I once violently up-chucked on over-cooked Goose and Rice…and I feel it coming on again.
Former Boston slugger Jim Rice is often asked to talk about the Red Sox. After all, he does serve as the pre- and post-game analyst for some of the games on the New England Sports Network.
It’s pretty clear, however, despite his continued association with the game, he’s no longer all that enamored with it.
...“The game is still the same (but) the players have changed. There are no fundamentals in the game anymore,” Rice said. “That’s why I really enjoyed the game was because of the fundamentals. We had to do fundamentals. If you didn’t know the fundamentals, you weren’t playing.”
It’s one of the reasons why Rice, who played for the Sox from 1974-89, is not still in a baseball uniform as a coach. He did try his hand at it from 1992-94 as a roving batting coach for the Red Sox organization, and then was the hitting instructor for the big league team from 1995-2000.
Don’t expect him to be back in the dugout anytime soon, however.
“I don’t want to do it because guys are not subject to change,” Rice said. “If you went back to giving guys one- or two-year contracts, it’s a different story. When you give guys five-, six-, seven-, 10-year contracts, they don’t have to change. Their money is in the bank. And if the thing doesn’t go right, who do they blame?”
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Careful Carl, you're going to reinjure that elbow.
Sacrifice bunts for Jim Rice in his career: 5.
$14 million in salary over his career, per b-r.
Was he signing 1- and 2- year contracts?
Sounds like 5 too many for a middle of the order hitter.
I take it staying out of the double play is not considered fundamental.
It was a tie game, top of the 8th, Burleson singled to start the inning. Rice came up next and bunted him over. It sort of worked as planned, Yaz was up next and singled in Burleson. They played for 1 run and got it, took the lead 5-4. Then they gave up 2 in the 9th and lost 6-5.
So did you know that he signed a 7 year contract making him the highest paid player at the time?
I ask because I'm just curious if his contract was so legendary, I should have known about it.
In another article it cites "Contracts of 2 years, 10 years and 12 years were also discussed."
You know, you just can't make this #### up sometimes.
Sidenote, is there a job out there that pays a decent amount and involves digging through old newspapers and things and looking for stuff? Cause I love that ####.
Mine does! (sort of anyway...they didn't really have newspapers per se in the 1620s...and it also doesn't pay spectacularly well)
Though I did work as a research assistant for a historian writing a book about Saskatchewan in the 1920s that involved reading through a lot of local papers looking for stuff about provincial elections. There was one cartoon about a Flapper Girl in the Prince Albert paper that I had fun following.
EDIT: For the same book I also had the task of reading up on the founding of the Saskatchewan Rough Riders which involved reading a lot of 20s sports pages. Kind of fun to see the rural Saskatchewan take on John McGraw's Giants.
Is there a field out there where they'd pay a guy, say, 75000 to do that sort of thing? Just ballpark.
I just love digging though things and looking for stuff. doesn't even matter what stuff really. But it has to be like, a reasonable chance of finding what you're looking for too. I would go mad if I was looking for some rare thing that I had a .0001% chance of finding or whatever.
I sort of do this professionally at times but not nearly often enough.
You should think about being a financial analyst. Digging through a company's books and trying to find what's not there and then putting the pieces together using news sources, depositions, comparisons to competitors, etc. is kind of fascinating. I'm very serious about this. I watched Bill Ackman's 3 and a half hour presentation on Herbalife and I found it fascinating. And, if you're good at it, you'll make more than 75K. A lot more.
Rice talking about fundamentals is particularly amusing. I loved Jim Ed but he was far from a fundamental player. He overthrew the cutoff man regularly and watching him slide was a source of amusement. Still one of my favorite players to watch hit the ball though.
Grumpy old men were better in the old days when Bob Feller and the like were around.
This. I have no ####### idea.
Here's the first part:
And here's the paragraph on Rice:
This is insightful.
I was wondering why a can't find MLB on my TV this week. Now I know.
How many beers did the reporter slip to Jim before this interview was done?
EDIT: every time I forget that URL won't work. Fixed.
Yeah--remembering shooting model rocket engines at each other through glass bottles (and not at ten, but probably twelve or thirteen) can help keep me humble wrt that stuff.
The one thing that strikes me, though, is how utterly ####### dumb my nieces and nephews and cousins in their late teens and early twenties are. They know almost nothing, and think all the research you need to do is on wikipedia. I know I knew a lot more at that age, and wonder if it's because they grew up staring at video screens while I grew up with books.
Or maybe you just have dumb relatives? My nieces and nephews (and kids, and friends' kids) in their late teens and early twenties are incredibly freaking smart. And motivated to make themselves even smarter. That doesn't mean that they aren't still really young and naive and prone to say and/or do some incredibly goofy things due to lack of experience and the wisdom that (hopefully) comes with it.
Can I blame it on their parents? I've noticed a tendency for badly raised or abused kids to often distract themselves, if not in drugs and alcohol, through mindless entertainment. Which sort of makes close reading and thinking unlikely.
---
Apropos of its being on, anyone else here enjoy the movie, For Love of the Game?
Then maybe you're just being too hard on them. Perhaps a little patience? Unless some of these nieces and nephews are pushing 30 or so. If that's the case, then you're probably being too easy on them.
As opposed to say, oh, the late 1700's where our leaders thought the common man was so stupid that they didn't let over half the population vote, didn't let us vote for our senators, set it up so that the common man didn't really vote for their leader, and kept an entire race in bondage and thought they were inferior, so you're saying we're worse than that?
To paraphrase another thread and poster, "people who pine for the good old days never had to live through that shvt."
I think there may be something here. I don't think it's a stupidity so much as immaturity. I think as a society each generation matures a bit later largely because of need. My parents generation had to start working at young ages, I started working later, kids now are able to be kids longer. I don't think it's necessarily good or bad but I think it is happening.
And that was the world leader in democracy and human rights at the time.
Oh, it's not something I bring up with them, or hold over them in any way. What's too bad is the complete lack of intellectual curiosity. My 24 year old niece is still a big Harry Potter fan. She never moved on to the more interesting works of fantasy literature, never mind a single great novel. She'd never watch a film with subtitles; after all, they're boring. When you get into your 20s and have no interest in film, art, or literature, except as pure entertainment; when politics is boring; when you create literally nothing, not even for the pleasure of beating a drum or sounding out a poem, or chiseling a piece of wood, or even just making a meal, something's wrong.
My parent's generation didn't have to, but their parents made them. I didn't have to, but my parents made me. The kids I mentioned didn't have to, and their parents didn't make them. Maybe there's something to that.***
More important than that, though, is the ability to read carefully and think in depth. They were never required to do that, at home, or in school.
***Of course, I'm a guy who posts on a baseball website, so there's that.
Well, to be fair, that attitude represented progressive change. It meant the white man had a responsibility. Imperialism, as a matter of record, was about more than simple exploitation for the exploiter's sole benefit. You can say, yes, but it was an attitude that justified imperialism. True, but before, there was no feeling it needed to be justified to that extent.
I suppose it all depends on the young person in question. My early 20s cousin (no nieces or nephews yet) was also a fan of the Harry Potter books and is probably the most intellectually curious person I've ever met. Pretty much everything she ever says is a question. She's a freakin' sponge.
I'm not sure if I have enough data points to generalize about young people, or perhaps I'm just too close to the action as I'm not yet 30 - the spectator sees more of the game, as it were - but if I were to take a blind stab at a characterization of the cadre of people in their early 20s at the moment it would be that they are very intellectually engaged with the world around them. To a frightening degree really, for a person like me who is a bit older and used to enjoy having younger people to condescend to.
But I guess it's all about the young people you are exposed to. Or, that doesn't sound quite right...the young people you expose yourself to? No, that's worse.
It's all about arranging your life so that lots of young people are exposing themselves to you?
Like everything else it really depends on which group you meet and how many of them in total you encounter.
just like he bytched about babe ruth striking out all those times and swinging for the fences instead of doing all the bunting/hitnrun/stretching single to double stuff like back in HIS day
although jose, i would guess you'd get to be an Old Person right quick if YOUR baseball team got took from you and replaced with a DH ball team that means to lose with el cheapo AAAA guys and shtty over the hill "major" leaguers
as for young people,
well, i don't think i'm old, and i know different people than youse do, but seems to me that most people over 2 and under 20 spend all of their waking time on the cell phone. unless their mean cruel parents turn it off sometimes for i don't know what reason
Well, sure, but you could do that then because you knew the players were playing for the love of the game, not the money, so they would stay dedicated. And if they started to slack off, they'd pop a few greenies. Kids these days, it's all about the Benjamins and the roids.
I have a mixed bag of 10 offspring of my siblings, but three of the offspring are siblings, each of whom are on track to graduate from major universities a year early. One of them just finished a semester abroad in Florence, Italy, where she got up at 6 am every morning to go to work at a bakery (she's an amazingly ambitious culinary arts/hospitality double major). She shakes her head at the other kids in the program who get in from partying while she's getting ready to work.
Maybe one of your relatives is in this program? I kid, I kid. But I can't believe how much more mature this trio was then my siblings were that age. So there's hope out there!
No, no, no. "Get off the ####### phone!" =/= "Get off my ####### lawn!"
One of the many things I love about my family reunions is that we have them in a place where wireless phone & Internet reception is lousy-to-nonexistent.
As the nieces & nephews hit their teenage years, it's important to force them to look up from their little screens once in awhile.
at our family thanksgiving dinner held at my parents this year, basically everyone under like 25 spent the entire time on the phone. including while they ate. but not when we said grace because my father said he would kill anyone who had a phone out or the phone rang for the 15 seconds it took for him to say grace. he meant it too. got a lot of rolleyes
the number of kids who have phones out with the sound turned off during church is getting more and more every sinday.
The one that gets me, is when you have two people out together (at a bar or restaurant) and they are both on the phone, rather than talking to each other.
WTF did you go out in the first place?
Well, from my perspective, bars are terrible stupid places. And the conversations that happen at them are terrible and stupid.
If people use their phones to set up dates online with people they might actually find interesting, that seems like a perfectly reasonable replacement to me.
my pattern back in the day was to be too inhibited to interact with anybody, get really drunk and go home by myself and cry. i don't need any electronic hand held device to be an antisocial lout, and neither do you!
What mythical bar was this where three perfect strangers are all sitting next to each other and they all end up talking to each other? About the only way they all end up talking to each other is if at least one of them was a sociopath.
"What mythical bar was this where three perfect strangers are all sitting next to each other and they all end up talking to each other?"
You must be from the northeast.
:)
Sometimes i'm annoyed at how teams only seem to be able to score with the HR. I think they should move fences back and stuff and make HRs as hard as they were back in the day. It's much more entertaining to see teams score via single/double than by just HR. I feel like teams haven't earned it as much when they get a sub-350 foot HR or something. It's kind of like how it's getting too easy to score in football now because of the pass interference penalty. It's really lame, especially in the 4th quarter, when teams start getting 50 yard PI penalties on every drive, or some other really huge and really subjective penalty. I wish football would make PI a five yard penalty without an automatic first down.
Anyhow, I don't see how today's baseball has less "fundamentals." I mean, if you look at the numbers, fielding percentages are still going up, by that measure players are getting better at fundamentals.
i am from omaha, nebraska, and have lived here my whole life. i have never been to a bar where strangers actually talked to each other. just like in school they get in groups of ten and treat everyone else like dirt. the whole midwest is nicer thing is not true. i'm pretty sure if i went to the northeast my experience would be exactly the same. nebraska fans are the nicest in college football because their average age is over 70.
obviously my sentiments are in line with the other posters on the topic. for me personally, i hate being greeted in public, i need a reason to talk to people, and I don't think the obvious is worth stating. and i talk about deep, nebulous, and complicated things like politics, art, etc. which anyone i'd try to meet at a bar wants to avoid. people at bars do not want to be intellectual.
also, women don't go to the bar to meet new men. they go there to try to get with the man they already know. any male stranger who talks to them they basically consider a rapist. so meeting women at a bar is a moot point. but i don't agree with the sociopath line from an earlier post. people want to be able to talk to each other in an ideal situation, it is not all pure and simple callous manipulation. maybe the poster was misusing the word or just referring to the social makeup of the trio making talking inappropriate, i don't know.
as far as technology, these new gadgets have some narrow usefulness but seem so extravagant. i would never get my kid one before he or she was out of high school at least. and the fact that business is now using facebook to judge applicants by is something positively orwellian to me. social life has now become corporate and under management. you are expected to be the same on the internet or your social life as you are in formal situations now? come on.
People say NYers are a cold bunch but I've lived here all my life and I have met literally 100's of people in neighborhood bars who I got to know. Most superficially, you'd greet them by name, have some clue about their story and could talk with them from 5 minutes to 5 hours depending on the person. Some became friends. Men and women. I know lots of people who moved in not knowing a soul and just by going to their local meet dozens of people who were somewhere on the acquaintance/buddy/friend spectrum. Man, you have a depressing view of mankind.
goodness. that isn't the nebraska i know. and i have been to all over the state nad initiated all kinds of conversations.
and i am not pleasing to look at and have been told i have demonic looking eyes
Concur. Back in my single days, met lots of people in local bars.
At least when travelling I find bars are great places to meet and get to know people (whether they are fellow travellers or locals).
On the topic of electronics...
I'm probably one of the few people in their 20s who doesn't really have any devices. When I moved to the UK two years ago I got a cell phone (mostly because it was a much more cost effective option than a land-line) to call my parents with. But pretty much it's only function is to make and receive phone calls. Technically it can text, but the process is so cumbersome I never do. It's not really out of some kind of protest against technology...I'm just cheap, and it doesn't seem worth a monthly bill. I just put £20 on my pay-as-you-go phone and that lasts me 3-4 months.
Also, unless it's necessary for your job I don't know why you'd want people to be able to contact you at all times. I treat my phone as a house phone and only carry it with me if I'm intending to use it for a specific purpose that day.
I do remember a New Years' Eve 2-3 years ago where I was at a fairly low-key party of 10-15 people. And at midnight my friend and I went to get the champagne and came back to find literally everyone else in the party texting someone else at a different party about how they were celebrating New Years at this party. It was an odd experience.
Though all this sounds more "get off your phone" than I intend it to be. Electronic devices aren't for me, but I don't really see a problem with them...I guess through exposure they seem natural to me. I suppose in some instances people can go over-board with them, but in principle I think they can be pretty useful things to normal human beings with actual lives. That just doesn't really apply to me.
I don't know how one can avoid talking to strangers in Chicago - or why one would want to.
I met my wife there, in fact - in a bar.
If the ladies ask for some vitals, I appreciate French New Wave films, existential philosophy, long walks talking about anything that comes to mind, and good beer. I don't listen to dubstep.
have been told i have demonic looking eyes
HW, surely you know that you always make nice to the guy with the demonic eyes until you have a chance to slip away unnoticed.
Exactly.
Ty Cobb could say whatever the hell he wanted about latter-day players and their lack of fundamentals, because Cobb was famous both for working very hard on fundamentals, and for being really good at them.
Similarly, if Gossage would limit his criticisms to how relief pitchers nowadays are one-inning-or-less babies, he would have a great deal of credibility on that specific issue.
Rice, though... yeah, I can't think of anything. Learning the tricky bounces in your own home park outfield, maybe?
edit: as for the state of education these days...if it wern't for Star Trek and comic books, I wouldn't know a damn thing about Shakespeare and Norse mythology. Damn if I can get kids into those though.
1. Rice is of course FOS and is whining in exactly the fashion that old ballplayers always have, as documented extensively by Bill James in his "Old Ballplayers Never Die" sections in the BJHBA.
2. To the part in which Rice may have a point, well, he played with some very excellent players on excellent teams. He played on teams with outfields of Yaz, Lynn, Evans, later Armas. Teams with Carlton Fisk and George Scott, Burleson. Guys who were consummate pros like Dave Henderson, Don Baylor, Wade Boggs. When you're with one organization your entire career, and you happen to go through an incredibly stable part of that franchise's history, it might make sense. It is not at all normal for a team to feature a HOVG outfield for almost 15 years or so.
I absolutely agree with this. I miss that guy. Still my favorite baseball player of all-time.
What is wrong, specifically? You could have just described me instead of your niece. I won't pretend that there's nothing wrong with me, but I'm just not an artsy-fartsy guy.
Uh oh. One of my cousin's many projects was to film various students/profs discussing various philosophers and put them up on youtube as a kind of primer. Not sure how she feels about the existentialists, but they are liberally represented.
I find the one on Wittgenstein to be the best. Though perhaps just because it reminds me one of my favourite comedy sketches of all time.
There sure is, but given the mass culture that most people grow up in, outcomes like that shouldn't be surprising. Some countries, some sub-cultures and some generations may be a bit better at nourishing intellectual curiosity than others, but there are so many factors that go into its development that pointing fingers at individuals doesn't really explain all that much.
Was at a Ravens party this weekend, and while watching the game everyone from the 50 something parents to the teens were on their phones, laptops, ipads, or whatever you have. Except me. And where was my phone? My 2 year old daughter was using it to look at pictures.
I don't know that this is necessarily bad. If this comfort allows kids to be more willing to ask questions about difficult subjects that's a distinct positive but the grumpy old man in me sees value in respect. I should note that the large majority of kids I deal with are respectful but the first name basis thing seems odd to me.
Examples: 1) students expect to be given the notes in an electronic format 2) students don't submit graded homework 3) students text or surf the web during lecture rather than taking notes 4) students parents call to complain about their kid's grades
Yet, they all think they are going to medical school. My wife is a Chemistry prof, and she has people who fail intro Chem 2 and 3 times thinking they are going to become doctors.
I blame a combination of rampant grade inflation in HS (and on standardized tests) and coddling helicopter parents.
I had the good fortune to attend the same college 11 years apart. Once as a 19 year old and the other time as a 30 year old. Mid 90's and mid 00's and I can tell you that the quality of students that I saw didn't go down. In fact I'd say it improved. I saw far more kids be totally dedicated to learning their field in the 2000's than I did in the 90's. What I did see was a decidedly marked drop in the quality of the teachers as more and more schools compete for teachers.
Side note: I can't imagine any adult I know being OK with an 11 year old making gunpowder. That said, I'm pretty sure my mother never heard anything about this.
Note2: Gunpowder's trickier to make than we thought. Our rocket just burned.
Amen.
As the father of three, what I find the most noteworthy thing about kids today is that they interact with the opposite sex far better, and at a far younger age, than we did when I was that age. Also, they don't roam like I did, though that's pretty much on the parents.
Other than that, my kids are a pretty mixed bag. My oldest son is more mature, more committed to education and his goals than I (or most anyone) ever was at that age, while my youngest boy is every ounce the typical boy. My daughter, both by age and personality, is somewhere in the middle. In other words, it's hard for me to make a whole lot of generalizations about all of kiddom from them.
I, like everyone over 25, was once in my late teens and early 20s, and I have no problem recalling how mind boggling stupid (and yet self assure) I and my peers were at that age, what I've never understood is how so many people seemingly deny or forget how dumb they and their friends were at that age.
Teens/early 20ers are like idiot savants- they can be as smart as an adult in some ways- smarter in others (the average 18 year old simply paying attention can learn an incredible amount of stuff- complex stuff), but in other ways just so dumb.
Good post. Things may have been different for people of Harveys generation, where you either were married with a job by the age of 14 or you died of tuberculosis, but for the under 60 crowd, what you say sounds pretty applicable. It's just another example of how humans constantly deceive themselves.
Police believe alcohol may have been involved.
It's interesting that this trend and the helicopter parenting trends dovetail.
This (minus the parts about the UK & parents). I actually broke down about 5 weeks ago & bought a tracphone & a few dozen minutes because I was headed off on a road trip to & from NW Louisiana/SW Arkansas & wasn't going to have access to the cell phone of the friend who'd been scheduled to go with me, as she'd taken ill. Last time that happened, in 12/06, she made me take her phone for possible emergency purposes, but she's since dropped her land line, so that was out. If I hadn't had the tracphone, I'd probably have had to make 20 stops in Shreveport/Bossier to find pay phones (I'm not sure there are 20 pay phones in Shreveport/Bossier) to get directions to this & that & to make arrangements to meet with my cousin a few miles away, which didn't sound like a very appealing prospect.
In any event, I haven't used the tracphone once sent getting back. I probably won't until the next trip back home.
The folks I work for/with are helicopter parents. I feel much sympathy for the teachers who dare give their kids anything less than an A- on a test.
I would think part of being fundamentally sound is knowing when you haven't been given the bunt sign. :-)
Has anyone ever kept track of failed attempts to sacrifice? That would be a sort of interesting stat.
Has taking along an actual book occurred to you? Not being snarky; I just assume that your latter sentence would no longer be applicable.
I know nothing about the various types of Nooks (or any other e-readers) out there, but when I was talking favorite authors with a thrift store owner near my house Saturday evening, she showed me hers & in general shape & heft it was very reminiscent of a real book. Pretty neat, as such things go.
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