The Weak In Rock

Ok, I cannot help myself.  I have to pile on with everyone else who is guffawing at Barry Zito’s recent demotion to the bullpen by the Giants.  I make no secret of this, I loathe the SF Giants.  There are worse teams in Major League Baseball, but I’d wager there are no worse run teams that have the sort of resources at their disposal that the Giants have.  Case in point - Zito.

The Giants are now, at least temporarily, paying $18 million a year for a mediocre long reliever.  They’re saying they’ve moved Zito to the bullpen so that he can work out his mechanics and return to the rotation.  Thing is, there’s nothing wrong with Zito’s mechanics.  His dramatic 12 to 6 curve ball just isn’t being called for strikes by the umps, and without that curve Zito is left to rely on a feeble fastball, a bush-league slider and a pretty impressive change-up to make it through an opponent’s line-up.  If you’re a big league hitter and you see that the umps aren’t going to give him the curve (traditionally Zito’s out pitch) for a strike then you can sit fastball and tattoo it when he serves it up for you.

The irony here is that Tim Lincecum, is currently sporting one of the best ERA’s in the National League, has won 4 games (that’s doubly impressive when you consider the tepid hitters, and mediocre defensive players the Giants are fielding this season) and is doing it all for a little more than 1/10th what Zito is getting paid.

The Giants signed Zito because their front office apparently does not understand baseball fans at all.  They signed Zito to try to balance out the impending loss in star power they knew they were going to suffer when Barry Bonds left for free agency.  The trouble with that theory of running a baseball team is that while Barry Bonds may have had sufficient star power and draw to distract fans from the poor performance of the team, Zito was never going to be close to that, and what really matters to any sports fan isn’t the names printed on the jerseys, it’s winning.

We invest our egos in our favorite teams.  When they lose we feel like losers.  When they win we take credit and carry that around as if we’d done more than just scarf down hot dogs and drink beer.  The Giants have two very talented home grown pitchers, Matt Cain and the aforementioned Lincecum.  It stands to reason that there’s other talent in the Giants organization, or at the very least that their scouts know where to find young, inexpensive talent.  This is one of the biggest reasons I hate the Giants.  They consistently rely on overpriced, under-performing veterans to flesh out their roster.  That’s a questionable move with hitters/fielders.  It’s brain-dead with pitchers.  It’s likely that Zito’s curve doesn’t cross the plate anymore because he no longer has the strength or flexibility to throw it with the proper bite.  Mechanical tweaking isn’t going to fix that.

Technorati Tags: Barry Zito, SF Giants, Major League Baseball, Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain

I wasn’t surprised that Barrack Obama distanced himself from Rev. Wright’s comments at the Washington Press Club, but I was still disappointed. On the one hand Wright is absolutely full of shit - claiming that the US government invented HIV to decimate the minority community. While on the other he’s dead on in such a way that anyone who calls him out on it is just in massive denial - that the 9/11/01 attacks shouldn’t have surprised anyone and were a logical outgrowth of the foreign policy practiced by the US for generations.

That Obama should distance himself from obvious conspiracy theorizing idiocy (the HIV comment) makes perfect sense, and he’s correct in wanting to keep his distance from such moronitude. Of course it could also be argued that comments so stupid shouldn’t even be acknowledged. Sitting Senators can and do support asinine social and political views, but those that do rarely become front runner for their party’s nomination to run for the White House.

What disappoints me is that Obama doesn’t have the courage to acknowledge that the obviously exploitative US foreign policies in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Central and South America are what fueled the anger that provided the opportunity for an organization like Al Qaeda to recruit volunteers to fly planes into US landmarks and kill thousands of people. This is not an extremist view. It’s a view held by many mainstream political thinkers (heck, I read Blowback by Chalmers Johnson, a sort of uber mainstream political scientist, former cold warrior and professor emeritus at UC San Diego, in 2000 when it came out - a book that flat out says the actions of the CIA and the US military in the third world were inevitably going to result in pissed off victims of those actions striking back at the US in the only way available to them - terrorist attacks.). But the official party line of the US government on 9/11/01 is that “the terrorists” attacked the US because they hate our democracy, our freedom of expression and Christianity, so Obama can’t deviate from that script lest he be thrown under the bus by his own party, also too cowardly to call bullshit where it’s so obvious the smell would curl your nose hair from 100 miles out.

I think most of all though I’m disappointed in my fellow Americans who continue to fantasize that our government somehow bears no responsibility at all for what happened on 9/11/01. I guess it’s just too difficult to think about for most people. They’d rather believe that we were all just hapless victims of sociopathic mass murderers, and while I’ll admit that there seem to be quite a lot of that sort involved in fundamentalist Islam (and fundamentalist Christianity, for that matter) it just doesn’t work for me to explain away 9/11/01 or Al Qaeda by saying “oh, they’re all just crazy with no genuine motives for the crimes they commit.” It’s sort of like the whole business about smaller scale sociopaths having been abused as children. It doesn’t excuse their actions. It does give them a logical explanation, however, and points out that looking the other way at domestic violence isn’t just bad for the immediate victim, it may lead to collateral damaged down the road.

Technorati Tags: Barrack Obama, Rev. Wright

This is the sort of thing that discredits folks on the left…

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/er.html

Some people are too dumb to be let out of the house.