Northwestern Shuts Out Purdue With Oozeball

After Northwestern went into Penn State, beat them at their own homecoming, and decapitated their coach, it would be understandable if they struggled against Purdue. It was a big week, the last game at The Lake, and Purdue Pete was lurking in a house of mirrors with dozens of Petes leering at every angle waiting to spring his trap. But it turns out it wasn’t anything to worry about because Purdue was terrible in this game, Northwestern completely suffocated them and came away with a demoralizing shutout.

It’s clear at this point that Northwestern’s game plan is to slowly drip onto the other team like a slow basement leak that causes foundation damage. They come at teams like one of those lumbering slasher movie villains who you think you can outrun simply by managing to walk at a brisk pace. They ooze. In the first half, Northwestern held the ball for more than 22 minutes in the first half and allowed 57 yards and scored every single one of their 19 points. It was excessive. They only needed to score one point to win this game.

A foundational text for Zach Lujan's offense

Nothing Northwestern is doing is complicated. They are going to send Caleb Komolafe to smash into linebackers. They are going to send Joe Himon and Dashun Reeder to also smash into linebackers. They are going to throw the ball almost exclusively to one guy who is pretty much always open. And they’re going to try to take away big plays on defense and let other teams methodically try to work down the field until they screw up and have to kick the ball or give it to a Wildcat defender; last Saturday we saw three Purdue turnovers, highlighted by 291 pound defensive tackle Brendan Flakes leaping up and snagging a pass. This is the same way Northwestern has been pretty decent since the spread lost its novelty and Northwestern looked exactly like it was being run by a bruising suburban linebacker whose solution to every problem was bruising suburban linebacking. They even ran a classic doomed special teams trick play that the Wildcats pull off about as successfully as a teenager trying a skateboard trick at a strip mall with a single stair.

Pat Fitzgerald was there, by the way. Northwestern honored its 1995 Rose Bowl team and it was a mystery whether he would show up, what with the university firing his ass and saying he was responsible for the awful stories that were coming out almost daily about the football team and him suing the university in a shockingly bitter end to the coaching tenure of the school’s most important sports figurehead and Doing Things The Right Way mascot. But money heals all wounds, apparently. Whatever bitterness existed between Northwestern and Pat Fitzgerald seems to have been put aside at least for one day after he and the school settled their lawsuit for what I assume is a lot of money and Northwestern having to issue an official “actually Pat Fitzgerald was shocked SHOCKED to see hazing going on in this football facility” statement. So there he was, looking older and more weathered than the last time he was in public, smiling and waving, the face of Northwestern football in everything that it has come to represent.

Fitzgerald in happier times, before he had ever heard of cell phones and the RPO

The game was the swan song for The Lake. In the end, despite nasty forecasts, it did not rain. The game was played in unseasonably warm and humid conditions in very seasonable October gloom. It staved off  the sudden descent of autumn by one day. They’ll pack away the extra bleachers and video boards and yowling sound effects and return the field to its primary purpose which is to unleash the power of Northwestern’s lacrosse team on hapless opponents. They'll host next year's lacrosse final four at The Lake, and hopefully the 'Cats will be there. The Chicago Stars (an inexplicable naming downgrade from the Red Stars that is the type of thing that happens when a Ricketts is in charge) will be playing there next summer. 

The Lake was a wonderful novelty, a beautiful setting, and a very silly college football stadium. On a clear day, it was easier to see the skyline of downtown Chicago from the north endzone seats than plays happening on the field if they happened to be one of the many massive poles in the way.  There was nothing like it in college football, which was fitting for Northwestern, which has never felt like its games are happening in the Big Ten. When you think of a major college fcootball game, you think of maximalism, of massive crowds and screaming fans, and pageantry. Northwestern has never been like that. There are just not enough fans. The point of Ryan Field is that it never made a Northwestern game feel like an event– tickets were affordable, it was easy to get there, and they occasionally would run out of things like hot dog buns and end up selling loose hot dogs in a paper cup. The whole feeling was that none of this was a big deal.

The new stadium will not have that cozy, neighborhood feeling. It will be fancy and expensive. It will not be rusting like a disused WWII freighter or (presumably) rely so heavily on decorate tarps. And yet, no matter how much money Pat Ryan spends, it will never feel like a Big Ten home game because there are just not enough Northwestern fans to outnumber opposing fans. Maybe instead of spending close to a billion dollars on a stadium, they should have just paid people to show up in purple like nineteenth century ward bosses rigging elections. They could hand them laminated cards with important Northwestern Guys to reference, with fans comparing notes and saying things like "who'd you get? I got Chi Chi Ariguzo." 

It's time to start using the revolutionary ideas of early 20th century Chicago aldermen "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna in Northwestern revenue sports 

Under my ambitious Bribing Fans plan, you could eventually turn on a Northwestern game on the radio and actually be able to tell whether it's a home game. It’s worth a shot– certainly it’s better than building a fancy stadium and making people rob a bank for the privilege of getting screamed at by Iowans.

ELECTRIC NEBRASKA

Here’s the set of circumstances behind last week’s Minnesota-Nebraska game on Friday night. Minnesota’s last three games involved squeaking by a lousy Rutgers team, getting run over by the Ohio State steamroller, and narrowly beating the same Purdue team that we saw last Saturday look like it was having the rules of football explained to them during extensive TV timeouts. Nebraska had beaten a Maryland team fading from its September mirage, beat Michigan State, and lost narrowly to Michigan, but managed to keep a toehold on the #25 AP ranking. So of course, Minnesota absolutely crushed the Huskers, holding them to 36 rushing yards, no touchdowns, and an anemic 3.9 yards per play. There’s a simple explanation for this: the Big Ten West is alive.

The Big Ten may have gotten rid of its roiling crab bucket division, but as long as these middling, corn-fed programs get to smash into each other a few times a year, it is impossible to predict the results. The last thing you want to do as a ranked team is go into Minneapolis on a Friday night to play a team that just had to throw down a smoke bomb to escape from Purdue. For a long time, Big Ten West teams would have to bus down to Evanston, play in front of an overwhelming crowd of their own fans on a cold, gray morning, and lose 13-10 after a flurry of overtime scoring. Every team had to lose a game to Iowa with one combined touchdown. Northwestern and Nebraska, for a solid decade or so, committed to playing the stupidest football game you have ever seen at each other. Nothing the Big Ten and its pots of money and ludicrous westward expansion has done has been able to stop the Big Ten West from Big Ten Westing when the schedule allows.

Once again, Northwestern has to play a team that is frustrated after losing a game in which they were favored with some coach drama. Matt Rhule, who looks like the thought experiment “what if Phillip Seymore Hoffman played a college football coach,” is a rumored top candidate for the Penn State job that opened up after the Nittany Lions made the mistake of scheduling Northwestern for homecoming. Rhule played at Penn State and coached at Temple. I have no idea if Rhule is interested in the Penn State job when he is ensconced at a Nebraska program where the expectations are currently to clean up Scott Frost’s vomit, but if he is, it was probably not a good idea to immediately go out and get wiped out by P.J. Fleck’s Acronym Squad*. I can't predict what Penn State's gas station barons and anti-woke hoagie magnates are thinking about their coach search, but I would have to imagine a loss to Northwestern would affect Rhule’s job prospects after that was what did in James Franklin; regardless of the effect on Rhule's future employment, I think we all can admit that it would be very funny.

Phillip Seymore Hoffman as Matt Rhule reenacting the shut the fuck up scene from Punch Drunk Love on the headset with his offensive coordinator 

*Technically it's the A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Squad, the first A stands for Acronym and P.J. Fleck is hard at work consulting his Acronymicon for the rest

Nebraska remains heavily favored in this game despite sporting identical records 5-2 records with Northwestern ahead in the conference standings. It does not seem like anyone takes the Wildcats and their Just Sit On Them offense particularly seriously even after vastly outperforming preseason expectations. Nebraska still has highly-ranked quarterback Dylan Raiola, whom I know mainly from his close emulation of Patrick Mahomes that, at least last season, involved styling and dressing himself like the Kansas City superstar. I appreciate that, and I encourage more quarterbacks to do this; I think every Purdue quarterback should be encouraged, if not required, to wear his hair exactly like Kyle Orton.

 Welcome to Purdue, please take this copy 1678 copy of Haire Styles, Beardes and Moustachios for the Vigorous Manne to your barber

Northwestern needs one more win to get to a bowl game. Nebraska needs to get the taste of Minnesota field turf out of their mouth. Once again, Northwestern is a “get right” game for a Big Ten opponent. We’ll see if Nebraska, Northwestern’s second Big Ten opponent that isn’t currently either spiraling into organizational chaos or Purdue can manage to figure out how to stop the ‘Cats from running at them for seven minutes at a time. They haven’t been able to get right against them yet.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti told Marco Polo that he would tell him about Big Ten cities and Marco Polo would tell him if they existed. "Here is an enormous, teeming city," Pettiti said. "Buildings pile up next to buildings. All manner of people that have ever existed bounce off each other on unimaginable business.  And yet, despite their differences, there is one thing that unites them: wanting to watch small, regional football teams from suburbs or even small towns nowhere near them on television. Every single week, they huddle together around television sets fervently hoping to see their team or other teams from cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away play, and in their excitement they are willing to buy the products they see on screen: extra large men's pants, various braces for sore limbs, farm implements. Every person in these gigantic cities where they are crammed next to each other in small apartments will order a backhoe or one  one of those string spinners used for weeds."

"Great Commissioner, I have not seen such a city," Marco Polo says.  I have seen a city where no one sleeps, where dreams become corporeal and mingle with the half-awake people. Where the distinction between dream and reality becomes blurred and so it has been for generations, no one quite able to determine whether they are in the city or in its familiar but convoluted double, where connections between the dreamers are ephemeral and yet somehow more lasting than in cities where people can differentiate between them. They float on gossamer streets that might not be there and nothing is where it is supposed to be. Those are the cities I have seen."

"You're always seeing cities like that," the Commissioner said.

Cities and Memory: Linka

Linka, the great city of the past.  Everyone in Linka knows that the city had once had been astonishingly prosperous, covered in riches, everyone happy and learned.  The love of the city's past is palpable.  They say that anyone born in Linka or who lives there long enough, no longer even sees the city as it exists, but in their mind's eye they travel the great thoroughfares and boulevards in their own parades celebrating the city's former glories.

Conversation in Linka only consists of the recitation of these former triumphs.  The residents' devotion to ancient scholars and poets and architects who built the great libraries and gardens and palaces is so clear that these great figures seem alive and well in Linka.  Their teachings and personalities have been passed down so thoroughly it is as though they can still speak. But they are not alive. Years of interpretation and scholarship and popular bastardization have created competing versions of the same figures. People in Linka sometimes argue over the merits of these great ancestors, arguments that lead to shoving matches and the inevitable interjection of passesby, who proclaim that the celebrated old figures would never shove, except for Balon The Shover who had perfected the art beyond the comprehension of any contemporary Linkan. "To shove like that is barbarity unworthy of Balon The Shover," is a refrain that is sadly more common than ever in contemporary Linka.

You would think that Linka is covered in monuments and statues and museums to honor the glories of the the city's storied past. But the city is barren. No one can agree when the golden age of the city was. Every person seems to have a different idea of when Linka was a guiding light to the world and when it has shrunk to its present decrepitude. Any meeting where someone proposes erecting a monument descends into denunciations and recriminations and the inevitable bout of shoving. Even after a particularly vigorous bout of shoving when someone suggested building a statue to honor Balon The Shover, a small but insistent faction denounced Balon and claimed that it was actually his successor Pleton The Pusher that had perfected the art, and that whatever shoving Balon The Shover was doing was low, brutish calisthenics. It took three days for the people of Linka to stop shoving each other. A similar episode happened after a suggestion to dedicate a street to Uliot The Chest Poker.

The city of Linka as it presently exists can never compare to the glories of the city in the past, and that makes the people who live there disgusted with their own city. They cannot build anything new because they fear it would compare unfavorably to what was there before, but they cannot admit that the desolate ruins of old, rotting buildings can ever be destroyed because of what they meant. The people of the city lead double lives, traipsing around the imagined city of past glory in their own heads while they grow ever more upset with the state of their own city as it exists, the one they traverse every day.  Linka is a city trapped within a million other cities that perhaps never existed, smothering the present. 

Baseball Botches Cheating Scandal By Not Calling it "Glue-Doping"

For my money, the most enjoyable cheating scandal in any sport is when a professional cyclist is caught using a motor secreted into a bicycle. That is an incredibly brazen way to cheat. It is cartoon cheating-- the only thing more dastardly than competing in a cycling race with a literal motor would be to see someone attempt to qualify for the Olympic high jump wearing enormous springs before getting carted out of the stadium with an injury where they are folded up into an accordion shape.

Cyclists have decided to refer to this, the practice of entering a bicycle race with a literal motor attached to the bike, as moto-doping. Presumably this name comes from the more common method of cheating in bicycle races through drug regimens or those programs where Tour de France riders have all of their blood drained and clumsily replaced with a mutant ooze in a dank hotel room. This is wonderful. Somehow, a plague of guys zipping past the peloton on improvised mopeds has yielded an all-time great cheating suffix, one that should be adopted immediately by every sporting concern.

Baseball, for example, spent most of the 2019-20 offseason entangled in the Astros sign-stealing garbage can banging scandal, which by all rights should be referred to as Can-Doping. Now, the biggest story in baseball is about pitchers using exotic adhesives to doctor the baseball. It seems like the baseball world is grappling with what to call this transgression. The most common term I have seen is a crackdown on “sticky stuff;” if MLB and baseball media had any sense or clarity of purpose, they would immediately begin referring to this crisis as Glue-Doping.

Pitchers have been rubbing baseballs with foreign substances as long as the sport has existed. The current glue predicament, like most modern baseball scandals, seems to have mutated into a crisis from the twin hobgoblins of analytics and technology. Baseball undergoes an approximate five-year cycle where a new term appears on the nerdiest baseball blogs that explains an advantage or long-sought market inefficiency and then the term then filters into the Sloan Analytics circuit and front office guys wearing those Investment Vests and then finally comes dribbling awkwardly out of the of mouths of grizzled former players on studio shows and local broadcasts like a trickle of tobacco juice. One of those recent trendy metrics has been Spin Rate, which has become ubiquitous.

The consequences of the new spin rate obsession were obvious: pitchers recognized that increasing their spin rate would lead to higher paychecks for established pitchers or the possibility of a steady job in the majors for the dozens of interchangeable relievers who are belt-fed at hitters and often yo-yoed between the big club and minors.

The emphasis on spin rate manifested from technological change in two ways. First, spin rate was not something that could be measured without the fancy cameras that teams have all recently adopted as part of their increasingly-ubiquitous pitch labs. Second, pitches gained access to new sticky substances beyond the pine tar that Michael Pineda was attempting to hide by pretending it was some sort of alarming neck secretion or the various sandpapers and jalapeño snots that pitchers had used before. The most infamous of these is a product called Spider Tack, invented by one of those strongman guys who you see on ESPN2 wearing the car suspenders when strapped to a Volkswagen who made the glue so he could get a better grip on those gigantic concrete spheres that the strongman haul around. This substance was so sticky that the guy who invented it ripped his biceps because he physically could not release a boulder, and now it is used to make a guy swing and miss at a curve ball and yell an obscenity.

After reading the article on Spider Tack the thing that immediately struck me is there is no way that oafish baseball players who regularly hurt themselves in the most improbable and clumsy ways even if most of those stories are probably dopey inventions to cover for being drunk should be allowed to handle a substance that sticky. It is a minor miracle that a baseball player has not dangerously glued himself to his own person, a teammate, or a moving vehicle. I am shocked that a pitcher as not yet thrown a ball but remained stuck to it so he flies towards the mound still gripping the ball and the hitter hits it now the momentum has him flying toward the outfield still stuck to the baseball where a quick-thinking outfielder must snare him with a gigantic net before there is a five hour video review that ends with the umpire declaring that everything that happened is legal and then must flee the stadium in a bullpen car shaped like a baseball glove.

While it is obvious that the Glue-Doping crisis is real and a detriment to a game already perilously tiled towards the pitcher, I am also somewhat skeptical of the impending crackdown only because I have no faith that Rob Manfred can competently resolve this situation, especially if it empowers Cowboy Joe West to do his Buford T. Justice routine as he becomes a Forensic Ball Inspector. Or maybe they will be able to pull it off and the change is enough to give hitters a bit more juice, let the ball go into play a bit more, and make baseball more than a festival of strikeouts. Either way, I think I have been very clear that the most important thing is that the practice of doctoring balls should be known as “Glue-Doping.”

THE DINK AND THE BATH

“Those reformers tried to blow up th’ place an’ look what they got for it. The Tribune thought people was gonna stay away. Well, look at it! All th’ business houses are here, all th’ big people. All my friends are out. Chicago ain’t no sissy town!”

Thus spoke Mike “Hinky Dink” Kenna, one of Chicago’s alderman for the first ward about a notoriously debauched 1907 First Ward Ball that he put on with his fellow alderman “Bathhouse” John Coughlin. The two were a classic team-- Bathhouse John (AKA “The Bath”), a large garrulous back-slapper who came up as a massage rubber in the swanky Palmer House, and Hinky Dink, the diminutive tight-lipped schemer who served as the brains behind the illegal voting strategies that kept them in power and in illicit profits for decades. I have written about them on this site earlier, but not after reading the full treatment of their antics from Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan’s Lords of the Levee published in 1943 that covers the full scope of their schemes in the rough-and-tumble politics of turn-of-the-century Chicago.

Wendt and Kogan were newspaper reporters, Wendt mainly for the Tribune and Kogan for the Sun-Times, and their depiction of Coughlin, Kenna, and Chicago politics comes off as cynical amusement. There are more recent and more academic studies that effectively grapple with the effects of Chicago’s crime and political corruption during this time period, but those studies would not have the alternate title of Bosses in Lusty Chicago that this book bore for several reprintings. Wendt and Kogan instinctively know that when someone reads a book about Chicago politics in the 1890s they want to know about crooks with dumb nicknames, big mustaches, and their hands in as many pockets as possible. Much like Gem of the Prairie, a Chicago crime opus published in 1940 that I wrote about in 2018, the central question driving this book seems to be “can you believe this shit.”

Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink sampled from a wide buffet of crimes including using the police to create protection rackets for saloons and brothels in the notorious Levee district, requiring anyone who wanted a contract with the city to buy insurance from Coughlin’s firm, and other sorts of standard Chicago clout-wielding, but they reveled in the art of the boodle. Boodling, in the parlance of the time, meant giving contracts to utility companies-- gas companies, for example, or those building the then-nascent elevated trains-- only after allowing company lobbyists to brazenly bribe them. The schemes were shameless, and the contracts usually meant a bad deal for taxpayers. Given the expansion of Chicago and the burst of new technology into cities like L trains and electricity, Bathhouse John, Hink Dink Kenna, and the bevy of corrupt city officials essentially sold off the entire city’s burgeoning  modern infrastructure to shell companies that often times did not yet exist or were already despised, such as one gas company whose shoddy equipment killed numerous people.

The two aldermen repeatedly faced off with reformers desperate to drive out corruption, crime, and vice. These reformers, like most late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century people devoted to good government, were blind to problems their solutions could cause and generally priggish, but it is hard to fault them on their basic premise that elected aldermen should not gleefully steal money from everybody. Wendt and Kogan, though, are not really interested in analyzing the reform agenda.  They generally treat these reformers as if they were stern foils for the Three Stooges who are constantly getting their eyebrows singed off or getting hit by an errant pie meant for another Stooge. They are characters getting in the way of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink but ultimately falling victim to their genuine popularity in the ward combined with Hinky Dink’s unstoppable voting strategy of rounding up as many indigent men as he could and registering them to vote and then hiring some street toughs to throw people down staircases and punch them using those nineteenth-century boxing stances; neither one ever lost an aldermanic election.

Of the two, Bathhouse John was the more colorful figure. He loved giving speeches constructed from the remnants of malapropisms; Wendt and Kogan also enjoy rendering his speeches in a phonetic Chicago accent that pushes the limit of typed nasalness. Unlike Hinky Dink, who preferred to scheme in his dank saloon, Bathhouse John craved the limelight like someone in collapsed cave digging towards brightness. In 1900, the Bath produced a sentimental poem he had written called “Dear Midnight of Love” that he had set to music and unveiled at the opera house. He attempted to get a famed opera diva to sing it but was rebuffed (she snorted as Wendt and Kogan note, "according to contemporary accounts").  Instead, he hired a cronie's thirteen-year-old daughter and augmented her performance with a brass band and a chorus 50 voices strong. The swells and papers ridiculed him for the spectacle, but he sold out five shows. “That settles it,” proclaimed the Chicago Daily Journal, “From now on it’s Bathos John.”

Dear Midnight of Love
Why did we meet?
Dear Midnight of Love
Your face is so sweet
Pure as the angels above
Surely again we shall speak
Loving only as doves,
Dear Midnight of Love.

Bathhouse John also bought a large property in Colorado and tried to build it into an amusement park and zoo that involved essentially stealing an elephant from the Lincoln Park Zoo.

But the place where Bathhouse John made his greatest mark was in fashion. He decided that he should set a new standard for menswear that involved loud, blasting colors. Then, just before the Democratic National Convention in 1900, the Bath went out east to show off his new duds, as the Times Herald put it, “going to seaside resorts to startle the eastern men with is magnificence.” In reality, he was going to meet with Democratic power brokers before the convention to try to drum up support for Chicago mayor Carter Harrison Jr. His most notable article was a green suit described by one First Ward apparatchik as “like an Evanston lawn kissed by an early dew." The Times-Herald continued that “the alderman of the First Ward will dim the glory of J, Waldere Kirk and snatch from the latter’s grasp the crown of fame which he has worn so many seasons as King of the Dudes.”

 

I had made a grave and naive assumption that the King of the Dudes that the Times-Herald mentioned was Evander Berry Wall whom I had previously run across in this blog and has survived the twenty-first century with the great honor of being the Dude that pops up when you put King of the Dudes into Wikipedia. But it turns out that heavy and presumably ostentatious lies the crown, and by 1900 Evander Berry Wall was no longer King of the Dudes, presumably put out to some Dude pasture by larger and dandier Dudes. J. Waldere Kirk has become a more obscure figure here in 2021, but I was able to uncover an incredible article in the New York Journal and Advertiser from 1897 about him entitled “A Dude from Denver Reviews the Dudes of New York.”

“A dandy-dude from altitudinous Denver descended upon the Metropolis a week ago,” the article begins. “He resents vigorously the insinuation that he bears even a remote resemblance to a dude, but modestly declares that he is “considerable of a sartorial sirocco.” The rest of the article, which is lavishly illustrated with Kirk staring through opera glasses at a procession of Dudes under the legend “The Dude from West Inspects the Dudes from the East” is an interview where Kirk expounds on his various theories of wardrobes, and is one of my favorite specimens of writing where some obnoxious windbag gets to explain how things are. If there was a climactic Dude Off between Kirk and Bathhouse John where they put on elaborate hats and colorful cloaks at each other until one of them exploded into a mushroom cloud of fabric, Wendt and Kogan did not say.

 

 
Wendt and Kogan pick up the pace considerably as Batthouse John and Hinky Dink age into grises-eminences of the City Council. By the 1920s, their own political power base gets subsumed by a more violent and brazenly criminal organization: the mob under Al Capone. Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink supported Capone out of self-preservation and greed-- Hinky Dink served as an informal advisor to Capone’s chief henchman Frank Nitti while Bathhouse John hung onto his seat on the City Council, known mainly for his wardrobe and poems that were ghostwritten by a newspaper editor. Hinky Dink even managed to get elected once again as alderman at the age of nearly 80 because the Capone Outfit needed someone reliable.  He was still alive when Lords of the Levee was published.

It is a bit jarring to read a book on municipal corruption where the authors seem to celebrate it. There is no doubt that Chicago would have been better off if Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink had lost power or faced any sort of consequences for their larcenous ways, but Wendt and Kogan have the reader instead marveling at their brazen schemes and Bathhouse John’s ostentatious oafishness. Readers almost can't help rooting for these characters to steal another election, humiliate another reformer or anti-vice crusader, and defeat their equally sleazy aldermanic rivals for the biggest slices of the boodle pie. As reporters, Wendt and Kogan are primarily interested in a story, and this is a great story. And, they have made a tremendous case that when a aldermen in the present day is caught using the same techniques to extort a Burger King or collect kickbacks from a gambling operation, the least they could do is wear ridiculous outfits, build a disastrous zoo, or produce a musical extravaganza.

Moneyball, or The Modern Prometheus

The baseball season has started up and fans are thrilled by the bunting and the umpires who have spent the entire winter brushing up on their HRAAAAANNNNTTTT strike bellows and the possibilities of World Series glory for the approximately eight professional baseball teams interested in winning games.

Each ump, upon graduation from Hey Ump! The Sacred 
and Ancient Order of Umpires, must symbolically call 
him or herself out, forever killing their former self before 
becoming reborn behind the plate, and choosing their 
Strike Call that they get after taking mind-altering substances, 
going into a fevered dream state, killing a hippopotamus, 
and claiming its death bellow from YAA AIII to WRRRRRONNNK

The baseball offseason is usually marked by a flurry of free agent signings and trades, but this winter featured a horrible months-long tedium where teams remained frozen in their tracks and all-star-caliber players found themselves in the curious position of having no teams willing to pay them large sums of money.  For baseball fans hoping their team would snag a player on the open market, the entire thing played out like the ending of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly if Sergio Leone had just continued to cut to increasingly narrow pictures of Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef squinting at each other for three solid months while a mournful harmonica played an Ennio Morricone piece entitled "Boras's Lament."

Sergio Leone got this shot by having his actors read an opthamological 
chart that said in tiny type in the bottom "ok shoot now"

The central question that haunted baseball's frozen stove involved collusion, whether the team owners had all gotten together to purposefully refuse to sign free agents and drive down their prices-- after a brief flurry of hefty contracts to stars like Yu Darvish and Eric Hosmer, increasingly desperate players signed for far less than they anticipated from ad hoc free agent spring training bivouacs.  The more likely explanation involves a soft collusion that comes from a combination of free-spending teams saving their money for Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, who are such transcendent talents that they will likely command the treasury of a small country to lure them to those organizations and the fact that all baseball teams are owned by unimaginably wealthy people whose interests include:

1. Acquiring as much money as humanly possible
2. Having all of their wealth converted to coins and bills and sacks of doubloons
3. Forcing a man-servant to photograph each piece of money individually
4. Staring intently at a picture of each of their individual monies all day every day
5. Occasionally suing people

And yet, even as the baseball diehards outside of internet comment sections where the prevailing ethos seems to be that baseball players should play for free or at the very least haul some sacks of coal around on off days and also why don't they have guys named "Pinwheel" and "Squeaks" anymore complained at the endless days of constipated transaction lines, this offseason provided the most grim and depressing result of analytically-inclined writers attacking free agency as a sucker's game and the triumph of teams that have tanked their way to October glory.

Over the past two decades, we've seen sophisticated statistical analysis break through to the mainstream, to emerge from the Proverbial Mother's Basement fully formed, suited, and hair-slicked, to the Sloan Conferences of the world to expound on Assets.  We can all agree that this is for the best, that the fact that sports analysis is no longer primarily done via amateur phrenology by columnists who guard against retaliation by wearing hats.  The fact, though, is that the type of salary inefficiency championed in Moneyball and in fantasy sports all results in finding ways for organizations to figure out how to spend less money.  In baseball, this means taking advantage of a bizarre inverted salary structure where teams' competition for top free agents often means paying them into their graying years.  This year, teams have found that they could stop paying for players' descent into overpaid chumps by not competing for their services at all.  They also figured out that they could avoid paying competent major leaguers in favor of young and unproven players because they can either convince fans it's part of a long-term tank and rebuilding plan or, in the case of the Marlins, get rid of all of their good players and pay only to emblazon their taxpayer-funded ballpark with their new team motto Who's Going to Stop Me?

One of  the most fascinating subplots of the Marlins is Derek Jeter's transition 
from universally beloved baseball icon to the face of a despised, penny-pinching 
ownership group as shown from his new office's decorative scheme "Volcano Overlord"

The salary efficiency mindset has spread well beyond baseball.  NBA players might as well have their salary on the backs of their jersey because the league's insane salary cap and labyrinthine trade rules make their paychecks vital aspects of player movement.  These rules are impenetrable to all but a select number of professional Salary Cap Knowers and podcasters that pretty much spend hours listing how much money everyone makes.  The prevailing wisdom in the NBA is that teams should either be one of the three or four championship contenders in a full-on free-fall for draft lottery ping pong balls; therefore a full third of the NBA has been actively trying to lose games for months.  Regardless of anyone's thoughts on The Process or the dozen Counterfeit Processes currently ongoing in professional basketball, the owners have finally found a way to fill their arenas with low-paid basketball excrement while being celebrated for being forward-looking because they are starting four heretofore unknown centers named Phil Lumberman and Miroslav Oaf so they will have a two percent greater chance to pick a nineteen year-old. 

The Bulls's tanking efforts became so extravagant that the NBA threatened 
disciplinary action against them unless they started to play functional 
NBA player Robin Lopez; Lopez has rewarded Bulls fans with entertaining 
bug-eyed flip outs

The NFL also has a salary cap, but it is aided by players signing inscrutable contracts that allow them to be cut or restructured so often that it is impossible to tell whether the cap exists; I have never seen the national football league enforce the salary cap, and I suspect that if they tried to do it to the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones would threaten to shoot them with a pearl-handled revolver.

CUBS PREVIEW

The Cubs remain in the enviable position of baseball's teams trying to win.  They brought back nearly every key player from last year's NLCS team except for Jake Arrieta, who has now joined the Phillies after a long offseason in limbo.  Instead, the Cubs shelled out for Yu Darvish, fresh from a disastrous World Series and a career of being what highly technical baseball analysis would describe as insanely cool.  Darvish has been one of baseball's best pitchers and slots in with Jon Lester, Jose Quintana, Tyler "Spin Rate" Chatwood whom the Cubs hope can salvage his career away from Coors Field, and Kyle Hendricks, who continues to dorkishly bamboozle major league hitters to form a fearsome rotation.

Every year brings a new update on Jon Lester's various attempts to conquer his fear of throwing to first, which has previously included underhanding, running the ball over, throwing his whole dang glove, attempting to hire a courier, and finally standing at the mound saying "I prefer not to."  Lester is now divebombing his throws into the ground like a cricket bowler.  This has already worked against Ryan Braun's stealing technique of sort of walking around, and I look forward to seeing how Lester plans to throw to bases next including building a miniature bullpen car for shuttling the ball or constructing an elaborate rube goldberg machine that draws the ire of the ump after he calls time for 25 minutes to figure out why the dowel connected to the boot that kicks over the row of dominoes and activates the third conveyor belt has malfunctioned.

This is my all-time favorite Jon Lester pickoff moment

The other major change for the Cubs this season involves Chicago's Beefy Boy Kyle Schwarber reporting to spring training svelte, muscular, and having a patchy beard instead of a hideous chin goatee that looks like he is trying to make do with a child's Civil War General Facial Hair Kit.  This may or may not help Schwarber's hitting or prevent him from lumbering about the outfield like an anthropomorphic thumb.  Aesthetically, it is a complete disaster.  The robust lefty-slugger who waddles over to home plate to blast enormous dingers and make cartoon coconut noises while stomping around the basepaths is a proven baseball archetype.  The best exemplar is Matt Stairs, a man who spent years summoned to the batter's box once a game from flipping burgers on a grill to launch a baseball into low earth orbit.  The only other perfect baseball shape is the relief pitcher who is just a load, his undulating belly straining against his baseball pajamas or satin pitcher's jacket.

This is an aesthetically perfect baseball image

There is little to say about the Cubs, a very good baseball team who should be very good.  They have made the NLCS three consecutive years, they won a World Series and ended the greatest championship drought in American professional sports, they play in an outdoor mini-mall that turns into a terrifying festival of drunken maniacs like what happens at night in Castlevania II, and they compete in a division that is competitive because it features three teams that took advantage of baseball's free agent market and the Great Marlins Exile.  After years of futility and heartbreak, the best extended stretch of Cubs baseball since the Theodore Roosevelt presidency is also its least compelling.  It would take an unforeseen baseball calamity to bring back the fear of inevitability back to Wrigley Field, one that would probably require at least two players to duel, to vanish into thin air, or to get attacked by a wild animal in the course of a playoff game for me to even flinch.

CHICAGO'S NINETEENTH-CENTURY UNDERWORLD

You would have done well as a resident of Chicago in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to make it through a month without getting bonked about the head and relieved of your possessions.  At least, that is the impression I got from Herbert Asbury's Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld.  Asbury, most famous for his study of New York's stabbiest criminal organizations in Gangs of New York, published Gem of the Prairie in 1940, just after Al Capone's reign of terror, and each page is filled with people with insane nicknames involved in ingenious and horrifying schemes of crime and violence in some corner of Chicago that used to be known as Little Hell or Bedbug Row or some other beguiling combination of words like Satan's Bloodnest.  Asbury at all times seemed appalled and angry at the municipal corruption that allowed crime to flourish while scarcely being able to hide his delight in prurient details and swashbuckling thievery.  Here's an example of the type of thing you'll see from Gem of the Prairie:


Asbury started at Chicago's transformation from a wilderness trading post to a growing town, one, as he described, built so ineffectively on a gigantic plain of mud that sidewalks varied in height threatening to force pedestrians to have to climb or plummet like they were navigating an M.C. Escher painting.  He followed gamblers, strongmen, prostitution rings, gangsters, and even the notorious murder house serial killer H.H. Holmes whose skin-crawling exploits regained widespread infamy in Erik Larson's Devil in the White City.  He also discusses the exploits of corrupt aldermen "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna that have already appeared on this blog.  Asbury's episodic anecdotes follow a format where a person with an impossible nickname did something terrible and then either got away with it in a mansion, got brutally murdered, or had something else equally improbable happen such as:

One of the famous hoboes who made Duncan's place [that's Bob Duncan, King of the Pickpockets] their Chicago headquarters was Wyoming Slivers, who left the road about 1896 and married a widow in Minnesota.  She died after a few years and left him ten thousand dollars, and Slivers and a score of his cronies went on a six months' spree in which ten of them died of delirium tremens and Slivers himself lost an ear and three fingers in fights.

One might think that a book on the Chicago underworld would spend a great deal if time on the city's most famous gangster Al Capone, but Asbury only turns his attention to him, his boss Johnny Torrio, and a host of "such notorious gunmen and bandits as Handsome Dan McCarthy, Bugs Moran, Maxie Eisen, Frank Gusenburg; Vincent Drucci, better known as the Schemer; Two-Gun Louis Alterie, also called the Cowboy Gunman because he owned a ranch in Colorado; Hymie Weiss, who was O'Bannion's alter ego and second in command of the gang; and Samuel J. Morton, called Nails..." towards the end of the book.

(Asbury notes that Morton died "as the result of what his fellow gangsters regarded as despicable treachery; he was thrown and kicked to death while riding a horse in Lincoln Park" before explaining that his fellow gang members "determined to exact vengeance, kidnapped the horse a few days later, led it to the spot where Morton's body had been found, and solemnly 'bumped it off,' each gangster firing a shot into the animal's head.")

Gem of the Prairie is nearly 400 pages of that.  Asbury seems to have done extensive research in newspapers, government documents, journals, and books such as Vice in Chicago written by a person improbably named "Walter C. Reckless."  But this is not a stolid, scholarly document.  Asbury provides statistics and analysis, but what he's most interested in is the anecdote, the improbable characters, and the over-the-top criminals, politicians, and law enforcement figures that populate the book.  It's also written in 1940, which passages and assumptions that will probably at times jar a reader in 2018.  The most fascinating thing about Gem of the Prairie is its evocation of a city with all of the dirt and grime and swirling possibility of shockingly casual violence and exploitation he seeks to paint a horrifying picture for his readers but he can't help but also romanticize.   

May Update

T.S. Eliot's specific problems with the month of April have been well documented by lazy sportswriters on deadline, the same sorts of hacks that cleverly allude to the exact number of acts in American lives, and start out blog posts with obtuse and clumsy references to various English language literary figures. Eliot, of course, had more immediate concerns, as has been noted in this Stefan Collini review of the hotly anticipated volume of Eliot's letters illuminating his struggles with his wife's mental health, the problems of interwar banking, and running The Criterion literary magazine that left him in fear of retribution from neglected contributors as the following quotes reveal:

Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody.

I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street.

Eliot never knew if his next foray to the corner shop could
lead him into a brow-beating from Wyndham Lewis or a
cudgel-wielding Ezra Pound

May, however, is a fairly dry time for a blog concerned with Northwestern and Chicago sports, with the football and basketball teams off and the Cubs enmeshed in early-season doldrums that leave fans with no choice but to decide whether a burgeoning appreciation for Carlos Silva is largely the result of Stockholm syndrome. Late spring is, of course, a time for Finals, with the Northwestern Women's Lacrosse team steamrolling their way into a sixth consecutive NCAA championship game, the geopolitical ramifications of a Slovenia divided against itself in the Goran Dragic/Sasha Vujucic rivalry, and the minor matter of Chicago's ice hockey team playing for the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup originally created at a time before Canada's Dominion Status would be brutally challenged by the high-handed actions of Governor-General Byng.

This photo, which has been running all over the Chicago Tribune's website all week in
order to drum up interest in the Hawks' Cup run, has revealed the troubling
transformation of Rocky Wirtz into reliable movie villain Eric Roberts. Roberts is has a
top ten menacing IMDB resume as evidenced by the following selection of Eric Roberts
movies consisting of two words: Dead End, Rude Awakening, Blood Red, Descending Angel,
The Grave, Most Wanted, Hitman's Run, Killer Weekend, Depth Charge, Royal Kill (bonus
points for being also known as Ninja's Creed), The Butcher (in which he apparently plays
a character named "Merle Hench"), and Making Sandwiches.

GRAVE ROBBING

In 1875, James "Big Jim" Kenally found his counterfeiting operation threatened by the arrest of Benjamin Boyd, the main source of his fake currency. Kenally had not reached the pinnacle of becoming a minor regional criminal kingpin without being able to hatch schemes, and he soon came up with a cunning plot of elegant simplicity: hire underlings to break into Lincoln's tomb, steal the president's body, and hold it for ransom until the federal government agreed to release Boyd who would then, presumably, resume his position in the Kenally organization.

Thomas Craughwell's Stealing Lincoln's Body enumerates the pitfalls of presidential grave robbing for ransom schemes. The most interesting chapters, though, are the early ones detailing the history of American counterfeiting and the rise of the Secret Service as a way to combat it. The list of counterfeiters involves characters such as Mother Roberts, described by Craughwell as a "shapely widow" who got caught by an undercover Secret Service agent after an inopportune striptease revealed a cachet of counterfeit bills secreted in her bustle.

Chicago became a natural hub for counterfeiters. After all, this was the Chicago of "Bathhouse John" Coughlin and Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna, where the line between politician and criminal mastermind was as porous as the line between Nicolas Cage and human cartoon (incidentally, the two funniest things about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans other than every single Nicolas Cage facial expression is his consistent inability to constrain his amusement that a low-rent criminal henchman has the street name "G" and his attempt to shake down a goateed, purple-shirted Kool-Aid man).

A collage of Cages for your home or garden. The final Cage is of
course from international blockbuster Zandalee, immortalized
in this fantastic review that contains clips of his spectacular
entrance scene which will forever change the way you use the
phrase "you got the power tie."

Needless to say, the nineteenth century Chicago underground is a goldmine of tremendous nicknames including "Red Jimmy" Fitzgerald, "Hungry Joe" Lewis, who successfully swindled no less than Oscar Wilde, and "Foxy Ed" Cullerton, who completed the crooked alderman decathalon by securing nomination in 1892 by both the Republicans and Democrats, reassuring his constituents that they are in safe hands because he has stolen enough already. Among counterfeiters, the key players included a boodle carrier known only as "The Flying Dutchman" and his arch-rival Lewis "Mysterious Bob" Roberts who successfully created the definitive ambiguous but clearly up to no good nickname-- the only mystery is whether Bob would be most likely found passing dirty money, creating a complex numbers racket, or using a diverse stable of poisonous animals as an undetectable means of assassination, baffling detectives unable to understand how a dozen asps, three funnel web spiders, and a Portuguese Man o'War successfully entered a Cincinnati tenement.

THWARTING GRAVE ROBBERS

The book is also a valuable resource on presidential grave robbing in the nineteenth century. According to Craughwell, a disgruntled gardener made a run at Washington's skull after being fired from Mount Vernon's crew in 1830; in 1878, thieves made off with the body of John Scott Harrison, the son of William Henry Harrison and father of Benjamin Harrison, selling it to a medical college. Vengeance, money, ransoming prisoners-- proof that nineteenth century grave robbing covered the entire gamut of human motivation.

In order to detail the securing of the Lincoln tomb, Craughwell looks at other burials, especially George Pullman. Pullman, known as the inventor of the Pullman Dining Car and a hard-heartedness towards strikers that is tough even by the standards of nineteenth century captains of industry and their truncheonous negotiations, declared that his grave would feature an eighteen inch thick slab of concrete and a steel cage proving that the true measure of the success of a man is if he is so hated at his death that he is actively concerned with corpse desecration.

The Pullman Crypt, c. 1897

With an endless stretch of months until the football season blessedly resumes and a season of baseball mediocrity on the horizon, expect what has been described as by the literary heirs of T.S. Eliot and his Criterion cronies as a "cruel summer."

Northwestern Basketball In This, The Best of Possible Worlds

The most unlikely of basketball seasons is coming to its likeliest conclusion. For the past month, Northwestern basketball fans have been hunkered down in bunkers, counting their RPIs, reading Skip Myslenski, and occasionally sending the neighborhood children out for supplies of cigarettes, adding machine tape, and boxes of green visors in order to figure out if this was the year that Northwestern was going to make the NCAA tournament.

Northwestern plans its road to the Sweet
Sixteen

From the improbable upsets against mediocre major conference teams and a 10-1 non-conference record to the victories over Purdue and Illinois, to the crushing loss against Penn State, to say that the season has been a roller-coaster is to reach one too many times into the box of sports cliches that I keep in my sports blog bindle (I also have boxes for run-on sentences, seemingly unending parenthetical asides, and one labeled "gratuitous mustache reference"). Instead, the best comparison for the season is like accidentally walking into a rough dockside tavern and wondering how long it will take between ordering a beer and gaining pool cue as a permanent new appendage or finding an even rougher dock where Journey hang out and make you stare uncomfortably at the work of Steve Perry's periodontist. After long reflection, I've created a handy chart of Northwestern's season in pictorial form (Fig 1A):

Fig. 1A

So it appears that, barring a miraculous run in the Big Ten tournament (the 19th century political equivalent of a Henry Clay presidential run) Northwestern will experience the NCAA Tournament in the traditional way of watching on television until unable to tolerate a specific level of Vitale. Although it still is a bitter feeling to get as close as Northwestern ever has to the NCAAs and falter, fans should celebrate a remarkable season and chance to do some damage in the NIT. With Coble's return and the emergence of Crawford, Shurna, and Mirkovic, Wildcat fans should really look to next year for the inevitable heartbreaking disappointment as somehow things don't click for a team that could go down as Northwestern's best.

A FRESH PERSPECTIVE

The New York Times's Chicago News Co-operative scores again, this time with James Warren's take on Illinois and Chicago corruption. Warren, the former managing editor of the Trib and current publisher of the Reader, among other gigs, has a wonderful perspective on the state's maintenance of what I would describe as Hamburlgar democracy:

“Compare the corruption of an alderman who takes a few thousand dollars from a developer to the corruption of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the head of the Pakistan nuclear program, going around the world, selling atomic bomb technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran to make a buck,” said Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a former Venezuelan trade minister who writes about the ravaging impact of corruption worldwide. “Look at the differing scale of consequences.”

Warren offers a fresh perspective by pointing out that Illinois is a shining beacon of clean government, non-existent graft, and completely justified bulldozings when compared to organizations such as international drug traffickers, Russian robber barons, Somali pirates, and the state of Florida.

Sample posters for Illinois residents hoping to throw an at least
we're not as corrupt as party in their homes or places of business

This article should be seen as a proper throwing of the gauntlet, and I urge residents to vote on the next Illinois governor or Cook County trash commissioner based on whether he or she could top Mobutu, who began all newscasts with an image of him descending from the clouds, probably with a giant canvas sack of celestial plunder to deposit in his Swiss bank account.

DINKING THE HINK

Try as they might, no modern politician could pull off graft, chicanery, bribery, and other sordid manipulation of the political system for their own gain with more panache than a nineteenth century Chicago alderman. The cabal of "Gray Wolves" ran Chicago's Levee district in a selfless attempt to reach the Platonic ideal of municipal corruption. So confident were they in their shiftless feudalism that they brazenly adopted nicknames such as "Bathhouse John" and "Hinky Dink" from the Chicago Bureau of Disreputable Nicknames or Potential Harlem Globetrotter Aliases.

Gray Wolves "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and
Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna in their watch-
chain, boater, cigar-chomp pinstripes, not to be
confused with Silver Foxes and their chain-smoke
Kansas flashdance ass-pants

Coughlin and Kenna owned Chicago's First Ward. Bathhouse John, the more flamboyant of the two, made speeches and composed bawdy lyrics for their decadent First Ward Ball thrown at the Chicago coliseum for the variegated criminal types in their constituency. Hinky Dink, meanwhile, tended to his fantastically named tavern called the Workingman's Exchange from whence he ran his innovative booze for votes program targeted at the local hobory. But this article from Time Magazine eulogizing his reign as he chose to forgo reelection in 1942 sums it up far better than I can:

For a nickel The Hink sold schooners as big as buckets to bums, roustabouts, prostitutes. They could always put the bite on him for two bits; he let the bums sleep in the back room. Once in a while he would go back to touch them on the head. He wanted to make sure they were not dead...On election days they voted as Hinky Dink wanted.

Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John ran an area of Chicago known as "The Levee," an area of the city rife with saloons, houses of ill repute, gambling, gangsters, book-makers, back-alley surgeons, trick handshakes, false mustaches, and unprovoked purple nurpling. Along with Johnny Powers of the 19th Ward, they became experts in "boodling," or basically awarding the franchise to operate public utilities to men who had adequately bribed them. In one case, they even invented a company called Ogden Gas in order to force the actual franchise holder to buy up its shares, which is pretty much the municipal corruption version of swashbuckling.

John Coughlin ready for ordinary boodling and preparing for the Odgen Gas
deal

Both Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink never got in much trouble for their showboating, sticky-fingered style of local government. Though their legacy lives on in clout and the old Chicago handshake which is like a regular handshake except that the recipient ends up with either a fistful of cash or nuclear green relish product, their milquetoast, unhatted prodigal offspring lack that Sandburgian swagger that made corruption as much a part of the fabric of old time Chicago as the constant stench of entrails.

PLAYING OUT THE STRING

With very little left to play for other than an NIT Home Game and some Big Ten Tournament momentum, Northwestern fans are suffering from a tournament hangover tantamount to waking up in the Levee, possibly with a knife as a new appendage in the ribs. On the other hand, the Cubs are preparing to do more lasting damage to Chicago's psyche than more than a century of graft-induced inefficiency by showing up to Spring Training. You can count on BYCTOM to keep you abreast of these and other crucial sporting news items with sporadic updates on nothing in particular.