October 26th, 2006
And you wonder why Gary Sheffield’s on his sixth major league team
Remember back in spring training when Gary Sheffield said the Yankees better pick up his 2007 option, or else? And remember how happy he said he was when Brian Cashman told him, yup, the team intended ot do just that? (”There was only one place [I want to play], and that still remains the same,” Sheff said at the time. “I don’t want to play for nobody else but the Yankees.”) Since then, Sheff has: 1. bitched and moaned when he was told that an intention to pick up a player’s option is different from actually picking it up; 2. said, after the Yankees traded for Bobby Abreu, that he didn’t feel threatened because he was a “team player” who wanted to help the team win a World Series.
Well guess what? The Yankees picked up Sheffield’s option…and he’s back to pouting the corner. “This will not work,” he said. “This will not work at all.” He then went on to say the team best not play him at first base or trade him to another team. (If only Gary had managed to stay someplace for five years he’d have that no-trade clause. Oh well.)
I know: this shouldn’t come as a surprise; players lie all the time, like, say, when they tell everyone who’ll listen they wouldn’t play for a team and that money doesn’t matter and then sign with that very same team in the offseason for marginally more money. And in a weird way, I can’t help but admire a guy who can take so many directly contradictory positions on one issue.
October 26th, 2006
Jack Shafer has a point. To a point.
On Monday, Slate’s Jack Shafer, (and here’s the standard caveat/suck-up included in the vast majority of stories press critics write about other press critics) — who’s somewhere between a friend and an acquaintance and is a reporter and writer I greatly admire — (now I can commence my criticism) took his trademark orneriness and applied it to the recent hand-wringing about media cutbacks.
Jack makes a couple of good points, such as:
* “[J]ournalists don’t want you to know this, but thanks to technology, it’s never been easier to hunt down a story, capture it, and bring it back to the presses for printing. A middle-school student sitting at a Web terminal has more raw reportorial power at his fingertips than the best reporter working at the New York Times had in, say, 1975. The teenager can’t command an undersecretary of defense to return his phone call as the Times guy can, but thanks to Google he can harvest news stories and background information that would take the 1975 model journalist days to collect.”
and
* “It’s hard to sympathize with the woe-is-us crowd of journalists when you learn that the number of full-timers employed by U.S. news-media organizations today has increased by almost 70 percent compared with 1971, according to The American Journalist in the 21st Century. The book doesn’t even include in its census the new jobs in online newsrooms or at the business-wire upstart Bloomberg News.”
(I’d be curious to know more about that study. Does it include staffers at the magazines that have sprouted since 1971? Because I’d be surprised if the Star (or Maxim) is the type of journalism the so-called hang-wringers are referring to.)
But Shafer completely misses the boat here:
* “The idea that a newsroom should employ X hundred staffers because it has traditionally employed X hundred staffers ignores the changes technology has made in the news market. For instance, Tribune critics denounce it for cutting the foreign bureaus at the Baltimore Sun and Newsday, which it owns. But should every metropolitan newspaper* keep its Moscow or Jerusalem bureaus when readers can click to Web coverage from the New York Times and the international press, especially when many of those papers are losing circulation? Something’s got to give.”
The (admittedly excessive) extension of that logic is that every story only needs to be covered by one outlet;** the past several years have shown the extent to which that’s not true. The best-known example of this is Knight-Ridder’s coverage of the WMD situation in Iraq (coverage which Shafer has praised). When the Times, among many other outlets, was accepting the Bush administration’s WMD rationale for war, Knight Ridder led the pack in uncovering the extent to which this wasn’t true. (Earlier this year, most of K-R was bought by McClatchy.) There are plenty of other stories the designated big-kid-on-the-block has missed over the years, from Watergate on; thank goodness other, redundent outlets have been there to pick up the slack. Foreign reporting is incredibly expensive; in fact, it’s essentially a subsidized part of any news operation. (Brief digression: the fact that the Times’s public editor spent a column debating whether this was acceptable shows the extent to which the public editor position has become a joke.) But it’s also necessary (and will only become more so in an increasingly interconnected world); in fact, as Times editor Bill Keller has said (and I’m paraphrasing here), it’s this type of reporting that comprises news outlets core mission.
I’ve worked at a daily paper, and lord knows there’s lots of deadweight at virtually every daily in the country. (That’s just as true at many weeklies; I’ve oftentimes been confused by just what the hell people do all the time.) The fact that so many newspaper employees are guild members makes the shedding of this deadweight incredibly difficult, and it’s the guy who’s been collecting a steady paycheck while writing an occasional brief (or online column) that’s the least likely to accept a buyout. (Why take a lump sum when you can get paid for doing next to nothing?) Judiciously culling staffs — when judicial culling is possible — can only be a good thing. But foreign bureaus and investigative reporting is precisely where this culling shouldn’t occur. We need three U.S. reporters covering Moscow a lot more than we need three covering the local school board, but it’s the Moscow reporter who’s more likely to see his job disappear even if it’s those school board reporters who are more likely to be phoning it in.***
* This is a bit disingenuous. Neither Newsday nor the Sun is an example of the type of “every metropolitan newspaper” Shafer’s trying to evoke with this phrase, the argument here isn’t whether the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the Kansas City Star should have a fully staffer contingent of international reporters.
** I fully realize Jack is not suggesting a national team of reporters with everyone covering one subject and sending those dispatches out to the rest of the country; I’m trying to make a point here.
*** Please: no hate mail from school board reporters. I’ve covered school boards. A lot of local reporters are great. Etc etc.
October 26th, 2006
Breaking News: Derek Jeter likes to win, doesn’t kill puppies in his spare time
The Times’s Tyler Kepner has an update on the love affair between Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. (How could a headline like “Jeter Unable to Make it Easier for Rodriguez” not be good news for the Yankees?)
During the year I spent with the Red Sox, my opinion of Jeter improved greatly; I went from thinking he was among the most overpaid and overrated players in baseball history to appreciating his — and yes, I know this is going to sound shockingly close to the “Captain Intangibles” crap that Yankees fans so often get mocked for — approach to the game and his leadership. He goes out of his way to take young players under his range-less wing; he’s much more likely to give you a good at-bat than are most players; and he’s among the better winners in the game (compared to, say, Kevin Millar). But if A-Rod is going to be with the Yankees next year, Jeter — who told some Sox players, sotto voce, that he didn’t disagree with their criticisms during the ‘05 pre-season — should find a way not to telegraph the fact that he hates his partner of the left side of the infield. To wit:
“Jeter said he expected Rodriguez to be back, but did not have any ideas on how he could make life easier for his teammate. Jeter, the Yankees’ captain, has been criticized for his seemingly lukewarm support of Rodriguez.
‘What would you like me to do?’ Jeter said. ‘You’re there and you support him. Everybody supports all your teammates at all times. I don’t really know if there’s anything else I can do. Maybe I’m not that smart; maybe you can help me out.’”
Jeter is smart — at least compared to most baseball players — and he knows he could do a lot more than say, “yeah, whatever, that guy’s not bad.”
That aspect of Kepner’s piece is sort of amusing — it’s (almost) always fun to watch 30-something multi-, multi-millionaires act like petulant little bitches. What bugs me is the piece’s lede:
“ST. LOUIS, Oct. 25 — Derek Jeter has been traveling in Europe, and he said Wednesday that he had not seen any of this year’s World Series. This is the time of year when Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, would rather be playing than watching.”
As opposed to whom? Pretty much every single major leaguer in the world would rather be playing in October; even Manny knows that. The endless articles celebrating Jeter’s desire to play in the World Series are ridiculous. Yes, we know Jeter likes the Series; that’s about as far from unique as is possible. And yes, we know he, along with the rest of the Yankees, he thinks of the Series as more of a right and less of a privilege; that’s the unique part. If you want to point something out, focus on that.
October 26th, 2006
How Green is my Apple
For all your enviro-conscious New Yorker types, Ben Jervey — a Middlebury grad who went to school with my brother (Jervey, for those of you are curious, is nicknamed the Gerbler (I have no idea, so don’t ask)) — is discussing his book “The Big Green Apple: The Eco-Friendly Guide to New York” tonight from 7-9 pm at Brooklyn’s 3r Living, at 276 5th Avenue between 1st Street and Garfield Place in Brooklyn’s beautiful Park Slope. Come for the beer, stay for the baby carriages and patchouli.
October 25th, 2006
As sure a sign as any that Barack Obama will be elected president
Jon Friedman, self-proclaimed “hard-bitten” journalist (is that legal?) says he “gaped and gawked” at a recent Obama siting; nonetheless, Friedman says (in an article charmingly run through with exclamation points!), Obama “failed to wow” a conference of magazine editors and publishers.
So the self-hating and often confused Friedman says neither he nor the rest of the media world is impressed; meanwhile, Bloomberg News, Time, The Washington Post, and many others say he’s an electrifying and ascending star.
Really, I don’t even need to comment on this one.
October 25th, 2006
Today in baseball: Everybody’s talking at me
In an effort to spice up one of the least watched World Series in history, sports writers around the country keep on searching for some gold in what’s now commonly known as Dirtgate. A couple of my favorite pieces (blatantly cribbed from Buster Olney’s daily wrapup on ESPN.com) are this NY Post story by Mike Vaccaro and this piece by the Toronto Sun’s Bob Elliott.
Vaccaro finds a new angle with which to slam Tony La Russa and, well, I’m a fan of any story that slams Tony La Russa (and I’m a fan of Vaccaro’s to boot). In the wake of Tony’s claiming he didn’t ask the umps to inspect Kenny Rogers’s hand during Game 2 because he didn’t want to hurt the purity of the game, Mike suggests La Russa apply for the job of Little League commissioner: “Then he can he can bathe himself in sanctimony all he likes and he can tell us all again about the high plane of baseball ethics he subscribes to.” My favorite section is the following: “La Russa knows the rules - jeez, if there’s one thing we can say with certainty in baseball, it’s that La Russa knows the rules. The same guy who held up Game 6 of the NLCS by questioning a balls-and-strikes count when it was obvious to everyone in Shea Stadium what the count was - apparently, that was well within the spirit of competition - didn’t go the distance this time.” Also, my obligatory sunglasses rant: Tony, man, take off the fucking shades already. Even Corey Hart is lets people see his naked face these days.
Elliott, taking a more humorous approach, chronicles all the varied instances of cheating, touching on well-known suspects (Gaylord Perry) and less-known ones (Nolan Ryan). My favorite anecdote involves Eck; this story is from the 1989 ALCS in which the A’s played the Jays. “The night before, a clubhouse attendant from Dunedin, helping with the laundry, found an emery board in Eckersley’s glove. When Eckersley finished his warm-up, and with the A’s leading 4-2, [Toronot manager Cito] Gaston approached plate ump Rick Reed asking him to check the closer’s glove. Crew chief Davey Phillips arrived and checked Eckersley’s glove. Finding nothing, he returned to Gaston, who claimed Eck put something down his pants. ‘I can’t ask him to pull down his pants in front of 50,000 people,’ Phillips said. When Eckersley struck out Junior Felix to end the game, A’s catcher Terry Steinbach gave the Jays dugout the finger. It wasn’t inspected, either.” No ambiguity about that, and for that reason alone it might top the infamous Derek Lowe crotchchop as one of the best screw-you’s in baseball history.
October 25th, 2006
Today in music history: Light up or leave me alone
Three quick things.
* I know all the cool kids are reading Pitchfork, the website that’s going to singlehandedly put Rolling Stone out of business and solve the Middle East crisis. I’ve been all into Stylus Magazine as of late; a friend pointed me to their site because of a recent multi-part series on the Boredoms, the super-awesome Japanese noise/meditative band that “managed to fully realize the drive for transcendence in heavy metal is the same as the one in new age.” (If you’ve never heard the Boredoms — or Yoshimi’s (of “Yoshimi and the Robots” fame) OOIOO you should check them both out. Now.) Any site that can write, with equal facility, about ELO and the Boredoms is, at the very least, worth investigating.
* Another entry in a never-ending series celebrating the genius of Kelefa Sanneh. Check out this section from his review of a recent Paul Simon concert:
“In the years before and after ‘Graceland,’ Mr. Simon has explored everything from salsa to batucada. If this rhythm obsession seems like an odd preoccupation for a mellow folkie, Saturday’s concert showed why it isn’t. Mr. Simon’s obsession with rhythm is related to his obsession with language. By packing his verses full of words, he emphasizes the complicated rhythms of spoken English. He needs a rhythm section that can keep up with his mouth.
You could hear this clearly during a sparse and propulsive version of the title track from “Graceland.” One stanza begins:
There is a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline
And sometimes when I’m falling, flying or tumbling in turmoil I say, ‘Oh, so this is what she means.’
That’s a mouthful. But if you add a nimble bass line, Mr. Simon sounds less like a chatterbox and more like a great percussionist.”
* Speaking of cool kids, I know I’ll get crap for this one…but the new Phish release reminded me of why I loved the band when I was 17 years old. The three-disc set, culled from a series of 1988 shows in Colorado, is officially being released on Halloween. If you hate Phish, you’re not going to give this a chance anyway. If you’ve ever been intrigued by the band but have a hard time figuring out why hundreds of thousands of blissed-out hippie freaks would travel up to Maine to watch them play for three days straight, these discs, recorded when the band was still playing at bars, should help explain things.
