The month of May is nearly gone and a young man's fancy turns to The National Pastime. The NY Fishwrap's resident Op-Ed baseball columnist, Doug Glanville, examines The Show's most forbidden practice: to do something that embarrasses another player (usually on the opposing team). Referred to as "showing [name] up," overt gestures or postures in professional baseball are not appreciated by the target. A batter who mocks a pitcher after hitting a home run will invite "a little chin music" the next time the showboat enters the batter's box, no matter that another pitcher might be on the mound for the other side.
At the other end of today's virtual twin killing, David Sirota rages against the New Gilded Age that finds the Steinbrenner family on the receiving end of public financing for their new Yankee Stadium. Ironically, the most expensive seats in Major League Baseball have been financed by New York City tax dollars. No wonder fly balls are sailing out of right field in the new Yankee Stadium at a record rate. It's that giant sucking sound of a government bailout for the un-neediest family of them all.
If this is a (fair & balanced) call for showing up the crooks in NYC, so be it.
[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] 
Doug Glanville shows up the hot dogs.
[2] 
David Sirota shows up Bloomberg & the Steinbrenners.
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[x NY Fishwrap]
Show Me Up, Show You Up
By Doug Glanville
Tag Cloud of the following article
Under no circumstances should you show up a baseball player. We hold grudges forever and we will find a way to throw it back in your face. It could take a week, it could take 25 years; in fact, just like any other debt, your heirs may have to pay if we don’t get you while you are alive. Still, we will get you, or your trustee.
Sure, it seems petty, but it’s what makes this game go ‘round. Beat me with your fastball or with your timely bunt with two outs in the ninth, and I will tip my cap to you. But do not ever ever, ever show me up.
Showing someone up can take many forms. It could be a self-admiring gesture you make on the field — pretending your hands are six-shooters and firing them off after striking someone out. It could be the way you record an out — you’re pitching, and you field a ball, but instead of throwing to the first baseman, you run over and step on first base unassisted. You could even show up your own teammate — say, you’re playing outfield, an opponent hits a mammoth home run against your pitcher and you don’t even turn and make a courtesy run after the ball, even though you know it’s probably going to break someone’s windshield in the parking lot.
This past week (as if the Giants and Dodgers need any other things to fight about, dating back to their days together in New York and their subsequent escape to California) the San Francisco pitcher Brian Wilson and the Los Angeles third baseman Casey Blake had a misunderstanding. Apparently, Wilson, who is the Giants’ closer (and a fan of the U.F.C.) had engineered a gesture after each save that expresses both his religious inclinations and his dedication to his late father. (My best attempt at describing it would be if you crossed your arms in an “X” with one index finger pointing to the sky.) So should you hit against Wilson, it is quite possible that after a 99 m.p.h. fastball blows by you to end the game, he will turn his back and make a sign you won’t understand — unless you’ve done a little research.
Blake took exception (out of ignorance of the genesis of Wilson’s sign, as he later admitted, although he did not “apologize”) after Wilson blew Blake away with one of his fastballs to save a game recently, and then formed his sign to mark the occasion. According to the “never to expire” grudge rules, if Blake felt he or his team had been wronged, he had infinite time to respond in kind.
But, as sometimes happens in baseball, he only had to wait two sleepless nights.
In the next game, Blake would prevail, smacking a home run off Wilson. Upon returning to the dugout, he imitated Wilson’s symbol. Within minutes, one of Wilson’s buddies used the magic of text messaging to deliver into Wilson’s inbox a photo of Blake sitting on the bench, approximating an ersatz replica of Wilson’s sign.
Wilson was initially angered, but after ranting a bit in the locker room decided that he wanted to move on, and felt no need to further explain his method of expression on the field.
Did Wilson show Blake up, and then did Blake show Wilson up? Was Blake overreacting?
Does it really matter? Not really. You just have to feel shown up to justify recourse. And circumstantial evidence is admissible.
It is important to note that there is little latitude in the world of showing someone up. Players tend to understand that it’s permissible to point to the sky to acknowledge the loss of a loved one, like Bobby Abreu would do after a hit over his entire career. But even those types of gestures have slim room for interpretation, and depend on when, and how emphatically, you exhibit them. It is one thing to get a base hit in the fourth inning and make a quick gesture as you go back to first after making your turn; it’s another to hit a home run and point to the sky all the way around the bases while glaring at the pitcher as if he was the one who put your loved one six feet under.
For the most part, players assume the worst. Wilson decided to express himself after he saved a game. Those tend to be high-octane moments. If you’re a closer (as Wilson is), one pitch can change the fate of the game. Closers usually end up either heroes or goats so they tend to be emotional (let’s exclude the unflappable Mariano Rivera for argument’s sake) and need to release all that tension from living one pitch from the penthouse, one pitch from the outhouse. But opposing teams accept no excuse when it comes to how you release that tension. They don’t want to hear it. Don’t show me up. Period.
Once when I was playing with the Phillies, my teammate Wayne Gomes was pitching after some bad blood had developed over a few days with the Giants. We had intentionally hit Barry Bonds with a pitch earlier that game and there was some glaring and jawing.
Gomes threw a pitch that J.T. Snow deposited into the right field stands. Snow stared at his handiwork for a second, threw the bat around his back as if he was Magic Johnson (it rolled further than the “show up” rules allow) and then took a nice slow trot around the bases. I am sure Snow felt vindicated on behalf of his team, since we had kind of started it. But Gomes was fuming, and after the game, he told any teammate who would listen that if he ever got a chance to face Snow again and struck him out, watch what he will do.
Ah, the beauty of baseball. The next night, Gomes got his wish and he delivered, striking out Snow. All the way in centerfield I could hear Gomes yelling at him — “Sit down! Get out of here!” — as Snow walked toward the dugout. Of course, I am leaving out a few words, but you get the picture.
It was one of the few times a brawl almost started over showing up where no one was hit by a pitch, no one was spiked, there was no contact whatsoever.
Regarding the attitude of Blake and many other players, it would seem you should give a hall pass if a sign is meant for a lost loved one or as an expression of faith. But as my good friend Steve Fiffer puts it, “there becomes confusion sometimes when players have to define separation between church and plate.”
We are baseball players and showing someone up is showing someone up. You don’t have to understand what the other guy was trying to do, you don’t have to forgive and forget, you don’t have to take it with a grain of salt. After all, your ego is at stake, and your looking like a punk will be all over the Internet if you don’t protect your honor.
My son at 11 months old has to understand this about his father when I put his sippy cup on his tray and he sweeps it onto the floor as soon as I turn my back; my dog has to understand this when I try to put her leash on and she bites it in defiance in front of the neighbors; my business partner has to understand this when he interrupts a point I’m making in the middle of negotiating a construction loan.
Baseball players are crazy when it comes to being shown up. So, for you own sake, should you come into contact with a ballplayer, remember to choose your gestures wisely, even if you have a good reason, and understand that you make them at your own risk. ☐
[Douglas Metunwa Glanville is a former professional outfielder who played for the Philadelphia Phillies, Texas Rangers, and the Chicago Cubs. In 2005, with no immediate prospects of joining a major league roster, Glanville signed a one-day minor league contract with Philadelphia, then retired, having collected exactly 1100 career hits. He stated he wanted to leave baseball wearing the uniform of the team that he grew up a fan of, and to which he gave most of his playing career. Glanville flashed a bat in 1999 as he batted .325, and placed second in the league to Luis Gonzalez in hits, with 204, never to hit that well again. But he's always been known for his defense as one of the best outfielders in the National League. Glanville attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in systems engineering. He is one of only five Penn alumni to play in Major League Baseball since 1951.]
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company
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[x Salon]
The House That Taxpayers Built
By David Sirota
Tag Cloud of the following article
Somewhere, likely in a basement, the next great documentarian is scavenging YouTube for clips of congressional inquisitions, Wall Street perp walks, and CNBC rants for a future Oscar-winning film about the times we're living through. I'm hoping this future star calls her film "Wall Street II: Cataclysmic Boogaloo," and more important, I'm hoping she gets footage of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, preferably wearing a top hat and monocle.
Even amid CEO testimony, Bernie Madoff grimaces and Rick Santelli diatribes, nothing better captures the moment's destructive greed than a billionaire politician using the municipal office he bought to defend charging $2,500 a ticket to a new Yankee Stadium he forced the public to finance. If there is a single act showing how kleptocracy and let-them-eat-cake-ism are systemic and local rather than momentary and exclusively federal, Bloomberg turning the House that Ruth Built into the House That Taxpayers Built is it.
Foreign oligarchs use guns to confiscate citizens' wages. American oligarchs rely on government to give theft the aura of legitimacy, and Manhattan's richest man is no exception. As an investigation by Democratic Assemblyman Richard Brodsky documents, Bloomberg used various public agencies to extract between $1 billion and $4 billion from taxpayers and then spent the cash on a new stadium for the Yankees, the wealthiest corporation in sports.
The move followed a Bloomberg-backed 2005 initiative giving infamous investment bank Goldman Sachs $1.6 billion in taxpayer-financed bonds to construct its new headquarters — and amazingly, this encore rip-off is more spectacular. Mimicking tax cheats' deliberately complex transactions, the city owns the stadium, leases it to an agency, which then leases it to a corporate subsidiary, which then leases it to the Yankees. At the end of the Ponzi scheme, the team is permitted to use the taxes it already owes to pay off the mortgage on its new chateau.
New Yorkers might be celebrating if these giveaways delivered verifiable returns to taxpayers. But Brodsky’s report notes that "there is little in new job creation, private investment, or new economic activity" from the expenditure. Taxpayers don't even get affordable seats. According to Newsday, they get a stadium charging the highest ticket prices in baseball — $2,500 for "premium" views (since reduced to "just" $1,250) and $410 for a family of four in the cheap seats.
Like Wall Street firms insisting that trillion-dollar bailouts are a small price for economic stability, Bloomberg justified everything first by saying taxpayers "put next to nothing" into the stadium. (In fairness, a media-mogul mayor who is the planet's 17th wealthiest man may genuinely believe a few billion is "next to nothing" — but, for comparison, it's more than all the devastating cuts to police, firefighting, school and infrastructure budgets that he proposed in his budget.)
Then Bloomberg offered the same laissez-faire paean that financial CEOs cite in opposing executive pay caps. "Don't ever think sports is anything but a business," he said, joining bankers in selectively forgetting that arguments for free-market "business" ring hollow when government is propping up said "business."
If this tale of the House that Taxpayers Built was some anomaly, it might be vaguely funny. But while Bloomberg sets milestones for avarice, the bailout-ism he espouses is the norm.
In Washington, "The Obama administration has broken all records in the distribution of taxpayer dollars to American businesses, primarily banks, automobile manufacturers and insurance companies," reports the Huffington Post. At the local level, lawmakers trip over themselves to throw giveaways at corporate campaign donors.
In the new Gilded Age, socializing risk and privatizing profit has become the standard — as American as General Motors, Bank of America and, yes, the New York Yankees. ☐
[David Sirota attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he earned his bachelor's degree with honors in journalism and political science. Sirota is a political journalist, nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist and bestselling author living in Denver, CO. As one of the only national columnists living and reporting outside of Washington, DC, he is widely known for his coverage of political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America’s political parties. David Sirota is the author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government—And How We Take It Back (2006) and The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington (2008).]
Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
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