A Ballgame with George

One summer, while living and sweltering in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, we decided to escape the city for an evening. We drove out on a Friday after work to see the Baltimore Orioles' single-A affiliate, the Frederick Keys, about 45 minutes to the northwest. Thought it was a little strange that there were metal detectors set up at the gate (this was a decade before the 9/11 attacks). Had there been a threat of some kind, we wondered? Inside it became more surreal, as we saw a bunch of uniformed, armed officers on the roof of the small ballpark.

Long story short, the late President George H.W. Bush, a serious baseball fan and former college player, was stopping to take in a game on the way to a Camp David weekend. We'd headed out to get away from Washington for an evening, and instead it had followed us. He was escorted in, waved to the crowd, threw out the ceremonial first pitch, sat somewhere in the seats above us, and signed a few baseballs that fans tossed up to him during the several innings that he was there. I'd like to say there's more to the story, say the offer of an Assistant to the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce position (declined) or an invitation to a state dinner (accepted), but will have to settle for having garnered this brief, baseball-related anecdote to tell on the occasion of his passing.

The Moose Jaw

Aw, crap.  I had to downgrade this enjoyable nightstand read by Mike Delany from four stars to three stars to protest its hackneyed, supernatural ending.  The occult explanation of events that had been vaguely foretold and lightly foreshadowed was never relinquished, only rationalized.  The characters didn't so much solve the mystery as have the spooky solution revealed unto them. 

Pity, because I'd been engrossed in the adventure.  The novel's first half included several well-written chapters depicting Alaskan outdoorsmanship and backwoods cabin life, among the best I've read.  The third quarter placed the protagonist in more and more danger, but events still lay within the bounds of plausibility.  I was sure that within the denouement we would learn some natural explanation of weird happenings: something in the spring water; some hallucinogenic plant inadvertently consumed; some mental health issue spurring the protagonist's prodigious consumption of alcohol and increasing paranoia.  Some prankster in a bear suit.  Something.

But this magic-laced ending, as ripe as a hunting party after a two-week Alaskan fishing trip?  Aw, crap.

Side note: there's a touch of arrested development in the author's Hefneresque depiction of a relationship with a damsel in distress, a-heh, a-heh.  (Spoiler: goose grease.)

A Win for the Buccos, At Last

I have often, repeatedly, and ruefully lamented the lowly exploits of the Pittsburgh Pirates, The Team That Would Be My Other Team, in this space.

Yesterday, March 4, 2012, Pittsburgh's days as a perennially cellar-dwelling National League franchise unworthy of the Steel City's 1970s moniker "City of Champions" finally came to an end. Yesterday, the Pirates agreed to a high-value, six-year contract extension, with a club option for a seventh year, with its franchise player, All-Star center fielder Andrew McCutchen. Yesterday, the Pirates set themselves up to achieve a winning record in 2012 and win the N.L. Central Division within four years.

You could say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

It's impossible to overstate the break with the past that the McCutchen long-term signing represents. Here's the past: starting with Barry Bonds, the post-Willie Stargell Pirates had lost to free agency, or traded for budgetary reasons prior to free agency, the Killer B's -- Bonds and Bonilla -- along with most other letters of the alphabet. Ex-Bucs stars squeezed out of Pittsburgh's plans for having the temerity to move up the MLB salary scale have included Jason Bay, Jack Wilson, Freddie Sanchez, Aramis Ramirez, Adam LaRoche, Andy LaRoche, Xavier Nady, Nate McLouth, Ian Snell, Zach Duke, and Paul Maholm. Jose Bautista just smacked 54 and 43 home runs for the Blue Jays in consecutive seasons; how did your right fielder do?

Fast-forward to the present (Q: Do MP3 shuffles "fast-forward"? I need a new cliche!). The proof of concept, on the field and at the gate, was Pittsburgh's extraordinary first half of the 2011 season. Excitement was up, attendance was up, the buzz around baseball was up. Clint Hurdle's suddenly fearsome 25-some was, for once, the talk of the town in a city that also sports the Steelers and Penguins. The Bucs' epic second-half regression to the mean of their prior performance doesn't obscure the startling conclusion that if you win more, you attract more fans; if you attract more fans, you can sign more players and win more games -- sometimes, almost immediately.

Now, in preparation for the 2012 season, the Pirates are making their move. Atop the earlier Jose Tabata signing, the A. J. Burnett free agent acquisition, the return of veteran Nate McLouth, and the inexpensive trade for former 100 RBI man and comeback candidate Casey McGehee, the McCutchen deal sets in place a multiple-year core around which the Buccos' front office can attract talent and manager Hurdle can develop young players and win ballgames.

As with the Milwaukee Brewers during the past four years, when the youthful core of Fielder, Weeks, Hart, Braun and Gallardo remained intact, the Pirates can be seen as a choice destination for free agents and first-round picks for the first time in decades. Or at least an acceptable one. Upon his retirement, National Leaguer Jim Edmonds recommended Milwaukee as a free agent destination with a lot to offer veteran players; the Pirates have now put themselves in a comparable position to compete in the market for scarce talent, and maybe even avoid inclusion on some All-Stars' no-trade clauses.

Time will tell if Owner Bob Nutting, President Frank Coonelly, and General Manager Neal Huntington truly mean it; will they put forth a half line-up of stars with a limited supporting cast to try to overcome twenty years of losing, or will they now, finally, provide the resources to give the Steel City a full roster worthy of its long-ago winning history?

Of course, if the Pirates' notoriously stingy ownership reverts to its pattern of recent years, McCutchen might not play the full length of his contract in a black and gold uniform. He could be traded, as McLouth was at the peak of his value, to a savvy organization with deeper pockets. Perhaps Theo Epstein will covet an outfield asset for the Cubs, or the Steinbrenner family or the new Dodgers owners will make the Pirates an offer that they can't refuse -- which historically has been far less than what other teams couldn't refuse. Or, heaven forbid, McCutchen could be injured and follow another Pittsburgh sports legend, Sidney Crosby, onto the long-term disabled list.

But for now, the benefit of the doubt is in order. This shot in the arm for the Pirates is a shot across the bow of every team in the National League. The pregame pyrotechnics on the PNC Park scoreboard can finally be matched by its tally of Pirates' runs during the game. The polarity of free agent transactions can be reversed.

Once again, at long last, you can raise the Jolly Roger. It's shredded and tattered after years of neglect, but if you look closely, you can still see a hint of a wild skeleton grin. It's a Renaissance at Three Rivers, Yo Ho!

You in?

Covert Horse

My latest guilty-pleasure TV show is Covert Affairs, on USA Network. It's like the defunct, geek-appeal series Numbers, without the math. Only this time, the clueless brother is in the field while the smarter brother is behind the scenes at headquarters. Only they're not brothers at all; rather, the field agent is a sexy, newly trained gal-agent recruit who can drive like Mario Andretti, throw an elbow like Gordie Howe, and hold a bewildered but meaningful facial expression for an extra beat whenever she processes new information like Judge Amy on Judging Amy; and the smart guy is a blind techie ops guy who gets her out of two types of trouble every three minutes, between commercials. And they're all in the CIA, not the FBI. Except that Charlie, the smarter brother in Numbers, was never actually in the FBI; he was a math professor who consulted for the FBI. And his colleague was an astronaut. And his father was Judd Hirsch, who used to be the guy in Taxi and Ordinary People; only this time the mentor is not Judd Hirsch but an ice-blond covert ops lady boss who is married to her boss, a politically connected CIA Deputy Director who is leaking information to a pretty reporter, whom the blind guy is sleeping with, while he deputy-directs a thorough shakedown of his division to stem the leak; which is why the blind guy can never answer the phone when Judge Amy needs him.

Perhaps I should have started by comparing the series to Bonanza.

Anyway, the horse comes through the wall in Covert Affairs at least twice per action sequence, which, while putting it on a par with Leverage, the statistical leader in the Implausible Moments category, is of little consequence in the realm of guilty-pleasure viewing. Piper Perabo is no Gina Bellman or Leslie Ann Warren; then again, Gina merely bowls you over with her classic beauty and Pan-European accent, assumes stock-character identities, and arranges helicopter pick-ups, whereas Piper as Annie Walker has to keep the very identity of her employer secret from her Georgetown Hausfrau sister, Amber from House, with whom she lives, only Amber isn't Amber in this series and hasn't appeared as anyone's spooky ambulatory hallucination as if she were one of John Nash's imaginary friends helping him develop the mathematics of Game Theory -- which Charlie, the smarter brother, calls upon weekly to illustrate a plot point in Numbers -- in A Beautiful Mind. At least, she hasn't yet.

Will she? Will the Deputy Director blame the leak on the blind guy, kick him to the curb, and start fooling around with the reporter himself? Will Annie Walker find love while successfully ingratiating herself with her Ice Queen boss -- who also appears in Leverage as Nate Ford's ex-wife who bailed Nate out of trouble while Gina Bellman was off having her baby, despite her lack of covert ops training and not being blind? Will Amber from House turn out to be a fellow CIA agent whose own ambulatory hallucinations involve Judd Hirsch? Most crucially, is Leslie Ann Warren -- who also played Juanita in Baja Oklahoma and Cinderella in Cinderella (A Very, Very Special Television Event), and whose star-turn in Mission Impossible set the bar for future spy-gals very, very high -- still smokin' hot?

The answers to these questions, and many more, are only a DVR box away.

When the Horse Comes Through the Wall

"Slumdog Millionaire" deserves its popular acclaim. I wish the reviews had given some hint of the human cruelty depicted, not to ward off moviegoers but to prepare them to brace themselves on the way to the feel-good, Bollywood payoff; it's not only a game show fairy tale involving a plucky kid from the Mumbai slums but a full-on, Dickensian exploration of the harshness of poverty, including the often brutal, other-than-heroic actions of people facing that circumstance.

That's a different topic. Today I would like to perform humanity a service, one far greater than the entertaining, yet gritty depiction of authentic life in the slums of India for worldly, media-saturated Western audiences that somehow have remained staggeringly unaware of the world's inequities.

Namely, I would like to retire the tired cliche, "jumping the shark" and offer the world a replacement.

As we all know, "jumping the shark" is what happens when Hollywood writers, rewriters, script doctors, directors, producers, studio executives, and interns have run out of new ideas and say the hell with it, let's just stitch up the plot with a spectacle and move on.

Only Dickens' Mr. Scrooge would deny the orphans of "Slumdog" every possible small triumph in their two decade adventure of youthful survival. But when these vagabond train riders on a random journey are forced to jump, and they JUST HAPPEN to land within a kilometer of the Taj Mahal, they are jumping an entire school of SeaWorld sharks at the same time.

This won't do. Rather than tagging the screenwriter's picaresque plot points with an overused metaphor derived from Fonzie's motorcycle stunt jump in a "Happy Days" episode, I would like to propose a fresh, new cliche.

In Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen", we begin from the opposite end of the credulity spectrum. We expect from the outset to be led on, lied to, and stretched beyond recognition by the Baron's tall tales. That's the story, after all. In context, riding a cannonball over the siege to conduct reconnaissance is plausible. Nobody bats an eye when Eric Idle's character Berthold revs his feet in Flintstones fashion and zooms across the landscape at cartoon speed. We cheerfully suspend disbelief when Vulcan crushes a lump of coal into a diamond for his true love, Aphrodite, who tosses it in a pile with all the others.

However, near the end, when our heroes have not so much jumped the shark as been swallowed by one, and are hanging around in the sea creature's belly digesting the circumstances, as it were -- and then, the Baron confidently whistles for his gallant white horse who comes riding through the wall into the belly chamber to rescue them; well, excuse me, Mr. Gilliam. Even compared to your inferno of intentional implausibility, you've tossed one too many logs on the fire.

Which brings us to our New Metaphor Opportunity.

We're willing to believe Jamal, Salim, and Latika could survive the urban slums by the force of their wits, willingness to accommodate, and eternal hope; millions do. We're even willing to suspend disbelief that Jamal has found his way onto "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and answered each question, because that's the story. But when our youthful unfortunates jump from the train and JUST HAPPEN to land in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, I propose that we henceforth characterize such a deus ex machina as "The Horse Coming Through the Wall" instead of "Jumping the Shark".

Rest in peace, fish tank hurdlers everywhere.