Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Congratulations to LA, MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and the continent of Australia

Kudos to the Dodgers, celebrating their first world championship since Kirk Gibson could see his toes while standing. They'd get hugs and kisses, if not for the virus. Bridesmaids for seven years, they finally made the necessary addition - Mookie fuckin' Betts! - and won. Suck on it, Boston. And you, too, Hal...  

Today, Major League Baseball also deserves a cascade of glowing praise. Back in August, when the Marlins tested positive, I wouldn't have bet a Raleigh coupon on the 2020 season playing out to a world series. Considering the Bozos who oversee the game - (the extra-inning rule? seriously?) - it seemed only a matter of time before the floor caved in. Today, let's give them credit: MLB  pulled it off. 

And here's to the NBA, which built the "bubble" to protect its players, staffs and families, and held a successful set of playoffs. And - fingers crossed - here's to the NFL, which continues to keep the largest rosters in pro sports. And how about Australia, which just ended a 111-day lockdown in Melbourne, its second largest city; the Melbornites -(which include one of my sons) - now has no current Covid cases - none. Can you imagine that?

They defeated the Beast.

Today, America is smoldering through its worst Covid wave yet, each day bringing the highest numbers of new infections since the pandemic hit. 

The most galling part of this calamity? Seeing how all the death and suffering could have been avoided - if there is enough money in it, I guess. 

We've always known how to beat the Beast. We just didn't bother.  Masks were too uncomfortable. Bars were too important. Besides, when it was other people dying, when it was people we didn't know - well - we either didn't believe it, or we simply  didn't care. 

What we have are excuses. We would not bend to government authority! We would not change our ways! We would not obey restrictions! If necessary, we would reject medical science altogether, choosing our experts based on what we want them to say. Goodbye, Dr. Fauci. Hello, Dr. Oz!

For years on this blog, we've argued that baseball was run by a bunch of old, greedy fools. Well, they pulled it off. Why couldn't America?

31 comments:

Platoni said...

This may have been mentioned already, but the extra inning rule makes it possible so that you could pitch a perfect game and still lose. That's stupid and I can't wait for it to happen one day

13bit said...

Remember folks, prosperity is just around the corner...

TheWinWarblist said...

Andy Hawkins threw a no-hitter and still lost by 4 runs.

Those years were awful.






FUCK YOU HAL!!!

Anonymous said...

BEING A LIBERAL ONLY CONVINCES YOUR TWISTED MIND THAT YOU ARE SUPERIOR TO THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS. THE BUBBLE WAS CREATED FOR THE 20% LIBERAL CREATURES LIKE YOURSELF, KEEP HIDIN WITH BIDEN.

Ken of Brooklyn said...

Well said El Duque, WELL SAID!

ranger_lp said...

Talking about COVID...

https://www.startribune.com/justin-turners-covid-celebration-was-an-abundance-of-recklessness/572896191/

From the article...

But he was let off the hook to a large degree by the aftermath of the Dodgers’ 3-1 victory — whereby we learned not only that Justin Turner had been pulled from the game because of a positive Covid test but also watched him join the post-game celebration, post-diagnosis, including posing for a team picture and kissing his wife without his mask.

“I don’t think there was anyone that was going to stop him,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said after the game of Turner joining the celebration.

How stupid and thoughtless can a sport, an organization and a player be?

(Quick conspiracy theory aside: The Dodgers learned of Turner’s confirmed positive test in the sixth inning — the same inning in which Snell was mysteriously pulled. Now there’s a tiny piece of me that wonders if Commissioner Rob Manfred ordered the Code Red, telling the Rays to stand down given any comeback victory would have led to a delay of Game 7 and even more embarrassment for MLB).

el duque said...

Anonymous, you pretend to be a conservative but you are merely a tool of Nancy Pelosi and George Soros!

13bit said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
HoraceClarke66 said...

ALL-CAPS, is that you? I hope not.

Yeah, I guess Herman Cain is a liberal. He died. I guess everybody who died or got horribly sick—with damage that may last a lifetime—was a liberal.

Sure, not many kids have died. Only a few hundred—or maybe a few thousand. Only a few healthy young people died—or maybe a few thousand.

Mostly it was older people, or people with pre-existing conditions. And who cares if they're gone, right? I mean, it's not like they were anyone's beloved parents or grandparents. It's not like any of them did anything to keep this country running, or maybe had another great book or piece of music they were going to write, or one more thing they wanted to do or see in their lives.

No, probably just useless people we hated died, and there was nothing we could do about it, nothing like what nearly every other industrialized country that tried could do. The Australians! We all know what fearful weenies they are. Not like our macho leaders...

HoraceClarke66 said...

Look, there's one reason and one reason only that an extra 100,000-150,000 people and counting are dead: because the president we elected decided that doing anything systematic or rational to stop this plague would hurt the stock market. And the stock market was what he decided was the only measure of a successful economy or a successful America.

I don't care if you're a liberal, a conservative, an Ayn Rand acolyte, or a fascist: that's just plain stupid.

Anonymous said...

TRYING TO REASON WITH BRILLANT LIBERALS IS AKIN TO TALKING TO A ROCK. KEEP HIDEN' FROM THE FLU WHILE WE DEPORABLES LIVE OUR LIVES WITHOUT FEAR OF OUR SHADOWS. "LIBERALISM IS A MENTAL DISORDER"

Stang said...

I look forward to turning 90 and launching all-caps shout posts at people I would never listen to. Seems like a rich life.

Anonymous said...

I have not studied Australia, so I don't know the extent of their lockdown and what it entails. What businesses were open and how you got power or groceries. Melbourne has approximately 5 million people out of a country of 25.6 million. I sincerely doubt that Melbourne's lockdown had much of an effect on Perth or Brisbane, let alone Sydney. Australia is an island. Much easier to close down the country from external visitors. I do not know if they closed their borders much earlier than we did. They propably did because they don't have a large segment of their population that seeks open borders and demonizes those he want to limit immigration. The same people shrieking today would have screamed just as loudly had we totally sealed all borders on Feb. 1.
I'll also bet the Australians did not send infected persons to nursing homes . Our death rate is 2.7% and trending down. Australia's is 3.3%. They do have significantly fewer cases. So our purely medical response was better, even with all of our mobiles.
You can second guess all you want, but liberals like Pelosi and DiBlasio were telling us to go to Chinese New Year and Dr. F changed his mind on masks several times.
The reality is that you would never have gotten 330million Americans to stay locked in their homes for 111days. That would have been the total annihilation of this country. You know that. You are not a stupid person. Please stick to baseball here as much as possible.
The Archangel

JM said...

If everyone wore a mask, without a long lockdown, we would still have way fewer deaths, hospitalizations, and cases overall.

Fauci's flip-flops don't matter. It was common sense. People in Japan and China wear masks as a matter of course. We used to laugh at them when they wore them here in Manhattan.

Not laughing now. Also, not suffering the infection, hospitalization, and death rates other parts of the country are seeing now. People here have been masking since March/April. So far, so good, even since lockdowns ended.

As Letterman used to say, this is not a competition. It's also not political. It's just what you do when weird shit is floating around. Like wearing a seat belt or looking both ways before crossing.

Anonymous said...

New York State did as much to lock down their state as could be done with all of Cuomo's edicts. They had Federal assistance in building hospitals and sending a floating hospital. They restricted all kinds of businesses and movement. 14 day lockdowns for travelers, etc. All restaurants, churches, gyms, etc. closed. Federal money for all equipment and testing. Everything fast tracked to New York
Essentially, New York State did everything that you wanted the Feds to do. They tried to set up roadblocks to stop people from other states going there. Yet, it is hard to say that NYS was not a total failure relative to other States. On top f that, the State is basically decomposing, leaking jobs and people like a severed femoral artery. All of America would be like NYS if we had followed some of the suggestions here. Hide and separate yourselves from society all you want. That is your choice as free Americans. Let the rest of us live our lives with relative freedom. And yes , I know people who contracted Covid.. They all lived, including my daughter and son-in-law. The only fatality I personally know was a man who lived in assisted living and died at 91 from an apparent heat attack. they did bloodwork and told his daughter, our friend, that it was COVID, even though she had seen him 12 hours before he was found dead and exhibited no indication of symptoms.
Godot

Anonymous said...

P.S. , I wear a mask which I consider small limit of my freedom, but I do it because it appears to make sense and really can't hurt me and it makes nervous people more comfortable which is a small curtesy on my part. But I do find it funny that I have to wear a mask into a restaurant, then I can take it off as everyone else does, but then if I go to the bathroom, I have to put it back on. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but we are trying to accommodate the competing interests of keeping family businesses afloat and not getting sick. An inexact science.
Godot

HoraceClarke66 said...

Of course it's an inexact science. And of course others, Democrats as well as Republicans, made numerous mistakes about this at first.

The difference: they didn't go on making the same mistakes for the next 8 months, in the face of all available evidence.

The president you people worship as a god, did.

HoraceClarke66 said...

Amazing to hear you smear NYC, God-o. Why ARE you a Yankees fan?

Of course we got hit hard, first. We're an international center. Or hadn't you noticed it?

Right now, North Dakota is the epicenter of the disease. Took them longer, but of course they learned nothing from our experience, or that of so much of the rest of the country, and the world.

Meanwhile, NYC had this beat...until people listening to your god-president decided they didn't have to care about their fellow man or take any precautions.

Now the disease is back here, and it will continue to take its toll. But it will also do so all over America, and probably worse and longer than it will here.

And you know what? New York City will bounce back and be its right old self again–much as god-president openly hopes for the death of his hometown.

(WTF is wrong with him? What kind of person hopes for the demise of their hometown? Honest to God, you have no trouble casting a vote for such a sad shell of a man?)

HoraceClarke66 said...

Archie, you seem like an otherwise sensible person. So please stop spreading the lie that this is "the flu."

The flu doesn't generally kill at least 250,000 Americans (and more likely, 300-400,000) in 8 months.

The flu doesn't last all year long, in warm and cold months.

The flue doesn't cause lasting bodily damage in many of its victims.

And what if it WAS just another, more terrible flu? That's all right? It's not like it's something that just replaces the old flu, you know. If a new chicken pox came around that killed many times more people, would you say, 'Hey, it's just chicken pox!'?

The fact that your favored politician may suffer from this is not a good reason to pooh-pooh the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

HoraceClarke66 said...

And God-o, glad to hear your relatives lived. Many did not. Many others are permanently damaged.

And the cost of not having tried to suppress the disease in any way would have meant our hospitals overwhelmed by patients whether they lived or not, and countless doctors, nurses, and other medical workers killed or disabled by this.

Do you really think that wouldn't have been a factor in killing countless more? People who couldn't get medical care in time—or get it at all?

Anonymous said...

Actually Horace, my wife is the perfect example of what a "lockdown" state did wrong in the initial panic over the virus. She is a red-headed freckled farm girl from the Midwest who grew up on a working farm and is now an RN. Exposed to the sun every day and who reallyknew what sunscreen was in the 60's and 70's. Anyhow over the last 25 years she has gone to the dermatologist religiously after skin cancer was detected in 1995. on fMarch 26, she felt a bump behind her knee and knew she had to go in pronto. But our Gov and his crack medical experts determined that dermatologists were "nonessential" and closed the offices.Apparently no one told them the skin cancer was one of the top 4 causes of cancer deaths.
Anyhow, calling every day, it was not for 17 days until the office was final open , that she could get an appt. for later in the week. She would not go to an emergency room as I begged her, because she [falsely it turns out] believed that the local hospitals were swamped.
On April 28th, she was finally diagnosed through a biopsy that her cancer was melanoma. That's the one that needs surgery and chemo. Because of the semi-aggressive nature of this species of melanoma, She met her surgeon on April 30, and surgery was done on May 5. Being a nurse, she had known the system and basically wagered people to get medical attention, follow-ups and biopsies. As her surgeon told her , it was good for her to have been persistent. She has had two surgeries on her legs, has had 4 lymph nods removed and only has had to take specialized chemo treatments that don't make her lose her hair and get really sick. Now, my point in all this is that a Gov. misguided full lockdown mode in my state had the unexpected consequence of delaying for about 5-6 weeks my wife's cancer treatments of what was characterized as one of the more aggressive forms of melanoma.
How many others will we find out over time have either died or been severely adversely affected by State Govenor's response? We won't know for a while, like the effect of no vaccines for children. However, I will not call my Gov. a "murderer", because as he has told us, "I am just following the science." However, it is self-righteous posturing to constantly carp on the Federal response when so much was done incorrectly on the State level. Money flowed to the States and our grandchildren will pay for this expenditure for their entire lives through the burgeoning deficit.
Hindsight remains 20-20. I think that they all were trying to do their best under circumstances that none of us had every seen in our lifetimes. . PS., No one whom I know that has gotten Covid has had any "disabling" effects from catching it. and we will never know how many have really died directly from the virus because I know from relatives in the medical field. and hospital admins., that they get more money based upon a "COVID" diagnosis .
You have the right to hate Trump because you hate Covid, but getting 330,000,000 Americans to follow lockstep dictates from government officials is kinda like herding cats. Good Luck and welcome to 1984.
Godot

Anonymous said...

Godot,

Very sorry to hear your wife's story. Thank you for sharing it.

As you said, " I think that they all were trying to do their best under circumstances that none of us had every seen in our lifetimes."

I agree 100%.

There are a couple of other things you said that I take issue with but I want to focus on one...

"PS., No one whom I know that has gotten Covid has had any "disabling" effects from catching it."

Uh... ME! I now walk around with not one but two different inhalers after never experiencing lung issues in my life. Totally fucked me up!

Plus I still get the various symptoms that come out of nowhere. They are short lived but depressing and debilitating none the less. Especially when I can't get out of bed or can't taste my fucking food. Or can't fucking breathe!

So there's that.

Doug K.

DickAllen said...



I don't hate Donald Trump because I hate COVID, I hate Donald Trump because:

DONALD TRUMP IS A CUNT.

That is all.

Rude Fan said...

Mr Allen1964 does this look familiar? "(Note: Your objection to the word "cunt" is noted."

Anonymous said...

Doug K, sorry that the virus has had a debilitating effect on you. Perhaps a passage of time will help.
Richie, very convincing counterargument. When all else fails, use profanity. However, as a heathen liberal, you should know that use of the c-word is very hurtful to vast segments of society. You should be banned form this site, except. A) I don not believe in banning/censorship and B) your rants and unhinged comments are comical, unless of course you have a neurological illness or have contracted rabies, and I have you in my thoughts and prayers.
Godot

HoraceClarke66 said...

God-o: Genuinely sorry to hear about your wife's health, and I think it's very possible that this or that governor or state was mistaken in pushing through this or that regulation.

(I suspect some governors may have been distracted by the heavily armed gun thugs Pres. Trump encouraged to show up and "liberate" their states, but never mind.)

That's a far cry from STILL insisting that this is nothing and that it is going away imminently.

As for the the permanent damage Covid is thought to be causing, that's been cited in several different articles in the Times, quoting highly respected doctors and researchers. You could look it up, as Casey used to say.

And sorry, I don't care what your friends and relatives are telling you, there is no monetary incentive to claim more deaths are from Covid—and regularly spreading this blood libel, as our president does, is only likely to get hospital personnel killed.

(For sources, I cite my own numerous friends who are now completely exhausted doctors and nurses, who have been working for day and night to stem this thing. A friend who is an emergency room doctor down in Georgia didn't even have any PPE after a very short time, and was terrified she was going to infect her small children.

I ended up running up and down Broadway to various small stores, buying whatever gloves and masks I could find, and shipping them to her. She was profoundly grateful.)

THIS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN IN A CIVILIZED COUNTRY IN THE 21ST CENTURY.

Is it all the fault of Donald Trump? No. Is it all the fault of one political party? No.

But it's a real thing, and 8 months in, there shouldn't be any question about it.

DickAllen said...



Godot, you are quite accurate in suggesting I am in the grip of a neurological illness. But being mentally ill has it's benefits.

I must, however, object to your assertion that my use of the word "cunt" is very hurtful to vast segments of our society, and strongly disagree. I might have called Donald Trump a dick, except that use of that word might be construed as a compliment to him. Any man who would publicly proclaim he "has no problem in that way," has a problem in that way. Suffice it to say he is no dick. Not even a small one.

There are certain parts of the english-speaking world, America being the exception, where it is perfectly acceptable for men to call other men "cunts," and NEVER to be used with woman except in the midst of heightened coitus, where all words are useful, the dirtier the better.

So, object you may, and I completely understand. It's a hard word, a sharp word and should be used concisely and carefully. Except perhaps in America where the word is completely misunderstood and in no way reflects my feelings and attitudes toward the "fairer sex," which in itself, if you think about it, is an ever bigger insult.

Be careful with your words, but use them without reservation.

That being said, I reiterate: DONALD TRUMP IS A CUNT.

Rude Fan said...

Richie Allen 1964, Lee Papa would agree. Donald Trump is a cunt!

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