Shots in the Dark

Yankee fans did boo Robinson Cano.

I guess they were grouchy about more cold weather and losing a second starting pitcher to injury….

Jimmy Fallon plays a joke on Yankee fans in which he asks them to boo a cutout of Robinson Cano—the free agent second baseman, now Seattle Mariner—who’s coming back to the Stadium tonight.

They do. And then are embarrassed when the real Robinson Cano walks out.

A few words before you watch.

Fallon says, “Well, obviously Cano’s going to hear a lot of boos when he steps up to the plate…”

Actually, I don’t think that’s true. Yankee fans really never loved Robinson Cano, and I think a lot of us think the Yankees made the right decision in not giving him a massive ten-year contract. There’s not that much outrage about his departure.

Second, a couple of the fans interviewed make the point that Cano left a winning team for a team that doesn’t win solely for the money, and question that thinking. It’s a fair point.

Third—and this is my personal anti-Cano animus here, I’ll admit—Cano comes off as just as monosyllabic and uninteresting as he did during all his years with the Yankees.

He’s a great athlete, no question. But I’m just fine with him playing for Seattle.

Michael Pineda may have embarrassed the Yankees with his indiscreet use of pine tar on Wednesday, but the Red Sox embarrassed themselves last night by playing one of the worst games in the history of baseball.

It’s not just that they lost, 14-5. It’s that the Sox looked more like the Bad News Bears, making five errors by the official count. At one point Brett Gardner hit a little bouncer to the first base side of the mound that wouldn’t have rolled to the base path, and it bounced through Sox “pitcher” Felix Doubront’s legs; the scorers ruled it a hit. Should have been error number six. (Caveat: The Globe says it was an error; as I was watching the game, it was scored a hit. This box score has it ruled an error. So…I guess the ruling did get changed.)

Doubront was also stolen on three times in that inning, mostly because he looked like he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to anything that was happening behind him.

The Sox’s play was so bad, it actually distracted from the Pineda fiasco the night before, and the fact that Pineda was suspended for ten games, meaning he’ll miss two starts. As the Times put it,

The mess that was smeared across Michael Pineda’s neck on Wednesday was nothing compared with the slop that was on display at Fenway Park one night later.

But the fact is, the Pineda fiasco felt relevant to what happened last night. Presumably neither Doubront nor Yankee pitcher C.C. Sabathia were using pine tar because of what happened to Pineda, but the weather was equally cold, and both pitchers had control problems; there were 18 walks in the game, and two hit batters by Sabathia, who usually has impeccable control.

Now everybody seems to think that the pine tar rule should be changed.

Pineda, by the way, has apologized about five times, and I’m actually kind of starting to feel sorry for him. H was wildly denounced as a dummy—yes, by me too—but is he really a martyr? If this episode prompts the league to reconsider the pine tar rule, a lot of players might be thanking him, both pitchers who don’t have to break a rule to pitch with control and batters who have less fear of getting hit.

Hmmmm…is Michael Pineda an unintentional hero? That’s going to be my story from now on and I’m sticking with it.

I’s always fun to see the Yankees crush the Red Sox, but it’s not fun when it looks like they’re playing a Triple-A team. I know that if I were a Sox fan, out in the frigid cold last night, paying the highest average ticket price in the league, I would be pissed…and concerned.

Oh, and by the way—Jacoby Ellsbury had about 15 hits during the series. Not sure how Jackie Bradley did, other than his error last night….

Here on Usonia Road, I recently put up a bird feeder. It looks like a little red house with a silver top and a platform on the front, like a front step, where the birds feed.

Uncool, maybe, but actually, kinda cool. It’s the easiest way to see a diversity of wildlife just outside your window that I can think of short of moving to a ground floor apartment in the East Village. Right now, for example, as I type, I’m watching what appears to be a fight between a male cardinal and a significantly larger blue jay, with the cardinal pursuing the jay through the rhododendron tree that flanks the bird feeder. Why is that happening? I have no idea. But it’s pretty dramatic, I can assure you.

I get up pretty early, and watch the birds as the sun comes up—it’s when they’re most active. Yesterday morning between 5:30 and 7:15 I saw countless sparrows and chickadees and tufted titmouses, a pair of cardinals, any number of jays, a red bellied woodpecker (he’s a recurring visitor, and astonishingly beautiful), and a wild turkey. Okay, that wasn’t at the bird feeder; he was crossing the road by my driveway.

Maybe this is middle age speaking, but…it’s wonderful.

The jay and the cardinal are still fighting….

(A red bellied woodpecker, not the one in question)

Yesterday the Mets pitcher Matt Harvey announced that he was giving up Twitter after his team scolded him for posting a picture of himself making an obscene gesture. (What do you expect? He’s a Met.) The University of South Florida has asked its graduating students to stop taking selfies while accepting their diplomas. Perhaps the most enthusiastic supporter of Google Glass has just announced that he’s giving it up. And one of the world’s smartest hedge fund managers, David Einhorn, has just declared that he sees another tech bubble due to an irrational support for “cool kid” stocks.

Tech Flight: The phenomenon of adopting a new tech fad for a brief time, then realizing that it really doesn’t make your life more meaningful or better, and giving it up.

Of course, there are plenty of trends in the opposite direction. More than not, I would imagine. Facebooks’ profits tripled in the last quarter! (But does anyone really get excited about Facebook anymore! I check it by habit, but find it less and less interesting.)

What I’m suggesting is that we come to a more nuanced cultural understanding of tech innovation in which we don’t automatically assume the universal adoption of some new digital platform or innovation, with attendant panic about everything else. For example: Yes, some forms of journalism will work well online; no, not all forms of print will go extinct. Yes, Twitter will be useful for some things. No, there’s no particular reason for most people to Tweet.

And so on.

The real tech bubble that we need to pop here is not so much the stocks; a lot of the stocks in question aren’t widely held by retail investors, and if they did plummet, the economic impact would be much more limited than in 2000.

The bubble we need to pop is actually the mindless genuflecting toward the cultural power of Silicon Valley 20-somethings. As smart as these guys are, most of them can’t speak another language, have never read a poem or studied a painting, don’t know anything about faith, and just aren’t very mature—for all their technical skill, their understanding of the world is limited. (Binary, you might say.) And yet, we have afforded them a kind of cultural hegemony solely because they work in a field that most of us don’t understand and make huge sums of money doing so.

Tech flight: It’s a real thing, in my opinion, and it’s going to get more widespread. Not that people will become Luddites, mind you. But they’ll feel increasingly comfortable with picking and choosing what tech advances they want to participate in, and not worrying so much about the rest. “You know what? it’s okay if I don’t give a damn about Pinterest.” We have lives to lead, and they won’t always revolve around our interactions with smartphones and computers.

Now, if only we could do something abut those people who walk down the street and text at the same time….

Do you ever feel alienated from large parts of the country? Reading about how radically conservative the South is becoming, I do. In Georgia yesterday, the governor signed into law a bill allowing people to carry guns into schools and airports. The governor of Mississippi just signed a law banning abortions after 20 weeks, with no exception for rape or incest. But truth be told, the law probably won’t make a huge difference: There’s only one abortion clinic in Mississippi anyway. Across the South, most Southerners “loathe” Obamacare, even as they think that their state’s health care exchange is working well. And all the time, the South is only becoming more racist; there’s barely a white person in the region who can bring him or herself to say a kind word about President Obama. The whole area is starting to feel like Dallas on November 21st, 1963—a place defined by fear and hate.

This is, funnily enough, not a good thing for the Republican Party, as there aren’t enough Southern racists to elect a president, but there are enough to stop a Republican moderate from getting the GOP nomination. But that’s bad for the country. The Republican Party should be a healthy political force, rather than a toxic one.

I’ve searched for some good explanations why the South has become even more conservative during the past, say, six years. My suspicion is that it’s a reaction against having an African-American president, but it must be more than that, too. Or is that last part just wishful thinking?

It was a good game for the Sox last night, and a ridiculous one for the Yankees, marred by Michael Pineda’s bizarre decision to slap a huge wad of pine tar on his neck. By contrast, Boston’s John Lackey pitched a great game. Credit where it’s due, and as to Pineda, I suppose it’s a reminder that athletes aren’t always the sharpest knives in the drawer.

It’s a long season…but the Yankees have already beat the Red Sox four times, as opposed to just six in 2012. This is very exciting, and also just plain good All-American fun.

Last night’s game was particularly satisfying: outstanding pitching from Masahiro Tanaka, fine hitting by Jacoby Ellsbury, Derek Jeter extended his ten-game hitting streak, and a pathetic, embarrassing outing by Sox “ace” John Lester.

Of course, only about 12 percent of the season has been played, and things could change: Ivan Nova’s season- (career?) ending injury doesn’t help, and the Yankees are pretty thin in the infield. But any patriotic American has to be pleased with the way things are going so far.

The New Yorker’s review of Elizabeth Warren’s new autobiography, A Fighting Chance, contains this anecdote:

In 2008, Warren joined a five-person congressional-oversight panel whose creation was mandated by the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout. She found that thrilling and maddening, too. In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice. to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: “They don’t criticize other insiders.” That’s about when Warren went on the Jon Stewart show, and you get the sense that, over that dinner, she decided to run for office.

Fascinating, don’t you think? I love the fact that, in the most arrogant and patronizing of ways, Summers tried to teach the woman how the world works—which inspired the woman to go out and do something that made her considerably more powerful than Summers, and also ensured that she would oppose his nomination to replace Ben Bernanke at the Fed should that ever have happened.

This is why, when people so routinely and unthinkingly characterize Summers as “brilliant,” I generally demur: This is the most ham-handed and boneheaded of power plays. And while you can’t say for sure that Summers felt comfortable engaging in it because of Warren’s gender—it’s possible Summers would be just as arrogant with a man—it’s hard not to think that gender played some role here. Another reason why I am unconvinced of Summers’ all-around brilliance: Did he learn nothing from the women-in-science fiasco?

And one final point on insiders versus outsiders: I expect that Summers’ insight is correct, but what a noxious modus vivendi!

In this particular instance, Summers appears to be suggesting that Warren should shut up cease her criticism of a hugely important, $700 billion program…in order to maintain her status as an insider.

Makes you wonder what public goods Summers has bartered in order to do the same.

Judging from the comments below, I’d say so. You guys are touchy!

Let me give Chris, who asks why I continue to harp on David Ortiz’s steroid use, a serious answer.

Chris says, “Your steroid fixation with Ortiz is getting old. Why don’t you focus on guys who really used them—Afraud, Clemens, Pettite [sic]…”

Afraud? I’d go with Aroid, but that’s just me.

In any case, the answer is this.

Pettite says he used steroids once to come back from an injury, and nobody really seems to argue that; Clemens is a former Red Sox, so you know where that trouble started (and besides, he’s out of baseball); and A-Rod, well, I still think there’s more to that story. How A-Rod became the most hated man in baseball, I’m still not sure I understand.

But what bothers me, Chris, is the double standard here. Sox fans go ballistic about A-Rod, what a terrible guy he is and all that. Hell, if you polled Sox fans, I’ll bet at least 50 percent would approve of Ryan Dempster deliberately throwing at Rodriguez multiple times. Just because, you know, he used steroids.

But out of all the players we’ve mentioned here, the only one who’s actually failed a drug test is David Ortiz. And Ortiz’s ridiculous numbers, both in the mid 2000s, the height of the steroid era, and more recently certainly suggest that he was/is a ‘roid user. From 2004-2006 Ortiz drove in 424 RBIs and hit 142 home runs, or about 47 a season. There’s no way those are not artificially inflated numbers.

And, Chris, the three other players you mention are out of baseball, at least for now. Ortiz is still playing. And, possibly, still using. Let’s be honest, last year was weird.

Yet Sox fans give Ortiz a pass. They don’t want to know. And the main reason they don’t want to admit it is because they’d have to admit that their World Series victories in 2004 and, very likely, 2007 are completely tainted.

Hey, I don’t blame you. That’s a tough thing to come to terms with, given how important those championships were to the Sox. And Ortiz is an immensely likable guy who’d probably be a very good hitter even without steroids. Just not the monster hitter that he was.

Alex Rodriguez, however, is not a likable guy. By almost all accounts, he’s an insufferable jerk. (I say “almost” because I know someone who knows him and swears A-Rod is just misunderstood.)

So Ortiz gets a pass, while A-Rod gets ostracized and thrown at—when they both did the same thing.

That’s not right. That’s high school mentality. We let the cool guy off the hook and pick on the unpopular one. Because we can’t admit Ortiz’s transgressions, we’re just going to pile on A-Rod that much more. To prove to ourselves that, no, really, we take this steroid stuff seriously. There’s no place for it in baseball!

Except when it was the foundation of the Red Sox’s first World Series victory in a century or so.

So as long as Sox fans are in denial about what really happened in 2004 and afterward—or as long as they keep vilifying A-Rod while canonizing Ortiz—I’ll keep harping on David Ortiz’s steroid use.