Ramblin' with Roger

I am a big fan of your baseball stories, such as the one that appeared in our local paper the Times Union (Albany, NY) this week. We too have a team that plays in a stadium called the Joe, named for Joseph Bruno, the Majority Leader of the State Senate.

The team is the Tri-City Valley Cats in the New York-Penn League, playing out of Troy, NY. This is a single A , short season (roughly Father’s Day to Labor Day) . In our league, there is the Staten Island Yankees, an affiliate, of course, of the NYY.

You described your team as “low A”. I inferred (and I think others will as well) that it is the “lowest A”, which I don’t believe it is. The short season A I believe to be on the lowest rung. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Thank you.
Roger Green

Dear Mr. Green,

Thank you for contacting the office of George F. Will. Mr. Will is thankful to have actively engaged readers like yourself. In single-A ball, there is class A-advanced, class A and class A-short season. The column used class A low (also used by minor league officials and the RiverDogs staff) to distinguish the level from class A-advanced. You may access a list of all the minor league teams by classification via [this site] Thank you for your readership and have a nice day.

Best Wishes,
Office of George F. Will

Oh, sorry, I was just rehashing the debate I was having with myself a couple weeks ago when I read, on the front page of the Albany Times Union, that the Rolling Stones were coming to Albany, NY, maybe three blocks from where I work, on September 19.

On one hand, it’s the Rolling Stones!
On the other hand, the tickets started at $60, and I’m sure those seats would have required balls of cotton to stop the nosebleed, not to mention binoculars. So, I would have wanted the $100 seats. Wife Carol showed no interest in going, so it would have been a night that I’d be off while she had to stay home. this would require some sort of later trade-off.

But it’s the Rolling @#$%^&* Stones! With Alanis Morissette opening, it was recently announced.
The (Naming Rights Sold to a Soft-Drink Company) Arena was doing that “get in line for the wristband on a Friday so that you would be eligible to buy a ticket on Saturday” thing. What a pain. Moreover, that all took place a weekend I was out of town anyway.
On the other hand, my student intern was going to go get tickets ANYWAY for her and her MOTHER and her mother’s boyfriend. (Why does that make me feel just slightly OLD?) And there was an 8-ticket maximum, so I could have given her the money to buy one more. Oh, but she didn’t get any, either, because while she was early in line for the wristbands, they started with a “random number” that came AFTER hers. (She said she would rather have slept in the ticket line overnight, rather than go through that frustrating ordeal.)

One of the things that I read recently made seeing the Stones more interesting. On their upcoming album, A Bigger Bang, they reportedly have a song with the lyrics:
You call yourself a Christian,
I call you a hypocrite.
You call yourself a patriot,
Well, I think you’re full of s***.
How come you’re so wrong,
My sweet neo-con?
Will they play the song? And if so, what will be the reaction?

I knew SOMETHING was up when I saw cars stopped in front of my house a full block from the main intersection of Allen and Madison. At first, I figured that it was an accident, but as I headed to the Price Chopper supermarket, I found that it was a bank robbery at the Trustco, where hostages were taken, just two blocks from my house. The Price Chopper, just beyond the bank, required me to walk nine blocks to get there. When I got home, the helicopter that would pass by occasionally rattled the windows of our house. During the LLWS US championship (won by Hawai’i), Channel 10 interrupted the game three times – in mid-inning!- to announce that there was a situation and that people should avoid driving on that part of Madison Avenue. The Cable News Channel 9 had a scroll, but didn’t, in my watching, interrupt its pre-Travers coverage.

A Republican Dictionary. All you Republicans reading this may be deeply offended. Oh, well.

Book: Hendrix avoided Vietnam with gay ruse. This MSNBC story takes a somewhat salacious angle, I think. But if the draft comes back – the cover story in this week’s Metroland – what WILL keep one out of the army these days?

Speaking of war, my friend Cecily sent me this: The first and only federal conspiracy trial arising out of civil resistance to the Iraq War begins September 19 in Binghamton, NY. Imagine – in my hometown.

Mark Evanier is the self-appointed tracker of all appearances of the characters in the comic strip Blondie in other comic strips, in advance of the 75th anniversary of Mrs. Bumstead and her family next month.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I want to know why it is that I can see that photo in my mind’s eye when the event took place when I was but two years old when it took place. I’m guessing that on the fifth anniversary in 1960, Ebony and/or Jet magazines reran the photos, I saw them and the image seared in my mind to this day.

When I was in high school, a bunch of us raised money for some poor, rural folks in Tennessee. One day, I was (foolishly) walking alone down some dirt road down there. I see a sign indicating that I was about to enter the state of Mississippi. I crossed into the new state, then my mind screamed, “Emmett Till!” and I literally jumped back into Tennessee.

In January or February of 1986, I saw the Capitol Repertory Theater’s performance of Toni Morrison’s Dreaming Emmett, based on his life and death. I don’t remember if was particularly well-acted or -written. All I remember was that I felt again the pain that was Emmett.

The last time I saw the picture in print was when his mom, Mamie Till-Mobley, died a couple years ago.