The Icepick Cometh

With apologies to Defiantly Dutch, who would assuredly disagree (thanks for the plug, Double D), what the hell is wrong with Connecticut these days? Earlier this summer you had some overly aggressive moneyed homeowners in Greenwich trying to shut down Wiffle ball-playing teens and kick them back into the Great Indoors where they apparently belong.

Now we've got a youth baseball league in New Haven booting a 9-year-old pitcher and probably his entire team because he's too good a hurler.

After reading about these back-to-back fiascoes, I have to ask, why doesn't Massachusetts annex the Northwest Corner and add it to the Berkshires and let tiny Rhode Island have everything else from this crazy state? (In a battle of disgraced politicians, I'll take Providence's Buddy Cianci over former Connecticut Gov. Rowland.)

Let's see, here are some things that Connecticut cursed us with: the Hartford Whalers, Joe Lieberman, Carl Pavano, Benedict Arnold, and the movie Mystic Pizza.

Good things to come out of the Nutmeg State? (nicknamed after something you put in your apple cider, I might add.) You have Katharine Hepburn, no arguing that. I'm OK with Meg Ryan, too. Wiffle Ball itself was alleged to have been invented in Fairfield. And then, … um, the Danbury Mall was pretty cool for a week in, like, 1987 (it once was the site of an even cooler fairgrounds). That's about it.

And, no, I didn't forget the worst offender in Connecticut's lineage — no, not the various other corrupt elected officials from the self-named Constitution State. It's that all-consuming monolithic sports Galactus in Bristol.

I love this quote from the AP story on the 9-year-old pitcher:

League officials say they first told Vidro that the boy could not pitch after a game on Aug. 13. Jericho played second base the next game on Aug. 16. But when he took the mound Wednesday, the other team walked off and a forfeit was called.

League officials say Jericho's mother became irate, threatening them and vowing to get the league shut down.

"I have never seen behavior of a parent like the behavior Jericho's mother exhibited Wednesday night," Noble said.

Um, you think she was irate? Hey, I can't stand most kid-sports parents — even if they're not the infamous hockey dad, I think most parents should be banned from watching their kids play as soon as they start doing more than cheer their daughters and sons and begin commenting, criticizing and, hell, even speaking anything other than "Yay." But if I was this mom and they kicked my kid out because he threw too fast, yeah, I'd go apeshit too. Not hitting-people-apeshit — you can't condone that. But there would be some raised voices, yes.

More coverage.

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Sorry I haven't linked to my man Mark Kriegel as often as I should — I am still having trouble forgiving him for going Hollywood and moving to sunny L.A., to say nothing of his current employer — but he has hit it right on the head with this column, which my Father the Would-Be Sportswriter shared with me.

Kriegel argues that New York has truly become home of the Hedge Fund Class, and its sports teams are reflecting that reality. Forget Gawker's Creative Underclass — they (we) are just the rabble mob muttering underneath this pile of money. Yes, the money has arguably brought a cleaner, safer city, but at the cost of keeping it, and by extension most of the desirable places in the state and the country, nearly unaffordable to the middle class, to say nothing of anyone trying to support a family at a lower rate than that.

It's a weird twist on Benjamin Franklin's famous quote on liberty and safety — the money has brought both (or as much as attainable in these dark days), but at a cost that none but the wealthy can afford.

At least the Yankees are not laying off workers part-time, at least as far as we know. Then again, who knows what Hank Steinbrenner has up his sleeves for the average front-office worker?

Hey, we reached 102! (as in, this is the 102nd published post and you actually read this far).

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I haven't forgotten you, loyal readers (all 2 of you). We've just been on vacation a little bit.

Watching Old-Timer's Day with My Father the would-be Sportswriter, and thinking of Thurman Munson, who died on this day 29 years ago, while trying to educate the Baby in the lore of baseball (and bunny cars).

A few days ago, the Yankees traded for Detroit's Ivan Rodriguez, and I thought the same thing this blogger did at Bronx Banter: what would Munson have thought about the Yankees acquiring a catcher with the nickname of "Pudge," the same as his hated Red Sox rival Carlton Fisk?

Anyway, more blog posts in the future, after vacation. Enjoy the summer.

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A game of chess, is like a swordfight. You must think first, before you move.

I told Lord Jim I owe him a finder's fee for this (and all full credit for the Wu-inspired headline above).

Knights in the ring as chess boxers slug it out

To me, this merely deepens our unanimous decision.

I might even watch this summer's Olympics if they added chess boxing, but only if Girthy lifts their protest.

And if the sport's origins are accurate, this should give us something to do in the coming crisis in 2020 (or in 2034, according to the graphic novel that introduced the sport, as cited in the Agence France-Presse article).

The Kingpin just castled with his rook and lost a pawn indeed.


UPDATE July 10:

The RZA launched a new site for Wu-Tang and chess fans recently at Wuchess.com. RZA also swung by a team chess tournamanet at the Chelsea Art Museum last weekend.

More on the RZA and chess.
 

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What is it about baseball, or base-e-bol as The Baby calls it? (He says it almost like Chico Escuela's "beisbol been berry berry good to me," which Sammy Sosa would sometimes pay homage to in 1998.)

What is it about a late afternoon game under sunny skies and lightly breezy temperatures, about sharing a game with two people you adore and love, about a guy walking around with cold beer to sell you, about hot dogs, about soft-serve ice cream in miniature helmets, about no matter how much The Game pisses you off because of steroids, big-ego players and (shamefully) most of my fellow Yankee fans (not the true-Yankee blue Bleacher Creatures of the ’90s who were denizens of Sections 37 to 43 before alcohol was banned there, but the loud-mouth and obnoxious ones guzzling gas in SUVs with Yankee decals on their trailer hitches; perhaps many Red Sox and Mets fans feel the same way about their obnoxious cohorts)?

Despite all that, what is it that makes the game still great to see live, even if your toddler can only sit still in awe for an inning and-a-half? Is it the clichéd pastoral nature of a game that for the formative years of its inception was really a city game¹? Is it summer evenings under a waning sun? Is it the pure simplicity and complexity of the game, the only major team sport without a clock?

Whatever, we took The Baby to his first real game last weekend. He can't stop talking about it. Though this was his favorite part:




¹From George Vecsey's, Baseball, 2006, Modern Library, an imprint of Random House:

Hoboken, the birthplace of another American institution, Francis Albert Sinatra, has lobbied to be considered the home place of baseball [possibly the first big recorded game took place there on June 19, 1846, some 162 years ago last week], but its urban grit and anonymous proximity to New York City make it a poor competitor with upstate Cooperstown for the honor. In the minds of the American builders of baseball, the game needed the appeal of the woods and pastures, with the players retaining the posture of farmers and outdoorsmen. This image was more myth than reality: baseball was a city game.

Within a few miles and short ferry rides, the Knickerbockers could challenge teams like the Empires, Atlantics, Eagles, Putnams, Washingtons, Gothams, Eckfords, and Phantoms in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey, whose rosters included men from the shops, factories, offices, and civil service of the metropolis. Some clubs were organized along ethnic lines, like soccer teams of future generations, but others represented trades or companies or neighborhoods.

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Thank God this wasn't part of the baby's first-ever baseball game.

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Mighty Mite Mike Lupica unsurprisingly tops New York sportswriters in estimated salary in a post from The Big Lead on the highest paid sporstwriters (Update: The Big Lead posted a follow-up), with former SI and current ESPN Mag thinks-he's-funny-man Rick Reilly topping the estimated national list of sportswriters (broadcasters who think they can write are left off the list).

Gawker links to it, and adds its own chart and commenter-generated snark for these writing men plus one writing woman. Though we'd gladly pay to read Whitlock and Feinstein (and Gary Smith, as noted in the updated post), the list skews heavily toward hack-scribblers with Lupica, Albom, Reilly, Mariotti and (often) Simmons. Bitter/jealous much? Hell yeah, I am!

Continuing on our sports theme, and for our Boston (both current residents and fans of) readership (apparently, there's quite a few of 3 of you): Congratulations! This is for you, beaneaters:

"Boston Just Can't Get Enthusiastic About Sports Rioting Anymore"
(via Deadspin.com)

and this:

Police arrest 23 during Celtics revelry
(link and photo of potential He-Man relative via Boston Globe

Finally, can't Italy win without drama and a dose of skirting failure? Though the Azzuri beat France 2-0 in their final group-stage game in the European Championship on Tuesday in a rematch of the great 2006 World Cup final — of Zidane head-butt fame — both Andrea Pirlo and Snarling Dog Gennaro Gattuso, Italy's star midfielders, got themselves eliminated from the quarterfinal Sunday against Spain by picking up their second yellow cards of the opening stage.

Pirlo's smashing penalty kick in the 25th minute and Daniele De Rossi's goal in the 62rd minute carried the Italians past Les Bleus. Former Fiorentina striker Luca Toni (Number Nyne!) looked great in the first half, just missing wide on at least three sublime touches inside the box. Both goals came after France went down to 10 men, despite the efforts of the unparalleled Thierry Henry.

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Lost, perhaps, in the sad news last week of the death of Buffalo's own Tim Russert was the death of another journalist — Eliot Asinof's passing at 88 a week ago can hardly be called sudden in the way Russert's was, especially because Big Tim was 30 years his junior.

Still, let's not forget Asinof. His 1963 book Eight Men Out, filled with research, interviews and (according to the Times) some fiction was a groundbreaking work, and one of the many influences of The Young Icepick in his quest to become a Writer — I read it at age 15 when an edition was released to coincide with John Sayles' excellent 1988 movie.

Asinof's conceit, hammered home in Sayles' film, is the eight Black Sox of 1919 were victims of a miserly owner and a unionless system that chewed them up with no chance for the freedom that today's free agents enjoy, even though at least five of the eight were in fact guilty of throwing games to the gamblers.

The scandal ruined the lives of many yet, in an ironic way, saved the sport from shadiness by paving the way for Babe Ruth and the needed strong, centralized leadership of baseball's Office of the Commissioner; strong and heavy-handed, and perhaps too heavy-handed at times — Ford Frick helped kill an early Asinof screenplay attempt at the Black Sox story — though Bud Selig has acted like he's been apologetically making up for prior commissioners.

There was much heartbreak on individual lives in the pages of Eight Men Out, from the young boy's plea of "Say it ain't so, Joe," to the sad decline of the talented but naive Buck Weaver, still looking for another chance to play practically until the day he collapsed and died on a street on Chicago's Southside at age 66.

The story gets a lot of justified mileage as a tale of the Loss of American Innocence, coming on the heels of the horrors of World War I and the moralizing by the Baby Booomer-like righteous leaders of Strauss & Howe's Missionary Generation that instituted Prohibition.

Asinof, Bruce Weber's Times obit states, was blacklisted in the 1950s, with Asinof claiming, “after he got hold of his F.B.I. file, the blacklisting came about because ‘I had at one time signed a petition outside of Yankee Stadium to encourage the New York Yankees to hire black ballplayers.’”

The passing of Asinof, who lived in upstate Ancramdale since 1985, near where I cut some teeth covering semi-semi-semi-pro ball in cow country, was sadly missed by my sometimes favorite sports blogs, which shows there is some (some) use for newspapers still. (Though how weak is it that in Chicago, muse of Nelson Algren, home of the Black Sox story itself, the Tribune ran the obit written and distributed by the New York Times, and not by one of its own writers, perhaps highlighting the downward turn of the Sam Zell's Tribune and the local press in general. But again, I digress.)

Happily, I discover via The Google this blog post at Bronx Banter at Baseball Toaster by writer Alex Belth, who quotes Roger Kahn as saying Asinof had "an enduring anger at what he perceived to be injustice" — my kind of hard-working writer.

Belth later quotes Glenn Stout as saying Asinof was one of the first writers (including Al Stump of Cobb fame, another Icepick favorite) to legitimize baseball history as a serious subject.

Meanwhile, the past few days marked another mourning — the end of the annual exhibition Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown. I feel nothing but sadness about this and have nothing but good feelings for Cooperstown and the Hall, but I am currently reading George Vecsey's Baseball (yes, it was a Father's Day gift) and perhaps I am the naive one, but the amount of racism sewn into the fabric of the game's history never fails to amaze me.

The Hall and the Abner Doubleday myth were largely (if not wholly) created by the racist Albert Goodwill Spalding (yes, of the Spalding sporting goods fame) who, according to Vecsey's book, organized an international barnstorming tour in 1888 without any black players, yet took along a black man as a "mascot" who was vulgarly (I had to read this twice to believe it) "paraded around in front of Asians, Australians, Africans, and Europeans with a leash around his neck, a wonderful advertisement for the American character, indeed," Vescey writes.

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Random thoughts while waiting out a wind-whipping thunderstorm at a local cafe:

For the Blogfather.

Had this months ago. And I thought I was embarrassingly re-stating the obvious.

I don't know the answer to this, but if Obama can figure something out to help these people (more rural transit, gas subsidies for those making under a certain income) and put the supposed lack-of-middle-class-cred comments to rest, he should hit this issue, and hit it hard.

And now, for tonight's anti-newspaper rant:

If you're a kid in college wanting to be a journalist, it's not too late to change your sucker bet. Don't worry, the newspaper industry isn't what you thought it was, and hasn't been for 20 years. It's a Boomer-centric society, where hiring and news coverage is dictated by those who think new rules to make things better — including clubby hiring and obstructionist and narrow-minded coverage — apply to their younger employees, but not to them. It's the continuation of the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do ethos of the Boomers.

Because, like a lot of other industries, the Boomers got in and locked the door behind them and said, no, sorry, this is for us. You go get us coffee, child, and we'll use up most of the resources so there's nothing left for you. And then create new rules to limit your advancement (while not limiting our own), all in the name of protecting "the children" and "the earth." Which they pretty much fucked already.

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Well, I guess it turned out that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog had as good a chance of winning the Belmont as Big Brown.

Don't weep for Big Brown and his owners, though. They'll make a killing in stud fees. And that's the problem — horses are bred and trained for their retirement years (after age 3), rather than for winning. Sure, they need to win the big races to command big stud fees, but the syndicates and conglomerates that own the Sport of Kings these days proudly operate like owners of mutual funds. That attitude, protecting your investment (protecting your brand, as the business-types say) has infected the entire sport for too long. It's not about winning. It's all about the money. That's why we're likely to never see a Triple Crown winner again.

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this important post about Saturday's Belmont Stakes. For what seems to be like the 10th time this decade, a horse enters the race having won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness in the last few weeks and has a real shot at winning the elusive Triple Crown. No horse has done that since Affirmed in 1978.

As a track veteran — I remember selling back some freshman textbooks in my second weekend of my first year of college to scrap up $50 to go to Belmont, but they were math textbooks, and I wasn't getting no "A" in calculus as an English major, anyways — I want to share the advice that has given me, like, three winning days in 17 years of track visits.

I was part of a group of friends camped out at the top of the stretch in 2004, a perfect spot among a record 120,139 gamblers in Elmont to watch Birdstone overtake Smarty Jones down the stretch and spoil the most recent Triple Crown bid. I had money on the Philadelphia favorite Smarty, but I also had maybe $10 on Birdstone to win, and wound up heading back to Mrs. Icepick in Midtown with a waking hangover and a couple of hundred in "blood money" at something like 36-1 odds, as I recall. (Digression No. 1: It's hazy how much I won, and I can't believe I went home with $360, so maybe it was a $5 win ticket and I won $180, but it was still a decent haul. Karma still has me paying for that, because I haven't had a winning day at the track since, though I won again with Birdstone in the Travers later that year, though not enough at 9-2 odds to make up for the rest of that Saturday in Saratoga. But I digress.)

If you're determined to beat the crowds, if not the house, on Saturday, here's some free tips:

1. Plan your bathroom breaks and your visits to the teller windows. The lines for both grow increasingly longer as the day drags on. I wouldn't attempt to visit either within three races of the Stakes race.
   
   
2. Don't wear open-toe shoes if you plan to use the restrooms, especially if you're a woman and, in desperation, need to use the men's room. Trust me on this one. And don't go passing out in the restrooms, either. Think sloshed, both the patrons and the viscous layer on the floor.
   
   
3. If you're bleeding and in need of first aid, the nurses station is top-notch, though it's in a subterranean alcove underneath the huge grandstand, near the jockey room. They're awfully nice down there. Trust me on this one, too.
   
   (Digression No. 2: On my way back after visiting said nurses station in 2004, President Reagan's death was announced over the loudspeakers. Strange coincidence that such an icon of my ’80s youth died while I was stumbling through the hallowed halls of Belmont. But I digress again.)
   
   
4. Don't even attempt to drive there, unless you plan on arriving around 6 a.m. There was a special Belmont/drunk train from Penn Station the last time I went. Plan accordingly. It took us quite a while to get out of the track at the end of the day, as I remember, too.
   
   
5. I have only one bit gambling advice: bet on overwhelming favorite Big Brown to place, not win. Modern horses are bred to stud these days, not for the grueling and increasing distances of the Triple Crown, especially the 1½ miles of the Belmont Stakes. There's no reason to think any differently this year. Remember, it's only happened 11 times in 88 years (of course, with my luck and reverse psychology, I just handed the Triple Crown to Big Brown). Many of today's sportswriters can still remember three horses pulling off the feat in the ’70s, so it's no wonder they can be a bit nostalgic.
   
   Anyway, with 10 horses in the field and Big Brown at 2-5 odds and on the inside post, you're not making shit picking him to win, or with him on top of any exotics. So wheel him in the No. 2 slot with an exacta for $2, which will cost you $18, and enjoy the show. You still won't make much money, but you're a lock (in my book) for cashing a winner. And who doesn't love a winner?
   

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Maybe as journalists, would-be journalists, wanna-be journalists, ex-journalists, bought-out journalists, hacks, reporters and disenchanted prematurely retired ex-journalists, perhaps all that is left to cover is ourselves and by extension, our opinions, even if it is only for an audience of one.

And as a seasoned reporter myself — after two whole conventions — I can safely say that you get about as many insights into the hearts and souls of the candidates on the campaign trail as you would watching a plastic fern grow.

—Matthew Klam, Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail, New York Times Magazine, September 2004

The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy says the same thing, almost four years later, about sports — "That's just the way it is now," he writes — and bemoans the lost access to players the media once had.

Shaughnessy is 100% correct — that's just the way it is now.

To which I say, yeah, it sucks. Just deal with it.

Pat Jordan is worried, too, but he seems to be adapting to it better.

It's been coming to this point for a long time. Thirty-five years ago, Red Smith said it best:

The sportswriter learns to adjust, to make allowances. When you're listening to these people, who are serving special interests, you simply adjust by taking a little off the top.

Pat Jordan might have taken a lot off the top for his Deadspin article, but I applaud the adjustment. After all, it's the future.

As teams, political parties, athletes and candidates continue to control the message (and control the messengers in a growing trend to hire their own reporters), we're seeing the of loss of hard news, which might turn into ceding the coverage of hard news if the media conglomerates see a way to save money out of it.

In the end, it may not be such a bad thing. Instead of parroting the PR-party line coming out of the press conferences, let's let the flacks break their "news" and let the smart media quickly dissect it and turn more toward analysis — it's not the breaking news, itself, that is so important, it's what it means — and, for features, toward what we see in Jordan's Deadspin and Slate pieces: the write-around.

Consider that "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is thought in some circles perhaps the best magazine article of all time though the subject famously never allowed Gay Talese and to interview him. Instead, Talese talked to Sinatra's acquaintances and just watched the guy.

This, unfortunately, requires time, talent, a sharp eye and a broad mind ("He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles."). These things are in short supply in an MBA-dominated newsroom culture and among J-school educated writers who can't escape the grip of publicists dictating coverage and fear the same thing Shaughnessy wrings his hands over — lost access.

If that wasn't problem enough, would a corporate-owned bottom-line oriented magazine or newspaper even take a chance and dedicate the resources and take a risk on such an article?

So beyond the unusual (unfortunately, investigative reporting is now unusual, given newspapers' bean counting and belt tightening), what's left?

To be sure, Shaughnessy is not explicitly laying blame for this decline on anyone, though he seems to be tipping his Samuel Adams in the direction of publicists and the players who hide behind them.

But the media has its share of blame to shoulder, too. Even Red Smith once said he was admonished by his editor, Stanley Woodward, to "stop Godding up those ballplayers."

It's worse now, even if today's media builds the public's heroes higher only to tear them down later. The press is as complicit as anyone in building sports into an empire; reporters' guilt in this is subtle, but self-serving, and any reporter who complains about how ESPN has ruined sports (and I think it has, to a large extent) ought to remember that the booming Business of Sport also keeps them in business, if only just barely. Call it the Media-Athletic Complex.

(NYT Magazine article via comment on Gawker; Shaughnessy column via The Big Lead; Red Smith quotes from an actual book (yes, printed on paper!), The Red Smith Reader, which excerpted Smith's 1973 interview in No Cheering in the Press Box, neither of which appear to be in print on Amazon, though used copies are available.)

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With March Madness™ underway, my favorite predictable crap news stories are the ham-handed hang-wringing about how many work hours the tournament costs American business.

Well, to paraphrase an old Onion headline, how many leisure hours are lost to working in today's economy, with unpaid overtime, answering e-mails and Blackberries at home, with conducting business while driving and talking on your cell phone, while surfing the Web at home to gain an edge on business the next day?

But no, the five days of handicapping and watching the first round (after which, interest drops waaaay off) is killing American business? I'm not sure this isn't a plot by CBS to get the NCAA to move all the tournament games to prime time, just like all the other sports, even if it means extending the tournament by four weeks — well, won't that be accommodating for the "student-athletes" — and, of course, a plot by Corporate America to further wring every penny out of your body and soul before discarding you to the retirement pile.

Meanwhile, Slate (blessedly and wisely) re-runs Jack Shafer's column debunking the math, myth and hysteria surrounding the annual and always predictable news stories about work-hours lost to the NCAA Tournament.

The Wall Street Journal joins the fray with a blog piece today making fun of the $1.7 billion supposedly lost this year, predicted by the firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. That same firm, the WSJ says, predicted this same NCAA tournament would have cost Corporate America $3.8 billion (not a typo) in 2006. Guess we all got more productive in two years, despite the rise in online video broadcasting.

My favorite quote from Challenger Gray's press release (the WSJ provides a link), regarding the difficulty in estimating this "lost" time: "…most people are not keeping a detailed time sheet on minutes wasted during the work day." Yeah, because they probably gave up hope in keeping track of how much time Work sucks out of their non-work day.

Watch for Challenger's next press release (and the resulting gullible news stories) on Productivity Lost to eating lunch, breathing air generously provided by Your Company, getting a vasectomy and taking a shit.

In Shafer's 2006 column, he quotes another Slate post that further proves the "workplace interruption" stats are bogus.

Still, it's sad to see how many media outlets still buy this line of bullshit, though thankfully, fewer seem to be swallowing, and some actually sound balanced, if not all benevolent masterly.

But with many news outlets falling for this year after year with predictable and repetitive stories, it's a wonder they just don't re-run last year's stories, like Slate did with Shafer's piece.

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Apropos of nothing: There were Kriegel-like sports columns I wanted to write, and then there was this one from the former Boston Sports Guy (Bill Simmons, who has been ESPN.com's Sports Guy for a long time, and was never as good as this after he moved from Boston to L.A. and the Sox in 2004 won their first Series since Oog invented fire — the ESPN platform seemingly went to his head).

Incidentally, this column is from the NBA preview of more than 6 years ago (before the 2001-02 seaosn, I think) and is currently apropos of nothing, except it was late one night and I was Googling and wondering if I could find this column. Really, I don't care about the NBA part of this column because it is so old (except for the Patrick Ewing line at No. 33 — that never gets old), but the Boogie Nights quotes are priceless. How he matched them to the NBA offseason was relevant at the time.

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If you hadn't heard the news, Lisa Olsen, the Daily News columnist, resigned sometime in between the Jints' NFC and Super Bowl championships these last two weeks. Probably unrelated, but six years ago, Mark Kriegel was fired from the News.

First, to the Olsen resignation: Speculation on two somewhat "meh" sites is rampant that wee author Mike Lupica, the name-brand sports columnist with the Napoleon complex, had a hand in undermining Olsen to the point of making her quit. Without any better sources than the rival New York Post and the sports blog The Big Lead, where this rumor appeared, I'll merely repeat the rumor (I just did), but can't put full stock in it because of the sources (it's like the old journalism saw: It's a story so good, you'd hate to check it out). Olsen (at least, someone claiming to be her) said nothing about this and denied another rumor about mistreatment at the News because of her gender while otherwise confirming her resignation on sportsjournalists.com.

If you remember, more than six years ago, the excellent Mark Kriegel was fired by the Daily News. Rumors then had it that Lupica had "blood on his hands," according to this old New York Observer report (last item in the linked report). Kriegel has since written two well-received biographies (I recently finished his Pistol Pete) and is now a national columnist for Fox Sports online.

To be truthful, I wasn't a huge fan of Lisa Olsen's writing, but I respected her writing, and her reporting skills were said to be top-notch. I read her stuff if I bought the News that day, but didn't seek out her work online. I respected her for persevering after what she'd been through with the Patriots and sexual harassment (and one of the reasons I still dislike the Pats).

Meanwhile, Lupica's work reads like he's writing most of his columns (except for, say, really Big-Ticket events) off the TV coverage from his living room in Connecticut (rather than actually going to the game sites, like, um, a real journo — at least, that's how his columns read to me). Is it me, or when was the last time he had a good quote in the paper that wasn't pulled from a press conference?

Nothing was like the final late-heyday of the News in the late 1990s. Pete Hamill edited it for a time and it was a classy tabloid, a workingman's Times, something it never was again after Hamill was fired. It was a place where the late Mike MacAlary won a Pulitzer (I believe that happened after Hamill's tenure, but I feel his influence lived on). Even still, the sports section still flourished until Kriegel was canned around August 2001. But during that stretch, the Daily News sports section was the newspaper-world version of the Yankees (1996-2000).

If there is any justice on the planet, Kriegel would still be at the News and Lupica would be hanging with Wee Man and trying to land a role in The Hobbit, maybe as Gollum's special private "preciousssss."

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To be revised, but will include...

Eight Men Out — A tragic look at a baseball team, also showcasing the beginnings of America's sports-obsessed culture that continues to this day.

Major League — At the other end of the spectrum. Forget the cliched plot about the underdogs winning the pennant and the love story (despite the gorgeous Rene Russo) and enjoy how it fetishizes the culture and quirks of baseball.

Bang the Drum Slowly — Yes, the pacing of the film certainly reflects the title, but works because of the touching friendship between Michael Moriarity's Henry "Author" Wiggins and Robert DeNiro's dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks dying back-up catcher. Also looks like a piece of early '70s kitchz, which always gets a few extra points in my book.

Not on the list:

That Minor League Film with Kevin Costner as Crash Davis and Susan Sarandon — Overrated. I don't need Susan Sarandon telling me about the lyrical joys of baseball. Nor do I need Susan Sontag telling me the same fucking thing. About the only good thing about it is that it helped usher in the late 80s/early 90s boom of rediscovering Minor League Baseball, which unfortunately morphed into putting a ball team in Staten Island while abandoning classic Minor League towns like Pittsfield, Mass. (OK, that was the Coney Island team, but that gets a pass for simply being Coney Island.) The abandonment of Albany as a maket can be forgive, since it is such a shitty sports town unless you're Siena hoops, UAlbany hoops (only in a winning season) or a Saratoga pony for 6 weeks. By the way, why the fuck is Troy's minor league team playing on a college campus away from any downdown shit to do before or after a game, or at least in a quaint rural setting. And where the fuck is "Tri-City"? Another great fuck-up by the locals here. Figures.
OK, I digress...

The Natural — Looked at now as some sort of a classic, it was never beloved earlier. And can't be forgive for changing the ending to Hollywood-uplifting.

Field of Dreams — Never saw it. I put this in the same category as Forrest Gump — two late '80s/early '90s beloved films that surely must be overrated because everyone fucking loves them. Forget it. Though if you ever find yourself in Dyersville, Iowa, (we did, once) the Field of Dreams site is more than worth the visit. The chance to walk into cornfields directly from the outfield, and the farm house overlooking the field make it worth the visit to the two sites (yes, there are two sites, since the field actually straddles a property line, and thus, there are two visitor centers).

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Can't wait for the "Bronx is Burning" miniseries on ESPN. Seriously, these are the real Yankees, not the Corporate Raiders these clean-cut Yanks have been ever since 1999 when Clemens first came to town. I can still remember doing laundry in the local strip-mall laundromat reading the Daily News coverage of the Wells trade. It was like when they traded Nettles because for some reason they picked up Toby Harrah in the 1983-84 off-season (Harrah's best attribute was that you could spell his last name backwards and forwards the same way).

I only hope they don't kill (no pun intended) Thurman Munson in this miniseries and make him out to be some sort of bad guy. I would think most of the old-time sportswriters hated him, but he is still St. Thurman in The Icepick household. Ask me about my framed picture of him that will go up in The Baby's room as soon as his moms isn't looking.

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