Give Patrick McHenry (R-NC) Islamophobic Birther Tweets or Give Him More Just Like Them






Do you use Twitter? Why not try an experiment? Take an apolitical Twitter account. Make a racist or verbally violent comment on muslims or Obama's supposed conspiracy to destroy white, conservative Christian America. Append the hashtag #tcot to the comment so it gets filtered into a feed read by people interested in the "Top Conservatives on Twitter." Then ask yourself a question:

Q: How long will it take for someone to follow your feed or RT (re-tweet) your comments in approval?

A: Not long at all. But what may surprise you is that your new fan may be Republican United States Representative for North Carolina's 10th District, Patrick McHenry.

That's what happened to a Twitter user named MagicHDetective, after posting the following tweets satirizing far-right paranoia over Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan:

And here is the email notification he received from Twitter just a minute after that last tweet, showing him that Representative McHenry was now following his tweets:

When:
The images embedded here are screenshots taken by MagicH on his own PC, to show you how the time- and date-stamps appeared to him as he looked at his email and at the tweets he'd sent. I'm also linking those three tweets here, so you can see their time- and date-stamps on the Twitter site.

If you click the links, the timestamps on Twitter, as you see them, will adjust for your timezone, so that may create the mistaken impression that the tweets themselves do not chronologically accord with MagicH's email timestamp. However, MagicH is a resident of Perth Australia, so adjusting your timezone for the discrepancy (and also Standard v. Daylight Savings, where applicable) should make the stamps line up so that the last tweet predates the email notification by a minute — i.e. exactly as it happened.


Who:
Patrick McHenry is a Republican who's represented North Carolina's 10th District in the U.S. Congress since January, 2005. In a little over four years, he's managed to garner quite a bit of negative attention (even inspiring a site called Republicans Against Patrick McHenry). For instance, in 2007, he ridiculed a Democratic bill that attempted to reduce U.S. foreign oil dependency by giving a $20/month tax credit to those who commute via bicycle. At the time, he said:

A major component of the Democrats' energy legislation and the Democrats' answer to our energy crisis is, hold on, wait one minute, wait one minute, it is promoting the use of the bicycle. Oh, I cannot make this stuff up. Yes, the American people have heard this. Their answer to our fuel crisis, the crisis at the pumps, is: ride a bike. Democrats believe that using taxpayer funds in this bill to the tune of $1 million a year should be devoted to the principle of: "Save energy, ride a bike." Some might argue that depending on bicycles to solve our energy crisis is naive, perhaps ridiculous. Some might even say Congress should use this energy legislation to create new energy, bring new nuclear power plants on line, use clean coal technology, energy exploration, but no, no. They want to tell the American people, stop driving, ride a bike. This is absolutely amazing.

Of course, saying that riding bikes is a dumb solution to reducing energy dependency when you could otherwise pump millions into nuclear plants and clean coal is like saying that Americans' jogging to lose weight is foolish when we could invest untold millions into liposuction and the development of a Photoshop slimming tool that works—only in real life this time.

McHenry's got other problems. He dismissed a soldier, who inconvenienced his going to the gym while in Baghdad's Green Zone, as a "two-bit security guard." The callousness of his attitude toward someone who was acting in the interest of his safety was emphasized by a subsequent attack on the Green Zone. Even worse for McHenry: he filmed the aftermath, pointing out where landmarks were struck by fire, showing specific evidence of the location of destruction, then posted it online — perhaps to indicate his bravado in being around at the time while bad things happened in the best-defended citadel in Iraq. This possibly jeopardized Green Zone operational security (OpSec) and prompted the Pentagon to, basically, yell at him and make him take the video down.

He showed his hardline conservative colors during the 2008 GOP primaries, criticizing John McCain as objectionably moderate and asking other GOP leaders why he "shouldn't be physically ill at the prospects of a President McCain." He's further cemented those hardline conservative bona fides when outlining what he believes to be the current GOP strategy toward national government:

We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010. Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

In short, John McCain, whose policies were not substantially distinguishable from those of the previous eight years, was not conservative enough for McHenry's America. His leadership was such that No True Republican could want it. Good Republican leadership, on the other hand, consists of abandoning governance or the creation of cohesive policy in favor of relentless yelling about people we don't like, in hopes that 2010 will be the year American government can finally get back to the business of yelling about people we don't like.

He's also been implicated in questionable electoral and PAC funding activities.

(By the way, despite linking to other sources above for the sake of credibility, I also got all that information from Wikipedia, a site McHenry should know well, since he allegedly had his staffers edit Wikipedia to remove information about scandals related to him.)

Last but not least, he seems willing to court "Birther" interest by waffling on President Obama's citizenship in the standard "I'm just asking questions, here" format, then backtracking tepidly when called on it. His willingness to say, "I have absolutely no reason to question President Obama's citizenship," comes only after the qualifier, "As I stated last night, I have not carefully reviewed the evidence as a jurist would."

This splits hairs nicely. It gets out the instant and galvanizing message that he's willing to entertain the idea that Obama is not a citizen, while walking it back with language that concedes that he won't question Obama's citizenship yet... since he's not some fancypants judge. Put in blunter terms: "I'm no expert. I'll just assume he's a citizen for now. But there's always the possibility that some totally brilliant legal mind with a wealth of juridical expertise behind it will somehow see through all the really obvious evidence that he's a citizen to some truth underneath. Maybe. I really wouldn't know. Just talking, here!"


How:
So that's who Patrick McHenry is, insofar as this topic is concerned. He's a very conservative Republican who may be ethically challenged, too interested in self-promotion, willing to question the president's citizenship and dedicated to abandoning policy in Congress for the interests of maintaining a screeching line of daily poisonous rhetoric designed to pillory Pelosi and all other Democrats. And he followed someone on Twitter who said:

Obama forced Nidal Hasan to sacrifice himself so he could destroy the Constitution. Muslims are scum #tcot #glennbeck #forthood

Obama needs to be impeached for allowing Muslim terrorists like Nidal Hasan into the country. God has abandoned America #tcot Fort Hood

Instead of searching Nidal's apartment, they should be searching the real perpetrator, Barrack Husein Obama. #tcot #glennbeck Fort Hood
Why? Why would a United States Representative follow someone on Twitter who said horrible things like this? Only a few explanations come to mind.

1. This isn't Patrick McHenry's Twitter account.
Extremely unlikely. One, the content reflects things he is doing at the moment, directing people to interact with him live. Two, the feed repeatedly links back to his own House.Gov page, a site which would be tracking incoming content and would have notified even the dumbest intern of the existence of the Twitter feed. Three, no one spoofs a public personality on Twitter to behave exactly like the personality except for one easily overlooked discrepancy. There's absolutely no point to it. Anyone doing it for kicks would be trying to get kicks, not mask them. Four, even if his staffers were the dumbest people on earth, at some point in the last seven months, someone would have pointed out a Twitter account they didn't know about. There's really no point in entertaining this explanation.


2. Patrick McHenry has a Twitter bot that automatically follows people.
A bot is just a bit of programming that automates an online function. In this case, a Twitter "follow bot" will scan Twitter for keyword usages you favor and automatically add anyone who tweets them. Say you run a golf shop and have an in-house pro who's willing to give lessons on the cheap. You might program a follow bot for your shop's Twitter account to automatically follow anyone looking for the terms "golf pro" "discount" and whatever your location is. Simple explanation, right?

But that doesn't make any sense given the evidence. One, McHenry's Twitter feed goes back to April 14th (conspicuously, the day before tax day and thus a day before the first tea party protests), and yet he only follows 1,200+ people. Even assuming he'd set up a follow bot a month ago, he'd be following over 3,000 people by now, because Twitter allows you to follow up to 100 new people per day. That number would doubtless be higher by word of mouth. Even with one month of a functional bot, McHenry should be following well over 3,000 more people.

Most tellingly, though, since following MagicH on Friday, McHenry has only gone on to follow 28 more people, the last one, as of this writing, being a djtablesauce. Even over a span of three days, there's no way that whatever keywords McHenry chose could have targeted MagicH's tweets without targeting hundreds of conservative Twitter users who are also using those keywords, often within organized topics that would have garnered McHenry's attention. Those organized topics are represented by those # marks. By tweeting to things like #tcot — "Top Conservatives on Twitter" — McHenry has directed his comments to those following the #tcot topic.

Since he's targeted that audience with his tweets, any follow bot created would likely be targeted to that audience as well. Yet, despite MagicH targeting that audience too (although satirically), McHenry's Twitter account has followed so few people from it since. Those not familiar with Twitter might not realize that #tcot surges at all hours with incredible volume, like Gulf storm surge colliding with a flooded Mississippi — often with the same negative consequences for black people. Tweets emerge and disappear off the page nearly instantaneously. Anyone who tweets at that audience and looks for keywords from that audience would have their "followers" column overwhelmed in short order.

In conclusion, given the numerical evidence, it's extremely implausible that McHenry followed MagicH due to some automated process.


3. A page or intern manages Patrick McHenry's Twitter account, and he's not involved with it.
It's possible, but also unlikely and immaterial.

As to that last point, if a staffer is managing this account, he or she is doing so at McHenry's behest. He or she ostensibly has his confidence and trust to act in accordance with The Plan or The Message. Just as a captain is responsible for the crew under him, if McHenry's staffers are making judgment calls or tweeting out mission statements, they're doing so under the aegis of McHenry himself, whether he's directly ordered it or is tacitly in control. As a member of the soi-disant Party of Personal Responsibility, McHenry has no other attitude or approach to take to this situation; either way, it's on him. This is the chain of responsibility when you establish the leadership paradigm as a fundamental tenet of your party's (and your own) qualifications.

Now, as to the first point, it's unlikely that McHenry is uninvolved. He's young! He's still at that age where technology adoption is easy. And if McCain can tweet, so can he. Also, he's not unsavvy when it comes to messaging. While he might not execute that messaging well, he certainly knows which avenues to attempt. For instance, he may not pack in the townhalls 100%, but he's smart enough to put himself out there to not only conduct them but be able to say that he conducts them.

Speaking of which, take this tweet from a day before he followed MagicH on Twitter: "Send online healthcare townhall questions via @/DM or email (mchenrytownhall@gmail.com) and I'll answer them live tomorrow at 11am." The tweet asks people to engage him via Twitter's Direct Message (DM) function, demonstrating awareness of the site's functionality. Even if staffers mined the Twitter feed and the email address for questions, it's implausible to suggest he wasn't aware of where the questions could be coming from. Finally — and, unfortunately the stream of this townhall is no longer available for viewing — it would have done him a world of good to visibly check and respond to his Blackberry or iPhone on camera, to show supporters the value of connecting with him via texts, because it would show connectivity, folksiness, personability, all those good things.

In conclusion, even if staffers manage Patrick McHenry's Twitter feed, it's very unlikely he is unaware of it. And, most importantly, he is still responsible for it, as it is a means of communication that goes out under his name, just like a franked letter or a robocall. However, there's one very good indicator that staffers aren't managing this Twitter account, which suggests the following:


4. Patrick McHenry manages his own Twitter account.
If he didn't, why only 305 tweets since April 14th, 2009? There are easily a half dozen events or talking points per day that staffers could exploit, either reiterating talking-points memos or giving conservative boilerplate responses to what's on the TV. Even at, let's say, five tweets per day, between April 15th and November 6th, that's 1,030 tweets that should be there. If you're having your staff run things, that many tweets is a no-brainer. First, you don't have to write them yourself. Second, it gets your message and "brand" out on every incident or issue of the day. Third, it gives other conservatives on Twitter incentive to follow you: you're going to be dropping sick politi-beats on them, like, every single day. They will want to listen to you.

But, if you're a busy congressman tweeting on your own, 305 tweets over 206 days sounds about right. You have something to say once or twice per day, or else you have something to say once per day and also pass on a link you find convincing or enlightening. A tweet pace of 1.4 per day is just about perfectly within the wheelhouse of someone who's trying to maintain a Web2.0 brand without having the time or attention to really exploit its functionality. Someone like a sitting congressman.


What?
So what conclusions can we draw from this? What has happened here?

First, it's highly unlikely that this is an outlaw or parody Twitter feed. It would be easily noticeable to borderline-competent staff; and even if it weren't, someone would have told them about it in the last seven months. Second, the number of people McHenry follows simply does not accord with bot usage. He should be following thousands more people, even if he's looking for the most histrionic and unpleasant keywords associated with the far-right, if he's got any automated process at work. The fact is that conservative discussion on Twitter is large and intense enough to garner even 3,000 hits in a month's time, whatever the word choice. Third, even if McHenry has farmed out Twitter responsibilities to his staff, the interactivity of his public appearances and the words used on his Twitter indicate his awareness of that content outlet. And even on the extremely tenuous chance that he knows nothing of what his Twitter account does, he is still accountable for it. It's his name, his staff, his brand, his mandate. You cannot lead while disclaiming the actions of those you directly lead, those for whom you bear direct responsibility.

But the idea of staff responsibility rings a bit hollow. A dedicated staff or staffer would exploit an interactive function like Twitter more than 1.4 times per day. Tasked with getting McHenry's message or brand out, they'd suffer no shortage of things to talk about, respond to, link, or just "re-tweet." The slow and intermittent activity it exhibits is more indicative of a single man in charge.

And who is that man? He's a man who's fond of self-promotion and found (although not yet judged) ethically questionable. He's a man who was willing to look at 2001-2009 and this nation's governance, then look at John McCain's allegiance to most of the same and deem him insufficiently conservative. He's a man who's been willing to equivocate about Barack Obama's citizenship and then backtrack without contradicting himself or condemning the thinking he's echoed. He's also mocked incentivizing the use of bicycles as a means of reducing oil dependency.

He is, in short, someone so hard-right, so unscrupulous and, frankly, so dumb as to see a bunch of tweets about how "Obama needs to be impeached" and is "the real perpetrator" because he forced Nidal Hasan "to sacrifice himself to destroy America" and "the Constitution" nod silently at them and think "right on" and then follow the person who wrote them. He is exactly the sort of person — and, via Twitter, he is likely exactly the person — who unironically and uncritically applauds such virulently racist, eliminationist and dangerous language. Nidal Hasan acted on Obama's orders; Obama's mission is to try to destroy America.

(But, hey, maybe McHenry doesn't really believe that: he's just thinking out loud about the maybe-muslim maybe-usurper who wants to annihilate everything you care about! We're just all talking, here! That's plausible deniability, right? Twitter's an open forum.)

If you're wondering where even cruel comedy can emerge from this sort of thing, consider this: the person McHenry followed — the person using that horrible language satirically — had, in his previous tweet, complained about not being able to summon an elemental in Dungeons and Dragons made out of semen. But why stop and check on that sort of ridiculous detail before following an angry citizen when there's outrage to nod smilingly at, stoke, inflame and exploit? Why pay the slightest attention to what you endorse when it's time to

win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010... to bring down approval numbers for Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Perhaps the last, most distant and improbable excuse McHenry could employ is that he followed MagicH for the sake of satire. But that would require hundreds of the other people he followed to be tweeting satirically about the same racist, eliminationist, paranoid and verbally violent things. Given the facts, that explanation doesn't hold water. And even without those facts, to borrow an instrument that obviously inspires confusion and horror in McHenry: conservatives tend to use satire about as well as a fish uses a bicycle.

The Yankees Are Cancer: World Series, 2009






You already know the outcome, so welcome to the last bit of liveblogging doom, gloom, angst and loathing for the 2009 baseball season. Think of this as the sports equivalent of watching Glenn Beck read a newspaper. Only I'm not actually insane. Let us instead enter a legitimate Chamber of Loathing:

Being a baseball fan and rooting for the Yankees is like being an oncologist and rooting for cancer.

I don't remember when I wrote that. I want to say the 7th inning. And while I recognize that it is partially histrionic, I think also that it's true.

Most baseball fans want to see their teams win, and aside from a few sociopaths or fans of teams who've been so horrible for so long that they've earned a malicious desire, very few fans want to see their teams stomp holy hell all season and win a championship effortlessly. In video games, it's one thing to play in God Mode, to force trades and make your team a roster of monsters, but in real life I think we all acknowledge that victories are sweeter for being won rather than being taken and walked off with. I think any Red Sox fan would, in a candid moment, admit that 2004 and 2007 would have been dreadfully dull without the 0-3 and 1-3 comeback runs in the ALCS to get to the World Series, because those Series games were almost painfully lopsided. (I think any good Red Sox fan would also admit that the team had an obscenely large payroll and reaped the rich benefits of the same.)

Although the presence of so many World Series trophies certainly helps, I think it's the expectation of dominance that anathematizes the Yankees for me. If you ask me to break down the team on an individual-to-individual basis, there are really few people on it I genuinely dislike. If you ask me to break down their fans on the same, there would be loads more people, but taken as a percentage of the fanbase I would imagine it would be quite small. But whether you call it mystique or entitlement, there is a general attitude about Yankeedom I find immediately abhorrent.

The money issue is a big thing. Look, we're kidding ourselves if we try to seriously claim that money doesn't win championships. Three- and four-game series in the postseason introduce a randomizing aspect that allows lower-payroll teams to eliminate higher-payroll teams via luck and small sample size, but it's stupid to disbelieve that a lot of money usually gets you to those postseasons. For instance, the Yankees have missed the playoffs only once in the last 14 years. Getting to the postseason takes 90+ wins, but once there, you only have to put together 11. Eventually, enough opportunity should statistically give you a championship. It's not being there: it's getting there.

As is the case with anyone supporting The Establishment, Yankee fans will point to the one year that the Yankees didn't get to the postseason as an indicator that a system where they DO get to the postseason 13 of 14 times is fair and equitable. Of course, that exclusion only happened because of an outlier: a team that had been so bad for so long was able to accumulate so many high draft picks that they put it all together surprisingly at once. In fact, they got where they were from the benefit of being a touchstone of terrible. Had they merely been mediocre for a decade, they'd never have stood a chance.

This is the same outlier defense that plutocracy uses to excuse itself. Any success story proves the egalitarian structure of the system regardless of the success' aberrancy. Take God knows how many families that had $10 million in 1900 and you'll probably find that 90% of them are still in the same bracket today. And probably every one of them will point you to some ass who got lucky creating a local cable company as proof that "The American Dream" works and that there's "no such thing as aristocracy," despite the fact that he's a tiny fraction of the available millionaires and there by chance, while they're playing with money that's been there for a century, reliably.

I realize this seems sort of abstruse, but this is why I can't root for the Yankees and why it baffles me that people hop on their bandwagon — why, indeed, they have any resonance for those not born in New York. We don't root for this shit anywhere else. We tend to view the sports business as just sporty enough to obscure its business aspect and wipe away the attendant privilege attached to certain teams' largesse. We personalize the team via players and attitudes so that we can escape the dissonance of being, on average, lower-middle-class people who exalt an upper class for the gain of an upper-class organization and its continued dominance. But this doesn't translate elsewhere. Nobody has ever opened a newspaper and leaned over to a stranger and said, "Gosh, I hope the Rockefellers earn a fuckload of money this year," just as no one ever starts a Facebook group called, "1 Million Strong for Exxon to Reach Another Billion $."

Why? Because fuck those people, that's why. And like the Rockefellers and Exxon's primary shareholders, the annual Yankees supporter is essentially born on third base and thinks he's hit a triple. Only, in their case, the analogy is reified by its actually being about baseball. The Yankee fan can open the newspaper in April and know that he's already looking at a team OPS of .800 or more. And if you express disgust at this, he'll point to outliers like the 2003 Marlins or the 2008 Rays and say, "I don't really have an advantage, here. Anything can happen," and swaddle himself in just enough statistical anomalies to make him feel like marginally less of a dickhead when he silently says to himself, "But I know what will happen: we will contend." Because he knows he can't control for luck. But he sure as shit can make luck have to work harder, go longer and be less likely to happen.

Hence the analogy up top. We know most of the time that cancer wins. It takes a lot of luck and little factors to beat it back, but usually it returns, and usually it triumphs. There is no challenge, no real commitment to backing a sure thing. You can just recline and wait. It deviates sometimes. Incidental factors may rebuff it. But it will recur. Now, I don't mean to suggest that the Yankees eat away at people and murder them, but rooting for them as a baseball fan is a lot like rooting for cancer. It's a concession to momentum and inevitability over the possible and unique. And in a sport where the competition is more fun and more engrossing to everyone the greater the chances are for anyone to succeed, putting faith in the inevitable over the possible is just such a concession. Death is the ultimate sure thing, and it's hard not to think that if Death were willing to put on a uniform, Yankees fans would want to sign him. Their attitude to anything outside Yankeedom is often that nullifying, ruthless and zero-sum.

Enough. The following should be brief:


World Series Game Six

• FOX Keys to the Game:

Phillies: You're kidding, right?
Yankees: 27 for 27 for 27.

Whoa, guys! Stop smothering me with content!


• Number of Pedro Pitches Before the Yankee Stadium Organist Goes to the Let's Go Yankees/Who's Your Daddy riff: 17


• Look, I don't begrudge a fanbase their right to mock an opposing player, but is there anything more pathetic than the fact that Yankee fans desperate hump that WHO'S YOUR DADDY shit, in addition to needing help from the organist? You know who came up with that burn? The dude you're using it against. He wrote it for you. That's like calling someone fat, and the other person blowing you off and saying, "I also fuck dudes," and then screaming, "YOU FUCK DUUU-UUUUUDES" at him every time you see him. Great line, shithead: you didn't think of it.


• Hey, Mark Teixeira looks pissy walking to first base after being hit with a baseball. Other things Mark Teixeira looks pissy doing/about:

Showering
Shitting
Combing his hair
Hearing anything come on the radio that is not Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon"
When he's got the look — L.A. Look — but he's not in L.A.
Mousse that's "control hold" and not "power hold"
Carbs!!! Arrrghhh!!!!!
When you ask the guy at the fish market what that fish is, and he gives you a normal name for it instead of the sushi name, because you're buying it for your own sushi guy to cut up
Poors
Too much Jesus
Not enough Jesus
"Natural" beef jerky that isn't really natural
When a girl isn't hot
When a guy wants to talk to him, but he isn't his driver
People who don't have rad cars
Cheese—seriously, just be milk or yogurt, but not this undrinkable stuff
People who don't have a lot of money
Bobby Cox—stop being old! Old people are creepy!
Birds
Going to the bathroom and nothing comes out and then you have to READ while you're there
When the guy at the taqueria recognizes you and then pronounces your name all Mexican
Hams—either be a good food or someone's butt—too confusing!!!!
When a dog humps you
People who don't have a plasma-screen wall
Fans that don't give packets of hand sanitizer after the autograph
Detroit
Priscilla Presley's name and how you spell it
Wingtip shoes that don't fly

I think I'm starting to love Teixeira because every single face he pulls is about one moment away from some De Niro "Ehhhh, l'il bit..." face.


• Taking a break from a Yankee's game to watch Windows ads is like fleeing Berlin for Rome in 1941.


• Oh, good, more Rudy Giuliani sighting. Is there any person who's quotation-marked middle name is a human tragedy who isn't a complete predator and asshole?


• Texeira gets his first hit since August and immediately starts pursing his lips and glowering on first base when he gets there. I've figured out what he reminds me of. He reminds me of when a boy under 10 gets his first hat and doesn't yet have a real sense of self that takes into account his own image. So let's say it's an Indiana Jones-style fake Stetson, and the kid walks around theatrically like "injured Indy," wearing an oversized smirk and limping around like someone who's never been in pain, this just over-the-top sad approximation of what people look like. Mark Teixeira looks exactly like that, except he's trying to scowl out from under the brim of his hat like Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange while pursuing his lips like one of the Heathers in Heathers.


• If the Yankees win this, how far do the players on the current roster move up toward True Yankee status? I'm thinking Nick Swisher gets there for always being cheery and a "gamer." I think Joba gets there for being "home grown." I think A-Rod gets a pass for a while but will never get there. Also, CC Sabathia won't get there because he's black. The True Yankees already have their "token" with Bernie Williams. Adding CC would only make people ask why so many of the existing True Yankees' statistics suck.


• Top of the 6th:

JOE BUCK: You know, the Yankees are often criticised for throwing around money and trying to buy a championship... (He then names the $320+ million they spent in the offseason for three players alone, plus the $250 million for Alex Rodriguez.) But hey, how about Pettitte?

This is the capper he has for a long wandering bit about the Yankee payroll. First of all, Pettitte's contract is for a baseline $5.5 million, which creeps to almost $9 million with bonuses. His contract, with bonuses, is almost a fifth of the team payroll for the team that won the AL East last year. This is Buck's grand point: look at how little the Yankees spent on this guy they're ultimately going to give nearly $9 million for pitching. This is a point he brings up after mentioning that they spent $320 million in the offseason. I know the answer to, "How do you have such a witless lack of perspective as this?" because the answer is, "You are Joe Buck." But even this seems like he's trying to be dumb. He seems to think that naming the winner of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest and the first and second runners up will disguise the fact that he's introducing a girl to you who can inhale six hot dogs in 120 seconds. He thinks that telling you something profoundly excessive makes something merely excessive just normal. This is why he's Joe Buck.


• Joba Chamberlain's eyebrows look like a cat emoticon.


• This Happ guy's been pitching pretty well. Obviously it's time for Charlie Manuel to pull him. All during this Series and last year's, people took great pains to explain that Charlie Manuel was a fantastic hitting coach. My quibble is that he seems to be so good that he's orchestrating things so both sides can hit the shit out of the ball. The problem here is that he's the hitting coach for only ONE team.


• The home run was sweet, but aside from a couple sweet defensive plays, Ryan Howard no-showed this World Series.


• Why can't we watch Mariano Rivera's entrance? It's the coolest entrance in baseball. I hate when my team faces Mariano Rivera, but if you don't like the dude and don't think that he's amazing, you have a screw loose. It's a deciding game in the World Series. We should be treated to the entire "Enter Sandman" experience. Maybe I'm only bitching about this because I know the game is over.


• And it is. Yankees win. Mark Teixeira thanks "God" for leading him to the Yankees. I guess he means the word printed on the backs of all the dollars in the suitcase full of cash he signed for? I love his rationale. If anyone bothers to drunk dial from pay phones anymore, they should totally pull this. "Why am I callllbbrrhghgblling you? It's beCAZE of GOD!" (fumbles with coins) "I lissenned t'is VOICE. He all over thissdamn things. It's GOD, baby. GAAAD wanned me to call ya."


• This is awesome:

SOME DOUCHEBAG: Hal [Steinbrenner], it's the most uttered phrase in sports, "The New York Yankees are world champions."

Ahahaha. That's not even the most uttered phrase for this team, which would probably be "Past a diving Jeter!" Or, I don't know, "Outside, for a ball." What a fucking whore.


• Joe Girardi has a lot of clichés to tell you while explaining how the Yankees won:

GIRARDI: The willingness to be unselfish and to play the game the right way.

I'm guessing here he meant "write," referring to checks. And "unselfish," referring to being willing to take a check for the other guys on the team, just dive right into that salary. Or maybe he meant that they'd be willing to hit home runs the right way: "gutty dingers." Surely he didn't mean that they bunted, stole and ran their way to a championship. You know, sliding, dirty, gritty. I would hate to think that the right way has changed to, "Sit, as the most powerful offense in baseball hammers the crap out of shit and use your iPhone to make sure the direct-deposit went through."


• Matsui is the MVP. Good for Godzilla. He's a good egg. He also murdered the ball. Matsui's pretty cool. Although, despite its being awkward as hell, I think I would have liked Chase Utley to win.


• Good on ya, Jeter, for getting another ring. I think you jump up like a goof to make plays seem closer than they need to be; you have less range than you should; and you dive a lot to make up for your shortcomings. But you've been working to stay fit, upgrading your range in your defense, and you hit like a bastard. You're a great fucking player, and you're a First-Ballot guy, all the way. Good on ya, Nick Swisher, one of the goofiest motherfuckers in baseball. Good on ya, Mariano Rivera, one of the classiest and most impressive people to play the game. Anyone who wouldn't be proud to have the three of you on their team is either a liar or a fool.


Fuck You

• Fuck the Steinbrenners who can get annoyed at some mosquito-like inconvenience in baseball and drop fifty million dollars to correct it. Fuck Brian Cashman, who annually professes his interest in developing talent from within and becoming a top-down complete Yankees organization, but who signs a bunch of free agents every year with more mad money than most other teams can dream of having for essential operations. Fuck Joe Girardi, who misused his bullpen, who couldn't manage his starters and who had enough excellent pieces in his lineups that he could fuckup his way to glory and smash things to shit and still have replacements better than other teams' elite players. Fuck Chien-Ming Wang who was such a catastrophe early in the season that we didn't get to see him implode late in the season, and fuck that he got a ring anyway. Fuck AJ Burnett for being paid a team's salary to be an on-again and off-again ass. Fuck you and your Ichabod Chrane head, AJ. Fuck Joba Chamberlain, fuck him for being a tantrum-throwing fat baby. Fuck the fat fucking Joba baby. Fuck you, Joba, you Downs-faced fuck. You're basically a lobotomy with anime eyebrows and a pitching arm. Fuck every single Yankees reliever who isn't Mo or Marte. My GOD, you're all white and have enough wood jammed up your ass to purchase a home in Connecticut. If not build one. Which, given that you pitch for the Yankees, you've already done, to get away from the "bad" neighborhoods. Just don't buy in the same part of Connecticut that Damaso Marte might buy in. (Heeeee'ssss blaaaaack.) Also, CC Sabathia: thanks for the help, but true Yankees aren't fat. Well, except for Babe Ruth. Well, they're not like you... you know... what you look like.... LOOK, Reggie hit a lot of dingers, and he was lighter-skinned. You see how the Homeowners' Association could be unfomfortable with you here, CC. Fuck Jorge Posada. He couldn't cobble together his millions to buy a chin, a personality, anything about him that was interesting or a vestigial face that would be attractive. Fuck Mark Teixeira: if you loved Jesus so much, why did you leave the bible belt for a fucking payday, you pissfaced whore? You snorted cash on up to NEW YAWRK CEETEE and tried to whitewash it as God's impulsion for your career. But you're neither a pilgrim nor a Christian: you sucked your way upward like some pneumatic event toward the cashbox, and then up there you sniffed at those below you. FUCK YOU. While we're here, FUCK JOHNNY DAMON. I get it. You're one of the dumbest people on the planet. You probably took Boras' word as bond that the Red Sox would not pay you any more and immediately signed with the Yankees. But what you didn't think about—BECAUSE YOU ARE DUMB—is that staying with the Sox would have netted you endorsement deals until you died. You passed those up for a one-time signing bonus with the Yankees. Guess who got the most out of that and would've gotten much less out of those lifetime endorsement deals, Johnny? Your parasitic agent. You'll never be welcome in Boston again, and no one in New York will ever care. You signed a deal that killed the rest of the deals you'd get for the rest of your life. You are FUCKING STUPID. Alex Rodriguez: why should I even bother? You're a human punch line. You will always be a human punch line. YOU HAVE PAINTINGS OF YOURSELF AS A CENTAUR. Nobody needs to tell you to fuck yourself because you constantly do, with everything that you are. You actually live a life that instantly invalidates its purpose to anyone with fucking sense. You are a self-aborting human being. The longer you are known to anyone the less they think you should be alive.


• Seriously, though, way to go, Yankees!

• Thank God there are eight-year-olds in New York and eight-year-olds bandwagoning all around the country who don't have to say they've gone their entire lives without seeing their team win a championship anymore. I just hope to Christ they can buy some hats or something to keep this Hope Train going.

Fucked-Up Video Wednesday: Do You Know What I'm Saiyan?






We last met Alex Jones in what is easily the best YoutubeDoubler ever, doing what it is he does best, going completely nuts. Jones literally believes that European monarchs are going to help take over the earth with robot people, that 9/11 was an inside job, and the Jews he works for were in on it, and that the Hitler-run wing of the Obama administration is using states' Child Protective Services departments to kidnap and indoctrinate the few free-thinking lads and lasses who haven't already been rounded up in FEMA camps with their gun-owner parents or been tracked down by GPS-bearing members of the census bureau.

Apart from his being fucking crazy, the best thing about Alex Jones is that he sometimes gets so overwhelmed by his own bullshit that he has no choice but to scream. Sometimes, as in the case of that doubler, he gets louder and faster and winds up raving about how his bosses are a bunch of "psychotic killers." But sometimes the wheels just come off entirely. His own devotions to irreconcilable madnesses tongue-tie him, and he can't do anything but primally wail. It'd be the funniest and most captivating program on the radio if you could forget the fact that he's an inspiration to the heavily armed and itchy of finger.

Now, I don't know anything about Dragon Ball Z. Really. I'm neither ashamed nor proud of that; it just happens to be true. However, I do get this joke, and I know that this is funny:


Speaking of not knowing anything about things, I don't know anything about Lady Gaga. (Or I didn't until a few minutes ago.) In fact, the video below is the most Lady Gaga I've ever heard. I'm not wearing that fact for pop-culture credibility either; there's nothing upsetting about her, for me, and if there is for you, I wonder why that is. Reading over her Wikipedia entry, she seems like a mostly inoffensive person who creates decent pop music.

Granted, she tends to treat gay people like human beings worthy of respect and civil rights. I can understand why many people in America would hate her for that: they're stunted, horrible proto-humans with less empathy toward people than six-year-old boys tend to have toward winged bugs. But other than that, what is there? She looks totally ridiculous, but I don't think I can credibly carp on that after listening to Jethro Tull for years. Hell, I like two Elton John songs, and he once played a concert like this. It just doesn't seem like Lady Gaga should be that big of a deal to anybody.

Except vampires:


I don't think this is a joke. I clicked through Nosferatu's Youtube library, but none of his other videos would load. The dancing and decor suggest sincerity. The dancing is bad, but he seems to be trying: intentionally shitty dancing is much funnier, and you don't see as much earnestness in the hips. Also, the upside down flag-in-distress, The Crow, Chriss Angel's Mindfreak... sure they all seem too funny and too perfect to not be a joke. But even if you thought of all those gags, would you be willing to spend money on them? I don't think so.

Bravo, li'l vampire. Bravo.

Series Blog, Games 4 & 5: Gutty Twitter, Centaurs and Chinless Buzzards






This is the latest part in a volume of frustration. Part One deals with David Wells wearing a Member's Only jacket over his fatness. Part Two celebrates another postseason loss for the overrated/under-ridiculed Tony LaRussa. Part Three is your resource for FISTING and how getting a job because of your dad and grandpa doesn't work so well for people around you. Part Four details how godawful Joe Buck and Tim McCarver continue to be. Part Five focuses on World Series Game One and fan-paranoid jinxes. And Part Six covers World Series Games Two and Three. Let's play ball!

World Series Game Four

• Ugh, another national anthem, another gross martial display. Just once I sort of wish that the Air Force or Army (or whichever branch) didn't screen their singers carefully enough and sent someone out there with PTSD. We'd sit as baseball and the Armed Services again solemnized and venerated combat, death, injury and horror, and the well-coiffed representative would belt out the familiar lines, reaching the "laaaaaand of the freeeeeeeee" and hear the fireworks go off and immediately flip the fuck out. I think maybe that might dial back the aggressive patriotism to tolerable pre-9/11 levels, at least for a couple years.


• 8:23 pm:

McCARVER: More than anything else [Blanton's] a gutty performer, and that's why he's out there tonight.

We're not even at the first pitch yet, and we have a "gutty" sighting. As was the case with Chase Utley in Game One, McCarver has nothing to say and is scrambling for meaningless baseball generalities. In Utley's case, he didn't expect the guy to be the offensive hero of the first game, so he ad-libbed something that at first blush might have seemed meaningful. In this case, he's just trying not to insult Blanton. He can only bring up his good outing against the Rays in the 2008 World Series and the home run he hit off Edwin Jackson for so long — there is airtime to fill — but he can't go negative without alienating a huge FOX market share.

The problem with Blanton is that he's either on or he's not. Sometimes he can pitch solidly, but sometimes you watch him just seem to throw the ball at batters and hope nothing happens. Aside from some flashes in Oakland, he doesn't have "ace" stuff. He might get close to that tonight, or he might just heave the ball with his fingers crossed. But saying this makes McCarver seem like both a dick to the Philly audience and uneducated to everyone else.

Because we've attributed omniscience to the cult of the former ballplayer commentator, he has to have something to say about Blanton. Surely McCarver knows Blanton. He knows the real deal with everyone. Admitting "Blanton could go out there and be well above average or just sort of suck — or he could suck, but the Yankees could be off their games and let him get away with a poor performance" means conceding that Blanton is essentially unknowable and that some things in baseball are a matter of luck triumphing over Received Baseball Wisdom.

Hence, "Gutty." It sounds like something insightful without conveying anything. It sounds like he knows this guy in a way you don't, some baseball way you civilian viewers just don't get. McCarver runs through a brief monologue naming the amorphous things about Blanton that make him gutty, like playing the game and throwing the ball and also wearing an official team uniform. Nothing he says to justify "gutty" would be misapplied if you said them about a ballboy who inexplicably was sent into the game as a pinch hitter. But if you don't stop to think about the absence of meaning in what he said, the smokescreen works. Blanton's gutty. Bet you didn't know that, chuckles. But, heh, then again: you don't know baseball.


• Top of the 1st: Blanton plunks A-Rod. Good. Having a man on base is usually bad news, but screw it. Everything about A-Rod — his contract, his play, his personal life, his face — everything about the dude is eminently punchable. But if you can't punch him in the face or at all, hurling a hard object into him at 90+ mph is a good second option. To be honest, I wondered why this didn't happen earlier in the postseason.

Believe it or not, I didn't wonder that because I hate A-Rod, which all people should and probably do. It just seemed like something worth trying. He lit up opposing pitching and rehabilitated his postseason image in just a handful of games, and it reminded me of when that postseason image went in the tank. Remember, at the beginning of 2004's ALCS he owned Red Sox pitching. Through three games, he had something like 172 home runs and his on-base percentage was so good that the box score just read, "HOOKERS AND BLOW." Then someone drilled him with a baseball, and he virtually disappeared offensively. Two years later, against the Detroit Tigers' young high-heat pitching, he went something like 1 for 14. Maybe he was scared the young fireballers would kill him.

So of course I spent the ALDS and the ALCS wondering, "Why isn't anyone plunking this dude?" It seemed like a fair proposition: hurt the bastard, scare him, get him out of the way. Naturally, I was wrong. A-Rod went 0 for 12 or 1 for 12 through the first two games, complete with six strikeouts. Then he got plunked twice in Game Three and started hitting. Blanton plunks him here — gutty-as-fuck throw, by the way — and who knows what will happen? Obviously not what I was hoping for during the Twins and then the Angels series. Anything can happen with him now.


• The umpire warns both the Phillies' and the Yankees' dugouts that there is to be no further plunking during this game. This decision sends McCarver into a sanctimonious soliloquy about how cosmically unfair this is, possibly because Tim seems to have trouble remembering that he's not paid by the Yankees anymore. CC Sabathia is an inside pitcher, and McCarver keeps saying, "You cannot take away the inside of the plate like that!" meaning that you can't force CC to not pitch inside by giving him a warning and making him afraid of accidentally beaning someone.

Now, I don't know which World Series he's been watching, but CC has been dealing left and right, and it's almost absurd to think that he won't have whatever control he likes. Also, I don't know what sport McCarver watches for a living, but this and the rest of the evidence makes me suspect it isn't baseball. Warnings are unfair pretty often. For instance, one batter owns a pitcher, and the next time up he gets very obviously drilled. This nets a warning for both teams. What's happened, then, is that one team got away with intimidating or hurting a batter while, at the same time, doing it so obviously that the umpires prohibit further beanballs and thus take away the other team's only means of retaliation. This shit happens all the time.

The only real substantial complaint to make at a moment like this is that Blanton's beanball didn't seem intentional. It seemed like one that got away from him and, anyway, it's Joe Blanton. But instead of focusing on this rational and, frankly, team-agnostic argument — that of an umpire's overreaction reading intent into an accident and thus unfairly penalizing both pitching staffs — McCarver runs off at the mouth in a totally Yankees-centric way. It's as if Helen Lovejoy's catchphrase were, "Won't someone PLEASE THINK OF CC SABATHIA???" Yeah, it sucks for CC. It sucks that he can't bust people inside without a little anxiety. You know who it also sucks for? Joe Blanton: a substantially less talented pitcher. Once again, McCarver's calling a baseball game as if there are only three baseball teams in existence: the St. Louis Cardinals, the New York Yankees or the Calmeyed Derek Jeters.


• 8:29: Blanton does something pretty pedestrian.

BUCK: That gutty performer, that guile...

Let's put this in perspective:

Elapsed Time of Game in Minutes: 6
Number of Uses of the Word Gutty: 2

Buck and McCarver are employing an absolutely gutty rate of Gutty, scrappily gritting out one Gutty for every three minutes of gameplay. At this rate, if the game goes the standard three hours or so, Buck and McCarver will pay witness to 60 gutty things. That's an almost Ecksteinean level of guttiness.


• Victorino doubles. I would be paying more attention after the double, but I have to relight all the candles in our Halloween pumpkins. The forecast calls for rain, so we brought the jack-o-lanterns inside to keep them from getting moldy too soon. I normally suck at carving pumpkins and, because of this, make almost zero effort besides some triangular eyes and a round nose and a big rectangular mouth with a few teeth. But for some reason this year we really got serious about it. Instead of watching, we just listened to the Community/Parks and Recreation/Office/30 Rock bloc on Thursday while diligently carving out some interesting carving patterns we found. Bottom line: I like this pumpkin. It weirded out a bunch of the neighbor kids. I'm not letting it get coated all over with blue fuzz a day earlier than absolutely necessary. Me and this pumpkin, we went through some shit together. If I start drinking during this game, I guarantee I will wind up talking with this pumpkin. Pumpy game. Pumpykin.


• I wound up tweeting that thing about the national anthem and PTSD, and of course some dude who has a Twitter feed with the term "PTSD" in it has rigged up an alert to automatically notify him of PTSD-related postings and decided that I am exterminable garbage. He tells me that he won't bother threatening my life — hey, you stay classy — because I'm obviously so stupid that just trying to think any thought would kill me. Awesome.

I have family currently in the service, and my family has had service members for three generations, so I feel like I'm on pretty good ground when I say that I'm supportive of our troops in general. I may think the way we use them is sometimes criminal, but the individuals on the bottom of the command structure are usually good people. I don't really give a shit if this dude thinks I hate soldiers, because I'm comfortable knowing he's wrong.

What bugs me, instead, is kind of a recurring Twitter problem. Namely: it's not that hard to do your due diligence about the person you're addressing. I don't begrudge a dude taking PTSD very seriously. It is serious; if he were part of a foundation and not a jackass, I might even give him money. I question, however, the worth of teaching a lesson about PTSD and threatening death on a person who, hours before, tweeted:

I want to cure Terry Gross of being lesbo.

and

A-Rod makes a quarter of a billion dollars to swing his lumber at balls & he has a picture of himself with a manbody & horsecock.

Even if you don't feel like reading my other tweets, there's are some other indicators that I'm not a person worth taking seriously. Beyond the brutal irony of this guy's coming to the defense of those who are vulnerable and psychologically shattered due to violence by obliquely threatening someone else's safety, there's the much more self-evident issue that he's threatening death for someone who claims to be an African dictator who's been dead since 1997. Obviously that last bit is a terrible lie. I'm alive and kicking. But you'd expect someone like this to trust Wikipedia and just recognize that threatening me is futile because I'm putatively a dead person. Or that I cannot be killed. Or that, maybe, someone who has died already would be suffering more Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder than he can possibly imagine.

Whatever the man's issue is — PTSD seems like a good guess — he's distracting me from the game, so I decide to troll him a little more and see if he'll take umbrage with further tweets:


No such luck. I guess he stopped reading or else wasn't alerted to any words that aren't "PTSD." Or maybe I drove him to suicide. It's a coin flip.


• CHASE MOTHERFUCKING UTLEY doubles home a run! Chase Utley: Progress Intelligently Planned.


• I missed a whole bunch of stuff because my dad called me and we talked about the economy and my little brother. Both are a little banged up. My brother has a concussion, and even though my dad managed to raise a kid to adulthood without too many major errors, he still gets a little new-parent panicky with this new brood. It's certainly not my stepmom's fault, because she worked in medicine and knows well enough that little kids are pretty durable. If anything I blame all the recent articles — Malcolm Gladwell's in the New Yorker, for example — for making him super-paranoid about the little brother's getting his bell rung. It's not like the kid's an offensive lineman or anything.

I should also note that, between dad talking and the pumpkin thing, I have totally lost track of the number of "Guttys" this game. My performance is decidedly non-gutty. My distractions show that I am not a gamer. A gamer would just take some sand and grind it into the speaker on a phone and grit his own family away. "I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I'm too busy grinding out wins. Like a grinder." A gamer might fart into the phone and gut out family all gross-wise. My pumpkins might start smelling gamey, but I'm not gonna be gritty or gutty here, because I just didn't watch the game the right way. The only reason I'm still Ecksteiny is because I can lift a mug of German beer with more force than a child or a bleached midget.


• CC Sabathia is bunting. This is a homer-friendly ballpark, and Sabathia is a homer-hitting pitcher. This is stupid. He fouls out. Nice one, Girardi. Then again, I pretty much spend the rest of this half of the inning screaming at the TV, so maybe Girardi can do whatever he likes. The Yankees score 412 times.


• Jorge Posada and Yankees pitching have now conducted more meetings on mounds than entire tribes of native Americans. My buddy J-Shap likes this observation, but tweaks it to be about Hershey's candy-bar R&D personnel.


• I knew these constant meetings wouldn't go unobserved.

McCARVER: Posada Calling more audibles than Tom Brady.

Or, you know, Peyton Manning, who is just as famous as Brady and who calls more audibles than any other quarterback playing and possibly more than any quarterback in history. But I'm nitpicking. Why would McCarver know anything about sports, even really famous sports personalities that get mentioned a lot on sports shows and sports channels and by people who care about sports? It's not like this is his job or anything.


• Bottom of the 7th:

McCARVER: The Phillies' lefthanded batters have been able to do NOTHING with the breaking ball from Sabathia.... That slider has been eating Phillie lefthanders up all night.

Utley promptly crushes one of those sliders about 370 feet for another home run. Chase Utley: THE POWER OF YES.

Also, two things. One, thank you, Tim McCarver, for using your powers of the reverse-jinx against the Yankees for once. Two, regarding the lead actor in that commercial, I have only one word: HORNBERGER!


• Bottom of the 8th: Pedro Feliz ties everything up on a solo homer. Unfortunately, this is the last good thing to happen this evening, as the top of the 9th involves a complete basket case, The Brad Lidge Formerly Known as a Good Closer.


• Phillies lose, 3,712-6 or something.


World Series Game Five

• Singing the national anthem: Alanis Morisette! Apparently nobody in the Phillies' organization or Citizens Bank Park could find an infant pig with a spike driven through it and decided to pay extra for the same sound. There's absolutely no reason to choose her to do this. Morisette not only cannot sing without sounding like something created from the DNA of David Bowie, Ian Anderson, that chick from the Cranberries and an anthropomorphized adenoid, but she's also from Canada. Despite her becoming a naturalized American citizen, getting her to do a celebrity appearance at a Philly ballgame makes about as much sense as Sylvester Stallone cutting the ribbon at a remodeling of the Toronto Skydome.


• FOX Keys to the Game:

Yankees want a parade, not a game six.

On the other hand,

Phillies: Key guys need to hit.

Not mentioned: the team with more runs wins; three outs end a side of an inning; if you're at bat, you better face the outfield, otherwise you might not see the ball coming; and, of course, Alex Rodriguez is contemptible shit.


• Speaking of which, this seems as good a time as any to point out that, before Game Four, US Weekly ran a bit of gossip about A-Rod. Apparently he has not one but two pictures of himself as a fucking centaur. One of them hung above his bed. Stop and think about this for a moment. This man has two paintings of himself as a man around the chest and head and as a horse below the waist. Think about how this dude views himself as a mythically powerful beast with a chiseled man's frame and a horse cock. Now think about how he could pay someone to decorate his homes and manage his life and impart to it some semblance of class, but he never bothered.

Instead, it took him years to hit on the idea of getting a life coach, and only then after suffering an ugly public divorce, being seen with strippers, dating Madonna, getting criticized and dismissed in a memoir by one of the nicest coaches in the game, being outed as a career steroid abuser and alienating his fanbases in Seattle, Texas and New York, on top of being loathed pretty much everywhere else. Think about the intense oblivion you have to exist in to believe that any of this is tolerable and only, after intense pressure, should be altered in any way. Then stop and realize that this man earns a quarter of a billion dollars to hit balls with sticks. That's Alex Rodriguez.


• CHASE MOTHERFUCKING UTLEY hits a three-run home run. Chase Utley and the Baseball: Together We'll Go Far.


• Top of the 3rd: Teixeira slaps an infield hit that the Phillies field for a very close out at second against the fast Johnny Damon. This immediately starts Buck and McCarver in for an exchange about the "Neighborhood Play" that is nearly identical to the verbatim transcript I made of their discussion in ALCS Game Two. (If you click the link, just do a FIND for "neighborhood" to take you to their words.) Here's the thing I didn't go into in that gameblog: they were wrong. At the time I was more concerned with pointing out how McCarver's observations about the actual physical tagging of the bag were wrong, so I focused on that. What I didn't bring up was that he and Buck both emphasized that there's an unwritten umpiring rule that the "neighborhood" of the bag is good enough for an out when it comes to the double-play ball at second. This is wrong.

There aren't unwritten rules in baseball. Baseball rules are written. There are common close plays, such as first basemen taking their feet off first base when receiving a throw, but it's pretty easy to examine game tape and realize that they do this almost by rote just as they catch the ball and without any cheating. When we see the first baseman taking his foot off the bag early, usually it's because we want to. Similarly, in ALCS Game Two, McCarver saw Aybar clearly miss second base and decided that he'd missed it all game. It turned out he was wrong, every single time, except for the one obvious play that inspired his decision that Aybar had never touched the bag all game.

Maybe this seems like semantic nitpicking, but in both that game and in this one, you have a guy who played baseball and another guy who's paid to know about baseball — even if this is Joe Buck, and the word know is stretched laughably beyond all common understanding of the term — explicitly saying that there are absolute unwritten rules in a game that absolutely does not have unwritten rules. Instead of being chastened by their previous error, in addition to the cry of protest from Major League Baseball and umpires, they just reiterate their previous absolute confidence that there was a missed play at second that should be perceived through the lens of some ironclad understanding that exists somehow despite not being written or mandated anywhere. McCarver might as well talk about how any close play at first base should be examined in light of the rule that "the tie goes to the runner." In Major League Baseball, that rule doesn't exist either.


• Yankee's pitcher AJ Burnett is chased from the game in the bottom of the 3rd inning, after giving up a Jayson Werth liner up the middle that scored Chase Utley and a right-field shot from Raul Ibañez that scored Ryan Howard. Current score: Phils 5, Yankees 1. Reminder that Burnett's contract is 82.5 million dollars. Granted, that's over five years, but to put this in perspective, the team payroll of the Tampa Bay Rays for 2008 was 43.8 million dollars. I don't feel like doing math right now, but I suspect the annual cost of the Yankees pitcher leaving the mound, the third baseman and the first baseman, just for this year, is probably close to that Rays team total. And, sure, the Rays went to the Series last year, so blah blah blah, money doesn't win championships, right? But let's also stop to remember that the Rays could only do that by getting #1 draft picks year in and year out because they consistently had the worst team in baseball. Anyone who doesn't think the Yankees have an unreasonable competitive advantage on Day One of any season is fucking delusional.


• Top of the 4th: in the bottom of the first, Shane Victorino got plunked on the hand by a pitch. When asked how his x-ray went and how he's feeling, he says, "It's not broken. I'm fine." That man has some cool brevity.


• Top of the 4th: because Burnett has left the game, Girardi pinch-hits Yankees catcher Jorge Posada for Burnett's preferred catcher, backup Jose Molina. Posada's apparently a humorless dickhead. During an early season blowout at Tampa Bay this year, Girardi let right fielder Nick Swisher pitch an inning against the Rays. He even struck out a batter! It was a dull game, because the Yankees were so far behind, but watching Swisher was fun. It doesn't hurt that Swisher is sort of a silly and endearing guy. It's neat to see position players pitching. Everybody — Rays fans, Yankees fans, Swisher, Rays and Yankees players — liked it. Everyone except Posada, who after the game reportedly stomped around the clubhouse churlishly and delivered a lecture about how the Yankees were not going to win anything if they didn't take everything DEADLY SERIOUSLY.

Posada's whole personal attitude really contradicts the goofy impression you get from his face, neck and the segueing "faceneck" part of his head where human beings usually have chins. Basically, you look at the guy and think of "Beaky Buzzard," from the old Warner Brothers cartoons, that bird who would say, "Hyuck! Gulllp! Ahhh, nope nope nope nope. Ahhhmmm bringin' home mah baybee bummble bee, hyuck-yuck, ayuck yuck GORSSSHHH." But nope, that's not him. That's not Jorge Posada at all. He only looks like that. He's actually just a totally stupid asslord.


• Top of the 6th:

McCARVER: [Swisher] homered from 7 different lineup positions. Which shows you his versatility.

Or, you know, it shows you how fucking fatuous it is to think that lineup position has any impact on individual ability, a fact that has been statstically proven and confirmed and reconfirmed and reconfirmed for a decade. This is one of those bits of baseball conventional wisdom that amazes you when you realize how long it's been believed, principally because it doesn't make any fucking sense to begin with. This thinking prevailed for a century but shouldn't have gotten out of the development phase. How can someone's position in a line affect how good they are at doing something that bears no relation to their position in a line? You can get a room of hip-hop fans together and organize them any way you like, but if only two of them rule at freestyling, it won't matter when you get to them. They'll still be the only people dropping mad science.

Nick Swisher hit a bunch of home runs because he's good at two things:

1. Being patient at the plate, which forces a pitcher to throw him balls he can hit or otherwise put him on base via a walk.
2. Hitting home runs.

That's why he has those kinds of stats. It's not because he's "versatile." Unlike in the field, versatility means absolutely dick at the plate, where everyone has the same set of basic tasks. He did the thing he always does, only in a different order, because the thing he always does is something he can always do so long as he has a bat in his hand, while standing at home plate, waiting for someone to chuck a ball his way.

McCarver's praising Swisher for being versatile suggests that he's unique in behaving the exact same way despite being told to bat at different points in a sequence. This begs the question that others' performance should be altered by where they bat in an order, that you can magnify or mute traits by putting someone in one part of an order that they shouldn't be in. Again, this has been repeatedly statistically disproved, but what's sort of funny about it is that those who trade in this kind of wisdom have never asked themselves why, if it's true, it doesn't get applied more.

By their reasoning, you can modify batter behavior via some kind of batting chronology. You could take someone who hits a shitload of home runs in the #4 spot and somehow fuck him up completely by batting him first. His power would disappear. Presumably he'd get smaller and much faster. Similarly, you could say, "Hey, we're going to bat this guy eighth," and someone else who believes in traditional baseball would fly off the handle screaming, "NO! DON'T DO THAT! HE'LL TURN INTO A CATCHER! BAT HIM FOURTH BECAUSE WE NEED A FIRST BASEMAN!!!!"


• Top of the 7th: Cliff Lee is in his windup already and about to serve up a pitch. Posada puts up his hand and puts down his bat and starts to come out of the batter's box. The homeplate umpire just ignores him, because, like, TOO FUCKING LATE, PAL, and then Posada panics, squares up at the last second and takes a called strike. Then he takes a called third strike. Out. This is funny for two reasons:

1. In the last two games, Posada has basically called time out between every goddamn pitch from the 6th inning onward, wandered to the mound and had some interminable colloquy with whomever was pitching for the Yankees at the time. It's engendered showers of boos, likely been pretty unnecessary and made the games unbearably protracted and dull. Seeing Posada told, "Nope, you've had enough time," probably made every non-Yankee fan in America happy.
2. Jorge Posada is a complete fucking asslord.

You know what? Fuck it: here's another Beaky Buzzard cartoon.


• Bottom of the 7th: Chase Utley HAMMERS another home run. His second of the game. This ties Reggie Jackson's record for most home runs in a single World Series. Remember that we are only in Game Five, which means Utley could set the record if we go to another game. Chase Utley: The Next Stage in Hitting.


• Raul Ibañez TATERS a ball off Phil Coke and sends it about 420+ feet and into a billboard. Millions of potsmokers light up because, hey, free excuse. Millions of Philly fans rejoice. Millions more Yankee haters rejoice. Phils lead 8-2. Also, Raul Ibañez just keeps Ibañezing it up. Thanks, J-Shap.


There are about a billion reasons why the rest of the game turned into a sustained fucking heart attack, but it doesn't matter. Phillies win. The Series goes back to New York. For at least another game, I Am Not Angry.

Series Blog, Games 2 & 3: Corporate Whore Stadium and, Like, Double Guitars






As I explained at painful and unfunny length in the Game One blog, I'm sports superstitious. Sure, I'll be ironic and dismissive about it, but I still take it seriously behaviorally. Sort of like a guy who constantly busts on fat chicks yet has unprotected sex with a different one every night. I might dismiss my sitting in a weird position for "Good Luck," and even mine some good jokes from doing so, but I'm still the one sincerely doing something inadvisable or aesthetically wanting with my body.

Because the Phillies had won Game One while I was chitchatting with people online, I had to do that for Game Two, right? I didn't want the Phils to lose. The problem was, the people I'd been yammering at weren't online. Thankfully, one of my few Pennsylvania buddies, a former online writer I know, was around and willing to be bugged. Let's play ball!


World Series Game Two

• Pedro Martinez is starting for the Phillies, which a lot of people disagreed with because the game is at Yankee Stadium. Back in 2004, when he was still with the Sox, Pedro acknowledged the Yankees' recent success against him by saying, "What can I say? They're my daddy." Naturally, in the 2004 ALCS, Yankees fans serenaded him with huge chants of "WHO'S YOUR DADDY," which seemed to change the tone of those games. If I remember correctly, Red Sox manager Terry Francona brought Pedro into Game Seven to pitch in relief, whereupon Pedro immediately gave up a double, instantly recharging a dead crowd and bringing them to full throat with those chants. So let's just say that a lot of people had a case for this starting decision's being karmically bad.

Personally, I agreed with it. Pedro's a better pitcher than the shaky Cole Hamels and the human question mark that is Joe Blanton. With Hamels, it's a question of when he'll start to lose his poise, not if; and with Blanton, you never know if he'll fully check into the game at all or instead come out firing on all cylinders of Bad Joe Blanton. With Pedro, you know you get 90-100 pitches, which should usually make for 5-6 innings. You know you'll give up a run or two.

Besides, and this is important: 2009 Pedro and 2004 Pedro are different pitchers separated less by ability than by mentality. 2004 Pedro kept trying to pitch like 2000 Pedro: dominating speed and 12-6 curveballs, but he'd clearly lost that. His fastball no longer topped out at 97 when he needed it, and the curve seemed to be thrown constantly at about 2:35 on the clock face. At the time, he hadn't yet acknowledged the inevitable truth that he had to change his strategy for getting guys out, that effort or emotion wouldn't make a tiring arm perform the way it had years before. Now, though, the 2009 Pedro understands that, be it wisdom or the cruel reality of his recurring injuries forcing a conclusion on him. He pitches like a guy who know's his stuff has to elude and dupe rather than dominate and overwhelm. He basically went from being Wild Thing Rick Vaughn to veteran spitballer Eddie Harris in Major League, and I think it'll work out.


• As in 2004, the Yankees' organist is goosing the "WHO'S YOUR DADDY" chants by playing the "LET'S GO, YANKEES!" music in between what seems like every pitch. But this is a different stadium. It's nowhere near as loud; acoustically, the widened upper decks, rising outward, don't contain and reflect noise in the same way as the almost cosy upper decks of the old Yankee Stadium. The old stadium had metal girders in the lower and upper decks supporting the stadium structure, which allowed the upper deck to be situated closer to the field at the expense of obstructed views, making the venue more intimate. Because the Billion-Dollar Corporate Kickback is actually designed to increase interior commercial space and to charge more for seats, it flares up and outward, increasing the stadium's girth and essentially letting all that noise rise up and out. Think of the containment properties of a highball glass versus a martini glass, and you have a good working example of the difference between the old stadium and the new corporatized abortion. The old one harnessed atmosphere. This one harnesses dollars. Unfortunately for the Yankees, you can't fire up your team and oppress the visiting players with the sounds of cash registers. It's much quieter in there now.


• It's also quieter because, no matter how much the organist is trying to goose chants along, he or she is playing to the deaf. Say what you will about the ugly barbarism of old school Bronx Bleacher Creatures, but they made noise. The Yankees not only reduced hardcore-fan presence proportionally within the stadium by the design of its seating, they also did so via the pricing. Postseason games are already so punitively expensive that they tend to price out all but bankers, brokers, lawyers and other assorted predators and whores, but to say that the regular-season pricing in Corporate Kickback stadium requires a personal loan just to gain entrance misstates the case. You don't have enough credit to qualify for that kind of loan — certainly not in this economy. A 20-man construction crew makes substantially more noise than 20 junior traders at Salomon Brothers, but guess which group Yankees ownership wants to be able to actually get into the building? The organist can pump away at that LET'S GO YANKEES!/WHO'S YOUR DADDY riff all he or she wants, but a much larger proportion of the people in the seats are too busy texting on fucking iPhones to give a shit. That is, assuming they're not inside buying thousand-dollar art or a $100 Kobe Beef burger.


• I should also point out that the WHO'S YOUR DADDY chant isn't working because Pedro struck out two batters in the first inning.


• I'm getting nervous because I realize that the Phillies aren't crushing the ball yet, and I'm not chatting with anyone, so maybe it's my fault. I find my buddy J-Shap online:

ME: Are you watching the World Series? I feel like absolutely nobody I know is watching the World Series.
J-SHAP: Literally it is on muted to my left.
ME: You missed the Yankees' organist pumping the "LET'S GO YANKEES" notes over and over to start the "WHO'S YOUR DADDY" chant.
J-SHAP: Are we in Bush's first term again? Is John Paul Deuce still poping hard? Terri Schiavo? Napoleon Dynamite?
ME: Vote for Pedro Martinez.
J-SHAP: Textbook execution there.

• Raul Ibañez loops a ball just barely in fair territory, sending home a run. The Phillies are up 1-0. It should also be mentioned that this postseason's officiating has been so abysmal that Buck and McCarver take time to point out that the fair/foul call was correct. Buck and McCarver have been surprisingly decent so far, despite a willingness to praise Pedro so lavishly that you'd expect they had money on the Yankees and were trying to jinx the Phils. Still, Ibañez's hit is good juju, leaving me to think this chatting idea wasn't so bad.

J-SHAP: I believe one of The Onion's keys to victory was for Raul Ibañez to "keep Raul Ibañezing it up."
ME: I still sort of wish I played guitar so I could buy an Ibanez and then do the obnoxious newscaster thing of talking in a normal tone of voice and then mention my guitar with an out-of-nowhere heavily accented Ibañez.
J-SHAP: haha
ME: "Shitchyeah, brah, thing is, Jimmy Page was the first dude to ever play, like, a double-necked Eeh ban ñez back when he was tourin with the Yardbirds, bro."
J-SHAP: I remember their legendary gig in the Bolivarian Republic of Baynazwayla.
ME: They had to make the Dodgers play on the road because they sold out Hugo Chavez Ravine for five shows even though they were only booked for two.
J-SHAP: The venue originally known as Chan Ho Park.
ME: lmao
(we go to the next inning, where Ibañez makes a great diving catch)
ME: That's a good defensive guitar.
J-SHAP: Just perpetually Ibañezing here.

• I really really hate the fucking Yankees, so I'm just all kinds of nervous during this game. I'm just trying to ignore everything and distract myself. Which means more chat nonsense:

J-SHAP: My favorite annual World Series tradition is the outcries of why the World Series can't be played at dinnertime so the kids can watch the games, and savor it with their childlike innocence, with their mitts, and catch the foul balls and the crackerjacks spit out of the TV, and so pitchers would pitch complete games like they used to all the time back before there were relief pitchers or black people or black relief pitchers.
ME: I can't believe Taco Bell's not requiring the stolen base to qualify for the free taco this year. This kind of terms-free consumerism disgusts me.
J-SHAP: Bahaha really? OBAMA GRR.
ME: lol
J-SHAP: Tim Raines and I miss our country.
ME: What did Tim Raines do?
J-SHAP: He earned all his tacos with meritocratic stolen bases, sliding bootstraps first.

• This game is reaching really unnerving levels. Pedro has given up two solo home runs. I'm just talking about anything at this point:

ME: Here's a question: am I the only person who gets drunk and eats too many chips at once or bites into an over-toasted slice of bread on a sandwich and cuts and scrapes up his gums and the top of his mouth?
J-SHAP: Destrooooooooooooooyed the roof of my mouth on some toasted rye bread.
J-SHAP: Like, genuinely torn up, didn't even notice it happening.
J-SHAP: And then I was like hey — ahh.
ME: haha
ME: Well it's good to know that I'm neither uniquely clumsy nor do I have a wussy mouth.
J-SHAP: It's the subtlest killer this side of a carbon monoxide leak because you would never expect BREAD to do you like that.
ME: I thought my wife was trying to kill me with sandwiches for a while there. Because she'd toast the shit out of them, and I was like, "There are shards in my mouth. Fucking SHARDS. What are you doing to me?"
J-SHAP: Once you start chewing you're basically flossing with a bed of nails.
ME: Here's something the FOX crew won't tell you about Teixiera: he stabs and murders drifters. Also, do you think Buck and McCarver could be trying harder for the last inning to jinx the shit out of Pedro?
J-SHAP: Pedro is apparently the greatest interview in the game.
ME: You know who else gave good interviews? Hitler.

• And here's the thing with Pedro: not only are Buck Buck B'cCarver! trying to jinx the shit out of him, it's working. He's given up two unlucky-pitch solo shots (one that hung, one that was a meaty curve low to Matsui, who loves a low curve), and he's already at nearly 100 pitches. And Phillies manager Charlie Manuel leaves him in. This is bad news.


• And the bad news pays off with another Yankees run. I almost talked myself into Manuel's decision. Almost. See, here's the thing: Joe Posnanski — who's just a really great sportswriter and generously talkative blogger — has this kind of ongoing debate with himself over whether Greg Maddux or Pedro Martinez is basically the best pitcher ever. He comes down on the side of Pedro, but what he has to say about Maddux is both effusive and totally justified. Maddux pitched with a gift for accuracy and strategy in a way we may never see again. His fastball wasn't fast; it was, by standards of pure velocity, nearly a gag. But he could almost always put the ball exactly where he wanted it, usually in relation to what a hitter liked and how he preferred to hit.

Stories about Maddux's baseball brain are legion. Supposedly he once turned to a teammate in the dugout and told him to move because the ball was going to be coming his way soon; sure enough, the batter fouled the ball into the Atlanta dugout. On another occasion, he supposedly told teammates to watch the base coach, because he was about to nearly get leveled by a foul, and of course the batter pulled a screaming liner right by him. The point to all these stories was that Maddux wasn't obsessed with being BIGGER than the batters, or being bigger than the game. He just wanted to be smarter. Showing who was boss was immaterial next to knowing what was likely to happen with a given batter and a given pitch. If he studied his opponent better than his opponent studied him, he might know where the ball would wind up, if the guy hit it at all. My favorite Maddux quote — which may be apocryphal, but expresses a central truth to the man anyway — is an exchange a friend of mine is fond of quoting.

REPORTER: What's your "perfect" game?
MADDUX: 27 straight groundball outs.

Nothing about being overwhelming, nothing about making batters look foolish. Hell, the guy's even willing to let them put the ball in play. He just wants them to hit the ball to a defender each time.

Here's the thing: based on what he did tonight, if Pedro pitches another year, the argument has to be over. Maddux was only Maddux; whereas Pedro started out his career as Pedro and can end it as another Maddux. His numbers in his prime are sick. He had the talent, but now it's obvious how crafty he is as well. During this game, he kept silencing that WHO'S YOUR DADDY chant by nearly striking out the side over and over. And the strikeouts were just ridiculous. I can't remember who it was — I want to say Teixeira — but Pedro struck someone out on three changeups so slow that altogether they might have amounted to 97 mph. He also struck out Jeter by fast-pitching him, shortening the interval between his pitches, leaving the Yankee captain swinging suddenly at a ball he wasn't expecting to be thrown for another ten seconds or so. It was like watching Maddux again. If he does this for one more season, I think we put the discussion to bed. Pedro Martinez is the greatest pitcher in history. There's nothing else you have to learn about him.

Unless you're Charlie Manuel or Grady Fucking Little. Because if you're either of these men, you haven't yet realized that Pedro Martinez is absolutely, positively, always-will-be, completely done after 100 pitches. You have to pull him from the game.

From the moment Manuel sent Pedro back out there after 100 pitches, the game was over. The score remained the same through the end of the game, and we go to Philly with the Series split 1-1.


World Series Game Three

I didn't watch this because I was at a Halloween party out of town for hours. I took one look at the final score and decided not to bother the next morning. My head hurt too much, and I needed the room on my DVR for more World Series baseball, seven hours of NFL Red Zone and the Packers-Vikings game in its entirety on the off chance it wasn't a BREAT FRRV nightmare. (It was.) Since there's no blog content for this game, why not consider reading this amazing article on Deadspin about the travesty that is the New Yankee Stadium?

It's devastating. You already knew that that the stadium is a monument to luxury, a giant sybaritic boil on a city with increasing third-world-level income inequality, a nauseating eruption of boom-year largesse in the middle of a lower-class neighborhood riven by bust-era misery, corporate welfare conspicuously celebrating its consumption in an area where real welfare may not keep people from succumbing to poverty.

There's not a single part of the article that isn't astonishingly quotable, but to pick something, try this passage, responding to the question of why the new stadium sucks:

Because the $400,000,000 direct public investment is the equivalent of 8,000 teachers or cops or firemen at $50,000 per year.

Because the remaining $800,000,000 of the city's bonding authority was supposed to go to build things that we actually need, like the Second Avenue Subway, improved parks, or new or improved schools, police stations, firehouses or hospitals.

Because it would have only taken about $40,000,000 to fix up Macombs Dam Park, the Park that "new Yankee Stadium" sits on top of, while it will cost $120,000,000 to demolish Yankee Stadium and build replacement parks.

And if there were any doubt about the fact that there is nothing even remotely good that can be said about the new Yankee stadium, remember this: the Yankees play there.

More gameblogs to come.