Bits and Pieces
Some things you should read, watch or otherwise ingest:
From Josh Friedman's "I Find Your Lack Of Faith Disturbing" screenwriter blog (which seems to be updated on an annual basis), this post called "Sledgehammer and Whore" is pretty hilarious and riveting. An excerpt:
ME: Okay, fine, you're in my office. Why? And again, who are you?
WOMAN: You know why I'm in your office, Josh. You've been here with me for the last three or four hours.
ME: Lady, I don't know who you've been with in my office, but I haven't been there for two weeks. I mean that's a problem itself, my lack of motivation, but lets get back to what you're doing there?
WOMAN: Well...I met someone claiming to be you on the internet and he paid me to come to your office and have sex with him. Only he didn't pay me. He left. And now I've wasted my whole fucking night.
At which point I write the word "hooker" on the bottom of the envelope I'm using to take notes and hold it up for the wife. Now, it is perhaps a testimony or a condemnation to the way that I've lived my life that at no point during my conversation with this hooker calling me from my office and asking for payment does my wife for EVEN AN INSTANT think that perhaps, yes, she should be concerned that a hooker is calling her husband at home asking for payment.
Now I don't know about the rest of you, but this is a first for me, and my mind is racing. What to do? What information do I need? How do I go about getting it? I'm proud of myself for writing "hooker" on the envelope but I know I've got to do better than that. What pops into my head is: WHAT WOULD THE MENTALIST DO?
...
Here's another diddy, this from YouTube, it's a seemingly tripping man seeing a "Double Rainbow" while camping in Yosemite...this is mostly audio (I'm fond of the part where he breaks down crying and saying, "It's so beautiful...WHAT DOES IT MEAN?" myself):
...
Bay Area sports fans may know this, but Ray Ratto (and now, @rattoCSN on Twitter) has moved to Comcast Sports Net, after years of being one of the true "newspaper men" in the area. It's a trend - where guys like Matt Maiocco and Matt Steinmetz have already taken the similar leap. (CSN, not just for Matt's anymore!) It is yet another bad sign for newspapers but good to keep local talent here. I mention this only because, as listeners to KNBR know, CSN has been promoting this move lately with an ad that consistently trips me up.
Here's what I hear:
Ray Ratto, who has always had the best stash in the business, is moving to Comcast Sports Net.
First off, I want to know how they judge who has the best stash of weed and who doesn't. Does the audience get to vote? Is this aired on TV? I need details.
But in reality, here's what they are actually saying:
Ray Ratto, who has always had the best 'stache in the business, is moving to Comcast Sports Net.
And here's a picture of Ratto for those who don't know. I think this is me, right? I'm the idiot here. But ... I can't be the only one who misheard this. And the ad has been running for more than a week now.
By the way, nice sweater, Ray. Got a tennis match coming up anytime soon?
(Ratto is almost definitively the sports writer who inspires no in between - you either love him or you hate him. I like his work, but I definitely don't mind when he publicly falls on his face. An NFL Films about the 49ers dynasty recently showed after the 1981 NFL Draft, when the 49ers picked Ronnie Lott, a brief clip of a trimmer Ratto talking about how it was a bad pick, that Lott wasn't talented enough to play in the NFL. I'm sure Ratto is thrilled to death that this got preserved on film.)
...
Making the rounds yesterday was news that former Dallas Cowboys head coach and NFL commentator Jimmy Johnson is going to be on the next season of Survivor, taking place in Nicaragua. I have so many problems with this it's hard to know where to start:
Johnson is rich. Really, really, rich. And folks will know who he is - hell, someone recognized Gary Hogeboom on his season and that's still hard to believe. Johnson is a true celebrity. People kick folks off the island for being a doctor, or otherwise having money and not "needing" the cash. Jimmy better have a good excuse - charity, I'm guessing - otherwise, he's gone.
He's 67 years old, and not in what would appear to be great physical shape. In fact, reputedly he was supposed to be on last year but failed his physical (he claims he's since lost weight).
He's known for having unmessed up hair, to the point that when he won a Super Bowl, his players tousled his hair with glee. I'm guessing he's going to look pretty damn bad on the beach.
He's a dick.
He reminds me of the Dallas Cowboys, and that's always bad news.
Really, my main problem is that the show shouldn't be about celebrities, or people who the viewers have a prior impression of. I'm sure they'll make it work - they almost always do - but this was news I wasn't psyched to hear about.
...
Here's a chilling note from Rob Neyer that I completely agree with:
At this moment -- and I mean literally right now -- the [Giants] front office should completely forget about October and focus instead on exactly why [Tim] Lincecum's not throwing consistently in the low 90s.
I try not to worry about The Freak, but there's something off with him this year. The Giants say he's not hurt, and I'll assume that they have no reason to lie with the franchise, but ... he ain't right.
Sticking with the Giants, readers will know that I never shy away from an opportunity to slam GM Brian Sabean, and I think Murray Chass is absolutely right here when he says that the Giants almost clearly withheld promoting Buster Posey for two months as a way of limiting his service time (thus delaying when he'll be eligible for free agency). Sabean denies it - he has to - but Chass then loses part of the argument by essentially arguing that if a rookie comes up mid-season and does well, that means he should have been called up earlier.
“I know people think there were economic reasons,” [Commissioner Bud] Selig said of the Giants’ delay with Posey. “I don’t think so.”
And it also wasn’t economic with the Marlins and Mike Stanton (June 9), the Pirates and Jose Tabata (June 9), the Orioles and Jake Arrieta (June 10), the Indians and Carlos Santana (June 11), the Pirates and Pedro Alvarez (June 16), the Astros and Juan Castro (June 22), the Giants and Madison Bumgarner (June 26).
There's a lot of good rookies this year, and yes, folks like Reds pitcher Mike Leake never spent anytime in the minors and have thrived in the bigs. But surely Chass doesn't believe that any talented rookie should always start the season with in the majors. Bumgarner is 20 years old - at the beginning of this season he had lost velocity, wasn't in great shape and seemingly needed to get his head re-focused on baseball. Also, Bochy and Sabean are idiots - but leaving Bumgarner in AAA for a few starts wasn't the wrong decision.
I hate it when I have to defend Brian Sabean, I really do. Chass' overall point is correct, that this is a game that the GMs play because it's within the rules - and when that's truly the only reason for these decisions, it hurts the fans, the team and the player in question. But there's no way I can think of to regulate it and frankly, if the MLBPA -- the strongest players union in sports -- doesn't control this one part of the game, I'm okay with it.
And finally, if you want to know what a crotchety old man like Murray Chass really thinks, read the disclaimer on his website - IT'S NOT A BLOG - written by Chass' website minion:
This is a site for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the site is not a fan of blogs. He made that abundantly clear on a radio show with Charley Steiner when Steiner asked him what he thought of blogs and he replied, “I hate blogs.” He later heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show.
Bloggers, however, are welcome to visit this site; so are stats freaks, fantasy leaguers and Red Sox fans. How else will they know what is being said about them by a columnist they love to hate?
Otherwise, this site will most likely appeal primarily to older fans whose interest in good old baseball is largely ignored in this day of young bloggers who know it all, and new- fangled statistics (VORP, for one excuse-me example), which are drowning the game in numbers and making people forget that human beings, not numbers, play the games.
As comedian Greg Proops sent in a direct message to me once (still a personal Twitter highlight), Excuse the fuck out of me.
