I’m currently in line to vote early. I have never experienced a line to vote early before. I don’t know for sure what this means, but my gut tells me it’s not at all good for the incumbent.

I’m lucky my line is entirely indoors. While it is a crisp, sunny day, standing outside would be uncomfortable for any amount of time. Not unbearable, just uncomfortable.

The people in line at the early voting location look like a cross-section of Champaign, Illinois. Some older voters, many in their 30s-40s, but not many young people in their 20s. Behind me is an elderly Asian gentleman. I passed an African-American couple walking out when I walked in. They are all here at this early voting location a half an hour after it opened on the first day it opened.

I’m going to be here for a while.

To no one’s surprise, I will cast my vote for Joe Biden for President of the United States. I was not very political until I was in graduate school, and then it was because I saw my professors scared to death about the ramifications of the first Gulf War. I liked Bill Clinton’s way of presenting and voted for him twice. I don’t remember voting for Gore, but I do remember the craziness of Florida’s hanging chads. I don’t believe I voted again until Obama in ’08, and I’ve voted ever since.

As I’ve gotten older, elections have mattered more. However, this one seems even more critical. The fact that I’m in an early voting line 15 days before November 3 tells me the American electorate feels the same way. The American people are voting and voting early. This feels like a movement.

I have an affinity for “what if” games. If Joe Biden had run in 2016, I think he would’ve beaten Trump. I understand why he did not. Hindsight being 20/20, we would’ve been so much better off with him or Secretary Clinton as President.

As it stands now, I’m happy to vote for Joe Biden. I would’ve been just as delighted to vote for Harris, Warren, Sanders, or any of the Democrats who ran. Ultimately, I’m glad it’s Joe Biden. He is an honest, good man whose life has been marked by tragedy and pain, and he’s used it to bring immeasurable empathy to others. He is exactly who we need at this moment to heal this nation.

He isn’t perfect. He’s a tad bit slower since he ran around the White House as VP. He can be awkward. However, I also see a man ready to take on this job. A man prepared to help champion the next generation of leaders. He’s a bridge. In fact, he might be the absolute perfect personification of a politician we need right now.

Joe Biden will be a fine president. If he has the full House and Senate, I think he can accomplish a great deal of good and begin the healing process. He was not my first choice or even my second choice. He did, however, pick my first choice to be his Vice President and, honestly, heir apparent. He won’t be a transformational kind of candidate the way Barack Obama was, and whoever becomes the first woman president. He’s an old white guy who rides down the interstate at 69 miles per hour and not a tick over. Still, the bottom line is he understands the President’s role and truly understands it isn’t about him at all.

It’s going to take forever to pick up the pieces of these last four years. Joe Biden is the right person to be that bridge to the 21st century. With him at the helm, I see a period of transition into a new progressive government. He will gladly take the hand of the next generation and bring them up the ladder.

A Biden administration will not be a non-stop, runaway train of crisis after crisis. You won’t go to bed wondering what illegal, racist, misogynist, ad infinitum crap he will have pulled overnight. How wonderful it will be to see that haze of melancholy finally burned away.

This country has been ill-served by having Donald Trump as president. We are not better off than four years ago. The world is not better off. And as much as I’d like to not lay the blame solely at the feet of this ignorant, self-serving bully, it’s all his. This moron never wanted to be president. Look at the photos when it was announced he had won. His face says it all: “Oh shit.” He hates every second of being president, and if he could have left somehow without losing face, he would have done it. Not to mention the criminal charges that are just waiting to be unleashed on him on January 20, 2021, at 12:01 EST.

Donald Trump is a horrible person. I can’t even begin to remember all the awful things he’s done since becoming President. He is venal, corrupt, and quite likely a criminal. He should never have gotten close to the nomination, let alone the Oval Office. He’s going to go down as the worst president in the last 50 years and maybe of all time. I literally cried when it was announced he had won in 2016. I might lose my mind if he wins another four years.

I have faith that he won’t.

I have finally finished casting my ballot. The line never got shorter when I was in it and has now grown larger and larger. There is an apparent hunger to make our voices heard. We get to decide between four more years of corruption, criminality, incompetence, maleficence, and white supremacy or four years of the exact opposite. I feel confident in my choice.

I voted for Joe. I hope you do too.

Andy Greene, writing for Rolling Stone, has the story that has just gutted me. Eddie Van Halen has passed away at 65. When I heard the news, I cried.

I love this little tidbit in Greene’s story about what he wanted his guitar playing to do to people.

Were it not for his titanic influence, hard rock after the late 1970s would have evolved in unimaginably different ways. He may not have invented two-handed tapping, but he perfected the practice and introduced it to a mass audience. Yet despite his complete mastery of the electric guitar, he never learned to read music.

 

“I don’t know shit about scales or music theory,” he told Rolling Stone in 1980. “I don’t want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the competition. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should be melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.”

His sound was everything. All the heroes of my youth are leaving, and I’m left with my memories of playing air guitar to “Eruption” and playing “Jump” in my high school “air band.”

My heart goes out to his family and loved ones who lost more than just a rock guitar god.

Will Leitch, writing in his weekly newsletter, had a paragraph that spoke to me directly about this day and age we are living in:

When you are at your darkest moments, when you are exhausted and collapsing and at your wit’s end, remember that continuing to move forward in the midst of all this, continuing to survive and someday tell your story, is courageous. More than anything else, it is strong. Every day is a struggle. But we keep getting up and doing it, regardless. I looked around and saw people fighting their own battles just to get through it. And you know what? Just by picking themselves up and continuing to move forward, they were winning those battles. So am I, I realized. And, dammit: So are you. Be proud of yourself for however you’re handling this. You deserve it. We all do.

Moving forward is the default. We can try and stand still, but the world keeps plodding away second by second into the future.

However, some days I wish I could thrive in the midst of this. I didn’t start making sourdough bread or learn to play the guitar. I didn’t even write more. Still, I’m lucky I have a job, that my family is safe and healthy, that I have food on the table and a warm bed to sleep in. I know I’m one of the blessed who is doing better than so many others. Is it wrong that I wish I’d been doing more?

I’m a writer. Most of the time, I write sales copy for product boxes and websites. I’m a writer and editor of a couple of publications for my company that is also focused on selling not only products but a lifestyle as well. My point is not the company I work for but what I’ve done for decades: write copy that sells.

If I was writing copy for the Biden campaign to help sell the candidate to the American people, the following is what I’d write for an ad. I’d let the graphic designers and videographers take care of the visuals, but this is my voice-over copy. Imagine hearing Joe Biden speak these words:

My fellow Americans… in these last few days before Election Day, and while millions of you are already voting, I’d like to make a new covenant with the American people. This new covenant is predicated on one thing… I will do everything in my power to bring normalcy back to the United States of America. These last three and a half years under this administration have been nothing but normal. And the last six months have been worse. The American people have lost so much. From your workplace being closed, losing employment, losing connections with friends and family. Your health care in the middle of a global pandemic is at risk. Your kids are unable to go to school. Every day, something new comes along to remind us that this is not normal. Donald Trump has no plan to bring back normalcy. He’s pretended we were already there, and look where it got him and his Republican friends. Vote for me, and my administration will do what it takes to get through this crisis together. It won’t happen right away, but it will happen. There will be a morning when the sun is shining on that great city on the hill. Won’t you join me there?

It’s the first draft, but you get the idea.

There’s a tendency to think of crime families in terms of cinematic ones. We call Donald Trump, Jr. “Fredo” as a comparison to the dumbest, most inept of crime family boss Vito Corleone’s sons. The problem with that analogy is Donald Trump isn’t Vito Corleone. The Trumps may be a crime family, but at best they are Fredo. Well, maybe not poor Baron.

If you are looking for a more accurate description of the Trumps, the answer is not in The Godfather , but in The Great Gatsby .

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby is an examination of the perversion of the American Dream and considered a prime example of “The Great American Novel.” As major characters, Tom and Daisy Buchanan do whatever they please, getting several people killed by their indifference or actively causing it. They are horrible people who do horrible things and then simply walk away.

There’s a quote late in the book where our narrator, Nick Carraway, describes Tom and Daisy.

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

These are the kind of people we have in charge. Callous, dismissive, and holier-than-thou. They were contemptuous of people much smarter than them because they believed, mistakenly, that having money made you instantly smarter. It does not. They believed people who contracted this virus were suckers and losers. Perhaps, now they will understand the virus doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, a Democrat or a Republican, or smart or dumb.

Now, we have a deluge of members of this administration testing positive for COVID-19. Some might get seriously ill.

These people dismissed the calls for masks. They actively made fun of people wearing masks. They politicized the very act of trying to minimize the spread of the virus.

They’ve ignored more than 200,000 people who have died of this virus. They didn’t care. They still might not care.

President Trump is in a hospital room at Walter Reed Medical Center and no one knows just how sick he truly is which is a nightmare scenario. His health could quickly take a turn for the worse over the weekend. We don’t know.

Earlier today, I saw a man at the grocery store walking around with a Trump 2020 mask on. Alanis Morissette could not have asked for a better simile of irony. All I could do was shake my head and try hard not to look upon him with disgust.

Barton Gellman, writing in The Atlantic, has the scariest piece on the 2020 Election I’ve read. Entitled,  The Election That Could Break America, it explains a wide variety of tactics the Trump administration and enablers in Congress and states could pursue to create unprecedented chaos on November 3 and the days and weeks after all in an attempt to stay in office. 

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un-certainty to hold on to power.

 

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

There are so many scenarios of what could happen, including the obvious voter suppression but also using the expired consent decree governing “ballot security” operations at polls, deploying the military to “Democrat-run cities” to “protect ballots,” and my personal horror: using hand-picked electors in Republican-controlled swing states to overturn the will of the people. This story, more than any other, made me uncomfortable and a bit frightened. 

I’ve always thought that Trump would never concede. He would fight with everything at his disposal, legal and illegal, to stay in power. As I’ve said in the past, he needs the Presidency to shield him from Federal and State charges that will undoubtedly be presented as soon as possible.

Some of this is going to happen. Probably not all. Hopefully, not enough to cause a real constitutional crisis. It is smart to be ready when this comes down. I believe the Democrats are lined up to fight the disruptions and the legal issues. Reading the story makes me feel like there’s going to be a real fight for the future of our country. Don’t lose confidence in the democratic process.

And vote.

WASTED OPPORTUNITY

I’ve never read a Bob Woodward book. I haven’t seen All the President’s Men. However, I do know you don’t speak to Bob Woodward and think you are going to “beat” him at his game. Everyone always says something stupid. Donald Trump is no exception.

I’m sure you’ve read or heard the quotes from Donald Trump as he sat with Bob Woodward for a book that will ultimately be more fuel to the fire that is this bonfire of an administration. The only thing I learned is that Trump is far worse than I feared. I already knew he was nothing more than a con artist, misogynist, and racist pig. His handling of this pandemic was bad enough when I believed he was just too stupid to understand the dangers of the virus and did the worst possible things. Now, everyone knows that he did know how bad the virus would be but did nothing. Much worse.

The thing is… I don’t really care that Woodward saved the material for his book. What I wanted him to do was release the audiotapes in late October. Imagine if he would have simply released the quotes in print. Promote the book as factual. “These are the words of the President.” Watch the Republicans and Fox News hanger-ons scream Fake News and bleat that Trump would never have said any such thing. Always and continue to say these are the President’s words. Stand firm.

Then on Halloween, release the audio.

Can you imagine the outrage in having to scramble against these actual quotes from Trump tearing through the media cycle? Right before the election?

They didn’t do this because Woodward and his publisher weren’t trying to take down a corrupt President. I seem to recall a time when that was what made Bob Woodward famous.

Wouldn’t it have been fun to do it again? We’ll never know.

In the summer of 1981, I turned 13. My life revolved around comic books, Star Wars, and KISS. I’m pretty sure my brain would have exploded if I had heard about Halyx.

Live From the Space Stage — A Halyx Story is a crowd-funded documentary about a band that only existed for one summer, but what a band. A spectacularly weird concept that might have really been something if things had turned out differently. Just imagine if their first album masters wouldn’t have been trashed? What if “Hey There Boys” was slipped to a few rock stations? What if?

Watching this incredible documentary, I longed to be 13 and living in the shadow of Disneyland. I always wondered what it would have been like growing up where a major amusement park was located. Season tickets would have been a forgone conclusion. If I had been 13 and stumbled onto this band, I’m positive I’d be just like Rick Damigella, who opens the documentary.

Mind blown. Hooked for life.

Matthew Serrano’s film made me tear up and feel a longing for something I never experienced. I would love it if somewhere out there, a full concert show existed, and it was posted to YouTube.

If had a time machine, there are lots of places I’d want to visit and experience. Seeing a Halyx show would be one of the top ten.

I am beyond frustrated with the willfully ignorant. Those who don’t want to understand the reasons for protests highlighting grave injustices always say the same things: “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” or “black on black crime is bad so why do we need to care about black lives now?” They choose to be ignorant. There is no self-reflection happening. They already know they are morally superior, so when they see these things happening in society they justify it all away. “He was going for a weapon” or “It was self-defense.”

No. No, it wasn’t. It was murder.

The fact that they can’t see that because it makes them uncomfortable or it shatters their self-worth is pathetic.

There is no need for me to dig deep and figure out where this comes from. I don’t need to know that they were born in a small town with little to no diversity. I don’t need to know that they have never traveled outside of their country let alone much past a hundred-mile radius of that small hometown. I don’t need to know that they don’t have any non-white, non-Judeo-Christian, non-heteronormative friends. It is painfully obvious in their responses when they say, “all lives matter” or any of the other similar refrains from scared white people.

They are racist.

It is frustrating to read people’s social media and email regurgitating the talking points of a propaganda machine. Those people are hearing what they want to hear: you should be scared, you should be aggrieved, you should be prepared because the black and brown people are coming to take your jobs/women/guns/etc. The willfully ignorant lap it up like a bad dog eating their own poop. It is far removed from reality, but they don’t care. It is the reality they prefer to live in no matter who gets hurt so long as it isn’t them and theirs.

They are racist when they tell NBA players to “shut up and dribble” and when they tell college athletes they shouldn’t peaceably march for Black Lives Matter.

They. Are. Racist.

I know they don’t think they’re racist. They think the way they think because they were taught this was right and proper. Everyone around them in their tiny little bubble thinks the same way. Well, the bubble is about to be popped.

It isn’t hard to figure out why these people feel emboldened to say the quiet part out loud. They have a role model and enablers ready and willing to tell them all of those things they believe but knew deep down inside they shouldn’t say were now okay to spring forth like a broken sewage gate. Because Donald Trump is a racist who says racist things on the regular, they’ve decided it’s fine and dandy to express themselves in the exact same way.

I would have thought by now when racist people express racist thoughts and feelings in the age of cell phone video cameras and they subsequently lose their jobs, their friends, and their families, they’d learn their lesson. Apparently not. In fact, you might instead get rewarded for it.

If you point guns at protestors walking down your street, you will a.) make the news, b.) get charged with a felony and c.) get invited to the Republican National Convention to spread more fear and racism. If you don’t find this repugnant, I don’t want to know what would.

Racism isn’t going to go away if Joe Biden wins the Presidency and neither will police brutality.

However, it would be a step in the right direction.

At least we’d have someone in the Oval Office who gave a damn about systemic racism and police brutality. I’d like to think being empathetic to their cries might move someone to take action to stop it instead of stoking the flames of civil unrest.

Maybe I’d be a little less frustrated all the time.

Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine, would like to talk about how unprecedented it was for NBA players to simply go on strike.

What was so powerful on Wednesday afternoon — after the Milwaukee Bucks announced that they weren’t going to play their first-round NBA playoff game against the Orlando Magic to demand accountability for the shooting of Jacob Blake, which led to cancellations of the rest of the NBA and WNBA games and several MLB and MLS games — is that sports actually stopped. They stopped! World War I, a pandemic, and now police violence: It takes a lot for this to happen.

 

It was jarring and disorienting: Wait, there’s no game? They’re just … not playing? We had slowly adjusted to a COVID-induced absence of sports, but this felt different: This felt like a needle sliding off the record. And that it felt so reality-bending is why it was entirely necessary. It is one thing to take a knee during the national anthem as way to protest police brutality toward Black people — considering that doing so got Colin Kaepernick banned from the NFL and turned the act of bending down slightly into the most white-hot political stance imaginable, it’s fair to say that was a pretty big thing. But to say, “We have been pushed so far that we are no longer going to play this game” — something that is essentially unprecedented in the history of sports — is a jaw-dropping moment. And yet, now that it’s happened, it feels like it was inevitable. In fact, it’s a little surprising it took this long.

Sports stopping is a wake-up call. As much as I wanted sports back, here are those athletes stepping up and saying there are more important things than sports. 

And that will be with us for a long time.

Seth Godin is on a roll. This time he’s explaining, in simple terms, no matter what you say or think or make up, the virus doesn’t give a shit about what you say or think or make up.

All of us are good at rationalizing. It helps us process the world, navigate our choices and live with ourselves.

But gravity doesn’t care if you got a lot of sleep last night or not. It’s still the same amount of force.

The pavement doesn’t care if you always wear a helmet on your bike, except just this one time when you didn’t, because you were having a video taken.

Melanoma doesn’t care that you always wear sun screen, except that one day when you were really busy and couldn’t go back to the house for it.

Outside forces don’t care about the situation, because they have no awareness or memory. They simply are.

Newton’s law doesn’t care that you were really distracted and that’s why you weren’t wearing a seatbelt, and the virus that infected your friend doesn’t care about why that person in the office decided not to wear a mask, either.

People are very good at stories. That’s our core technology. Everything else in the world, though, has no interest in them.

Smart.

Anti-science is no way to go through life, son

Here’s how the United States is going to beat COVID-19–Coronavirus saliva tests. Meryl Kornfield, writing in The Washington Post, outlines how this got started and how it will work moving forward.

As the United States grapples with building testing capacity to meet the growing demand as people resume going to school and work, officials have placed their hopes on several solutions, including saliva testing. Because the test doesn’t require chemical reagents or swabs that have become scarce during the pandemic and offers a faster turnaround than the standard test, some believe it could offer the country a way to determine the spread of the virus quickly.

These tests, developed at Yale University and the University of Illinois, are pretty amazing. I know nearly first hand because my wife is employed at Illinois and my step-daughter is an incoming freshman. They’ve been tested multiple times and the experience was painless and fast. They get their results in just a few hours. 

Illinois is leading the way. 

One of the research groups is led by Martin Burke, a chemist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has already launched a similar saliva test he developed at the university’s campus to screen more than 50,000 students, faculty and staff members. The test’s quick turnaround time has allowed the school to reach its goal of 20,000 tests per day, or its aim to test students twice per week, Burke told The Post.

 

Millions of students are returning to college campuses this fall, and some have already been sent home because of outbreaks. As schools have wrestled with implementing coronavirus precautions and screening, Burke believes the speed and affordability of the saliva test could be scalable for others — if they have the availability of a lab. Frequent testing would can guarantee an infected person is notified and quarantined promptly before passing the virus to peers.

 

Illinois students can go to one of 40 testing stations across their campus, self-administer the test and get their results on a university-created app within three to five hours, Burke said. The school retrofitted its veterinarian laboratory to handle screening the student population. Burke hopes the capacity will be expanded to offer testing to other people off-campus.

No other campus has anything even close to this level of sophistication. Plus, the news just came down that the Illinois rapid saliva test for COVID-19 is now operating under FDA Emergency Use Authorization. The University isn’t messing around.

When these tests get implemented nationwide, we will finally be able to test and track on a massive scale. Once we understand the spread and can start isolating people, then we can slowly ramp up reopening on a more scientific footing and start the real recovery.

Maybe we’ll have in-person sports, concerts, and movies too. Wouldn’t that be nice?

#LETSMAKEHISTORY

I am shocked that Ayo Dosunmu is coming back to Illinois Basketball for his junior season. It is a dream come true for Illini fans.

With Ayo back and Kofi Cockburn of Big Ten Freshman of the Year accolades coming back (hopefully… please…), plus two senior leaders in Trent Frazier and Da’Monte Williams, plus ready-to-break-out-of-his-sophomore-slump Giorgi Bezhanishvili, and two top-50 freshmen in Adam Miller and Andre Curbelo, aaaaaaaaand two transfers who sat out last season (Austin Hutcherson and Jacob Grandison) this team has more than Sweet Sixteen dreams or Elite Eight dreams or even Final Four dreams… this team wants to win a National Championship.

It’s what Ayo said he wants. “Since a kid, I’ve been working. My dream is to play in the NBA, but first I need that national championship,” Dosunmu said in a video announcing his return to the University of Illinois.

Making it to the Final Four is an incredible achievement and there are lots of teams pushing towards making the Tournament and going on a run. This upcoming college basketball season, Illinois has a real, legitimate shot at doing it. 

If there’s a college basketball season.

Last season, COVID-19 derailed the team’s dream of just getting back to the NCAA Tournament. Even though the trajectory was going up when the crisis hit, everything stopped. It was a profound disappointment not to hear their name being called on Selection Sunday. 

As a fan of Illinois athletics, I have an almost desperate need to see sports come back. Admittedly, even more so this particular upcoming season because both the football and basketball programs are going to be good. Really good. Really, really good.

And then there’s this virus.

If everyone would just do their part and wear a mask, socially distance, and continue to wash their hands, this country would knock back the spread and maybe get to have bars and restaurants open safely. Maybe we’d get concerts and weddings back. Maybe we’d get all the sports back. Maybe we’d have a college football season and a college basketball season.

In the meantime, I’m going to bask in this wave of happiness and hopefulness I’m feeling. There happens to be an orange and blue hue to it.

Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis might be one of the greatest speeches he’s ever given. It was political in a way that honored the civil rights achievements Lewis strived for during his life and challenged everyone to continue. His words were incredibly powerful.

If politicians want to honor John, and I’m so grateful for the legacy of work of all the Congressional leaders who are here, but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero. You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute. But John wouldn’t want us to stop there, trying to get back to where we already were. Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better.

By making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance.

By adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are someone who is working in a factory, or you are a single mom who has got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot.

By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C. and in Puerto Rico. They are Americans.

By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering — so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around.

And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.

Keep your eye on the ball

Here’s a guest post by my friend Grant Chastain. While not really a direct response to The Asterisk Season, it was his unvarnished thoughts on the current state of baseball. He graciously allowed me to present it here.

==

Baseball is a pastime that’s almost entirely about tradition.  That’s why there are still people complaining about lights for nighttime games at Wrigley, much less the Jumbotrons they’ve got in right field.  It’s why we’re still debating the purity of the Designated Hitter.  No other sport values verisimilitude the way that baseball does.  Not just values it, or appreciates it — baseball actively REQUIRES it.  Every single fan and pundit-related argument about the sport for the past 30 years has been in the service of keeping the venerated old wheat and separating it from the new-fangled chaff.  And yet it’s not annoying, and doesn’t seem like it’s pandering to an aging audience.  Every single fan of the sport that enters each stadium knows what they’re going to get when they arrive.

That’s also how you know that Rob Manfred doesn’t GET baseball.  It’s supposed to be more than just salvaging a season, or seeing if you can save 30 ownerships a few shekels as we watch 2020 go down the drain.  We all suspected he didn’t get it when he referred to taking back the 2017 trophy from the Astros a futile gesture because “you’d just be taking back a piece of metal.”  But railroading a 60-game season down the throats of the MLBPA without player buy-in just proves it.  Rob Manfred’s not a baseball man that happens to deal in numbers, like Bud Selig or Fay Vincent were.  Rob Manfred is a NUMBERS man, that happens to deal in baseball.

Baseball Men can keep their jobs if they’re qualified, because they’re hard to come by.  But Numbers Men?  Numbers Men are all around us.  And you know what happens when a Numbers Man can’t produce numbers?  He gets shown the door.  And that’s as true in any business as it is in Major League Baseball.  Manfred’s got no pedigree to keep his job aside from his promise that he’ll Bring Up Those Numbers.  And that’s why he’s pushing for a season, regardless of risk, or value, or any other factor.

I hope this season doesn’t happen, but I suspect it will.  And of course I’ll watch.

I’m a Baseball Man.

Jeff Passan and Jesse Rogers, writing at ESPN, start their baseball story like this:

Major League Baseball plans to hold a 60-game season that will begin around July 24 but first needs players to sign off on a health-and-safety protocol and to pledge to arrive at home stadiums by July 1 to prepare for the season, sources familiar with the situation told ESPN.

It is my firm belief there is no way the players are going to sign-off on whatever the health and safety protocols are going to be. Why? Because there is a GLOBAL PANDEMIC OUTSIDE AND IT’S NOT GOING AWAY!!!

Sorry. Didn’t mean to yell right there, but sometimes you have to make your voice heard.

Everyone seems to underestimate the danger COVID-19 brings to people. You might be a lucky one who gets it, gets over it, and moves on. You might not be. And if you have a compromised immune system or other underlying health concerns, you don’t want to get this virus.

Will Leitch in New York Magazine has written about the terribleness of this moment in time concerning sports and, specifically, baseball.

I learned to love sports because I loved baseball first. I’ve written books about it, and I spend weeks every year visiting stadiums around the country. My taciturn, midwestern father and I talk about baseball in a way that we’ve never been able to talk about anything else. And I’ve afflicted my 9-year-old son with this disease. Three months into all this, he still comes upstairs every morning to ask me if I know when baseball is coming back yet. I write about baseball professionally, for this publication and several others, including MLB.com itself. I had a few pieces in the World Series program last year, and seeing my name and my words that close to my favorite sporting event on the planet has the 7-year-old version of me doing backflips. An alarmingly high percentage of the most memorable moments of my life involve baseball in some way, shape, or form. This is my sport.

Baseball is my sport too. In fact, it’s my family’s sport. My Uncle Tom was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals and played in their minor league system. My Uncle John chose to pursue a family instead of joining his teammates at spring training for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I have two other cousins who played professionally, but never really made it past A ball. John and Tom became coaches, scouts, and raised their families. My Dad learned baseball from his older brothers and was often a coach for my brother and me.

For me, there is nothing more energizing than to sit and watch a Major League Baseball game with my Dad and my brother (an excellent college player and coach himself) and talk about what’s happening on the mound, behind the catcher’s glove, and in the dugouts. I love watching my nephew throw his wicked curveball and make hitters look ridiculous.

Baseball is my family’s sport.

I want baseball back, just to have a small taste of something nostalgic and normal. Baseball is not boring to me. Each pitch changes the trajectory of the game. It’s something new each time. New and old.

I love that game 32 is meaningful and also not meaningful in a long 162 game season. A relaxing afternoon of watching pitch and catch can be soothing to me. It can be as restorative as sleep, a deep meditation with the smells of freshly cut grass, leather, and sunflower seeds. A 60 game season is a sprint. Nothing is relaxing or soothing in it. A season like this will be here and over so fast no one will care except billionaire owners trying to staunch operating losses in the millions.

Most importantly, what if there’s a horrible outbreak of COVID-19, and the shortened season is cut short again? Who do we blame? What if an athlete or coach dies because of this? I don’t need baseball that much. Do you?

There should not be baseball played in 2020. I think the players will reject the protocols. I think if a majority vote to report and play, several stars of the game will sit this season out. It’s not safe. Nothing has changed.

If there’s any season, fans won’t take it seriously. It will be a full asterisk season. The only fans who will care will be the ones of the team that wins the World Series.

And it will still be the asterisk season, and it will still be meaningless.

Baseball during the time of COVID-19

Mark Feinsand, writing for MLB.com, has outlined the Major League Baseball official announcement of a 60-game regular-season schedule to begin on July 23 and 24.

MLB has submitted a 60-game regular-season schedule for review by the Players Association. In order to mitigate travel, the schedule would include 10 games for each team against its four divisional opponents, along with 20 games against the opposite league’s corresponding geographical division (for example, the AL East will play the NL East, and so on). […]

 

The designated-hitter rule will be used in both leagues in 2020, part of the league’s health and safety protocols for this season.

I’m really surprised the health and safety protocols passed inspection by the player’s association, but here we go. Putting that aside and the what-ifs of players/coaches contracting the virus and what that could mean for a club, this seems… fine. I still think they should have canceled the season, but I’m not the one with millions of dollars on the line.

The new rules are a bit of a trip. I hate the runner on second to start extra-inning games, but it won’t be carrying over to the 2021 season. However, the DH, which I don’t really hate, most definitely will. No more pitcher’s batting. I suspect that’s a good thing.

Masks in the dugout? Whatever. 

Also, am I missing if fans are going to be permitted inside the stadiums? Maybe for just the playoffs?

Seth Godin on Juneteenth —

Today is Juneteenth, a holiday that should be more widely observed.

It doesn’t mark the date of Lincoln’s proclamation that freed the slaves, nor does it occur on the day that the 14th amendment was passed. Both were overdue and urgent and important steps forward. Instead, it commemorates the day that a last group of slaves (outside of Galveston, TX) heard that they had been freed years earlier.

 

Holidays are symbols. They can cause us to pause for celebration or grief, for togetherness or simply to smile. Holidays are worth recalling because they give us a chance to connect and recommit to an idea that matters to us. This is a holiday about freedom delayed.

 

Change is hard, but delaying what’s right is toxic. Today we can remember just how much we have to do and realize the ability each of us has to see and alter the systems around us. Not simply today, but every single day. A chance to make things better.

I will admit that I did not know about this holiday until recently. I’ve been doing my best to educate myself better. I hope you do too.

The other day, in a phone call with my parents about my weekend, I said, “I was enjoying my white privilege painting my front porch.” I was trying to make a joke, but my wife pointed out that it sounded like I was being a dick. It made me pause and reconsider.

I am about to turn 52. I was born in the middle of the year everyone is referencing now, . My life began in central Illinois, a couple of hours away from major cities like Chicago, St. Louis, or Indianapolis. My upbringing included all the privileges, blinders and biases that come with being a white kid growing up in small town America.

Today there is real rage and I can understand it, but I’ll never share in it. The closest I can get is to mourn for the families of George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and so many others. I can point to places online to help foster support such as these two articles, “ How to Support the Struggle Against Police Brutality “ and “ 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice. “ I can try and make a difference in my own life and one of the most simple ways is with understanding, listening, and challenging myself.

I decided I needed to do more reading about the situation and see things from a different perspective. I’m sure there are plenty of better writings, but these were the ones that caught my eye, no doubt, due to their authorship.

The first thing I read was this editorial by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar :

Yes, protests often are used as an excuse for some to take advantage, just as when fans celebrating a hometown sports team championship burn cars and destroy storefronts. I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.

Then I found one by Arnold Schwarzenegger:

We can do better. We have to be willing to listen, to learn, to look in the mirror and see that none of us is perfect. We have to be willing to see one another as Americans, and not as enemies. We have to be willing to sit down and do the hard work of reform without worrying about stupid party lines.

I’m ready to listen and work to make America better every day. Are you?

George Clooney , writes a piece that ultimately has the right solution.

The anger and the frustration we see playing out once again in our streets is just a reminder of how little we’ve grown as a country from our original sin of slavery. The fact that we aren’t actually buying and selling other human beings anymore is not a badge of honor. We need systemic change in our law enforcement and in our criminal justice system. We need policymakers and politicians that reflect basic fairness to all of their citizens equally. Not leaders that stoke hatred and violence as if the idea of shooting looters could ever be anything less than a racial dog whistle. Bull Connor was more subtle.

This is our pandemic. It infects all of us, and in 400 years we’ve yet to find a vaccine. It seems we’ve stopped even looking for one and we just try to treat the wound on an individual basis. And we sure haven’t done a very good job of that. So this week, as we’re wondering what it’s going to take to fix these seemingly insurmountable problems, just remember we created these issues so we can fix them. And there is only one way in this country to bring lasting change: Vote.

Finally, today Barack Obama decided to weigh in on things. It’s so nice when an adult speaks:

I recognize that these past few months have been hard and dispiriting — that the fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and hardship of a pandemic have been compounded by tragic reminders that prejudice and inequality still shape so much of American life. But watching the heightened activism of young people in recent weeks, of every race and every station, makes me hopeful. If, going forward, we can channel our justifiable anger into peaceful, sustained, and effective action, then this moment can be a real turning point in our nation’s long journey to live up to our highest ideals.

Let’s get to work.

Yes. Let’s do this.