Friday, January 25, 2013
Posnanski reviews “Trouble with the Curve”
(joeposnanski.blogspot.com)
posted on January 25, 2013 at 03:29 PM by RoyalsRetro (AG#1F) to andres blanco, clint eastwood, films, hollywood, movies, posnanski, scouts, trouble with the curve
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426 comment(s)
Maybe the movie didn’t have enough of the invisible President bit?
Read More...In so, so, so many ways TWTC does a much greater disservice to scouts that it does to the stat people. Heck, it merely makes stats-people into unrecognizably cartoonish figures who hate baseball but want to work in it so they can take over the world with their baffling “batting average” statistics. Big deal.
But scouts … this movie was supposed to celebrate them. Instead it makes grumpy and unfunny old men* who have some ...
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1 2 3 4 5 6 > Last ›Gone would be an upgrade. Generations of your family will wish it were gone. Instead it will be decades and decades of shame.
I also looked at framingpaterno.com for about 10 minutes. One of their claims is that the "coach" in the 1998 emails is not Paterno at all, but Sandusky.
Jerry Sandusky! "Uncle Eddie" Savitz! Ed Rendell! Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski! Jerry "The Geator With the Heater" Blavat!
This reads like a Pynchon novel from hell.
If true...
So far, so good! No one blow it!
Essentially he withdrew from the UVa search when they started scrutinizing and questioning his "close ties" with Second Mile. We don't know why they started questioning him about that - maybe it was just dumb luck, or maybe someone tipped them off. Either way, Sandusky didn't want them investigating further and removed himself from consideration.
Thanks, that actually makes me feel better. I remembered he was mentioned as a candidate for UVa job, but I didn't remember him getting as close as he did. Maybe the second mile questions scared him off from future applications.
Many of them are very eager for Posnanski's book to come out.
Maybe that's the problem; that Paterno was so obsessed with making his name mean something that he failed at the most human basic level.
So what are people expecting, here, as a best guess? Will the book be an apology for Paterno, or will Posnanski offer an objective and rightfully harsh critique of Paterno? Something in between?
I don't know what to expect. I lean towards basically an apology for Paterno, with some lip service paid to "Oh, Joe made mistakes," but without said lip service really doing much to change the fact that the overall tone of the book is an apology for Posnanski's Flawed Hero. But who knows.
I don't really expect a harsh, excoriating critique of Paterno - which is what is in order here - to be coming our way.
Somewhere in between. I'm guessing the book will "humanize" him.
I don't think it'll be an apology for Paterno, but I think it'll probably go easier on him than he deserves.
No, me neither. But that's not really Joe P's style anyway, somebody will do a better job of that than Joe could have. The book started out as a love letter to Paterno but obviously had to get some extensive rewrites as the news broke. I expect it to be a book where you can pretty much see the cut and paste marks and guess when each section or chapter was written.
Actually, I would have the opposite reaction... all it really does is widen the circle of people who might have at least smelled smoke, but took no actions to see if there was fire*.
*I recognize how dangerous this line of thought is - making everyone in a vigilante, following every suspicious thread, etc... I'm not saying there's an easy answer here, but at the same time - I find it awful hard to believe that those who 'looked the other way' were solely confined to the PSU administration and coaching staff. I'm in no way absolving them by adding more possibly guilty parties to the mix and again, I'm not calling for a witchhunt... But Sandusky WAS a well-known DC, at a big-time program -- and there are only so many big time programs. I doubt anyone would admit it now, but I find it hard to believe that there weren't at least rumors floating around the NCAA CFB world.
"I work my whole life--I don't apologize--to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those bigshots. I don't apologize--that's my life--but I thought that, that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the string. Senator Corleone; Governor Corleone ..."
I don't mean this as a dig at you, but the BSD crowd is saying the same thing--they seem to think that huge somemembersofBOT/Mafia/Pols/Freeh/sickos multiple conspiracies will exonerate Paterno. I think one basic problem the BSD crew has is that they don't seem to get that Paterno has not been accused of a crime. They (and his family) seem to see him as being falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. That isn't what happened.
In Repoz's link, Buccerino says that everybody was on their best behavior whenever Paterno showed up at Second Mile functions, even though according to Buccerino, some of these guys were there looking to find kids to abuse, meet, trade, etc.
Buccerino comes off as an unstable individual, and as the article points out, he jumps from factual claim to theory a lot. But the story has a lot of detail and rings very true and his profile as an adult fits with the claims. It is tough to read for that reason and others.
note the reference of not having any supporters on the board of trustess. that is because paterno bullied the board of trustess into keeping his job. this latter point will be ignored. just that paterno was 'isolated' and 'alone'
i have seen these whitewash jobs under the guise of reporting the facts for decades now and it never fails to grab an audience
paterno will be portrayed as alone, frail and confused. which will be true. but that is because he had his power stripped away and without it he had nowhere to turn and his mind and then his body failed him. it was the power that sustained him
Yes, I wonder how to pull this off. There will be hundreds of pages about the great things that Paterno did - do you just throw in a sentence every once in a while to dampen things? "Little did they know that, a few short years hence, everything would come crashing down."
I believe that Poz will do very little moralizing about the issue. He will admit that Paterno's actions were beastly, and then move on. Most of the stuff about the scandal will be (and probably should be) focused on the inside view that Poz had of effect of the fallout on the family.
Also, what Harveys said.
SSS and all, but yeah, so far it looks like it's going to linger over the impact of the scandal on Paterno and his family. If it doesn't discuss at length how the family internalized Joe's distended power as their own -- just look at their complaints that they weren't "consulted" by the NCAA in re the penalty, an utterly ludicrous expectation -- then the book will miss the point.
You may be right, but I would also suggest that we know less about the people we work with/deal with professionally in our fields than we might think we do. I don't think this applies to Paterno in this case, but to people around CFB, it might.
To be honest, such a book would be interesting. Even if he tries to portray the family as being unfairly wronged(and I doubt he will) anyone who knows anything about this will be able to put things in a proper context.
And if it's just an attack on Paterno et al. I don't think it'll be interesting enough for me to want to read. I can see him condemned on the internet for free.
It's interesting that I think the exact opposite. Paterno could become a smaller piece in a bigger puzzle, though, if that makes the BSD crowd feel better.
You could probably write a pretty good book or movie on Posnanski's process of writing this book about Paterno. Maybe even more interesting than Joe's book itself.
You could write a good book on people's comments about Posnanski writing a book about Paterno, making that a derivative book of the 2nd order.
but it wouldn't be very good......
It shouldn't have been that hard.
Billy Beane never should have written that book.
One possibility that occurred to me is that the guy might be grafting the Sandusky situation onto a preexisting story of child abuse. If you'll notice, he doesn't have much contact or very many interactions with Sandusky himself. Certainly nothing like the level of specificity in the rest of his story. If he's a bit of a storyteller to start with, I could see how a huge national news story that's *almost* like what happened to him could get joined with his own story.
I thought that at first, but the problem with that storyline is that they'd likely have intervened much earlier in the negotiation process. According to the article above, Sandusky already had members of his coaching staff lined up to join him at UVa when he abruptly took himself out of the running.
~eerie~ (random pentaquirks explode) ~eerie~
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