Osama Bin Laden

Ten years ago, I went to sleep after watching the end of the 8th inning of the 2001 World Series. That was the World Series when the Yankees were playing to win back happiness from the depths of post 9/11 depression that existed in NYC. I'm not a Yankees fan, and I never thought about that aspect during the series - just that they wouldn't 4peat. When I woke up, I found that they lost and I was in jubiliation at the Diamondbacks victory. I made sure that I made any Yankee fan who crossed my path suffer for Rivera's defeat at the hands of Luis Gonzalez's bloop single. In the end, I never thought I could wake up to better news.
About 2 weeks ago, I watched 9 Innings at Ground Zero and was visibly moved by the aspect of baseball bringing America together (from Bush's World Series first pitch to Jeter's heroics to the Mets captivating America by making a run for their own pennant). Much of it is very powerful. It's actually impossibly to watch without tears, but it takes us back to an America that hasn't existed since the great partisan divide of the Iraq War (for better or for worse).
Today, I woke up to much better news - Osama was dead. It turned out that if I stayed up another half hour or so, I would have heard the news as the reporters broke into it. Nevertheless, I wanted to shout "USA, USA, USA" like the hordes of joyous celebration at West Point, in the subways, in Times Square, and from the Philadelphia / Mets game. It was about 615 and my wife was still asleep, but I wanted to wake her up to tell her, but she still had about an hour before her alarm clock was set to go off, so I split it down the middle and told her at 645. When I did, she asked me if something was wrong, and all I could say was "we killed Bin Laden. The most wanted terrorist in the world was now dead, and everything had changed. The air of celebrations hit home. And with that, in many ways, it was like America came together again - save a few comments from anonymous You Tube posters and the like speculating conspiracy or judging whether it was hypocritcal to kill a mass murderer for murdering our people.
In the hindsight of a million news stories, I have to admit that there were times that I wondered if we'd ever get him. Years and years of wondering why Bush was failing and finally Obama made it a point to get him, and somehow, we got the intel to make it happen, and I have to say that I'm just glad that we did.
In the classes that I taught today, we briefly looked at all of the headlines from all of the major news sources, the blog sites (Huffington Post and Townhall), and Al Jazeera (Arab news network). It's interesting to see the difference, to see the words of Obama (we watched him on You Tube), and to contemplate what Bush would have done. It's amazing to think about how things have changed, and as I sit here, there are scary things, too.
I called my parents to tell them it happened, and they knew. My mom was reflecting on how they're quacks over there and would do something while wondering about the need for celebration ("but this was how it was at the end of World War 2"). I know that there will be some semblance of retaliation. We must be ever vigilant to that... we're not in a 9/10 world anymore, but that said... there is something powerful about the moment... the change.
Ayman al-Zawahiri is still out there. There are plenty of lunatics ready to make jihad and suffering on the West. The war has not been won (or lost) and yet there are people who will contemplate what we should do now that Bin Laden has finally died.
Sometimes, the world just becomes too real for sports. One has to wonder about all of the changes and events of the weekend and stop and think... to find time to enjoy the simple things, but all the same, to pause and reflect and remember our history and our future.
And to remain ever mindful.

Roger McDowell

On Seinfeld, he was the 2nd spitter. Sure, Hernandez was upset at Kramer razzing him, but it definitely wasn't a magic loogie!
In baseball, he was a career .500 pitcher, but he did post a 3.30 ERA for his career that ran from 1985-1996. That has to say something. He also had a fair bit of saves, and while they are baseball's most over-rated statistic EVER, he did have a purpose when he played.
As the Atlanta pitching coach, he was tasked with making the team resemble that of the late eighties and nineties. However, instead, he took a couple of hecklers to task in ways that were homophobic and threatening. They were so degrading that do-nothing commissioner Bud Selig did something - suspend McDowell for 2 weeks, give him sensitivity training, and agree to have him personally apologize to one fan and his family.
To this, we have 2 thoughts:
1) don't be an asshole.
2) don't be an asshole back.
I learned a long time ago that you can't win in a confrontational argument. If you're a professional, you have to act like one. Look at former President Bush and the fact that he had to deal with people wearing Kill Bush T-shirts. Sarah Palin and John McCain were brought together for sex pictures during their run for president (as was Obama and Hillary). When you're a public figure, you get this stuff... like it or not. You're manhood isn't in question when drunken yahoos are shouting insults at you. Play through and ignore them. It's part of the game.
Sadly, this isn't the first time that the Atlanta Braves have had to face the consequences on some redneck comments by one of their pitchers. Who can forget John Rocker, who screwed up so badly that even Twisted Sister got upset at him and refused to let him come out to their song anymore.
Now, don't get me wrong. I get the call for him to be fired for insensitivity unparalleled, and as we learned on Glee last night, once the toothpaste is out of the container, it doesn't go back in, but there's something else... the right to earn a living.
Is McDowell competent enough to pitch or be a pitching coach? Is firing him going to permanently keep him from getting hired again (and thus being a ward of the state)? Aren't we supposed to be punishing people so they learn from their mistakes?
Because if we can't allow them to learn from their mistakes, then why not just feed them to the sharks?
To be honest, I'm sure a lot of people would like to see him eaten by Jaws.

Derek Jeter

I know... I know... I've said it before about a great many things: A) I'm a Red Sox fan and a "Certified Yankee Hater" (I've got the t-shirt to prove it).

B) Derek Jeter's flip play is the most over-rated play this side of Willie Mays' backward catch (great play, but Mays was well known for losing his hat to make plays more theatrical and that yard was really deep - players today would watch a homer rather than get a chance to duplicate the feat) in the history of baseball.

C) Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty was a great book and an even greater feeling (though we wouldn't know for sure until the Angels in 2002 and the Marlins in 2003; Detroit in 2006 was just the icing on the cake) to know it was over... yeah!

D) I didn't watch the original single of the Luis Gonzalez game winner. All of my talk about Mariano Rivera being over-rated was shown for what it really was - knowing the truth as I went to bed after the end of the 8th inning. I did celebrate the next day, but it would be ages before I saw the video of the whole inning.

E) I have come to grudgingly respect Joe Torre since Tom Verducci's excellent Yankee Years book. In fact, some of my greatest dreams (and worst experience in the last 5 years of teaching) came from Mike Mussina and Jeter rallying the troops together in 2005 and thinking that giving my students a motivational push would make them want to do the same for me. Fat chance of that, but it's still a nice dream for a Mr. Holland moment.

F) Since the Yankees didn't make the playoffs in 2008 and since the Red Sox won in 2007, I have lost some of my hatred for the Yankees. Well, that and the fact that I don't watch full Yankees / Red Sox games religiously since I spend more time with my wife (we met at the end of 2007).

That being said...

On Saturday, I watched Nine Innings from Ground Zero, which is actually an HBO production, and let me just say...

It was the best documentary this side of Ken Burns Baseball. However, I don't think I would or even could watch it twice. Yes, there are scenes that stand out (the aforementioned flip, the George Bush first pitch, and Brielle Saracini), and those can be watched again, but even those are super emotional - especially Saracini.

When you watch Saracini, she's a tween reading a letter about being bummed out over the events of 9/11, but she's writing it to Derek Jeter and asking if he can cheer her up with a phone call. Not knowing who she is or isn't, it's at that moment that they reveal that her father was Victor Saracini, the pilot of Flight 175, which was horrifically slammed into the World Trade Center on that September morning, killing everyone aboard (for a total of 2,819 victims). And it's at this moment that the emotion of the rest of the film truly hits - it's human lives lost, stopped, and completely eliminated. It's survivers that don't know how to make sense of it. Looking at the link to all of the dead and what the stats mean (the lives, the money, the city, our America), it's just catastrophic and over-whelming and completely emotional.

I was a blubbering wreck.

Watching Jeter 10 minutes before tell Bush to throw from the mound or face being booed while giving him advice to throw a strike brings it all home... as my friend Dale said, to not include that on Ken Burns' The 10th Inning, wasn't right. It is our game and what our game can do. For all of the pro Yankee sentiment that they should have won (and while I wouldn't have wanted them to win ANY of the other 5 World Series they won since my rebirth interest in baseball after the Air Force, I don't think I would have minded that one for all of these reasons in hindsight). To understand that there was a visible presence of anti-Arizona sentiment for what this win would mean for New York... it just said everything. But we forget that... and we forget that the Mets almost went to the playoffs that year before folding as America cheered for them, too - from the moment of Mike Piazza's game winner to their last hurrah in that elongated month of baseball.

And it goes back to the event of the flip... fat ass Jeremy Giambi chugging around the base path on a shot to the corner, and somehow, some idiot decision allowed him to move around third even though he had to be gasping for air, and if only he wasn't Jeremy Giambi, but rather, someone who didn't look like a softball player from a beer league, he would have made it a half step sooner or slid to avoid the tag... but he didn't.

And for that, he was out and the New York comeback was in motion and that was it for Oakland. It was finished. Seattle was soon to be history, and it was all because some force of nature compelled Jeter to be a superhero that post season. His game winning home run in the World Series against Byung-Hyun Kim, perhaps the worst reliever this side of Joe Nathan and Rod Beck, and the set up for the second comeback the next night against Kim... it all made it seem like he really did save the day...

And then Rivera folded like an ironing board being put into storage, and it was all over. And for this new perspective... it's really there and understandable in truth and reality and perspective and sadness and nostalgia from the Yankees, their fans, and Rudy Giuliani. And perhaps, there is a lot of anti-Yankee hate in some of the Amazon reviews... and perhaps there is some for Rudy and Bush, too, but politics aside, they were the men of the hour. Bush was at his finest in that pitch and with the bullhorn. After all, this is 2 years before Iraq and in a time when people wore anti-Osama Bin Laden shirts... a time before we all took the following statement from Condoleeza Rice (as taken from CNN): Still, she disclosed that the U.S. intelligence community had intercepted communications from al Qaeda suspects during the summer of 2001 that included these words: "Unbelievable news in the coming weeks;" "Big event ... There will be a very, very, very, very big uproar;" and "There will be attacks in the near future." Rice described these interceptions as "troubling, yes." But she added, "They don't tell us when; they don't tell us where; they don't tell us who; and they don't tell us how."

to mean that America was somehow complicit in the act of 9/11 because we didn't know enough to stop it. And for this partisanship, perhaps, it's the ultimate treason in America to believe that we did this (even Bill Clinton condemned the attitude of blaming our own country for this radical act of jihad).

But alas, we have forgotten so much about that day. I remember one time in teaching 9/11, I had a video of the events from Youtube, which played the news clips and people left the room in tears. They had literally never seen it before or it was personal to them (we never know who in the room has lost a friend, neighbor, or relative), and I felt truly bad for daring to show a video so that I could make them understand the statistics and events that they were to try to write about (in part because many of their comments weren't grounded in reality - through no fault of their own, but based on how they were caught in a post Iraq / Afghanistan uprising attitude of the media and the world around them).

And yet, I knew why I did it. This was our history, and the same tears I felt at MANY times in the video were something that makes me realize that we should never forget.

And it was something that says no amount of understanding what America could have done to make someone hate us so much that they would plan out a heinous attack on this level WOULD EVER JUSTIFY their having done what they did or even TO ALLOW US TO DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT TO KEEP IT FROM HAPPENING AGAIN. And while I don't claim that America is innocent or totally happy go lucky nice to the whole world, I don't see that search for WHY as being worthwhile - only WHAT can we do to eliminate this evil from the world and make sure it never comes back again. For that, I have come to wonder that if by doing anything so rational as hunting for understanding, we are in a sense enabling the evil in the world that would seek to destroy us, and for that, I have changed from the 30 year old man that stood in front of a room slack jawed as the building came down while 9th graders looked to me for understanding and I had none - only an all too wrong idea that the only thing that mattered after 9/11 was maintaining our lives and rights as normal - when in reality, we were changing for always and needed to adjust to winning a war that we would quickly be forced into.

But all of this detracts from what is good with America, and the end result of that is baseball (amongst other things). For anything that gives us happiness in its entertainment and sense of pleasure while making our day brighter is good, and this isn't something that a cornered dog lashing out with 19 of his minions to devastate the true sense of normalcy and the world that we live in some sense of jihad purpose would ever be able to understand.

And if there are rights and truths in the nearly 10 years since this day they are that anyone can offer something, even something insignificant to a large part of the world, to make the world a better place.

For that, I love baseball, slot canyons, waterfalls, Christmas, music, the history and culture of the country I live in, my family, and especially my wife.

And for that same reason, I despise tyranny and blind partisan hatred and agression.

Hideki Matsui

In a meaningless spring training game on Saturday, Chipper Jones, a sort of star, hit his first home run of what will probably be his last year.
This morning, a second quake rocked Japan. This one wasn't as strong as the 8.9 magnitude first one that struck on Friday and sent tsunami waves to the West Coast of America, literally ruining one entire California harbor. In the turmoil of the 4th worst earthquake in the last 150 years, a second Hydrogen explosion at a nuclear reactor leaves the world north of Tokyo in a state that could be hellaciously dangerous in a very short time - if that time isn't now.
At times like this, sports don't matter. What matters is what people do to rise up for their fellow men and women.
In this, former Japanese baseball great Hideki Matsui, who now plays for the Oakland A's (after a stint with the Angels and a stint with the Yankees) is stepping up with his team as they offer to do a fund raiser for the victims of the earthquake when they face the Seattle Mariners who feature the greatest Japanese player in history this side of Sadahura Oh. Yes, Ichiro vs. Godzilla will be a game that means something for the world instead of American League West also rans, and isn't that what baseball is supposed to be about?
We are bringing good things to people and entertaining society to make us forget about our woes in times of trouble. Whether that's Albert cracking home runs for Down's syndrome or pink bats for breast cancer or George Bush taking Derek Jeter's advice to throw a strike as the players all wear FDNY and NYPD hats after 911. We've always been there when society calls to us, and that's the way it should be.
So we'll get the perfection of singles and speed with Ichiro, a player that had it drilled into him from a very young age that to be the best, one had to give all. We see this with rescue workers who use chainsaws and pick axes to reach bodies of survivors and the dead.
We'll get a class act who apologized to his boss for getting injured after playing in 1,000 games straight. And the life philosophy of Matsui is what the Japanese will do as they rebuild their country all over again. Just like in the devastation of World War 2, their world will come back together and will be stronger and a force for the world as a whole.
And through it all, we will come together and we'll get back to baseball being the good things in life - not the bad things in life bringing us together to look after our fellow man, which when you think about it really is the best thing in life.

Kurt Bevacqua

Every once in a while, I get a hankering to buy baseball cards again. I'll look for them on e-Bay in hopes that there will be something cool and cheap. The two don't often go together. I do have a Pedro Martinez and Bob Gibson jersey card that I got for under $10 with shipping. I don't care about the real value. I just like that two of my favorite pitchers of all time are memorialized on one card with their jerseys fashioned into the card itself.
Cards like this are what makes collecting nowadays special. I never pulled a card like that from a real pack, but I did get some cards that were above and beyond the sets themselves. That said, other than ones of Mark McGwire's numbered home runs (especially #55), I really don't think much of any of them.
Baseball card companies today had to go back to the concept of something special to set them apart. For example, there's a 2007 Topps Derek Jeter card that also features George W. Bush and Mickey Mantle. That's a cool card. Really.
However, it's not the 1976 card that features Kurt Bevacqua of the Milwaukee Brewers blowing a huge ass bubble to win the Joe Garagiola / Bazooka Bubble Gum Blowing Championship. Things like that don't happen nowadays.

That said, it took a whole different era to respect Garagiola since he was the guy who spiked Jackie Robinson back in the day. A large part of his life was spent explaining away how he wasn't a racist until he eventually turned into a voice of the good things in baseball.
But that's not why this card is so cool. Kurt played from 1971-1985 for 7 teams. He finished with a .236 average and 27 homeruns. He stayed around as a bench player for that time. He did have a 3 hit game in the 82 World Series that saw him hit a homerun, but he wasn't anything great.
That said, he was a bubblegum blowing champion, and frankly, that goes a long way towards something great.

Baseball cards today are still nice. My wife bought me a pack of 2011 Topps, which didn't really feature anyone special, but the anticipation that I'll get someone life altering in that 5 cards for $1 pack is still like playing the lottery and seeing if I can get more than 2 numbers.

However, going to shows is more about seeing the names and the faces than being able to plunk down big bucks for the Golden Era of collecting (1950s and 1960s). There's the Platinum Era, too, but I can't afford tobacco cards. Nevertheless, I'm always amazed by what cards go for - even in 1 and sub 1 condition.

All the same, it's still fun to wander around the Convention Center in Valley Forge and think about what I could get.

Dallas Green

People count on baseball for all of the good things in life. Sure, there are incidents that are horrible and ugly with spitters, fighters, and cursing up a blue streak, but baseball is a sport that matters because it doesn't matter. It's not politics; right, left or in between. It's not a give and take relationship. It just gives and you either accept what it gives you or you mope. It has a history that is all its own. Nobody questions it that much and contemplates ulterior motives on it that much (save excluding African Americans, collusion, and strikes that need to be handled by larger than life authorities).
When baseball is at its best, George Bush is throwing a strike over the center of the plate and Mike Piazza is bringing the city of New York back to life. When America needs to heal, there is baseball. For this, we love it.
All the same, sometimes, baseball loses its players in horrific and tragic ways. For these times, we cry, but usually, we don't see these things.
Nevertheless, when the world cries and baseball cries, too, then we know that there is something wrong in the world.
And it is at times when Dallas Green, the former manager of the 1980 World Champion Phillies loses a grand daughter (Christina-Taylor Green) as part of the shooting that seriously wounded Gabrielle Giffords and many of her staff members and people present at a town hall rally AS WELL AS killing 5 other people, we all mourn.
The whack jobs from both sides making their noise... either in terms of gunshots fired or claims that anyone who joins the Tea Party is this kind of whack job, when clearly the gunman was a mentally ill man.... we just can't believe or support this type of insanity.
We wonder where and when it will all end and moderation will take back this country again. We wonder when the hate and the partisanship will end.
We look to the meaningless things in life to distract us from that: PIXAR movies, waterfalls, slot canyons, music, day trips to beautiful places, music, and Christmas decorations. But the decorations have all come down. The world outside is cold, and warmth is still a few months away. And so there is only one meaningful distraction that always makes it better, and for that, I sit here waiting for my wife to come home because this cold dark and insane world just feels too far away from the good things in life.