Purchase of the (yester)day.

"Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend" [Kindle Edition] by Timothy M. Gay. (Amazon Associates earnings to the blog: $0.93). Thank you, all who shop through the Althouse Amazon portal and, by doing so, tacitly speaking to the blogger: Hey, keep up the rough-and-tumble good work!

After the 4 Mt. Rushmore presidents, who should be the 5th president for the Nats racing presidents?

It's like the Milwaukee Brewers racing sausages, who've been around.... how long?

The origin of the races is sketchy. Laurel Prieb, a former Brewers vice president who is now Major League Baseball’s vice president for Western operations, said the races existed when he arrived in 1991, but only as a cartoon shown on the scoreboard at County Stadium. Three animated wieners — a bratwurst and Polish and Italian sausages — scampered past Milwaukee landmarks and finished at the stadium.

“At some point, somebody — and I don’t know who came up with the idea — said, ‘Why don’t we rent some costumes and do it live as a kind of surprise?’ ” Prieb said. “It was meant to be a one-and-done thing.”

The live debut is believed to have occurred on May 29, 1994, the day the Brewers retired Robin Yount’s No. 19, although the team’s chief operating officer, Rick Schlesinger, said he could not confirm the date.

Got that? It's a Wisconsin idea:

Teams in other cities have co-opted the basic racing idea, using United States presidents, scoreboard subway cars and pierogi, but only Milwaukee has sausages....

“It’s unique to Wisconsin.... It wouldn’t work anyplace else.”

But it's okay. You can show the love for Wisconsin by copying our fabulous styles. We began with 3, added a 4th (hot dog), and in 2007, they added a 5th, a chorizo named Cinco. So you can kind of see why the Washington Nationals wanted a 5th president, and yet, it was hard to go beyond the classic 4 who were predetermined by Mt. Rushmore. (Whatever political wrangling went into that decision is long past.) Obviously, they had to avoid all the recent presidents to avoid political disputes that live in the minds of the fans. It can't be Reagan or Clinton. And it can't be anyone boring or negative. And it has to be someone who can be depicted in a cartoonish costume. There was only one man for the job:



Isn't it obvious?

"Stan Musial, one of baseball’s greatest hitters and a revered figure in the storied history of the St. Louis Cardinals..."

"... the player they called Stan the Man — died Saturday. He was 92."

"No to the man with 762 home runs. No to the pitcher who won 354 games. No to the hitter who got 3,060 hits."

Baseball Hall of Fame vote against steroid-era stars.

Football is by far Americas favorite spectator sport.

Rasmussen Reports that 53% say football.

Only 16% for baseball, 11% for basketball, and 6% for hockey. Nothing else gets as much as 5%.

And, despite all the liberal hand-wringing over the violence of football — with all that brain-damage and post-Super-Bowl wife-beating — the preference for football is greater in women than in men. (57% and 50%.)

Seen on the internet.

Grabbed this morning from a major news website:



I just wanted you to know what's out there. I'm not saying be afraid, be very afraid. But... pay attention.

"Survivor" loser knocks Obama: "It's not even a million bucks, it's 600 grand by the time Obama takes it!"

Video from tonight's episode, so spoiler alert:



Voted out tonight, Jeff Kent, who — though he never revealed it to the other contestants — "won the National League Most Valuable Player award in 2000 with the San Francisco Giants, and is the all-time leader in home runs among second basemen.... Kent is a five-time All-Star and his 560 career doubles put him tied for 21st on the all-time doubles list."

What he says in the clip is "You know what pisses me off is I think I made about 60 million dollars playing baseball, and I want this frickin' million dollars in this game, and it's not even a million bucks, it's 600 grand by the time Obama takes it!"

"The offensive shutdown may very well not have been an aberration as much as deficiencies camouflaged through the regular season..."

Brooding and babbling over baseball in New York.

"We’re all big Derek Jeter fans since we were younger, watching the World Series and everything, from ‘96 to the recent one."

Said the Tigers’ Delmon Young.

“We all grew up, backyard baseball, wanting to win the World Series either against the Yankees or getting through the Yankees to get to the World Series, especially with Derek Jeter as the catalyst. Unfortunately, it happened. We’d love to see him out playing with us and playing against him, because it is really fun playing the Yankees, especially when Derek Jeter is healthy.”

"Orally urinating turtle boffin in nominative-determinism classic case/Shit Fun Chew probes mouth-excreting chelonian."

Actual headline — not a joke — about actual scientific research.

What's nominative-determinism?, you may ask. Possibly not your first question, but you may get to it. You might have asked, before that, what Google alert does Althouse maintain that gets her there? (Answer: "boffin"!) Anyway:

The theory of nominative determinism suggests that a person’s name can help form their choices in life, influencing the character they develop or profession they adopt.

Examples: "Poet William Wordsworth, caricaturist and Disney animator Mr T Hee, and sprinter Usain Bolt..."

Which reminds me, chez Meadhouse, we're supporting the Detroit Tigers in the ALCS, because of Prince Fielder, whom we like not because of nominative determinism, but because he's an ex-Brewer.

How would you have reacted to Joe Biden?

Meade and I were just having a conversation, not about politics. About baseball, actually. I was expressing an idea I had. (It doesn't matter what my idea was, but in case your curiosity is distracting, my idea was that to enjoy baseball, you need to watch the game in real time, with the slow parts left in, and once you start fast-forwarding to the parts that look exciting, it ruins the experience, and you might as well just read a report of what happened.) Meade keeps scoffing and laughing really annoyingly, until I get the joke that he's doing his Joe Biden imitation.... at which point I give him the finger. Suddenly, I realize that is the normal reaction to Biden's antics. Give him the finger.

There are other reactions when someone acts like that, laughing in your face, rolling their eyes, smirking, every time you're trying to say something. It's incredibly antagonizing! In real life, what do you do? There are different reactions, depending on how much of a friendship you have and how much you know about this person's propensity toward physical violence and whether you have a good escape route.

But sometimes you're in a situation where you must maintain your demeanor, despite the other guy's antagonism. For example, in a job interview or a discussion with your boss or maybe when you were a kid and your father was exerting his authority. The VP debate is also, obviously, one of those situations. Imagine if Ryan had given Biden the finger? Ryan is a young man, he had to have been thinking of the various reactions that you'd use in an ordinary social situation, even as he rejected each one and told himself that he had to keep acting as if Biden were not behaving inappropriately.

And what was going through Biden's head? (♪♫What goes on in Biden's brain?♪♫) Did the old man lose control of his bodily functions? Let's assume he had a strategy and was deliberately annoying, distracting, bullying, and rude. Why would he adopt such a strategy? Has he no self-respect? Maybe he's okay with his longstanding "Old Joe" reputation. He's a clown. A gaffe machine. So what? Everyone already thinks that. Flip it! Weaponize clownery. If it was a plan, it was a plan to provoke Ryan. What if Ryan suddenly gave him the finger? Where's your choir boy now, Ryanistas?

Did the umpires get that infield fly rule call right?

Paul White says yes.

Watch replays closely and you'll see that Holbrook, the left field umpire, watches as shortstop Pete Kozma backpedals into left field. As soon as Kozma waves his arms to communicate that he's ready to catch the ball, Holbrook raises his arm to signal an infield fly.

In other words, the umpire waits until he's certain it's a play the infielder can make. Kozma apparently thought it was a play he could make.

Whatever caused him to suddenly peel off — was it when, amid the stadium noise, Holbrook accompanied his signal with a verbal call of "infield fly?" — Kozma suddenly changed direction, as infielders are taught to do when they believe they hear the outfielder calling that he can make the catch.

"Vin Scully Quotes Bob Dylan as the Dodgers’ Playoff Hopes Slowly Die."

Bob Dylan... Dylan Thomas... what the hell's the difference? They were dying out there last night.



Here's the Dylan Scully quoted:



Here's the text of the poem, which I checked for the reason you might want to check. He doesn't say "fucked." It's "their words had forked no lightning." Also "Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay..." Green Bay! This poem is good for baseball and football.

There's always next year.

"The Brewers finally are eliminated from the race for the second wild-card berth in the National League, and they go out with a whimper, getting routed by the worst team in the majors."

Meadhouse is now free to devote full allegiance to the Reds.

Did Scott Brown staffers make anti-Indian gestures at a rally?

I'm not saying it was good or wise for them to make the "tomahawk chop" gesture while yelling in a way that the news report characterizes as an "Indian war whoop." And Scott Brown has said he doesn't condone that sort of acting out, but I just want to specify that the staffers' gesturing and noise-making doesn't count as antagonism toward Native Americans.

Someone doing the "tomahawk chop" is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero. At a certain level of political correctness, the tomahawk chop is considered offensive to Native Americans, but somehow it's not offensive enough to have stopped Atlanta Braves fans from doing it.

Anyway, these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians, miming an attack on Elizabeth Warren on the ground that she's a fake Indian. There's a lot of fakery in there, but no one is expressing the view that it's bad to be Indian. That's all I wanted to say, and I do understand how real Indians might prefer not to be represented as stereotypical characters. And maybe they'd object even more if a non-Indian got a great job from an employer who was practicing affirmative action in hiring or self-promoting by claiming diversity.

"I was surprised people were as attached to my hair as maybe I was."

John Axford — the Brewers' closer — talking about tweeting about his previously extravagant facial hair.

"The Brewers can't be saved" — wrote the Isthmus sportswriter on August 23d.

Jason Joyce wrote: "Deep into August, the Milwaukee Brewers are 10 games under .500 and 18 games out of first place in the National League Central." Etc. etc.

Meade began dogging him in the comments on August 24th:

I wonder if any St. Louis fans, exactly one year ago today, when the Cardinals were 10 1/2 games from winning a wild card, were writing articles titled "The Cards can't be saved."

The days have passed, and the comments thread over there has grown to 12 comments — all save one from Meade. The only one that isn't, on September 12th, says:

There is of course the fact that they added an extra wildcard this year. Without that where would the Brewers still very slim hopes stand? They'd have been eliminated already.

Which was a reason to maintain more baseball-style hope, not less, but they have to put it in a pessimistic way. (This is Madison, Wisconsin, and you know liberals are pessimists.) The Meade comments continue. The newest one is:

WCGB: 1.5

Six games over .500

L10: 9-1

STRK:W6

"I'm going home. I'm going home... Don't worry about me."

"I'll be alright. God bless, and the Texas Rangers, Texas Rangers."

The condemned man's last words.

624 comments on the live-blogging thread last night.

Did the spam-bots find out I'd turned off word verification for commenting? I'll check it out. There's our liberal commenter Lindsey Meadows, who said (at 6:24 PM):

I think I'll just have casual sex tonight. After Romney, I couldn't possibly feel more violated (or bored).

When Clint Eastwood came on at 9, the liberal commenters, offset by Meade, went ageist:

elkh1 said... Clint is really really wobbly old.

Meade said... Clint looks great.

Alex said... Clint looks old and jittery. Remember folks he's 82. When he was in his 40s, it was scary.... Clint is just embarrassing right now. There is a reason for the old folks home and you're seeing it. Shoot me before I ever get like this. Senile.

2 of the long-time conservative commenters picked up the age theme:

Pogo said... Old, jittery, but vicious as hell.

Shouting Thomas said... Unfortunately, Clint is really struggling. Sad to see the great man suffering the humiliation of old age.

Pogo said... No way, ST, he's an elderly man whose body betrays him a bit, but he's hitting a million right notes. Hurrah!

What I liked about Clint's routine — which you had to trust not to feel nervous about — was when he said "We own this country... Politicians are employees of ours... When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go." As I said in this post, this was a play on something Romney said, something that's been used against Romney: "I like being able to fire people." Clint imposed the correct interpretation on that: When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go.

I didn't say much about Romney's speech last night, because I was way too tired by then. Our liberal friend Alex said: "ROmney talking too much about his family and church. Where are the policy initiatives? Obama is going to be speech-ifying policy like crazy next week." (Yeah, lotsa policy wonkery, that would have kept me awake.)

And our liberal Lindsey said: "I just watched Mitten with the sound on...sound on/sound off...same amount of policy specifics. Meade must be in seventh heaven." Oh, she wants policy too. If only they'd have bored us all to tears all week with specifics.

Shouting Thomas continued his lugubriousness:

Romney played small ball. I think that's what we need. He doesn't have an overriding theme, only the promise that he has the technical and managerial skills to lead.

Obama will promise social justice and payoffs to his favored groups.

The debates should be interesting.

Meade responded:

Exactly right. What we need now is boring small ball competence. Time to put obama's failed presidency behind us. Romney will be a fine president.

Lindsey with the liberal lady's focus on sex not baseball had no trouble seeing the opportunity to say:

Well by all appearances, you got a guy with small balls. I was actually hoping that all the non-policy fluff was just to woo the far right but I am now pretty locked into that being all he has. Sad really.

If a man had said something equivalently sexual about a woman, Democrats would cry "war on women." If that kind of rhetoric is okay, we ought to call out Lindsey for her "war on men."

Ah! No spam. Maybe some not-so-admirable comments in there, but nothing robotic, and so Morning on the Althouse Blog continues (i.e., no word verification for commenting). And I just want to say one thing about this supposed lack of policy specifics from the GOP and the implication of Democratic superiority on said specifics. I mean I want to quote something from Paul Ryan's speech:

[President Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. 

It was loaded with specifics.

He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.

Ryan put a long pause between "did" — the action word — and "exactly nothing."

$14.5 million settlement to a brain-damaged boy struck by a baseball hit by a metal bat.

The legal theory was that the metal bat was unsafe because it propelled the ball faster than the old wooden bats.

The ball hit the boy in the chest "at the precise millisecond between heartbeats, sending him into cardiac arrest," and oxygen to the brain was lost for 15 to 20 minutes.

(The linked article isn't completely clear about the different kinds of metal bats. It seems that Little League has been involved in getting metal bats designed to limit their performance to that of wooden bats, so don't assume that this huge settlement means the end of metal bats.)