The 2013 Baseball Hall of Fame Vote

It is heartwarming that the three steroid cheaters on the ballot for the first time--Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa--all fell far short of the 75% needed for induction into the Hall in this year's voting. And it's not just that they were cheaters; more than that, they all fell short of the character requirements for induction into the Hall. Clemens is a known jerk, ever since he cursed out an umpire in the 1988 playoffs and then denied it afterwards. Sosa is a known cheater, who had the audacity to claim he only "made a mistake" when caught using a corked bat in a game. Bonds is a known anti-social personality, in a game which thrives on conversation.

But the most fundamental way these three losers cheated the game is that they reduced it to something akin to a slow-pitch softball game, where batters tried to hit a home run every time up. No true baseball fan wants to see this malarkey. (Nor do we want to see this ridiculous home run derby which MLB serves up to us the night before the All-Star game.) MLB shares the guilt here in promoting homers as the be-all and end-all of the game, to the great detrment of a game many of us think is beautiful when played as it was meant to be.

The tragedy of this year's voting is that the one guy who is clearly deserving fell short, that being Craig Biggio. Biggio represents all that is right about the game, and all the skills we look for in a superstar--defense, speed, and batting skills. And he was a "team first" guy, playing three different positions as his team needed. Spending his whole career with the same team is a definite plus here. Not that I begrudge any player the right to change teams if he gets to the point where he earns free agency. But showing loyalty to the team which drafted and developed you is an admirable trait, one in short supply in this "me first"' day and age. The good news is that Biggio's percent of the vote was high enough that he will probably make it in next year.

The Rise and Fall of Howard Cosell

I am old enough to remember when, in the mid-1950's, Howard Cosell gave up his job as a successful New York lawyer and began his radio show, "Speaking of Sports". At the time he seemed like a breath of fresh air, trying hard to bring some real journalism to the world of sports. Prior to Cosell, "sports journalism" was an oxymoron, as there was no effort among reporters to be objective and avoid hero worship of the athletes they covered. Cosell later switched to television, and when ABC landed the "Monday Night Football" contract, Cosell was instrumental in making MNF the insitution it became.

Cosell had a running feud with the print reporters, and in fact the title of his third book, "I Never Played the Game", comes from the frequent criticism leveled at Cosell by the writers that he didn't understand sports because "he never played the game". When this book came out in 1985, Cosell was already in a steep downhill slide toward irrelevancy. He had become completely disenchanted with his favorite sports, boxing and football, for reasons he details in the book. In 1982 he announced he would never cover another boxing match because of boxing's inherent brutality, and in 1983 he left Monday Night Football, saying the games all looked the same to him.

As ABC had acquired rights to some major league games, Cosell switched to baseball and was part of ABC's world series announcing team in 1979, 1981, and 1983. I watched those telecasts and Cosell was just awful. He had no feel for baseball, and in his first two books he had made it abundantly clear that he thought baseball was boring and worthless, destroying any credibility he might otherwise have had as a baseball announcer. Mercifully to viewers, ABC took him off baseball in 1985 after this book came out, and replaced him with Tim McCarver, a wonderful announcer who has since become a superstar and is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame for his great broadcasting.

Cosell's shtick was that he felt that "what happened on the field" was not all that interesting. Rather, he prided himself on getting the "stories behind the stories", i.e., talking about what was going on in the players' lives. How ironic, then, that his replacement, Tim McCarver, along with Tim's longtime broadcast partner Joe Buck, has shown us that what happens on the field can be terrible interesting. There is a saying that "baseball is only dull to dull minds", and by his brilliant success McCarver has demonstrated the truth of this aphorism, and the falsity of Cosell’s position.

Also ironic is that Tim McCarver, as an ex-player, was part of the so-called "jockocracy" that Cosell always railed against; Cosell felt that broadcasting jobs should go to people with journalism training, rather than to ex-jocks. McCarver's success shows the shallowness of this strongly-held belief by Cosell.

I recall an interview with Barbara Walters that Cosell did toward the end of his life. Barbara asked him "How do you want to be remembered." Cosell answered, "That's easy, as a good husband, a good father, and a good grandfather." Barbara: "Nothing about career". Cosell: "No, it's not important."

This odd statement really seems contradictory to all the pompous pronouncements Cosell made during his career about how important what he was doing was for the development of sports journalism. If what he was doing was ultimately unimportant, then why did he make such a big fuss about it?

Cosell died in 1995, a recluse during his last years, which seems odd for a person who always prided himself on what a close relationship he had, or at least claimed to have, with some of the people he covered. Sadly, he seems to have revealed himself in his later years to be a complete fraud. One suspects he would have been happier in life had he stuck with his original choice of profession.

A Different Kind of Mandatory Sentencing

The numerous mandatory sentencing laws, under which judges have no flexibility in sentencing defendants, have caused the prison population in the US to balloon to seven times what it was in 1980, so that now the US imprisons its citizens at a higher rate than every other country in the world. Judges hate these mandatory sentencing laws, because it ties their hands, and a fair number of judges have resigned in protest at the injustices they are required to perpetrate. A common example is the girlfriend of a drug dealer, who gets decades in prison along with her boyfriend, even though her involvement in his criminal enterprise was minimal, or tangential, or perhaps even coerced.

One problem mandatory sentencing has caused is the  high cost of this ridiculous level of incarceration. In California it is estimated that it costs $70,000 a year to incarcerate an inmate. The Ohio legislature has taken a novel approach to reducing the runaway cost of all this incarceration. A year ago a new law was enacted which *prohibits* judges from sentencing first-time offenders to prison, when the offense is a low-level felony. As a result, the prison population has already shrunk to the 2007 level.

I sometimes think that whenever a judge sentences a defendant to prison, that judge should be required to give a statement setting out the projected cost to the state of the incarceration. It seems absurd for judges to be able to incur, on behalf of the state, these tremendous costs, with no accountability or consequence. When a judge runs for re-election, the burden his sentencing decisions have placed on the state could then be part of the public record, just like all other government financial information already is public record. Maybe then this "tough on crime" mantra that we constantly hear from candidates could properly be interpreted as "tough on taxpayers' pocketbooks".

Sentence Adverbs

In school I learned that adverbs can modify verbs, adjective, or other adverbs. Never did I hear the term “sentence adverbs”, and it was only recently that I first heard of this concept.

As the name suggests, it is an adverb that modifies the whole sentence, and not a particular word in the sentence. An example is, “Fortunately, Hurricane Isaac missed Tampa and the GOP convention was able to proceed with its business last week. Unfortunately, all decisions had already been made beforehand, and there was no real business to conduct.”

Here the adverbs “fortunately and “unfortunately” are used as sentence adverbs, modifying the whole thought. One could use “It is fortunate that”, or “I think it is fortunate that”, instead of “fortunately”, but obviously the use of one word is preferable to the longer and more awkward phrase that would be needed as a substitute.

So far so good. But the problem comes in when such words are used improperly. A news anchor said “X allegedly killed Y.” Here the use of “allegedly” right before the verb makes it look like it is the verb that is being modified, and this makes no sense, for one cannot be “allegedly killed”. “Allegedly” here is being used as a sentence adverb, and needs to be set off with a comma (if at the beginning of the sentence), or two (if in the middle).

An even worse misuse of “allegedly” occurred in a news report which stated that “X was being charged with allegedly killing Y”. This is total nonsense; X was not being charged with allegedly killing Y, he was being charged with killing Y. The concept of “allegedly” is contained in the verb “charged”, and no further modification is necessary or at all useful. News people seem to be so obsessed with being politically correct that they continue to make these glaring errors.

The number one problem in this area is of course the word “hopefully”, whose careless use is widely castigated. I could say, “Hopefully, you will find this explanation of sentence adverbs helpful”. The problem here is that “hopefully” does not modify anything found in the sentence; it is thrown into the mix solely to convey the writer’s point of view. It is not a real adverb here, and should be replaced with “I hope”, or something similar.

(Some may complain that “hopefully” is a weasel word, in which the writer of speaker uses the passive voice in order to avoid responsibility for the matter at hand. An example is when a president responds to a scandal in his administration, as Reagan once did, by saying “Mistakes were made”. But this is not the real crux of the problem with ”hopefully”.)

While some grammarians have come to accept the use of “hopefully”, the best advice is still to avoid it unless you know your audience is accepting of such casual use of the language. One need not resort to awkward and wooden alternatives like “It is to be hoped”, or “One hopes”, as there are more natural-sounding options available like “Let’s hope”, or “With luck”. Let's hope you can learn to use them instead.

Why Romney Will Lose in November

1.  The man is a robot, at least he comes across that way to the public he is trying to persuade to vote for him. History shows Americans usually vote for the candidate they would most like to go out and have a beer with. One has to back to the 1970's to find exceptions to this rule.

2.  He is unable to tell voters what he stands for. Voters like to know their candidate has some passion and commitment to his values. Romney has none of this. Conservative commentator Joe Scarborough says that a friend of his who is a prominent Republican governor met with Romney and asked him three times why he wants to be president. He never could articulate a meaningful sentence as to why he wants the job, or what he wants to accomplish as president.

3.  He is unable to convince true conservatives he is one of them, while at the same time mouthing conservative platitudes which do nothing to convince the crucial voters in the middle to vote for him.

4.  He is unable to answer simple questions, as when he went on "Face the Nation" (the first non-FOX interview he's done in this campaign), and could not answer a simple question about whether he would continue the recently-announced Obama policy of not deporting illegals who came here as children and are being productive, law-abiding residents of this country. Bob Schieffer had to ask him five times (!), and he never was able to answer. Romney said he would put into place a long-term solution. Two problems with this. First, Romney refused to give any details of what this so-called "long-term solution" would consist of; and second, he seemed oblivious to the reality that getting any immigration bill through Congress was unlikely, given the partisan divide in Washington these days. Schieffer pressed him by asking, "But would you leave the policy in place while you pursued your long-term solution", and Romney still could not answer. I think the American voters, while not sophisticated, can recognize stonewalling when they see it, and reject it.

5.  He is obviously completely ignorant on foreign policy, as shown by his occasional statements in this regard. He wants voters to believe he is strong enough to stand up to Iran, whatever that means, when he isn't even strong enough to stand up to Rush Limbaugh! Voters are smart enough to see through this.

6.  His refusal to release his tax returns leads to inevitable speculation that he is hiding something. The irony here is that his own father, George Romney, pioneered the policy of releasing multiple years of tax returns, saying that one year can be a fluke, and only by releasing many years of returns can an accurate picture be had. Initial speculation was that he had paid no taxes in 2008 and 2009, after the collapse of the financial market. Now, Harry Reid says on the Senate floor that he heard there were ten years of no taxes paid whatsoever. Whether Reid is right or not is irrelevant; the point is that Romney has it within his power to clear this up in an instant, and has refused to do it. All commentators, Dem. & Rep. alike, say he should have done it along ago and got this out of the way, so that the campaign could focus on the real issues. Romney is tone-deaf on this issue.

7.  If the election ever does get close enough to be in doubt, the Democrats will have in the can and ready to go TV spots which will highlight Romney's many flip-flops and gaffes. Just about anything Romney has said can be refuted by Romney's own statements in the past. No candidate can survive this type of withering onslaught.

8. He gives no details as to how he intends to accomplish any of his campaign promises. Here is a partial list of promises for which no details have been given: create 12 million new jobs; stop Iran for getting nuclear weapons; enact comprehensive immigration reform; enact comprehensive tax reform; balance the budget even while cutting taxes for the wealthy and increasing military expenditures. This lack of detail is reminiscent of Richard Nixon's promise in 1968 that he had a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Of course, there was no secret plan and the war dragged on four more years. And recently it has come out that Nixon actually sabotaged pre-election peace efforts, because he feared that a pre-election peace would cost him the election!

Inverse vs. Converse

The word "opposite" is found in the definitions of both of these words, so obviously there are similarities. However, they are not quite the same.

"Inverse" comes from the Latin "invertere", meaning to turn upside down or inside out. It is often used in mathematics, as in "3/2 is the inverse of 2/3".

"Converse" comes from the Latin "convertere", meaning to turn around. It is most often used in connection with words, rather than with mathematical concepts. In fact, the misstatement known as a "Spoonerism" is a form of converse, in which letters or syllables are inadvertently interchanged. An example is "lack of pies" rather than "pack of lies", or, the oft-cited one attributed to Rev. Spooner when officiating at weddings, "It is kisstomary to cuss the bride?"

Who vs. Whom

I suspect most of us learned the (prescriptive) rules in school. "Whom" is used when it is the object of a preposition or verb, otherwise "who" is used. There are some who say that "whom" is on its way to obsolescence. I don't go this far, because I can't believe that "To Who the Bell Tolls" will ever sound better than "To Whom the Bell Tolls", nor can I believe that "To Who It May Concern" will ever replace "To Whom It May Concern."

More complicated sentence construction requires more analysis, and therein lie the difficulities. Take this sentence: "Give it to whoever wants it." What is being said is, "Give it to the person who wants it." Hence, "whoever" is correct. "Whoever" is the subject of the clause "whoever wants it", so "who" is needed, even though the clause itself is the object of the preposition "to".

A Pat Buchanan column this week had a usage which is dubious. In a column discussing the possibility of Romney choosing Condi Rice as his running mate, he wrote,  "Asked whom she voted for in 2008, Rice reportedly said, '...it was a special time for Americans.'"  The "whom" here just does not sound right. After all, I have often been asked "Who did you vote for?", but never "Whom did you vote for?" If Buchanan wanted to insist on using "whom" here, he could have moved the "for" and made it "Asked for whom she voted in 2008..."

Another example appears in a recent devotional guide. The sentence reads, "Whom else would it make more sense to follow?" If we do the usual rearranging to to see if who or whom is correct, we have "It would make more sense to follow whom." But then, what about the "else"? It can't be rearranged to include the else, so we know something is wrong with using "whom" here. This is yet another example of going overboard in an attempt to be technically correct, and in the process spoiling the whole sentence, not to mention the whole thought.

When dealing with the written word we usually have the luxury of thinking through the correct usage, and re-arranging the word order if necessary to make it sound right, which the above writers failed to do. Speaking orally and off-the-cuff is more problematic. Best rule-of-thumb here is to use "who" if one is not sure, since a misplaced "whom" is much more grating that a misplaced "who".