There was a commercial break in the 1975 Richard Pryor rerun of Saturday Night Live. Was he brilliant.
I clicked on the Mets. Two outs. Runner on third. Mets down, 1-0. Duda against some lefty. “Game over. He can’t hit lefties,” I informed my wife. Clang. Home run off the foul screen in right. Perfect timing for my baseball wisdom. I texted our son. Doo-dah. Doo-dah. David was on the phone with his wife, who was visiting family. At the same time, he was watching the Mets. “Losers to the end,” he said. Duda can’t hit lefties. Clang. Do we know the game, or what? Soon there will be no Mets, no season. As mediocre as the Mets have been, they have given us Lagares and de Grom, Mejia and Familia, and Daniel Murphy, who worked himself into an all-star. Collins is really a good manager. My guess is that baseball fans in a lot of cities feel the same way, bereft. Yankee fans and others now that Jeter-mania is over. Baseball has been with us every day since April. I’m adopting the Pirates to make a run in the post-season, and I’m adopting the Tigers in the other league. I like the old cities, the old clubs, and root for them in October. But it’s not like having your own team, every day, even when you are 100 percent positive that Duda cannot hit lefties. Clang. The (imagined) sound will echo all winter.
Brian Savin
9/28/2014 02:41:06 pm
Well, there is a six month dream ahead for a next season with 12 more promised wins according to GM Alderson. Maybe he'd be more convincing if he wore a bow tie to work instead of his usual open collar sports shirt? Anyway, Collins looked happy.....but he'd be happy managing a team of 10 year olds. He said an interesting thing....that he likes to take some credit for a player development when he was talking about Bobby Abreu. Then he said managers don't matter, but I don't think he believes it. He wouldn't work so hard if he did. I like him better than "Loose Leaf Boy."
George Vecsey
9/29/2014 02:37:37 am
Brian, thanks. I didn't know Collins at all before he came to the Mets, but apparently he was a hard guy early on. Nothing like somebody who has learned a few things along the way. The Mets have played for him all along. Very impressive. GV
Altenir Silva
9/29/2014 04:05:21 pm
Dear Brian,
Altenir Silva
9/28/2014 05:01:15 pm
Meanwhile, we can watch the beautiful movies about baseball.
George Vecsey
9/29/2014 02:35:00 am
Altenir, thanks for the list. You as a maker of movies and television in Brazil know more about American movies than I do.
Brian Savin
9/29/2014 02:47:36 pm
Altenir, I'll take #5, The Natural. I can't think of a more enjoyable movie. Redford rewrote that story to make a modern-predictable, and essentially mediocre book into perhaps the classic American sports dream. Redford knows baseball and he knows American sensibilities and he knows art. I also think Glenn Close's character created the most beautiful woman I've ever seen on screen -- with the most affecting spoken lines I've ever heard on film ("we all have two lives, the one we learn with and...."; "his Father lives in New York") as well as being perhaps the screen's greatest foil for a leading man, prompting such classic lines as "life didn't work out the way I expected" and "I could have been greater."
Altenir Silva
9/29/2014 03:30:24 pm
Dear George,
Altenir Silva
9/29/2014 03:36:11 pm
Dear Brian,
Ed Martin
9/29/2014 03:25:02 am
GV. A couple of weeks ago Collins said Duda needed to hit lefties better and he was working on it. That night he got a key hit off a lefty. So last night, being wiser than some professionals I know, I said to Peggy, he is getting better against lefties, and bingo! I also checked, afterwards, his overall hitting since All Star break, about 50-50 on average, but two or three home runs and RBIs. Couldn't find lefty/righty stats, but I expect they would not differ much. Call me anytime if you want any advice, tips, etc. G-d.
George Vecsey
9/29/2014 07:02:13 am
How foolish of me not to have called. 9/29/2014 04:58:54 am
Like you, George, I'll get sucked up into the Playoff and World Series drama. Before you know it, we're into the holidays. Winter is long, bleak and hard here in the NE, but by January we're counting the days until the pitchers and catchers arrive in training camp. And by then we can be pretty confident that we've survived another offseason. I'm admittedly biased, but I predict there will be some very exciting baseball in my birthplace of Flushing next year... Best regards.
George Vecsey
9/29/2014 07:00:23 am
I was covering when Seaver Koosman and Ryan emerged....but Jones, Agee, Grote, Swoboda were all there, or arriving, too. Different time. 9/29/2014 07:19:26 am
And speaking of young arms, I just hope they are consulted before they start tinkering with the right field fence at Citi!
Josh Rubin
9/29/2014 07:41:43 am
That's the team I grew up on, when I first started watching the game and collecting baseball cards, and why, despite my upbringing, I have always been a Mets fan. In some ways, though, it feels like 1983 right now, with the Mets one Keith Hernandez trade away from turning a team of promising young guys into a real contender.
Altenir Silva
9/29/2014 04:03:24 pm
Dear Josh,
Mendel
9/29/2014 06:55:58 pm
For the off season I have composed a special benediction thanking God for Roger Angel. His printed words on baseball evoke the sights, sounds, and smells of the game more than actual grass, wood, popcorn, and leather.
Xiaolu luo
9/29/2014 09:08:07 pm
Why you hate baseball.Is their any reason for hate baseball.But i like baseball.Its interesting game.I can say its my favorite game and everyday i play this game in my home ground.
George Vecsey
9/30/2014 01:48:29 am
Dear Luo: Thank you for your note. I think the people writing in these Comments love baseball, and particularly the artistic movie views of baseball. I am glad you get to play baseball. When I covered the 2008 Olympics in Beijing I met a young journalist from Xinhua named Hu who had played for his university in Beijing. One day he brought his glove and we played catch outside the Media Center, One of my favorite memories of Beijing. Play Ball!!! GV 9/30/2014 03:34:07 pm
Altenar—great list of movies!
George Vecsey
10/1/2014 01:44:20 am
Alan, spot on with the two other Sayles movies. I love Matewan because I lived and worked in the region. And Brother is one of his first, a classic. Great sense of uptown.
Thor A. Larsen
10/1/2014 01:53:05 am
I am a die-hard Yankee fan and I am very happy to see the season end! How long could the Yankee brass keep flashing Derek Jeter, Derek Jeter etc, to hide the fact they have a very inept team. Beltran, McCann, Ellsbury are not the playes they thought they 'hired'. They let Cano,a superb batter and fielder, escape. They overpaid for all the older pl;ayers they keep bringing around. CC Sabathia is unlikely to last, now maybe Tanaka a question mark. .Nova will also be a question mark. (Is there a problem with the pitching coach in handling these pitchers?)
Ed Martin
10/3/2014 04:23:38 am
GV. I appreciated your kind note to Luo, so typical of your concern for others. I noticed you mentioned meeting Hu, who had played at a university in Beijing. First base, I assume.
George Vecsey
10/5/2014 03:24:50 am
Ed, thanks, very good. Strangely, it never occurred to me. Comments are closed.
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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 |