Modal's Sporting Goods; The Best Value For Your Alternate Universe Dollar

'If Buckner had fielder that grounder, then he would have beaten Wilson to the bag.' Maybe, maybe not. Usually, statements are true when they tell it like it is, false otherwise. But how is it with something that never happened?

Answering such counterfactual questions- so called because the first clause is counter to fact- is difficult not just because we don't know how it is, or could have been, but because, being counter to reality, there may not be anything at all to know.

One of the neat things about philosophy is how a little problem like this has cosmic implications. The philosopher David Lewis argued that any possible state of affairs actually exists, but at another possible universe, different from ours in just such ways. For Lewis, there exists a world where Buckner makes the play to retire the side, forcing another extra inning (remember, the tying run scored on the wild pitch), and there's a world where Buckner makes the play but Wilson beats the throw, and on the next play a grounder goes through Boggs' legs, and so forth. (There's also a world where Tampa wins the division and the Yankees finish third. Crazy, I know.)

The reason for this infinite explosion of universes is to provide grounds for the truth of counterfactual statements. Without such universes, there simply is nothing- nothing exists- that makes counterfactuals true or false; there'd be nothing to know. So according to Lewis, 'if Buckner had made the play, Wilson would have been out' is true if the existent possible world where that happens is closer to this one than a world where he makes the play and he's safe.

Don't worry, I'm not going to explain what makes one world closer than another. (Though it is pretty crucial for the plausibility of all this craziness. For more, here's the wikipedia on "modal realism.")

The point of all this, as I so often have to say to my class, is the Most Valuable Player award.

For some reason, the MVP has to play for a contending team. Now, there might be many different definitions of 'valuable', or, 'most' or 'player', I imagine, but its best to be on the same page with these things. If I say "yankees suck," and some yankees fan says "sure, if by 'suck' you mean 'awesome'", besides from forgetting to conjugate properly, this would be a pretty superficial, if short lived, agreement.

I think the definition of the sort of V that one finds in MVP is best put in counterfactual terms- I think the MVP is the player who answers this question: The hypothetical absence of which player would cause that player's team the greatest loss? Or, in other words and letters, if a player x was absent, then which team y would suffer the most? Player X is your MVP. That is, the most valuable thing is the thing which, if taken away, would harm whatever it was taken away from the most.

So if you can live without your hair, as some of us must, but not without your liver, then your liver is more valuable than your hair. And if your team can win without Manny Ramirez, then Manny ain't that valuable.

Now, what does this have to do with contending? As the Manny example indicates, the better a team is, the more able that team is to withstand the loss of any one player, even if that player is great; I'd say there's an inverse relationship between a players' value and the competence of his team. It's the worst teams, not the best, that can least withstand the hypothetical absence of their best player. The closest possible worlds are those where a bad team loses its best player and plays even worser...

'Well now,' one might say, especially if that one is you, 'take away a great player from a last place team, and they're still last.' Well, yes. But take Manny away from a wild card leading team, and they're still a wild card leading team, even though he's put up monster numbers. And standings are relative to the other teams- you can win close to 95 games and not win a division (stupid tampa), so I think its the number of wins that counts. A last place team may win 65 games with a star player, but, who knows, 50 without him. A first place team may win 96 games with a star player, 94 without him, as they are better able to absorb the blow.

Pedroia is getting a lot of MVP attention, and there's no doubt that he's a kick ass ballplayer, and the heart of this team. But if players on noncontending teams or the Twins are counted, as they should be, he doesn't really stand out. Only on the assumption that only a contending non-Minnesota team is worthy of MVP consideration puts him at the top (even though, of course, Mourneau won in '06.)

Pedroia does well in some traditional and count stats, and not in others. The top 3 in BA: Mauer .327, Pedroia .325, and Bradley .324. But Bradley is far and away ahead on OBP: .439, Mauer second at .413, and Pedey's 17th, at .375. Bradley is 3rd in slugging (behind Arod and Quentin), Youkilis 4th, Pedroia 18th at .493. Bradley leads in OPS, Youkilis is 4th, Pedroia's 18th at .868

Bradley has only played in 124 games, which hurts, whereas Pedroia is tied for third in games (and is 3rd in plate appearances, which helps his count stats.) Pedey leads in runs with 118, with the other contenders not in the top 5. He leads in hits with 210 and doubles with 54, but Aubrey Huff, of all people, leads with 329 total bases (Dustin is 4th), and Huff is 3rd in doubles with 48. Huff also leads in extra base hits with 82, Youkilis and Mourneau tied for 4th with 74. Pedroia's 6th with 73. And Youkilis has played plenty of games.

But it's not clear how much these tell us about the counterfactual situation. Some fancier stats aren't decisive, either. Bradley is way ahead in adjusted OPS+ with 165, Youkilis is 4th with 143, Pedroia's not in the top 10. Grady Sizemore leads in Runs Created with 132, Josh Hamilton is next with 125, and Pedroia 3rd with 122, Morneau 7th, Mauer 19th.

It seems to me that stats like 'value over replacement player' (VORP) are in effect counterfactual- if player x were absent and was replaced by an average player, how many 'value points' would the team lose?- in which case such a stat would be the best indicator for MVP. In this category, Pedroia is 3rd, behind Sizemore and ARod. Huff is 4th, Bradley 5th. Youk 8, Mauer 9, Mourneau 12.

But VORP is relative to a position- its easier to have a high VORP at 2nd than at 1st, and also it doesn't count defense. And particularly relevant to my conception of MVP is that it doesn't take into account the idea that a player's value is inversely proportional to his teams awesomeness, as discussed above. (The Indians would probably be more worse without Sizemore than the Sox without Pedey. And of course, as everyone knows, the Yankees would be even better without ARod and with a 42 year old Scott Brosius instead.)

But it's right about here where the fancy numbers exceed my present state of knowledge, so I have nowhere else to go. And there being another me in another possible world who knows this stuff doesn't help. As a philosopher, I'll simply say I think this is the right direction, and let the guys in the lab coats make the call...

That, and far be it for me to argue against the man. Pedey's 20/21 in stolen bases are remarkable, his f yeah attitude is f'in awesome, he curses and gets dirty, and he hits line drives like they were giving him lip.

I'm sure Pedroia is saving no-hitters in other possible worlds, and that if he were gone, and the Sox had to play Cora or Mark Bellhorn at second, they'd be a lot worse. Because they have a 7 game lead on the Yankees. (Ha), they'd probably would be the wild card without him, though of course it would have been a lot less fun. But just Pedey's swing, let alone the defense, speed, and attitude, for now, at least, make me glad I live in this world.... to the extent that I do, of course.

Something To Believe In

Karl Popper thought Marxism and Freudianism weren't genuine scientific theories, as they were often believed to be, because proponents of those systems did everything they could to interpret whatever they saw as confirmation of their -ist beliefs. For Popper, what made a belief scientific was the willingness to see that belief falsified, and not clinging to a belief despite evidence to the contrary.

Former catcher and current Yankees color commentator John Flaherty started with the simplistic belief that when Wakefield's knuckleball is up, it's hittable, and when it's down, it's not, and implied this hypothesis had predictive power- it looks like a good night for the Yanks, he suggested in the top of the 2nd.

In the 5th inning, after many high knuckleballs weren't hit, and some low one's were, Flaherty amended his statement, slightly, analyzing that now Wake's knuckleballs were hittable because they were falling down into the lefthanded hitters' zone, and they had no lateral movement. Ahh. How scientific.

Many philosophers think booing doesn't state a belief so much as express emotion. Yankee fans, no scientists they, expressed their displeasure, much to my satisfaction, booing A-Rod after he grounded into a double play with the bases loaded to end the 7th inning, keeping the Yankees down 7-3, and just moments after they had given a standing ovation, anticipating a heroic moment. But this theory was proven wrong. Clinging to their belief in A-Rod's talent, they were disappointed. Yankees play by play jerk Michael Kay said something to the effect of 'it looked like the crowd had the electricity pulled out of it', and that they were 'stunned' and filled with 'incredulity.'

Incredulity- disbelief-, the not-so-scientific response to reality contradicting expectation, theory, and prediction. I don't suppose scientists boo the petri dish when their cells don't culture. Though maybe they should. Or perhaps they could reinterpret the recalcitrant evidence; 'it's not the wrong enzyme, it just doesn't catalyze in the clutch.'

Man, A-Rod played such a shitty game. That's awesome. A K looking in the 1st, an inning ending double play in the 3rd, as the tying run in the 5th with 2 runners on- a fly out, as the tying run in the 7th with the bases loaded- an inning ending double play, and a K swinging to end the game. That's an 0-5, with 0 bases gained and 7 outs made. And he also committed an error. He was booed mercilessly in the 7th, 8th, and 9th. During the broadcast, Kay said that in the 8th and 9th innings in 2008, A-Rod has 2 RBI, contrasted with 31 in '07. ESPN said A-Rod is 0-7 this year with the bases loaded and 2 outs. David Ortiz, naturally, had 2 walks and 2 doubles. Ortizism is empirically sound; Rodriguezism is bunk.

Meanwhile, Michael Kay was looking forward to Wednesdays' starter Sidney Ponson coming to believe that his was a big game, a necessary game, a season saving game, and that he should prepare accordingly. Al Leiter strongly disagreed, and said that that kind of stuff doesn't enter the players' mind; a player can't have such different beliefs and attitudes about a big game than a regular one. Instead, he's got to keep it out of his head, clear his mind of beliefs about his place in the game, the season, the context. Kay challenged Leiter, in disbelief, asking that when Leiter started Game 7 of the 1997 World Series, he really wasn't believing it was such a huge deal? When Leiter said 'no', he had to stay in the zone, or some such, Kay responded, disappointed and a little afraid, that it sounded "robotic." Kay's theory of humans as nervous meaning-sensitive clutch warriors remained unaffected.

The inning ended. And after the commercial break, Kay returned to the subject with one of the greatest not great lines I've ever heard. He said to Al Leiter, "Al, it's not that I don't believe you. I'm just incredulous."

I can't say I know what Popper would say about that.

Grammatical Denigration of the Week

I have long been distressed that my favorite novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, called semicolons "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Others have suggested that real men don't use semicolons.

And according to today's Globe, semicolon use is way down. How is all this relevant to Soxlosophy? Good question. I use semicolons all the time; in my last post, I used 5 semicolons; in the previous post, 3. Right there, in that last sentence, 2 friggin semicolons; only a real man would be ballsy enough to do that!

Listen:

Periods imply abrupt stops, discontinuity; semicolons introduce distinctions yet maintain continuity. Commas separate mere words; semicolons ideas. Sometimes thoughts need to be modified by entire thoughts; thoughts are amplified, not diminished, by such qualification. Independent clauses don't require each other, it's true, but then how they are to be related is left unsaid; distinct ideas can holistically combine via the alchemical link of the semicolon.

The semicolon is suited to baseball. Baseball isn't just one damn thing after another. This. Then that. And then this. The period is such a Humean punctuation mark, severing the connection between clauses. It's also mechanistic, lifeless. And commas are just for breathing, required for life, yes, but of itself a lowest form of living; the vegetable state of punctuation. But the semicolon is the punctuation mark of the robust, meaningful life; anywhere there's narrative structure, nuance and modification, individual thoughts organically integrated into a larger whole, a semicolon is appropriate. It's the punctuation for the story of baseball; it should be in the scorecard. DP 6-4-3; didn't hustle. Sox humiliate New York; Yankees suck. And with apologies to Mr. Updike, he should have said "the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now; Gods do not answer letters."

I imagine that if Gods did answer letters, they'd use a lot of exclamation marks; Gods bark orders. But for those of us who do nuance, not imperatives, we have a plucky little overlooked Dustin Pedroia-esque punctuation mark to help out.

Curses; Lackey's No-No Foiled by Magic Single

It's not criminal assault to stick an effigy with a pin if voodoo magic doesn't really exist.

But it's still not nice.

Despite betraying an odd view of the cosmos, Sox broadcasters Remy and Orsillo did their best to put a hex on John Lackey's potential no-hitter, which was indeed broken up with 1 out in the 9th inning of an eventual 6-2 Angels victory, their 7th in a row over the ragdoll Red Sox.

Repetitive to the point of ritualistic intonation, Remy and Orsillo uttered the magic word 'no-hitter' before Lackey had yielded a hit, violating the sacred taboo of no-hit superstition: never utter that which is happening in front of you (typically not a problem for Joe Morgan.) NESN even showed a graphic listing the pitchers that had "no-hit" the Sox since 1763. Never daring to speak these words during Sox gems, this was no accident; they were attempting to raise the dead, to cast dark spells, to curse the fortunes of the Angels hurler.

Of course, words don't do that. It's a primitive view of language that conflates meaning and causality; a rock may vibrate slightly in response to the soundwaves emitted by vocal chords, but it will not step aside because those soundwaves encode 'open sesame.' Or, as it's sometimes put, if an opera singer sings "shatter" and the glass breaks, it's the intensity of the sound, not the meaning of the words, that does the trick.

Though this makes Remy and Orsillo's hexing all the more ridiculous, it renders it morally ambiguous. They had malicious intent, but they stuck a doll with a pin. On the one hand, this renders the assault benign. On the other hand, not only are they mean, but they're dumb. I'm not sure which is worse.

Given that I just drank unattended rum and a bat hit the back of my head, I think I've changed my mind. Maybe Jobu made that curveball not quite reach the corner. Maybe the magic words pushed Pedroia's groundball just out of Izturis' range. Maybe the Sox can actually someday beat the Angels.

[sigh]

Logical Fallacy of the Week; Manny vs. Tito

[Editors Note: 'Logical Fallacy of the Week' is the segment where I'm a real dick about language.]

Manny says stuff, Francona says stuff. And in this most recent episode, it turns out Manny was logical and well-spoken, whereas Francona packed fallacies and mal mots like they were his last chaw.

Let's start with Tito. "We've run into bumps in the road ever since I've been here and there have been some before I've been here." I know this is an expression, but doesn't one run onto bumps in the road? One falls into holes, runs into friends or brick walls, but onto bumps. Moving on.

Tito continues: "The result of two of the times has been a World Series ring."

But just because the Sox won the World Series after Manny's - or anyone's- bumpiness, that of course doesn't mean that they won because of or as a result of those bumps. This is our fallacy, known as 'post hoc ergo propter hoc', or 'after this, therefore because of this.'

It's like with Jeter. Just because Jeter couldn't field a routine grounder to his left after I said he couldn't doesn't mean that the result of my saying that was Jeter's not having any range. My yelling doesn't cause Jeter's shitty fielding, and Manny's bumpiness didn't cause the World Series victories.

But maybe I'm picking on the word 'result', and Francona only meant- but didn't say (despite talking at the time)- that the Sox have weathered the storm, and have won the Series despite Manny's bumpiness.

Maybe so. Nonetheless, there are two strikes against Francona on this one because what we need most in this media maelstrom is some clear thinking about causality, and muddled thinking and talking on the subject only exacerbates the problem.

For instance, there's all this talk about Manny being a distraction. Presumably, this is bad because this distraction will somehow result in more losses for the Sox. But does Manny's behavior actually affect the team? Is there any evidence for his whatsoever? Does Youkilis stand up there, stroking his bat, thinking:

"Look for the fastball up. He's gotta come with the cheese. Relax. Relax. Quick bat. Pop the clubhead. Open the hips. Relax. You're thinking too much. Get outta your fuckin' head, Crash [Youkilis calls himself Crash.]... Throw that shit again, meat. Throw that weak ass shit. Now he's gotta try to slip the cheese by me. One and one. You're on top. Now bring me the gas --This son of a bitch throws hard... Manny, Manny, Manny. Who is this Manny? Jesus, get outta the box you idiot, where's your head? Get the leftfielder outta your head."

I hope not. Manny causes beat writers to write lousy articles. But that's about it.

Secondly, the rest of Francona's quote was jibberish, which disturbs me. Tito then spake: "As a team, sometimes you fight through things, sometimes you work through things. It's not always perfect, but how you get to the end is what counts and that's what we're trying to do."

Huh? How you get to the end is what counts? It's not whether you win or lose, but how? Really? How much do they pay Tito? And what's the 'that' in 'that's what we're tying to do'? Is it ''How you get to the end'? That doesn't make sense. 'Get to the end'? If so, is he not contradicting the noise he made 1 second earlier by suggesting it's the end, not the how, that counts?

Contrast Manny. "If the Red Sox are a better team without Manny Ramirez, they should trade me."

Absolutely. Only Tampa Bay Yankee fans would disagree with this.

Manny continued "Enough is enough." That's definitely true. A necessary, tautological truth, even.

Manny said: "I could choose a team that offers me the best conditions or one in the chase for the postseason." Manny clearly lays out his options in the form of an exclusive disjunction.

He even said: "I don't care where I play, I can even play in Iraq if need be. My job is to play baseball," and "I don't want to be a problem and a distraction to the Red Sox in such a critical moment of the season. I want to help the team, even if that means I have to go."

Here, Manny selflessly offers his services to wherever Duty takes him, and nobly understands that his true Love for the Sox means that even if they're better off without him, then that's something he must accept.

Also, Francona said this in response to questions about Manny's possible bad mood: "I'm not sure that matters. I'd take a guy that's hitting .500 that's miserable as opposed to a guy that hands out bouquets to his teammates and is hitting a buck 45."

Really? I could have sworn Francona didn't pinch hit Casey for Varitek...

Free to Exist You and Me

"David Ortiz can’t just be. He has to be David Ortiz," suggests the Herald's Rob Bradford. I am slightly amused that we sort of know what he means, despite it appearing that he is contrasting David Ortiz with existence, which doesn't really make sense.

It's a bit Platonic, Bradford's statement, encoding, as it does, the difference between mere existence and a higher plane, giving a hint of Plato's contrast of the actual with the Ideal.

For on the one hand, we have David Ortiz, existent. Thing in the universe. Occupant of a portion of space-time. Detectable with the senses. On the other hand, we have David Ortiz, David Ortiz. Great thing. Ideal Designated Hitter. Big Papi. Team Leader. Object of incredulity and awe.

So really, there's no pressure on Big Papi at all. All David Ortiz has to do during the pennant race is not exist, but transcend existence into the realm where his true self -David Ortiz- lies; that is, for Bradford, it's not enough simply that David Ortiz- that thing that answers to the name 'David Ortiz'- exists, but that the David Ortiz that exists also exists as David Ortiz.

What I love best about philosophy is the clarity it affords.

Logical Fallacy of the Week: Introduction

As I'm sure you're well aware, baseball folks make erroneous statements and draw invalid inferences and derive conclusions from nothingness and arbitrarity. All the time. And as someone in the thinking business, I feel duty-bound to point out such things when I notice them.

So, in what might become an irregular regular feature of Soxlosophy, I've decided to introduce the "logical fallacy of the week," a feature that in all likelihood will not be updated every week.

But it's a better name than "logical fallacy of the unspecified time-unit."

Now, strictly speaking, many errors in reasoning which I'll discuss (and by discuss I mean 'ridicule') are not logical fallacies at all, so the name's inaccurate on both fronts. But "the sloppy informal cognitions and ambiguous and misleading assertions of baseball folks of the unspecified time unit" is actually a worse name than 'Pujols' or 'Asdrubal Cabrera'.

For the trial run, I thought I'd start with a valid syllogism like 'modus ponens'- you know, the one that goes

(All) Yankees suck

A-Rod is a Yankee

therefore, A-Rod sucks

and work up some fallacies from there. But I changed my mind.

For what better place to start on the butchering of thought and language as we know it than with Fox's A-team, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver?

So lets take a trip down memory lane to last week's Fox national broadcast of the Sox vs. the Yankees, and with Tim McCarver in a moment, this is Joe Buck.

Buck has this habit of putting the predicate of the sentence in the place normally reserved for the subject, namely the beginning. So, for instance, last week Buck said "overpowered was Varitek by Veras", and "on deck is Ramirez".

And though one might think such Yoda-speak is cute, the habit of saying everything backwards led to the following vacuous statement, our very first "Logical fallacy of the week."

Buck said of Sox starter Justin Masterson after Masterson left the game, "he can only be the loser if he gets a decision."

Spot the f- up? Well, can Masterson be the loser if he doesn't get a decision? Buck seems to be laboring under the mistaken impression that he's saying something, namely "if Masterson gets a decision, he will be the losing pitcher." But he didn't say that. I had to guess that's what he meant. Because what Buck actually said was equivalent to "in order to be the losing pitcher, Masterson must get a decision." Thank God I watch Fox, or else I might not know that getting a no-decision precludes a pitcher from being the losing pitcher.

Thank you, Joe Buck. Thank you.

And then there's McCarver.

McCarver's analysis following a sacrifice fly was that the ball went "high enough and far enough" to drive in the run.

Apparently, there is a height the ball must reach before the runner can successfuly tag up. I did not know that.

But there's more. In light of A-Rod tying Mickey Mantle's career home run mark of 536, McCarver went on to wax sentimental about the Mick. Near to wiping away a reverential tear, Timmy McC said the Mick was "anything but slow, and anything but weak."

Wait, is McCarver saying Mickey Mantle was a communist? Or that Mickey Mantle was addicted to Robitussin? Apparently, according to McCarver, Mickey Mantle was every single attribute there is except slow and weak. And because 'communist' and 'addicted to Robotissin' are attributes, after all, and they are not the same as 'slow' and 'weak,' it sounds like McC thinks that these, among all others, are things that Mickey Mantle was.

The Mick sure was a lot of things to a lot of people.

But if McCarver meant something else, he should have said something else.

Of course, that probably would have been wrong too.

This is Mel Allen. See you next time-unit for another installment of "logical fallacy of the week." In Baseball.

if you're scoring at home

From the Archive: May 2, 2007

remember that magic fastball I said papelbon had? well, he didn't have it tonight. no zip, as Remy pointed out, none of that last moment thwbbt, no command on any of his pitches, especially the slider, and predictable sequences. I hope he's not hurt.

and just to resurrect the broadcaster issue, I'd like to let everyone know how much Don Orsillo hurts my ears. I'm sure he's a nice guy, and he banters with Remy in a satisfactory manner, but he garbles English sentences like they were lottery ping pong balls. it hurts my ears. almost everything he says has some sort of absurd ambiguity or is a grammatical disaster.

I come replete, yes replete, with examples. tonight, for instance, he said that 'huston street is still just 23 years old'; what, he's still 23, despite turning 23 6 years ago? is he a slow ager? if what don meant was 'street's experience belies his age', he should say it in less dumb way.

also tonight, he said of mike lowell's uncharacteristically high error total that it 'is very un mike lowell like', when, i'm fairly sure, the more natural, and luckily, correct way to say that is to say 'its very unlike mike lowell.'

and he always says 'with which to work with', which, at the moment, strikes me like reading stage directions from a cue card out loud.

I mean, there's precision, and there's precision. (how's that for an epigram?) today, for example, I gave an exam in my class. a student walked in and saw that I was about to hand out the exams, and he said 'oh crap, we had a test today?' I said 'no, but we will have one shortly.'

maybe i'm getting a little pedantic on that one. but don is a broadcaster; he has an extremely high profile and desirable job, and he is paid to paint a verbal picture to complement the visual picture we see. I hardly think it is unwarranted for me to want someone to not speak the way johnny damon throws.

I have mlb.tv, with which I may see out-of market games. sometimes, at night, when the west coast games are on, I watch the dodgers, just to hear vin scully. he is a pure delight. he does the game alone- no color guy. He is a born storyteller and an aphorist, an astute observer of the game, with a radio voice and a sense for the dramatic. the guy has got to be in his 80s by now, and I can imagine him having been sharper calling the brooklyn dodgers, but he's still worth the price of admission alone.

and don't blame vin for saying 'behind the bag, it gets through buckner.' he just calls em how he sees em.

[Chris responded:]

Jonah, you as student of philosophy must be aware that people have been lamenting the degradation of english since before the days of Beowulf. I read a quote (which I looked for on google for about 15 minutes and couldn't find) from a philosopher several hundred years ago complaining about colloquial grammar. No one reads the king james translation now and says "these guys really had their language down!" So I choose to view don orsillo as an innovator, not deficient.

[My response:]

Although I had a fight with my dad on this issue a few weeks ago, wherein I mockingly sympathized with him by suggesting that its a profound disappointment that we still don't read cuneiform, or some other proto ur-language (I suppose that's redundant), there is something to the idea of correctness.

the back-and-forth, it seems, and I hope my brother the linguist will agree, is between whether language is normative or not; if language changes willy nilly with the times, then there's no such things as using language incorrectly. seeing it this way does, as you suggest, allow one to view Don as an innovator, an artist, really, who transforms the mundane workaday world of nouns and proper names- like 'mike lowell'- into magical adjectival flights of fancy, where how 'un-mike lowell-like' something is a quality of the events in our midst. this grammatical-cum-ontological transformation, like all great art, surely reflects the deeper reality that we in our quotidian stance fail to appreciate, unless provoked and prodded by the few great artists we are lucky enough to have among us.

Bassball

From the Archive: July 20, 2006

Remy apparently just got a fancy new big screen HDTV and sound system, and during the 5th inning he was telling Don how great it is. He asked Don if Don ever heard of a sub-woofer. Don said 'no'. Remy told him it was for extra bass, and he was watching CSI New York, and each time it made this great big 'whoof!', his dog ran away. 'It was great', said Remy, to which Don replied, 'so the whoofer didn't like the sub-woofer, huh?'

Sean Mcdonough, we hardly knew ye

inyourendo

From the Archive: March 20, 2006

Look, we've all watched baseball for a long time, and we've learned to accept the slapping on the 'backside' and the communal showering and all that without batting an eye, but there is a line that I think gets crossed in the following passage. See if you can spot it.... from today's Boston Globe...

"
Schilling faced Clemens in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series between the Diamondbacks and Yankees in a memorable duel of 20-game winners. Neither pitcher was involved in the decision, but the Diamondbacks won, 3-2.

Before that game, Schilling retold the story of Clemens pulling him aside when he was a young pitcher during an offseason workout in Houston.

''What I thought was going to be kind of a sit-down talk about pitching experience turned out to be an hour-and-half butt-chewing," Schilling said at the time. ''He felt at the time that I was someone who was not taking advantage of the gifts God had given me, that I didn't respect the game the way I should, that I didn't respect my teammates the way I should."
"