Spring Pro Football

Northwestern has extended Coach Fitz through 2015 in an effort to extend the fist pump gap against Big Ten opponents. The deal is a no-brainer; Northwestern fans cannot think of anyone else in the country they want in charge of the program, and Fitzgerald says he does not want to go anywhere. That Wildcat fans believe him when most college football coaches are a combination of treacherous snake oil salesman, glad-handing, corrupt good ol' boy state congressperson, and poet/warlord speaks volumes to what he means to the program. Things did get a bit convoluted late last year with swirling Fitz to Notre Dame rumors no doubt cooked up by the Sun-Times and the sort of conniving papist agents that Dan Brown really wants to exist, but those have dissipated.

Coach Fitz gets his ceaseless energy from NU fan enthusiasm and by traveling
around the country decapitating lesser coaches who stand in his way

In other Northwestern news, three former NU players have been drafted by the new USFL league tentatively scheduled to begin play in February 2010 and fold sometime in March. C.J. Bachér has been drafted by the as-yet-unnamed New York team, and Prince Kwateng was chosen by San Francisco. Tim McGarigle has evidently turned in his badge to St. Louis after growing disgusted with the due process involved with their special teams and decided to tackle ball carriers himself after the brutal stiff-arming of his partner just one week from retirement, but failing that, he has been drafted by the Orlando USFL team.

"You're a loose cannon, McGarigle"

Look also for the return of Dennis Green, who coached the Wildcats in the 1980s and has evidently been punching at the microphone to return to coaching. Other notable players include Michigan's Chris Perry, Wisconsin's Brooks Bollinger, and someone named "Fred Bledsoe."

SPRING PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUES

There are few things more prone to a tragic romantic failure than an attempt to start an alternative spring football league. These operations fail for a number of reasons: for one, the sports landscape becomes crowded in the spring, with basketball and hockey playoff races heating up, March Madness, and the childlike joy of the first images of corpulent relief pitchers waddling around some complex in Florida or Arizona practicing a nineteenth century stretching regimen followed by the arrival of new players and the first sweet crack of the bat heralding the beginning of baseball season that will inevitably end with disappointment or searing heartbreak because your team hasn't won anything since the Kaiser menaced Europe and Yugoslavia was born and collapsed and never will for some mystifying cosmic reason.

Planning the next professional spring football league

The other reason is because these spring leagues are inevitably bereft of solid franchise ownership and constantly plagued by teams moving, bad management, and comically bad ideas. For example, the World Football League, as shoddy a fly-by-night sports organization as any that had ever existed, where players feared visits by both the Turk and the repo man, nearly implemented a special color-coded system for players' pants based on position including featuring stars on the pants for quarterbacks. The World Football League did become a pioneer in ridiculous team names including the Birmingham Vulcans, the Memphis Southmen, and the Shreveport Steamer, which will escape further comment.

The original USFL lasted from 1983-1985 and managed to lose $163 million. Few teams lasted from season to season, and at one point Arizona and Chicago somehow traded franchises. According to the widipedia page, the San Antonio Gunslingers simply stopped paying players, some of whom "were forced to move in with sympathetic fans." The UFL did attract NFL-caliber talent including MVPs Jim Kelly and Herschel Walker as well as the venerable Doug Flutie, but, much like the World Football League, it could not remain stable enough get a grip on fans and ended up inevitably pursuing an anti-trust suit against the NFL.

The most spectacular bust in recent memory is Vince McMahon's XFL, that sought to bring the understated sophistication of professional wrestling broadcasts to football.

Vince McMahon

On paper, the XFL had many advantages: it owned all of the franchises, preventing the squirrelly management that hurt the WFL and USFL, it secured the participation of Dick Butkus, snagging him from the set of "Hang Time," and it promised the type of tawdry gimmicks that inevitably come from using the letter X to stand for "extreme."

The X-treme phenomenon taken well past its logical limit. My
review of xXx: State of the Union can be summed up by the
sentence "Xibit has lines."

The XFL did debut to massive hype and made a number of small contributions to sporting lore: Rod Smart's inexplicably brilliant "He Hate Me" jersey, the return of Rashaan Salaam, the questions raised about the duties and responsibilities of a sitting Minnesota governor, and the possibility that Maniax might be the most inane name of any sports team ever, including the Paraguayan soccer team named after Rutherford B. Hayes.

Even a spring league officially sanctioned by the NFL was destined for failure. Granted, NFL Europa was designed to foster interest in football in Europe as well as develop talent, but American fans largely dismissed it as a curious punchline, and as its existence facilitated a chain of events that led to Jonathan Quinn starting games for the Chicago Bears, I am forced to agree.

NFL Europa employed some minor stylistic differences from NFL
football to make it more palatable in Europe

The financial chaos of the WFL and USFL are actually seductive; that is, owners think that if they can get a business model that does not involve moving teams in the manner of military commanders pushing tanks around those giant table maps with those special tank pushing croupier devices, actually pay players to play, and maintain stable leadership, the leagues could succeed. Instead, the new USFL should consider whether there is a natural saturation point in interest in football and if it is possible to create fan interest in teams after they have already invested so much attention in college football and the NFL. It's impossible to see any spring league rising above the level of niche league beyond appealing to absolute football fanatics and fans of novelty sports leagues.

The odds are against the success of the new USFL, but it is in the hands of Commissioner Michael Huyghue, who boasts an mystifyingly unpronounceable name, but also an uncanny ability to manipulate the shape of his head.

These are two images of Huyghue taken from the USFL site, from his blog index
and then an actual post. I refuse to support the USFL until it resolves this
crucial issue of the exact grade of Mr. Huyghue's head pointiness

BASEBALL AND GOGGLES

Earlier this evening, Cubs closer Kevin Gregg served up a walk-off two run homer after a fantastic shot by Micah Hoffpauir off of Joel Zumaya put the Cubs ahead. Gregg has an above-average ERA+ of 110, a fairly average WHIP of 1.33, and 11 saves, which conventionally means that he's not a terrible pitcher (although Fangraphs calculates a more damning Fielder Independent Pitching stat of 4.59 on an ERA scale). A rational person might argue that it is his tendency to walk batters and occasionally melt down that creates an anti-Gregg furor among Cubs fans; the fact that he replaced Kerry Wood does not hurt although Wood's recent performance has mollified those feelings. Instead, I argue that the invective against Gregg has as much to do with his stupid goggles as his occasional incompetence on the mound.

The Kevin Gregg experience

In fact, I posit that goggled relief pitchers inspire a unique ire in baseball. In other sports, especially basketball, Rec Specs added a certain charm: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Horace Grant, BYCTOM favorite Antoine "Big Dog, damn your eyes Glen Robinson" Carr all were accepted with their goggles. Basketball fans even embrace those face protector masks that Rip Hamilton wore that make it look like they are the only things preventing them from launching into a Lecter-esque cannibal frenzy.

Goggled relief pitchers, however, tend to have sordid reputations-- Francisco Rodriguez, whose wild gesticulations recall the spasmodic reaction to an unexpected encounter with a Portuguese Man o'war or the celebration of a lesser Gramatica, Eric Gagné, the portly department store Santa implicated in the Mitchell Report for all but writing "steroids" on a check memo, and Kyle Farnsworth, baseball's greatest brawling pitcher who started wearing goggles most likely as a way to conceal a shiv and is guaranteed a job in the majors for fear of a Shawn Chacon incident that would turn an executive into a crater and a damp wingtip.

The Legion of Goggled Relievers

By donning the goggles, Kevin Gregg willingly joins this evil legion. I imagine that they gather in a bullpen in a hollowed out volcano, coming up with plots to blackmail the UN into forcing umpires to enforce a looser strike zone, owners to increase the dimensions of their parks, and someone else to give them a card promising a lifetime supply of Chicken McNuggets. Unfortunately, their plan, developed by Farnsworth, involves writing the words "Space Lazer" on a giant sheet of cardboard covered in tissue paper and festive streamers. Gagné prepares the "Good afternoon, gentlemen" speech in front a rasterized portrait of Ricky Vaughn, while Rodriguez practices a series of enraged fistpumps to show the depth of his seriousness and Kevin Gregg, I'd imagine, merely runs back and forth after accidentally setting himself on fire.

The Legion of Goggled Receivers is less
effective than other master criminal legion
organizations

The new USFL presumably has a more competent organizational structure behind it than a set of rogue goggled relief pitchers. It, however, faces a long struggle to become a relevant sports institution, stepping over the bloated corpses of myriad failed opportunities to extend the football cash cow into the spring. Even if it does not work out, perhaps it can keep Bachér, Kwateng, and McGarigle in the football limelight long enough for them to catch on with an NFL team. In the meantime, the USFL owners will leave Commissioner Huyghue tilting at the windmills, dreaming the impossible dream, and somehow adjusting his head.

Interleague Baseball

Interleague play between the Cubs and White Sox begins this week providing the city with playoff intensity, bragging rights, and an excuse for local face-punching enthusiasts to practice their art on unsuspecting drunks. All great sports rivalries are at root inconsequential, but the Cubs/Sox rivalry remains one of the most nonsensical rivalries in all of sports. Between 1906 and 1997, the Cubs and Sox did not play a single meaningful game against each other, yet the two fanbases share a pathological antipathy. In theory, the Cubs and Sox play in separate leagues and share a startling history of futility and a fanbase of mustard enthusiasts-- there is basically no logical reason not to root for both teams or at least maintain a benign indifference to the neighboring club instead the kind of searing, fist-shaking hatred practiced by French mobs against anyone in a powdered wig or a chocolate-guzzling monseignor. Then again, by this logic the Hatfields and McCoys should have realized their similarities as moonshine drinking, possum gobbling, rifle toting, buckskin wearing, toothless shitkickers and combined into a massive jugband, doubling up on knee-slappers, washbin scrapers, and gutbucket experts.

While the washtub is possibly more emblematic of the
classic hobo jug band, the gutbucket is a vastly
superior hobo instrument in terms of versatility,
required skill, potential stew earning power, and
ability to ward off railroad bulls

Like most great sports rivalries, however, the Cubs/Sox rivalry comes from some sort of primordial place that defies logic. Part of being a Cubs fan is taking shots at U.S. Cellular Field (which has evolved into an underrated ballpark) as bland and corporate while Sox fans follow Ozzie's lead by decrying Wrigley's monuments to failure, propensity to attack passersby with unexpected masonry assaults, and incubation of a swaggering vermin population. Therefore, Chicago baseball fans should choose a side and deal with opposing fans by puffing out their chests and displaying eye spots in the threatening manner.

BYCTOM fully supports the "when you're a jet, you're a jet all the way"
school of sports fandom, gangland activity, and grandes jetes. On a
somewhat related note, a shark is so much better than a jet as a
gang mascot (are jets a killing machine made of nothing but
cartilage, teeth, and malevolence?) that it is not even worth discussing

INTERLEAGUE HISTORY

The greatest interleague series between the Cubs and Sox was the 1906 World Series, the first and only postseason meeting between the teams. The "Hitless Wonder" Sox upset the Cubs with Hall of Famer Ed Walsh winning games three and five.


The 1906 White Sox (above) and Cubs. Both teams showcase an extremely
disappointing lack of facial hair, with the main difference coming from the
pictured executives' haberdasherment. The Cubs' C.G. Williams (mentioned here
as a club treasurer) prefers the Jack the Ripper suspect look while "The Old Roman"
Comiskey has the bowtie and more sporting hat allowing him greater mobility for
foreclosing on the dozen existing Spanish-American war widows and stabbing at
Dickensian orphans with a sharpened pince-nez

The modern interleague series has a more festive air. City officials celebrate the ballparks' connection by putting the game ball on the Red Line to be carried by a handpicked malodorous wino or a confidence man with an elborate rhyme taunting fellow patrons into challenging him at three card monte. The most recently indicted city official gets to throw out the first pitch to a mafioso-turned-state's witness.

Wednesday night is "Grand Jury Night" where a lucky fan will
be able to pull a crooked alderman's corruption case off stet, and
the verdict will be decided by fanometer, as the founding fathers
intended

While the 1906 series featured Hall of Famers like Mordecai "Three Finger Brown," Tinker, Evers, Chance, Ed Walsh, and George Davis, the modern interleague series has been marked by mediocre players tormenting the Cubs, like Twins irritant and high priest of the unnecessary head-first slide into first base in blatant defiance of the physical laws of the universe Nick Punto. It's one thing for Carlos Lee to clobber the Cubs; the gelatinous devotee to the sloppy chin beard who loves waddling around the basepaths at Wrigley Field after inevitably assailing Waveland Avenue with grand slams so much that he now only plays for NL Central teams is an all-star caliber player. Surely the greatest White Sox player in this category is former shortstop Jose Valentin, the only batter who demanded a batting cape and was banned from Minute Made Field due to fears that he would tie helpless women to the railroad tracks in front of the orange train before escaping with a cackle and demanding that fans pay the rent.

Only British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald could use his mustache more
effectively to cast aspersions upon his enemies

I cannot currently find a website that publishes hitters' stats against a specific team, and I am unwilling to manually sift through Valentin's game-by-game stats only to have my anecdotal assertions disproved by inconvenient data, but I clearly remember Valentin as a constant thorn in the side of the Cubs despite his slightly below average career 96 OPS+.

SUBMARINES HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH INTERLEAGUE PLAY

A recent article that caught my attention is David Kushner's piece for the Times about the use of semi-submersible submarine crafts to smuggle drugs. The vessels are assembled deep in Colombian jungles and are capable of traveling hundreds of miles with a cargo of thousands of tons of cocaine shrouded from military radar, a safer and more efficient way to haul a large amount of cargo than with go-fast boats or massive condom-swallowing operations. Kushner notes that the crews refer to the vessel as el ataúd (the coffin) for its cramped conditions and rickety construction reflecting what one naval officer described as a Mad Max style, although the tight quarters dissuade a Road Warrior wardrobe as crew members are reluctant to inadvertently stab each other with unnecessary sadomasochistic spikes jutting out from leather chaps.

Lord Humungous demonstrates submersible fashion faux-pas with
studded vests and chain-link gimp tethering

The submersible technology has improved, with crews using lead and piping cool water to reduce the engine's heat signature. The Bigfoot II, presumably named to echo the creatures' impossibility to detect without the aid of moonshine or a Fox camera crew, remains the only semi-submersible captured intact by the U.S. This video shows the seizing of the vessel and gives a shaky tour of the inside of the boat.

The use of these crude yet sophisticated vehicles recalls the development of submersibles and submarines. The first working submarine dates all the way back to 1620 when Cornelius Jacobszoon Drebbel built an oar-powered sub for England's Royal Navy, a remarkable feat considering the alchemical scientific climate, where, according to his Wikipedia page, Boyle claimed that "Drebbel had a chemical liquor that would replace that quintessence of air that was able to cherish the vital flame residing in the heart."

Drebbel's submarine could travel for three hours submerged at 12-15
feet in an age of leech-driven medical technology

The American Civil War provided the first military testing ground for submarines. The first U.S. Navy sub was the Alligator, which did not actually undertake any military missions but was commanded by Samuel Eakins, who, even by lofty Civil War standards, sported an excellent combat beard.

Samuel Eakins oversaw the
Alligator's glorious puttering around
in Navy experiments before it was
scuttled in a storm or engulfed
in a mislaid pair of Civil War
muttonchops

The Confederate H.L. Hunley did successfully destroy the Union Housatonic with a spar torpedo as a punishment for naming a ship or any object not endorsed by Billy Mays"Housatonic," but the experiment was a mixed bag as its crews tended to drown. The H.L. Hunley sent 32 soliders to a watery grave during its career. The Hunley showed that submarines that did not kill crew members could be useful in combat, and submarines did eventually become the infernal tools of the hated Kaiser.

The Kaiser sends one six-footer Allied
shipping couldn't handle ladies let's have
a party

The Cubs and White Sox meet in this first series to torpedo each others' tenuous playoff hopes. Let us hope that the teams display the quintessence of air and the fans challenge the vital flame of competition residing in the heart but their reliance on chemical liquors could result in watery deaths or overly aggressive pas de basque.

Baseball Draft

Tuesday is baseball's draft, which tends to function as a minor event in the baseball world. It certainly has less flash than the NFL and NBA drafts; Major League Baseball got the draft televised this year by taking control of its own network, taking a page out of the Silvio Berlusconi playbook.

Selig's Forza Baseball policy hinges on retroactively changing baseball rules that effect
him, but has been hampered by the publication of nude photos of aged Czechs taken at
his villa, an ugly public feud with his wife over the appointment of former beauty
queens and television personalities to European Parliament (over which Major League
Baseball evidently has no authority), and a photo posing strategy based on a complete
misunderstanding of the Jowellgate scandal.

Interest in the MLB draft eludes all but the most hardcore baseball fans for several reasons: the relative unpopularity of college baseball coupled with the fact that so many prospects come from high school, the concept of "sandwich picks" and other vagaries resulting from the loss of different types of free agents graded by a shadowy cabal of of Freemasons, the fact that few ever make the majors, and the fact that the draft is restricted to American and Canadian players while the teams stock their foreign talent through some sort of shady process spinning a web of treachery and deceit across Latin America.

A strategic meeting of baseball scouts in Santo Domingo

The success of a player rarely has anything to do with his position in the draft, with first rounders floundering about in the minors unable to deal with tougher opponents, or succombing to injuries or gunshot wounds from mysterious women in black who follow them onto trains, an injury that accounts for a startling 14% of prematurely ended careers. Northwestern's own J.A. Happ avoided this fate after going in the third round to the Phillies in 2004 and is enjoying his first season as a full-time starter.


J.A. Happ joins Northwestern alums Joe Girardi and Mark Loretta in
the Bigs

SUPERPROSPECTS

The exception to the rule is the few highly hyped prospects at the top of the draft, expected to charge through the minor leagues and serve as cornerstones of the franchise. This year, San Diego State ace Steven Strasburg is touted as the can't-miss prospect that could help change the fortunes of the Washington Nationals who have been afflicted by the "Curse of the Youppi" caused by their hasty departure from Montreal as well as the team's brazen taunting of all of the city's soothsayers, monkey skull retailers, crusty old hermits, and Indian grave yards.

Talk of a can't-miss pitcher coming out of college naturally engenders painful comparisons to Mark Prior, whose brilliant 2003 season gave way to an improbable series of shoulder injuries and the occasional freak injury such as when he took a line drive to the elbow, collided with Marcus Giles, and rented an apartment in Chicago's hanging piano district. None of these skeptics have thought about the improbability of a pitcher repeating Prior's career cycle of brilliance matched by an alternating series of freak accidents and the replacement of his shoulder with a cylinder of Cream of Wheat. After speculation of a comeback with the Padres, Prior has been unable to return to the mound; take a look at this list of his recent activity and take a shot every time you see the phrase "Dr. James Andrews."

The classic Prior injury cycle in which Prior reports to camp, claims that he is
feeling better than ever and ready to pitch, and then falls into unforeseen tragedy

The 2001 draft was seen as a symbol of baseball's financial inequity, as Minnesota passed up drafting Prior because they could not afford all of the marriageable daughters and spices from the Orient demanded by Prior's representation of agents and traveling Khanate administration. Instead, the Twins had to get by with Joe Mauer and his batting titles. Who else was available in the first round in 2001 instead of Prior? Mark Teixeira, for one, as well as a surprising number of serviceable major leaguers. The Cubs' roster includes the eighteenth and nineteenth picks of that draft, although Aaron Heilman may still be on the payroll of a competing team in an effort to sabotage the club with his shoddy relief pitching and attempts to convince Cubs that the umpires plan on seizing their children through the aid of an apparatus hidden in the gatorade dispenser.

Other drafts do not seem to have as fruitful of a first round. For example, the 2004 first round seems to lack many bona fide major leaguers, although it does reveal that the St. Louis Cardinals spent the nineteenth pick on Christopher Lambert.

Christopher Lambert's epic rise from the
Quad Cities River Bandits to AA
Springfield to player to be named later in a
trade for Mike Maroth

VERCINGÉTORIX

Christopher Lambert, best known as Connor Macleod in the Highlander movies where he would chop off enemies' heads before being showered in sparks as opposed to when he was in the Mortal Kombat movie and shot showers of sparks at his enemies, also starred in Druids about the life of Gaul leader Vercingétorix. The trailer for the movie covers the requisite Roman war movie motif, alternating shots of clanking soldiers marching across a field and hairy men shouting in slow motion while tantalizing potential viewers with two snippets of dialogue ("You wanna fight? You wanna live forever? Then I will lead you!" and "We have made an enemy. And it would have been much better to have him as a friend.") in French accents so comical that at special screenings, the movie would pause occasionally to batter the audience with baguettes.

Vercingétorix rose from the Gallic province of Gergovia in the middle of present-day France and led an army against Caesar's invading legions. Unfortunately for Vercingétorix, he came down on the wrong side of a besiegement, a common barbarian ailment along with haunch rot, goblet rash, and battleaxe elbow. Though Vercingétorix lost and was subsequently paraded around as a trophy by the victorious Caesar while his land was enslaved to the Romans and then subsequently executed, he became a nationalist symbol under Napoleon III who commissioned a suitably violent statue of him trampling a hapless Roman as he rides to his death. Napoleon III emulated his hero a bit too closely as he discovered that Kaiser was German for Caesa. The Emperor led Frenchmen to glorious surrender as well, although luckily for him, by nineteenth century, captured heads of state merely spent time waxing their Van Dyke beard and getting deposed by unruly French mobs eager to declare another republic.

An illustration from Guizot's 1883 History
of France depicts Vercingetorix either
surrendering to Caesar or accepting a quest
to find the Sword of Foreboding that he will
use to destroy Ceasar when he turns into a
giant snake

The Cubs have the 23rd pick in the draft. Whoever they end up selecting, let's hope that Hendry offers each selection the proper words of encouragement: You wanna play forever? Then I will draft you!

Sports Update for a Sports Website

It's a slow time for Northwestern football news. If you are really desperate, you can follow Coach Fitz on Twitter, although it doesn't give me the Coach Fitz news I really need such as him getting fired up about an optimal oat to water ratio in a bowl of instant oatmeal or whether or not he chest-bumps his barber after another successful crew cut.

Coach Fitz successfully comes in under the
140-character limit

In other NU football news, The Bears signed linebacker Pisa Tinoisamoa. While this is potentially good news for the Bears' linebacker depth, Tinoisamoa will probably get the starting nod over NU alumn Nick Roach who will compete with Hunter Hillenmeyer for a roster spot. Meanwhile, Tyrell Sutton, John Gill, and Eric Peterman are all competing to secure roster spots for NFL teams.

Peterman tries on a Bears helmet while Sutton dons the hated green
and gold

CHICAGO CUBS MELTDOWN UPDATE PART 1

The Cubs are just starting to crawl out of a disastrous eight-game slide where the entire team has been beset by injuries and the complete inability to hit. Fortunately, the Cubs have responded not with complacency or quiet determination, but demonstrative tantrums and the occasionally brouhaha with umpires. Milton Bradley has been, as expected, a clubhouse leader in arguing balls and strikes and getting ejected and suspended. In this article, Bradley claims that the umpires have it out for him, summing the umps' dastardly plan up as "let's try to ruin Milton Bradley." By dipping into the third person when describing a league-wide umpire vendetta, Bradley has gained BYCTOM Most Favored Cub status. The pitching staff, however, has gone above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to mixing it up with umpires and punching inanimate objects.

The stage was already set for the Cubs' Memorial Day Massacre with the MLB-wide mandated wearing of red hats and the fact that this actually happened:

The presence of Mr. T ensured the prediction
of pain for the Cubs and their gatorade
dispenser

Mr. T actually joined the broadcast booth for the bottom of the seventh inning (MLB.TV users are not only encouraged but divinely mandated to watch the broadcast available here) during which Mr. T rambled on about being a Dean's List scholar at Prairie View A&M, growled at the Pirates, displayed a surprising amount of expertise on the Cubs' disabled list, shockingly declined to use the phrase "I pity the fool" for upwards of ten minutes, and, most surprisingly, laughed, a hoarse throaty chuckle reminiscent of Muttley from "Wacky Races" and a completely unexpected development from a man who spent his entire career, choosing only to express the emotion "I ain't gettin' on no plane, sucka."

Mr. T displays his range

Earlier in the game, Ryan Dempster erupted after lasting only 4 innings and giving up six earned runs and promptly pummeled the Gatorade dispenser with his left non-pitching hand in a savvy veteran move. In the fifth, Ted Lilly came sprinting out of the dugout like Mel Gibson going over the top at the end of Gallipoli in order to protest Bob Davidson's strike zone, needing to be restrained by two Cubs coaches. This was perhaps most surprising because Lilly usually has the placid composure and painted-on eyebrows of a bored action figure.

Firebrand Theodore Roosevelt Lilly in action

The Cubs ended up losing 10-8 to the Pirates, cementing an eight game losing streak. In response, the Trib wonders: is it time for Lou Piniella to do something drastic? The article recalls his great dirt and hat kicking exhibition from 2007. There are few things in baseball more satisfying than a Lou Piniella ejection largely because of his build resembling a spindly man that is inexplicably carrying a fetal hippopotamus to term, and the sight of a manager getting in an umps' face is always hilarious because he tends to jerk his head in a way that normal people never do, giving the effect of the slightly sped-up footage of old newsreels.

CHICAGO CUBS MELTDOWN UPDATE PART 2

On Wednesday, a wild pitch from Carlos Zambrano got away from Geovany Soto. Zambrano rushed to cover the plate and seemed to get Nyjer Morgan speeding in from third apparently on the way to check his birth certificate and confirm that he's actually named "Nyjer Morgan." Then, fireworks. You have all probably seen the video by now, but here's the blow-by-blow as part of a BYCTOM official Zambrano meltdown recap:

Zambrano immediately rushes over to the ump to protest the call in a dignified manner by standing less than three inches from the ump's face and showering him with a mixture of spittle, sunflower seed casings, and miscellaneous eyebrow detritus. The umpire takes in the tirade for upwards of seven seconds and then, after making some sort of barely perceptible incidental contact, tosses Zambrano with the "you're outta here" gesture. Zambrano whirls around. "No YOU'RE out of here," yells Zambrano who then throws the ump out; this gesture is unsuccessful, largely because of a little-known baseball rule that rampaging players cannot under any circumstances eject umpires from games. If Zambrano was a detective, he would have at this point turned in his badge and service revolver in order to get to the bottom of the case by playing by his own rules because he'll be damned if lets another killer slip through the system because his unorthodox and violent investigative techniques caused the case to get thrown out of court. Piniella gets between the ump and Zambrano, who is visibly restrained by Lou's superhuman belly, a force so powerful that he occasionally lends it out to third world nations in order to quell corruption riots. Zambrano picks up the ball and hurls it towards the bleachers, displaying his warning track power, and then stalks over towards the dugout, escorted by an embarrassed Larry Rothschild who has the look of someone either escorting a screaming child or an agitated senile relative from a place of business. Zambrano rips off his glove and spikes it into the ground before alighting into the dugout. Immediately upon entering the dugout steps, he grabs a bat, which means that at some point before entering the dugout, probably just after throwing his glove but possibly from the very minute he got tossed from the game, Zambrano had made the premeditated decision to whale on the Gatorade dispenser in the a display of berserker rage. He hits the machine a couple of times then appears to either stumble or be carried by his angry momentum down a series of stairs towards the clubhouse. Undaunted, he regains his footing and finishes the dispenser off, as Rothschild half-heartedly attempts to stop him while cautiously deciding to not get in between a bat-wielding Zambrano and a gatorade-dispensing product. Zambrano exits.

This is not the first time Zambrano's temper has flared, which is why instead of the insipid and uninspired "Big Z" nickname (he's big and his last name starts with Z, how appropriate), he should be known as "El Bombástico" or at the very least, "El Toro," which is apparently what he calls himself in calmer moments. The Trib's Paul Sullivan, their Cubs beat writer, prepared a surprisingly amusing Five Greatest Big Z Explosions, including him throwing at the contemptible Cardinal Jim Edmonds twice ("This is not a baby's game. This is a man's game," yells Zambrano while wearing his pajama-like baseball uniform), destroying water coolers by hoisting them over his head and throwing them like Donkey Kong as his teammates adopt the blank stares into the distance favored by figures on Soviet socialist-realist posters, and memorably beating up catcher Michael Barrett in the dugout and in the clubhouse. I had actually forgotten about the Michael Barrett incident, but Barrett had the distinction of having a Forrest Gump-like presence in Major League face punching incidents over his career.

Michael Barrett's career makes me really disappointed that I used up a Kumite joke
in the last post

ENTER THE KUMITE

The movie Bloodsport starring Jean-Claude van Damme, that bearded guy from Revenge of the Nerds, and that enormous Chinese guy with pecs the size of dinner plates (Bolo Yeong, who evidently has played characters named Thunder, Moon, and Ice) is both likely to be on Spike TV sometime within the next 3 hours and based on the supposed true story of Frank Dux (as was The Quest, another Kumite movie starring Van Damme that was basically the same as Bloodsport, except that Van Damme for some reason spent the beginning of the movie as some sort of French clown) .

Bloodsport: practically a documentary

Dux claimed that he entered the Kumite, a secret no-holds-barred fighting tournament sometime in the late 1970s and won it. He is a controversial figure in the martial arts world, claiming to be a Kumite champ, an expert in ninjitsu, and a CIA operative.

Frank Dux, self-proclaimed superspy
and Van Damme muse, phrases that often
appear on my personal resumé.

Since the 1980s, however, a number of publications have questioned the veracity of his claims, setting off a long chain of questions about his age, military record, and ability to break through bulletproof glass with his bare hands. One of the most bizarre accusations came from the L.A. Times, which alleged that he had purchased his Kumite trophy from a trophy shop in Southern California. The allegations go back and forth between Dux and his detractors; Dux is evidently not shy about suing people or writing interminable rebuttals to websites questioning or supporting his claims and the amount of nonsense generated by a shady character like Dux, and the martial arts enthusiast/soldier of fortune types that go after him is grimly tiresome enough to take the fun out of a guy living out some sort of Ninja Gaiden fantasy. All that matters is that hopefully, somewhere there is a secret underground fighting tournament where people shake money, and some guy adopts a monkey fighting style, and Chong Li has secreted some secret powder in his shorts that allows him to blind an opponent but does absolutely no harm to his sweaty genitals.

And if somewhere there is a Kumite involving gatorade dispensers, the CIA needs to get on the Cubs' bullpen phone immediately.

Orson Welles vs. Ernest Hemingway: Who was the greatest bearded inebriate?

Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles stood at the top of their respective mediums. Revered as geniuses in their lifetimes, they lived at a time where artistic accomplishment mingled with celebrity in a nascent age of mass media as evidenced by these fantastic Salvador Dalí commercials. Both responded in the only reasonable way: by growing beards and lashing out upon the world through heroic acts of drunken derring-do. But which man can truly be called the twentieth century's greatest bearded inebriate?

FUCK YOU, I CAN TALK TO BEARS

Hemingway moved around an awful lot, including stops in Paris, Toronto, Key West, and Cuba, occasionally returning to the U.S. to punch somebody in the face. His time in Paris is of course chronicled wonderfully in A Moveable Feast where he delves into the Paris literary expatriate community including the acerbic Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, whose relationship can best be described as a grandiose celebration of dysfunction, Ezra Pound, and gaping-mouthed gadfly Ford Madox Ford, who Hemingway describes as "breathing heavily through a heavy, stained mustache and holding himself upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead."

Ford Madox Ford, in fact, seemed be photographed only with his mouth agape, not unlike a muppet or the type of fish that sucks the muck off of aquarium walls. This posture fascinates me, since it did not appear to stop him from having a somewhat rakish reputation. I've done some cursory searching to see if Ford Madox Ford suffered from some sort of condition that gave him this unique expression or if he wore it as a sort of bizarre affectation of perennial mouth-breathing surprise. Barbara Bedford, author of A Female Rake, a biography of his lover Violet Hunter with whom he had a ten-year affair, describes him as "tall and thin and fair-haired, with a blond mustache that failed to conceal defective front teeth and a mouth that always hung open," and contemporary Wyndham Lewis flatteringly called him a "flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at a zoo inviting buns - especially when ladies were present," but neither offered a reason.

The slackened jaw of Ford Madox Ford remained a staple of the Paris literary world

The greatest hagiography of Hemingway comes from his close friend and acolyte A.E. Hotchner in Papa Hemingway. Hotchner befriended Hemingway in the late 1940s on an assignment from Cosmopolitan magazine when it aspired to literary ambition instead of serving as a glossy clearinghouse for makeup tips and an apparently inexhaustible number of ways to bring out the animal in your man. Hotchner quickly joined Hemingway's intimate circles and fell under his drunken, bearded spell as the author regaled him with his considerable macho resumé and introduced him to the pre-Castro Cuban world of fishing, drinking, and a large array of bloodsports. My favorite passage involves Hotchner's trip with Hemingway to the circus:

We went around to a side entrance on Fiftieth Street and Ernest banged on the door until an attendant appeared. He tried to turn us away but Ernest had a card signed by his old friend John Ringling North, which stated that the bearer was to be admitted to the circus at any time, any place...

Ernest became fascinated with the gorilla; although the keeper was nervous as hell and warned him not to stand too close, Ernest wanted to make friends with the animal. He stood close to the cage and talked to the gorilla in a staccato cadence and kept talking, and finally the gorilla, who appeared to be listening, was so moved he pickedup his plate of carrots and dumped it on top of its head; then he started to wimper; sure signs, the keeper said, of his affection...

"I should get through to him," Ernest said, staying with the polar bear, "but I haven't talked bear talk for some time and I may be rusty."...He began to speak to the bear in a soft muscial voice totally unlike his gorilla language, and the bear stopped pacing. Ernest kept on talking amd the words, or should I say sounds, were unlike any I had ever heard. The bear backed up a little and grunted, and then it sat on its haunches and, looking straight at Ernest, it began to make a series of noises through its nose, which made it sound like an elderly gentleman with severe catarrh.

"I'll be goddamned!" the keeper said.

In fact, Hemingway's prowess with bears becomes almost a minor theme in the book. Earlier, Hotchner refers to an incident where Hemingway got out of his car and confronted a snarling black bear by calling it a "miserable-son-of-a-bitch" and insulting its place on the grand bear pecking order and instilled in it a fear of cars. Later on, he describes an anecdote where Hemingway claimed to have killed three grizzlies single-handedly with a rifle, ostensibly because he did not want to wash bear blood off of his knuckles.

Unlike modern Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell who saw nature as
benign and harmonious, Hemingway saw the common character of the
universe as not harmony, but hostility, chaos, and murder

LIFE IS BUT A BEAR-BAITING

Hotchner's book is full of Hemingway's accounts of his past heroics some of which do not specifically involve bears, including his famous claim that he led the liberation of Paris while serving as a journalist in the Second World War and that he had narrowly avoided a duel with General Modesto during the Spanish Civil War over his wife because the republican partisans did not have enough money for a monument customarily given to all dead generals.

Hotchner and Hemingway at a bullfight (Hotchner is on the right) and after
hunting where undoubtedly those son-of-a-bitch pheasants planned to show
them the business end of their beaks and claws until Hemingway shot them in
the nick of time except for the big one, the smart one, that he hunted down and
clubbed to death with the butt of his shotgun for its goddamn impudence

Naturally, being a Hemingway book, Hotchner describes in great detail a 1954 trip to Spain where Hemingway could soak up as much bullfighting and booze as he could handle, having developed a considerable tolerance for both. Bullfighting was Hemingway's favorite bloodsport, although in Cuba he settled for cockfighting, and presumably in Hong Kong he would go to the Kumite to see a vicious battle featuring nature's greatest predator: man. I do not recommend reading Death in the Afternoon before attending a bullfight unless you are fully prepared to accept that the courage and artistry that Hemingway so painstakingly describes in the matadorical arts on closer inspection turns out to be a bunch of guys in Liberace costumes slowly stabbing a bull to death and ramming it with armored horses and then parading the carcass around the ring while accompanied by jaunty bullfighting music serving as a festive counterpoint to the gruesome spectacle.

Hemingway favorite Antonio Ordoñez doin' work in the 1950s. Ordoñez had a rivalry
with Luis Miguel Dominguin and they squared off in series of what Hotchner
describes as "deadly combats" known as mano a manos where two bullfighters attempt
to one-up each other. The mano a manos ended somwhat anticlimactically as Dominguin
got badly gored in the groin and soon after Ordoñez was wounded which, as Hotchner
mournfully reflects, "really put the quietus on our bullfight plans, and the intricately
worked-0ut itinerary had to be discaded."

Hotchner's account gives us everything you'd want in a literary lion: world-traveling bloodsport tourism, rambling violent anecodotes of questionable veracity, constant dropping of pithy epigrams, all fueled by a mainline of wine, whiskey, and anything else on hand.

WITHOUT ATTACKING PLANES, I THINK IT WOULD BE NICE TO PUT IN A WORD FOR THE GOOD OLD CHOO-CHOO

Welles, much like Hemingway, spent much time abroad in Europe. Of course, while Hemingway chose the life of the expatriate, Welles found himself blacklisted from the Hollywood establishment, mainly thanks to the steely-eyed vengeance of William Randolph Hearst, establishing a good rule of thumb in Hollywood not to make movies satirizing powerful media magnates with a penchant for declaring enemies as communists and sending a number of governmental goons to prevent them from working and forcing them to assert specifically why they are against communism in HUAC meetings.

Hearst did not shy away from attacking his enemies with his contacts in the
FBI and the secret of the ooze

One of Welles's projects abroad was a BBC travel show entitled Around the World with Orson Welles, a series of documentaries highlighting quirky aspects of Europe including, in a particularly Hemingway-esque touch, Spanish bullfighting. Here, for example, is a clip from the show, with Welles giving a short speech about the joys of train travel that starts out scripted but then rambles off into his own stream-of-consciousness narrative about trains without attempting to short-change the venerable airlines, an effect not unlike a far more articulate James Brown rattling off dance moves as they come to him in a bout of inspiration from the James Brown song that he is dancing to.


Thanks to the internet, there is also a portion of his documentary on Basque country available here, which is put together more effectively, although it is somewhat disappointing that the entire series is not just him ruminating on whatever mode of transportation happens to be available to him including fan boats, monorails, and zeppelins, mules, and Ferris wheels.

HERE UNDER PROTEST IS BEEF BURGERS

Of course, Around the World with Orson Welles does not really count in the standings for greatest bearded inebriate. Welles in the above clips is entirely clean shaven and at least apparently sober. Welles's greatest period of bearded inebriety came with his return to the U.S. in the late 1960s.

Much like Hotchner and Hemingway, Joseph McBride fell in with Welles during his older years and became a member of his circle. And, like Hotchner, McBride published a celebratory defense of Welles entitled Whatever Happened to Orson Welles, although his account is less personal than Hotchner's and written with a clearer agenda of showing Welles as a viable filmmaker through his later years despite his unfinished projects.

McBride became involved with Welles playing Mister Pister, a satire of a nerdy film critic in his epically unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. This film rivals his Don Quixote for his greatest abandoned project spanning years, although the impossibility of finishing a Don Quixote film has essentially become an iron law of Hollywood.

Joseph McBride and Orson Welles, with Peter Bogdanovich on the set of The
Other Side of the Wind (right). Welles is wearing a linen suit stolen from the
set of Fantasy Island originally designed to hold upwards to two Ricardo
Montalbans

McBride is up against a lot of Welles ridicule as he blearily starred in terrible movies, made guest appearances on ridiculous seventies television shows, and, of course, appeared in countless ads. Unlike Hemingway, Welles's body of embarrassing work was filmed and is now readily available on the internet. For example, his wobbly Long John Silver from a Spanish version of Treasure Island can be seen here, although it is missing Welles's dubbing into a voice that McBride describes as "mumbled into his beard in a strange pseudo-Cockney accent that sounds like Falstaff with a terrible hangover" because he "dubbed the entire part in a Roman studio one night while guzzling through a bottle of white wine."

Welles's commercial disasters are already legendary including the frozen peas spot and the "mwah-ha the French" outtakes from a Paul Maisson wine commercial in which Welles is comically blotted into oblivion past the point of coherence. My favorite Welles moment is his appearance at a roast of Dean Martin notable for him emerging from behind the dais like a tuxedoed mountain of humanity and then taking a number of highbrow potshots at Don Rickles.


Probably the most ridiculous role of Welles's career was his last, playing the voice of Unicron in the 1986 Transformers movie as a planet-sized transformer that devours other heavenly bodies possibly in search of their liquor cabinet or as Welles describes: "I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that change from one thing to anther...all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then, I'm destroyed...I tear myself apart on the screen." On the other hand, McBride relates in the same paragraph that Welles thankfully turned down a part in Caligula.

McBride gives various portraits of working with Welles, who stemmed from playful to wrathful on his actors. For example, he quotes John Houseman, who described Welles's Mercury Radio rehearsals:

Sweating, howling, disheveled, and singlehanded, he wrestled with chaos and time--always conveying an effect of being alone, traduced by his collaborators, surrounded by treachery, ignorance, sloth, indifference, incompetence, and--more often than not--downright sabotage.

This image gets only funnier if you read it in a John Houseman voice that you can get a flavor of in this inexplicable commercial featuring him squaring off with an impudent Teddy Ruxpin. By the 1970s, Welles had mellowed a bit, as McBride describes him as "often in a playful mood. He liked to direct in a purple or white bathrobe that gave him a regal air, waving his cigar like a sceptre, with a can of Fresca always nearby."

WHO IS THE GREATEST DRUNKEN INEBRIATE

Let us summarize already in this already interminable post what we have already learned in order to determine an outcome:

BEARS: Hemingway gets the edge because as far as I can tell, Welles never lifted a hand against any bear whereas Hemingway basically lived with them and spent his life battling them in deadly ursine combat.

BLOODSPORT: Again, Hemingway leads in this category, although Welles did make a documentary on Spanish bullfighting. We need more information on his predilection for cockfights.

FISTICUFFS: Hemingway gets this one as well because of his record against literary antagonists.




BEARD: Welles is identifiable beardless, his unbalanced Old Testament prophet look defeats Hemingway's grizzled prospector with a lexicon of authentic frontier gibberish.




DRUNKENNESS: Hemingway was more consistently drunk, almost drunk enough to qualify for a British imperial post where men were essentially hooked up to IVs of gin, but Welles occasionally rises to the occasion, promising us no wine before its time.

Result: I'll allow this anecdote from McBride to settle the score:

Welles recorded the narration Hemingway wrote for Joris Ivens's documentary feature on the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Earth. When Welles and Hemingway met at a preliminary screening, Welles suggested eliminating some lines and letting the pictures speak for themselves. Hemingway snarled "Some damn faggot who runs an art theater thinks he can tell me how to write narration." Welles put on a mocking swish act ("Oh, Mr. Hemingway, you think because you're so big and strong and havae hair on your chest..."), and they had a fistfight in front of the images of people fighting and dying on-screen...

Welles and Hemingway were able to laugh about their fight over a bottle whiskey after the screening, beginning a long if sometimes strained friendship.