Et Tu, John Henry?

 

Note: I first posted this just before Terry Francona's departure from Boston became official.  While the parting of ways seems to be mutually agreed upon, it doesn't change my basic feeling that this was not the right way for Francona to go out.

The Red Sox collapse was spectacular to witness.  I must admit that I really didn't think they would blow it in the end.  I figured that at the very least they would end up having to play the one game play-off, and then who knows?  Anything could have happened then.  In September they stopped pitching and hitting and had to deal with under performing stars and head case pitchers, not to mention the injuries.  It really was like the pre-2004 Sox who could never seem to get out of their own way and found new and increasingly torturous ways of losing out each year.  I'm hearing now that there is a good chance Terry "Tito" Francona will be out as manager.  There are many people to blame for Boston's September debacle, and certainly the manager has to take some of the heat as well.  It comes with the territory.  But he should not be the scape goat.  Shame on the Red Sox if they fire Francona.

In 1978 Don Zimmer's Sox blew a 14 and a half game lead to the Yankees, and then lost the one game play-off, a game that they were leading in the seventh inning when Bucky (Expletive Deleted) Dent famously took Mike Torrez over the Monster.   Zimm was given two more seasons as manager before being asked to move on.  Joe Torre's '04 Yanks suffered ignominy of being the first, and so far the only, Major League team to blow a three nothing series lead when they lost to the Sox in seven in the ALCS.  With it ended the mythic "Curse of the Bambino."  In spite of presiding over the greatest collapse in baseball history Torre managed the Yankees three more seasons.  In the Boston dugout that year was Terry Francona.  His team was considered dead in July, then scraped back to get the wild card.  After losing 19-8 in game three of the ALCS they were again left for dead.  By the time it was over the hated Yankees could do nothing as their blood rivals celebrated victory on their own field, before a stunned Yankee Stadium crowd.  After dispatching the Cardinals in four games Francona's team brought the title home to Boston for the first time since 1918.  That's 86 years between championships, if you're keeping count.  Don't you think that the man who broke "the Curse" deserves the same chance at redemption as Don Zimmer and Joe Torre?

And isn't redemption at the heart of the Red Sox story?  As a Yankee fan I can never hurt a Red Sox fan with the simple mention of Dent's or Aaron (Same Middle Name as Bucky) Boone's name again.  We may defeat them head to head in the future, even embarrass them along the way.  But nothing the Yankees will ever do will top how they beat us in '04.  They have one up on us, even if they never finish ahead of us again in our lifetime (highly unlikely, but you get it). All the pain of 1946, '67, '75, '78, '86, and 2003 when they came sooooo close and fell short were washed away by Curt Schilling's bloody sock.  And the manager had to take some credit too.  He also had a difficult to handle club house that year, dubbed "The Idiots" by Johnny Damon.  But he held it together and brought them home safe.  He deserves better than to be dismissed like this, if indeed that is what happens.  He deserves his chance to come back from this like he helped bring the Red Sox back from decades of failure to two Series titles in the double zeros.

Every manager is hired to be fired.  There is a time when even the best manager loses his club house or is tuned out by his players.  Change can be good for both the team and the skipper in that situation. But when a manager has had such an historic run with a team he should be given a fair chance to prove he's still the right man for the job.  I'm not sure that the man known as Tito is being afforded that privilege.  Francona is a class act who deserves better than this.  I hope Red Sox owner John Henry takes a day or two and cools down before he stabs the pride of Beantown in the back.

Baseball 2011

I have a lot of irons in the fire and loose ends to tie up, (excuse the mixed metaphors), what with the whole gay marriage thing, the Fr. Pavone controversy and my take on the show Mad Men; all themes I've started over the last few weeks but haven't finished. I'm not even going to mention the videos on why I'm a Catholic (I guess I just did).  But before getting back into the heavy subject matter I'd like to go light this time out.  The Baseball play-offs are starting on Friday and I have a few unprofessional observations.

The American League

As of this post the divisions were wrapped up, with the Yankees securing home field through the play-offs.  The wild card is still up in the air, with the Rays and Red Sox tied in the standings.  This is truly incredible.  On September 1 the Sox were in first place, a half game up on the Bombers, and Tampa was a distant 9 games off the pace.  Everyone thought the rest of the month would be spent in a fight between Boston and New York over how they would split the division and wild card amongst themselves.  Only Buck Showalter, the Oriole manager, predicted that Tampa would be in the mix.  At he end of August he told Ken Singleton, who calls the Yankees on Yes, that he thought they would contend for the wild card.  When Singleton mentioned it on the air the other announcers laughed.  One of them cracked, "Did he say what year?"  Well no one is laughing now, especially no one in Red Sox Nation.  The Sox are collapsing while Tampa has soared.

If Tampa completes the comeback, they should be feared.  The Yankees are slight favorites in a fairly even field, but the Rays are peaking at the right time.  The Tigers have the best pitcher, Justin Verlander, but the Rays have the deepest rotation.  The Yankees and Rangers have better lineups, but the Tampa Bay bats are coming alive at just the right time.  If I'm the Yankees, I want Texas in the first round, to avoid a short series involving the future Cy Young winner, Verlander, and that Boston gets enough of its mojo back to qualify.

The National League

As a Yankee fan I don't watch enough of the National League to really ask the right questions, beyond the obvious;  will anyone beat the Phillies pitching staff in October?  Yeah, they've been on autopilot since clinching home field advantage, but who wouldn't be?  And yes, I do believe that they can just turn it on once the play-offs start.  Joel Sherman in the Post wrote a couple of weeks ago that this year's Yankees reminded him of the '96 team that upset the Braves in the World Series.  Like that earlier team they have a solid lineup, a deep bench and bullpen to augment a questionable starting rotation.  The Phillies, like Atlanta of old, has a good all around team, an OK bullpen and starting pitching second to none.  But while these Yankees have a better lineup then their predecessors, I think their rotation isn't as solid.  And the big four of Philadelphia are better and, more importantly at play-off time, tougher than the 1990's Braves.

I'll save predictions for when all the play-off spots are filled, but if it does come down to Phillies-Yankees, Halladay, Lee, Hamels and Oswalt beats Sabathia, Nova and fill in the blanks any time.

Mad Men: Part 1

I wasn't going to comment on the AMC program Mad Men until March of 2012, when it's scheduled to return from a prolonged hiatus.  But I see that the networks are premiering shows in the next weeks that are attempting to cash in on the popularity of the early 1960's retro drama, so now seems as good a time as any weigh in on the trend. On the off chance you've never seen the show but plan to check out the back episodes, let this serve as a SPOILER ALERT.  

 

Mad Men

TV-14

AMC (New season to begin in March, 2012. Back episodes streaming on Netflix)

I had read all the hype on AMC's show Mad Men, about its spot on production design that uncannily recreates the look and feel of the early 1960's, its perceptive social commentary and solid cast.  It had been on hiatus since last October due to a contract dispute between it's producer and the network, but is now filming it's fifth season and is scheduled to return next March.  To catch up, and see if the hype was just hype, I trudged through the first four seasons in August on Netflix. And it is true; the sets, clothing, hairstyles and even incidental props all point, almost obsessively, to that earlier era.   The cast is very good, and they're given literate things to say.  But not far into the first season it dawned on me that for all the genuine quality on display Mad Men is really just an over glorified soap opera. And like many Soaps it's moral message seems to be a bit confused.

Mad Men takes place in the most politically incorrect setting imaginable. The series transports us to the fictional Madison Avenue advertising firm of Sterling Cooper (later Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce) between the years 1960 to '65.  The men are hard drinking, heavy smoking, skirt chasing, sexist, racist, homophobes, and loving it (after two heart attacks one of the main players admits that he's lived like he's been on "shore leave" for the last twenty years).  The women are over worked, underpaid, unappreciated, sexually repressed and or under constant threat of being put upon for sexual favors. And when they give in they are more often than not thrown to the side once it's over.  In spite of all the good times and material prosperity there are deep wells of depression and lack of emotional fulfillment welling up in the main characters.  The only people who seem to have it together are divorcees, bohemians and unmarried working women in their thirties (though even they get their comeuppance eventually).  Like all Soaps there are more characters than you can shake a martini at, and it would take a small booklet to describe them all and the somewhat convoluted predicaments they get themselves into.  

More important than the individual personalities, it's the show's mood  that sets it apart. We see the United States at the zenith of its material wealth, international power and influence, with boundless optimism over the future.  The men are in sharp suits and Fedoras and the women are dressed in concealing yet form fitting dressed that scream femininity.  Yet underneath the surface lies an understanding that it's all fake.  No one is who they pretend to be or satisfied with who they are or what they have. This is personified most clearly in the show's main character, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) whose adventures and tragedies the series follows.  He's the creative director of Sterling Cooper, a position he conned himself into.  But his con wins him not just a job but also a beautiful wife, who he has two children with when the show starts, and a spacious home in suburban Ossining, New York.   He is highly successful, and the other "big boys" on the Avenue are hot to steal him away from his midsized firm.  He's also a serial philanderer and, like almost all the main adult characters, has a serious drinking problem.   But Don has a deeper secret to keep than his womanizing and alcoholism; he's not who he says he is.  During the Korean War he switched identities with a dead officer who had been burnt beyond recognition in a freak accident. Richard Whitman (Don's real name) is assumed dead while Donald Draper lives on.  He's able to carry on the charade with cunning and more than a little help from the real Draper's amazingly understanding widow, with whom he begins a close but platonic relationship.

Much of the ground Mad Men covers is not terribly new; movies like American Beauty or The Graduate have shown the soulless, hypocritically phony suburbs and Fight Club gave a critique of our consumer driven, conformity obsessed society.  While I must admit that what's new about the show is its packaging more than it's content, and that it seems to loose steam a bit in the third season, I was hooked.  Part of it is the style.  But viewer be ware; the fashion covers up a multitude of sins and moral confusion, not just of the characters but of the basic message being proposed.  More on that next time. 

9/11+10

We began school Thursday across the parking lot at what is now called Our Lady of Guadalupe Academy, the former St. Anthony's School.  I teach the 8th grade religion class and the second day I looked out at the group and reminded myself that they were between the ages of three and four in 2001.  They obviously have no real memory of September 11, nor any real concept of what the events of that almost preternaturally sunny Tuesday meant.  The world that they have grown up in has been shaped by the war on terrorism, much like my childhood was by the Cold War.  I couldn't imagine a world without the Soviet Union, or the fear of nuclear annihilation.  I grew up after the duck and cover days, and only remember one bomb drill during my elementary school years, when I was in first grade.  I can't say I lived in constant fear and loathing, but I knew the threat existed, and more than once wondered if I would live to see adulthood.

I don't know what's in the heads of these kids.  I know that they have preoccupations that I didn't growing up with in suburban Westchester; gangs are a problem here, the pressure to do drugs, drink and get involved in premarital sex is already upon them.  I'm not sure if they feel any anxiety over the possibility of a dirty bomb going off, or if the sight of one of the low flying jets approaching Newark Airport, right next to us, gives them a slight twinge in the gut.  I know I'm less paranoid now than I was in 2002 or '03, when we had color coded alerts and anthrax scares.  But we still have our reminders that we live in a post-9/11 world; the public service announcements telling us to be suspicious of abandoned bags on subways and the constant war footing that has now become a part of the background noise.  I lived in a time before all this, when you didn't have to empty your pockets before entering Yankee Stadium, or take your belt and shoes off before getting on a plane.  But for those young people, this is life as they've known it; the only normal they've ever experienced. 

Today most of the memorial services and news coverage will focus on remembering the events of ten years ago, and especially the victims.  This is only right.  But I can't help but think of now, and the world our children are inheriting.  I could never have predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the symbolic end of the Cold War.  I don't know what the end of the war on terror will look like, but I've got to have the courage to imagine it.  Not so much for me, as for the children, that they might have a chance to shape a new, better reality.