Roger O Green

Baseball Hall of Fame 2016: if I had a ballot

Once again, time for me to think about the baseball players, who will be voted on by the baseball writers to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The results will be announced on January 6. “To be enshrined, players must be named on at least 75% of the Committee members’ ballots.”

Here are the players on the ballot. Last year, four players were inducted: pitchers Randy Johnson, Pedro Martínez, and John Smoltz, all in their first year of eligibility, and catcher/second baseman Craig Biggio. Still, there are a lot of quality picks available. The sportswriters who vote can select up to 10 players, though, clearly, most do not.

These are my picks if I had a ballot:

1. Lee Smith, who had more saves than anyone when he retired in an era when relievers often pitched more than one inning. 14th year on the ballot. He got 30.2% of the vote last year, only marginally better than the year before, and much worse than before then. I’ve supported his selection for years.

2. Mark McGwire, one of those PED (performance-enhancing drugs) guys. But Major League Baseball really hadn’t addressed the issue until 2004, well after his record-breaking 1998 season. Moreover, because of a change in the rules a couple of years ago, he is not in the 10th of 15 years of eligibility, but the 10th of 10 years, which seems like an unfortunate bait-and-switch. With 10% of the vote, it’s incredibly unlikely he’ll make it this year.

3. Alan Trammel, solid Tigers shortstop in his last (15th) year of eligibility. With only 25.1% of the vote last year, if he’s ever to make it into Cooperstown, it’ll be by some Veterans Committee down the road.

4. Barry Bonds remains the best position player on the ballot, and in fact, one of the best players ever, even factoring out the theoretical benefits of PEDs. From the start of his career in 1986 until the end of 1998 season, after which he bulked up and had the astronomical numbers, Bonds accumulated a .289 BA, 411 HR, 445 SB, 4 MVPs, 8 Gold Gloves, and only a 15% strikeout rate. Last year, he got 36.8% of the vote, and in his fourth year, he may do incrementally better.

5. Pretty much ditto for pitcher Roger Clemens, a dominant player, with 37.5% of the vote last year.

6. Ken Griffey, Jr. (pictured). Clearly the best of the first-time nominees, with 630 home runs, a fine fielder, and a decent fellow to boot.

7. Mike Piazza. A good hitting catcher, who was never specifically accused of taking PED, but everyone who bulked up in that period was suspected by some. There’s no reason to believe it so. Last year, in his second year of eligibility, he got 69.9% of the vote, and I’m guardedly hopeful he’ll get in this year.

8. Curt Schilling, a stellar pitcher in a couple of World Series. For some reason, don’t much like him much, but I’d support him. He got 39.2% of the vote last year, up 10 percentage points in year three.

9. Trevor Hoffman. With 601 saves, the relief pitcher is almost a certain first-year lock.

10. Tim Raines, in his ninth year of eligibility. He had 55% of the votes last year. Hope he gets in.

Left off

The number of qualified choices meant I passed on: Mike Mussina, Jeff Bagwell, Sammy Sosa, Gary Sheffield, Edgar Martinez, and Larry Walker. The logjam in the ballot is in large part a result of the 2013 balloting when NO one got into the Hall through the traditional balloting.

“In addition, BBWAA members who were otherwise eligible to cast ballots were required to complete a registration form and sign a code of conduct before receiving their ballots, and the Hall will make public the names of all members who cast ballots (but not their individual votes) when it announces the election results.” This is to try to get people who can vote to actually cast a ballot.
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Someone’s list of 9 Biggest MLB Hall of Fame Snubs.

Frank Sinatra would have been 100

Sinatra would occasionally muscle his way onto the pop singles charts against the likes of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

When the Times Union Center, or the Knickerbocker Arena, as it was then called, was first opened in downtown Albany in 1991, Frank Sinatra was the first performer. I didn’t go, but it seems that I’ve managed to have collected music representing most of his career.

I’ve acquired two CDs of his V-discs, recorded on Columbia Records, tracks sent out to the troops during World War II. He was idolized by “bobby soxers”, predated the adulation Elvis Presley and the Beatles would experience.

Then I have a boxed set of his Capitol singles from the 1950s. This is my favorite period, after Sinatra fell out of favor for a time, in no small part because he dumped his wife, the mother of his children, for actress Ava Gardner, in what was a tumultuous romance. Sinatra reemerged after appearing in the movie From Here to Eternity, a gig Gardner helped him get; he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

By the time I was old enough to really know who he was, he had left Capitol in 1961 to start his own record label, Reprise Records. And the Rat Pack mystique was in full force. He would occasionally muscle his way onto the pop singles charts against the likes of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles – Paint It, Black and Paperback Writer were the #1 pop hits immediately before Strangers in the Night, a song Sinatra hated. Still, my favorite Sinatra song, That’s Life, also came out in this period. So I do have the Reprise box as well.

This 1966 Esquire article explains the Sinatra mystique, and thus my ambivalence about his persona. The Frank of this period reminded me of the caricature played by Joe Piscopo and others on Saturday Night Live, the guy who was old-fashioned, using “cats” for guys and “chicks” for women. He retired, then unretired in the early 1970s.

I started “getting” him in the 1980s and actually bought the two Duets albums in the 1990s. He died in 1998. And my appreciation of his music, especially the albums, has grown.

Links

My Sinatra Top 10

Sinatra rock meme (I used to do those quite often on this blog)

CBS News: Sinatra at 100

Ken Levine: Somebody should say this about Sinatra; I agree

Stragglers in the night

Coverville 1103: A Cover Story for what would have been Frank Sinatra’s 100th

Music Throwback Saturday: STAX Christmas

Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday was a minor success in 1967.

When I obtained two box sets of the Memphis-based soul label STAX several years back, I noticed that there were a few holiday-related singles in the collections. Here are just three.

Booker T. and the MG’s

The STAX house band, included Booker T. Jones (organ, piano), Steve Cropper (guitar), Lewie Steinberg, replaced in 1965 by Donald “Duck” Dunn (bass), and Al Jackson, Jr. (drums). They also had some hit singles.

The group released a holiday album, In The Christmas Spirit in 1966. It put out one seasonal single that year, Jingle Bells, b/w Winter Wonderland. “Jingle Bells peaked at #20 on Billboard’s list of Christmas-related singles in 1966. It did not make the standard pop charts.”

The next December, STAX released another single, Silver Bells b/w the non-album track, Winter Snow.
Booker is still playing music, often with Steve Cropper.

LISTEN to Silver Bells with the painfully lovely Winter Snow at 2:30
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William Bell

The singer/songwriter/pianist had a number of soul hits. Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday was a minor success in 1967, getting to #33 on the r&b charts.
Bell was still performing at the beginning of 2015.

LISTEN to Everyday Will Be Like A Holiday
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Isaac Hayes

The keyboard player/songwriter for STAX, the singer, who died in 2008), released a couple of albums in 1970, but also a holiday, non-album single, one that invokes Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bells, and We Three Kings, among other songs.

LISTEN to The Mistletoe and Me

TIME Person of the Year: not Donald Trump

‘This Will Be The End Of Trump’s Campaign,’ Says Increasingly Nervous Man For Seventh Time This Year.

Feh. This will be about Donald Trump. Eventually.

Among the things that matter less to the general public in the 21st Century than it did in the 20th, unless it is to complain about the choice: TIME magazine’s Person of the Year, started back in 1927, in part “to remedy the editorial embarrassment earlier that year of not having aviator Charles Lindbergh on its cover following his historic trans-Atlantic flight.”

The magazine annually awards the title to an individual or group who, for better or worse, has had the biggest impact on the world and news over the course of the past year. The list has included every US President elected after Calvin Coolidge.

I recall the tremendous backlash TIME received as a result of naming Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 as what was then Man of the Year, even though it was totally justified after the Iran hostage crisis. They’d picked controversial figures before: Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939 and 1942), and Nikita Khrushchev (1957).

In 2001, Time’s Person of the Year, following the September 11 attacks, was New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, although, arguably Osama bin Laden was a more likely choice.

In 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders won the Readers’ Poll for TIME Person of the Year, and some people were all indignant that he wasn’t one of TIME’s eight finalists. I LIKE Bernie Sanders, and I’ll probably vote for him in the Democratic primary for President in April 2016. Perhaps he hasn’t had as much of an impact because much of the media has decided he can’t win the nomination.

TIME’s editors have narrowed the 2015 list down to eight candidates. When I voted Tuesday morning, with 159,124 VOTES cast, these were the readers’ results:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 36% – Leader of ISIS.
Vladimir Putin, 29% – President of Russia (Ukraine, war on DAESH).
Donald Trump, 15% – Frontrunner for Republican presidential nomination.
Travis Kalanick, 10% -CEO of Uber.
Black Lives Matter activists, 7% – protested inequality towards African Americans.
Angela Merkel, 2% – German chancellor (economic strife in Eurozone, Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis).
Caitlyn Jenner, 1% – coming out as a transgender woman.
Hassan Rouhani, 0% – president of Iran.

One could make the case for al-Baghdadi, certainly, or Putin. But Angela Merkel is a reasonable choice.

Of course, the most unreasonable Donald Trump was having none of that. If a journalist of my Facebook acquaintance hadn’t verified it, I would have thought the item at the top of this page was made up.

I’ve tried to ignore the Donald, I really have. But he keeps saying outrageous things, and his voting base keeps eating it up. Even before his latest blathering, I found myself with several interesting links.

The Political F-word: When and how should we talk about fascism? and Donald Trump and others are proving it: we can’t handle the truth and Is Trump Actually a Narcissist? Therapists Weigh In!, and Why One Political Science thinks he could actually win.

After Donald Trump’s comments demanding Muslims be barred from entering the country, based on a misleading poll, we’ve discovered DT’s Bottomless Bottom. “The GOP front-runner is tapping into a brutal xenophobia that’s at once un-American and uniquely American.” He could be the US equivalent to Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right party in France.

One article is titled We Are No Longer Entertained. I haven’t been entertained for weeks, myself. Exasperated by people who I know to be intelligent, yet apparently contemplating supporting DT for President, I find him most unfunny.

Not that he cannot be skewered by comedy. The Borowitz Reports spoofs Trump Supporters Disappointed He Only Wants to Ban One Religion. Plus this cartoon, Donald Trump, super villain. Plus the all-too-true bit from the Onion: ‘This Will Be The End Of Trump’s Campaign,’ Says Increasingly Nervous Man For Seventh Time This Year. That sounds a lot like me.

The Washington Post opines Why Christians must speak out against Donald Trump’s Muslim remarks. And I have.

Of course, suddenly almost EVERYONE is distancing themselves from Trump NOW, even ~~Darth Vader~~ Dick Cheney. The Republicans want the Donald’s enthusiastic voters, but not him. And they fear that if he isn’t treated “fairly” by the GOP, he’d consider a third-party challenge.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Martian

What got me was the true optimism of The Martian, a can-do attitude pretty much throughout without being too nerdy.

Despite generally positive reviews for The Martian (93% on Rotten Tomatoes), I was a little worried about watching a long movie (144 minutes) with Matt Damon as an astronaut, after seeing a long movie (166 minutes) LAST year with Matt Damon as an astronaut. That previous film was the nearly impenetrable Interstellar.

Or maybe it’d be an isolating film, like Tom Hanks and a volleyball in Cast Away. Or, since I understand the science of The Martian was reported to be pretty much spot on, based on a very wonkish book, that it might be boring as all get out.

It is none of the above. You’ll laugh out loud! You’ll cry! You’ll believe a man can grow potatoes in an inhospitable environment! You’ll be amazed how appropriate the unlikely soundtrack is; the choice for the end credits is inspired.

The cast is quite excellent, with Jessica Chastain as the astronaut commander who feels guilty, but not depressingly so; Michael Peña (who I saw in Ant-Man) as another astronaut; Jeff Daniels as the politics-balancing NASA administrator; the fascinating Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Mackenzie Davis, the surprising Donald Glover, and especially Aksel Hennie as various NASA staff; and Benedict Wong as the overwrought Jet Propulsion Lab guy.

The one really false note was Daniels’ character taking about a small margin for error, followed almost immediately by some problem.

But what got me was the true optimism of The Martian, a can-do attitude pretty much throughout without being too nerdy. Damon’s Watley keeps himself sane by trying to “science the s@#!” out of his resources, countries negotiate how to work together, people around the world sharing a single vision. THAT was what made me teary-eyed in this Ridley Scott film, a united planet when we don’t seem to have it right now. In some way, the politics are more utopian than the science.

I wish The Wife had gone to see this with me Sunday night, as I walked home from the Madison Theatre through the London-like fog.