Good Rethinking

This item at Bored Panda shows some of the original names suggested for famous TV shows. A couple of them are not very different from the eventual show title and in at least one case -- The Seinfeld Chronicles becoming Seinfeld -- the earlier title was used for a pilot. Some were just working titles, such as Married With Children's developmental title Not the Cosby Show. Showrunners used that title to help sell their concept of a show that was going to be anything but the easygoing kid-friendly style of the NBC hit. But when it got picked up a new name had to be chosen.

Some renamings were clearly necessary. House of Comics had to be renamed to Full House because otherwise Bob Saget would have had to have lived in a different building from the other cast members.

Attentively Waiting

I am quite certain we will quickly hear someone from the National Basketball Association speak out on this latest police abuse of power, in which an officer in full riot gear tackled a 12-year-old girl and held her on the ground with his knee, even though she was trying to walk around the protest and wasn't part of it.

It happened where? Oh, well, never mind then.

The Last W?

St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Lou Brock was accounted by many to be one of the nicer folks one could meet in professional baseball, despite his habit of making opposing catchers look bad with embarrassing regularity.

Not only did his former team post a win on the day he passed away, they did it over the team that idiotically traded him away for two aging pitchers and one light-hitting outfielder -- the Chicago Cubs. With the Cards, Brock went on to help win two World Series -- one of them the very same year he was traded away. He was a six-time All Star who won the National League stolen base title eight times. He held the record for stolen bases from his retirement in 1979 -- a year he won the Comeback Player of the Year award at 40 -- until Rickey Henderson broke it in 1991.

Brock probably started out as a nice guy but might have had his qualities honed by the man who scouted him for the Cubs, Buck O'Neil. In his own biography, I Was Right on Time, O'Neil notes the lopsidedness of the trade and says people ask him if he was mad or sad that the Cubs traded away a player he worked hard to get who went on to such great heights. O'Neil said he didn't feel either, he was just "happy for Lou."

When Henderson broke the base-stealing record he was carrying a card with a short speech he and Brock had worked on, since the two had become friends as it became clearer that the record would fall. In the excitement of the moment, he forgot his speech and gave the typically Hendersonesque statement that he was now the greatest of all time (Nolan Ryan pitched his unearthly seventh no-hitter that same day, so Henderson's ego was a bit premature). When he saw Brock later he apologized, saying he had been caught up in the emotion of the moment and forgot he had the speech. Whether that was true or not, Brock decided to act like it was and accepted the apology.

So while Brock might have rejoiced with you if you cheered on his former team in their win today, he might have suggested taking it easy on the chortling that might accompany the one last time the Cards put one over on the Cubs because of Lou Brock.

He might have found it more interesting that he passed just a few days after the great pitcher Tom Seaver, whom he faced more than any other pitcher in his career. Because Brock was the batter Seaver faced more than any other hitter in his career and his .250 average was better than a lot of top players could post. Upon his arrival, Brock might have found Tom Terrific waiting for him with an extended bat and a big grin: "Let's go again, Lou."

Edited 9/8/20 to spell Rickey Henderson's first name properly.

Adding Up

This is the second post in a row in which I link to an article from National Review, so I am sure there are many who are now convinced my knuckles drag the ground when I walk. Oh well.

Writer Brian Reidl casts his piece as a way of understanding why socialism can't work but I think his point is more basic than that. Even people who would not consider themselves socialists but simply good old-fashioned the-government-must-help statists sometimes don't do the math, as he describes. Claims that, simply by taxing rich people, we could fund extravagant social safety net programs -- let alone the full-blown nationalization of major sectors of the economy -- undercount 1) the number of rich people and 2) how much money they actually have.

Of course I sympathize with those folks. Math got me, too.

Major Effort

In this, the 100th year since the beginning of baseball's Negro Leagues, Major League Baseball is considering reclassifying at least two of the different leagues made up of African-American players as "major leagues."

As Dan McLaughlin notes in National Review, the push would do more than attempt to be another step in redressing the historical wrong of baseball's segregated era which stretched from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th. "Major League" has a specific definition for the organization, and the reclassification could bring about a change in the record books. 

McLaughlin points out that there have been other major leagues in addition to the two we recognize today. They were usually attempts to create a third league to rival the American and National Leagues which did not succeed. The criteria are not concrete, but things like a regularity of schedule and record-keeping play the largest role. Quality of play is a factor as well, but given the wide range in that arena among the thousands of players who have suited up in one of the two current leagues over their history, it can't really be the determining one.

Such a decision would be the right one, McLaughlin writes. While it would not make things right for the men prevented from taking their shot at the Show because of the color of their skin -- even for the few Negro Leaguers who are still living -- it would stop the continuation of the injustice. In the same way that Jackie Robinson demonstrated that melanin had no role in creating a quality ballplayer, the move would show that historical injustice could not prevent the proper recognition of Negro League organization, talent and importance.

The move would have its own problems, of course. In addition to their league games Negro League teams often played many games in barnstorming tours against local or semipro teams. They dominated, as one might expect a team of professionals to do. Do those games count in figuring statistics? White major leaguers would create winter barnstorming teams as well -- they often played Negro Leaguers during them -- and they didn't count those hits or wins in their own official totals. Should the Negro Leaguers count their stats against the white barnstormer teams but not against the locals?

And the two dominant teams for much of the Negro Leagues' history were the Kansas City Monarchs and the Homestead Grays. Add the Indianapolis Clowns and Newark Eagles to them and you have a huge chunk of the Negro Leagues World Series champions before you -- realistically some of the actual Negro National League and Negro American League teams weren't much better than the local opponents on a barnstorming tour.

McLaughlin thinks those problems can be ironed out and he's probably right. Plus statistics are a baseball fan's preferred subject for arguments, so adding an entirely new set has great appeal for some. And while I agree that this kind of reclassification would be the right thing to do another argument makes me hesitate. As the 2013 movie 42 illustrated, stepping across Major League Baseball's disgraceful color line took a tremendous effort from and a tremendous toll on Jackie Robinson. I worry that naming the NNL and NAL as major leagues would be a step down the road to diminishing the significance and cost of his accomplishment.

I know, I know, that sounds unlikely. Baseball more than other major sports lives within and around its own history. The fact that every team officially retired jersey number 42 -- even teams which didn't exist when Robinson joined the Dodgers -- and that the entire league holds a recognition day in which every player wears that number on that one day should make it difficult for Robinson's monumental role to be lost to history. I agree. But then I remember how Millennials and Generation Z tend to handle history and my worry returns.

Craft and Guile

Sherman and Filmore use the advantages that years of experience have given them to win in their nerf battle over the youngsters.

Time Capsule

Baseball, maybe more than any other major sport, draws fans who like to allegorize it and its varied parts. This happens in part because professional baseball has a longer history on the national stage than do its companion sports, so its changes since the late 19th century connect with changes in our nation's society and culture.

But are these allegories real, or are they just sappy sentimentality? An awful lot of them play on nostalgia and could be just airy statements without a lot of basis in fact or reasoned thinking. Richard Skolnick decided to examine several of them in the early 1990's and created Baseball and the Pursuit of Innocence: A Fresh Look at the Old Ball Game. In it he reflects on those allegories and whether or not they really can indicate the "old-fashioned" values they are said to represent.

From Skolnik's point of view, there's a way of looking at baseball that does exactly what baseball fans claim it does. The value of patience, for example, that a 162-game season requires in order to succeed can easily serve as a model for the way patience helps people navigate regular life issues as well. The high failure rate -- the best hitters miss the ball more than half the time -- models how much of life can be a struggle to get back up again after falling down.

Innocence offers a way to reflect on baseball that supports the idea it reflects time-honored values, but Skolnik takes care not to imply his vision is the only way to see the game. He's also clear-eyed about the way that some players, managers and writers romanticize the sport, and about how some of the allegorical lessons we are to draw from it contradict each other -- which makes it clear that some aspects of baseball can be molded to fit whatever the eye of the allegorizer wants to see.

In one way Innocence came at an odd time. Team owners had pushed Commissioner Fay Vincent out of office in 1992 and replaced him with an ownership committee kind of structure headed by Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig. Players' union representative Donald Fehr had zero trust in Selig's good faith and not much more in the owners as a whole. The collective bargaining agreement ended in December 1993, just two months before Skolnik's book was published. The owners' proposed agreement contained a salary cap and several other provisions that Fehr and the players' union rejected. Barely five months after a book about baseball's expression of longtime virtues was published, major leaguers walked off the job. A month later the World Series was canceled. Business bumped Skolnik's ruminations aside and the vices of greed, dishonesty and double-dealing supplanted the virtues he'd considered.

After several years fans finally began coming back in numbers that matched pre-strike totals. Toughened by the exposure of the seamy business side of the game, fans weathered revelations of performance-enhancing drugs and how they fueled some modern stars' big numbers. Still, read today Innocence shows a quaintness, more connected to the way people might have thought of baseball and its players in the middle of the century. The game's values and virtues remain, but Innocence seems like an account of them written in Eden. We consider them today in a more fallen light, but Skolnik provides a good reminder of both the virtues allegorized by the way the sport is played and the way we once looked at them.