Mid-Week Musings

We’ll Eventually Have An NBA Champion

Of the Big 4 team sports, the NBA is the one most likely to have its best team crowned as champion once all is said & done. MLB is susceptible to odd results due to small sample size. You never know how decimated by injury an NFL team can find itself come playoff time. And a hot goalie has an outsized impact on a NHL squad’s playoff success. Occasionally a poor matchup can skew results, but as a general rule of thumb true shockers in a series are relatively rare. That’s mostly due to the fact that all series are best of 7; the longer a series the more likely it is that the better squad prevails.

That has its drawbacks. First off, once the best of 5 first round series were jettisoned it decreased the possibility of one of those 8 defeats 1 shockers. The shot of Dikembe Mutombo lying on the floor in joyous disbelief is iconic; the chances of replicating that moment are much smaller now. Worse, the league schedules the games to maximize TV viewership, so there are no weekdays that contain 4 games as there are in weekends. That results in situations in which there can be a break as long as 3 days between games. This makes the first round series drag on forever; they can last as long as 2 1/2 weeks. By the second round the series are generally one day on & one day off, but that first round is endless. Because of that it’s hard for me to feel much of any enthusiasm for the opening weeks of the playoff grind. I’ll check in to see what’s going on, put I rarely pay close attention until it’s conference finals time.

With all of that out of the way, this year’s field is intriguing. So many teams legitimately feel that they should win the whole thing, which will mean there will be multiple franchises feeling devastated following elimination. And that Western Conference is really wide open. The most simplistic rule of thumb for me in trying to figure out what’s likely to happen is to take a look at a team’s road record. It stands to reason that to advance a team needs to have the ability to beat good teams on the road. But the West team with the best road record this year is Sacramento. I respect them for finally breaking their playoff drought, but it’s an unrealistic leap to become a title team in only one year. And their first round opponent is Golden State, who have the worst road record of any team in either the playoffs or the play-in. To use a cliche, throw out the records in this case. I’ll go out on a limb & trust the Warriors’ championship legacy over their poor road record.

On Spoilers

Before I proceed with this section, I assure you all that I will absolutely not spoil a big event that may have occurred in a major television show this past weekend. We’re good? OK, moving on.

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say this. There is so much great TV out there that it’s impossible to keep up with even the shows that are in the forefront of the collective culture. I’m waaaaaaaay behind on soooooo many shows including (name of show redacted.) The obvious drawback is that it often means I hear about major plot developments before I get to actually see it.

Which leads to what happened last weekend & what is proper internet etiquette. On Elon’s Sandbox Sunday evening I suddenly saw multiple people posting similar reactions to what happened on a show. Most of them were fairly vague, but as time went on it became fairly apparent what the plot development was that everyone was referring to, especially once hashtags started popping up. The issue is that this was coming from east coast viewers; those living on the west now all knew that (don’t say it) happened. I’m not sure if there is a way to prevent this; it’s the inherent nature of social media that it lets us share common experiences. One would just hope that people would show better courtesy towards those that are 3 hours behind.

That also leads to the argument about how much time should elapse until it’s safe to be explicit in discussing major plot points from movies & TV shows. I can only imagine that 1941 Twitter users would have had a field day in revealing Rosebud’s identity.

1, 2, 3 Strikes You’re Out!

At bats aren’t speeding by quite as quickly as the Bugs Bunny pace, but they’re not too far off. It’s great to see the game returning to a more ideal flow. I don’t want to overuse the boiling frogs metaphor, so I’ll go with this one instead. It almost replicates the situation of teens sneaking sips out of their parents’ vodka bottles and covering it up by refilling them with water. You may not immediately notice that it’s watered down, but over time as those mischievous kids continue their shenanigans you’ve suddenly got a bottle that’s mostly water. That’s what happened to the game; it had slowed down a bit here & there and it wasn’t until it was too late that we realized it had turned into a 3 hour+ test of endurance. Glad to see that normalcy is back.

We are still in the adjustment period; pitch clock violations do seem to be dropping slightly, so it’s very similar to what has happened in minor leagues that experimented with the new rules. By midseason it had become a nonissue; the new rules were the new norm. In fact, the group that has been having the most issues are the broadcasters. I’ve seen plenty of examples of a pitcher seen in mid windup as the game returns from a commercial break. The announcers have also occasional sounded a bit rushed. Perhaps there’s a station somewhere considering hiring this guy to call games.

Snappy Answers To Stupid Obituaries

Like many men spanning multiple generations (and yes, this is a primarily male phenomenon) I was a longtime faithful reader of Mad magazine. I’m too young to have experienced the initial Harvey Kurtzman era that epitomized pure anarchy, but I was there for its elongated period of cultural relevance, in which the artists and writers affectionately referred to as “the usual gang of idiots” stayed with the magazine for decades. Under the stewardship of William Gaines, who behind his eccentric uncle image was one of the most passionate defenders of the first amendment, they found a perfect sweet spot between middlebrow or lowbrow humor and pure subversiveness. The mag had some amazing talent - Sergio Aragones, Don Martin, Antonio Prohias, Dick DeBartolo, Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, among others. But one name stood out above everyone else, a Most Valuable Idiot if you will. That would be Al Jaffee.

Jaffee just passed away days after his 102nd birthday. I stopped reading Mad years ago, but I was amazed to read that he was still contributing as recently as 2020. Wow. He was well known for his often intentionally disgusting artwork; he loved to draw people vomiting out tiny bones. And his Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions was a reliable laugh getter. What will be best remembered for, however, was clearly the fold-in. It almost felt like a reward for reading the entire issue, knowing that waiting for you would be a clever visual puzzle found on the inside back cover. There was no shortage of reasonably funny people who could come up with good jokes for the assorted parodies found in the magazine; it took a special talent to produce the multi-layered comedy required for a good fold-in. Godspeed to a true legend.

Hope It Was Worth It, Tennessee Legislature

I don’t entirely buy the “sunlight is the best disinfectant” argument, but shining a spotlight on the Tennessee GOP has not done them any favors. The state legislature scored an own-goal in full view of the rest of the nation. In addition to the PR pummeling they have taken, Justin Jones was reinstated to his seat on Monday and he should be a certainty to win his special election. Justin Pearson can be similarly reinstated as early as today. After all that, it will be back to status quo for no reason. And once so much attention was drawn to the chamber we learned that the Tennessee speaker doesn’t even live in the district that he represents.

All this is serving to energize the opposition. Tennessee is currently one of the reddest states in the country, so no one should be under the illusion that things will charge too dramatically, but the expulsions are a prime example of GOP overreach. This kind of nonsense will continue to damage the party brand in states that are not as severely gerrymandered as Tennessee is. Sometimes I feel like I’m living that old bit John Oliver used to do with the “we’ve got him!” button, but the party’s constant slaps in the faces of young voters is not sustainable.

The Grand Finale

Hope everyone is having a great time testing out Substack’s new Notes feature. Could this be what drives a stake through the Twitter heart? Thanks for reading, & we’ll talk again on Friday.