The Rake Magazine

Month: September 2005

  • Okay, So Now It's Come To This

    Maybe it’s finally time that we all relaxed, kicked back, and found this sorry, sweet-and-sour spectacle of a season as amusing as it really is. Because it truly can’t get any funnier than what we saw tonight.

    It’s not likely, in fact, that we’ll ever see anything quite like it again: a walk-off victory that featured nothing more than two bunts and two throwing errors. That’s not small ball, friends; that is what you call Little League heroics.

    And I suppose I’d be remiss if I didn’t also add: another unrewarded gem from a starting pitcher and another night of futility at the plate, with a blown save thrown in for good measure.

    Let’s be honest with each other: that game shouldn’t count.

    I have wasted my life.

  • SCIENCE!

    Before The Merciful Intervention Of Medical Professionals:
    hospital 2.jpg

    And, Miraculously, After:
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    Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better, which cannot, unfortunately, be said of this world.

    Give something away. Some thing, or some part of yourself.

    Take a moment and try seriously to imagine yourself in the soggy or non-existent shoes of those forsaken people in Louisiana and Mississippi.

    I’ll bet you’re unable to do it.

    I sure can’t.

    We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

    –Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

  • Bad Dream Song 64 (With Apologies To John Berryman, Who Is Deader Than The Twins So Probably Doesn't Really Care)

    bovine trophy 7.jpg

    The Twins, friends, are boring. We must not say so.

  • Sir Lance A Lot

    I think I admirably avoided ranting about this year’s main event, dropping only a single Lance Armstrong-inspired metaphor a few weeks back. For this, I have been congratulated for “keeping my Lance in my pants” by a certain fellow who ought not to be pointing because there are three fingers pointing back at him. (I’m sure he’ll see this after he gets back from passing gas in the mail room.)

    Anyway, I was gone on vacation when the French daily newspaper L’Equipe published a story that claimed to prove that Armstrong had tested positive for an illegal performance-enhancing drug called EPO. (EPO boosts the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, and has thus been a very popular drug indeed in most endurance sports.) Today, this moderately well informed Chicagoan chides the American press for being too dismissive of the story, and blames it on anti-French sentiment. He has a point, but it’s a minor one in the big scheme of things. Aside from the highly dubious proposition of expecting a newspaper to conduct a neutral doping test [(1) get a hold of a six year old urine sample; (2)handle it properly; (3)insure purity and provenance; (4) insure peer review of the testing process], there are lots of problems here. Lance himself made many of them clear in an interview with Larry King earlier this week.

    But two points have not been made. The Tour de France was founded, and for most of its existence, run by a French sporting newspaper, L’Auto. I don’t have a lot of experience with the culture of French sporting newspapers, but I do know that rivalries tend to be bitter and longstanding–and the birth of the Tour itself was the direct result of a nasty copyright squabble between L’Auto and another paper called Le Velo. French sporting newspapers have therefore taken not just a professional interest in the what has become one of the world’s greatest sporting events–the interest occasionally becomes morbid. L’Equipe, ironically, is the modernday corporate descendent of L’Auto. L’Equip has been hot on the story of proving that Lance Armstrong is doping ever since Armstrong won his first Tour De France. (They have previously published two separate, similar stories sourced to former disgruntled associates of Lance’s, who expected that their word would be enough. The stories thus never rose above the level of he said-she said insinuation.)

    Second–and this is a point that gets quietly made because its subtle and a little thorny–EPO is one of the more effective tools in the treatment of cancer, particularly the kinds of cancer Armstrong was diagnosed with. In fact, if memory serves, Armstrong took prescribed EPO as a part of his (spectacularly successful) cancer treatment. This was not only lifesaving, but perfectly legal. Still, by the time he began racing his bike again in 1999, he would have been expected not to use the drug for any purpose, nor to test positive for its presence in his blood or urine. But it does not seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility that a man who once used EPO for legitimate medical reasons might thereafter show evidence of having used it. As an additional complication, until recently there was no direct way to test for the presence of EPO itself in the blood (it perfectly mimicks human hormones, or something like that). You could only test for its results, by checking the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood (hematocrit levels), and somewhat arbitrary levels were set as being natural versus unnatural. Needless to say, most world-class athletes have naturally high hematocrit levels. Some of the very best have unnatural levels.

    I suppose you can’t blame L’Equipe for so relentlessly pursing this story, even if it isn’t there. It would be the biggest scandal in sporting history–yes, much worse than the Chicago Black Socks, when you consider all of the endorsements and charities and corporate interests and cancer survivors that ride on the back of Lance Armstrong. Which may be the strongest argument of all against the remote possibility, and until there is unimpeachable truth, I prefer to believe that quickness of body and largeness of spirit are possible without cheating.

  • Praying for the Gulf Coast, and our country

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    Katrina started the party a little early this year

    Random musings today.

    There’s a photo on the front page of the NY Times this morning of a woman pouring water into a dish for her dog as a body floats in the water not twenty feet away.

    The damage to our country from this storm, and to our arrogant assertion that we have homeland security, far ourweighs the likely damage that could be caused by anything short of a nuclear bomb in a major city.

    How can we transport an army to Iraq, feed and water them, and yet we can’t do the same for the trapped residents of New Orleans? Should we hire Halliburton to do it? Should we hire mercenaries, like we do in Iraq, to guard the Halliburton people?

    Imagine a storm the size of Katrina hitting Manhattan. Imagine a 20-foot storm surge taking out Wall Street. Imagine the looting there with no National Guard…because they’re in Iraq.

    Did you know that Italy is spending over $20 billion to protect Venice from the encroaching sea, yet we, a far bigger and wealthier nation, cut spending to a mere $20 million to protect New Orleans?

    There’s a great story in Texas Monthly this month, written a month before Katrina, about the threat to the Gulf Coast from the sea. It seems, among other things, pumping huge amounts of water and oil out of the ground nearby is causing the coastal areas to sink. Go figure.

    Then, of course, there’s the whole global warming thing, that everyone in the world, (except the intelligent design touting idiot in the White House and his buddies in the oil biddness) know is causing the seas to rise around the world.

    We notice Bush is touring Mississippi today, but avoiding New Orleans. He’s a coward and a liar. Always has been. Always will be.

  • The Hardy Boys And The Mystery Of The Disappearing Summer

    I apologize for my unexcused absence, my silence, my disappearing act.

    It’s been a long, weird summer, and the weirdness of my neurological life has been disturbingly mirrored by what’s happened to the Minnesota Twins. I can’t begin to explain any of the weirdness, can barely even be bothered to try anymore.

    I think it’s probably best to chalk it up to an empirical blackout and leave it at that.

    Good lord, though, if ever there was a stretch when I could have used a pick-me-up from the local baseball club it was the stretch I have recently been living through. And the truly discouraging thing about this season, and this summer, is that for as long as I can remember baseball has provided that pick-me-up, or at the very least a consistent and satisfying diversion through all manner of black patches and disoriented slumps.

    That’s what the baseball season, in a nutshell, has always represented for me: a blessed time of orientation and order and routine. A period when I could provide a strict accounting for some portion of my days, and a clear, focused outlet for my obsessions.

    I stumbled off the path at some point back in early July, at almost exactly the same time that the Twins stumbled off the path and strayed so far that it was clear –despite resolute denial on my part, and on the part of so many other fans– that they would never manage to find their way back.

    Here’s the thing about baseball, which I continue to adore: a baseball team can be loveable and entertaining in so many different ways that it’s truly difficult to put a dog off its food (as Uncle Jumbo has described his recent reaction to this season). A genuinely lousy team can be supremely entertaining and worth rooting for almost precisely because of its futility. There have been many, many teams in Twins history that have been compelling to me almost solely because they have been so comically, hopelessly inept. It’s a classic dysfunctional, even abusive relationship.

    Through the bleak years of the early 1980s I routinely went to thirty to fifty games a season at the Dome, this at a time when the average attendance often seemed to rival that of a Sunday service at a suburban mega-church, or even, on some afternoons, a meta-church. The atmosphere was, of course, far less reverent, befitting a congregation that believed in almost nothing except beer, a cheap refuge, and the inevitability of futility and disappointment. Those versions of the Twins offered a crash course in all manner of entry-level philosophy (stoicism and existentialism, most notably), and exposed glaring holes in the average die-hard fan’s hard-wired child psychology.

    Still, I had a tremendous time at the ball park back then. Some of my all-time favorite Twins characters were a part of those teams, starting with manager Billy “Slick” Gardner. Those were also the years when we had our first look at the wave of players that would turn the long moribund franchise around and win the state’s first world championship in 1987: Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Frank Viola, Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunansky, Randy Bush, and Tim Laudner.

    A game then felt almost like purely private theater, and there was no attempt on the part of Twins management –none whatsoever– to entertain or occupy the fans that did show up. There were no bobblehead giveaways, no kiss cam. Every once in awhile they might give away a shoe horn or a ruler.

    Loving and intensely following a lousy team is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of true fan psychology. Nobody’s climbing on the bandwagon. There is no bandwagon.

    A very good team, a team that delivers on promise and expectations, is also a wonderful, sustaining pleasure. Of course. As is a team that utterly confounds expectations by playing well above its expected level. We’ve seen all sorts of teams that fit that description, including the 2002 version of the Twins.

    In truth, the only type of team that can utterly crush you as a fan is the team which enters the season with the highest expectations and proceeds to time and again confound those expectations in myriad and maddening ways. I can’t think of another team in Twins history that has ever carried such high expectations into a season, or dashed them so thoroughly, and so often, as has this team.

    I feel almost as if the Twins have stolen hope from me crumb by crumb, every so often turning around and, in an effort to make nice, allowing me to lick one of my own offered crumbs from their sweaty palms, only to promptly grab me by the throat and force me to regurgitate every single one of those measley crumbs.

    The hard thing to swallow about this season –besides all those crumbs of stale Dome Dog buns– is that this has not been a classically bad team. The pitching has been far too splendid to classify this as a team of abject futility. No, what this has been is a team of heart breakers and betrayers. It’s been a marriage in which one partner has been constant, and has worked hard to make the marriage work, while the other partner has dicked around and broken every promise it ever made.

    That’s a very hard team to root for, and I have never had such a hard time rooting for a team, never felt such genuine frustration and anger in the wake of so many games.

    There have been a lot of miserable games that left a lingering sour taste in my mouth this year, but yesterday was almost certainly the capper. It may have been the most shameful game in team history, as I believe a number of players openly acknowledged in its aftermath.

    Everything the offense of this team has done wrong this season –and they have done so many, many things wrong– they managed to do wrong yesterday. Looking at the boxscore of the game is the closest you’re ever likely to come to staring at a mathematical impossibility made horrifyingly, irrationally real. You cannot make sense of a mathematical impossibility.

    Runners in scoring position in eight of the nine innings. Sixteen base runners, thirteen hits, zero-for-ten with runners in scoring position; botched sacrifice bunts and stolen base attempts; double plays; runners at second and third with less than two outs left stranded.

    Zero runs. Against the Kansas City Royals (43-88).

    The fourth 1-0 game in the last three weeks.

    And, in perhaps the ultimate indignity of the entire season, Denny Fucking Hocking scoring the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, with Terry “Moses” Mulholland on the mound.

    Really, it’s almost more than a guy can bear.

    I’m back, though. I’ve made my own way out of the woods, and I expect to be here the rest of the way, gargling bile and doing my damnest to extract a bit of ivory from a dog’s mouth.

  • Horse & Buggy

    Somehow, I managed to avoid most of the television coverage of Katrina until last night, when I stuck on CNN for a while. As has been repeated ad nauseum, the tragedy beggars the imagination, but that of course wont stop most major news outlets from giving it the old college try, after this short break.

    A few months ago, Aaron Brown spoke to a writer here at the magazine, and they talked about what was then the most sensational TV news story–the Terry Schiavo case–and I was surprised almost to the point of admiration at how Brown described why that was a great story made for television news in the modern era, and why CNNs coverage of it had been good, even though in my gut, I felt unconvinced, and continued to suspect that CNN had been part of the problem rather than the solution. In that situation, it maybe was politically expedient–at least for the left–that the medias intrusiveness became indistinguishable from the intrusiveness of the republican U.S. Senate.

    Anyway, while its important to document the terrible human toll Katrina has taken (and will yet take) on one of Americas great, defining cities, there comes a point when I want to ask: Well, what about the larger ramifications here? Why havent any of the majors reported that ninety percent of all oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are literally gone–as in not only offline, but missing? And that GOM oil accounts for close to two percent of all oil consumed by Americans each day? And that the long-feared spike in peak oil is probably upon us, with barrels of crude going for more than $100 a pop (resulting in at-the-pump costs–for all Americans, by the way–of up to six dollars a gallon)?

    As I rode my bike in to work yesterday, I thought: Wouldnt it be convenient to believe that because Im a bike commuter, I am dodging the high cost of fuel? But when gas tops out at five or six bucks a gallon, I probably wont have a job to commute to. The ramifications for our economy are staggering, and coupled with the housing bubble, I had another thought. The Amish have had it right all along.