Reviews - GEORGE VECSEY

Yo La Tengo – A Mets Tragedy

7/20/2019

How come Armstrong and Aldrin could walk on the moon but the Mets cannot collaborate on a simple popup to short left field? Fortunately, the Mets were in Montreal that weekend in 1969, and could not botch up the lunar landing.

Fully knowing what would happen,
I, Tiresias, weary prophet
Stayed up late
To watch.

Jacob DeGrom,
Latter-day Sisyphus,
Pushed rock up hill,
Expertly, seven innings.

Did he know?
Probably.
No runs.
No runs, ever.
The human condition.

I loved the glimpses of The City.
Cable car. Bridge. Bay.
The color orange.
Blankets. Parkas.
I almost never miss anything
from my former life.
But last night I felt a twinge:
“I used to go there.”

Beyond my bedtime,
I waited for the inevitable.
And there it was.
Left fielder and shortstop,
Back to 1962.

Only one person I could count on being up.
I texted my friend Wakefield
In the Bay Area
Who pitched for the Mets in 1964.
Studied Casey.
Stanford guy.
Probably took a course
In Greek myths.

Was he there last night?
“Left field,” he texted back,
Citing the legend of 1962,
"Yo La Tengo,"
When original Mets
Botched a similar play
With similar results.

By now,
We have seen it all.
Old fans.
Old writers.
Old players.
But still we watch.
What does it say
About us?
* * *
The legend of Yo La Tengo:
http://phillysportshistory.com/2011/05/21/richie-ashburn-is-the-inspiration-for-the-band-name-yo-la-tengo/

Tiresias: I refer to The Waste Land:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land

Bill Wakefield’s Baseball Stats:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/w/wakefbi01.shtml

Very nice article by Deesha Thosar in NY Daily New:
https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/ny-jacob-degrom-dom-smith-20190720-36oevoexyfd3vb4r4fldva3yby-story.html

George Vecsey for Bill Wakefield, Mets 1964

7/20/2019 03:43:58 pm

George Vecsey for Bill Wakefield( georgevecsey@gmail.com )7/20/2019 03:33:57 pm

Bill Wakefield, Mets 1964, says he heard the Yo La Tengo story directly from Frank Thomas, who figured in the 1962 botchup.
"We stayed at the Hotel Manhattan 44th and 8th Ave. -- $7 a night till the Fair started. Told stories en route #7 (local) to Shea on a daily basis. Hot Rod Kanehl, Jesse Gonder and I giggled the entire trip!!"
(GV: Frank Thomas recently honored at New Shea, also played in last NY Giants game at Polo Grounds.)
Wakefield also confirms that he did indeed take a Greek History course one summer at Stanford: Description:
"The heroic and divine in the literature, mythology, and culture of archaic Greece. Interdisciplinary approach to the study of individuals and society. Illustrated lectures. Readings in translation of Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, and the poets of lyric and tragedy."
Casey enjoyed his "university men" on those early Mets.
GV

Randolph

7/23/2019 10:34:49 am

George,

Bravo! Loyalty is a quality that is becoming very rare in this modern world. You have it. Thank you.

I also say that you might need a burst of inspiration.
It is the best Tour de France in many many years. Four or five guys are capable of winning. I am rooting for a young Frenchmen.

Wednesday Thursday and Friday are brutal days in the Alps. Take a look my friend.

Go Mets.

Randolph

bruce

7/20/2019 09:02:54 pm

george,

laughed when i read your ashburn story.

as for les mets....intervention time for you.

bruce

ahron horowitz

7/22/2019 12:23:04 pm

thanks for the story.we probably need a citywide intervention

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

Yo La Tengo – A Mets Tragedy

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