Everybody Loves Joe
Why? Why? Why? BGW rightly presses the question as to why the press so loves their Joe.
An overdetermined phenomenon to be sure. But I would begin to speculate by rehearsing the old saw about why the Washington Press corps loved Reagan in spite of themselves, while they hated Nixon despite a greater degree of ideological proximity. The answer, as one wag had it, was that Reagan always let them feel smarter than he was and Nixon always made them feel stupider. Joe's hyper-banal press conferences always leave his questioners with the sense that there but for bad luck go they--a middling baseball mind excelling in nothing but a sense of authenticity. Joe never comes off smart--because he isn't--but he knows how to pass off his scuffed leather charm as some sort of unemphatic and therefore deep wisdom. Those world championships in turn reassure the sportswriters that they are not being "had," that Torre is every bit as bright as one needs to be, which is thankfully no brighter than they, to manage at the highest level. The popularity of Torre has something to do with the peculiar populism of baseball, which manages to feed off, even as it questions, its reputation as a thinking man's game.
An overdetermined phenomenon to be sure. But I would begin to speculate by rehearsing the old saw about why the Washington Press corps loved Reagan in spite of themselves, while they hated Nixon despite a greater degree of ideological proximity. The answer, as one wag had it, was that Reagan always let them feel smarter than he was and Nixon always made them feel stupider. Joe's hyper-banal press conferences always leave his questioners with the sense that there but for bad luck go they--a middling baseball mind excelling in nothing but a sense of authenticity. Joe never comes off smart--because he isn't--but he knows how to pass off his scuffed leather charm as some sort of unemphatic and therefore deep wisdom. Those world championships in turn reassure the sportswriters that they are not being "had," that Torre is every bit as bright as one needs to be, which is thankfully no brighter than they, to manage at the highest level. The popularity of Torre has something to do with the peculiar populism of baseball, which manages to feed off, even as it questions, its reputation as a thinking man's game.
posted by joe valente | 3:16 PM
1 Comments:
Even the besotted Torre could not put someone who threows like a girl out in right field of all places. He would be setting Williams up for major embarassment.
To improve defense, we must sacrifice some offense, which is fine since the road to the World Series is never paved with 10-8 ballgames. They make your season, defined a stime spent in the field, too damn long.
So trade Posada, who is a defensive disaster--can't throw, won't block the plate. Stinnet's got to be better I'm assuming. Make Bubba a permanent if roving part of the outfield, dhing Sheefield and Matsui by turns. Sit Giambi down and bring up Eric Duncan to play first. If you're not going to make Giambi bunt his way out of that shift, his value offensively will simply not be that high. He walks alot but then he just clogs up the bases. Waiting for him to hit home runs just exacerbates the Earl Weaver culture of the team (and we don't have Palmer, McNally, Cuellar and Dobson).
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