Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Monday, March 09, 2009

Wolff on Selig

"There's one thing I don't think enough people realize about Bud," Wolff said. "He knows that baseball is the players. Whether he reacted soon enough to the steroid situation or not, once he did react, it was still a fight with the union. And it shouldn't have been a fight. If there's anybody who puts baseball first, it's Bud. And I don't say this just because I went to school with him."

Dinner with the Say Hey Kid

When Willie Mays sits down at his customary card table in the Giants' spring clubhouse, he immediately lets out a high-pitched yell and demands to know [Fred] Lewis' whereabouts. The "Say Hey Kid" has found himself a surrogate godson. They go back and forth on every subject from hitting left-handers to money management to butchering hogs. And Saturday, Lewis received the dinner invitation of his life . . .

. . . Mays invited Lewis, Emmanuel Burriss and Travis Ishikawa for a feast: chicken, steak, red beans and rice, greens and cornbread.

"And pies, oh man, the pies," Lewis said. "Every kind you can think of. Ice cream too. I said, 'Willie, I'm about to go to sleep up on your couch.' "

Not only did the foot injury prematurely end Lewis' first full season, but it also robbed him of a milestone: He finished with 11 triples, one short of the San Francisco-era record shared by Mays and Steve Finley. Lewis plans to break that record and keep on running. He wants to match Mays' career high of 20 triples, set in 1957, the club's last season at New York's Polo Grounds.

The Samson Effect

In order to join the Yankees, Sabathia will be required to shave off the beard he sported during his 2007 Cy Young Award season in Cleveland and his 2008 second-half surge in Milwaukee, when he carried the Brewers to the post season with an 11-2 record down the stretch. The Yankees should be hoping his pitching prowess doesn't go with it.

Sabathia is just the latest in a long line of expensive acquisitions forced to face the Yankee clippers before being fitted for pinstripes. The wild look isn't allowed in Yankee land--a basic mustache is OK, but long hair and beards are out. And the list of onetime wild men who found their strength sapped after leaving the barber's chair is impressive. But don't shed too many tears for the Samsons of the Bronx. They all know the rules: Take the Yankees money; bow to their corporate culture. It's a tough deal to pass up; who wouldn't shave for $161 million?

Omar the Artist

Omar Vizquel's baseball career was on decline the last few seasons in San Francisco. But life in the Bay Area rejuvenated him in other ways.

"I painted a lot the three years I was there," said Vizquel, whose artistic portraits (note: gallery includes some nude images) were featured in an exhibition in September in San Francisco's Caldwell Snyder Gallery. "I wanted to show the whole thing I did during my stay there. It went great."

Vizquel's 30 water colors and oil paintings were for sale, with part of the proceeds and the admission benefitting the Giants Community Fund. He estimates that he sold "about half."


The gallery announced the exhibition by saying that "like his performance on the field, Vizquel demonstrates vitality and focused determination within his work." It lauded Vizquel's "sensitivity to humanity, romance and the larger questions of our existence."

Vizquel told the San Francisco Chronicle that he is a fan of European figurativists Odd Nerdrum and Lucian Freud, calling them "the two most exciting contemporary artists living right now."

Zirin on Bonds and the DOJ

The Justice Department wins 95 percent of the cases it brings to trial, and make no mistake: this case was about to become part of the other 5 percent. The only thing the Justice Department had in its favor is what it always has, unlimited time and funds, so it's rolling the dice in hopes that a three-judge panel rules against Illston. It wants the wiretaps, the illegal search and seizures and the acts of intimidation against Anderson's family all to stand legally. This is frightening, but prosecutors will likely find themselves very disappointed. The page appears to be turning on the entire Bush era of outlaw justice, and Barry Bonds will likely benefit. The case started when Attorney General John Ashcroft, the great champion of the Patriot Act, held a press conference in 2004 to announce that the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative was officially underway. Having the Attorney General convene a grand jury to look into steroid use was extreme overkill, but as commentators remarked at the time, it was a shot across the bow at Bonds.

Most sports fans were very comfortable with seeing the despoiler of the national pastime get crushed. Bonds has had notoriously difficult relationships with the press, fans, teammates and management throughout his career. He is also black, which makes him an easier target. But the desire to see Bonds punished came at a terrible collective cost. The Bonds case has always been about more than the sports media have chosen to dwell on. It's not about the scourge of anabolic steroids, or a surly, arrogant athlete getting his comeuppance. It isn't even about perjury. It's about how the Justice Department under Bush became untethered from the Bill of Rights. This week, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has released a series of post-9/11 memos that chill the spine.

The 2009 Matewan Massacre

“The public genius of Jeter”

For the Yankees, a vacation from A-Rod may be just what the proverbial doctor ordered. If only temporarily, the face of the team will again belong to Derek Jeter, not Rodriguez, whom we have come to recognize in a variety of poses as the deer caught in the limelight.

Maybe the Yankees will hold their own with improved pitching, for which there was no shortage of off-season expenditure, and the brand of baseball that won them four World Series during a five-year stretch almost a decade ago . . . That Seattle and Texas improved immediately after he left is hardly empirical evidence. But after all that has happened since the turn of the year, something tells me the Yankees won’t crumble while A-Rod is recovering for six to nine weeks. Given a break from all things A-Rod and good pitching, they may even thrive.

Many people would argue the public genius of Jeter is really just a strict policy of avoiding incendiary issues. Some members of the news media have extrapolated on that to call him boring. But boring is in the eye or ear of the beholder. To me, Jeter is not boring. When it comes to quotations, he just isn’t obsequious, or self-destructively dense.

His aura says: if keeping the back-page headline writers on 24-hour alert is the shallow measure of one’s commercial appeal, we can elect someone else most popular in class.

Hometown Heroes

Apples and Oranges

Today at THT