The flawed Hall of Fame ballot

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza are going in to the Hall of Fame. Both clearly belong, and Griffey was almost unanimous.

Almost.

Now, predictably, there are some demanding explanations from the three voters who left Griffey off. MLB.com’s Phil Rogers believes they owe fans an explanation:

What were you possibly thinking when you left Ken Griffey Jr. off your Hall of Fame ballot? How can you possibly justify turning a cold shoulder on a center fielder who won 10 straight Gold Glove Awards, hit 630 home runs and was the face of his generation?

First off, this isn’t how democracy works. Votes are kept secret at the discretion of the voter for a reason: to allow for unpopular opinions.

Second, let’s not pretend like this is an election for something really important. Baseball is entertainment. It’s interesting. It’s fun to follow and talk about. But we aren’t discussing what to do about ISIS here.

Third, this process really isn’t how democracy works. The voters (who, incidentally, are baseball reporters and not players, managers, or front office members) get ten votes, which they can use on anyone within the pool of eligible players. It isn’t a straight up-and-down vote on each career, but a selection of the ten most worthy from an arbitrary pool.

Rogers and others acknowledge the concept of a “strategic vote” – the idea that, with Griffey a likely lock to get 75% of the vote, a few writers could hedge their bets and vote for someone else if they felt strongly for them. One year ago, I made a case for doing just that. At ESPN, Jayson Stark wrote about leaving Mike Mussina off the ballot because he only had 10 spots to work with. Stark felt Mussina was deserving, but couldn’t vote for him. Kevin Davidoff of the New York said Tim Raines was his eleventh choice.  Raines fell 23 votes short, which makes you wonder how many eleventh votes he would have gotten.

The point is not that the three voters who skipped Griffey have a compelling case for keeping him out of the Hall of Fame, but that the voting system doesn’t do what it was intended to do – which is provide a referendum on each player’s career.

 

 

 

The real reason Oregon isn’t the same

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

There are plenty of questions about the way police and the media are handling the wildlife refuge occupation in Oregon. Bernie Sanders drew an immediate comparison to police brutality issues,  and  he wasn’t the only one asking whether the militia would have been summarily executed had they been black or Muslim.

The reality is that this situation isn’t the same because, unlike terrorism or a Black Lives Matter protest gone awry, this is actually pretty funny.

There aren’t hostages. There weren’t any forest rangers beheaded on video. There’s only a rag tag bunch of rednecks with legal guns holed up in a building people rarely ever go to.

When faced with terrorism (real terrorism, that is) we tend to become resolute. When faced with injustice, we become outraged. There is nothing here to get outraged or resolute over. There are just a few Duck Dynasty wannabes, probably getting drunk off some homemade hooch in the middle of nowhere, and taking to Twitter and Facebook to beg for snacks.

Snacks! This is hilarious.

Illegal? Sure. Wrong? You bet. But this is “terrorism” like John Candy and Rhea Perlman’s invasion of Canada in 1995’s Canadian Bacon was terrorism. Opponents are mocking them as “Y’all Qaeda.”

 

Most serious observers understand that in an American West which still smarts from government overreach at Waco and Ruby Ridge, an armed standoff could go sideways right quick. Hopefully, they’ll get desperate enough to leave soon. In the meantime, we can share a chuckle at the folks who really think they’re sticking it to the man by squatting in a birdwatching shack.

 

Big shake-up at a small radio station

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

You’d think a university wouldn’t need to tell everyone they were making their campus radio station more “student-focused.” But the University of Massachusetts, my alma mater, is doing just that with WMUA. This spring, the airwaves on 91.1 FM will have no more than 24 hours per week of non-student programming. This comes as a review committee checks out the controversy which led to the ouster of non-student DJ Max Shea and faculty adviser Glenn Siegel last spring.

For all this to make sense, you have to understand a little bit of backstory of the station.

Even as the radio voice of UMass, WMUA has enjoyed an awful lot of community involvement over the years- as in, tuning in meant you might hear a fellow student or you might hear a townie. Blocks of programming included jazz, world music, and even polka, so we aren’t talking about a typical college radio station that was playing Snow Patrol circa 1998.

Though the station was largely funded through student fees, community members always felt part ownership. It hasn’t been unwarranted.  Community DJs ate up time during the non-student-friendly hours when classes were being attended (early on weekdays) or hangovers were being nursed (weekends).  The signal from WMUA stayed strong through winters and summers because non-students felt like they were a part of the action.

My own show, Politics as Usual, was a student-produced Sunday morning outlier from 1998-2000. I was scheduled back-to-back with the late Ken Mosakowski, a nice older guy who would be cheering on Bernie Sanders each week if he hadn’t passed away some years ago. He was always remarkably nice to me despite our political differences, and I was really happy that I got to bump into him – by complete chance – on the day I graduated. Listening to the beginning of his show as I cleaned up after my own was fun and I learned a good bit from him about local politics. It was a benefit to have these folks around the station to serve as mentors.

Ont the other hand, the mission of the university – and, by extension, its radio station – is education, which means giving students the microphone. Reaction to UMass’s decision to focus on student-produced programming  drips with entitlement and self-importance:

At a press conference in the Bangs Community Center, community members said they are frustrated that mediation was not offered after they raised concerns about student leadership … 

Louise Dunphy, spokeswoman for the task force and host of “Celtic Crossings,” said she is particularly frustrated with what she sees as a “total absence of moral leadership” at UMass, pointing to a meeting she, Sax and community representative Maria Danielson attended Tuesday morning with Associate Chancellor Susan Pearson and Enku Gelaye, vice chancellor for student affairs and campus life.

“The very worst of our community played out in the chancellor’s office yesterday, when Associate Chancellor Pearson and Vice Chancellor Gelaye told us they would release a statement to the press soon while they had already planned a presentation with the students who have participated in conduct directly in conflict with university policy,” Dunphy said.

If I was a  student, or a parent writing checks to UMass, I’d wonder why the hell the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs is spending time meeting with a bunch of Amherst-dwelling hippies whose biggest beef is that their weekly volunteer world music radio show might get cancelled so that some Communications major can spin the Decemberists and Band of Horses for three hours. Pearson and Gelaye were right to dismiss these issues because they are non-issues. It’s disappointing to see adults getting so involved in the workings of a student radio station.

But like so many other things that UMass does, this has the potential to backfire. After all, the fact that no one listened to WMUA when I was a student had more to do with the advent of MP3s than people turning away from jazz or polka. College radio was the place to hear edgy, rare music once, but by the time the century turned people found that stuff online. Even back in 1997, older students told rookies like me that radio station jobs weren’t going to be easy to find as national syndication services edged out the old-school DJ-spinning-records model.

As both a reflection of UMass campus life and a training ground for real careers, WMUA may not be particularly relevant anymore. They can set aside programming blocks for students, but will the students actually want it anymore? UMass could find itself stuck with a choice: reinstate the dual student-community focus of WMUA, or be forced to shut the station down.

Hopefully, the students will come back – because even if radio is a dying medium, it’s still pretty cool to have a show.

Offensive jokes may help non-offensive behavior

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

The most recent episode of my Crummy Little Podcast featured a good friend and former colleage, Geoff Woliner. He runs his own company now called Winning Wit, which helps people be funny when giving speeches, making toasts, or running campaigns. At one point, we dish a little bit about the difference between the subtle humor of The Simpsons (at least in its early seasons) combined with the over-the-top gags in Family Guy.

Family Guy is well known for jokes which skirt the edge of decency (and occasionally fall over). But as it turns out, that may not be such a bad thing. According to a recent study, playing games like Cards Against Humanity that call for participants to be funny and a little offensive help our brains draw the line on what constitutes racist behavior.

Consider the evolution of mainstream racial humor. In the 19th and early 20th century that meant minstrel shows. Since All in the Family, most mainstream racial humor makes fun of racists; when Donald Trump mock-tweets “I love the blacks!” on SNL, the joke is on his supposed ignorance.

 

 

 

Ok, fine, get excited for Star Wars

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

“You know,” I told friends up until a few weeks ago, “this new Star Wars movie is probably going to suck.”

Here was my reasoning: viewed outside the lens of nostalgia, many of the Star Wars movies aren’t particularly great. The entire franchise rests on the excellence of The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars itself captures the imagination, but one wonders if it would have held up as a stand-alone movie. Return of the Jedi ties everything up nicely – but has its weak moments, too. Obviously, the prequels left a horrible taste in everyone’s mouth.

Since the franchise is really built on one excellent movie and a handful of flicks that hold up better in your memory than on screen, I figured a new, Disneyfied Star Wars movie would prove to be a shallow, thinly-plotted, poorly-acted money grab – just like the prequels.

Then the trailers started coming out. And three big reasons to get excited became clear:

  1. J.J. Abrams. There’s been plenty of excitement about the focus on practical effects over the CGI that made the prequel trilogy look like cartoons. The real value of Abrams, though, comes through in his work directing Super 8. If you’re a fan of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you’ll appreciate the way Super 8 uses light and sound to create a mood. Abrams understood what made those older movies special and adapted those elements in a modern film. He mixed a fan’s appreciation with a filmmaker’s expertise. That’s something George Lucas couldn’t do with the prequels; the storyteller can never see his or her own tale through the same lens as the audience.
  2. It looks like a good, new story. The first trailers banked on  familiar imagery – a downed Star Destroyer, lightsabers, Han and Chewie returning home. But look at this one, and seems clear there’s an well-thought-out story that intertwines the fates of several new characters. While the prequels were attempting to tell more of a story wehad already heard, this is uncharted territory.
  3. Prequels are, by nature, a disappointment. The problem with prequels is that, if a story is sufficiently interesting and addictive, fans will write their own prequels in their heads. Everyone who watched Star Wars had an idea of what Obi-wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker’s friendship must have been like, how the Old Republic fell, how the Empire rose. The mystery allowed each person to have their own image in their mind. Even if they had been good, the prequels couldn’t match the mythology each Star Wars fan had built in their own minds. (By the way, remember this in a few years when the Hunger Games folks cash in on a prequel showing how Panem was started.)

Early returns are good, so maybe there’s a new hope after all.

Distrust and Trump

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

It’s funny to watch talking heads on television news ponder why Donald Trump enjoys apparent popular support, even while making controversial comments that draw criticism from across the political spectrum.

Victor Davis Hanson has as good an analysis as anyone:

The first reaction of Attorney General Loretta Lynch after the recent San Bernardino terrorist attack was to warn the country about Islamophobia. Her implicit message to the families of the dead was not that the government missed a terrorist cadre or let Islamic State sympathizers carry out a massacre. Instead, she worried more about Americans being angry at the inability of the tight-knit Muslim community to ferret out the extremists in its midst…

The government reports that a record 94.4 million Americans are not in the labor force. That is almost a third of the country. How can the same government declare that the official unemployment rate is only 5 percent?

Aside from a government so obviously unmoored from reality, most people watch a 24-hour cable news media where facts are equally alien. Consider that in the 16 hours after the San Bernardino shooting, early Twitter-fueled reports the attack on misguided anti-Planned Parenthood activists, white supremecists, and a workplace dispute, before the facts actually came out. The need for speed has surpassed the need for accuracy.

There’s also a willful tone-deafness to opposing views which creates distrust. Megan McArdle got it right in a column about the public discussion about Syrian refugees that sprang up right after the Paris attacks. McArdle, who supports taking in more refugees, had plenty of criticism for the holier-than-thou voices from her own side of the argument:

Perfectly reasonable people are worried that a small number of terrorists could pretend to be refugees in order to get into the U.S. for an attack. One response to these reasonable people has been: “How dare you say people fleeing terrorism are terrorists!” This is deeply silly. Obama administration officials have admitted that they can’t be sure of screening terrorists out from asylum seekers.

As a result, media and politicians wringing their hands over Trump lack any moral authority to do so. It’s no wonder negative news stories and condemnations from his oppoenents don’t affect this guy’s polling numbers.

(Sidebar: There’s also the whole question about whether the poll numbers translate into a viable campaign. Some media outles have started asking those questions now. Why now? Why wasn’t that considered relevant four months ago?)

 

Hillary ALMOST nails the anti-Trump message

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Donald Trump had barely finished his call for a ban on Muslim travel to the U.S. when Clinton and Co. fired back. Naturally, because it’s Hillary Clinton, it came through a fundraising email pimping her new “Love trumps hate” bumper sticker over Huma Abedin’s signature. And in equally typical Hillary Clinton fashion, her message was almost off.

It started off promisingly enough:

Last night, when I heard Donald Trump’s hateful comments about banning Muslims like me from entering the United States, I was shocked, offended and angry. But after I saw the flood of responses from this team — and across the country — saying that Trump’s comments were absolutely unacceptable, I was overwhelmed with a different emotion:

Love.

That’s actually a pretty cool, positive response. Not only does it make the point that Trump was wrong, it changes the “hero” in the story. When Candidate A condemns Candidate B, A is trying to look like the hero sticking up for the little guy. Such self-aggrandizing rhetoric can ring hollow.

By referencing the public response, Abedin and Team Clinton share the spotlight with the person reading the email – and who doesn’t like getting a little shine, right?

It also marginalizes Trump, disconnecting his inflammatory rhetoric from the rank-and-file voters. For a candidate who referred to political opponents as her enemies, this is an important distinction. But the next paragraph blows up that concept:

Let’s show Donald Trump and his supporters that we won’t be torn apart by his hateful rhetoric.

It’s bad politics to blame Trump “supporters” for the ills of America, no matter which party you’re in. Its logical end is a misstep like Mitt Romney’s “47%” comments – essentially giving voice to the campaign’s plan to divide the electorate and work on getting their own supporters out to the polls. That may reflect a strategic reality, but it doesn’t mean a campaign has to say it publicly.

SyFy’s bold bet on Sci-Fi

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

Move over, Sharktopus: The SyFy network wants to put out better stuff. In announcing several new original series and mini-series, the network is going back to its roots as a destination for science fiction and fantasy, rather than the campy send-ups like Sharknado 7: Shark Harder.

In other words, Syfy is betting on quality. In a world of peak TV, they’re betting that being the same as everyone else isn’t sufficient, that they have to have a distinct brand in order to be sought out.

What a dangerous idea.

Normally, striving for excellence is a good thing. For SyFy, though, their corner of the cultural landscape has plenty of squatters. The sci-fi/fantasy audience has plenty of content to choose from elsewhere, from HBO’s Game of Thrones to AMC’s The Walking Dead. The two biggest comic book universes, DC and Marvel, both have superhero/sci-fi themed shows all over network programming (and Marvel has some on Netflix, too).

And these are well-produced shows, too. The days of Captain Kirk fighting the beast with a zipper up its back on the planet of styrofoam rocks are long gone.

That puts SyFy’s “making good television” strategy especially difficult. Suddenly, they have to compete with all those other outlets – not only for eyeballs, but also for talent. Sci-fi media – from comic books to pulp fiction paperbacks – once provided limited avenues for those seeking to reach a niche audience. That genre is now mainstream, and the exclusivity is gone now. A good sci-fi producer or writer can now find a job on a weekly network television or premium cable series. Why settle for a basic cable channel which targets a very narrow audience?

Making good, quality content is going to cost SyFy much more to produce than the cheesy effects and purposeful camp of Sharknado-style movies. It will likely result in better television. But will SyFy be able to find an audience – and make money – following what so many other outlets are already doing?

 

 

Why “professional politicians” win

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

This popped up in my Twitter feed today, and it’s a really good question right now.

Yesterday, Bobby Jindal joined Scott Walker and Rick Perry as multiple-term governors who bowed out of the Presidential race. Polls (albeit with questionable methodology) show neophytes Donald Trump and Ben Carson at the top of the Republican primary heap for now.

To interlope into this Twitter conversation, does an effective candidate for President have to be a career politician?*

The answer is: Almost definitely.

Sure, there are plenty of citizen-activists who have held very prominent offices without prior political experience. Jesse Ventura was actually governor of Minnesota once. Current Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson went from being a businessman speaking at a tea party rally to the Upper House on Capitol Hill within a few months. Arnold Schwarzenegger (and, for that matter, Ronald Reagan) held the California Governor’s mansion with little political experience.

But as with many walks of life, the need for tested expertise expands with the prominence of the stage. The amount of effort and money expended on Presidential races mean candidates have to be on their game.

Put another way: If some Jonny Yutz off the street grabs steps into the batter’s box against a junior college pitcher, they might make contact and get a base hit. Send them up against even a mediocre long reliever from the bigs, and it’s probably a strikeout.

On television, baseball looks easy, doesn’t it? When a batter strokes a single to center field, the swing can look so fluid and easy that it makes you think, “Yeah, I could do that.” We don’t see the hours in batting cages spent working just on the position of the batter’s feet, or the way his hips turn, or where he holds his hands in his batting stance. We don’t see the hitting coach who told him that this pitcher likes to throw get-me-over changeups on 2-1 counts to lefties.

With Presidential candidates, we see debate performances. We see stump speeches. We see polls and talking heads acting as campaign surrogates. We get mail and robocalls, and we see TV ads – boy, do we ever see TV ads! But we don’t see the phone calls to donors asking for money. We don’t see the person organizing volunteers to walk door-to-door speaking with voters. We don’t see the guy with three computer monitors telling the digital department that if turnout changes by 1.3% in Macomb County, the campaign will likely win Michigan.

We sure don’t see people being dragged to the polls, which is how contested campaigns are really won.

Could Jonny Yutz step off the street and, with some natural talent, intelligence, and practice, get a hit off a major league pitcher? Sure. But Jonny might not even know how to get himself into hitting shape.

Often, “outsider” Presidential candidates talk a big game about changing politics as usual, but fail to recognize that politics as usual is usual because it works. President Obama’s 2008 outsider bid offers a great example; for all the platitudes about change, they followed a very basic strategy of identifying supporters and turning them out. They simply out-organized Hillary Clinton in the primaries and John McCain in the general election.

Trump might be an exception.

As a businessperson, one would hope Trump understands the peculiarities of different markets. He likely wouldn’t launch a fast food company without learning what has made companies like McDonald’s successful. If Trump has brought that mentality to his presidential campaign, he might actually have a shot.

But that will only be if he recognizes that, as with any other business, there is an expertise to winning campaigns. Those who ignore that fact are doomed to lose.

*(To be a little clearer, let’s call a career politician someone who would have an elected office as their current title on their debate chyron. Trump, Carson, and Carly Fiorina would be noted for their accomplishments outside of elected office. Someone like Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum, though they have not held office in a while, would be more recognized as “professional politicians.”)

 

 

 

Congratulations, David Ortiz!

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

It looks like David Ortiz – “Big Papi,” as he is so affectionately known in Boston – will retire after 2016. Expect the coming baseball season to be a year of celebration for one of the iconic baseball players of the past 15 years.

What has been most amazing about David Ortiz’s career is his success since joining the Red Sox in 2003. Remember, he spent the first six seasons of his major league career with the Twins. He seemed like a solid player, but not spectacular. And that’s no small sample size. For all the world, it looked like Ortiz would spend his major career as a platoon player or an extra roster piece.

Then he went to Boston, and something happened.

In Ortiz’s three years as a regular before leaving Minnesota, he hit 48 home runs total. Amazingly, In his first three years in Beantown, he hit 119 (almost 2.5 times as many over the same span). As the sluggers who made baseball so much fun in the 1990’s faded, Ortiz stepped in to take up the baton passed from stars like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Barry Bonds.

Despite stretches where Ortiz appeared to suffer the physical breakdowns that afflicted so many of the other promising sluggers of his era – like Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi – he remained productive. He’s ninth all time in home runs hit after turning 30, putting up numbers comparable to the likes of Bonds, Palmeiro, McGwire, and Sosa.

As a player who spent much of his career as a key element within a heated rivalry, Ortiz has his detractors, opposing fans, and other negative voices. Results speak for themselves, though, and Big Papi’s results speak positively.