It's not as if the playoffs so far have lacked exciting moments so that all we can talk about are the umpires. Jimmy Rollins comes in to knock a dinger in the bottom of the ninth to not only put the Red Quakers on top for the first time in the game but walk off with a snatched victory. TV no doubt is already mourning the demise of the Dodgers and the consequent lack of a highly profitable Yankee-Dodger Series. With all the calumny the Phils have borne these many years, they now suffer as being seen as a small-market team--heck, when I was first watching baseball, Philly was the 3rd largest city and had two teams--and the other one, the A's, had had far more success historically. Don't tell me you don't recall Connie Mack's Million-Dollar Infield?
For about the millionth time in a row, the umpires are being blasted for bad calls. McClelland's mishap at third with Posada and Cano was a real doozy, as the late Johnny Most might have put it if he could slow down enough to even do baseball games. And then he admitted he had blown it, as umps are wont to do these days. It's easy for me to take this all calmly--being no fan of Dodgers, Yankees, Phils or Angels. And now there will be instant replay review of balls going over the fence. We've come a long, long way from Bill Klem's days: remember "Son, when you throw a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know about it" or "They ain't anything until I calls them"?
Reggie Jackson materialized to say that McClelland was a good ump. And I guess he is. So now it is accepted that umpires making mistakes is just another part of the game. Heck, they always did make them. Now they admit it. Soon we'll have a 12-step program for them. (They needed one after a moron who was their lawyer self-destroyed their union and their jobs a few years ago.) I do agree, however, with the side that says the best umps should be rewarded by being assigned post-season play and the accompanying extra pay.
The last time I lost my cool over an umpire's call was when Richie Garcia permitted that little punk Maier to steal a catch from Tony Tarasco of the O's in the "old" Yankee Stadium. I would have sent that kid on the first New York Central flyer to Elmira Reformatory (I know, wrong railroad--and there was no stop at the Stadium in those days.). I also sincerely believe that the new Curse of Coogan's Bluff that afflicted the Mets for ignoring their (my) Giant heritage in favor of the Dodgers turned around and probably bit this year's Dodgers too. Don't ever underestimate jinxes.
It's also time to remember that as written by Douglas Wallop, whose The Year The Yankees Lost the Pennant became the musical Damn Yankees, the Devil--Mr. Applegate portrayed on stage and in film by the inimitable Ray Walston--turned out to be, naturally, a Yankee fan. He tries to win back his departed Faustian ballplayer by urging him--this was 1954--to return to the now-lustreless Senators because otherwise the Dodgers would be favored in the Series. And in 1954, he could still truthfully say, "Those Dodgers have never won a World Series!"
The Yankees came back to almost close down the Angels last night but now after that great finish, all remains up for grabs. That's the best thing about baseball. Don't take anything for granted. And of course it turns out that the Phils want to play the Yanks--last year's win over Tampa Bay didn't elevate them to the heights of baseball renown. However you feel about the Yanks--while not a Yankee fan, I don't feel too strongly either way about them because I grew up a National League fan--that ancient cry hurled at any promising club: "When do you play the Yankees?" remains extant.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The American Songster
Last night enjoyed another delightful musical evening at the Smithsonian--well, it was at the Freer auditorium, and it was Robert Wyatt again, this time covering the amazing career, through CD clips, flim clips, and lecture without notes, of Irving Berlin. I finally appreciate the oft-quoted Jerome Kern line: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. Irving Berlin is American music." The man's productivity and mastery of every form of song still amazes me.
He makes us realize that the key to any song is the melody. He never could even read music but eventually, he could even put some rather complex contrapuntal harmonies together on the piano and have his musical secretaries transcribe them. This was one of those programs from which I learned quite a bit. Alexander's Ragtime Band isn't a ragtime song, it's jazz. His favorite singers were Ethel Merman (naturally) and Fred Astaire (just enough voice to present a song with great style).
He loved to use contractions in his songs--my favorite of all, What'll I Do, stands as a fine example. Just like Cole Porter he doubted his own ability to write an integrated show, that is, one in which the songs advance the plot; then he goes and writes Annie Get Your Gun and outdoes everyone else, as he always did. Porter also managed to do it with Kiss Me, Kate in even less conventional form.
And Always, there were the endless list of songs: How Deep is the Ocean, Say It Isn't So, Puttin' on the Ritz, Isn't It a Lovely Day, Remember, Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee, and often he came up with an unexpected song that made you think it had to written by someone else, such as Let's Face the Music and Dance.
The man encountered some tragedy in his 101 years on earth. He lost his first wife a few months after they married, to typhoid she picked up on their Havana honeymoon. His only son (he had three daughters by his second wife) died within a month of his birth. And Wyatt intimated that his last years were lonely and not particularly happy. I recall a Jimmy Breslin column in which Breslin hurled invective at Berlin for not allowing him to use some lyrics in a novel. It sounded like the man of a thousand melodies had lost his tune.
He makes us realize that the key to any song is the melody. He never could even read music but eventually, he could even put some rather complex contrapuntal harmonies together on the piano and have his musical secretaries transcribe them. This was one of those programs from which I learned quite a bit. Alexander's Ragtime Band isn't a ragtime song, it's jazz. His favorite singers were Ethel Merman (naturally) and Fred Astaire (just enough voice to present a song with great style).
He loved to use contractions in his songs--my favorite of all, What'll I Do, stands as a fine example. Just like Cole Porter he doubted his own ability to write an integrated show, that is, one in which the songs advance the plot; then he goes and writes Annie Get Your Gun and outdoes everyone else, as he always did. Porter also managed to do it with Kiss Me, Kate in even less conventional form.
And Always, there were the endless list of songs: How Deep is the Ocean, Say It Isn't So, Puttin' on the Ritz, Isn't It a Lovely Day, Remember, Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee, and often he came up with an unexpected song that made you think it had to written by someone else, such as Let's Face the Music and Dance.
The man encountered some tragedy in his 101 years on earth. He lost his first wife a few months after they married, to typhoid she picked up on their Havana honeymoon. His only son (he had three daughters by his second wife) died within a month of his birth. And Wyatt intimated that his last years were lonely and not particularly happy. I recall a Jimmy Breslin column in which Breslin hurled invective at Berlin for not allowing him to use some lyrics in a novel. It sounded like the man of a thousand melodies had lost his tune.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Round the Nation
I've been travelling again for work, this time to do some court assessments, last week in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and this week in Rutland, Vermont. Both very nice places--especially now that the trees on the Green Mountains are about half-turned for autumn. Coeur d'Alene was lovely too -- mostly evergreens around the huge lake and river. And today I'm in Trenton, NJ, to discuss improving caseflow management with criminal court judges tomorrow.
This morning I found myself somewhat amazed to see an obituary in both the Washington Post and New York Times for someone who was doubtless my richest law school classmate, Bruce Wasserstein. This will not be one of those warm (or cool) recollections because, yes, I had met him now and again, but no, I didn't know him very well. What can I add to the lengthy descriptions of his rather unusual career?
Two things stand out. I felt he had followed some similar paths (early on--way before the bucks rolled in) to mine. He'd been a college editor at Michigan and then stayed on an extra year in Cambridge to finish a joint law-business degree. Apparently, having been an SDS-er, he "justified" spending time over at the B-school, after spending a summer in Ralph Nader's crew, by citing the need to know the enemy, so to speak. I had similar feelings about starting out with a Wall Street law firm, wanting to learn something about how they practiced law before going in other directions.
So he started out at Cravath, then on the 57th floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza, and I was at a far smaller outfit (then called Reavis & McGrath, now absorbed by Fulbright & Jaworski) on the 39th floor, same building. There the parallel ends. Apparently he learned enough about Wall St. to become an investment banker with First Boston and just about take over everything on the Street that wasn't in the hands of Goldman Sachs. And it doesn't sound like he looked back in any kind of anger from atop his billions.
His generosity extended to adopting his late sister Wendy the playwright's child, on its face an admirable step and one that we would hope all such billionaires would do. I for one found his sister's plays absolute delights, having seen most of them--The Heidi Chronicles and others--in New York--I even think I'd still enjoy them should I see them revived.
He also contributed most munificently to Harvard Law School, which despite the recent decline in the university's endowment by 30 percent, remains part of the richest academic institution in the world. I gather he may have been the largest giver. Perhaps he had other charitable interests and maybe some of them will emerge as his affairs are put in order.
Apparently he will be remembered for leading the great corporate takeover movement, which began the process of saddling many of the target companies with huge debts that they then needed to shed many their assets, especially the human ones, in order to finance. I'll give him credit for not peddling derivatives--which seemed to be a crooked operation from its very start. But it wasn't very healthy for our economy to engage in takeovers that mainly enriched only the financiers, such as him, and left the companies stripped of most of their value. All the gain was transactional. It was reported that he didn't like the nickname--Bid 'em Up Bruce--which does sound like one of those nicknames that never quite caught on, anyway, as it hardly flows trippingly from the tongue.
It almost seemed he had reverted to his days as a student editor when he acquired a bunch of publications--New York magazine, The American Lawyer, and others--but it must have all been for either vanity or influence, because none of them reflected his personality or views. This was no Hearst or Rupert Murdoch.
So except for the sheer size of his deals and his fortune, it was an all too familar tale: young radical finds himself as a capitalist and outdoes the scions of inherited wealth--and almost everyone else--in his new incarnation. End of story?
There was that second thing that I said stood out. The obits said he went to a hospital with irregular heartbeats earlier this week. No other details of his illness or death were given. Such are the privileges of the very rich--at least until the pursuers of what inquiring minds want to know turn up. The limited information probably is illustrative of the discretion the well-off can enforce, yet in today's milieu, my first thought was that perhaps even such a mighty titan of finance might have been misdiagnosed or worse: that foul play may have entered into the story.
This morning I found myself somewhat amazed to see an obituary in both the Washington Post and New York Times for someone who was doubtless my richest law school classmate, Bruce Wasserstein. This will not be one of those warm (or cool) recollections because, yes, I had met him now and again, but no, I didn't know him very well. What can I add to the lengthy descriptions of his rather unusual career?
Two things stand out. I felt he had followed some similar paths (early on--way before the bucks rolled in) to mine. He'd been a college editor at Michigan and then stayed on an extra year in Cambridge to finish a joint law-business degree. Apparently, having been an SDS-er, he "justified" spending time over at the B-school, after spending a summer in Ralph Nader's crew, by citing the need to know the enemy, so to speak. I had similar feelings about starting out with a Wall Street law firm, wanting to learn something about how they practiced law before going in other directions.
So he started out at Cravath, then on the 57th floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza, and I was at a far smaller outfit (then called Reavis & McGrath, now absorbed by Fulbright & Jaworski) on the 39th floor, same building. There the parallel ends. Apparently he learned enough about Wall St. to become an investment banker with First Boston and just about take over everything on the Street that wasn't in the hands of Goldman Sachs. And it doesn't sound like he looked back in any kind of anger from atop his billions.
His generosity extended to adopting his late sister Wendy the playwright's child, on its face an admirable step and one that we would hope all such billionaires would do. I for one found his sister's plays absolute delights, having seen most of them--The Heidi Chronicles and others--in New York--I even think I'd still enjoy them should I see them revived.
He also contributed most munificently to Harvard Law School, which despite the recent decline in the university's endowment by 30 percent, remains part of the richest academic institution in the world. I gather he may have been the largest giver. Perhaps he had other charitable interests and maybe some of them will emerge as his affairs are put in order.
Apparently he will be remembered for leading the great corporate takeover movement, which began the process of saddling many of the target companies with huge debts that they then needed to shed many their assets, especially the human ones, in order to finance. I'll give him credit for not peddling derivatives--which seemed to be a crooked operation from its very start. But it wasn't very healthy for our economy to engage in takeovers that mainly enriched only the financiers, such as him, and left the companies stripped of most of their value. All the gain was transactional. It was reported that he didn't like the nickname--Bid 'em Up Bruce--which does sound like one of those nicknames that never quite caught on, anyway, as it hardly flows trippingly from the tongue.
It almost seemed he had reverted to his days as a student editor when he acquired a bunch of publications--New York magazine, The American Lawyer, and others--but it must have all been for either vanity or influence, because none of them reflected his personality or views. This was no Hearst or Rupert Murdoch.
So except for the sheer size of his deals and his fortune, it was an all too familar tale: young radical finds himself as a capitalist and outdoes the scions of inherited wealth--and almost everyone else--in his new incarnation. End of story?
There was that second thing that I said stood out. The obits said he went to a hospital with irregular heartbeats earlier this week. No other details of his illness or death were given. Such are the privileges of the very rich--at least until the pursuers of what inquiring minds want to know turn up. The limited information probably is illustrative of the discretion the well-off can enforce, yet in today's milieu, my first thought was that perhaps even such a mighty titan of finance might have been misdiagnosed or worse: that foul play may have entered into the story.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Sending Out the Nats
Thinking positively about the Nationals? Am I kidding? 103 losses and three games left in Atlanta to push that even higher. I've managed to see them twice this week--Sunday when they had the game tied up through the 9th and then let the bullpen pull its usual tricks to blow it in the 10th, but then there was yesterday...
A "businessman's special," as they used to call those late-afternoon starts in New York, and the last home game of the season, against the now lowly New York Mets, who had managed to drop the first two games of the series, no less. A good friend secured some Annie Oakleys that let us into the Diamond Club, which features a terrace where you can sit outside and watch the game from a nice vantage point up behind the plate. It was the 5th before we stopped chowing down and moved down to the seats, also well situated behind the plate.
Game was close all the way, with neither team ever ahead by more than two runs. Zimmerman showed his stuff with a homer and in the climactic 9th, the Nats slowly clambered back -- having had numerous men on base throughout the game who failed to score -- with some nice hits. There were also plenty of errors on both sides-- neither of these teams got where they stand in the bottom of the standings without some.
Zimmerman couldn't repeat so Adam Dunn came up with bases loaded -- and two outs. The high-paid reliever for the Mets, Francisco Rodriguez, walked him to cut the Met lead to 4-3. Then Justin Maxwell, a 25-year-old rookie who had come in to pinch hit earlier, was up. Not much info on him either in the paper or on the big screen. He might as well have been Cornbread Maxwell on the Celtics some years ago.
He pops a long ball from an unexpected fastball that Rodriguez let loose and it goes just over Pagan's glove in left field into the stands out there -- no one back where we were truly knew it was a homer until the left-field contingent began standing up and shouting. The team runs out to greet him at home after the walk-off grand slam on the last pitch of the game.
Satisfaction for a season where the club won about a third of its games? Of course not, but of such marvelous moments is baseball still our most delightful sporting event. The owners may be cheapskates (something that going back to the Griffith-owned Senators has been a D.C. tradition), the seats are expensive (usually), the food costs a lot too, the Metro station hasn't been expanded yet, and on a warm Sunday as this past one was, no beer vendor appeared for about eight innings, even in the high-priced seats.
And the middle of the infield is still suffering from injury-caused absences, the pitching staff has one reliable starter, the bullpen at long last has one decent operative, and no one has much confidence in management even with the pitching phenom they drafted and signed on deck for next season. All true. But then you have that one moment that sends everyone home with a smile because for at least a few minutes, baseball has put you on top of the world.
A "businessman's special," as they used to call those late-afternoon starts in New York, and the last home game of the season, against the now lowly New York Mets, who had managed to drop the first two games of the series, no less. A good friend secured some Annie Oakleys that let us into the Diamond Club, which features a terrace where you can sit outside and watch the game from a nice vantage point up behind the plate. It was the 5th before we stopped chowing down and moved down to the seats, also well situated behind the plate.
Game was close all the way, with neither team ever ahead by more than two runs. Zimmerman showed his stuff with a homer and in the climactic 9th, the Nats slowly clambered back -- having had numerous men on base throughout the game who failed to score -- with some nice hits. There were also plenty of errors on both sides-- neither of these teams got where they stand in the bottom of the standings without some.
Zimmerman couldn't repeat so Adam Dunn came up with bases loaded -- and two outs. The high-paid reliever for the Mets, Francisco Rodriguez, walked him to cut the Met lead to 4-3. Then Justin Maxwell, a 25-year-old rookie who had come in to pinch hit earlier, was up. Not much info on him either in the paper or on the big screen. He might as well have been Cornbread Maxwell on the Celtics some years ago.
He pops a long ball from an unexpected fastball that Rodriguez let loose and it goes just over Pagan's glove in left field into the stands out there -- no one back where we were truly knew it was a homer until the left-field contingent began standing up and shouting. The team runs out to greet him at home after the walk-off grand slam on the last pitch of the game.
Satisfaction for a season where the club won about a third of its games? Of course not, but of such marvelous moments is baseball still our most delightful sporting event. The owners may be cheapskates (something that going back to the Griffith-owned Senators has been a D.C. tradition), the seats are expensive (usually), the food costs a lot too, the Metro station hasn't been expanded yet, and on a warm Sunday as this past one was, no beer vendor appeared for about eight innings, even in the high-priced seats.
And the middle of the infield is still suffering from injury-caused absences, the pitching staff has one reliable starter, the bullpen at long last has one decent operative, and no one has much confidence in management even with the pitching phenom they drafted and signed on deck for next season. All true. But then you have that one moment that sends everyone home with a smile because for at least a few minutes, baseball has put you on top of the world.
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