The Groundhog Dreams of Baseball

1/30/2013

Photo by the Groundhog

A few days early, the groundhog emerges,
Temperatures heading toward the 50’s.
The local ball field looks inviting
Maybe it is time for opening day.

How is A-Rod recuperating?
The Yankees, he is told, are looking into new allegations,
Trying to bust his contract, be done with him.
Is that nice R.A. Dickey ready to win another 20?
The Mets let him go, and dissed him on his way out the door.
Never mind, the groundhog says. I’m going back down.

Let me know when it's safe to come up.

Ed Martin

1/30/2013 11:23:45 am

Ii am afraid the Mets will finish below the groundhog. Sigh!

George Vecsey

1/30/2013 12:40:55 pm

where is relegation when BB needs it?

Brian Savin

1/30/2013 01:40:13 pm

Relegation to where? At the end of Ralph Houk's tenure with the Yankees, my brother and I went to a few games and my brother would shout out to Ralph, "Go back to Spokane!" Where should we send the Wilpons and their team? "Go back to Bensonhurst"? They don't deserve Fort Greene, Boerum Hill or Carroll Gardens. It's Bensonhurst, as Thomas Wolfe seemed to know in Only the Dead Know Brooklyn (and the Mets). Sigh.

George Vecsey

1/31/2013 01:57:10 am

Brian, you just quoted my favorite author.
I would say the Mets could stay in that ball park. But without a single major-league outfielder, they couldn't play in the National League. They look like one of those Serie A teams that gets relegated, and most of the talent leaves. We know MLB is not structured for relegation, but what else is there to do but hallucinate in the torpor of Super Bowl week? GV

Ed Martin

1/31/2013 03:32:21 am

Did the Coney Island Ballfield survive Sandy?--I truly hope so.
Maybe the Mets could move there, and change their name to the "Coneys.". I have a hunch the seating capacity would be about right.

Roy Edelsack

1/31/2013 07:25:53 am

Well, I for one am going to miss the old fake-to-third-throw-to-first pick-off move this season. Never failed to remind me and my brother of our favorite Saturday morning cartoon:

Bullwinkle: Hey Rocky watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.

Rocky: That trick never works.

Bullwinkle: This time for sure!

(It never worked.)

George Vecsey

1/31/2013 07:31:35 am

Lucy and Charlie Brown

Friv Games link

6/1/2014 09:57:23 pm

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Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

The Groundhog Dreams of Baseball

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