Greatest Song Evah 8/4/23

Up The Junction

Squeeze’s masterpiece, this week’s selection is another song that could be classified as a short story set to music. In a few short minutes we experience the rise and fall of a young couple in love from courtship to the we have no money phase of a marriage to childbirth to the sad breakup. The power of the song is helped to some extent by the fact that although it has a bridge, there’s no chorus. As a result the story constantly propels forward.

It’s the little details in Chris Difford’s lyrics that add up to make this one so special. Some of the specifically English colloquialisms, such as setting aside a tenner, may escape the comprehension of the average American, but it’s easy to get the gist of what’s going on. I love the phrase “little kicks inside her” as a description for a new pregnancy. The jump cut towards the end is a bit jarring. Without warning we’ve moved from true bliss to a painful separation, but the lyric “the devil came and took me from bar to street to bookie” tells us everything we need to know.

Quick fun fact about the video. Glenn Tillbrook and Chris Difford were often branded as the new Lennon/McCartney. This video was actually filmed in Lennon’s old house, the same house where he had filmed the famous Imagine promotional video a few years earlier. What goes around comes around.

A New Era In Football?

One of the largest drawbacks for relatively new sports is the lack of depth. As a sport’s infrastructure gradually builds they are often very top heavy with a wide disparity between contenders and also-rans. This is very noticeable when it comes to women’s team sports on the international level. With a significant number of countries actively discouraging female participation it’s little wonder that in many cases there is still only a small number of dominant national teams, and those tend to be the same countries year after year. International tournaments in women’s ice hockey, whether it’s the Olympics or the world championships, inevitably culminate in a United States/Canada final matchup. Other nations are slowly catching up, but the 2 North American countries have had such a huge head start that the process has been very slow.

Which is why so many of the results in the group stage of the Women’s World Cup have been so refreshing. Gone are the days when some of the early scores resemble the type of blowouts often seen in the NCAA basketball tourney when a 16 seed faces a 1. This time around not only are teams more evenly matched but the usual favorites have had a tough time. Reigning Olympic gold medalists Canada - eliminated. Traditional powerhouse Brazil - eliminated. 2-time Cup champ Germany - eliminated. United States - barely made it into the knockout stage. That result must have made Fox executives wince a bit. Had a shot from Portugal not hit the goalpost Team USA would have been sent home shockingly early. As it was, that placed them second in their group and as a result their round of 16 match will take place mega early Sunday morning rather than in prime time Saturday evening. And even if they defeat Sweden, any possible subsequent games for Team USA are scheduled for the wee hours of the morning. The games still figure to draw good ratings, but they would obviously be much higher if US games were being played at a reasonable hour.

In the long term this is good for the growth of the game. Initially having a dominant squad or two is a good thing; it raises the bar to a high level and forces other teams to raise their game in order to compete. That’s exactly what has happened in soccer. There are a batch of fresh faces still alive as the knockout stage begins, such as Jamaica and Morocco. The American women appear to be extremely vulnerable. Chances are very high that there will be a first time winner this year. Assuming that happens it will have positive long term ramifications. If more countries enter tournaments with legitimate belief that they can win it will continue to raise the tide and lift all boats worldwide.

I’m Starting To Think This Might Not Be The Mets’ Season

Is it too late to take a second look at Carlos Correa’s medical reports? I kid. Correa has struggled this season. It was quite a trade deadline day for the Mets. They made it much less likely that either Max Scherzer or Justin Verlander Will sport Met caps on their Hall Of Fame plaques, and if the just completed series in Kansas City is any indication, it’s gonna be a loooooooooong final 1/3 of the season. The championship drought continues, and I ain’t gettin’ any younger.

In retrospect this season’s failure should not come as much of a surprise. Starting the year with a starting rotation that old was asking a lot and I don’t think everyone understood that the new change of pace rules would have placed a heavier burden on older pitchers. It’s a huge advantage to be young and athletic. Having a mix of veterans and youth is ideal, but the 2023 Mets skewed too heavily towards vets.

Maybe I’ve been sampling the Kool-Aid a bit too much, but as deflating as the great purge has been I’m not completely demoralized. This is nothing las traumatizing as the infamous 1977 trade deadline in which Tom Seaver (and to a lesser extent Dave Kingman) were sent away. It at least sounds like team management intends to field a decent team next season. No, they won’t be a juggernaut but I can envision Billy Eppler and Co. constructing a squad capable of winning 84 games or so. That’s not far from wild card contention, and if a few things go right, who knows what can happen?

I remain very confident in Steve Cohen. The contrast with the Wilpons remains obvious. When they disassembled the 2015 team, the Wilpons thriftiness left them unwilling to pay off any of the remaining contracts of the departing players. As a result they had to settle for third tier prospects in return. Cohen’s willingness to eat money has meant that they have gotten stronger returns. There’s never a guarantee that a prospect will pan out, but they have at least obtained young players with high ceilings as opposed to the Quad-A players (or worse) that the Wilpon era team collected. And can we finally put the Bonilla Day jokes to bed? Compared to what the team will pay Scherzer and Verlander, the Bonilla payment is the equivalent of grabbing a pack of gum at the checkout line.

As for the rest of this season, oof. Getting swept by the inept Kansas City Royals is bad enough, but to lose one game on a walk-off balk? To quote a former New York manager, it’s not what you want. By next month they may be so desperate to find enough pitchers to fill up the staff that they may have to phone Jon Niese’s agent. As a lifelong Mets fan I’ve learned to live with disappointment. I would rank this as one of the 3 most disheartening seasons in my lifetime. It’s one thing to suffer through a losing season such as those from the late 70s when as early as April you knew there was no hope. An awful season that began with so much promise is a bigger gut punch. The other 2 seasons that I would rank as poorly as this one are as follows. 1993 was the culmination of the Worst Team Money Can Buy era with the Vince Coleman firecracker incident and the Bret Saberhagen bleach incident. It wasn’t just a bad team, it was an unlikable one. No lovable losers here. The next year of doom was 2008. The 2007 collapse was one thing. It was stunning to sit through it again the next year. The final month I kept on thinking “I can’t believe they’re actually gonna do it AGAIN!”

I’m not one to blame curses or mojo, but things started to go downhill the moment the black uniforms returned. Burn them now. It’s also clear that when the Wilpons built CitiField they didn’t move the bodies, only the headstones. When the year began I never would have imagined that Kate Upton’s tenure as a Mets wife would not last as long as Anna Benson’s did, but here we are. It will be tough to say LFGM with the same gusto the next 2 months. At least we have Bartolo Colon Day to look forward to.

The New Booth

I used to joke that an NBA team really needs to hire Mark Jackson as coach. Not so much because I want to see him on the sidelines, but because I wanted to get him out of the primary ESPN booth. As an analyst, he’s perfectly adequate but ideally you’d want someone a lot better calling the NBA Finals. When word came out last month that Jeff Van Gundy was being let go as part of a wave of layoffs at ESPN, I was puzzled. Did they mistakenly set loose the wrong guy? (For the record, I like Van Gundy. I just wish he didn’t default so easily into cranky curmudgeon mode. NBA action - it’s fantastic! Stop spending so much time complaining about the product.)

Jackson confirmed earlier this week that he is also out at ESPN, which will give Mike Breen two new partners to work with next season. Which leads me to my second reason why I wanted Mark Jackson to return to coaching. It seemed such a waste to regulate Doris Burke to the #2 team, since she is arguably the best analyst currently working. There are few that can break down a game as well as she can. She of course has her share of haters on The Internets. Gosh, what could it be about her that causes such a visceral reaction from certain corners of the discourse? There must be something about her that’s different from many of her brethren, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s a mystery.

No official word has come out yet, but reports are that Burke and Doc Rivers will be the new analysts that will sit beside Breen. Rivers is an interesting choice. He was in the booth in between his Orlando and Boston coaching gigs, so he’s got broadcasting experience along with a wealth of hoops knowledge. But his speaking voice is really noticeable. Years of screaming on the sideline has taken a tremendous toll on his voice. I’m not sure if there’s a word to accurately describe his tone; scratchy or gravelly sound insufficient. I hope ESPN is supplying him with a bottomless supply of industrial strength throat lozenges.

Rudy Can Fail

With every bit of news concerning Rudy Giuliani, or if you prefer Co-Conspirator #1, my schadenfreude levels rise ever higher. He has easily wrapped up the prestigious honor of Trump’s Most Unhinged Surrogate, which is quite an accomplishment considering that he competes against the likes of Kari Lake and My Pillow Guy.

The phrase America’s Mayor has turned into a punchline, but I do give him credit for his post 9/11 stewardship. He set the proper tone and he made sure to attend as many funerals of first responders as was humanly possible. But that doesn’t make up for the first 7 1/2 years of his time as mayor. Angry, irritable, stubborn, combative, he exemplified so many New York stereotypes but he only succeeded in alienating large portions of the city’s population.

The signs were always there. After falling short in his initial mayoral bid in 1989, one of the events that kickstarted his second campaign was a police rally in 1992 that quickly devolved into vile, racist rants directed towards incumbent Mayor David Dinkins. Following an aborted senate run and a presidential campaign that fizzled, it was little surprise that he tried to maintain relevance by attaching himself to the Trump campaign remora style.

I remember a TV appearance he made early on election night 2016, well before it was evident that the race would turn out much differently than expected. Chris Matthews asked him if he felt proud of himself. It seemed a reasonable question at the time, as by all appearances he had debased his reputation by acting as a hype man for a losing campaign. The joke was on us.

He may have had the last laugh that evening, but it was all downhill from there. He became more of an embarrassment with each passing day. The infamous press conference with the hair dye sweats. The Borat cameo. The disbarments. And of course, Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The man is beyond caricature at this point. Part of me wants to feel a little sympathy for such a fall from grace, but then I remind myself who he is and say “f*** that guy.” The latest cherry on the sundae comes from the transcripts that have been released from his civil assault trial. Thank goodness he led a city that doesn’t have a large Jewish population, otherwise it might have become awkward.

A New Milestone

Finally, last night Diana Taurasi became the first WNBA player to score 10,000 career points. To put that in perspective, Tina Thompson is #2 on the career scoring list totaling just shy of 7,500. That’s practically a Rickey Henderson/Nolan Ryan level gap from leader to runner-up. This year the league increased the number of games per season to 40, so there will be more chances for players to rack up larger career totals going forward. But that huge gap suggests it will be quite some time before anyone approaches Ms. Taurasi’s Neighborhood.

Good Night, Mrs. Calabash

That’s all for now. Have a safe and fun weekend, and see you all again on Monday, same bat channel.