Game recaps, notes from Board of Governors meetings, Flyers hire Chuck Fletcher as GM, latest trades and more from a busy Monday in your NHL morning coffee headlines.
NHL.COM: Tampa Bay Lightning winger Nikita Kucherov extended his points streak to 10 games with a goal and three assists in a 5-1 victory over the New Jersey Devils. Brayden Point had a goal and two assists.
The Nashville Predators edged the Buffalo Sabres 2-1 to hand the latter their third straight loss. Kevin Fiala snapped a 1-1 tie with a third-period goal.
With Connor McDavid ailing and out of the lineup, the Edmonton Oilers fell 4-1 to the Dallas Stars. Brett Ritchie had a goal and an assist for the Stars.
Winnipeg Jets center Mark Scheifele, Arizona Coyotes goaltender Adin Hill, and Florida Panthers left wing Jonathan Huberdeau are the NHL's three stars for the week ending Dec. 2, 2019.
The Philadelphia Flyers hired former Minnesota Wild general manager Chuck Fletcher as their new GM. Fletcher takes over from Ron Hextall, who was fired last week.
SPECTOR'S NOTE: I'll have a look at Fletcher's possible immediate plans later this morning in the Rumors section.
SPORTSNET: NHL commissioner Gary Bettman projected the salary cap for next season could reach $83 million.
SPECTOR'S NOTE: That would be another healthy increase in the cap, jumping $3.5 million over the current $79.5 million ceiling. The finalized figure will be announced by late-June.
If, as expected, the Board of Governors approves the addition of Seattle as the NHL's 32nd franchise later today, it's expected their first season will be 2021-22.
SPECTOR'S NOTE: It's expected the KeyArena in Seattle won't be ready to go until November 2020, which would explain the rationale behind pushing their inaugural campaign to the following season. It would also remove a key piece of leverage away from the NHLPA should they opt to take the early out from the current CBA next September. The league probably doesn't want to risk a potential labor war potentially messing up the debut of their new franchise.
Bettman also said the league has informed the NHLPA that it needs to know by next month if they're willing to sign off on a World Cup of Hockey tournament in 2020. "For the last year and a half, two years, we've been anxious to anchor plans for a World Cup but for whatever reason, the players' association hasn't been prepared to do that," said Bettman.
SPECTOR'S NOTE: The reason being the players prefer the Winter Olympics over the World Cup of Hockey. Still, if the NHLPA agrees to take part in the tournament, it could mean they won't exercise their early-out from the current CBA next September. Fingers crossed, kids!
STLTODAY.COM: The St. Louis Blues placed defenseman Alex Pietrangelo (hand), winger Robby Fabbri (separated shoulder), and forward Alexander Steen (concussion) on injured reserve. Pietrangelo and Fabbri could be sidelined until at least Christmas while Steen is listed as day-to-day.
TSN: Toronto Maple Leafs winger William Nylander said he was told by GM Kyle Dubas he wouldn't be traded as long as Dubas is running the Leafs. Nylander and the Leafs recently ended a lengthy contract standoff.
SPECTOR'S NOTE: I don't doubt Dubas was sincere and Nylander undoubtedly believes him. But Nylander lacks no-trade protection until the final season of his new six-year contract. A lot can happen over that time period to change Dubas' mind if he remains the GM over that period.
Speaking of the Leafs, they traded forward Josh Leivo to the Vancouver Canucks for forward Michael Carcone and temporarily loaned defenseman Travis Dermott to their AHL affiliate to make room for Nylander. Dermott's expected back on their roster later today.
TRIBLIVE.COM: The Pittsburgh Penguins traded winger Daniel Sprong to the Anaheim Ducks for defenseman Marcus Pettersson.
SPECTOR'S NOTE: Both trades saw their clubs swapping young players who weren't working out, with their new teams hoping the change of scenery improves their respective performances.
NHL.COM: The Los Angeles Kings claimed forward Brendan Leipsic off waivers from the Vancouver Canucks.
So, in today's NHL, sucker punching someone is "unsportsmanlike conduct". If nothing else, that explains why Tom Wilson hasn't been banned from the league for life.
What gets my goat sometimes with (non-headshot) suspensions is that whatever stupidity that leads up to the offence is ignored.
I have no problem with Bertuzzi getting a couple of games for punching a dude on the ice while sitting on the bench.
Why though does Calvert get nothing for full on spearing dude in the guts on the bench while on the ice?
And yes I saw the redwings player grab his stick. Calvert's reaction was disproportionate to the situation and he freed his stick already.
I guess it is true, they only ever see the retaliation.
Rutherford trades a guy who is a point per game player at the AHL level for a guy that will never play a game in the NHL or the AHL. If Sprong goes on to become a scoring star then this is Marcus Naslund all over again. I realize Sullivan was never going to actually give the kid a chance but this seems like such a waste.
I am not overly happy about this one either as I think we are giving up on him too soon. However if he isn't going to get top 9 mins on the reg, there is no point of him in the lineup. Can't send him down to get that top 9 mins in the A or you end up like Zykov with Carolina last week. He also didn't really do the little things to earn him extra time to move back up. When he was in the top 6 he was non-existant for the most part. Its frustrating because he has high end talent, but what more can you do? he couldn't beat out the other RW's to get the time so this is the end result – Probably needs a change of scenery.
Naslund's situation was more towards having too much offense and thinking Stojanov was going to be that gritty Kevin Stevens light player they could actually use. Plus who thought he would be in a car accident shortly after to which he probably never recovered.
At least with Petterson he is controllable (can be sent to the AHL without going through waivers) and gives some defensive depth.
ds – you have something there too. If we remember last season, he got into some trouble while with WBS as he had some "attitude problems" and a few incidents. I think from that point on the team sort of had enough of him and he was tuned out.


The New Patriotic Party (NPP's) Special Electoral College process to prune down the number of presidential Candidate aspirant from seven to five by delegates, in keeping with the party's constitution, has proceeded peacefully across designated voting centres across the country, despite nearly initial scenes of confusion recorded at some centres.
Some 787 delegates of the NPP are voting in Sunday�s polls at 11 polling centres in the ten regions of the country.
About 130,000 delegates will be voting on October 18 to select a flagbearer to lead the party at the 2016 general elections.
Seven candidates, Dr. Kofi Konadu Apraku, Stephen Asamoah-Boateng, Francis Addai-Nimoh, Kofi Osei Ameyaw, Alan Kyerematen, Nana Akufo-Addo, and Joe Ghartey are hoping to make it to the top five after Sunday�s voting.
Initial reports from the centres indicate that in some instances, voting has already ended or is nearing completion to await the counting of ballots at 3:30pm.
Earlier reports by Utv's Prince Ahenkan, indicated that voting was halted at the party's National Headquarters in Accra, for nearly half an hour, because of confusion regarding proxy voting.
None of the party agents representing the 7 aspirants were prepared to give in.
The various agents insisted the delegates bring their proxy letters before they are allowed to partake in the exercise.
But the Nima Police Command helped to calm matters.
In Tamale, Kwabena Ntow reports that the timely intervention of security personnel prevented the ongoing special electoral college from turning bloody.
According to him, one of the delegates nearly caused chaos at the voting centre when after casting his vote, decided to display it to the gathering.
Agents of some of the aspirants got furious about his conduct and demanded nullification of his vote.
The resultant chaotic situation ended the smooth conduct of the exercise which lasted for close to 10 minutes.
Confusion was also recorded in the Eastern Region, but according to Michael Akrofi, peace eventually prevailed and the voting process subsequently resumed.
Meanwhile, the 2012 Presidential Candidate of the NPP and one of the seven aspiring candidates, Nana Akufo-Addo, is "surprised" at reports of confusions erupting at some polling stations. He however pointed out that he will not "prejudice the matter" by making any comments but will wait until he is properly briefed.
�I�m surprised to hear this news...I don�t want to prejudice the matter until I have heard from my people to hear what exactly took place,� Nana Akufo-Addo told the media.


text:
Everton are the only Premier League side left in Europe – no pressure…
Watch Dynamo Kiev v Everton in the Europa League live on ITV4 from 5.30pm
By James Gill
Thursday, 19th March 2015 at 1:50 pm
Dynamo Kiev v Everton, Europa League Last 16 second leg, 5.30pm ITV4 (kick-off 6pm)
Man City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool – all have tumbled out of European competition this season. Spurs too have been knocked out of the Europa League, leaving Everton the sole Premier League representative in Europe this year.
They may only be 14th in the table this season, but Roberto Martinez's side now have a chance to make it through to a European quarter final for the first time in 30 years.
Everton are 2-1 ahead in the Europa League tie thanks to a late penalty from Romelu Lukaku, and if they hold on tonight they will be the most successful English club in Europe this season.
Their match comes just a day after Premier League champions City became the fourth and final English club to crash out of the Champions League. Six years ago English clubs made up three of the four Champions League semi final spots, but since then the Premier League's domination of Europe has collapsed.
English sides have had marginally better luck in the Europa League, with Chelsea winning the tournament in 2013.
Everton's Gareth Barry last faced Kiev as a Manchester City player when the sides met in the Europa League in 2011. Dynamo won, knocking City out of the competition.
The Ukrainians are unbeaten at home this season, but Everton need only draw to progress thanks to their 2-1 lead.
That is the task facing England's last, best hope in Europe. No pressure.
West Ham and Fulham's FA Cup third round replays brought back the magic of the Cup
Liverpool v Everton – Premier League football preview
Premier League football: Everton v Chelsea preview
England manager Roy Hodgson to host Google+ Hangout – what could possibly go wrong?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Roberto Bolaño's Caracas Speech and the Limits of Invention
by Pedro Plaza Salvati
When Roberto Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for The Savage Detectives, Hugo Chávez had only been in power for a few months. In those early days of his government, he broke with the tradition of Venezuelan presidents awarding the prize in person. He also said, at the time, with barely a few hours' notice, that he would not be attending the ceremony because he had a fever. What's true is that Chávez never attended any of the subsequent ceremonies for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and a few years later he allowed the most prestigious literary honor in Latin America to become politicized.
Some previous fissure had given Bolaño reason to renounce being part of the judging panel for the next prize. Nonetheless, the decline was rooted in the speech given in 2003 by Fernando Vallejo, winner of the prize for his work El desbarrancadero, when, giving Chávez the perfect excuse, Vallejo criticized Simón Bolívar and donated his prize money to a humane society for animals. From then on, the Gallegos prize would be awarded to authors who aligned themselves with the ideals of the revolution.
By this I don't mean that the novels that won prizes in the years to come were not good novels—that's grist for a different mill—but that the prize was awarded to authors whose thinking was considered to be close to the ideals of the revolution, to the detriment of literary works that deserved to be awarded prizes.
When the prize, its prestige now tarnished, was awarded to Ricardo Piglia for his novel Blanco nocturno in 2011, one had the hope that the situation was starting to recover, but the joy was fleeting. To begin with, Chávez's words on Twitter from the comfort and safety of his keyboard: "What a beautiful Argentine-Venezuelan event. Congratulations, compatriot Ricardo Piglia, for this well-deserved prize, the Rómulo Gallegos. Thank you!!!" We Venezuelans understand very well what this sort of praise from the commandant suggests, always thinking in terms of alliances and friendships, always administered with intentionality. Piglia, as well, would emit some controversial statements that were very badly received in the Venezuelan literary world.
I happened to be in Caracas when the prize ceremony was happening. Along with a friend, a much bigger Piglia fan than I, we managed to insinuate ourselves into the event at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos (CELARG), in the same location where the writer and president of the country had his Caracas household, and where this headquarters was built. We managed to meet Piglia in a quiet moment before the ceremony, in front of the elevators. We spoke with him, he signed our books, and told us some stories about Princeton University. He struck me as humble and pleasant. Then we listened closely to his speech, seated among the back rows of the auditorium, sheltered by the darkness, outside the center of attention. As the applause died down, we slipped away into the shadows.
Many of the country's best writers who had been in the running for the prize several years earlier, in 2009, asked their respective publishers to withdraw their books, in protest against the politicization of the prize. They also demonstrated publicly about this. The award's disrepute increased in 2015 when Pablo Montoya's prize money was significantly delayed, and then, the last straw, suspended indefinitely, claiming the State lacked sufficient financial resources.
Nor did the reactivated edition in 2020 enjoy the participation of recognized Venezuelan writers, due to all the problems and the economic penuries the country has been suffering from, consistent with its principles. That was not the case with a small number of celebrated foreign writers who aroused amazement and criticism in the local media, and who were, ultimately, not selected, not even as finalists—the only exception being Horacio Castellanos Moya. Let's now consider the award we are most concerned with here: the winner of the prize in 1999 for The Savage Detectives.
From the start of what's known as the Caracas Speech, Bolaño shows his literary prowess and ability with lucidity and a sense of humor. He begins with an anecdote about soccer, probably to loosen up the formalism of the ceremony. He talks about the problem he has with Venezuela and relates it to an undiagnosed dyslexia that he himself discovered when he played soccer and used his left leg. He relates it to writing: he was a left-footed shooter and a right-handed writer. Through verbal sleight of hand, he connects his dyslexia, his difficulty in situating the right side or the left side of the soccer field, with his difficulty in identifying the real capital of Venezuela. He declares that the most logical thing would be for Bogotá to be the capital of Venezuela and Caracas to be the capital of Colombia: the letter V at the start of Venezuela has a very similar pronunciation in Spanish to the sound of the letter B with which Bogotá begins, and the hard-C sound of Caracas is the same as the initial hard C of Colombia; he also says that Cantaclaro and Canaima, which he qualifies as the two best novels by Gallegos, apart from Doña Barbara, could be Colombian novels.
Then he alludes to an incident at a conference in Mexico, when he mixed up urban poets from Caracas with urban poets from Bogotá, and then he dives headlong into his word games. Bolaño goes deeper and comments that Doña Bárbara combines the sound of the B from Bárbara with the b-sounding V of Venezuela. Then he launches a direct allusion to Venezuelan idiosyncrasy: Bolívar and Bárbara, what a fine couple they would have made, he says, perhaps thinking about the strong and domineering character of the heroic liberator with a strong, dominant fictional character created by Rómulo Gallegos, who also coincides with the original title of this novel which, allegedly, Gallegos changed at the last moment: La coronela. At the heart of it, what Bolaño tries to sketch is that in the spurious years during which Bolívar's dream was maintained, Colombia and Venezuela were one and the same country: La Gran Colombia. He skillfully Latinamericanizes his speech when he says that Bolívar died in Colombia, which is also both Chile and México, and he identifies the titles of works exchanged by Rómulo Gallegos, Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes. He even goes so far as to say that Pobre Negro is a Peruvian novel.
The speech, as it continued, caused joy among the listeners. From Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, who at that time was the general director of CELARG and who had spent several days doing various things together with Bolaño, I have learned, thanks to various anecdotes he has told me about Bolaño's one and only visit to Caracas, that Bolaño wrote the speech during those days in the Hotel Ávila, where the prize winners traditionally stayed. It's a place surrounded by nature on the slopes of the imposing El Ávila mountain. Bolaño assured him that the powerful chirping of the crickets kept him awake all night; Vila-Matas, winner of the prize the following year, said the birds that sounded like car alarms kept him on edge; both writers were disconcerted by the cacophony of Caracas. Bolaño's insomnia, along with the fever that his son Lautaro was suffering from, which required medical attention in Caracas and caused him great unease and anxiety, as Guitiérrez Plaza tells us, did not prevent him from composing a speech that was considered by those present to be intimate, affectionate, and very intelligent.
Bolaño returns to his initial wordplay about dyslexia and soccer; he affirms that he has just won the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos grand prize, Number 11, which was the same number on his team jersey when he played soccer, Number 11. Bolaño's passion for soccer is manifest in his story "Buba," dedicated to Juan Villoro, which takes place in Barcelona. He talks about coincidences, about the plaque for Rómulo Gallegos in Barcelona, on the building where he lived and worked. When Bolaño walked up to 11 Calle Muntaner, he discovered the plaque that, according to him, reads: "Here lived Rómulo Gallegos, novelist and politician, born in Caracas in 1884, and died in Caracas in 1969."
That would make a triple coincidence: 11-11-11: jersey number 11, Gallegos living at 11 Calle Muntaner, and the eleventh annual Rómulo Gallegos prize. Bolaño uses so much humor—which suits him very well—to accentuate the coincidences a little bit more, he just happens to remember to tell everyone how, in his room at the Hotel Ávila, they'd left him a snack and a mysterious package of the extremely sweet Venezuelan cake known as Once Once—(i.e. "Eleven Eleven"), whose company's factory was founded in Caracas by Don Rosendo Valentín Rondón Moronta on November 11 (i.e. 11/11), 1960, when Bolaño was seven years old.
Some inaccuracies take years to appear, without one seeking them out, and that is the case with the many coincidences in Roberto Bolaño's Caracas Speech. A stroll along the streets of Barcelona in the year 2021 to visit the house of Rómulo Gallegos made me aware of the discrepancy between what is related and what is real, at least in what refers to a factual circumstance mentioned in the speech.
Bolaño's translation of the plaque written in Catalan arouses the first suspicion: "Aquí visqué i escriví (1932-1933), Rómulo Gallegos, novelista eminent i President de la República de Veneçuela. Caracas 1884-1969."1 In that sense, we emphasize the fact of the place of writing: Bolaño finds himself in Caracas, and he's writing, grasping for what he remembers, through insomnia and the crickets in the background, and perhaps that explains why he relates so vaguely what's written on the plaque. If we want to be precise, we would say that he fails to mention the years when Gallegos lived at that address; he invents the word "politician" and omits the adjective "eminent."
The book Rómulo Gallegos y España (Caracas, Monte Ávila Editores, 1986) by José López Rueda contains some pages devoted to Gallegos' life in Barcelona: "To help themselves financially, Gallegos and his wife took in three young Venezuelans as boarders: Simón Gómez Malaret, Nelson Himiob, and Jesús Lavié… and sometimes Gallegos' apartment would be visited by young fellows who didn't live in Barcelona, like Gonzalo Barrios, Miguel Otero Silva, or illustrious Venezuelans like Pedro Emilio Coll."
Here arises a second, more concrete, suspicious point. What I mention next, I confirmed by walking from the address where Bolaño lived in Barcelona, Carrer dels Tallers 45, to Calle Muntaner 11. This route takes only about five to seven minutes on foot and doesn't really seem like the exhausting Ensanche district he mentions in his speech. Although, geographically, this spot marks the edge between the Ensanche and Barcelona's old city, it's not an area of especially wide streets, which is how Bolaño describes the area where he found himself when he discovered the plaque. Even more significant is the distance to the house where Gallegos really lived, just short of a mile away, about twenty minutes of fast walking amid the summer heat; which makes it improbable that he would have been confused about it, even with the way the mind plays tricks on our memory.
The speech continues, and Bolaño speaks about writers and their native lands: their language, the people they love, their memory, loyalty, and valor. The home country can be simply the novel that is written at a particular moment in time. The passport to those countries of literature is the method of writing––not just writing well but writing marvelously well. "It seems to me now that there can be many homelands, but only one passport, and that passport, evidently, relates to the quality of the writing." What makes good writing? Bolaño answers his own question: "Knowing how to stick your head into the darkness, knowing how to leap into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous job."
A dangerous calling, indeed, and for many reasons, including when a writer, either voluntarily or involuntarily, alters concrete reality in order to make it match their story, be it fiction or nonfiction. And I don't say this in a spirit of judgement—I'm not judging because I don't consider anybody to be the owner or master of the truth. I'm only sharing my own take, without trying to seem grave or affected—a deplorable attitude—nor for any excessive love of formalism, which limits creative freedom, while maintaining my admiration for the Chilean novelist.
Sometimes one reads a text and misses details along the way, unable to assimilate so many different things the first time. I'd had a few chances to visit the building where Gallegos had lived, and I knew it couldn't be at Calle Muntaner 11. Nevertheless, thanks to my cluelessness, that missing piece remained isolated in a mental fog, as if due to a small taste of what supposedly happens in Colombia or Venezuela—with, to paraphrase Bolaño, their interchanged capitals—when some criminals spike people's beverages with scopolamine, also known as Devil's Breath, and in Spanish burundanga, spelled with the B of Bogotá, Barcelona, and Bolaño: the person's judgement and memory turn cloudy, and unspeakable things happen. Like an aftereffect of the Caracas Speech, Venezuelan writers residing in Barcelona frequently ask: "Hey, man, where the hell is that Rómulo Gallegos plaque? I've never been able to find it. I always get mixed up, I walk all around till my head spins but I can't ever find it," as if they were talking about some hidden location requiring a secret initiation ritual to gain entrance.
What's more, Bolaño ran a serious risk during his speech because, if someone in the audience had known the real address of Gallegos' house in Barcelona, and had stood up, as abrupt, spontaneous, and direct as we Venezuelans are, he could have called him out or questioned him right inside the auditorium:
"Hey, listen Bolaño, with all due respect, you're wrong: Gallegos' house is located at Muntaner 193."
And it's now when I realize, after paying homage to the Venezuelan novelist in May 2021, upon returning to Barcelona after unexpectedly staying in Caracas for a whole year, trapped by the pandemic, the discrepancy that was floating in my head as if in the zero gravity of space. Gallegos, clearly, had not lived at 11 Calle Muntaner but at 193 Calle Muntaner, where he had written, concluded, and then submitted his novel Cantaclaro to the publisher Araluce.
The mind comes floating back down to earth.
Bolaño also says that Number 11 corresponds to one of the "two different houses" of Gallegos in Barcelona, and says that Pere Gimferrer, whom he uses as a shield, told him that Gallegos had two houses, when all sources indicate that Gallegos lived only at one address in Barcelona, Besides, there is no doubt that only one single plaque exists. This is confirmed by Xavi Ayen in his book Aquellos años del Boom. Offering a detailed discussion of Gallegos as a precursor to this movement, Ayen affirms: "Who knows if he came attracted by the sonority of a name that evoked for him his brief stay in the Venezuelan Barcelona, where he directed the Colegio Federal de Varones (Federal Men's College) and married Teotiste Arocha in 1912. He worked as sales manager for the National Cash Register Company, and in his flat at Calle Muntaner 193, a plaque in Catalan commemorates his stay. There he conspired politically with the tranquility afforded him by the protective barrier of the ocean."
Gimferrer and Bolaño enjoyed a close relationship. To begin with, it seems to be what enabled Bolaño to become known in Spain. In a conversation published by the Nueva Revista in June 2017, Gimferrer affirms: "I did not discover Bolaño in the strict sense of the word, because he'd already published work, only nobody was paying any attention to him. Then he sent [me] the manuscript of Nazi Literature in America and I proposed publishing it; and so it was done, and the book signified his launch as an author." But more than this anecdote about Bolaño's literary launch, the speech's explicative tone, along with its playful and transgressive spirit, reflect both men's way of viewing the writerly life. In the prologue to Bolaño's The Romantic Dogs (Barcelona, Acantilado, 2010), Pere Gimferrer writes: "His fictions, in some way realistic except as metaphor and parody, not only of reality, but of themselves, in the fecund ambiguous frontier in which pastiche and homage adjoin, are just as poetic as his poems/anti-poems are narrative."
For his part, Bolaño signals his admiration for Gimferrer in multiple interviews. For example, in some statements made to the Mexican media upon winning the Rómulo Gallegos prize, he comments: "Pere Gimferrer has lucid texts on this point. A writer should never pursue respectability: it's completely contrary to any literary project because it tends toward immobility, toward consensus, toward the approval of others and a secure position in society. They should not seek any position in society, they should flee from it, from any position. They should walk freely through the open air and let the elements be their household. The first thing necessary to consider is that they should destroy figures on the landscape and not wink at power, whatever that happens to be, on the left or on the right… Power is always an obstacle between the writer and the elements where he lives."
In this sense, it's worth highlighting, like an affinity between Bolaño and Gallegos, what José López Rueda tells us: "It's well known that Rómulo Gallegos eschewed literary salons and conversations. For that reason, despite the fact that his novels sold quite well in Spain, he was not very well known in literary circles." Being a Latin American writer in Spain, his work would be spread, in a rather uncommon way for the time, given Spanish readers' preference for authors from their own country, when the Spanish Association of the Best Book of the Month chose Doña Bárbara as its selection for September 1929. Even so, Gallegos did not mingle much with the media, perhaps in agreement with what Bolaño affirms: "A writer should never pursue respectability: it's completely contrary to any literary project because it tends toward immobility, toward consensus, to a vote from others, and to a place in a society." Which means, returning to the sense of the speech, is that it could be interpreted as a grand parody, and it's possible, I'd venture, that Gimferrer and Bolaño shared a good laugh together over their roguish farce about Gallegos having two different houses in Barcelona,
Bolaño's speech has also had its practical repercussions over time. Apart from the various lost Venezuelan writers spinning around like a child's top looking for the Gallegos plaque, I find, for example, a literary blog from 2006 whose author, who claims to write "reckless reviews of the books that fall into my hands," as a result of the Caracas Speech, comments: "Reading that Bolaño knew that Rómulo Gallegos lived in Barcelona: he had seen a plaque like the one he mentions in the entry. All my attempts to locate this aforementioned plaque were in vain. Not even Google knew the answer." Nowadays, clearly, you can definitely find the street address, but perhaps not back in 2006. Those who took the Caracas Speech seriously, even knowing it to be a literary piece filled with roguishness and humor, were never able to find Gallegos' house in Barcelona.
At the end of the prize ceremony, Bolaño spent several hours signing his books and talking, especially with young people. He was generous and open with the people, generously making time for anyone who brought him one of his books to sign. This was possible through an initiative organized by the CELARG administration that year. As one of the conditions for the award, Monte Ávila Editores had the right, for the first time in the prize's history, of bringing out a Venezuelan edition of the winning novel, whose price would be affordable for Venezuela's general public and especially for the young people to whom Bolaño dedicated so much time.
In other countries, most award committees, throughout the history of literary prizes, choose as many as half of their winners from the native-born population. Not so with the Rómulo Gallegos prize. To date, only a single Venezuelan writer has won it: Arturo Uslar Pietri, for his novel La visita en el tiempo. In the interest of a supposedly misunderstood impartiality, the various juries never chose Venezuelan writers who might have deserved it. The winner walked away with a significant monetary prize, the big Spanish-language publishers benefited from increased sales, and the country got nothing. Just like that, in the interest of achieving a balance between what's given and what's received, this condition was imposed, and saw its debut, precisely, with The Savage Detectives. Bolaño was the first honoree to enjoy the privilege of a guaranteed Venezuelan edition of his prize-winning novel, and he was able to see, in situ, in a nighttime visit to the old headquarters of Monte Ávila Editores in the La Castellana neighborhood, in the company of Gutiérrez Plaza, the offices where numerous people worked on the process of digitization, correction, editing, layout, and printing his novel, a few days before the prize ceremony. At that time, Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, who publicly supported this initiative with great enthusiasm, was the president of Monte Ávila, in its time one of the large publishers with widespread market coverage in Latin America and Spain.
Literary talent—which Bolaño, with his undisputed obsessive dedication, had in abundance—translates, in the act of writing, into blood, sweat, and tears. Along that path, it's inconvenient to alter tangible, concrete, and provable realities. I cannot say that Spain lies north of Europe, nor that Chile shares a border with Colombia or that Liechtenstein and Andorra are neighbors, nor that Bolaño lived in one of the buildings on the Rambla del Raval, right smack in front of Botero's enormous cat, set there after being dragged from the Ciutadella Park, through a plaza in Drassanes and the Olympic Stadium. Of course I'm taking my examples to the extreme, but, what if someone composes a text with one of these premises? Not for nothing the final word of Bolaño's speech: "Pinocchio."
In all likelihood, Bolaño was conscious of his own game when he affirmed: "By this point in the speech, I hope that Don Rómulo is not too angry at me; I also hope he doesn't decide to haunt the dreams of Domingo Miliani," this last comment an allusion to the founder of the CELARG and the institution's president at the time. Bolaño had become very fond of him during his stay in Venezuela, along with various members of that institution who hosted and attended to him during those days, with whom he later maintained an affectionate friendship. This lasted until the lamentable impasse in 2001, when Bolaño declined to serve as a jury member for the twelfth edition of the prize, motivated by, among other things, the unfortunate declarations of the next president of CELARG during the Chávez era, the sociologist and philosopher Rigoberto Lanz. A week after the verdict, Lanz declared that "the Rómulo Gallegos prize smells fishy," saying that it had a corrupt history. Such infamous and irresponsible statements kept the prize from being awarded that year. The successful handling of the situation, on the part of the four other remaining jurors, Sergio Ramírez, Victoria de Stefano, Carmen Ruiz Barrionuevo, and Edgardo Rodríguez Julia, enabled it to weather the storm.
And with the nostalgia induced by the title of his story "Last Evenings on Earth," how could Bolaño have imagined that everything was going to accelerate beyond expectation, that three years after his Caracas Speech he would die, and that he too would then have a plaque in the place where he lived in Barcelona, in the Raval district, Carrer dels Tallers 45, in a flat measuring twenty-five square meters, before moving to Girona and then isolating himself in the coastal city of Blanes. The plaque, translated from the Catalan, says: In this house lived the writer and poet Roberto Bolaño Ávalos. Santiago de Chile 1953 – Barcelona 2003. Barcelona with B for Bolaño, the same where he wrote—so they say—his poem "The Romantic Dogs," which begins like this:
At that time, I was twenty years old
And I was crazy.
I'd lost a country
but I had gained a dream.
And as long as I had that dream
nothing else really mattered.
Translated by Brendan Riley
1 Translated from the Catalan: "Here lived and wrote (1932-1933) Rómulo Gallegos, eminent novelist and President of the Republic of Venezuela. Caracas 1884-1969."
Brendan Riley is an ATA Certified Translator of Spanish to English. He holds degrees in English from Santa Clara University and Rutgers University, as well as certificates in translation studies from U.C. Berkeley and the University of Illinois. Brendan's writings and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Three Percent, Asymptote, Numéro Cinq, Bookslut, Drunken Boat, Anomaly, Publishers Weekly, The Believer, Best European Fiction, and The New York Times. His book-length translations include: Juan Velasco Moreno's Massacre of the Dreamers (Editorial Polibea, 2011); Álvaro Enrigue's Hypothermia (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013); Sunrise in Southeast Asia by Carmen Grau (Dunsborough Books, 2015); The Bible: Living Dialogue by Pope Francis, Abraham Skorka, and Marcelo Figueroa (American Bible Society, 2015); Caterva by Juan Filloy (Dalkey Archive Press 2015); The Great Latin American Novel by Carlos Fuentes (Dalkey Archive Press, 2016); and Recounting: Antagony—Book I by Luis Goytisolo (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017). Since 1994, Brendan has been a full-time high school teacher of English and Spanish.
Pedro Plaza Salvati
Pedro Plaza Salvati (Caracas) holds a master's degree in creative writing from New York University and a master's degree in literary creation from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He earned a cum laude B.A. in international studies from The American University in Washington, D.C. He won the prestigious XVI "Transgenerico" literary prize in 2016 for his book What Joan Didion Told Me (Chronicles of New York), currently translated into English. His most recent work is the novel Broadway-Lafayette: el último andén (Kalathos Ediciones, Madrid, 2019). He has also published the short story collection Decepción de altura (Equinoccio, Caracas, 2013) and the novels El hombre azul (bid & co., Caracas, 2016) and El lugar de las nubes (San José, Uruk Editores, 2016). His story "El puesto 690 de la sala de lectura" was included in Escribir en Nueva York: Antología de narradores hispanoamericanos (Editorial Caja Negra, 2014). He has published literary pieces at Asymptote, LALT, Papel Literario, Buensalvaje, Áncora, and Mercurio and is a regular contributor to Prodavinci. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.
Brendan Riley
On the Eve Of, Cherries are Born
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Every morning the church bells would wake me. The first time I heard them, I desired to always be awakened like the arijunas, far from the crow of the roosters…
Latin American Criticism: Chronicle of a Resurrection Foretold
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Along with the historically recycled deaths of the author, literature, and the critic, the demise of literary interpretation naturally has played a major role in those frequently apocalyptic perceptions. Latin…
Achy Obejas: "Translation as Something to Play With": A Conversation with George Henson
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I think we both have conflicted relationships with our ethnic communities here in the States. I think to a certain degree, we're both in love with those communities, and at…


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F1 boss Guenther Steiner, the breakout star of Netflix smash-hit 'Drive to Survive,' broke down what it takes to manage in the world's fastest sport
Sam Cooper
Steiner began his motorsport career in 1986.
Mark Thompson/Getty Images
Haas' team principal Guenther Steiner spoke to Insider to explain what his job is all about.
Steiner joined Haas at its inception in 2014 and was a breakout star of Netflix's "Drive to Survive."
The Italian-American told Insider that there are no quiet days, and that he never knows what he'll be dealing with.
Behind the drivers, the role of the Formula One team principal is arguably the sport's most crucial job. Effectively acting as the manager of the team, they are charged with ensuring everything keeps running smoothly.
It is an extremely rarified role, with only 10 people in the world doing the job at any given time. One of those people is Guenther Steiner, team principal of the Haas F1 team, and one of the sport's most colorful characters.
"There are not many quiet days," Steiner told Insider a day out from the start of the Turkish Grand Prix weekend at the start of October.
"You start with the race on Saturday and Sundays, then on Monday you get back and have to deal with the more mundane things like managing people, HR stuff, business stuff with our partners and sponsors. There is so much stuff you have to deal with.
"There is always a surprise every day."
'You have to deal with the people, drivers, the politics of the sport.'
Steiner has been at Haas since the team was created.
Marco Canoniero/LightRocket via Getty Images
Through his colorful language and tell-it-how-it-is approach, the Italian-American Steiner became a breakout star of Netflix's "Drive to Survive," a fly-on-the-wall documentary credited with hugely increasing the popularity of F1, particularly among younger American viewers.
Born in the Northern Italian town of Merano, Steiner is into his 35th year in the motorsport industry. He has been Haas' team principal since the team's inception in 2014 and describes his role as like a general manager or CEO of a company.
"You look after the whole company. I would say the only thing different to a standard company is that you have to do a lot of things you don't normally have to do in a standard company.
"You have to deal with the technical stuff, you have to deal with the people, drivers – who are very complex people – you have to deal with the politics of the sport. There is a lot to deal with."
'I don't know if I always wanted to be a team principal, I don't know if I want to be one right now!'
Steiner was picked by Haas to lead the new team.
Peter Fox/Getty Images
Steiner was tasked by team owner Gene Haas to not only create a new team from scratch, but the first American team in the sport since 1986, the same year Steiner entered the industry. Back then, becoming team principal was never a target for him.
"I don't know if I always wanted to be a team principal, I don't know if I want to be one right now!
"It's not something I gave myself as a target 20 years ago saying 'I want to be an F1 team principal' — no.
"I've worked in motorsports for 35 years now, it's a long time. It's step-by-step so at some stage, that became the only place to go to.
"There are only 10 principal jobs in this sport, so there are only so many places you can go. It's not like football where you've got a lot of places to go to.
"I started when Gene Haas got to know me and said I think you're the right guy to do this."
Providing a 'bigger picture' look on race day
Where the team principal is come race day varies between the teams.
Joan Cros Garcia/Corbis via Getty Images
The role of a team principal come race day can vary.
Red Bull's Christian Horner, who can be spotted on the pit wall alongside the engineers, took a swipe at his Mercedes counterpart Toto Wolff, saying the Austrian "is in the garage next to the press guy."
For Steiner, he likes to see the bigger picture.
"I wouldn't say I'm hands-on but I'm also not hands-off.
"With our chief race engineer (British-Japanese staffer Ayao Komatsu), I've got a very good relationship. We work well together, I don't interfere.
"They get in their race mode whereas I can see the bigger picture. I understand racing pretty well and I like to do it but I know that somebody needs to take the decisions and it shouldn't be me.
"He sometimes asks me my opinion, I sometimes tell him some things which I see out on the race track and just make sure that he sees them but I'm not making the calls here.
"I just try to support as best as I can and if I'm needed, I'm there to help. Sometimes I'm needed because they trust me pretty well.
"I'm just there to support them. That's my role but I'm quite involved mentally in that. I'm not just watching the race as a spectator."
Haas and the opportunity to shape things in his image
Steiner worked alongside Christian Horner at Red Bull before joining Haas.
Before Haas, Steiner worked alongside Christian Horner at Red Bull when the team was in its infancy but starting a team from the ground up provided Steiner with the opportunity to shape it in his image.
"From my perspective, as a general manager you can mold it as you want to see it. You don't come in somewhere where you have to fix things and change things which takes a lot of time as well.
"On one side, it's nice sometimes if you get into a successful team and you just have to run it. It's pretty easy and when everything is right, running anything is easy.
"But when you start something new, you have to make it your way and make sure you make it successful for the future, not only for the short term.
"I quite like to start something from new so you can get your ideas in.
"Gene Haas let me do quite a lot of stuff because he said 'you have done this before, you have started race teams before, you have done this quite a long time.'
"I just tried to do what was best, I always exchanged notes with him on what I was trying to do obviously, but he always supported me which was fantastic for me."
'COVID was the biggest challenge in Haas' history'
Steiner said the COVID pandemic was the hardest challenge in the team's history.
Clive Mason - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
Under Steiner's leadership, Haas finished its debut season with 29 points then improved the following year to earn 47 points. Life has been tough since then, and in 2021, the team is far and away the slowest on the grid.
Steiner admitted it became a matter of keeping the team alive rather than aiming for podiums and described the impact of the COVID pandemic as the hardest thing the team has ever faced.
"It hit at the complete wrong time for us.
"Our car wasn't good, then COVID hit and the commercial agreement we had expired. It was a challenge keeping the team going and that's the biggest challenge up to now.
"The challenge last year was bigger than starting the team up in my opinion because there is something there, you want to keep it going but you need to make a case so that the owner keeps it going.
"That was the biggest challenge in Haas' history."
A change in approach with the arrival of two rookies in the paddock
Haas brought in two rookies for the 2021 season.
Lars Baron/Getty Images
The start of the 2021 season saw the introduction of two new drivers to the grid in Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin, replacing veterans Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen.
Neither had ever raced in F1 before, with both arriving from the sport's feeder series, Formula 2.
Steiner said he has changed his approach with the arrival of two rookies, both 22 years-old, to the garage.
"I had to change because I can't expect rookies to be at the level the other guys were because the other guys were on a pretty good level.
"With these guys, I need to explain more why things happen and how they happen.
"That is what I try to do. When I see they are ready to be pushed harder, that is what I will do but in the moment, I try to give them as much as I can of my experience so they are getting prepared quicker."
Steiner says with the introduction of budget caps, the goal now is for Haas to be fighting for points.
"Next year [the goal is] to be back in the midfield, to fight for points.
"Mid-to-long term, it is to get podiums and hopefully at some stage, Haas can get wins.
"I'm realistic about it, that is not a short or mid term thing. With the budget caps that are coming in, the playing field should get more even. That is what we are working on and I think it's achievable."
NOW WATCH: Why so many Olympians are broke
Haas Formula One F1


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Van Zant
Van Zant is an American musical duo composed of brothers Donnie Van Zant and Johnny Van Zant. Both are brothers of the late Ronnie Van Zant, former lead singer for the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Johnny became the lead vocalist for the reunited Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1987, and Donnie is also the leader and vocalist of .38 Special. Initiall… Read More
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Elisha Boyd
Co-Pastor Elisha Boyd serves as Women of Worship Leader for the Women Ministry where God has gifted her to preach, teach, train and encourage women to pursue their destiny. She also plays an intricate role in the intercessory prayer ministry. God has given her a deep passion and desire for aiding teen girls through "NIARA", Young Women of High Purpose, a mentoring program the Lord gave her vision for several years ago. She is involved in community support groups such as Family Promise, NAACP of Bryan County, Richmond Hill MLK Observance Committee Co-Chair, and has served as booster club parent for the Richmond Hill High School Lady Wildcats and Lady Legacy AAU basketball teams. Elder Boyd's entrepreneurial spirit has led her to establish several startup businesses, Lisa's Chimichanga's and Joint Heirs Enterprise and t-shirt designing. She is also A Director III in a home-based business called Melaleuca the Wellness Company. She also is the founder of Kingdom Women, a community-based group birth to unite local pastor wives and women for the common goal of advancing God's Kingdom. God has blessed her to encourage and empower Women from all over through her newly organized Facebook community Warring Women Win Sister Circle.
Co-Pastor Boyd is married to Senior Pastor Daniel Boyd and together they serve as the Shepherds of Emmanuel Christian Church, located in Richmond Hill, GA They have two children Danika and Nathaniel Boyd and 3 beautiful grandchildren. Elder Boyd is a Combat Veteran who served her country for 13 years. Elder Boyd received a Bachelor of Science Degree from Columbia College in Business Management with a concentration in Human Resources. In May of 2017 she earned her Master of Arts in Human Services Counseling, with a concentration in Military Resiliency Counseling from Liberty University. She is a certified Professional Life Coach and CEO of Resilient Living, a life coaching service business, empowering women to especially female veterans to take back their lives after being exposed to sexual trauma and living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One of her most cherished accomplishments was the launch of her first book, "Diary of A Mad First Lady" Lady Boyd accomplishments and community service landed her a featured article in Voyage ATL Magazine in 2018. She has her own column for GodLock Magazine based in Atlanta called "Coaches Corner." Lady Boyd most recent accomplishment, she has published her first book collaboration, "Warring Women Win." She has been a guest on several radio stations and book tours promoting her message "Women have a voice that matters" She is a dynamic Conference host/speaker and Vision Board trainer. God has opened doors for her ministry to go international, taking her infamous "Warring Women Win Conference" across international borders to Vincenza Italy as well as preparing to launch her Warring Women Win product line. Lady Boyd and Pastor Boyd launched their company Lions Den Legacy with DBA called "Marathon Marriage Mentorship." She is currently employed by the Department of Veterans Health Administration where she continues to make a difference in the lives of the community, veterans, and countless others.
Previous Profile LinkROBERT ANDERSON


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If we must retire one more Yankee number . . .
Posted on May 31, 2022 by Jeff Kallman
Gil McDougald, the infield jack-of-all-trades for the 1950s Yankees. If we must have yet another retired Yankee uniform number, let it be his.
My rejoinder to Dr. Paul Semendinger's argument to co-retire Yankee uniform number 9 in honour of Hank Bauer (it's already retired for Roger Maris) provoked a pleasant enough debate, when Dr. S. republished it on his Yankee blog Start Spreading the News a couple of days ago. Well, it was pleasant until some comments.
Nobody attacked me, but some of the arguments addressing retired Yankee uniform numbers went from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. Now there came calls from one or another place to think about retiring the numbers of such Yankee ghosts as Spud Chandler, Tommy Henrich, Graig Nettles, Willie Randolph, and Roy White.
Let's just say for openers that the Yankees have so damn many retired uniform numbers that they've made the honour almost meaningless. I'll say it again: Be not surprised if you live long enough to see the middle of this century featuring all active Yankees wearing triple digits on their backs.
But let's say, too, that in the cases of Chandler and Henrich, there's more than one number to ponder. Presumably, Chandler's likeliest target for uniform retirement would be 21, which he wore for the bulk of his Yankee career. Oops. Paul O'Neill's getting the honour of number 21 retired.
Henrich wore four numbers in his career. Of those, he wore 7 from 1939-42, when he went into World War II service; and, 15 from 1946 until his retirement after the 1950 season. Ol' Reliable's 7 was taken in due course by Mickey Mantle. And 15 is retired already—for Thurman Munson. Whoops.
Semendinger has no apparent issue with co-retiring uniform numbers as it is. He thinks (erroneously) that there's nothing wrong with declaring 9 co-retired between Maris and Bauer, not to mention Nettles who wore it as a Yankee. I'll answer that again soon, promise. But I'd like to see him come right out and argue that Chandler ought to be part of O'Neill's number retirement or, even better, that Mantle should share 7's retirement with Henrich or Munson should share 15 likewise.
Not even the most casual of the casual among Yankee fans would stand for that without a rip-roaring fight. (Or would they?)
Chandler was a tough righthanded pitcher for three Yankee World Series winners (1941, 1943, 1947). Much of his reputation rests on a fluke 1943, when he posted both the lowest ERA (1.64) and fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP: 2.54) of his major league career. Credited with a league-leading 20 pitching wins, Chandler was named the American League's Most Valuable Player even though the award probably should have gone to Cleveland's Hall of Fame shortstop Lou Boudreau. (Boudreau: 8.1 wins above replacement-level, leading the league; Chandler: 7.3.)
Why call Chandler's 1943 a fluke? Easy: 1) Baseball was already depleted of enough prime talent by World War II. (The Yankees themselves lost Henrich, Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and Red Ruffing, not to mention a catching prospect named Yogi Berra.) 2) His '43 ERA was 1.20 below his career mark. 3) His '43 FIP was 75 points under his career mark. He did get a late major league career start thanks to several minor-league injuries, and the injury bug also kept him out of a few World Series pre-1941.
Chandler himself was pulled into the Army after the '43 Series, though his injury history kept him from combat. He returned near the end of the 1945 season, posted two more solid seasons in 1946 and 47, but age and injuries compelled the Yankees to release him at 39 in April 1948.
He was a good pitcher who was probably held back by his minor league injuries in the 1930s (he didn't throw a major league pitch until he was 29) and a few more injuries as a Yankee, where he was respected for a toughness that sometimes bordered on recklessness. But if you're even thinking about retiring or co-retiring the uniform number of the 377th starting pitcher of all time, who isn't even one of the ten best Yankee pitchers ever, you should quell that thought post-haste.
Henrich was a terrific player whose travel over the top of the mountain toward his decline phase was rudely interrupted by World War II—Ol' Reliable lost three seasons to the war. He was one of the solid men when he returned, too; somehow, he remained much the same player after the war as he'd been before it.
As a matter of fact, my Real Batting Average places Henrich (.558) just behind Paul O'Neill (.565 as a Yankee) and way ahead of Hank Bauer (.500), while the defensive metrics show Henrich pretty much a match for both those men, whom Dr. Semendinger think deserve equal uniform retirement. Well, now. Henrich is ranked as the 58th best right fielder ever; Bauer, the 88th best. Case closed.
But you're not even going to think about compelling Munson or Mantle to share a uniform retirement even with Henrich. You're not going to compel a shared uniform retirement between the second-best catcher in Yankee history, the arguable greatest all-around player ever to wear the Yankee uniform, and the guy who isn't quite one of the Yankees' top ten right fielders. Not unless you require psychiatric evaluation.
Think of Monument Park as the Yankees' team Hall of Fame. That's where you honour the Chandlers, the Henriches, the Bauers. Strike their Monument Park plaques. (While we're at it, do likewise for Nettles and White; Randolph already has his plaque there.) That's it. They don't quite deserve uniform number retirements.
Co-retired numbers are also unwarranted insults. Yogi Berra didn't deserve to be co-retired with Bill Dickey; Berra was ten times the catcher Dickey was and he's a hair's breadth ahead of Johnny Bench as the greatest all-around catcher who ever strapped it on. And Roger Maris was insulted without warrant more than enough in his Yankee career without handing him one more by compelling him to share retired number 9, even with Hank Bauer.
You want to think about a Yankee uniform retirement that a) hasn't been done yet (believe it or not) and b) would do honour to a truly underrated Yankee great? I'll give you one. Number 12. It's the only number Gil McDougald wore in his entire Yankee life. Of all the not-quite-Hall of Famers to play for Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel under his platoon-and-multiples system, McDougald was the best of the group.
He was a fair hitter (he led the league with nine triples in 1957) and a 1951 American League Rookie of the Year. (Even though Minnie Miñoso really deserved the award.) But he was a defensive virtuoso at the three toughest infield positions, finishing his career in double figures on the positive side for defensive runs above his league average at all three. (Second base: +46. Shortstop: +16. Third base: +13.)
Maybe McDougald gets short shrift even among Yankee fans because he wasn't exactly one of the most glittering Yankees of his time. Maybe, too, he gets such short shrift because of Cleveland pitching legend Herb Score.
You know, the line drive McDougald cracked off Score's face in 1957 that people to this day believe ruined the Cleveland lefthander's career. False. Score returned in 1958, had a shaky season's start before he began to find his proper form again . . . then blew his left elbow out pitching eight innings on a damp night. That, and not the McDougald liner, ultimately put paid to Score's effectiveness and, soon enough, his pitching career.
McDougald tried to visit Score in the hospital but was blocked by hospital personnel. Yet Score's sister disclosed decades later that their mother told her, "It's bad, but he's got the finest doctors in the world and they will do everything that they can. You need to go down to the church and say your prayers for Herb, but more than that to pray for Gil McDougald. That man is a hurting man."
Indeed. McDougald wouldn't quite be the same player after the Score incident, even though Score's mother herself reached out to him as her son did to tell him the injury was nobody's "fault." (McDougald in gratitude visited the older woman regularly for the rest of her life as well as swapping holiday cards with Score himself.) The Yankees left him open to the American League's first expansion draft but he elected to retire, instead.
"The way that Stengel used him," Bill James has written of him (in The New Historical Baseball Abstract), "kept him from becoming a star . . . But then, Gil McDougald wasn't born to be a star. He was born to be a Yankee."
The sad irony is that McDougald suffered an almost Score-like injury in spring training two years earlier, when a batting practise line drive caught him behind his ear while he was chatting with coach Frank Crosetti. The ball fractured a hearing tube; in his baseball retirement, successful with a dry cleaning business and a building maintenance business, as well as coaching Fordham University baseball, McDougald went completely deaf by the mid-1970s.
New York Times writer Ira Berkow told the story in "McDougald, Once a Quiet Yankee Star, Now Lives in a Quiet World" in 1994. Not long after, McDougald received a cochlear implant that restored his hearing. ("They've turned the music back on," he said happily.) Both Berkow's original story and the happy followup ("For McDougald, the Miracle of Sound") were republished in 2009's Summers in the Bronx: Attila the Hun and Other Yankee Stories.
McDougald got to live another fifteen years with his restored hearing until his death at 82 in 2010. Like too many honours it should have been done while he was still alive to appreciate and accept. But if there's one more Yankee who really does deserve his uniform number retired, McDougald does.
Posted in Baseball | Tagged Gil McDougald, New York Yankees, retired uniform numbers, Spud Chandler, Tommy Henrich | 2 Replies
On Kapler, the Anthem, and the atrocity that provoked him
Kapler's intended National Anthem protest hasn't provoked a flood of outrage—yet.
This time, a funny thing happened after Giants manager Gabe Kapler said the atrocity in Uvalde, Texas moves him to stay in the clubhouse until "The Star Spangled Banner" finishes playing before games, because he's "not okay with the present state of the country." The funny thing that happened was . . . nothing.
No flood of outrage. No choking social media to death with demands for Kapler's termination, if not execution. No threatened boycotts of Giants games. No politicians from the top down demanding Kapler be run out of a job, run out of town, run out of the country. No mass demonstrations around AT&T Park. No thunderous editorials calling for a Giants organisational shakeup.
This time, the country seems very much united across all lines of race, ethnicity, and even political belief in outrage that nineteen Uvalde police officers were in or around the Robb Elementary School building and did nothing to thwart the eighteen-year-old shooter who killed nineteen young children, a pair of teachers, and whose murders may have caused the fatal heart attack of the husband of one of those slain teachers.
The outrage deepens when learning as we have that those Uvalde police even tried thwarting efforts by the adjacent Border Patrol and federal marshals to stop the massacre. "As sickening as it is," writes Reason's Robby Soave, "this is worth repeating: With the children wounded, bleeding, dying, and frantically–quietly–calling [9-1-1 on cell phones] for help, the police stood by, waiting for even more assistance. They told the Border Patrol to hold off, and they actively restrained parents outside the school who begged them to help and even volunteered to do so themselves."
"Second Amendment supporters often counter, 'The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.' Except the hallway of Robb Elementary School had no shortage of good guys with guns, and yet they did not stop the massacre until it was far too late," fumes an editorial by National Review, a publication not known to suffer criticism of law enforcement without a fight. "Perhaps that slogan should be revised, 'The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun and the willingness to act.' No Uvalde cops acted when it could have made a difference."
From the atrocity of George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minnesota police to the atrocity of Salvador Ramos at Robb Elementary, Kapler—one of baseball's most articulate and genuinely sensitive managers—looked upon the state of these United States and discovered he simply couldn't partake of a dubious pre-game ritual because Uvalde slams an exclamation point down upon a country in self-inflicted peril.
"When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde," wrote Kapler in a blog entry last Friday, "my father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn't. I don't believe it is representing us well right now."
About the only truly pronounced demurral Kapler incurred came from Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa, who came out of retirement to take the White Sox bridge last year. "I think he's exactly right to be concerned . . . with what's happening in our country," La Russa told reporters before a game against the Cubs. "He's right there. Where I disagree is the flag and the anthem are not appropriate places to try to voice your objections."
Apparently, La Russa forgot the anthem's line about "the land of the free and the home of the brave." The brave were thwarted actively and incompetently at Robb Elementary, the only people Ramos set free were nineteen children and two adults from their earthly lives, and those Uvalde, Texas pays to be brave in the presence of evil—to put it in the absolute most polite language available—didn't exactly do what they're paid to do last Tuesday.
We can debate La Russa's demurral and Kapler's quiet outrage all day long. La Russa thinks Kapler's intended protest disrespects the men and women of the military who defend what the flag and anthem purport to mean. I fear La Russa dismisses the prospect that those very men and women would think, appropriately, that they didn't put their hides on the line to defend either police becoming criminals or police doing nothing to prevent mass murder while blocking others from trying to prevent it or while allowing it to continue inexplicably.
Some of Kapler's fellow skippers get it. "[He] is very passionate about things he believes in and that's his way of protesting," says his downstate rival, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. "I don't think any of us are happy with what's going on in our country. I do respect people using whatever platforms they have to address that."
Alex Cora, who played with Kapler on the 2005-06 Red Sox and now manages the Red Sox, gets it, too. "He's a good friend of mine and the kind of guy I respect from afar for what he's doing," Cora says, "and if this is what he's doing, good for him. I understand his reasons. He was very open about it and I know there's a lot of people that are going to support him."
One of those people is also Chris Woodward, the manager of the Rangers. "I think we're all frustrated, especially in this country," he says. "Nobody's happy. It's not about which side you're on. It's just we've got to get better as a society . . . I'm not going to really make comment either way on whether I would or wouldn't do what he did."
Kapler made a Memorial Day exception to his intended protest before today's game against the Phillies. "While I believe strongly in the right to protest and the importance of doing so," he said, "I also believe strongly in honoring and mourning our country's service men and women who fought and died for that right. Those who serve in our military, and especially those who have paid the ultimate price for our rights and freedoms, deserve that acknowledgment and respect, and I am honored to stand on the line today to show mine."
Maybe now it's time to revisit an argument I made a few years ago: It's time at last to re-think "The Star Spangled Banner" before sporting events.
What began as a spontaneous show of respect by a Red Sox third baseman, as a Navy band played "The Star Spangled Banner" during the seventh-inning stretch of a 1918 World Series game, has become at once a ritual of habit and—since the NFL's Colin Kaepernick over police brutality in 2016—a flash point whenever professional athletes seize upon its playing to protest quietly, usually by kneeling, over assorted outrages.
The song wasn't even the sanctioned National Anthem when Fred Thomas (on leave from the Navy to play in the 1918 Series) turned and saluted the flag. That didn't happen until the 1930s. But the song's playing before every last sporting event regardless of day, evening, or calendar significance, renders it meaningless except as pressuring crowds into a patriotic gesture.
I've suggested it before, but it's worth repeating yet again: An everyday anthem during baseball season means nothing but false patriotism, compulsory patriotism, the sort of patriotism you see in countries unworthy of it but likely to execute those who say or behave so.
Faithful readers (all three of you) may remember my saying this in prior writings on the matter: I don't write lightly about this. I'm the paternal grandson of a New York police officer, and I'm an Air Force veteran. My grandfather would have fumed over Uvalde police doing nothing and trying to stop others from doing something, anything to save those children and teachers. And though I wasn't in a job requiring direct combat, I wore the Air Force uniform knowing well that I had sworn by implication to die if it came to that on behalf of defending these not always so United States.
I accepted and lived it proudly. And I damn well didn't spend four and a half years of my life in a military uniform, doing a military job, on behalf of those engaged to protect us from the criminals either becoming the criminals themselves or living down to the admonition, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Neither did the men and women we commemorate today who died in actual combat.
So, one more time. Save "The Star Spangled Banner"—and, while we're at it, "God Bless America" in the seventh-inning stretch—for baseball games played on such national holidays as Memorial Day, Flag Day, the Fourth of July, and Labour Day. Save it otherwise for Opening Day, the All-Star Game, Game One of the World Series, and even Game Seven if the Series gets that far.
The rest of the season, can it.
We can live quite well without the National Anthem before every last game without losing the only patriotism that truly matters, that in and of the heart. Even when that patriotism is challenged as murderously as it was in Uvalde, Texas last week. A challenge so murderous that the manager of the Giants prefers no compulsion to false or diluted patriotism when his country is compromised by evil.
Note: The foregoing essay was written originally for publication by Sports Central.
Posted in Baseball | Tagged Gabe Kapler, Robb Elementary School massacre, San Francisco Giants, The Star Spangled Banner, Uvalde Texas | 2 Replies
Paul O'Neill vs. Hank Bauer?
Hank Bauer (far right) with (left to right) Mickey Mantle, Casey Stengel, and Yogi Berra, in 1954. A key element in Stengel's platoon system, Bauer was immortalised by a comic as a man "with a face that looks like a clenched fist." (UPI photo.)
My Friday morning e-mail included a copy of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America's Here's the Pitch newsletter. Fair disclosure: I contribute to that newsletter once a month at minimum, sometimes more if called upon, and no one has requested my assassination over anything I've written there. Yet.
Further fair disclosure: Paul Semendinger, Ed.D., is an educator, elementary school principal, enthusiastic Yankee blogger, and author of The Least Among Them. He has even been agreeable enough to republish a few of my own writings on his blog Start Spreading the News.
Dr. Semendinger may not be so agreeable about my demurral from this: he says in this morning's HTP that Hank Bauer deserves a Yankee uniform retirement number just as the forthcoming Paul O'Neill does. (O'Neill's 21 will be retired this season.) Until this morning's e-mail, and nothing against O'Neill himself, I'd never considered him a candidate for uniform retirement.
Not just because the Yankees have retired a few too many numbers already (21); not just because eight of the 21 don't belong to Hall of Famers. (Thurman Munson's 15 is retired, but he deserves a plaque in Cooperstown and will get one in due course from the Hall's Classic Era Committee covering pre-1980 players.) Yankee players may be wearing triple-digit uniform numbers exclusively by the time this century is half over.
O'Neill was as solid a ballplayer as you could ask. So was Bauer. They have much in common. They were both right fielders with good throwing arms and route instincts; they both hit for extra bases as often as not; they both played on multiple World Series winners. They were both the kind of men to whom teammates looked in the clubhouse as well as on the field.
They also both played in high-offense eras though O'Neill's was somewhat higher than Bauer's. Neither is close to having been a Hall of Famer, but Dr. Semendinger thinks Bauer was the better ballplayer by margin enough. I'm no more convinced of that than I am that either man deserves a number retirement, however excellent they happened to be.
The traditionalists might care to note that O'Neill has a higher batting average as a Yankee than Bauer: .303 vs. .277. Even allowing the righthanded Bauer some slack for having to hit to that cavernous left center field in the old Yankee Stadium, that's a big river between them. Bauer hit only a couple of points higher at home while slugging a few points less at home.
O'Neill was a lefthanded batter who hit better at home in two cavernous ballparks (Riverfront Stadium, the remodeled old Yankee Stadium which kept the shorter right field porch) than on the road. But the splits aren't as wide between the two as you might think.
So we should take a look at the two right fielders as Yankees according to my Real Batting Average metric: total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, dividing that sum by their total plate appearances. Dr. Semendinger may or may not like this:
Player PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Hank Bauer 5375 2123 491 24 19 33 .500
Paul O'Neill 5368 2313 586 51 69 13 .565
Paul O'Neill at the plate during his Yankee seasons.
How could Bauer have only nine more plate appearances than O'Neill despite playing three more seasons as a Yankee than O'Neill did? Simpler than you might think if you know where to look.
Bauer has been remembered as one of the near-typical elements of Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel's platoon system, usually in hand with fellow outfielder Gene Woodling. He averaged 117 games a season as a Yankee. O'Neill wasn't a platoon player in the Joe Torre era and averaged a percentage point short of 140 games a season in the pinstripes.
And in nine fewer Yankee plate appearances O'Neill has 190 more total bases, drew 27 more walks, and was handed 27 more intentional walks. I submit the last indicates the pitchers in Bauer's time feared him at the plate less than the pitchers in O'Neill's time feared him.
Dr. Semendinger points to Bauer's 29.3 wins above replacement-level as a Yankee and O'Neill's 26.7 WAR as a Yankee as further evidence. Well, now. If you got to play three more Yankee seasons than the next guy even if you were almost the same kind of player, of course you're going to have 2.6 more WAR.
Bauer also has one leg up for being a slightly better defensive right fielder than O'Neill was, but have a look at their offensive WAR as Yankees: O'Neill (29.9 oWAR) has Bauer (24.0 oWAR) beaten by a decent distance. Bauer's seven-year peak WAR is 25.7 . . . but O'Neill's is 27.4.
Dr. Semendinger made a point of noticing Bauer's 158 home runs in a Yankee uniform. I did mention both men had some power. But I forgot to mention O'Neill hit 185 out as a Yankee. It's not exactly Bauer's fault that Stengel saw him as the kind of player who'd shine in his platoon system as a platoon man, though Bauer did get remarkable enough playing time for a man made a key part of that platoon system.
But O'Neill wasn't considered a platoon player, and I submit the final numbers say O'Neill was just that much more valuable to his generation of Yankees than Bauer was to his. Not so fast, Dr. S. might rejoin.
"If O'Neill deserves credit for being a leader on four championship teams, Bauer also deserves that same credit, and then some," he writes. "Bauer was a leader on seven World Championship Yankees teams." It's O'Neill's fault that he didn't have the full caliber of teammates Bauer had?
Let's see. Bauer played with three full-time Hall of Famers: Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Mickey Mantle. O'Neill as a Yankee played with two enshrined full-time Hall of Famers (Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera) and a third who belongs in Cooperstown (Roger Clemens) but isn't there yet thanks to continuing suspicions (as opposed to, you know, evidence) about involvement with actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances.
Bauer's teams had the slightly better role and platoon players. (Imagine if O'Neill's Yankees could have had their own Gil McDougald, to name only the most versatile.) They also had Berra behind the plate doing what almost no other catcher in major league history did: helping their pitchers pitch better as Yankees than they did a) with any other Yankee behind the plate and b) on any other team in their careers.
Bauer also played in the pre-division era where you finished in first place or you went home for the winter a couple of weeks early. He got to play in nine World Series and on seven Series winners, of course, and he finished with a .245/.279/.399 career postseason slash line. O'Neill played in seven division series, six League Championship Series (five as a Yankee), and six World Series with five rings (four as a Yankee) to show for it . . . and his career postseason slash line is .284/.363/.465.
Does this mean Hank Bauer doesn't deserve Yankee recognition? Of course not. But if you're going to even think about retiring his uniform number, too, you're going to have a problem. Dr. Semendinger thinks it's not that big a problem:
[H]ere's the beautiful thing—retiring Hank Bauer's number wouldn't change anything uniform wise. His number 9 is already retired for Roger Maris. By retiring the number in Bauer's name as well, the Yankees would simply be recognizing another great Yankee. The fact that this is so easy and obvious makes me wonder why this hasn't been part of the plan already.
Bauer managed after his playing days and skippered the Orioles to their franchise-first World Series championship in 1966.
He's kidding, right? There'd be nothing beautiful about co-retiring number 9, it'd be a downright insult—to Roger Maris, for whom it was retired in the first place, a man who was probably the single most insulted and disrespected Yankee great of them all.
Maris busted the single-season home run record held by an all-time Yankee idol and received more opprobrium than praise for doing so, for not being the glib, movie-star-handsome idol just about every Yankee fan prayed would break it if it had to be broken. And if you insist on going there, Maris was a better man than both the guy whose record he smashed and the guy Yankee World prayed would do it instead.
What might have been regarding Maris's career remains unknown; he was ground down first by the unwarranted attacks for pursuing and breaking ruthsrecord (that's how they said it back then, folks) and then by numerous injuries.
The Yankees have also insulted one great with a co-retired number already. There was no way they should have retired number 8 for anyone other than Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra . . . but the Yankees made it a co-retirement with Bill Dickey, the pre-integration great who mentored and taught Berra the fineries of the position. (Surely you've seen Yogi's observation, "Bill is learning me all his experiences.")
Dickey on the surface resembles a better hitter than Berra, but Dickey played in an even higher-offense era than Berra did, and Berra shook out as the far better receiver and handler of pitchers behind the plate. (Yogi also caught the same number of World Series winners as Dickey while catching one more pennant winner, by the way.)
Dickey deserved a plaque in Monument Park more than he deserved a uniform retirement. Yogi deserved the uniform retirement exclusively. Bauer absolutely deserves the Monument Park plaque (O'Neill has one), but that's it. (For that matter, so does another Stengel Yankee, Gil McDougald.) But number 9's retirement deserves to belong to Maris alone.
Bauer was an underappreciated ballplayer, generally. He could hit leadoff, hit third, hit almost anywhere in the order and deliver. He was also underappreciated for his World War II service as a Marine in the Pacific. That service didn't exactly harm him as a player; he'd played only one minor league season in 1941, then enlisted at age eighteen after Pearl Harbour. (His father had to sign his enlistment papers. "I traded a bat for a rifle," he once said.)
He saw action among the Marines who invaded New Georgia, Emirau, Guam, and Okinawa, taking shrapnel in his thigh that stayed for life because it was considered too dangerous to remove. He also battled malaria while he was at it in the middle of all that. He returned to the Yankee system and didn't get his call to the parent club until 1949; he might (underline that) have made it about two seasons sooner otherwise.
But as Bauer settled into his fine Yankee career, according to Bill James (in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract), he endured a nastier insult than even the time comedian Jan Murray immortalised him as a man "with a face that looks like a clenched fist":
A Congressman trolling for publicity published a list of athletes who had gotten "soft duty" in World War II, and put Bauer's name on the list. This didn't get the distinguished gentleman the kind of publicity he had been hoping for. "Did I say Bauer?" said the Congressman. "I meant Sauer, Hank Sauer." Sauer had also seen combat, although not as much as Bauer, so that didn't help much.
Paul O'Neill looked the military type (you could see him just as readily in an Air Force uniform as a Yankee uniform) but he never saw military service, never mind combat. He was 27 and six years into his baseball career when Saddam Hussein's takeover attempt of Kuwait stirred Operation Desert Storm. As much as O'Neill looked the part, the military might not have wanted to recruit a fellow his age, anyway.
Posted in Baseball | Tagged Hank Bauer, New York Yankees, Paul O'Neill, uniform number retirement | Leave a reply
Where Votto sits
Father Time may have something to say about Joey Votto's major league days soon enough. But Grandfather All-Time has wonderful things to say about Votto's career as a Red.
Earlier this month, Cincinnati magazine published an audacious looking article proclaiming Joey Votto the greatest Red of all time. The hype of that headline alone was probably enough to bring Votto's critics to a boil, and that was before such social media cracks as:
LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!
In your Dreams!!
Frank Robinson Pete Rose Johnny Bench Joe Morgan Concepcion just to name a few not even mention the pitcher.
They were All Much Better ballplayers and Definitely More Valuable to Their team! I might take Tony Perez at first before Votto!
Way too many crack smokers out there.
Against my better judgment, I responded to that next-to-last one first, reminding the entrant it wasn't Votto's fault that he didn't (and doesn't) have the caliber of teammates Perez had. That was after mentioning that Votto's 63.7 wins above replacement-level (WAR) as a Red are 18.1 higher than Perez's.
The article's author, Chad Dotson, mentioned that since Votto's Show premiere in 2007 only two players have more WAR than Votto: Mike Trout, and Robinson Canó. (Canó may or may not be compromised by two suspensions for actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, of course.) When you're third in the WAR race since 2007 you've got a powerful case as one of your time's genuine greats.
Votto has been an on-base machine for the most part; his seven league OBP titles are matched only by Hall of Famers Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, and Ted Williams, plus should-be Hall of Famer Barry Bonds. Votto's also done something only Hornsby, Williams, and Hall of Famer Wade Boggs have done: win four straight OBP titles.
Which doesn't impress the Votto critics—including his former general manager Walt Jocketty—who think he walks too much and passes by too many chances to put a ball in play, including (as Dotson observed) taking pokes at pitches out of the strike zone. Oh. The hor-ror. Taking pitches out of the strike zone. Didn't they used to call that a great batting eye?
"[J]ust on the surface, it's clear that there is more to Votto than standing in the batter's box, bat on shoulder, waiting for ball four," Dotson wrote. "After all, the guy has led the league in slugging percentage, doubles, and OPS and has pounded 24 or more homers in nine different seasons . . . He's a well-rounded player who has been one of the game's best for a long, long time.
There's more to Votto than just those league leaderships and his career average 28 home runs per 162 games, too. Wait until you see Votto measured by way of my Real Batting Average metric. The Votto critics will discover that, among the top six WARriors as Reds, Votto looks a lot better. Not that they'll pay attention.
One more time: Real Batting Average (RBA) does what the traditional batting average fails to do to the point of it being a fraudulent statistic. The oldest fart among baseball's statistic traditionalists should be made to answer why we should continue living by a stat that a) treats all your hits equally and b) determines its champion by a minimum number of plate appearances even though it goes no further than dividing all hits regardless of value by official at-bats alone.
RBA accounts for just about everything a man does at the plate and uses the sum of the following parts:
Total bases (TB), which treats your hits with the unequality they deserve. (If you still think a single's equal to a double's equal to a triple's equal to a home run, get thee back to sixth grade math and that may be giving you too much credit.)
Walks (BB). The only thing insulting about a walk should be that you read the strike zone better than anyone else in the park. If that's a crime, Votto should be only too happy to plead guilty and serve sentence—namely, a trip to first base. The last I looked, one of your most valuable assets in a batting inning is baserunners.
Intentional walks (IBB). You deserve to be credited separately for the other guys preferring—for whatever reason, whether it's your formidable swinging or the lesser man behind you they'd prefer as the easier out—that you take your base instead of their pitchers' heads off.
Sacrifice flies (SF). Unlike the sacrifice bunt—in which you're giving up a precious out to work with on purpose, on behalf of an advance that gives you team a better scoring chance after your bunt than before it in only one of six known "sacrifice bunt" situations—you're not trying deliberately to make an out here. You didn't check in at the plate thinking boy, I'm gonna hit that slop all the way for . . . an out, but your fly out brought him home. And you should damn well get some credit for it.
Hit by pitches (HBP). Their pitcher puts you on first the hard way? Let it be to your credit and on his head. You didn't ask to get drilled, but—assuming you didn't start a bench-clearing brawl over it and get thrown out of the game—there you are on first base. You just gave your team that much more shot at, you know, scoring.
We take the sum of all the foregoing and divide that sum by total plate appearances to get your RBA. And this is Votto as a Red according to RBA, and compared to the five other franchise WAR leaders (none of whom happens to be Tony Perez):
Player (as a Red) PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Frank Robinson 6410 3063 698 129 53 118 .634
Joey Votto 8241 3523 1309 147 48 69 .618
Joe Morgan 4973 1885 881 39 52 22 .579
Johnny Bench 8674 3644 891 135 90 19 .551
Barry Larkin 9057 3527 939 66 67 55 .514
Pete Rose 15,890 5752 1210 167 79 107 .460
Think about that. RBA places Votto as the number two Red in the history of the franchise and shows him as one of only two players among the franchise WAR leaders with a .600+ RBA in in Cincinnati uniform. The only thing missing on his resume is beyond his control. It isn't Votto's fault the Reds have never reached, never mind won a World Series with him.
The only alarm that ought to be raised over Votto now is whether age (he's 38) is overtaking him for keeps at long enough last. (His .407 RBA for 2022 as of this morning is 211 points below his career mark.)
The Reds didn't exactly look like the Dreads hosting the Cubs at Great American Ballpark Thursday afternoon. Not when they beat the Cubs 20-5 with a twenty-hit battering after the Cubs held a 3-0 lead following an inning and a half. Not with a two-run second, an eight-run third, a single-run fifth, a two-run sixth and seventh, and a five-run eighth.
Votto had only a small hand in the Reds' destruction, scoring on a two-run single in that third. He walked twice, struck out once otherwise. But if he's always been the kind of player who cares about improving his craft, he's also been one of those men who couldn't care less about his own numbers so long as his team wins.
The wins these days are about as easy to come by for the Reds as summoning up his longtime brio has been for Votto this year. About the only thing remaining intact from his younger years is Votto's continuing passion for the game.
Remember: This is the guy who got thrown out of a 2021 game early, arguing a check swing call against him, then learned a young fan in San Diego at her first live major league game was disappointed at not being able to see him, her favourite player—and sent her a ball he signed that also said, "I am sorry I didn't play the entire game."
The spirit remains willing even if the reflexes are no longer fresh and the swing is no longer swift. Even if he admits to being embarrassed by the Dreads' 14-30 season's record thus far. Father Time may be starting to tell him that his major league days might be numbered at long enough last. Grandfather All-Time says Votto may not be the greatest ever to wear a Reds uniform but he's at least the number two man at the plate in their long, long, storied, long history.
You tell me who needs to retire the crack pipe now.
Posted in Baseball | Tagged Cincinnati Reds, Joey Votto | Leave a reply
Legit enough not to quit
Luis Gonzalez—the first Giants position player to pitch in back-to-back games since 1906 wasn't exactly just thrown to the Mets wolves in the ninth Monday night. The Mets didn't exactly abuse a patsy, either.
They've been without uber ace Jacob deGrom all season thus far. They've lost Max Scherzer for six to eight weeks thanks to an oblique strain forcing him to pull out of a start against the Cardinals last Wednesday. Hands up to everyone who thought the Mets would fold the way they did often enough when the injury bugs swarmed in the recent past.
Guess again. Without deGrom the Mets sit 29-15 and a very healthy eight games in front of the second place Phillies in the National League East. Since Scherzer went down, they're 5-1, including the game from which Max the Knife removed himself after feeling it a little too hard on the left side.
And, especially after they demolished the stumbling, likewise injury-plagued Giants 13-3 in San Francisco Monday night, a fifth straight loss for the Giants leaving them third in the NL West and with a 3-7 record in their last ten games.
The Mets rode a solid start from David Peterson, freshly recalled from the farm, to a five-run third, a four-run eight, a three-run ninth, and a single run in the sixth. They laid fifteen hits on legitimate Giants pitching and three more against Luis Gonzalez, a right fielder by trade asked to pinch hit in the eighth before taking one for the team in the ninth.
More on that soon enough. Peterson's shakiest inning was the second, when Brandon Crawford tore a two-run homer out of him on 2-0, but then he got stronger for the next four innings before handing off to the Mets' pen. Of course, the Mets' bats made Peterson's life almost comfortable enough that he could have pitched to the Giants from a lounger and kept them quiet.
That was Francisco Lindor with two out and the bases loaded on Giants starter Alex Cobb in the top of the third, bouncing a ground-rule double into the left field stands, before Pete Alonso sent a first pitch the other way over the left center field fence for a three-run shot.
The game stayed manageable enough for the Giants over the next several innings, before J.D. Davis—whose recent plate struggles had Met fans' side of the Twitterverse demanding his replacement, if not his execution—sent Jeff McNeil home with a flare double on two outs into left in the top of the sixth.
That ended Cobb's evening and turned the Mets fast and loose into the Giants' bullpen, and in the top of the eight they got faster and looser. Alonso opened beating out an infield hit, McNeil hit a two-run homer to the top of Levi's Landing, and Mark Canha followed almost immediately with a launch over the left center field fence, all on Giants reliever Mauricio Llovera's dollar. One out and a Davis double later, Mets catcher Patrick Mazeika doubled Davis home with a shot all the way down the right field line.
Giants manager Gabe Kapler elected to waste no further pitching from there. He sent Gonzalez out to the mound for the top of the ninth. Prowl the social media world and you'll find plenty harrumphing against the Mets' lack of "sportsmanship" for the way they treated Gonzalez. It might be a fine thing to ask in reply whether it's sportsmanlike to ask the other team to tank because you don't want them to waste legitimate pitching.
Closing seven-run deficits or larger in the ninth inning isn't unheard of, either. The Tigers looked doomed trailing by nine at 13-4 in the ninth on 25 April 1901 . . . and beat the ancient Milwaukee Brewers (about to become the American League edition of the St. Louis Browns) 14-13.
The same year, Cleveland trailed Washington by eight coming to the bottom of the ninth of a May game—and won, also 14-13. The 1934 Indians trailed the Philadelphia Athletics by eight in the top of the ninth in an August game and scored nine before holding on to win, 12-11. And the 1990 Phillies trailed the Dodgers by nine coming into the top of the ninth of another August contest—and won, too, also 12-11.
You get Kapler not wanting to burn a relief pitcher, but you also remember baseball doesn't have a mercy rule yet. Suppose the Mets had cut Gonzalez and the Giants a break and played dead in the ninth. What was really to stop a) the Giants from mounting a seven-run comeback in the bottom of the ninth; or, b) anyone else from accusing the Mets of—dare we say it?—tanking for a game?
On the other hand, quit your yammering, social media meatheads. Gonzalez wasn't just thrown to the Met wolves, either, and the Mets didn't just pile on against a puny position player. He had a pitching record for the season entering Monday night and it wasn't exactly a record to be ashamed of, either.
He'd had two previous relief outings before Monday night with a zero ERA to show for it. And, a very respectable 3.11 fielding-independent pitching rate to match it. He surrendered no runs and a hit to the Cardinals for an inning while the Giants got blown out 15-6 in St. Louis on 15 May. He surrendered no runs and a hit in two and a third while the Giants got blown out by the Padres 10-1 at home the night before the Mets came to town.
Come Monday night, Kapler and the Giants just might have had a reasonable hope that Gonzalez—whose only known pitch seems to be an eephus that goes up to the plate in a floating parabola—really could keep the Mets from any further damage in the top of the ninth.
The Mets must have scouted him on the mound somehow. Gonzalez may have gotten two quick ground outs to open, but he walked McNeil on 3-1, surrendered a clean base hit to Canha on 1-1, a two-run double to Eduardo Escobar on 1-0, and a first-pitch RBI single to Davis. He threw ten strikes out of nineteen pitches but four built three more Met runs.
Alas, Monday ruined Gonzalez's chance to inspire waxings about the bullpen's answer to Shohei Ohtani. He's got a nifty .372 on-base percentage, an .825 OPS, a respectable 137 OPS+, and a 2022 Real Batting Average (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances) of .523 so far.
But he only has two home runs on the season thus far, too. (Ohtani has nine, not to mention a 2.82 ERA/.2.14 FIP on the mound.) The Giants may continue using him to mop up on the mound when they're getting blown out, but that's probably all. They're probably hoping Monday night was his exception, rather than his rule to come.
Posted in Baseball | Tagged blowouts, Luis Gonzalez, New York Mets, position players pitching, San Francisco Giants | Leave a reply