Sunday, May 19, 2013
Cafardo: Dustin Pedroia the best second baseman in MLB?
(www.bostonglobe.com)
Sweet spectroscopy! The argument is rolled out again!
Read More...It’s not surprising to hear what two scouts from each league, who both have watched a lot of the American League this year, say about Dustin Pedroia.
“Nobody is playing his position better in baseball right now than Pedroia,” said the AL scout. “He’s playing out of his mind. The plays he’s making — you just don’t see that stuff every day, but you see it with him every day. Honestly, I’m surprised he doesn’t get hurt ...
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1 2 3 4 >Headline?
Yes! There's no story … Just a headline!
Which headline?
THE BIG HEADLINE ON THE FRONT PAGE!
Read it to me, Senator.
"BEDFELLOW: THE SECRET LIFE OF A WIFE-SWAPPING ATHEIST."
Oh that's just a typo.
As a mets fan, I have no skin in this game, no team of mine has won squat diddly in over two and a half decades but I doubt there is any team in the past twenty years who is taint free! The vast majority of players have at least tried, if not frequently used the stuff, to single out one organization over any other is silly...and BTW, losing orgs have the same number of players who use as the winning clubs do.
The Mitchell Report was 98% about players so that anecdote really stuck out to me (ie I think my hazy memory is true - beleive me!).
That's a long way from backing up Schilling's story, but it undermines Hoyer's too righteous indignation about ever being involved in a conversation about PEDs.
Oh, man, I used to love Bloom County. I still have the "Billy and the Boingers" 45 which came in one of the books.
Though on second thought, maybe its more that Berke Breathed's recent attempts at anything Bloom County related hasn't aged at all, and falls flat.
People say this about every decade and like clockwork 30 years later the decade becomes popular again.
Epstein considered whether a player was roiding in making a personnel decision about him -- it's in his own words in the Mitchell Report. Why wouldn't he have? He'd have been derelict in his duties if he hadn't.
Is this going to be one of those things that obviously should have came to "light" years ago that people are just now "noticing"?
That's from 4 years ago...and #### Simmons.
Wow, I couldn't disagree more vigorously. Bloom County is still very funny, it's everything Berke Breathed has done since then that's awful.
I don't want to know. Haven't looked at those books in many years. In my mind Bloom County was/is awesome. I better not ruin that by re-reading them.
Matt Drudge turned the Bloom Beacon's methods into an empire. I respect parody that succeeds in predicting the future.
Like Opus the Rhyming Bird
Yes. So so what? Epstein was deciding whether to acquire Gagne and noted that the Dodgers thought Gagne was on steroids and so asked his staff if they had any further information. I'm at a loss as to what your point is, SugarBear.
That's still one of my favorites.
A few years ago I was working late in a project with a couple of Big Pharma scientists and we were chatting about married life. Me and one of the guys had both gotten married young, the other guy waited until he was 33.
"Geez, I can't even imagine living alone and unmarried when I was 30," I said.
"Yeah," the guy replied, "I was pretty much Steve Dallas."
And we all laughed, because we got it. Goofy bachelorism, squalid living conditions, lots of booze - the whole picture painted in two words,
Calvin and Hobbes all sorts of rocked (Came out in 85)
That Hoyer has had "direct" conversations about players using PEDs and been "confronted" with the subject of players using PEDs.(*)
He denied both things.
His attempted distinguishing of discussions about roiders and being "confronted" with roiders is silly and untenable, but that's a secondary point.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with such converstations, and wonder why Hoyer is running away from them so quickly.
(*) As has Epstein, obviously. See Mitchell Report, not that it's necessary. Anyone who doesn't think GMs tried to keep track of who was roiding during the Steroid Era is positively cookoo. One couldn't have engaged in serious talent evaluation without trying.
Seriously, you won't. Still brilliant. Go back and enjoy.
Seconded. It started out looking like a plagiaristic ripoff of Doonesbury because of the similar artwork, but after a while I started to appreciate its sheer anarchistic vision. It's not a work of near-genius like Ruben Bolling's Tom The Dancing Bug, or some of the older strips like Pogo, Krazy Kat or Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, but it's still right up there with just about any of the others. Breathed was probably smart to quit while he was ahead, but when you consider the terminal lameness of about 80% of today's comics, I wish he'd thought about his readers before his understandable personal interests.
I'd imagine SugarBear's point is among the following:
a) Hoyer seemed to just say that Theo would never engage in the sort of discussion Schilling recalls. The Gagne discussion is rather different but is about whether a player is using and can he be effective without them.
b) are people really so naive to think management wasn't involved in PED conversations and possibly PED encouragement or even PED decisions?
c) if Theo was interested in the PED use of Gagne prior to acquiring him, do we believe that was a one-time thing or was he also interested in the PED use of other players he acquired and his own players (especially prior to contract extensions)?
d) if Theo was informed that a player he wanted to acquire was on steroids, how did the rest of the conversation go? Did Theo wash his hands of the player (he acquired Gagne)? Was the probability of the player being caught discussed?
e) Did Theo Epstein knowingly employ players who were in violation of baseball's new PED rules while GM of the Boston Red Sox?
I find it hard to believe that Theo (and every other GM) wasn't having these conversations about players other than Gagne. As SBB notes, especially post-testing it would be part of due diligence to assess the chances that a guy was going to get suspended for 50 games.
Are you really not interested in the question of to what extent MLB management, pre- and post-testing, encouraged/tolerated PED use? I have no interest in expanding the witch hunt to include Theo and others -- alas, the most likely outcome of somebody starting to poke into that question -- but I'd certainly be interested to know how widespread this is and I think concrete proof of management acceptance/abetting/encouragement of PED use would further strengthen the case that pre-testing usage was not "cheating" even in terms of the "spirit of the game" or whatever.
d) If Theo believed that Gagne's performance was substantially due to PED use, did he ever give in to the temptation to suggest PEDs to a player?
Of course BALCO was in 2003. It
"I love you mooooore than he..."
"I love you endlessly...."
Oh yes, the decade happened.
But, the 80's WERE 30 years ago.
It wasn't just the artwork. Breathed used the same balloon-less word balloons, namechecked the same news figures and topics, and even paced the panels and the dialogue with the same cadences that Trudeau had been using for a decade. I still remember a review which said that giving Breathed full credit for "Bloom County"s style would be like "complimenting a shoplifter for being a snappy dresser."
The example linked above shows why Bloom County was always a lesser light. Where Garry Trudeau would have come up with a punchline or a sequence that actually addressed Caspar Weinberger in a tangible way, Breathed merely uses his name as a funny-sounding Mad Lib fill-in. That's something he did all the time. Beyond the whimsy, there's very little there there. The Simpsons' takedown of Mark Russell for playing toothless "satiric" songs like "The Deficit Rag" could just as easily be directed at Berke Breathed. The strip was cute, but let's not pretend that random drop-ins of Jerry Falwell or Ivana Trump or Margaret Thatcher chronicled the zeitgeist of a decade. "Bloom County" was like a "Doonesbury" entirely populated by Zonkers. I don't think how the strip is perceived to have aged is the issue; I felt it was overrated at the time.
Phil Hartman on an episode of Newsradio was fantastic at this.
Being able to do Pretty in Pink, I Melt With You or Don't You Forget About Me well generally leads to hookups in karaoke bars these days. YMMV.
The strip was much more about the meadow community, people and animals bouncing little bits of thoughts and feelings off each other. The tone was often light and the focus local. It was a "hang out" strip. The strip linked above was of course not a piece of satire, and critiquing it for lacking satirical bite is like complaining that your croissant wasn't spicy.
For the most part, Breathed didn't satirize the Congress, he didn't seek to skewer, he had a lighter touch and focused on the media and celebrity culture. I don't think this is necessarily a lower form of comedy. The stories of Bill the Cat running for president and being famous focus mostly on jokes about how the media covers campaigns and celebrities. You can perhaps wish that Bloom County had run more strips where the panel is a repeated shot of the outside of the White House and see words coming out, but that wasn't the angle it took. (Bloom County could do real political satire at times. The "penguin lust" storyline as a critique of public gaybashing was quite brilliant. But that was rare, for the most part.)
OH JA
it was a pretty lame strip, brethed is vastly overrated.
The joke is about the characters, sweet confused Opus and his weird little interactions with the world around him. And it's about the fact that Caspar Weinberger is a funny name.
I'm guessing perhaps the big thing you're missing is the character-based humor, the way this joke wouldn't work at all with Bloom or Binkley or Portnoy performing the poem. It's about Opus.
And phredbird, if you're going to be all "it weren't all that, sheeit", what exactly in the period of 1980-1989 are you judging above it, daily-strip-wise? If you think it's overrated, that's fine, but unless you read the dailies, I'm going to have a hard time taking "lame" empirically.
the criticism is warranted. brethed was trying too hard to do another doonesbury and it showed. when he realized he'd never be able to match trudeau's ability to develop stories and characters he relied on silliness and lots of exclamation points. and really. come on. dallas was duke with a thatch of hair drawn on. embarassing, truly. every device he came up with to distance himself from trudeau accomplished nothing more than to put in relief how trite the strip was.
this is strictly a critique of bloom county, by the way. i have my own issues with doonesbury too, but nevermind.
a chacun a son gout.
Just a nit...electronic music first developed in the 70s, with especial emphasis on the Krautrock pioneers (Can, Kluster/Cluster, Kraftwerk, Faust, Neu!, Amon Duul, etc.). Sampling, which became easy to do in the 80s, then broke things wide open.
Have I mentioned this here? My childhood best friend became the bassist for the actual band who recorded that record.
This band (Mucky Pup) put one of the Billy and the Boingers songs on their own album and were immediately sued by Bloom County.
seriously? calvin and hobbes started in the middle of that timeframe and ran circles around brethed.
schulz was in his decline phase and was still better than brethed.
The original, or the remake?
I'm in the process of buying the Complete Peanuts. He's an immortal. But no. Better? Not in those years he wasn't.
seriously? calvin and hobbes started in the middle of that timeframe and ran circles around breathed.
Oversell.
It's funny, when I was in college, I met a girl who was saying everything about Calvin and Hobbes you are saying about Bloom County. A kid. On sugar. Running around. With a stuffed tiger. A sad copy of Little Nemo.
I loved the strip, but reading some of the collection in the past few years, I do see that view.
If Breathed didn't have political satire as a goal (or more likely, desired the Trudeau-like cachet for doing it), then he wouldn't have submitted examples of his strip for the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He wouldn't have pushed his strip as a suitable replacement for "Doonesbury" during the latter's sabbatical from the comics page. The unflattering comparison is entirely on Breathed. But his political satire, with a few exceptions, was of the "those clowns in Washington are at it again" variety.
My main problem with Bloom County's unmistakable Trudeau worship is that it came off like Rich Little: a B+ mimic with D+ material. "I lust after Jeane Kirkpatrick," zing! Breathed was better at doing the cutesy-poo stuff, which is really what the rabid fans have always been responding to the most.
"Bloom County" wasn't a bad strip by any means. But if you line up 1980s cartooning stars Garry Trudeau, Bill Watterson, Gary Larson and Berke Breathed, is there any doubt which one is Ringo?
I cited that strip (a) because it was posted on the thread; and (b) because it's absolutely emblematic of Breathed's overreliance on Mad Lib punchlines. But if you'd rather I criticize it as being too inspired by Charles Schulz's hilltop Sunday strips, or for its slavish Garry Trudeau timing, or even as a repeated shot of identical penguins with words coming out instead of White Houses, I could be persuaded!
yes, he was. schulz on a bad day was still better than brethed at his best. that kind of defines immortal. you can still knock off the punks.
watterson nailed a kid with a borderline condition and an overactive imagination. its perfectly encapsulated in its vision. brethed ... well ... gonfalon nails it in 45. brethed was a poser.
Hadn't heard about the lawsuit before... I'm guessing it wasn't successful given that years later, Mucky Pup sold t-shirts at their shows with Bill the Cat on them...
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