What Day Of The Week Is It? This Is The Time Of Year When No One Really Knows
The Countdown Continues
Newcomer #1 - Adrian Beltre. Beltre is far and away the easiest call on this year’s ballot. More than 3000 career hits and more than 475 career home runs practically seals the deal in and of itself, but there’s more to his CV than just that. He is easily one of the 10 greatest defensive third basemen in history, perhaps even top 5. He only won 5 Gold Glove Awards, but the early part of his career coincided with a time when voters would lazily select the same guys year after year for that award. It’s very likely that he was overlooked several times when he deserved to win. More telling is that he twice won the Platinum Glove Award for top defender at any position. And he never won an MVP, but he finished in the top 10 in 6 different seasons.
It’s also worth acknowledging that he was more than just a great player, he was also an exceptionally fun presence in the game. No insult intended, but there are plenty of members of the Hall who slowly fade into obscurity over time, and I’m not just referring to any of the poor choices. Beltre will not be one of them; fans will tell warm stories about him for decades to come. The time when a home plate umpire warned that he was straying too far away from the on deck circle and ordered him to get back in the circle? Instead, he dragged it over to where he was standing and was immediately ejected. Classic.
Then there was the number of times he would swing so viciously that he had dropped to one knee twisting himself into the ground like a corkscrew yet still had enough power to hit it out of the park. But no Beltre story tops his annoyance over people touching his head. Teammates would constantly threaten to do so and you could almost picture cartoon smoke coming out of his ears. I’d love to see the plaque makers try a little something different with him and include a depiction of a hand ominously hanging over his head in a patting motion.
No need to overthink this one. There are few candidates whose qualifications are as obvious as his. He should get in with more than 95% of the vote.
Holdover #1 - Carlos Beltran. Beltran was almost cursed for being too good at baseball; he made it look so easy, and played so smoothly on the field that he almost appeared as if he wasn’t trying. Doubly ironic was the fact that he was one of the most productive postseason players of his generation, yet there is a significant portion of the Mets fan base that will never forgive him for being frozen by one of the most perfectly placed curveballs ever seen.
Beltran won Rookie Of the Year in 1999, but he spent the first portion of his career in relative obscurity. The Kansas City Royals were in a prolonged losing stretch, so he was off the radar of most casual fans. It took a midseason trade in 2004 to Houston for most fans to see how good he was. He hit well enough in his half season with the Astros; in the playoffs he was otherworldly. He hit 8 home runs in only 12 games, with OPS’s above 1.500 in both the LDS & LCS. Overall, in 65 career postseason games he hit 16 career home runs with an OPS of 1.021. Yes, there are small sample sizes here, but to come through so reliably in such crucial situations is an important part of his narrative.
He was more than just an outstanding power hitter. He was a premiere defensive center fielder, winning 3 consecutive Gold Glove awards. And he was one of the great base runners the game has ever seen. He has the highest career stolen base percentage for any player with more than 200 career steals. He lost a lot of his speed after he started to get serious knee problems, but even with those limits he continued to be a valuable player into his late 30s.
He also had a reputation as a true leader. He mentored young Latin American players, and he was instrumental in leading the movement for MLB to mandate translators in each clubhouse. This also leads to what has so far been the biggest drawback to his candidacy. He had a high baseball IQ, and was well known for his ability to interpret opposing team’s signs. Fairly or not, he came to be known as one of the ringleaders in the Astros’ sign stealing scandal, and as someone who was retired when everything came down he bore the brunt of punishment.
In his first year on the ballot last year he drew only 46% of the vote. This year will tell us a lot about how much real support he has. How many voters felt the need to “punish” him by withholding their vote for his initial year? How many feel that his role in the sign stealing was an unforgivable sin? You can probably guess how I feel by my ranking. In my eyes he is an obvious choice for the Hall. Whatever happened in 2017 does not cancel out all of the positives from a 20 year career.
SNL Season 10 Finale Recap
Season 10 of SNL, and a specific era in the show’s history, ended with Howard Cosell’s sole stint in the hosting slot. Fun fact - back in 1975 he hosted a weekly prime time variety series on ABC called Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell. That’s why in the earliest years of SNL history the show was dubbed NBC’s Saturday Night. The Cosell show was a memorable failure, he was attempting to become a modern day Ed Sullivan, but the show flopped badly. The only memory I have of the series was his attempt to turn the Bay City Rollers into his own Beatles, complete with breathless reports from JFK Airport as their plane landed in the states. (Another notable point is that one of the actors in the repertory cast was Bill Murray.) Cosell made references to that old show in his monologue.
When a non professional hosts the show is generally careful to avoid including too much material that falls outside of their wheelhouse, and that was clearly the case here. In fact, Cosell played himself in every sketch he appeared in with one exception, and that one was a sketch in which he portrayed his own father in a premise set in Cosell’s bar mitzvah complete with a 12 year old actor wearing a prosthetic nose and speaking verbosely with a nasal voice. Billy Crystal had a well-known Cosell impersonation, so he joined in as Cosell’s mother.
This episode was the season finale, so it relied more heavily than usual on recurring bits. Because the majority of the cast only appeared in this one season, few repeated so often that the audience grew sick of them, but the counterpoint is that it also meant that few had an opportunity to fully mesh into show history. Among the sketches this week was Billy Crystal’s Fernando’s Hideaway. That is a character he was doing both well before and well after his time on the show, so it has made more of a cultural impact than, say, Crystal & Christopher Guest’s masochistic Willie & Frankie characters. But I was a big fan of that bit. And of course a special shout-out must go to Martin Short’s Nathan Thurm, one of the most brilliantly conceived characters the show has ever seen.
The entire cast was either let go or left on their own accord after the season, but the established comedy veterans went back to their regular careers. Not all of the others had it so easy. Mary Gross would occasionally pop up on movie screens in supporting roles here & there for a while, but Gary Kroeger didn’t go on to do all that much. Jim Belushi went on to become Jim Belushi, for better or worse. Pamela Stephenson returned to the UK, and had intermittent success there before leaving show business entirely. The cast member whom I really wished to have seen more of in later years was Rich Hall. Years ago I went down a rabbit hole while trying to find whatever happened to him. I was surprised to find that he had moved to the UK and found reliable work as a TV presenter. In addition, he served as the model for the character of Moe Szyslak; once I read that I can never unsee it when I see him on a Simpsons episode.
It took a few years after she left the show, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus turned out OK in the long run. She suffered from bad timing as an SNL regular. She was so young when she joined and came aboard in the Eddie Murphy era when screen time for non-Murphy cast members was so hard to come by, and by her third season when you would think she would have been sufficiently established that she could have earned a more prominent role, the Crystal/Short veterans were clearly going to move past her in the pecking order. At least she had a funny little showcase in her final episode.
This episode was the end of Dick Ebersol’s run. Prodigal son Lorne Michaels would return the following fall to run the show, and he has been there ever since. His first season back was a shaky one; the next golden era of SNL was still more than a year away. So I going to make a minor change in this segment. I’ve covered the Jean Doumanian & Dick Ebersol years. Beginning next week I’ll circle back to the show’s origins by going back to season 1. I’ll continue with what I had been doing - watching 3 episodes per season; the season premiere, mid year episode, and season finale. As a bonus, I have the DVD box sets for each of those first 5 years, so I can watch complete episodes with all of the music intact. This starts next week with George Carlin as the inaugural host. The very first episode looked a lot different than the show we would come to know.
The Worst Of the Worst - Comedy Division
I’ve looked at some of what I believe to be among the very best TV series in recent history. But there is also a flip side to that - what are some of the worst? For some background, there was actually a period in which I attempted to watch every network TV a show at least once. That eventually became impossible to do, once cable networks and streamers increased their amount of original programming it became impossible to keep up. What waste 45 minutes of my life watching something that I know is going to be bad, when there are so many better options out there?
Because I’m now more selective with what I am willing to sample even once, that means that I have almost certainly watched the worst television show that I ever will. What has earned that dubious honor? I’ll tackle that in two parts, revealing my choice for worst comedy today and worst drama on Friday.
A couple of years after the Great Recession there was a whole slew of shows blaming everything on the belief that it was caused by men not being able to be men anymore. Of those, nothing was as bad as a show called Work It. The opening scene took place in a bar, with the show’s “wacky” character making that same argument, and yes, he actually used the word “mancession.” The two leads were former coworkers at the local Pontiac dealership - best friends who were the top salesman & top mechanic who had been out of work ever since Pontiac had been shut down. They had pledged to find new employment together, following the credo “I work, you work.”
The main lead’s wife was the breadwinner, leaving him feeling somewhat emasculated. As part of his daily chores he was picking up a prescription from a clinic, where he overheard a visiting female pharma rep saying that she was overworked while her company was searching for a new salesman. The character asked for info, but he was told that pharma companies don’t hire male sales reps - a female salesperson is more effective because she can flirt with the doctors while selling the product. Feeling further dejected he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he’s putting his wife’s dry cleaning in the closet. Eureka!
He shows up the next day at the pharma company in his wife’s clothing to interview for the position. He gets the job - his character’s name was Lee, so a name on his resume that could be either masculine or feminine raised no red flags, but on the other hand you would think a company that large would do some sort of background check before hiring.
The show suffered from the usual issue with a show of this type. The character dressed up in women’s clothes was tall, muscular, and deep voiced. You would have to believe that everyone else is implausibly stupid to not immediately recognize that it’s a man. Of course, we’re talking about a silly TV comedy and not a documentary. All is forgiven if it’s funny enough. I’ll let you judge if it passes the test. On Lee’s first day all of the other saleswomen take their lunch breaks at their desks, pulling the smallest salads imaginable out of their bags. Lee takes out a hero sandwich that must have been 3 feet long; when the others look at him he removes the lettuce, tosses the rest of the sandwich in the trash and says “tee-hee!”
Of course, when Angel, the other lead character, finds out that Lee has a job he feels a sense of betrayal and reminds him of “I work, you work.” At first, Lee feels bad about it, but with a “what else can I do?” attitude. It’s not until he goes to a fast food restaurant for lunch (that bit of lettuce from his original lunch wasn’t enough for me) that he saw Angel manning the counter that he realized he needed to help out his friend. He revealed himself and in the very next scene Angel was interviewing for another sales position, also in full drag. The problem is that he had no sales background and was therefore rejected. However, he was next seen walking past the car of the woman who had interviewed him & the car was not starting. He fixed the problem, after which she immediately had a change of heart & hired him. Once again, if it was funny enough, such a major plot hole would be forgiven, but the show was not. So you’re left thinking, this person is unqualified for a sales job, but gets hired simply because he knows how to fix a car?
ABC put it out of its misery after only 2 episodes back in 2012. It says a lot, though, that I remember so much about it more than a decade later. Bad TV is one thing; TV that is so bad that it has permanently etched itself into my brain is something else entirely. This show’s notoriety has lived on; to this day TV critics use it as a shorthand reference for the true nadir of the medium. That’s not the case with my choice for worst TV drama. It has largely been forgotten since the very moment it aired its last episode. It left such a nonexistent cultural imprint that I would almost believe I had imagined the whole thing if the show didn’t have IMDB & Wikipedia pages. What is it? You’ll have to wait until Friday to find out.
The Latest Batch O’ Rules Changes
MLB is further tweaking some of the change of pace rules this upcoming season. The revisions are subtle; the pitch clock with runners on base will now be 18 seconds instead of 20. There will be one fewer mound visit per team. Finally, this one isn’t connected to game pace, but the runner’s lane up the first base line will be expanded by 6 inches.
Actually, there’s one additional rule change. This one caught my eye because it is similar to a change I’ve always wished for. The new rule states that any pitcher who warms up between innings must face at least one hitter. That means we will no longer see a situation in which the telecast returns from a commercial only to see an immediate pitching change followed by yet another commercial break. Even though this is a rare occurrence, it’s still tedious. It wastes at least 2 minutes.
I would hope the league eventually considers this change as well. We’ve all seen this scenario. A pinch hitter comes in, and once he is announced the opposing manager makes a pitching change followed by the pinch hitter being called back in order to create a better lefty/righty matchup. As a result the initial pinch hitter has “played” without actually doing anything other than walking from the dugout to home plate and back. That unnecessarily removes a player from the availability list for the rest of the game. I’d like to see the rule amended so that a pinch hitter pulled back without actually stepping to the plate is eligible to return.
Closing Laughs
Hope you are all having a relaxing final week of the year. Welcome aboard to any newcomers to this little corner of The Internets. Stick around, you’ll like what you see. See you all again on Friday.