Saturday, August 14, 2021

HoraceClarke66: An’ Anudder T’ing!

 From the whirlwind mind of HoraceClarke66...


No, I’m not letting that awful, “Field of Dreams” excrescence go. 

 It was a celebration, first of all, of a movie that badly mutilated the book in some awful ways—starting with the use of (the civil rights) Bob Moses as a prop. 

James Earl Jones’ character is a thinly disguised depiction of the recently departed Moses, organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, as brave and dedicated an American as there’s ever been…and a product of the Bronx.

 Not Iowa.

 For that matter, the original Hateful Eight on the Chicago Black Sox didn’t have anything to do with Io-way, either. They were streetwise guys who actively sought out gamblers to finance their fix. 

 (For an excellent movie on them—also excluded from Jack Curry’s woeful list of best baseball films—check out John Sayles’ Eight Men Out.)

 Who saved the game? Why, New Yorkers, of course. 

 The colonels, Ruppert and Huston, who owned your New York Yankees, and brought Babe Ruth to the biggest stage in sports. The Black Sox scandal was forgotten overnight, as New Yorkers rushed to see the Bambino, giving baseball its first million-fan gate.

But hey, in the endless media pandering to “the heartland,” somehow saving the game Chicago nearly wrecked becomes all about Iowa, where “the mighty Yankees” are the bad guys.

 The corn is as high as a pig’s eye.

 

29 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm with you guys. While that farce was going on, I kept wondering if it was just my cynicism or was I really seeing and hearing more bull shit packed into one major league game broadcast than forty years' worth of such bull shit put together. It was enough to make me puke. Turning a freaking game into a movie, and a movie into a game. Is art supposed to imitate life or is life supposed to imitate art? I don't like it when life starts imitating art, for all the wrong reasons. And when I heard that the average ticket price was $3,000 (multiply by 8,000 seats = $24,000,000), that brought back the puking multiplied by 24 million little demons. What a disgusting, disgraceful, commercialized hypefest. There is no bottom to the low to which major league baseball will stoop.

The Hammer of God

Anonymous said...

And I almost forgot... With the ball zooming around the park like meteor showers, I have a very sneaky suspicion that the ball was juiced for this game. MLB probably ordered their factory to wind a batch of balls tighter, or they tested a whole bunch of balls and used the balls determined to be the most astronomically gifted for this launching pad affair. I wouldn't be surprised....

The Hammer of God

Anonymous said...

Hammer,

Re Juiced Balls There's precedent. Remember the Yankees/Sox games in London?
17-13 and 12-8. The balls were flying out of there.

Doug K.

Anonymous said...

Yep, it can't just be coincidence that every time we have these hype fest games, we get intersteller home run derby.

The commercialization of this one far exceeded the London games, however. As was said in "Apocalypse Now", the bullshit piled up so fast for this one, you needed wings to stay above it all.

The Hammer of God

JM said...

I'm reading a book put out by an organization devoted to baseball history about the 1919 White Sox. Eight Men Out was a fine book in its day, but that was 60+ years ago, and a lot of documents and important film footage has come to light since then. The real story doesn't really fit the old book and movie narrative. It's more complicated and interesting. One of the main myths it punctures is the meme of the Babe saving baseball after the scandal. Another is that there was quite a bit of betting by players for years before. Players pretty routinely had relationships with gamblers and their organizations.

I'm just getting into it, but it's pretty good stuff. Called Scandal on the South Side.

JM said...

Wait. They had second and third and nobody out and didn't score. Isn't that our thing?

JM said...

This ump blows. Wow.

TheWinWarblist said...

Sucks and blows. Sucks and blows.

Pocono Steve said...

We have a late lead--and you know what that means!

Pocono Steve said...

Do we have 1-2-3 inning in us?

Pocono Steve said...

These aging relievers: they just don't provide relief, do they?

Leinstery said...

Do they have anyone in the organization that can close a game? I imagine they've already broken the franchise record for blown saves in a season and we're still in August.

ranger_lp said...

Deja Vu all over again

TheWinWarblist said...

Britton cannot throw strikes never mind quality strikes. Why is he back out there??

TheWinWarblist said...

Boone's the master strategist. Let's let Britton load the bases AND THEN BRING IN ABREU!!!

Pocono Steve said...

Britton: MOTHERFUCKING GLUE FACTORY!!!!

TheWinWarblist said...

That fastball was right down the middle.

TheWinWarblist said...

Everything this at bat is out of the strike zone.

TheWinWarblist said...

Over the middle of the plate again.

TheWinWarblist said...

What a treat to watch this miscarriage of the bottom of the 10th inning.

Pocono Steve said...

Abreu does what his the grossly overpaid Britton couldn't do.

ranger_lp said...

Collective exhale...jeez

ranger_lp said...

Britton is not right...not sure if he will figure it out by the end of the season...

Kevin said...

Amazing that they haven't gone into a freefall yet.

ranger_lp said...

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32024043/remove-closer-role

"Physically [I am] not where I normally am at this stage of the season. But I have to find a way to get outs with where I'm at physically right now because it's just where I'm at," Britton said. "Just need to figure out how in the future I can get back to the top level of pitching that I want to be at."

Britton has been dealing with command issues, which he has attached to his routine being disrupted by missing spring training to undergo left elbow surgery. The 33-year-old also hasn't completely recuperated from suffering major weight loss after contracting COVID-19 in the offseason.

But with regard to COVID-19 and the surgery being factors affecting his performance, Britton called them "an excuse that's holding me back."

"I have to figure out a way to pitch with where I'm at. You've got to get outs, regardless of how you're feeling, velocity being down," he said. "I've been around long enough to know that it's not always about the best stuff, the most velocity, to get outs. It's about executing pitches. And I'm not doing a good job of that right now. And I'm capable of doing it."

TheWinWarblist said...

That was a stand up admission. He's not the same young pitcher he used to be.

Joe Formerlyof Brooklyn said...


ICYMI dept - from the MLB.com write-up:

Green’s stumble marked the Yankees’ 18th blown lead in the eighth inning or later, most in the Majors this season.

See? It only FEELS like they've blown 1,942 saves this year!

Don't you feel better now?

Anonymous said...

Britton seems to be a standup guy.
Much like the rest of us, he can't do now what he could once do then.
I'm afraid to look at what we owe him next season.


The Archangel

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