But let’s not waste any more time on sordid subjects like Chris Christie’s office, which inconvenienced and endangered thousands trying to get across the bridge.
Let’s talk about something wholesome, like Alex Rodriguez. We can only hope that A-Rod will stick to his promise – he is a man of his word – and take that sabbatical for the next year, like a college prof, catching up on his reading. The funniest thing I heard in recent weeks was that A-Rod was planning to take spring training with the Yankees and play in the exhibitions. I checked, and according to the labor agreement players under suspension are entitled to take part in spring training. Since it is quite likely the Yankee organization has been dropping dimes (old police phrase for informing) on A-Rod for a long time, it would have been delightful to see him emerge in Tampa, like a Ghost of Creatines Past. Put me in, Coach. The second funniest thing about A-Rod was his including the Players Association in his little law suit. This nervy move was an insult to the contemporary association, which was re-directed by the late Michael Weiner. After the previous Donald Fehr regime had stonewalled the concept of testing and penalizing – widely accepted throughout world sport by that time – the Players Association took rational steps to acknowledge the conniving by a swath of its membership. Weiner’s death from brain cancer last November was a double blow -- the loss of a nice human being as well as a visionary leader. Then A-Rod went and filed a suit on his own association. What a guy. My friend Bill Rhoden has a provocative column in Saturday’s New York Times. Bill has a point that Major League Baseball deserves some of the blame for overlooking drug usage in the past generation. I particularly love the part of his column in which an Episcopal priest explains the psyche of A-Rod, comparing him to Michael Jackson. It reminds me of the explanation of Rodriguez in a column I wrote last year. * * * Another baseball thought: A bunch of baseball writer-types were discussing the new instant-replay rule the other day. Most of us regret the swerve by baseball, turning the challenge into a piece of strategy, as outlined by Tony LaRussa in Tyler Kepner’s as-always thoughtful column. The new gimmick allows a manager one challenge per game. But what if a couple of umpires suspect they got it wrong, and the manager chooses not to challenge? Isn’t the point of instant replay to get things right? The shepherding of that challenge could touch off a dozen stalling tactics in a game, as the manager awaits a call from his techie, down in the bunkers. Longer games. Just what we need. More time for baseball to bombard us with witless noise. * * * Finally, it was instructive to watch the Sosas and McGwires and Palmeiros sink in the voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame. If the voting writers are indeed the Everyman of the American psyche, the Enhanced Generation is not going to be well represented in Cooperstown in generations to come. I thought there might be some recognition of the great original talent of Bonds and Clemens, but that may never happen. Creeps are creeps. Another interesting development from the recent Hall of Fame voting was Dan Le Batard, the preening television personality, turning over his vote to a web site. He said he was trying to prove a point, which remains obscure. The interesting part is that a great newspaper like The New York Times does not allow its writers to vote for any award, sport or otherwise, because it does not want them to become the story, yet another agency can send out a popinjay who will waste a vote as a prank. Le Batard is banished from the Baseball Writers for a year. He’s from South Florida. Perhaps he can spend his time covering A-Rod. * * * (But, look, if you are really into the Christie scandal, check out the latest great work by Steve Kornacki on msnbc.com on Saturday morning. And also check out the real-estate angle to the bridge scandal, from Laura Vecsey. She is the only journalist in the world to have covered Alex Rodriguez as a slender shortstop before turning attention to Gov. Christie.)
Thor A. Larsen
1/18/2014 06:02:47 am
Assuming the 1-year major-league baseball ban holds for Alex Rodriguez, is it totally inconceivable that Alex signs on to play in Japan for the 2014 season? Alex wants to return to the Yankees in 2015 and apparently Hal Steinbrenner hints that he wants A-Rod back in 2015,, based on this article:
George Vecsey
1/18/2014 07:04:00 am
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/sports/baseball/filling-in-the-details-of-rodriguezs-suspension.html
Charlie Accetta
1/18/2014 06:47:08 am
GV - One of the comments on the Bill Rhoden piece points out that the beat writers themselves are just as culpable for the curtain of silence that pervaded the Steroid Era. I found that comment to be the most lucid thought on the page.
George Vecsey
1/18/2014 07:01:36 am
Charlie, I was in a lot of clubhouses in those years. If I had written that so-and-so now had fangs, or a new cap size, or that so-and-so had acne on his back, I somehow doubt the editors would have printed it. I wish the collective we had kept a closer watch on the Players Association's fight against testing. But like a lot of good stories, it takes time for things to come out. It's taken many months for the story to come out about the mayor of Hoboken being pressured by Christie people....It's not as if reporters are sitting there with printable facts...Still, we all wish we had done better with scraps of the drug story...GV Comments are closed.
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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 Categories
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