| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Bob Dog" |
| Date: |
15 Aug 2003 05:29:10 AM |
| Object: |
OT: Shrub = Fidel Castro? |
Brutal despots, incompetent managers, willing to ally themselves
with massive and massively brutal organizations...yep, they must
have been separated at birth.
For those not aware, Fidel Castro was once a pitching prospect.
It's one of the great "What ifs?" of political history. Now if
only Shrub had taken another job in 1990....
http://www.jamescampion.com/chekcuba.html
"There is a well-known baseball trivia question that makes
its way around most press boxes involving Fidel Castro as
a 21 year-old pitching prospect for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Seems two corpulent scouts, hired by the parent club, went
to Havana to watch the diminutive lefty break nasty curves
and dip sinkers in and around the aggressive Latin
competition, but were somewhat lukewarm about his speed.
"The kid Castro has some command of breaking pitches
(stop)," the report told the front office the next morning
via Western Union. "Has nothing on the fast ball (stop)
Double AA talent at best (stop)."
The Pirates never did have the patience to develop short
Cuban kids with little pop on the cheese, so a dejected
Fidel attended law school, went to prison, and disappeared
into the Cuban socialist underground. Those were the days
when his family and friends were subsisting on a steady
diet of dung beetles and palm leaves chased by rotten
disease-ridden water, while the mob ran numbers for a
dictatorship backed by the muscle of Harry Truman's United
States."
Bob Dog
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Bush league
Frank Deford, SI.com
In his memoirs, Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner,
recounted how much the Texas Rangers' owner of a decade ago
wanted that job for himself. It was only after George W. Bush
finally realized that Bud Selig was simply not going to step
down as the perpetual "interim" commissioner that Bush finally
agreed to enter politics and the Texas gubernatorial race.
Events of the last week in baseball made me wonder again how
George W. Bush would have managed if, instead of then attaining
the presidency, fate and Bud Selig had given him the more
difficult job of baseball commissioner.
For instance, surely you'd recall that there was some controversy
when Commissioner Bush tried to get all states to lower their
sales taxes on baseball tickets in order to stimulate attendance.
And yes, Commissioner Bush's appointment of Donald Rumsfeld to
head up the umpires and Rumsfeld's subsequent reduction of the
strike zone didn't please traditionalists. But certainly, the
way Commissioner Bush handled the Montreal Expos situation could
not be faulted. As you very well remember, the commissioner
brought in the Halliburton Corporation to run the team and then
moved it to the Alaska Wildlife Preserve.
But, really, could Commissioner Bush have done a better job
dealing with the Yankees than has Commissioner Selig? There were
the league-leading Yankees last week blithely adding a new All-
Star third baseman to their $182 million payroll. It also seems
the Yanks pick up a new reliever every week. Let 'em eat cake.
Most teams have, say, a hitting problem or an outfield problem.
Real problems. Here is the Yankees' problem: They don't have the
perfect pitcher for the eighth inning. That's what they lack --
the ideal hurler to get the 22nd, 23rd and 24th outs in a game.
So they scour the rosters of the little sisters of the poor, who
make up most of the major leagues now, and cherry-pick whatever
they want.
The few teams with the resources to temporarily try and keep up
with the Yankees -- like the Red Sox -- do the same, and poor
Commissioner Selig or President Bush or God in His heaven are
powerless to stop the obscene imbalance that is baseball today.
Fans in too many cities realize that the season really ends on
July 31, the trading deadline -- the day that the weak teams
sell their souls to the Yankees and the few other aristocrats.
You know what this is doing to baseball, the summer game? It's
turning it into the July game. It was not all that long ago when
national interest in baseball lasted into the fall. September
was for pennant races. But for most fans now, September is for
football. And as both the colleges and the NFL move up the start
of their seasons -- even into August! -- attention is diverted
from baseball season to football preseason. If your team has no
chance, if the Yankees and their few rich brethren dominate, why
keep caring, hopelessly? You know baseball has reached rock
bottom when the good people of Cincinnati give up on the Reds and
start following the -- ugh -- Bengals in training camp.
President Bush must realize how lucky he is having had to settle
for his current job. He can deal with Iraq. He can deal with
North Korea. He can deal with Congressman Tom DeLay -- well,
maybe. But neither the President nor anybody else can do anything
about the financial power and hubris of the Yankees and their few
rivals of the moment who have made baseball such a hopeless
imbalance.
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