This morning in US v Skilling and Lay, prosecutor Sean Berkowitz (who also is a part owner of The Double Door here in Chicago — who knew?) in his summation said:
"[They] told the truth! and Enron couldn’t handle the truth!"
"They" refers to Col Jessup Ken Lay the Wall Street Journal. Lay refrained from countering, "I’m out of order? You’re out of order!"
… yes, I am the same Sam Hollander who currently has a piece on the McSweeney’s website this morning. How embarrassing… [giggle] I can’t believe you saw that!
Three things I thought were jokes when I first heard them, but, sadly, they’re not:
There is a show on Food Network called Good Deal With Dave Lieberman about how to be cheap. Save some money at the grocery store and your guests can’t tell the difference. Couldn’t get him to use the less goyishe name "David"?
There was a Hillary fundraiser in Chicago this past weekend (you may have heard of it via Deepak) where Biz Markie performed. You probably remember Biz Markie from his only hit "You Got What I Need," which is a song about being publicly cuckolded. What do you think she did while he sang it? Think she danced? Sang along? Surprise guest Shaggy play "It Wasn’t Me" with Bill on sax?
A new movie about a passionate love affair between 2 cowboys is called Brokeback Mountain.
Tomorrow the 2005 National Book Awards are revealed. Last month, Jonathan Franzen and a handful of critics were torn a new one in Harpers by Ben Marcus for realist/anti-realist posturing. A couple weeks later, an interview was published where Jonathan Lethem (less caustically) weighed in. Not that I’ve read any of the NBA nominees — I just enjoy angry public infighting. If this continues to heat up, maybe the MSM can cover it like a sporting event. They can even keep the "NBA on NBC" music. For my money, the best, angriest, most personal, least punch-pulling public catfight is still the philipic Mark Ames wrote in NYPress calling Chuck Klosterman a "beigist,"* and the philipic sequel two years later that proved that even after 24 months of potential cool-down time he wasn’t just still angry but obsessively, psychotically loathing Klosterman. Daaang. Even though I love a public emasculating as much as the next guy, I will forever love Klosterman for his Ricky Williams as Predicator of ‘Singles’ v ‘Reality Bites’ Personality Theory (I don’t have ESPN Insider, so I can’t link to it, but it’s from a Bill Simmons column last year). Also, personal attacks have no place in serious criticsm, etc etc, Bob Loblaw. Still… mo’ded!
Also re: ranking of book importance, today Slate published writers’ most influential books in college. David Brooks: way to reinforce the U of C stereotype. It’s apparently in danger of being replaced by a worse stereotype.
* As far as I can tell, the word "beigist" is a bile-filled epithet meaning something along the lines of "philistine in hipster glasses." I believe Ames coined the term just for the occassion of skewering Klosterman.
Co-worker Dave took time off from playing with his dolls to make a prototype of the marketing concept for fictional product "Baconites." Judging by how gratuitously foreign campaigns are received stateside (Fanta, Mentos, Amelie, Kylie Minogue), I think he’s on to something. 
Now he just needs a product.
Bacon-flavored Pop Rocks?
Tonight I’m staying home on a Friday night for the second time this year. The first was 2 weeks ago, when I stayed home to watch the Sox sweep the Divisional Series. The next night I would go on to have an adventure that included walking and hitchhiking 20 miles with someone who was trying really really hard to buy crack…, but, that’s a story for another time. And though I can’t watch them sweep a series tonight, I can write something about this World Series bound team tonight.
Tonight I’m staying home because I have an early flight tomorrow. I can use the sleep anyway, since I haven’t been right this week. I was up until 4am on Sunday night listening to Sox fans pour their hearts out live on The Score - 670AM. People calling in were hoarse. From screaming, crying, laughing, shouting, cheering, emoting. Choked up. People called in to talk about their parents and their grandparents. Old timers talked about their friends. Some people called in just to yell into their phones, “Whiiitesooox!!,” which would usually make for abysmal radio, but was somehow appropriate and appreciated. I kept turing the radio off, rolling over and trying to sleep, but I’d last only a couple of seconds before I rolled back over and had to hear the next caller. As I found myself emoting to call after call, I finally admitted to myself that this is the most significant baseball team of my life. This is a strange admission, since I always say I am a Giants fan first, and that I’ve adopted the Sox sometime during the last 7 years. That being said, somehow I find myself overcome with attachment to this team in ways that I wasn’t to the 2003 or 1989 Giants.
This team, the Grinderball Rules team (I still don’t get it), the Win or Die Trying team, is special. One of the first Sox commercials I saw this year — you may remember it — showed a bunch of the Latin sox and asked the question “Jalapeno?” and then showed the Japanese sox Iguchi and Takatsu and replied “Wasabi!!” My first reaction was to shake my head. Leave it to the trashy south side of Chicago to think of baseball players in terms of their ethnicity. Afterall, this is the organization that stopped playing the organ to announce batters in 2000, choosing instead to play rap for black players (originally Frank Thomas was “Big Pimpin’”), metal for white players (Paul Konerko was Metallica) and salsa for Latinos (worse, Jose Valentin was, like, a Baile Folklorico tune). But somewhere in the middle of the 2005 season it dawned on me, the difference between the 2000 team and the 2005 team, and why I now love the Jalapeno/Wasabi commercial.
In 2000, separating players by ethnicity was a way of compartmentalizing the team. The players thought of themselves as belonging separately to the same ball club, and to show their individuality they each celebrated their own culture. This fit in well with the type of ball club the White Sox were. They were about big bats. That year only 3 clubs hit more homeruns than them in the league, and the next year only 1 club hit more than them. Frank Thomas, Magglio Ordonez, Carlos Lee, Paul Konerko, Jose Valentin, etc, all players who hit for power. Over the next 4 years, the White Sox, despite their offensive talent trailed the Minnesota Twins almost continuously. In 2003, Mike Lamb interviewed then-Minnesotan AJ Pierzynski and asked him why he thought the Twins were not having much of a problem with such a powerful Sox team. AJ responded that this Sox team will never beat the Twins, because the Twins work harder. How’s that for foreshadowing?
Two years later, the ChiSox buy AJ from the Giants in one of many offseason moves that changed the culture of the team drastically. Carlos Lee, who was to become one of the most powerful sluggers in all of baseball was traded for Scott Podsednik, who wouldn’t hit a homerun all season. Someone no one had ever seen play in America, Tadahito Iguchi, was to become the everyday second baseman. Scrappy but frustrating young Rowand and Çrede, whom we had seen make spot starts since coming up in the Sox farm system, were to bring their hardnosed attitudes with them. When Rowand was made the Sox’s everyday centerfielder Jerry Reinsdorf had extra padding put on the outfield walls, because Rowand slammed into those walls at full speed to make catches. This was a team that stole a lot of bases (3rd) but more importantly, they weren’t afraid to risk getting caught (no team was caught stealing more than the Sox). This was a team that was no longer solely about “the big bat” in “the big inning,” where base runners hoped to get batted in by a Magglio homer. This was old fashioned small ball — though Ozzie hated the perjorative tone of the term and renamed it “smart ball” in a classic and awesome WTF Ozzie moment.
Ken Williams got grilled harder than he had ever been before at Soxfest this spring. The Sox biggest asset had been their power, and Williams was disassembling the lineup.
It worked. AJ brought from the Twins the knowledge of how to be a different kind of team. Now, I’ve been a huge hater of AJ Pierzinsky since he was on the Giants. He was a shitty teammate, refused to go over his pitches with poor-harmless goofy-looking Kirk Reuter because he was too busy watching Twins games, and he once punched trainer Stan Conte in the groin for no reason while Stan was trying to help him deal with a baseball injury to his own groin. After seeing what the Sox think of him, I’m just jealous that he couldn’t do that with San Francisco. You see, my Giants have a long way to go before overcoming their ego problems, perhaps further than anyone in baseball. But the Sox… this team now loves each other. Time and time again, there were inside reports that there are no longer egos in the club house. Frank Thomas, who once pointed fingers at his teammates publically for lack of production and in turn had fingers pointed back at him for poor clubhouse culture, was overcome with emotion following the ALCS listing name after name of people in the organization that he was proud of, from the top down. A selfless Frank Thomas getting emotional about a season that he only had like 30 ABs in? Special. Analysts on the field interviewing Ken Williams kept trying to paint him as the one who masterminded the paradigm shift, but this culture goes all the way to the top: Williams went on and on about how he was only able to do this because of the lack of big egos throughout the organization. He claimed he would talk to Ozzie, to Jerry, to Hawk, to Eddie Farmer, even to players about what they thought about the team, ideas to improve and what wasn’t working. How amazing is that?
Which, finally, almost brings me back to my original point, but not quite. Ken Williams was named GM in 2000, and was no where near an obvious pick. Williams went on to make his own far-from-obvious pick, selecting his former teammate Ozzie Guillen, just 3 years our of baseball, as manager in 2004. Ozzie and Kenny went on to the fill the coaching staff with other former Sox stars, Sox who were part of the “Winning Ugly” era in the 80s: Tim Raines, Harold Baines, Joey Cora and Greg Walker. See the pattern emerging here? By surrounding the team with coaches-cum-players, this team becomes — and I know it sounds trite and cliche but I don’t know how else to say it — a family. When the players can play cards with the manager, when the owner is showing how much he believes in the players by making them his executives, when Ozzie pokes fun at players and himself, and can take it in return, where the GM pretends to be a sportswriter, doing hilarious mock interviews in the locker room during spring training, it is impossible to have an ego-oriented team. A ribbing from Dustin Hermanson earlier this year: “Ozzie doesn’t speak English very well. Actually, he doesn’t speak Spanish very well either. And he doesn’t speak Japanese at all.” Can you imagine Jerry Manuel and Ron Schueler creating an atmosphere where saying that would ever be considered appropriate? Does Manuel have a single fun bone in his body? Does he even like baseball? A story from an Ozzie interview earlier this year: Ozzie walks out to make a pitching change and holds up his right arm, wanting the righty, but then, absent-mindedly uses that extended right arm to point to his left arm, and the bullpen sends the lefty onto the field, wasting a pitcher. First order of business in the post-game interview, Ozzie addresses his screw-up. He holds up both hands showing a big R on his right hand and a big L on his left, saying he won’t make that mistake next time. That’s a joke you make after screwing up the softball game at the family reunion. It’s a culture that breeds familiarity, is completely unaffected by elitism, destroys egos, puts team before individual. This team hustles for each other.
And so, sometime during the season, I realized the Jalapeno/Wasabi commercial may have come straight out of the clubhouse. Can’t you just see Uribe and Iguchi opening the brown paper lunch bags their wives packed for them looking at each other and trading tamales for maki? These guys don’t think of themselves as individual producers, like the slugging egos of 2000. These guys are what AJ had in mind when talking about a hard working team. When you depend on the next guy to bunt you over to 2nd, you can’t afford to think of yourself as the Japanese player or one of the Latin players. But, you do think of how this team is different from other teams around the league, and White Sox teams that came before it.
And PS: Independent of the current cultural climate of the clubhouse, I’m so proud of the culture the south-side fans have here. You will never see Ben Affleck or any celebrity hosting HBO documentaries about White Sox curses, you won’t see White Sox fans ever call themselves the lovable losers, you won’t find an article on the team website titled “Whose Curse is Worse,?” you won’t hear about goats and 80 year-old trades, you won’t see sox fans swinging from the jock of whichever celebrity wants to sing “take me out to the ballgame” in the team hat the he bought that morning, you won’t see pre-tattered White Sox hats being sold new at Abercrombie & Fitch from coast to coast, you won’t see Lincoln Park trixies in high-heels and their “white collar on weekdays, striped collar on weekends, popped” boyfriends watching a game in a Bridgeport bar, and you won’t ever hear someone suggest that once the White Sox win the world series they will lose their identity. When ESPN did their “50 States in 50 Days tour,” they mentioned every team in Illinois except the White Sox. When the Red Sox won the world series for the first time in 84 years, baseball writer after baseball writer, including Bill Simmons, said “your turn, Cubs.” The White Sox will not commercialize their losses. They pay for it by being less accessible to the casual fan. I don’t see anything wrong with not selling your team out for a few fans. Becoming an easily embraceable cliche is not the same as wanting to win. Winning means as much to Sox fans as anyone. On Sunday, Jerry Reinsdorf said that winning the pennant was more significant than all his Bulls championships combined. Winning the pennant was more important to him than the entirety of the most dominant dynasty in all of sports, and that’s just the American League! What happens when the Sox win the Series? They won’t need a Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore romantic-comedy to tell them it’s significant. Last year, at the Cubs-Sox interleague game at Comiskey, the pre-game video montage (btw: the Sox have the greatest video montages ever. Who directs those, Oliver Stone?) the film welcomed the Cubs fans by showing them some of what makes them different, “we have Comiskey, they have Wrigley. They have the north side, we have the south side. They have Prior and Wood, we have Buerhle and Colon,” etc etc. Every White Sox fan’s favorite: “They have a fan who says ‘woo…’ we don’t.” Exactly. The middle aged woman on the south side who has been going to the same bar to watch White Sox games with her 3 best friends, who called in to have her voice get heard by those who, like her, were still awake at 3 in the morning, not wanting to go to sleep because they were afraid to wake up and find it was a dream, telling the story of her best friends in a shaking voice that was raspy from cheering in a smokey bar and a toungue slow from toasting her team too many times, her story of her parents and children and friends and friends’ children and the shared history of generations of White Sox memories… her. All she wants is a win. She doesn’t need the Sox to get the notoriety of the Yankees-Bosox series, or to become the darling of 30 something celebrities. Or for this Series to get 18 million viewers. Just give her a reason to knit her baby grandson a “World Champion White Sox” blanket.
updating this post, which was updating this post, comes this story today. Criminal charges!
Still, at least if you pronounce it properly it’s not an embarrassing surname at all. High five on that tip to Chien-ming Wang. Pujols: at least it’s less funny in print. Sorry, John Lackey, but you’ve got the stupidest name of all.
Angels pitching staff: ugliest even before considering their 27th century eye-wear? When you factor in Lackey’s second head coming out of his face (molie, molie, molie), Colon looking like the love child of Andre the Giant and Mrs. Klump, and Paul Byrd being part Ferengi, it’s not even close.
But back to that 27th century eye-wear. Is the pitching mound really the place to make your po-mo fashion statements, introducing conceptual designs like "wrap-around cat eyes," and "transparent metal?" And maybe retro is the new metro, but Kelvim Escobar, do you really need to trick-out your librarian grandmother’s glasses from the 1950’s?
When Telemundo broadcasts games of The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, do they translate the team name "Los Los Angeles Angeles de Anaheim" ?
Game 4: Jon Miller’s "Touchdown!" call when Orlando Cabrera airmailed the ball 10 feet over Molina’s head to allow the Yankees go-ahead run in. Accident? Probably. Awesome? Yes.
Jason Giambi, Athletic : Jason Giambi, Yankee :: Mario & Luigi: Wario & Waluigi
QED: Wagiambi.
And, though it won’t help quash the rumors of my unhealthy interest in Garret Anderson and how he should not be elevated to superstar status, I ask is there a baseball player that would look more comfortable wearing a bowtie?
