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The New York Mets are best worst

From first to third

New York Mets

Kelly reviewed the book So Many Ways To Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team In Sports, by Devin Gordon. You can read the review about what the heck that title means. But the 2021 season pretty much encapsulates this.

From Baseball-Reference.com: The Mets were in first place in the National League East for 91 days, if one counts only the days a team played and was in first at the end of the day, or 114 days if one counts all days of the season including off days. They topped their division as late as Friday, August 13. They ended up 77-85-0, 3rd place in NL East. It was in large part because of a season-ending injury to pitcher Jacob deGrom on July 18, he with an astonishing 1.08 ERA.

There’s a friend of my sister’s named MJ, who swears I turned her on to the Mets in the mid-1960s, after their truly awful early seasons, but before they won the Series in ’69. Curious, because I had thought of myself as a Yankees fan in those days.

There was a farm team in Binghamton (actually Johnson City) that was usually a Yankees farm team. I saw Al Downing, who as an LA Dodger gave up home run 715, I saw play there. The stadium was razed in the late 1960s to build a new Route 17 (now I-86).

1986

By happenstance, I caught the ESPN Films’ 30 for 30 Documentary “Once Upon a Time in Queens”. It chronicled the 1986 Mets season. But it also discussed the 1984 and 1985 seasons, and how they built to their improbable World Series victory. It includes many interviews, including Keith Hernandez, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Mookie Wilson, Lenny Dykstra, and Kevin Mitchell.

Executive Producer Jimmy Kimmel is correct. “The characters and events captured in this documentary are so outlandish it is hard to believe this documentary isn’t a work of 80’s-era fiction. Whether you are a New Yorker, a Mets fan or even a fan of baseball makes no difference. This is the definitive, must-see story of a team and a time whose antics and even existence now seem unimaginable.”

Back in 2012, I documented seeing the ’86 Game Six on TV, with my friend Cee dressed as Gary Carter.

NYCNY

When the Yankees and the Mets played in the 2000 Subway Series, I was a bit torn. The Yankees had won in 1996, 1998, and 1999, so I was thinking the Amazins deserved a shot. It was not to be. On the other hand, I had all but forgotten that they lost to the Kansas City Royals in 2015.

There’s now a stadium in downtown Binghamton. The team that plays there is the Rumble Ponies, the Double-A farm team of the New York Mets. I’ve only been there once or twice, but maybe next year, something the MLB Mets are undoubtedly saying right now.

What to do with your stuff when you’re dead

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I may have mentioned this first part before. My wife periodically asks me, “What do you want to happen to your stuff when you’re dead?” She wasn’t quite that coarse. But to mind’s ear, it SOUNDED that way.

Recently, my daughter has been also uttered the refrain. I don’t know, but I’m still using them, thank you.

In my wife’s case, it’s a function of my mother-in-law dealing with my late father-in-law’s stuff, so I get it. But the question still makes me irritable.

There may be some of my music and books – surely the largest physical representation of my “stuff” – that they may actually want to keep! Surely, my daughter should want the book Soulsville, USA, even if she doesn’t KNOW she wants it. Likewise my Motown, Stax, Beatles-adjacent, and other albums.

We’re giving ’em away!

That said, there are some books I could part with. Top Pop Albums for 1996, 2001, and 2009 I’m giving up if anyone wants them. But I’m holding on to the 2005 and 2016 versions, the former renamed The Billboard Albums. Why keep the 2005 version but not 2009? Because 2009 dropped the tracks on the albums, re-instated in the 2016 version. And I keep 2005 because it weighs less than the 2016 version and meets most of my needs.

I just got Top Pop Country Singles 1944-2017. So the version ending with 2012 I’d gladly give up.

I’ve somehow got two copies of Marvel Masterworks, Daredevil Volume 5, covering DD issues 42-53. They’re mostly by Stan Lee and Gene Colan, but also Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith.

And I have a case of “And don’t call me a racist!” The book was compiled by Ella Mazel.

Musical CD duplicates:
25 – Adele
Secret Identity – the Andrew Allen Trio
Sky Signal – Audible
The Long Black Veil – The Chieftains
Open Ground – Kyle Fischer
Cowgirl’s Prayer – Emmylou Harris
Metal Cares – Picastro
Long Knives Down – Rainer Maria

Optimally, anyone who wanted these locally could pick up one or more of these, and multiples of the Mazel book. Or I could drop them off. Beyond that, I’ll ship the rest, in the US only because international postage and regulations are pains. Email me at rogerogreen (at) gmail (dot) com.

More important to me than stuff

I’m more interested in what becomes of my blog when I go. My blog is paid for through March 2027. Still, I’d like to find someone to dump the spam emails, accept the real comments, and update the plugins.

Fortunately, I know most of the blog will live on via the Wayback Machine. At this writing, it was last captured just after my last birthday, on March 8, 2021.

What I discovered, though, is that I used to insert these Continue Reading breaks, the content below which I can’t retrieve. So I have been systematically been getting rid of the MORE tabs.

Also, the first five years of this blog were on Blogger. When I moved it, some of the punctuation was wonky. I’d now get a sentence such as Thatâ€™s why thereâ€™s no such thing as an â€œaspiring writer.â€ I know what it means, but it’s ugly. I’m going through those posts as well.

As for Facebook and Twitter, I suppose I should figure something about those too. But they’re just not that important to me.

16 candles for the Ramblin’ blog

Daily since May 2, 2005

16 Candles. I remember that track. The song by The Crests was released at the end of 1958. It got to #2 in the pop charts for two weeks and #4 on the soul charts in early 1959.

16 Candles was kept out of the #1 pop slot by Stagger Lee by Lloyd Price, a song that also kept Donna by Richie Valens from reaching the top of the charts.

The Crests was an “interracial doo-wap group formed in Manhattan, NY.” It included Johnny Maestro, later of the Brooklyn Bridge (The Worst That Can Happen); Harold Torres; Talmadge Gough; and J.T. Carter. Patricia Van Dross, older sister of Luther Vandross, left the group in 1958.

But I’ve never seen the John Hughes movie.

I suppose those paragraphs epitomize what I try to do in the blog. Find a hook for the topic, sometimes using information gleaned from something called books. And I have a fair amount of them in the office where I almost always write.

In fact, it’s the books, or more correctly, the built-in bookcases which contain mostly my books, many of them reference materials about music, television, and movies, that kept me in here during the pandemic. Meanwhile, my wife ended up in the guest room, where she now does her email, school planning, and church meetings.

How I write a daily blog

This sounds obvious, but it does help. What makes blogging easier is knowing what I am going to blog about. There are about 30 holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. Then I’m going to write about my daughter once a month. All I need to write is about 300 more posts per year. Piece of cake!

Sometimes an event happens in the world, and I need to write about it; the death of someone significant to my understanding of the world, e.g. I might bunch a few together, as I did when Cicely Tyson, Hank Aaron, and others who died within two weeks of each other.

Often, I don’t know that I have something to say until I do. After the Atlanta-area shootings, I thought I’d just put some links in my twice-monthly linkage dump. But then they became so numerous I realized that I should probably create a blog post.

I try to write every day. If I go more than a day without writing, it becomes more difficult to restart. For me, writing begets writing. So I have to muse about SOMETHING. If I know I’m going to note the 1991 #1 hits in October 2021 – and I am, BTW – and I don’t have anything else in mind, I could write about that. I haven’t, yet; maybe tomorrow.

For the birds

My late blogger buddy Dustbury “noted that he and I have something in common: we are both magpies. As he put it: ‘The Eurasian magpie… is wicked smart, especially for a bird… I am not quite sure how ‘magpie’ became a descriptor for humans who flit from topic to topic unless it has to do with the bird’s tendency to be attracted to Shiny Things, but I’m pretty sure I fit that description, and I have several readers who seem to do likewise.”

He was not wrong. In early 2021, I watched five movies in five days and wrote posts about them soon thereafter. But I didn’t post five movie posts in a row because I didn’t want to. I sense that you don’t want me to either. The strength, and weakness I suppose, of this blog, is that it ping pongs all over the place. That’s because my mind does that.

Consequently, I don’t post in the order that I write. Frequently, I have something already scheduled for a date, but something more pressing/timely pops up. I will, and in fact, do move posts around. A lot, sometimes.

This has the added benefit that, as often as not, I have no idea what I’ve decided to post on a given day until I actually see it. Surprise! And, as I’ve often mentioned, it’s not until then that I see the damn typo or wrong word choice (site instead of cite, e.g.).

Long-form

Just recently, my wife asked me if I might want to “publish” sometimes, to which I said, “I DO publish, every day.” But I knew what she meant, write a book or something. The problem is that I don’t know what it would be about.

Now Jaquandor, HE writes books. I’ve read a couple of them and I liked them. Go read HIS books.

I never tried to get a doctorate because I couldn’t imagine spending the time necessary on one topic. And, as I get older, I realize that I keep learning “stuff” about myself, the world. It’s not that I have no preconceived notions, for surely I do. It’s just that they often tend to get dashed on the rocks. Reason enough to keep blogging, I suppose.

Review: The Stringer graphic novel

Mark Scribner

The details about the declining US press are so accurate. You might think that the graphic novel The Stringer was a piece of nonfiction. Surely writer Ted Rall has captured the essence of newsrooms experiencing severe budget and layoffs.

As the publisher’s description notes, “veteran war correspondent Mark Scribner is about to throw in the towel on journalism when he discovers that his hard-earned knowledge can save his career and make him wealthy and famous.” All he has to do is reframe his entire journalistic ethos.

The title, incidentally, describes “a newspaper correspondent not on the regular staff of a newspaper, especially one retained on a part-time basis to report on events in a particular place.” They are generally poorly paid, with little or, usually no job benefits or security.

The Stringer shows how “fact-based journalism,” which means reporters on the ground, has often taken a hit. What’s more important in an age of social media, is to get eyeballs to view your “content” on social media. It might make someone rich and famous but at the potential cost of one’s soul.

Mark Scribner, as shown by Rall and Pablo Callejo, has figured out the system and how to game it. The book is an “action-packed timely statement about how a society without a vibrant independent culture of reporting can degenerate into chaos and a warning of the dangers of sophisticated new technologies that enable the manufacture and modification of ‘truths’ with no basis in fact.”

Would Bryan Cranston approve?

Some have compared Scribner to the Walter White character in the TV series Breaking Bad. He was once a decent person who, due to circumstances, ended up committing acts that he once could not have imagined doing. And cynically rationalizing it.

Publishing Weekly calls the conclusion “well-crafted overkill,” and I would agree, though I found Scribner more than “two-dimensional.”

Ted Rall is “a nationally syndicated political cartoonist, columnist, graphic novelist, editor, author, and occasional war correspondent.” Rall and Callejo have worked together previously on The Year of Loving Dangerously, a semi-autobiographical tale about getting booted out of college, then grifting.

The Stringer is available from NBM Publishing, Amazon, and Target.

And Theodor Geisel as Dr. Seuss

sturm und drang

Seuss books — Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers

In this blog, Dr. Seuss has been mentioned numerous times, often on March 2, his birthday. I love the work of Theodor Geisel, especially Bartholemew and the Oobleck. It involves speaking truth to power. And oobleck is green. Though I found The Lorax movie only so-so, I don’t fault the source material.

I’ve learned new words, such as gox, which my spellcheck doesn’t seem to like. REM confounded me with their reference to him. But Ted hasn’t said all of the trite things that have been attributed to him.

Back in 2009, I noted him as one of 20 men I admired. So this made-up “controversy” over the voluntary cessation of future publication of a few books hurts my heart. It’s because I think Dr. Seuss, were he still alive, might very well agree with the action.

As Ty Burr said in the Boston Globe, “You can still get a hold of the six early titles that Seuss Enterprises has chosen to cease publishing anytime you want to. They’re in libraries and used bookstores; they’re on eBay and Alibris and Amazon. No one’s destroying any copies; they’re just not printing any new ones.”

Recognizing changing attitudes

More to the point: “It’s likely the good Dr… would be down with that. Before his death in 1991, he expressed regret to biographers over the virulently anti-Japanese political cartoons he had drawn during World War II; a great-nephew told the New York Times in 2017 that ‘later in his life, he was not proud of those at all.'”

And have the folks screaming “cancel culture” even perused these books? I read If I Ran the Zoo as a child. And I found the stereotypes of “potbellied, thick-lipped blacks from Africa, squinty-eyed” Asians unsettling.

But I didn’t read And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street until I was an adult. The yellow-colored “Chinaman”, later recolored and relabeled “Chinese man,” bothered me greatly. I noted that things were different in 1937.

The sturm und drang of the false narrative exhausts me. The “thinking” is that “liberals” are inflicting the cancel culture. But folks such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris had praised Seuss in public settings. Therefore liberals are also disingenuous hypocrites. QED. Oy.

Some folks seem to relish the fact that Dr. Seuss is now dominating the Amazon best-seller list. At this writing, 11 of the top 12. But, oddly, NONE of the six books being pulled is even on the Top 100.

See also what Jaquandor and Chuck Miller wrote. Daily Kos quotes Ben Carson. The Weekly Sift takes on the Silly Season in the Culture Wars.

Tag: books