August 31st, 2006 → 6:06 pm @ Seth Mnookin
OK, so this isn’t different, but important: for all you going to the game, remember to cheer. These comments from Gordon Edes’s article in today’s Globe were incredibly dispiriting:
* “Oh yeah, they’ll be welcoming us with open arms,” manager Terry Francona said sardonically of the reception that awaits the staggered Sox.
* “Are you dealing with rational people?” said [Kevin Youkilis], infielder by trade, left fielder again by necessity. “I don’t know, they’re Red Sox fans. If they want to boo, what are you going to do? People boo players when they come into a game trying to win a game. Some people will, some people won’t. It depends on the radio, and what they’re saying. Even our parking lot attendants listen to the radio.”
So c’mon: welcome them with open arms. Pedroia, Youkilis, Loretta, even emergency start Julian Tavarez — it’s not these guys’ fault.
(Emergency starter Julian Tavarez, you say? Yup…because the on-the-verge-of-being-traded David Wells has been sent home to literally pack his bags and wait for a phone call. Up to the minute updates are are here; the Globe writers get paid for this, after all. I’m heading out to grab some food.)
Post Categories: David Wells & Red Sox Fans
August 31st, 2006 → 12:06 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Bob Dylan’s been doing a show on XM satellite radio for the last while. I already have Sirius and have been wary of paying for another satellite service, even if it featured an hour of one of the primary poets and chroniclers of our time. (That hour, I feared, could be made up of incoherent rambling. I’ve seen more than a dozen Dylan concerts over the last 16 years. Some have been transcendent. And some have been inscrutible. Inscrutible can be interesting, but not $12.95 a month interesting.)
Yesterday I bought Dylan’s new album, Modern Times, and the Virgin megastore threw in a CD of Dylan’s braodcast on baseball (which is already in the Hall of Fame). It’s insane. Truly unbelievable. I’ll likely listen to it all the way through four or five times today alone. Dylan starts out with an a-cappela version of “Take Me Out…” and it’s crystal clear and predictably sui generis. Then he tosses off transitions like “Stepping up to the batter’s box first” (to introduce The Skeletons herky-jerky version of said same song) and “Abbott and Costello said a lot of ballplayers have funny names” in between classic radio calls (including Ted Williams’ home run in his final at bat) and a wonderfully eclectic mix of songs.
Some of the best bits are where Dylan quotes lyrics of some of the songs he’s played interspersed with his own quips. To wit:
* After Chance Halladay’s “Home Run”: “He’s gonna knock the cover right off the ball…that was Chance Halladay stepping up to the plate, hitting a grand slam, sweeping you off your feet, scoring a home run with you, and with me too. Home run, on Theme Time Radio Hour.”
* Before Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Baseball Canto”: “He was a brave man, and a brave poet, ‘watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn, reading Ezra Pound and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the Anglo-Saxon tradiiton in the first canto and demonish the barbarian invaders.’ Well…why don’t i let Larry say the rest of it.”
* After Sister Wynona Carr’s “The Ball Game”: Sister Wynona Carr talking about life being a ballgame, where everyday life is a ballgame and everybody can play, ‘Life is a ballgame and everyone can play: Jesus is at the home plate and at the first base is Temptation, second base is Sin and at third is Tribulation. King Solomon is the umpire, Satan’s doing all he can to psych you out and Daniel’s up at bat, Satan pitches a fastball and Job hits a home run,’ you’ve got to just swing at the ball, give it your all, Moses is on the sidelines, he’s waiting to be called…Sister Wynona Carr, ‘The Ball Game.'”
* In the middle of Sonny Rollins’s “Newk’s Fadeaway,” Dylan cuts in right before a Rollins solo and says, “Let’s go.”
* And finally, Dylan actually answers email: “Let’s enter our email basket and hope they don’t throw us a curve.” A woman writes in from Las Vegas saying her boyfriend complains that when she listens to games on the radio at night he can’t sleep. Dylan answers: “Well Jamie, you should do what I used to do. When I was supposed to be asleep, I’d take the beside radio and slip it under my pillow, press your ear close to the pillow, which is what you’re supposed to do with pillows anyway, listen to the second game of the doubleheader without bothering anyone else in the house. Millions upon millons used to do the same thing back when radio was king, and I hope you still do that with Theme Time Radio Hour, your private radio pal.”
Wow.
I don’t know if your local Virgin Megastore still has these promos in stock, but you should sprint out there and check.
(Modern Times is pretty great too.)
(I think I knew this, but this week’s Louis Menand New Yorker article on a new book of published Dylan interviews reminded me that in one 14-month period in ’65 and ’66, Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. During those same 14 months, the Beatles released Help, Rubber Soul, and Revolver. As Menand says, “It was a good time to be alive.” True; that’s also a good way to make mortal accomplishments feel pretty insignificant.)
August 31st, 2006 → 10:31 am @ Seth Mnookin
I’m not someone who gets off on slagging the MSM (or mainstream media, for those of you who don’t spend your days trolling sites dedicated to dissing the press). But there’s one area in which I think the press consistently falls short: providing context for the facts and figures cited in their articles. Two recent examples from The New York Times:
* In yesterday’s paper, Linda Greenhouse, the Times‘s Supreme Court reporter, wrote an article titled “Women Suddenly Scarce Among Justices’ Clerks.” Greenhouse describes a one-year decline in the number of female clerks on the Court. “In interviews, two of the justices, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer, suggested that the sharp drop in women among the clerkship ranks reflected a random variation in the applicant pool,” Greenhouse writes. To prove that this explanation isn’t cutting it in the legal community, she writes, “But outside the court, those who care about what goes on inside are thirsting for more than statistical randomness as an explanation. A post on one popular legal Web site, the Volokh Conspiracy, asked, ‘Why so few women Supreme Court clerks?’ and drew 135 comments during a single week in July.”
I guess 135 comments sounds like a lot, but earlier this month I got more than 50 comments on one post in about 24 hours, and I’m not running what amounts to a water-cooler site for lawyers and law students around the country. Were these 135 comments made up of a dozen or so people posting a dozen times each? Were the posts attributing the one-year drop to any particular cause, or were they, as Breyer, Souter, and at least some of the relevant data indicated, just a random fluctuation? (Ruth Bader Ginsberg has noted this year’s decline in at least one speech, but declined to discuss her thoughts on the matter with Greenhouse.) Readers of the article will never know. Greenhouse’s piece was presented as a front-page news story (printed under the rubric “Supreme Court Memo”), but, with the Volokh Conspiracy comment board the only example of any actual debate or discussion, it looks more like an op-ed written by a reporter with a history of political activism: In 1989, Greenhouse participated in a Pro-Choice rally (in violation of Times policy) and in a recent speech, she described crying at a Simon & Garfunkel concert because the war in Iraq had convinced her that her generation was “mak[ing] the same mistakes” in running the country that previous generations had made. The Times has drawn fire in recent years for pushing agendas in its news pages. Without any context, this has the appearance of another example of that type of reporting.
* Another story, printed earlier this month, also relies on Interweb-based stats and also presents them in a vacuum. In an article detailing the resignation of the top two editors of the Columbia Journalism Review‘s daily website after budget cuts and a change in direction, Kit Seelye writes, “In 2005, CJRDaily.org received an honorable mention from the National Press Club in the category of ‘distinguished contribution’ to online journalism. It now receives nearly 500,000 page views a month, Mr. Lovelady, [one of the editors,] said, up 30 percent from the beginning of the year.”
Again, 500,000 page views sounds impressive at first blush, but what does that number really mean? A little poking around shows that it means Columbia Journalism School Dean Nick Lemann was arguably right to focus the magazine’s limited resources elsewhere. In August, I had 300,000 page views…and I don’t have a paid staff of writers and editors, a connection to an Ivy League university, or any type of marketing or advertising. A handful of sites in the Gawker media empire are regularly topping 350,000 page views a day, according to proprieter Nick Denton’s personal website.*
I’ve argued before that statistics can be used to prove almost anything. The Times has one of the most sophisticated news-gathering operations in the world, and its manpower and resources allow it to cover stories in more depth and with more nuance than the vast majority of media outlets out there. It wouldn’t take much to throw in some context with those figures (and it would make sense for the Times to be extra-careful about the appearance of reporters using the news pages as a forum for their political views). When the media is under attack from so many quarters, it’s crucial places like the Times do absolutely everything it can to show readers it deserves their attention and trust. This would be a good — and cheap — place to start.
* This section initially read: “A handful of sites in the Gawker media empire were regularly topping 350,000 page views a day back in September 2004. (That appears to be the last month that Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s proprietor, posted data on daily web traffic.)” The site traffic figures posted on Denton’s site are actually live; he posted the blog entry in which he began putting up page view figures in 2004.
Post Categories: Media reporting & New York Times
August 31st, 2006 → 10:22 am @ Seth Mnookin
For Immediate Release
August 31, 2006
STATEMENT FROM BOSTON RED SOX
MEDICAL DIRECTOR DR. THOMAS GILL
BOSTON, MA—Jon Lester has been undergoing testing to determine the cause of the back pain he has been experiencing. During the course of that process, some enlarged lymph nodes were identified. Jon was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital on Wednesday for further evaluation and testing. Jon is resting comfortably.
(This morning, the Globe also reported that Lester is being tested for cancer.)
Post Categories: Jon Lester
August 31st, 2006 → 2:02 am @ Seth Mnookin
Do you remember August 1? I mean, for some other reason than it being the day after the trade deadline. That’s right: that was the night that an injured crow was flitting (never sitting) feebly around the bases at Fenway. And remember how funny it was? Remy and Orsillo spent most of the ninth joking about how said crow was trying to swipe second base. The Globe ran with the same joke the next day. Ha ha.
It doesn’t seem so funny anymore, does it? Since that time, the Sox have been swept by two out of three last-place teams in the league, and two out of three first place ones (they did manage a single win against both Detroit and Tampa Bay). Against Kevin Millar-less clubs, the Sox are 5-21. Even more ominously, the number of players with broken wings, er, serious injuries is growing by the minute. It won’t be long before the Fenway scoreboard installs a (corporate sponsored) injury ticker with up-to-the-minute updates.
From what I understand, this whole made-up curse thing can be pretty lucrative, and as I pondered, weak and weary, the state of the Sox I realized: Boston is currently dealing with the Curse of the Gimpy Crow. (Take that, Chicago: you’re no longer the only city that suffers at the hands of the animal kingdom.) Before you cry shenanigans, let me remind you: Indian tribes from Puget Sound (you know, Mariners country) knew the raven — and really, what’s the difference between a raven and a crow? — as the trickster god, and believed he created the human world after dropping a stone in the ocean. Not a good dude to piss off.
So I am sorry, Mr. Crow, and truly your forgiveness I implore for any offense I might have caused. Now please, let us play the rest of the season in peace. And to this curse I say: Nevermore!
August 31st, 2006 → 12:13 am @ Seth Mnookin
This story was posted online just after 11 pm Wednesday on the Herald‘s website: Jon Lester tested for cancer. (While the Red Sox don’t comment on non-performance related health issues, Curt Schilling is quoted in Tony Massarotti’s story as saying, “There are a lot of personal things going on here that weigh on us a lot more than the losses and wins.”)
There’s also some indication, according to the Globe, that David Ortiz’s irregular heartbeat is caused by atrial fibrillation, which is usually controllable and would likely not impede his playing career. (Jackie MacMullan has a piece in which she talks to Larry Bird, who also suffered from the disorder and is now on medication that controls it.)
Six in a row, 19 of 25, whatever: it’s only a game, folks.
Post Categories: David Ortiz & Jon Lester
August 30th, 2006 → 4:41 pm @ Seth Mnookin
As in: one position player playing where he played on Opening Day. That’s right, folks: Coco injured himself last night on that diving catch. So maybe we don’t want him to make quite so many great plays in the outfield after all. Let’s hope no one else joins the ranks of the walking wounded today; there’s only one guy — and that’s not a misprint — on the bench: defensive specialist, er, immobile catcher Javy Lopez. (There are only 20 guys total in uniform today (21 if you include Coco), with Wells sent back East to “prepare” for his “start” and Papi, Manny, and WMP making appearances at Boston-area hospitals.) If anyone else goes down, we might see a Foulke to Beckett to Timlin DP combo by the end of the afternoon.
(But hey, Schilling did make it to 3000 K’s, although he whiffed Nick Swisher and not Milton Bradley as I’d predicted. I’m glad he got that, because it sure doesn’t look like he’ll get the win: the Sox are trailing 3-1 in the bottom of the third, and with three players in the lineup hitting below the Mendoza line, I can’t imagine these guys are up to making up any big defecits. Or any defecits, for that matter.)
Post Categories: Coco Crisp & Curt Schilling & Injuries
