decade of the 90's) between a professional title of any kind.

Get over your self-inflicted agony. I could do 28 years standing on my head. And during those 28 years you had one of the greatest NCAA champions (Villanova, 1985), a largely relevant NFL team, an appearance or two in the Stanley Cup, and one of the top 5 NBA teams ever (led by one of the greatest players ever). There's been plenty to cheer about in Philadelphia. Enjoy the parade, but don't expect the rest of us to feel any happier with the end of a drought of 28 lousy years.