Thoughts Medley 7 April 2024

by Tony Medley

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts continues to make baseball an unattractive farce to watch. He pulled his rookie pitcher, 25-year-old Yoshinobu Yamamoto yesterday from a 0-0 game after five innings in which he allowed only two hits and struck out eight. Roberts used four more pitchers to end the game, which the Dodgers won.

Now, the MLBPA is blaming pitcher injuries on the pitch clock! What absolute nonsense! Introducing the pitch clock was the best thing MLB has done in years because it sped up the game, which had gotten notoriously long due to pitchers stalling around after each pitch. I go back to the days of yore when games lasted around two hours. The pitcher would throw a pitch, get the ball back from the catcher and throw another pitch within 10-15 seconds. There were hardly any arm injuries in those days. The pitch clock has nothing to do with arm injuries.

Pitchers are coddled like no other athletes, and they have become oh, so fragile. Baseball today is run by accountants and mathematicians who have little or no knowledge or appreciation of the game and the managers are mostly unquestioning puppets who worship at the altar of sabermetrics. And the game is not just worse than it used to be, it’s much worser and is getting worser by the second. I want to see Yamamoto pitch a complete game. (don’t tell me “worser” is not a word. It is, and there’s no reason not to use it. Shakespeare used it 21 times. He has Hamlet saying, after he murders Polonius, “Oh, throw away the worser part of it, And live the purer with the other half.”)

PBS is running a documentary on Wiliam F. Buckley, Jr. Being PBS, it has, unbelievably, a leftwing slant. For example, it shows Gore Vidal in a positive light vis à vis the Buckley-Vidal contretemps. It ends with an attack on Trump and his supporters, but it also includes the following statement by Newt Gingrich from the ‘90s about the Democrats and the Deep State:

They will do anything to stop us. They will use any tool. There is no grotesquery, no distortion, no dishonesty too great for them to come after us.

The biased PBS narration says, “He (Gingrich) teaches Republicans to talk in a new way about Democrats being associated with infection and disease and disloyalty and decaying.” Exactly! Look at the Democrats today and tell me where Gingrich was wrong. They are doing precisely what Newt said they would do. Just witness what they are doing to President Trump and what Biden is doing to American society. Newt was 100% correct in 1994 and it has come to pass in a way even the brilliant seer George Orwell couldn’t have predicted.