Keith Olbermann is back: "The Worst Person in the World 10/07/2020."

 

It's nice to have Keith Olbermann back. 

Cubs fans, here's a good one for you: The Devil and Frank Chance.

Some amazing sleuthing by Baseball Researcher, and I'm glad Keith Olbermann mentioned it on Twitter. The topic is a photo of Frank "Tinker to Evers to" Chance chatting with none other than the Devil.

I first saw the photo around five years ago and my initial reaction was “What the hell?” And that has basically been my reaction every time I revisited the photo, as I tried to solve the mystery behind just what is going on. It has taken me a while to crack this nut, but here's what I've determined.

Get the full story right here: The Devil and Frank Chance.

Keith Olbermann and The Resistance: "More people are paying attention to my message at the moment than they would be if I were some other host on MSNBC or CNN."

Let us read, and watch, and draw our own conclusions: Watch 'The Resistance" with Keith Olbermann.

Have liberals found their combative new leader in … Keith Olbermann? by Ben Terris (Washington Post)

... Olbermann may have claimed “The Resistance” as his show’s title, but it’s also fashionable shorthand for the emerging, amorphous community — career Democrats, masked anarchists, Hollywood liberals, conservative Never Trumpers — working to topple, or at least rein in, President Trump. Not working together, mind you: The movement has only the barest organization and no true leaders. But plenty of people are looking to fill that void and, in some cases, pave their own path back to relevance.

As in 1864, a fragile democracy: Olbermann on Trump and the "national suicide" party.

Keith Olbermann's point is well taken.

Still, one might argue that in cases of terminal illness, suicide is a viable option -- for nations as well as individuals. I won't go there, apart from acknowledging that Olbermann has been among the most eloquent public figures in opposition to Orange Mussolini.

I have appreciated it.

Make no mistake: My internal political compass may be in upheaval, and yet I've detested Donald Trump since the late 1980s.  Rich, white assholes aren't my cup of Joe, though I'll make occasional exceptions for artists and musicians as long as they soft-pedal the asshole part.

Meanwhile, the story of the 1864 election remains fascinating. It's hard to overstate the rancor and violence of the Civil War, and most people now are clueless about it. By the time the 1864 election campaign got under way, war weariness in the North was very real.

Looking at the situation from our vantage point, it can be seen that the South was in the process of bleeding to death in the summer of 1864, but as with the fog of war itself, things aren't always what they seem. In this atmosphere, the fall of Atlanta in 1864 became a pivotal symbolic bellwether. Abraham Lincoln won the election, George McClellan lost, and the rest is history.

Two brief points: First, there has been a lively debate to the present day as to whether Jefferson Davis's replacement of Joseph Johnston by John Hood was the best idea with the Union troops nearing Atlanta. Had the Confederates held Atlanta, even under siege, how would the Northern election have gone?

For what it's worth, I believe Davis made the best choice available to him.

Second, Lincoln's winning margin was considerably enhanced, and perhaps his victory made possible, by votes cast by ordinary Union soldiers. They favored him by a margin of something like 4 - 1, despite the probability that a prolonged war would result in injury or death.

That's because they knew they were winning, and wanted to finish the job. There may or may not be analogies to today's election, but I find the 1864 election compelling just the same.

In 2016, the polls are closed here.

Finally.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Putrescent, especially after 497 days of curing, Caesar-style, just like surströmming.

Welcome to another installment of SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS, a regular Wednesday feature at NA Confidential.

But why all these newfangled words?

Why not the old, familiar, comforting words, like the ones you're sure to hear when asking the city's corporate attorney why the answers to my FOIA/public records request for Bicentennial commission finances, due to be handed over on July 8, still haven't arrived on August 24th?

Bicentennial commission financial trail? What's two (yawn) weeks (shrug) after 463 days?

August 24 update: Make that 7 weeks since the FOIA record request due date and  497 days since I asked Bob Caesar to tell us how many books were left unsold, and how much the city's 200-year "summer of love" fest cost.

It's because a healthy vocabulary isn't about intimidation through erudition. Rather, it's about selecting the right word and using it correctly, whatever one's pay grade or station in life.

Even these very same iniquitous, bond-slush-engorged municipal corporate attorneys who customarily are handsomely remunerated to suppress information can benefit from this enlightening expansion of personal horizons, and really, as we contemplate what they knew and when they knew it, all we have left is plenty of time -- and the opportunity to learn something, if we're so inclined.

Today's word is putrescent, as prompted by Keith Olbermann's Olympic observation about Hope Solo.

Ironically, Team Gahan views itself as courageous, too. The truth?

Well ...

putrescent

[pyoo-tres-uh nt]

adjective

1. becoming putrid; undergoing putrefaction.
2. of or relating to putrefaction.

Origin of putrescent

Latin 1725-1735; < Latin putrēscent- (stem of putrēscēns), present participle of putrēscere to grow rotten

How long does it take to count a stack of unsold books?

Oh, yes ... I almost forgot surströmming.

Fermented herring, surströmming

Never has rotten fish smelled so bad but tasted so good. Small Baltic herring are caught in the spring, salted and left to ferment at leisure before being stuffed in a tin about a month before it hits the tables and shops. The fermentation process continues in the tin; ‘souring’ as the Swedes refer to it, and results in a bulging tin of fermented herring or surströmming. The aroma is pungent, and the taste is rounded yet piquant with a distinct acidity.

Thank you, Sweden. I'm so hungry that I just might go out and buy a diamond.

Any jewelers around?

Olbermann: "Media Goes Too Easy on Donald Trump."

As with this.

It's Keith talking about The Donald, but certain of the points are just as applicable to the hometown rag.

Media Goes Too Easy on Donald Trump, by Keith Olbermann (Hollywood Reporter)

Polarization of news is not new, but its failure to ask the candidate tough questions — the ones that might cause him to refuse to call in to your morning show or provide hours of free TV content — will be the legacy of Campaign 2016.

Despite the Mad Men-quality institutional image campaign the nation has so effectively waged on itself since the middle of the 20th century, we haven't actually destroyed the sacred institution of objective American news media, without which we are lost in this presidential campaign. As the unprecedented specter of Donald John Trump, Supergenius, rises up around us like some orange fog, we are not unequipped to describe and report on him because we have traded our golden tradition of neutrality for a handful of magic point-of-view beans. It's a simple but hidden truth: The news has almost always been like this.

It's sad but true. Those among us old enough to recall a time before the Internet now must grudgingly concede that fair and objective journalism was a blip lasting five or maybe six recent decades amid the long history of humankind. When money is god, objectivity cannot survive, can it?

If all the belching and bellowing voices in that marketplace are in ideological disagreement about Trump or any other candidate real or fantastic, ranging from Hillary Clinton to St. Francis of Assisi, we're fine. It's unintentional but entirely suitable that the phrase "polite political discourse" includes a homophone for the word "coarse." But if these Crank-It-to-11 competitors all find themselves in agreement that Trump, and the coverage of Trump, and the blowback to Trump, and the advertising dollars spent on the coverage of the blowback to Trump, constitute a cash explosion in a dying journalistic ecosystem whose healthiest part had been broadcast and cable news until recently there came a plague of locusts called cord-cutters — then we've got trouble.

For so long as local governments pour money into struggling local entertainment platforms costuming as news, where's the incentive to ask hard questions of local government?

Podcast: Bill Simmons and Keith Olbermann.

An hour and twenty minute podcast, and time well spent.

On the political side, Olbermann's comments about the American "tradition" of compromise are spot on. He also laments the Balkanization of sports -- and the very fact that this term was used tells you much about why I'm an Olbermann fan.

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons welcomes Keith Olbermann to discuss "the never-ending state of stupidity" in politics, learning to compromise in America (19:30), the impact of social media on cable news (25:00), baseball’s future (32:30), Pedro's peak All-Star Game performance (42:40), how to fix 'SportsCenter' (54:15), and modern sports news (1:00:00).

Keith Olbermann explains why you should boycott the NFL Draft and Mayweather-Pacquiao.

Matters of principle can be inconvenient, can't they?

Olbermann: "Sports (and its consumer -- you) are unavoidably, inescapably and permanently political."

Olbermann's not alone. On Saturday, Dave Zirin published his version of the same argument.

Why the NCAA Should Move the Final Four Out of Indiana, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

... If (NCAA President Mark) Emmert really wanted to make a statement, he’d move next week’s Final Four out of Indianapolis. Emmert could announce that they were moving the basketball semifinals and finals to Cincinnati, less than 100 miles from the locale, so anyone who had their plane tickets or driving plans set wouldn’t be egregiously inconvenienced. Play it at the University of Cincinnati—hell, play it at a Cincy YMCA—but just get it out of the clutches of Mike Pence.

As noted here, I view it as unlikely. But the reasoning is strong.

Olbermann: "Close the Hall of Fame and Start Over."

No further comment necessary.

Keith Olbermann: "The Greatest Speech in Sports History."

75 years ago on the 4th of July.

Keith Olbermann on Tommy John surgeries ... and all about Steve Dalkowski.

To put it mildly, this story goes all over the place.

Let's start with a commentary yesterday by Keith Olbermann on ESPN: Video: All The Tommy John Surgeries Are A Good Thing. Olbermann's consideration of an increasingly common surgical procedure closes with a reference to the legendary pitcher Steve Dalkowski.

And who was Dalkowski?

Delving into the Dalkowski depths, by Steve Treder (The Hardball Times)

... He is a figure from the deepest heart of baseball legend and lore. In his every aspect, of electrifying performance and of gargantuan struggle, on and off the field, he appears far more plausible as an invention, as a character of baseball fiction inhabiting the same imaginary universe as Ring Lardner’s Jack Keefe, Bernard Malamud’s Roy Hobbs and George Plimpton’s Sidd Finch, than as historical reality.

Dalkowski's legend probably dates to Pat Jordan's classic piece from Sports Illustrated in 1970.

The Wildest Fastball Ever

... Stories of Dalkowski's speed and wildness passed from one minor league town to another. Inevitably, the stories outgrew the man, until it was no longer possible to distinguish fact from fiction. But, no matter how embellished, one fact always remained: Dalkowski struck out more batters and walked more batters per nine-inning game than any professional pitcher in baseball history.

In the 1980s, Jordan penned a follow-up essay in Inside Sports, picking up the Dalkowski story at its lowest ebb, as described here in SI, circa 2003:

Where Are They Now? Steve Dalkowski, by Pete McEntegart

 ... Soon he was in the California fields, picking cotton and sugar beets, beans and carrots. Dalkowski's drink of choice was cheap wine, which he would buy when the bus stopped on the way to the crop field. Often he would place a bottle in the next row as motivation.

Dalkowski doesn't remember much of the next 30 years. He suffers from alcohol-related dementia, but the gaps in his memory don't start until about 1964. "I keep trying and trying to remember," he says. "But I don't."

In the course of reading about Dalkowski, it occurred to me that there is an oblique point of convergence with my father's brief baseball career, in that they both played at Kingsport, Tennessee, eight years apart; my dad in 1949, and Dalko in 1957.

For this incredibly strange reason, I stumbled via Google across the byline of Vince Staten, former Louisville-area barbecue specialist and columnist for the now degraded Gannett paper. As of 2009, Staten also was in Kingsport.

Steve Dalkowski - The Real Nuke LaLoosh

Steve Dalkowski, the fastest pitcher in baseball history, and the wildest, spent the 1957 season with the Kingsport Orioles.

Dude, Chicken, and the Louisville Colonels baseball club in 1889.

The 76ers snapped the losing streak against the woebegone Pistons, and we're left with this timely (yesterday's Bats vs. Reds exhibition) and intriguing discussion about the even more wretched 1889 Louisville Colonels, who played in the old American Association.

Among the squads four managers in 1889 were Dude Esterbrook (who later died while being taken by train to an insane asylum) and Chicken Wolf, who was killed by the effects of brain injuries suffered as a firefighter. Louisville star Pete Browning was an infamous drinker.

Meanwhile, with another season about to start for the Bats, will there be the usual paucity of better beer in Louisville Slugger Field in 2014? Only team management and Centerplate know for sure, and that's enough to make a guy emulate Dude.

Baseball Hall of Fame as corrupted banana republic: Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth and (not) Marvin Miller.

I stand as one with Keith Olbermann on this topic.

Nine to Know: Remembering Marvin Miller, at Billy-Ball

Marvin Miller fails in 6th try for Hall of Fame, by Ronald Blum

Column: Miller will make Hall and have last laugh, by Jim Litke

"Keith Olbermann Reflects on the Life and Career of Doug Kotar."

The NFL settled, and to me, that's too bad. We won't know the extent of its complicity with respect to generations of players and their brain injuries. In short, it was a good time for Keith Olbermann to return to ESPN, as the commentary above attests.

Brain injuries, the NFL, and my indifference ... to football.

Several times over the past two or three years, I've posted links to stories about brain injuries in sports, primarily football, but with at least one sobering report on concussions in hockey. Readers can search for them if they're interested.

The baseball fans doth protest too much, methinks, and yet ...

When you've almost entirely lost interest in the perennial baseball Hall of Fame routine well before the current "who gets kept out" controversy, it's tough being a baseball history nut, because as much as it annoys me, I still do care about it in some strange way even when I say I don't. That's frustrating.

The Hall held its election, and yesterday it was revealed that no one won. I read three solid explications, two before the fact and one after. As usual, Keith Olbermann is right on target, and he gives some love to my baseball writer hero, former pitcher Jim Bouton.

Nobody Elected to HOF: We Deserve It, at Baseball Nerd

 ... To his eternal credit (in 1998), the author and former pitcher Jim Bouton not only disagreed, but got it exactly right. Some day, he says in the interview, baseball will have to reckon with years and years of records that will be artificially inflated, distorted beyond all measure, by the effects of a drug that lets you keep working out when the guys next to you – or before you, chronologically – have to drop the barbell. It was Bouton, after all, who had written in the eternal Ball Four that if a pitcher could take a pill that guaranteed him a) 20 wins and b) that he’d die five years sooner, he would’ve swallowed it before you finished that “b)” part ...

... The path to Steroid Hell was indeed paved with good intentions. And Jim Bouton’s pills. And the drugs that he didn’t know the name of that the guy told me about 26 years ago that they also gave the East German Women Swimmers. And the stuff we saw with our lying eyes and just pretended wasn’t real.

Bill Pennington focuses on the the many creative forms of aberrant behavior previously tolerated by voters.

Hall of Fame Has Always Made Room for Infamy, at the New York Times

... Players linked to steroid use have been resoundingly rejected by Hall of Fame voters in recent years, shunned as synthetically enhanced frauds. But drawing an integrity line in the sand is a tenuous stance at a Hall of Fame with a membership that already includes multiple virulent racists, drunks, cheats, brawlers, drug users and at least one acknowledged sex addict.

In the spirit of Groucho Marx, who refused to join any club that would have him as a member, would not baseball’s 77-year-old gallery of rogues be the perfect fit for (Barry) Bonds and (Roger) Clemens?

In the process, he digs up a classic baseball boozer anecdote.

Casey Stengel (class of 1966) once called right fielder Paul Waner (class of 1952) a graceful player. Why?

“Because,” Stengel said, “he could slide into second base without breaking the bottle in his hip pocket.”

But Jayson Stark's viewpoint comes closest to mirroring my own, except that a baseball establishment refusing to recognize Marvin Miller probably can't be trusted to tell the truth about its past, and that's quite regrettable.

Let's face it: Hall of Fame is a mess; Something must be done because current system of electing players isn't working, at ESPN

... Maybe it needs to be a place that does what other great history museums do -- tell the story of a time in history, for better and for worse, wherever it leads. Maybe that's not exactly what we would hope and dream a Hall of Fame should be. Maybe, though, that's what it has to be, because if we try traveling down that other road, we'll find nothing but forks and detours and roadblocks.

But once we have that conversation, at least we'll know how to vote and how to proceed and how to build a Hall of Fame for the 21st century.

If we decide it's a museum, then we need to put all of these men -- the greatest players of their generation -- in the Hall of Fame, and let the sport do what it should have done years ago: Figure out some way to explain what happened back then.

There are many ways to do that. Put the good stuff and the bad stuff right there on the plaques. Erect informational signs that explain the context of that era -- and every era in baseball history. Just be real and honest, and let the truth carry the weight of history in all its permutations.

Keith Olbermann: Marvin Miller, RIP.

Next year, Marvin Miller again will be eligible for the Hall of Fame. I suspect he'll get the nod, because the very same detestable Seligites who kept Miller out while he was living will find it sufficiently sophomoric to give in to inevitable enshrinement following his death.

Marvin Miller, The Man Who Reinvented Baseball, by Keith Olbermann (Baseball Nerd)

... In that he utterly reshaped the way the game was played on the field, Babe Ruth probably reigns supreme on the list of those who changed baseball most. In that they reshaped its color (and our nation’s attitude – and laws), Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson probably share second place. But only they can even be considered above Marvin Miller as men who had greater influence on the history of baseball.

Late note: Only after posting this did I see Charles P. Pierce's piece about Marvin Miller at Esquire, and his sentiments parallel mine:

He is not in the Baseball Hall Of Fame because the voting process is completely corrupt and needs to be blown up and rebuilt from scratch. (My prediction is that they will vote him in posthumously, just to be nasty about it, because Miller already told them not to bother.)

Pierce gets the last word: "(Miller) had a positive genius for making all the right enemies."

Another day-late note: There's a great interview with Miller at The Nation.

Why? "Because they’re standing at an ATM machine that’s spewing out thousand dollar bills."

From FOK News Channel, the official not-for-profit blog of Keith Olbermann, comes an essay that might have been called "Anatomy of the GOP's ATM."

Gov. Scott Walker: Follow The Money

This is, of course, the answer to the most macro of the questions I get asked every day: why are the Republicans trying to do things like what they’re trying to do in Wisconsin? Why do they want to impoverish the middle class, bust unions, cut staples like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, postpone the retirement age, stop government expenditures on everybody except the rich, increase government expenditures on everybody who’s already rich, smother real small business, redefine “small business” by counting not the number of employees but the number of owners, and a thousand other scams worthy of an economic version of the Spanish Inquisition?

Because they’re standing at an ATM machine that’s spewing out thousand dollar bills. They know some day it will stop, or they will be stopped from grabbing them. They know that there is a tipping point coming in this country when – to borrow cartoonist Clay Bennett’s priceless imagery - the mice will realize they are mice and the Republicans are cats. They saw the polling that showed that it took barely six weeks for Scott Walker to lose the state GOP its Republican Union members. They know what the changing demographics of the nation suggest about the extinction of Conservatism.

Olbermann: "You and I speak up."

Perhaps his finest commentary, ever.

Keith Olbermann's Prop 8 Special Comment: It's "About The Human Heart."

First viewed at the Huffington Post.