I've lived in DC for more than 35 years and things actually have improved plenty. But the response to this storm shows how far we have to go. It's midday Monday and the plow job on the main roads is fair; Metro has opened some underground lines, but with limited service, and is also getting some above-ground stations open; bus lines are on an extreme skeleton schedule and there are none working around our area. Schools remain closed.
Contrast this to New York, not just the city but the suburbs. Subways are running totally and streets are cleared, schools are open. I called an old colleague who was in his office and described the atmosphere as business as usual.
The attitude in government here is better than it once was. When Marion was mayor-for-life, he was likely to tell those who complained about the district's slow response to "get over it." Now the mayor holds press conferences twice a day but there's still the inclination to boast about progress than really isn't there and to blame citizens even for walking in the road when sidewalks aren't cleared.
It seems that a plow came through our street, something that did not happen during my first two decades living on this block. But not much else has happened: the next cross-street is a more major road and does have one lane cleared more or less. The cross-street in the other direction has not been plowed at all and is hardly passable to walkers. I tried it out yesterday and can tell you that is true.
To me, this torpor results from low expectations: almost like the old Boston lion of "whoever brought it will have to take it away." People here expect crummy performance from District government; Maryland and Virginia, which have far more territory to cover, are actually performing at a higher level--you can even see on TV that main roads are cleared more thoroughly.
There has been an upgrade in equipment here but it's hard to see that it has translated into action yet. The difference, I suggest, is that in New York City--with the subway, the sanitation plows, and even the commuter trains on Metro-North--there was the expectation and goal that the storm that ended later than it did here would be cleared oin time for the resumption of work on Monday.
Goals here seem to be far vaguer. Everything moves at a far slower speed. And this is indeed cultural. People are used to lousy service. So that's what they get.
Monday, January 25, 2016
Friday, January 22, 2016
Universal DH? No Way
I've been a baseball fan since I was nine and began rooting for the New York Giants because they sailed to the National League Pennant that year (1954), led by their superstar, Willie Mays. At that age, I was not totally capable of appreciating the style of their manager, Leo Durocher, who was definitely someone geared to be appreciated by an adult fan group. But they went into the Series that year as clear underdogs.
So everyone was surprised when they upset the highly favored Cleveland Indians, whose superb pitching staff had finally managed to break up the Yankees' seemingly endless dominance of the American League. Feller was just about through, but heck, he was the finest pitcher of his time. Then there was Bob Lemon, joined by Early Wynn and two now-less-recalled relievers, Don Mossi and Ray Narleski. Hitting hard were Vic Wertz and Al Rosen.
But the Giants, apart from Mays, who was not yet known as he is today in his old age as the greatest living ballplayer, were a lacklustre crew. They could play ball and sometimes Don Mueller, another outfielder, and Whitey Lockman, first baseman; Al Dark, shortstop and captain; Hank Thompson, third base; and the great Monte Irvin, a hard-hitting vet of the Negro Leagues who was injured all too often during his still-great career with the Giants, could get some hits. The pitchers didn't compare to the Tribe's: Hoyt Wilhelm became one of the first great knuckleballers and some of the others did well that year: Johnny Antonelli, Jim Hearn, Marv Grissom, Larry Jansen.
Wes Westrum was a reliable catcher but not a great hitter, compared to his New York City peers: Berra of the Yanks, and Campy of the Dodgers. And then there was Dusty Rhodes--the player who gets hot in the World Series, classically, as here, as a pinch hitter. He had an incredible Series...and never did anything again.
So I grew up loving baseball strategy. And that's what gets killed when you have the Designated Hitter or DH, in the American League for the past three decades or so. The National League held out. You see managers having to struggle with keeping their starting pitcher in when they have something going on the bases and there are two outs. In the post-season, these are magnificent moments.
I received a piece by an ESPN scribe this morning in the e-mail that argues for making the DH universal. As he notes correctly, it is being used in almost every baseball venue except the National League. And since the National League is the "senior circuit" dating back to the 1870s, he scorns their resistance as 19th-century thinking. Prospects do grow up with the DH. Pitchers get less training in hitting than ever and it is true that utility players complain that their hitting suffers when they don't play every day: pitchers of course only play every fourth or fifth day.
Sometimes I feel like the old English actor, C. Aubrey Smith, who led the Hollywood cricket players and often played old cricket types, colonial sergeant-majors, and the like, as Brit stereotypes in the movies of the 1930s. Those old denizens of the Marylebone Cricket Club resisted every innovation in cricket--and eventually most of the changes ran right over them. The game survived but it benefited from the resistance to too much change. I was living in England when the late E.W. (Jim) Swanton was the senior cricket commentator in The Daily Telegraph and The Cricketer, and was often on the BBC Test Match Special broadcasts. It would be fun to read his predicting the imminent demise of the game if players were permitted to wear colored clothing.
But the DH is an innovation that, to me, has not proven its worthiness. National League ball is still more fun because we have a pretty good balance in the majors today between pitchers and hitters. The DH came in because pitchers in the 50s were dominating the game, even with hitters like Musial, Williams, Mantle, Mays, and many more active. Even the great Bob Gibson, the pitcher most resembling one of the great West Indian bowlers of the 60s and 70s, didn't always win.
It's bad enough that strategy isn't what it once was in the AL before the DH. Let's keep it as it is in the NL, even if we go mad with the practice of using it in AL parks but not NL venues in this age of interleague play. Baseball has survived...despite the worst instincts of those who run it.
So everyone was surprised when they upset the highly favored Cleveland Indians, whose superb pitching staff had finally managed to break up the Yankees' seemingly endless dominance of the American League. Feller was just about through, but heck, he was the finest pitcher of his time. Then there was Bob Lemon, joined by Early Wynn and two now-less-recalled relievers, Don Mossi and Ray Narleski. Hitting hard were Vic Wertz and Al Rosen.
But the Giants, apart from Mays, who was not yet known as he is today in his old age as the greatest living ballplayer, were a lacklustre crew. They could play ball and sometimes Don Mueller, another outfielder, and Whitey Lockman, first baseman; Al Dark, shortstop and captain; Hank Thompson, third base; and the great Monte Irvin, a hard-hitting vet of the Negro Leagues who was injured all too often during his still-great career with the Giants, could get some hits. The pitchers didn't compare to the Tribe's: Hoyt Wilhelm became one of the first great knuckleballers and some of the others did well that year: Johnny Antonelli, Jim Hearn, Marv Grissom, Larry Jansen.
Wes Westrum was a reliable catcher but not a great hitter, compared to his New York City peers: Berra of the Yanks, and Campy of the Dodgers. And then there was Dusty Rhodes--the player who gets hot in the World Series, classically, as here, as a pinch hitter. He had an incredible Series...and never did anything again.
So I grew up loving baseball strategy. And that's what gets killed when you have the Designated Hitter or DH, in the American League for the past three decades or so. The National League held out. You see managers having to struggle with keeping their starting pitcher in when they have something going on the bases and there are two outs. In the post-season, these are magnificent moments.
I received a piece by an ESPN scribe this morning in the e-mail that argues for making the DH universal. As he notes correctly, it is being used in almost every baseball venue except the National League. And since the National League is the "senior circuit" dating back to the 1870s, he scorns their resistance as 19th-century thinking. Prospects do grow up with the DH. Pitchers get less training in hitting than ever and it is true that utility players complain that their hitting suffers when they don't play every day: pitchers of course only play every fourth or fifth day.
Sometimes I feel like the old English actor, C. Aubrey Smith, who led the Hollywood cricket players and often played old cricket types, colonial sergeant-majors, and the like, as Brit stereotypes in the movies of the 1930s. Those old denizens of the Marylebone Cricket Club resisted every innovation in cricket--and eventually most of the changes ran right over them. The game survived but it benefited from the resistance to too much change. I was living in England when the late E.W. (Jim) Swanton was the senior cricket commentator in The Daily Telegraph and The Cricketer, and was often on the BBC Test Match Special broadcasts. It would be fun to read his predicting the imminent demise of the game if players were permitted to wear colored clothing.
But the DH is an innovation that, to me, has not proven its worthiness. National League ball is still more fun because we have a pretty good balance in the majors today between pitchers and hitters. The DH came in because pitchers in the 50s were dominating the game, even with hitters like Musial, Williams, Mantle, Mays, and many more active. Even the great Bob Gibson, the pitcher most resembling one of the great West Indian bowlers of the 60s and 70s, didn't always win.
It's bad enough that strategy isn't what it once was in the AL before the DH. Let's keep it as it is in the NL, even if we go mad with the practice of using it in AL parks but not NL venues in this age of interleague play. Baseball has survived...despite the worst instincts of those who run it.
Monday, January 4, 2016
Spotlight and The Big Short
Continuing the year-end movie jag, we took in Spotlight and The Big Short last week and weekend. It was so appropriate that we saw them at the end of the year because they may have been the best two pics of 2015.
Spotlight featured fine performances by Michael Keaton as the Boston-Irish-bred chief of the Globe's investigative team and Mark Ruffalo as his star reporter, along with Liev Schreiber as the paper's new editor-in-chief. Aside from Keaton, is magnificent, I found the less-renowned players perfect--all the guys Keaton's character grew up with and who are now pressuring him to go easy on his target: the Catholic Church in Boston with its history of protecting pedophile priests and scorning the interest of survivors of child abuse.
The major triumph of this film is how it captures the atmosphere in Boston where everyone knows something about what's going on but no one really is doing much. Stanley Tucci does a great job playing an Armenian lawyer who is taking on the Church and is skeptical that the Globe will really come through on a story it has previously buried.
The moment I loved in that it showed that the filmakers understood the environment was where Robby, Keaton's character, ends his meeting in a bar with one of the powerful Catholic laymen and they toast, saying "For Boston!" As they both went to Boston College High School. this toast is of course the first line of the Boston College fight song.
Much has been said about how The Big Short manages to make clear the complex machinations of Wall Streeters who securitized subprime mortgages and eventually caused a housing bubble that led right into the Great Recession of 2008, from which we are only now beginning to emerge.
Some have pointed to the statements at the end observing how nothing serious has been done to reform this world so that the same thing couldn't happen again and some others have claimed that the principals in the movie--the few who sensed that this was a collapse waiting to happen and invested accordingly--profited from the misery of the thousands who lost their homes and whose lives were ruined.
I felt that the picture showed how these skeptics had to battle their own organizations to bet against the powers-that-be--the big banks--who were making money hand over fist from the fraud they were inspiring. Steve Carell gave the performance of his career thus far as one of the principal investors questioning the status quo.
The picture's most sterling achievement was capturing the giddy atmosphere of the financial world, especially in the characters of two real estate guys in Florida who glory in the fakery in which they are ensnarled, and then too in the two young men just breaking into the business who have figured out what most more experienced types have not.
Spotlight featured fine performances by Michael Keaton as the Boston-Irish-bred chief of the Globe's investigative team and Mark Ruffalo as his star reporter, along with Liev Schreiber as the paper's new editor-in-chief. Aside from Keaton, is magnificent, I found the less-renowned players perfect--all the guys Keaton's character grew up with and who are now pressuring him to go easy on his target: the Catholic Church in Boston with its history of protecting pedophile priests and scorning the interest of survivors of child abuse.
The major triumph of this film is how it captures the atmosphere in Boston where everyone knows something about what's going on but no one really is doing much. Stanley Tucci does a great job playing an Armenian lawyer who is taking on the Church and is skeptical that the Globe will really come through on a story it has previously buried.
The moment I loved in that it showed that the filmakers understood the environment was where Robby, Keaton's character, ends his meeting in a bar with one of the powerful Catholic laymen and they toast, saying "For Boston!" As they both went to Boston College High School. this toast is of course the first line of the Boston College fight song.
Much has been said about how The Big Short manages to make clear the complex machinations of Wall Streeters who securitized subprime mortgages and eventually caused a housing bubble that led right into the Great Recession of 2008, from which we are only now beginning to emerge.
Some have pointed to the statements at the end observing how nothing serious has been done to reform this world so that the same thing couldn't happen again and some others have claimed that the principals in the movie--the few who sensed that this was a collapse waiting to happen and invested accordingly--profited from the misery of the thousands who lost their homes and whose lives were ruined.
I felt that the picture showed how these skeptics had to battle their own organizations to bet against the powers-that-be--the big banks--who were making money hand over fist from the fraud they were inspiring. Steve Carell gave the performance of his career thus far as one of the principal investors questioning the status quo.
The picture's most sterling achievement was capturing the giddy atmosphere of the financial world, especially in the characters of two real estate guys in Florida who glory in the fakery in which they are ensnarled, and then too in the two young men just breaking into the business who have figured out what most more experienced types have not.
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