Filed under: News, Sports | Tags: Baseball, News, Sports, the Mets, the Yankees
Nice win, Willie. You’re fired.
I’m not a Mets fan, so I’d like to think I can be impartial here. By rights, as a Yankees fan, I should be glee-stricken that it’s finally the Mets who can’t keep their house clean and whose front office comes off looking like some pissant, third-world military junta. I’m all for dysfunction on that end of the Triborough Bridge, but not at the expense of Willie Randolph.
From the The New York Times: ”The organization plotted the firing on Monday morning, and Minaya arrived here Monday night but did not attend the game. As Randolph managed the game, answered postgame questions and drove back to the hotel separately from the team bus, Minaya waited.”
The guy, a Brooklyn native, builds a winning record and takes the team to within a Yadier Molina bomb of the World Series. True, there was The Collapse last year — culminating in a demoralizing thumping by the Marlins on the last day of the season. And the sense that he didn’t have the respect of the players. And the stupid things he said about race to a Jersey paper.
But this is the same question the Yankees faced last year with Joe Torre. Was the team’s impotence in the Division Series because of the manager or in spite of him? A so-so team flush with all stars and bad chemistry may not win no matter who is filling out the line-up card.
Maybe I’m not impartial at all. I’m loyal to Randolph for the same reason I was loyal to Joe Torre and for the same reasons (I imagine, though I can’t really speak to this myself) people feel so strongly about Bill Clinton. They were all The Bosses during better times — Torre and Randolph during the Yanks’ 90s dynasty.
But that was then. So the Mets start a whisper campaign that Willie’s card’s been punched, then fly him cross-country for the third time in two weeks, watch the team beat the Angels and climb to within a game of .500, then fire him at the team hotel just after 3 a.m. eastern time. They break the news to the rest of the world in an e-mail.
The Daily News’ Bill Madden wrote: ”In the history of New York baseball, there has not been a more cowardly, indecent, undignified or ill-conceived firing of a manager.”
Yet ESPN.com went so far (creative really) as to pose the question of the circumstances of Willie’s firing to Randy Cohen, author of The New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” column. Sayeth Cohen: “Discourtesy does not necessarily equal unethical behavior.”
Maybe not, but it does burn bridges. Luckily, there are a lot of bridges in New York City. And more than a few lead from Queens to the Bronx. Let’s hope Hank and Hal see the light.
ESPN The Magazine’s Buster Olney put it like this:
Even the writers of “The Sopranos” could not have invented a more recklessly handled hit. … There was just one last vexing problem: Telling the news to Randolph, Peterson and Nieto directly. The Mets’ front office could’ve done that Saturday, as they sat for hours through a rain delay. Or they could’ve done the job Sunday. But somehow, the Mets’ front office seemed to shrink from the idea of firing Randolph on Father’s Day.
Stay classy, Flushing.
Business Week has a good one about how billionaire Oilman T. Boone Pickens has devised a clever-as-hell way to make yet another fortune by gobbling up water rights — by many accounts the only valuable thing the land can offer in parts the Texas Panhandle. He’ll do it by using eminent domain to build a 250-mile pipeline to thirsty cities who haven’t yet realized they need what he has. Or have but don’t want to admit it.
It’s aptly titled “There will be water” and quotes the viral “milkshake” scene from the final minutes of “There will be blood.” In case you forgot (and really, how could you?), they went something like this:
From the article:
“Pickens’ decision to get into the water business was regarded by some in the Panhandle as nothing more, or less, than a shrewd move by a man who knows the value of commodities. The economy of the High Plains region is based on people taking out the natural resources and selling them. If water that can’t be used for farming ends up in the taps of city residents hundreds of miles away, that’s fine.”
So he finagled state law to get the exceptional power of eminent domain by selling land to five people who work for him and triggering an election in which only two people could vote. (more…)
There’s a great article in the July Vanity Fair (sadly lost in the Bill Clinton “hatchet job” freakout) that uses a federal immingration case to look at the larger phenomenon of the relatively untapped well of Cuban baseball awesomeness. It’s by Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball,” which you should read for no other reason than it will make you feel smart even if at the end of the day you’re a dumb schlub who still believes in The Art of Being Clutch and that batting average matters. The thesis:
“The U.S. government needed the jury to believe that the American best informed about Cuban ballplayers didn’t know which ones were worth stealing; that he’d refinance his house to smuggle the wrong guys; that Cuba was a mysterious black hole, about which this sort of ignorance was plausible. And it did! After listening for seven days the jury quickly reached its verdict: guilty.”
This is fascinating mainly because it gives a semi-sad, semi-amusing look at the sport Americans love so much as it’s played in a country past generations were taught to fear for so long but which people my age (who only distantly recall the first Gulf War) mostly look at with bemusement. (You were serioulsy afraid of Cuba? Cuba the island? That Cuba?) Cuba is so interesting — to me at least — because it is so unknown at a time when there seem to be so few mysteries and blanks spots left on the map. But even the mystery of Cuba is uniquely American, since it’s self-imposed. We’re the ones who have told ourselves we can’t go there. Terrorist’s can, however. (Lewis hitches a ride with a Canadian baseball fanatic…perhaps the only one .)
And maybe what’s so striking about the connection to baseball is that it paints such a very different image of the institution we think we know so well – a place where the games are played in open spaces at insane asylums, the balls are rationed, beat writers don’t attend games or interview players and the players are paid so little they ride bicycles to the stadium and sell their uniforms to make extra money. And yet they’re consistently the best in the world.
Then there’s what this all reveals about the direction of the U.S. government – and it’s preoccupation with homeland security – post-Sept. 11. If Gus Dominguez, who Lewis describes as small-potatoes sports agent who stumbled only grudgingly into the business, was smuggling Cubans, you could argue his case should be looked at no differently than those of people accused of smuggling immigrants into the U.S. from Mexico, Pakistan, France or Paraguay. (more…)
Update: Apparently, he faked it: “Authorities began to suspect Mr. Israel was on the run when a body failed to turn up and the message turned out to be the theme song of the film “M*A*S*H.”
The M.A.S.H. angle seemed a little … hokey.
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The NY Daily News reports that a former Long Island hedge fund manager who swindled hundreds-of-millions from investors likely leaped from a bridge rather than report to federal prison.
“State police said they found a 2006 GMC Envoy registered to Samuel Israel III of Armonk abandoned on the Bear Mountain Bridge, about 40 miles north of New York City.
The phrase “Suicide is Painless” – the famous theme song of the TV show “MASH” – was scrawled in the dust on the hood.”
What’s the appropriate way to react to that news? You can’t be happy about it and still feel good about yourself at the end of the day — at least I can’t anyway. Yet, what sympathy does this guy deserve? He was apparently completely capable of living with his crime — just not the punishment.
The problem is, there’s something fundamentally more offensive about thieves who are already rich. Maybe because it’s harder to understand what motivates them. Maybe it’s because gluttony and greed have been taboo since the dawn of taboo. Or maybe it’s because the narrative requires the bad guy to end up in the pokey to seem complete, or balanced, or satisfying.
It’s a similar situation with former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, who died weeks after being convicted of fraud and months before he was sentenced. A convicted criminal, awaiting sentencing for presiding over a landmark corporate collapse that devastated the private finances of countless people far less wealthy than him, dies without ever serving a day in prison.
And he dies in Aspen.
Thanks for the hospitality. Now where’s that lethal injection?
Okay, so that’s not exactly what Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged terrorist mastermind, said when he emerged from a five-year cone of silence into a Guantanamo Bay military courtroom this morning, but it’s pretty much the gist of it.
And what’s more, according to The New York Times, he “cheerfully” addressed the court while asking the judge to execute him.
“Mr. Mohammed did not shy away from the spotlight. It was difficult, he explained, to establish a common ground with the lawyers sent by the American government to defend him after five years of custody.
“Then,” he continued, warming to his subject, “after torturing, they transfer us to Inquisitionland in Guantánamo.”
Mohammed, who claims to have engineered the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, spent the five years since his 2003 arrest in Pakistan in several secret C.I.A. prisons and Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. government admits having subjected him to waterboarding.
This fascinates me — mostly because I think it highlights how little we in the United States understand the forces that shape and motivate the people we now consider our enemies, forces that make them defiant even after years of isolation and being subjected to what many consider torture.
Even if Mohammed’s bluster is just that, a savvy put-on for the benefit of reporters and the American public, it underscores the importance of appearances. Saddam Hussein raged for the cameras present for his trial, but, behind closed doors, according to 60 Minutes, he was a clean freak who depended on his FBI handler for moist wipes.
[The agent] even used Saddam’s birthday, a former national holiday, to drive home another painful point. “In 2004, no one celebrated his birthday on April 28th. So the only one that really knew and cared was us. I’d brought him some cookies, and we, the FBI, celebrated his birthday for him.”
Yet many people will probably most remember the shaky video images of him standing tall, unmasked and at least outwardly calm moments before dropping through the gallows.
