Today’s Thoughts

The Outsiders - Center Field

So many of the most iconic players in baseball history played center field. Mays. Mantle. Griffey. DiMaggio. You can even go back as far as Cobb & Charleston & Speaker. It’s no surprise that center is well represented in the Hall of Fame. In a quirk of timing, there were several players of recent vintage who had the misfortune of becoming one and dones on the BBWAA ballot simply because they came on at the precise moment when the ballot was stacked. I’ll give some of these guys their just due on my ranking of the top 10 center fielders not in the HOF. They were all better players than Torii Hunter, who has been able to stay on the ballot simply because it’s lighter than it was a few years ago.

1. Dale Murphy (121 OPS+, 46.5 bWAR)

2. Bernie Williams (125, 49.6)

3. Cesar Cedeno (123, 53.1)

4. Jim Wynn (129, 55.8)

5. Kenny Lofton (107, 68.4)

6. Jim Edmonds (132, 60.4)

7. Brett Butler (110, 49.7)

8. Amos Otis (115, 42.8)

9. Dom DiMaggio (111, 33.5)

10. Vada Pinson (111, 54.2)

It took a while for Dale Murphy to find his feet, but once he did he went on an outstanding 7 year run, leading the Braves to their first division title in more than a dozen years, winning back to back MVP awards, with a 30-30 season thrown in to boot. He was also considered one of the most admirable men in the game. He declined rapidly in his early thirties, which prevented him from reaching the statistical milestones that tend to impress voters. The Core Four branding always bothered me a bit, because it diminished Bernie Williams’ contributions to the Yankees 4 titles in 5 years run. He was left out of that clique because he was a few years older than the other 4, but he was a vital piece of each of those championships, which could not be said about Jorge Posada. A clutch run producer, he was as consistent as they came.

Cesar Cedeno was a victim of raised expectations. Hyped as the next Mantle, he wasn’t that, partially because playing in the Astrodome harmed his home run numbers. But he was a doubles/stolen base machine, as well as a spectacular defensive center fielder. By the time he turned 30, his production was already drastically plummeting, and he had, shall we say, off the field issues. (Google him.) The Astrodome also did a number on Jim Wynn’s home run totals. He was almost a precursor to more modern sluggers; his batting averages were low but he had such a keen batting eye that his on base percentages were top notch. Plus, The Toy Cannon was an all-time great nickname.

Kenny Lofton was one of the fastest men in the game and arguably baseball’s premiere leadoff hitter of the 90’s. At a time when virtually the entire league was racking up massive home run totals, Lofton was a real throwback. Jim Edmonds made several catches that show up on highlight reels to this day, and he was also an ideal middle of the lineup hitter.

Even more than Lofton, Brett Butler was a throwback player. He had no power, but he had every other necessary tool. He was an outstanding base runner, an above average fielder, and quite possibly the best bunter of the last 40 years. Amos Otis is one of those players whose name makes Mets fans of a certain age wince, one of many promising young prospects traded away in a futile attempt to acquire a third baseman. He was one of the top stars on the perennially contending Royals teams from 1976-1981, finishing in the top 10 of the MVP vote 4 different times.

Dom DiMaggio’s career was relatively brief, mostly due to his missing 3 years during World War II. Overshadowed both by his brother and by some of his Red Sox teammates, he had his best seasons after 1947, leading the AL in runs scored twice and stolen bases once. Vada Pinson was a guy whose baseball card attracted my notice every year. By the time I was a fan, he was the type of veteran player who got a lot of playing time yet was essentially league average. His career totals were still impressive, because he put up some huge numbers as a young player in Cincinnati. The Vada Pinson that I saw play was nowhere near the Vada Pinson who was a stat machine in his peak days.

That leaves me with right field as the final position to cover next week.

Classic SNL Recap - Season 12, Episode 9

I’m calling an audible here, no pun intended. I usually watch the midseason episode, but in this case the episode in question was hosted by Paul Shaffer. I assume it was very music heavy, because the Peacock edit was less than 30 minutes long. Going forward I want to stick with ones that last at least a half hour, so instead I’m going with the previous episode, co-hosted by Joe Montana & Walter Payton.

Shows hosted by sports stars are often shaky. These people are professional athletes, not seasoned comedy performers. That means we will often see stiff line readings. I remember reading an interview with Lorne Michaels decades ago in which he said that an athlete hosted episode usually result in an easy week. They know they’re out of their element, so they surrender themselves to the atmosphere, and the similarities between listening to coaches and to directors make for smooth sailing. The trade off is the aforementioned stiffness. Montana and Payton had that, but they also had the benefit of some stellar material, including an all-time classic sketch.

This episode ran on the eve of Super Bowl XXI, a game in which both men would have rather been playing, but they made do. Montana did the monologue, which was funny, but a tad uncomfortable when viewed through a modern lens. The Giants obliterated the 49ers in the playoffs a few weeks earlier, knocking Montana out of the game with a concussion. He joked about that, saying that he is fully recovered. The audience applauds, and the noise makes Montana rub his temples. He then restarts the monologue, once again assuring all that is OK, and yet again the noise reboots his brain & he starts from scratch a third time. Knowing what we know now about head trauma in football, that gag is a lot less funny than it was in 1987.

Following one of the many perfectly produced commercial parodies in which Phil Hartman starred - this one for the Adobe, a car made out of clay - the spotlight sketch featured Montana & Payton appearing on Church Chat. The Church Lady predictably denounced the sport, but I got a kick out of the way each man described the position they play. Montana said that as a quarterback he attempts passes to a tight end, & if it’s long enough they score. Payton said that his job as a running back is to penetrate any opening that he can find.

There was an amusing sketch in which Kevin Nealon played a hostage constantly attempting, and failing, to overpower his captor. “OK, I give, I give.” Repetitive after a while, but good for a laugh or two. Payton also met famous liar Tommy Flanagan, and tried to get in a good fib himself.

There was one sketch this week which stood out above all others. It starts off with a standard joke. Hartman has brought his date Jan Hooks back to his apartment and is trying to close the deal. It has the standard format of a voiceover revealing what the characters are actually thinking. They are interrupted as Hartman’s roommate Stu, played by Montana, arrives home at just the wrong time. He is introduced as a sincere guy who always says what’s on his mind. It culminates with one of the best closing punchlines in SNL’s long history.

This was another strong episode in a season that was filled with them. Because the musical performances are not included in the Peacock versions, there’s usually no need to mention them but I do want to acknowledge that this week’s musical guest was Debbie Harry. This was when Blondie was on a hiatus & she was working on what was a very fine solo career but she just couldn’t break out of the college/alternative radio box. In addition in this season most episodes would close with a performance by Buster Poindexter singing with the SNL band; this was the era in which G.E. Smith led the house band. Next week; the season finale - hosted by Dennis Hopper.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of SNL… There has been a lot of online chatter over who should portray Tim Walz and JV (sic) Vance next season. Kudos to Steve Martin for politely turning down the Walz role when it was offered to him. Some of you may have noticed that the cast of the show is huge. Get someone from that group to play the 2 roles. Hell, physical resemblance isn’t even necessary; when Chevy Chase portrayed Gerald Ford they didn’t have even pretend to make him look or sound like Ford. Yes, JV Vance appears to be the role that Zach Galifianakis was born to play, but it shouldn’t be difficult to find someone already in house to apply the guyliner and make goo goo eyes at a couch.

More Olympic Thoughts

A big part of these Games has been the ability to see so many GOAT level athletes add more entries onto their lists of accomplishments. It doesn’t even necessitate the success that Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky had this year. Their legacies would have sufficiently secure regardless of what happened in Paris. There were other greats who didn’t leave Paris with more gold, but still had the opportunity for a final curtain call on the world stage. Brazilian legend Marta is considered by many to be history’s greatest female footballer; the only thing missing in her career is Olympic gold. Brazil fell just short once again, winning silver, but she has nothing to be ashamed of. Another all-time great without an Olympic gold is Aussie Lauren Jackson, who has been retired for so long that she has been a member of the Naismith Hall of Fame since 2021. She came back for one more run, and provided some valuable bench minutes in their run to bronze. There was no such luck for Jamaican sprint legend Shelly-Anne Fraser-Pryce. How long has she been a star? Her first gold came in the same 2008 games which introduced Usain Bolt to the world. This was to be her final Olympics, but she withdrew from the 100m with a hamstring injury, and was not able to compete in the relay either. No “victory lap” for her. (There was apparently a brief hubbub between security and both Fraser-Pryce and Sha’Carri Richardson. It seems that because neither arrived at the stadium on the athletes’ shuttle, they were forced to use a different entrance to the stadium, which caused enough of a delay that they did not have sufficient warmup time. That is part of the reason why Fraser-Pryve withdrew; she didn’t feel confident that her hamstring would hold up if she have that crucial time to warm up.)

Those long runs for certain individuals demonstrates how much better things are without the restrictions on professionalism. In olden times before Olympians could make a living in their sports the greatest champions were often limited to two Olympic cycles, sometimes even just one, before they needed to get on with their lives. Now we as fans have the pleasure of seeing some of our favorites return for multiple Olympiads. To use just one example, if he could have, would Mark Spitz have stuck around long enough to win as many career golds as Michael Phelps eventually did? We’ll never know, but it’s comforting to know that we can look forward to seeing so many of the featured athletes from these Olympics once again four years from now in Los Angeles.

Speaking of which, one of Ledecky’s accomplishments this year was her breaking of the record for most career medals by an American female. The previous leaders were a 3-way tie among fellow swimmers Jenny Thompson, Dara Torres, and Natalie Coughlin. I always felt that Coughlin got short shrift. She was constantly overshadowed by others. Not just from Phelps, but her greatest year was in 2008, which was the year in which Torres competed & won medals as a 40 year old, a significant feat but which wound up sucking a lot of oxygen away from Coughlin. Give Coughlin her due as a great champion.

Staying in the pool I had recently mentioned that diving analyst Cynthia Potter unexpectedly retired in the middle of the Olympics. Another long time Olympic voice is also retiring, but this time we got a heads up. Rowdy Gaines announced that the 2028 Los Angeles games will be his final broadcast. He is quite possibly the single most identifiable voice in an Olympic broadcast booth. His excitement is palpable, he makes his love for the sport so apparent, and when a race is exciting enough his voice reaches an octave so high that it doesn’t seem possible that it can come from a human larynx. (If I have one wish it would be that somehow Gaines and Gus Johnson could call an event together. It doesn’t even need to be swimming, it could be anything. It would be history’s most enthusiastic booth.) I love NBC’s introduction of the Rowdy Cam, so that the viewers can see how bananas he acts as he’s calling a race. The Olympics won’t be quite the same once he has left.

Current Chicago White Sox Pace

39-123, and they were mathematically eliminated from the AL Central race last night.

The Streaming Orphans - The Tick

There have actually been 3 different TV series based on The Tick comic book. There was the beloved animated series from the 90’s which remains a cult classic to this day. That can be found on Hulu. There was a live action revival that briefly ran on Prime Video a few years ago, where the episodes still reside. The streaming orphan is the live action version which ran for only 9 episodes on Fox in the early aughts. (Quick note, the episodes are all on YouTube. The reason why I consider a YouTube stream as an orphan is that more often than not it’s an unauthorized upload from a user. That means that not only can the quality be shaky, but there’s always a chance that copyright owners could pull it at any time.)

There was a period when Fox ran all sorts of twisted comedies that had a lot of love from hip taste makers, but not much mass appeal. Even Arrested Development struggled badly in the ratings, but it was a smash hit compared to something like Greg the Bunny. The Tick fell under that umbrella. It wonderfully satirized many conventions of superhero storytelling, and it struck paydirt with the casting of the title character. The Tick’s main personality trait was his incredible stupidity. Let’s see, a muscle bound he-man who is also a dim bulb? Call up Patrick Warburton, stat! There’s not much of a stretch from David Puddy to The Tick. It worked perfectly.

There wasn’t a great deal of super heroic action in the few episodes that ran, it was basically a workplace comedy in which the workers just happened to be superheroes. I imagine the scope would have expanded had the series ran longer, but most of the stories were predicated upon the title character’s utter cluelessness. The 3 other regular characters made for strong foils. First was his sidekick Arthur, a nerdy guy who was as physically weak as The Tick was strong, and whose family strongly disapproved of his superhero moonlighting. Then there was Captain Liberty, a great example of transplanting a standard sitcom type into this sort of madness. She was the sort of sensible, eye rolling female character often seen barely tolerating the buffoonery of those in her orbit. Best of all was Batmanuel, portrayed by Nestor Carbonell as the classic swashbuckling egomaniac displaying a comically overboard level of self confidence.

If Fox had nurtured the show better, could it have reached the level of Arrested Development? Maybe. As it was, the few episodes that exist contain some wonderfully demented comedy. Somehow, the original animated show escaped my radar, and I felt that the Prime Video reboot suffered in comparison to the Patrick Warburton original. This one to me is the ideal version of The Tick.

Closing Laughs

That’s all for today. Thanks again for tuning in. See you all again on Friday & enjoy your day.