Last week the Mitchell Report concerning the use steroids and Human Growth Hormone was released and much of the sports world has gone into the vapours concerning the allegations.
It was a given that Barry Bonds was a juicer. and that Mark McGuire was pumping the stuff. But when it was charged that Roger Clemens, Andy Petitt and Eric Gange had been using either steroids or HGH many of the sports writer were "shocked, shocked," while the remainder claimed to know that such nonsense had been going on for many years. In either case, the sports writers have proven themselves to be craven in either claiming not to know while actually knowing, or knowing and not reporting because they didn't want to burn their sources.
Whatever the case, baseball has been regarded the sacramental sport in the United States. Certain eggheads have even claimed that in order to understand the United States one must understand baseball. But, of course, that was said before so many players were recruited from the Caribbean. But there is a certain mythic quality to baseball that must at least we must pretend to exist -- the late spring afternoon played in a newly mown field by farmers' strapping sons or hardscrabble coal miners' sons making the professional league because of their strength and talent.
The great game, unfortunately, has long gone beyond those myths (not unlike the old Playboy myth that the centerfold is a graduate philosophy student at Oxford who poses nude in front of a camera just for the hell of it). But one finds oneself hoping that the players will at least play without the help of steroids and HGH in the same way that a young man hopes that the figure of a Playboy center fold is natural and not the result of implants or air brushing.
The difference, of course, is that baseball has always held itself to be a reflection of truth, justice and the American way. Playboy has held it's photographic endeavors as representations of "the girl next door", which is great unless it is your daughter who is the girl next door.
But to get back to cases, there are men in baseball who have used steroids or HGH. Some of them have been named. Major League Baseball has not condemned them. The owners have not condemned them. The players union has not disowned them. No player who has been named has had a Marion Jones moment. And those players who have admitted to using HGH (never steroids) have claimed that they only used HGH to recover from an injury (ask yourself this question: have any of your co-workers been prescribe HGH to recover from an industrial injury? Your co-worker lost more, percentage-wise and in real terms, more money than the recovering baseball player, as did your co-workers' employer due to his absence).
The juicers have tainted baseball, the Great Game. And as much as the protest that they haven't been goosed by a hypodermic needle, they have wrecked the image of the game. Let's face it. Politicians are expected to be rotten, cheats and corrupt. We, the populace have no choice but to pay them through our taxes. But the pay of ball players is based on our disposable income. We have, in theory, control of the game, and we have been led to believe that the game is clean. There may be drunks or womanizers or just plain jerks, but on the field we expect every player to play without performance enhancing drugs. Is it not a strange thing that Babe Ruth, a known souse, knocked in so many run runs, while Barry Bonds had to surpass his record while using steroids. Hank Aaron managed to break the record on his own talent.
Many years ago Brett Butler of the Los Angeles Dodgers was sidelined by throat cancer. At the time it was assumed that his cancer was caused by the use of chewing tobacco or Copenhagen snuff. The result of Mr. Butler's malady was that the use of chaw or snuff in the major leagues was pretty much ended in favor of the use of sunflower seeds. MLB did not want to be associated with a substance that might (and very rarely might) be associated with cancer. So instead of players perhaps getting cancer from chaw or snuff, they have deigned to use a substance that will more likely give them cancer later in life such as steroids and HGH.They have not learned the lesson of the NFL players, such as Lyle Alzado and John Matuzeck, who, being steroids users, succumbed to cancer at early ages. Chaw and demon rum are benign compared to the wonders or modern chemistry. The chances of a player getting cancer from Red Man or Meyers' Rum are much less than his getting cancer from a Balco product, but since the the effects of chaw or booze ( spitting or stumbling) are not as apparent as steroids. MLB has ignored the use of the Juice because an uneducated fan base expects home runs instead of good in the park ball and homers make money while getting upset over an honest brown stream of tobacco juice spit over home plate that results in no improvement of a player's performance.
Let's face it. Baseball will never be what it was or what we hope it was. There have always been cheaters in baseball and there always will. But we, as fans, can shun or shame the dirty players. Can you imagine what a bunch of fans would do to Roger Clemens by shouting "Juicer!" the ext time he goes on the mound?
Kudos to Curt Schilling, a truly honorable and ball player with heart (remember his World Series victory pitching while bleeding into his sock) who has called out the juicers. If only more players had his sense of honor.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Let's take "my bad" to a new level
As regular readers of this space are well aware, your faithful correspondent is not a writer of the most elegant or proper English prose. But he does try to write proper English. By "proper English" he means the Queen's English or standard American English as was spoken and/or written in the English speaking world up until twenty years ago.
This is the English that was regularly in the popular press, in literature and in the electronic media. It was the English as taught by Webster, Fowler, and Strunk and White. It was English meant to be used as a lingua franca among English speakers. It was free of dialect, cant, occupational terms and slang in general.
In those days slang was written with quotation marks to signify that the slang term was rather suspect and dialect was identified as so. There was an assumption that there was a proper way to speak English and an improper way to speak English. Proper English was the language spoken in public or among those outside of one's social or occupational group. In other words, a machinist would refer to one thousandth of an inch a a "thou" among other machinists, while using the term "one thousandth of an inch" among those outside the trade. Or Japanese-Americans would refer to elastic as "gommu" among other Japanese-Americans while using the word "elastic" among the gaijin.
About twenty years ago, the various new media and the entertainment industry decided that they wanted to appeal to youth instead of conveying clear information that would be understood by all English speakers. They began using street slang and business slang. The result, more recently has been the regular use of such terms as "my bad", "gettin' real (or makin' it real)", "hottie" and "taking it to the next level." What do these terms mean? They are so loose in definition as to mean nothing. Does "my bad" mean that one has been bad, done something bad, made a mistake or is "bad" in the street sense? Does "gettin' real" mean being sincere, a genuine item or feeling or getting down to brass tacks? Is Monica Belluci a "hottie?" Was Deborah Kerr? Was Audrey Hepburn? What exactly is a "hottie"? When a young man and young woman have been kissing one another good night for several weeks and one suggests that they take their relationship to the next level does that mean that they should go back to holding hands? Or start going to bed together? One wonders if, in announcing the declaration of war against Japan, if had the current trend toward the use of street language had become popular, Franklin Roosevelt would have announced to the nation, "Yesterday, December seventh, the shit hit the fan in Pearl Harbor."
Here's the gist of the matter. English is a difficult language to master. For some it is a difficult language to attain competency in. But these are not reasons for the various media to lower the standards of the usage of the language to appeal to those who cannot tell a preposition and a noun. One would think that those in the various media would want to try to raise the standard of the use of the language for no other reason than to allow more nuance in their stories and programs. But the hunger for money trumps what is proper and more and more while reading the newspapers and watching television and the movies we will be subjected to such terms as "MILF" or "googling."
It's all enough to gag a maggot.
This is the English that was regularly in the popular press, in literature and in the electronic media. It was the English as taught by Webster, Fowler, and Strunk and White. It was English meant to be used as a lingua franca among English speakers. It was free of dialect, cant, occupational terms and slang in general.
In those days slang was written with quotation marks to signify that the slang term was rather suspect and dialect was identified as so. There was an assumption that there was a proper way to speak English and an improper way to speak English. Proper English was the language spoken in public or among those outside of one's social or occupational group. In other words, a machinist would refer to one thousandth of an inch a a "thou" among other machinists, while using the term "one thousandth of an inch" among those outside the trade. Or Japanese-Americans would refer to elastic as "gommu" among other Japanese-Americans while using the word "elastic" among the gaijin.
About twenty years ago, the various new media and the entertainment industry decided that they wanted to appeal to youth instead of conveying clear information that would be understood by all English speakers. They began using street slang and business slang. The result, more recently has been the regular use of such terms as "my bad", "gettin' real (or makin' it real)", "hottie" and "taking it to the next level." What do these terms mean? They are so loose in definition as to mean nothing. Does "my bad" mean that one has been bad, done something bad, made a mistake or is "bad" in the street sense? Does "gettin' real" mean being sincere, a genuine item or feeling or getting down to brass tacks? Is Monica Belluci a "hottie?" Was Deborah Kerr? Was Audrey Hepburn? What exactly is a "hottie"? When a young man and young woman have been kissing one another good night for several weeks and one suggests that they take their relationship to the next level does that mean that they should go back to holding hands? Or start going to bed together? One wonders if, in announcing the declaration of war against Japan, if had the current trend toward the use of street language had become popular, Franklin Roosevelt would have announced to the nation, "Yesterday, December seventh, the shit hit the fan in Pearl Harbor."
Here's the gist of the matter. English is a difficult language to master. For some it is a difficult language to attain competency in. But these are not reasons for the various media to lower the standards of the usage of the language to appeal to those who cannot tell a preposition and a noun. One would think that those in the various media would want to try to raise the standard of the use of the language for no other reason than to allow more nuance in their stories and programs. But the hunger for money trumps what is proper and more and more while reading the newspapers and watching television and the movies we will be subjected to such terms as "MILF" or "googling."
It's all enough to gag a maggot.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Two Topics for the Price of One!
We here at the Manor are baseball fans. We are not rabid baseball fans; we cannot recite statistics, but we do believe that it is God's own game. We often encourage the hired men to play ball on the verdant fields during Christmas and Easter, as well as those late afternoons when they've finished the sheep shearing.
Having said that, your faithful correspondent has heard that the Mitchell Commission dealing with the use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs will be making their findings public soon. According to Arte Moreno, the owner of the Angels and an opponent of juicing, despite the fact that one of his players is a know user of human growth hormone, says that the commission report will name names. In other words, it will name players who have been using steroids.
We here at the Manor hope that Moreno is correct in his prediction. Major League Baseball seems to be unwilling to enforce its own rules against steroid use. Perhaps the Mitchell Commission report will shame the juicers into either quitting the great game or quit using steroids. The likelihood of either event taking place is, admittedly, slight. But one can always hope that someone will do the right thing.
The steroid controversy has excited your faithful correspondent to consider the fact that baseball was not the game that it once was. Let's face it, baseball is a game that children play for free or pay to play and which adult men are played enormous amounts of money to play. Something is a bit out of balance in the equation. It's somewhat tantamount to one's little daughter playing house for the fun of it and the cast of Desperate Housewives doing the same thing for more money than the average engineer makes.
If your faithful correspondent had just a bit more cash on hand (the majority is tied up in ruby mines in Columbia and tea plantations in Ceylon) he would found a new baseball league called the Real Baseball League. The rule book of the league would be the same rule book used in 1890. The ball used would be the dead ball (making for in the park ball and home runs a real oddity instead of an expectation), gloves would be optional, pitchers could throw spitters, and the only safety equipment would be batting helmets. No batting gloves (what's wrong with friction tape or pine tar?), no elbow or shin guards (these batters are looking more and more like robots instead of men) and no drugs other than alcohol, nicotine or caffeine. And not changing the ball after every time it's hit or touches the ground. As the ball changes the game should change.
Consider the fact that the only thing that has changed in the English game of cricket in the past 200 years is that now the batsman wears a hard helmet. It's the same ball, the same bat and the same game. Baseball is not the same game that it was a hundred years ago. The plethora of home runs has made the game rather boring. Baseball has become a batters' game instead of a pitchers' and fielders' game. And we all lose by the change.
This past week the Los Angeles Times (a truly terrible major city newspaper, but even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once a day) printed an opinion/entertainment piece about the old television program Mannix. The jist of the article was that the series is a hidden treasure and was pretty much the last gasp of the "cool" private investigator. Apparently the character Mannix was a smoker, a wearer of ties and sports jackets, a listener of jazz and a drinker of scotch. In other words, he was the last of the Peter Gunn type of television P.I.s.
Yours can not remember ever having watched the series. But this may be due to the fact that he was slaving away at the mill on the night shift during the show's run. The only thing that he can remember about Mannix is that Mannix's secretary was named Peggy, which is the name of your faithful correspondent's lovely sister-in-law. Night shift workers get what they can on television and what we got at the time were re-runs of the Rockford Files at 2:30 Monday morning. Rockford was not the cool shamus. He was the common man shamus, but he was pretty entertaining.
In musing over the article it slowly dawned on your faithful correspondent that the private eye series, which was once a staple of network television (the last being the Mike Hammer series starring Stacy Keach), is no more. Instead the networks offer series about trashy suburban women (and if any trashy suburban women are reading make sure to e-mail me and I'll give you directions to the Manor), hospital soap operas and crime shows featuring government operatives in various permutations such as CSI, Missing, NCIS and 24. No private investigators.
What does this mean? While your writer is no sociologist (a truly grim and useless profession) he will take the reins and state that the change from the private detective hero to the government investigator is a signal and disturbing change. Without quoting Raymond Chandler, let it be said that the private eye was a free lancer, a man outside of society working to correct society, a knight walking down the mean streets of society to right the wrongs that the barons ignored. The government operatives work to maintain the society. They do not work to try to fix the society and the government. They ARE the government. They don't smoke. They rarely drink. They agonize about beating up or killing a villain. They are products of the 60s and 70s. They distrust the government and yet do everything they can to maintain it. The old timers like Mannix, Rockford, Gunn et al, while working for what was right did not do so for the state. They did what was right because they knew what was right. And in doing what was right was not always what was legal.
And to think that shows such as Mannix, The Rockford Files and Peter Gunn were written by men who were of the generation called square and sheep. They were more suspicious of the government than are the writers of the current crop of crime shows. Their characters didn't depend on the state to save the day.
Having said that, your faithful correspondent has heard that the Mitchell Commission dealing with the use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs will be making their findings public soon. According to Arte Moreno, the owner of the Angels and an opponent of juicing, despite the fact that one of his players is a know user of human growth hormone, says that the commission report will name names. In other words, it will name players who have been using steroids.
We here at the Manor hope that Moreno is correct in his prediction. Major League Baseball seems to be unwilling to enforce its own rules against steroid use. Perhaps the Mitchell Commission report will shame the juicers into either quitting the great game or quit using steroids. The likelihood of either event taking place is, admittedly, slight. But one can always hope that someone will do the right thing.
The steroid controversy has excited your faithful correspondent to consider the fact that baseball was not the game that it once was. Let's face it, baseball is a game that children play for free or pay to play and which adult men are played enormous amounts of money to play. Something is a bit out of balance in the equation. It's somewhat tantamount to one's little daughter playing house for the fun of it and the cast of Desperate Housewives doing the same thing for more money than the average engineer makes.
If your faithful correspondent had just a bit more cash on hand (the majority is tied up in ruby mines in Columbia and tea plantations in Ceylon) he would found a new baseball league called the Real Baseball League. The rule book of the league would be the same rule book used in 1890. The ball used would be the dead ball (making for in the park ball and home runs a real oddity instead of an expectation), gloves would be optional, pitchers could throw spitters, and the only safety equipment would be batting helmets. No batting gloves (what's wrong with friction tape or pine tar?), no elbow or shin guards (these batters are looking more and more like robots instead of men) and no drugs other than alcohol, nicotine or caffeine. And not changing the ball after every time it's hit or touches the ground. As the ball changes the game should change.
Consider the fact that the only thing that has changed in the English game of cricket in the past 200 years is that now the batsman wears a hard helmet. It's the same ball, the same bat and the same game. Baseball is not the same game that it was a hundred years ago. The plethora of home runs has made the game rather boring. Baseball has become a batters' game instead of a pitchers' and fielders' game. And we all lose by the change.
This past week the Los Angeles Times (a truly terrible major city newspaper, but even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once a day) printed an opinion/entertainment piece about the old television program Mannix. The jist of the article was that the series is a hidden treasure and was pretty much the last gasp of the "cool" private investigator. Apparently the character Mannix was a smoker, a wearer of ties and sports jackets, a listener of jazz and a drinker of scotch. In other words, he was the last of the Peter Gunn type of television P.I.s.
Yours can not remember ever having watched the series. But this may be due to the fact that he was slaving away at the mill on the night shift during the show's run. The only thing that he can remember about Mannix is that Mannix's secretary was named Peggy, which is the name of your faithful correspondent's lovely sister-in-law. Night shift workers get what they can on television and what we got at the time were re-runs of the Rockford Files at 2:30 Monday morning. Rockford was not the cool shamus. He was the common man shamus, but he was pretty entertaining.
In musing over the article it slowly dawned on your faithful correspondent that the private eye series, which was once a staple of network television (the last being the Mike Hammer series starring Stacy Keach), is no more. Instead the networks offer series about trashy suburban women (and if any trashy suburban women are reading make sure to e-mail me and I'll give you directions to the Manor), hospital soap operas and crime shows featuring government operatives in various permutations such as CSI, Missing, NCIS and 24. No private investigators.
What does this mean? While your writer is no sociologist (a truly grim and useless profession) he will take the reins and state that the change from the private detective hero to the government investigator is a signal and disturbing change. Without quoting Raymond Chandler, let it be said that the private eye was a free lancer, a man outside of society working to correct society, a knight walking down the mean streets of society to right the wrongs that the barons ignored. The government operatives work to maintain the society. They do not work to try to fix the society and the government. They ARE the government. They don't smoke. They rarely drink. They agonize about beating up or killing a villain. They are products of the 60s and 70s. They distrust the government and yet do everything they can to maintain it. The old timers like Mannix, Rockford, Gunn et al, while working for what was right did not do so for the state. They did what was right because they knew what was right. And in doing what was right was not always what was legal.
And to think that shows such as Mannix, The Rockford Files and Peter Gunn were written by men who were of the generation called square and sheep. They were more suspicious of the government than are the writers of the current crop of crime shows. Their characters didn't depend on the state to save the day.
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