Rudy Giuliani…your modern day Mass-kisser!

 

He had to have known Yankee fans would react like this.  He had to have.  He is, after all, the man who has spent the better half of the last 6 months trying to convince Americans that only he knew that something like 9/11 was bound to happen.  He is literally running on a platform where he is attempting to paint himself (contrary to what his own 9/11 commission testimony tends to indicate) as some sort of modern day prophet.  And he didn’t see THIS one coming?

A day after former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he plans to root for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series, two of the city’s tabloid’s offered their response.

“TRAITOR!” decried the Daily News.  “C’mon Rudy, How Could You Root For the Red Sox in Series?”

“REDCOAT”  screamed the New York Post.   ”Yank Fan Rudy Pulls for Bosox”

Perhaps it won’t matter. After all, it’s not like he’s rooting AGAINST my beloved Yankees, who once again failed to make it to the series. But the baseball faux pas is a jab in the eye to all those die-hard Yankee fans who have always thought they had Rudy in their corner.   After all, this is the man who has been accused of having spent more time at Yankee Stadium than at Ground Zero in this post-9/11 world. 

Do a quick google search (image tab mind you) under “Giuliani” and see how many hits it comes back with.  You will be amazed at how many of them involve the man either wearing some sort of Yankee attire or sitting at Yankee stadium.  Of course that will be after you get over the shock of how many different examples of Rudy Giuliani in drag are in the mix.

Hizzoner has always been such a fan. He even got into a bit of hot water earlier this year over questions about the four World Series rings that he owns — just like the players and coaches — courtesy of the franchise in response to his lifelong devotion to the ballclub.  Giuliani’s sudden change of heart about the nation’s pasttime has opened him up to charges of flip flopping and pandering.

Could it be that he is supporting the Red Sox because the team is so popular in neighboring New Hampshire, where, by the way, the nation’s first primary will be held sometime in January (or maybe even December)?

If you listen to the man that wants your vote the answer is “No”.

“I’m an American League fan, and I go with the American League team – maybe with exception of the Mets,” he said. “Maybe that would be the one time I wouldn’t, because I’m loyal to New York.”

But that answer may not satisfy everyone.

Kevin Madden, the spokesman for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney despite being a long-time Yankee fan, offered this observation in his morning email to reporters Wednesday:

“For me,” Madden said, “baseball season ends when the Yankees play their last game. I don’t even root for the AL in the All-Star game!”

Giuliani’s willingness to root for the Sox appears to be a recent phenomenon. In June, he was asked the following by a political columnist for the Providence Journal-Bulletin:

“If the devil said you can be president if you become a Sox fan, would you do it?,” asked M. Charles Bakst.

The answer was typical Giuliani, which means, blunt.

“I’m a Yankee fan. My father made me a Yankee fan probably before I was born. I always believe it’s a sign of my being straight with people, about not wanting to fool them, that I was one of the first mayors to be willing to say I was a Yankee fan. Most mayors pretended they rooted for both sides. I have great respect for Mets fans, Red Sox fans. I have great respect for people who really are fans of the team they say they are fans of. But probably that’s a deal I could not make.”

Rudy Giuliani has made more than a few errors in his political career. This is, after all, the man who dumped his second wife on television.

But his latest questionable decision hits Americans where it really, really hurts: their sporting allegiances.

This week, he attempted to explain why he’ll be rooting for the Boston team in the impending World Series finals.   But his spin-job seems to be falling on deaf ears in New England.

The Boston Globe points out:

Recent history shows Massachusetts voters would sooner adopt Manhattan clam chowder as the state’s official food than vote Republican in 2008.

Ben Affleck, a rabid Red Sox fan, is a man that has made a career out of making bad decisions (J Lo or Gigli ring a bell?). His reaction to Rudy’s sudden change of allegiance went something like “If I was a politician I’d sooner admit to Satan worship than claim to be rooting for the Yankees”.

And that sentiment is pretty much par for the course when taken in the context of this rivalry.  This is the Sox and the Yankees!  Not Ohio State vs. Michigan.  Not Duke vs. North Carolina.  Not any one of many other epic sports rivalries.  This is the standard against which all other such sports conflicts are measured.

It’s bad enough that we live in the Sportscenter/Performance Enhancing Drug era, but now we have to have these two-bit politicians sullying our sports landscape? 

We live in an era where too many athletes favor style over substance while looking for a spot in a highlight reel, even if it costs their team a win.  Our most sacred of baseball records are being assaulted by pharmaceutic-ally enhanced phenoms on a daily basis.  Olympic heroes are being revealed to be nothing more than frauds.  And now this.

“…there is no joy in Gotham—mighty Rudy has copped out.”

Dumbledore gay? Much ado about nothing (in my eyes)

I have never been homophobic, nor am I a big fan of the Harry Potter franchise, so I have been quite amused with the uproar caused by author J.K Rowling’s recent revelation concerning one of it’s most beloved characters sexuality.  I am, of course, referring to a recent Q&A session that found the world’s first (and only) billionaire author outting the paternal figure Albus Dumbledore.

The question was: Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?

JKR: My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] … Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that’s how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair… [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, “Dumbledore’s gay!”

Needless to say, ever since she uttered those words news wires have been in overdrive, providing us with an abundance of opinions on the matter.  The homosexual community has expressed joy at what the consider “an acknowledgement of the obvious“, conservatives have lambasted the announcement as an example of an author pushing their own political agenda ( I absolutely CAN’T wait to hear Pat Robertson’s take on this one), and a great many others have seized the opportunity to have a good natured debate of all things in between.

In the end we are getting all worked up over an author’s take on her own fictional character.  Some people will argue that they saw it all along (that line starts right here by the way), while others will say this is just another case of the popular books subverting christian ideals.  The most cynical will say this is nothing more than a clever maketing ploy, while the academic community will debate whether an author has “proprietary rights over a character’s sexuality”…an argument I find to be inherently flawed.

Wherever you may stand on this one, I think it is safe to say that there are far more pressing issues to be dealt with in this day & age.  Homosexual rights proponents should be more concerned with pushing for a recognition of gay marriages, christian leaders would be better served in trying to diminish the mainstream perception that they have been hijacked by the extreme religious right, cynics should go find some joy in their lives and academics need to….well, debating silly stuff like that is kind of the point of academia so I am going to give ‘em a free pass on this one.

I guess my point is that just because something that has occurred is relatively new, that doesn’t mean that it is news.

A pep talk for “Dubya”: Presidentin’ & the politics of sacrifice

 

I stumbled across something on the news wire today and couldn’t help but get a little irate as I read the thing.  It seems airports across the country are raising cane over new policies instituted by the Transportation  Security Administration.  The policies, which went into effect on October 1st of this year, include more extensive background checks for all airport employees, including janitors, store clerks etc…

The airports are complaining the vetting process takes entirely too long, and as a result this is creating longer delays in all aspects of their day to day business.  While I know firsthand just how annoying travelling can be, whether the delay is at the airline ticket counter or while just trying to grab a up of java in between flights, I find it rather disheartening to hear a story like this.

Are we really such a self-centered society of “I want it alls” that we are willing to forgo the most sensible of security processes merely for the sake of convenience?  Are the events of 9/11 that far behind us that we would be willing to stoop so low?  Sadly, for some, it appears that the answer is yes.

Frankly this is just yet another symptom of an ailment that has been plaguing this country for far too long.  I like to call it “Iamagreedybastarditis”.  And make no mistake, unless the government intercedes this disease is going to quickly become a plague of biblical proportions.

Now for those of you who either know me personally or are familiar with my writings, I am NOT the biggest fan of George W. Bush.  I never thought the guy had the mental capacity to hold the Office of the President and he has done little to change my opinion since being sworn in.  But please don’t take what I am about to say as “just more Bush Bashing”. 

Listen to my argument then come to a conclusion as to whether the argument is valid or not.  This former Republican (and yes, I am a conservative of the Reagan era that has become quite disillusioned with the GOP since Bush and Cheney started running it into the ground) thinks you may tend to agree with me in the end.

To me, one of his greatest “lost opportunities” came on the day the the now iconic picture above was taken.  It was at this time when he could have asked anything of our country and we would have complied.  Rather than ask us as a society to sign off on a dubious invasion of Iraq, and like it or not the preponderance of evidence now indicates that no one- including the administration itself- saw Iraq as a significant threat at the time of our invasion, he should have (and could have) asked us for so much more.

Rather than ask us to make the same kind of sacrifices our grandparents did during World War II, donating blood on a regular basis, rationing our fuel usage, recycling our precious metals and completely forgoing luxury items for the betterment of the war effort are but a few examples, we were asked to continue with life as usual, to be a “part of the growing economy”.  In other words we were told to “shop our blues away”.

While I fully understand the rationale behind needing a growing economy to fuel a war effort, this is merely another example of this administration “dumbing down” another complex issue.  Much like when he says “they hate us for our freedom”, President Bush is only touching on one of many factors in an issue.  Whether he thinks we don’t have the ability to understand the rest of the factors involved or just care not to, he is doing our nation a disservice every time he does this.

We as a people are not stupid.  Sure we can stumble across several examples showing the opposite simply by making a trip to the end of the driveway to check the mail, but collectively we have always shown the capability to accomplish great things.  And it’s not like self-sacrifice is an alien idea in western culture. The notion of personal sacrifice for the common good is a cornerstone of Christianity and has featured prominently in the rhetoric of previous wartime Presidents. But this brand of sacrifice is not supported by the President’s materialistic conservatism.

Not only did this President choose to be the first “wartime” president to NOT either raise taxes or drastically slash government spending in areas outside of the military budget to finance an ongoing conflict, he merely asked us for a more materialistic brand of sacrifice.

And even more disappointing, after a few years of that approach not really getting the job done, he refuses to see it’s shortcomings. 

This past January, PBS News Hour host Jim Lehrer interviewed President Bush. This encounter told us a lot about Bush’s brand of conservatism, in particular, his feelings about sacrifice.

Towards the end of the interview, Lehrer posed this question to President Bush:

[If the struggle in Iraq] is as important as you’ve just said… why have you not, as president of the United States, asked more Americans and more American interests to sacrifice something? The people who are now sacrificing are, you know, the volunteer military – the Army and the U.S. Marines and their families. They’re the only people who are actually sacrificing anything at this point.

The President said Americans had sacrificed “peace of mind,” then added:

Now, here in Washington when I say, “What do you mean by that?,” they say, “Well, why don’t you raise their taxes; that’ll cause there to be a sacrifice.” I strongly oppose that. If that’s the kind of sacrifice people are talking about, I’m not for it because raising taxes will hurt this growing economy. And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life’s moving on, that they’re able to make a living and send their kids to college and put more money on the table.

The PBS interview made it pretty clear clear that Bush’s notion of acceptable sacrifices is remarkably narrow: expecting Americans to pay more taxes would be asking too much.  This brand of conservative ideology argues that we’re all materialists: in other words, all Americans care about is money. 

I, for one, am both insulted and could not disagree more.  We are a proud, resilient people.  One only needs to look at the outpouring of support for the cities affected directly by the events of September 11th or to the quick response of charitable organizations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Where FEMA failed the average American citizen rose to the occasion.

Even more disconcerting, for the past six years, Bush’s disdain for real sacrifice had a terrible impact on the American psyche. We have all been made keenly aware of Bush’s “war on terror”, but have been given no role to play other than to struggle to respond when the “threat level” was elevated from yellow to orange or red. This situation– being continuously informed that we are at risk from a terrorist attack, but given no concrete way to respond– has produced widespread public anxiety.

The Bush “no sacrifice” mandate has led to a variety of Administration policies that run counter to our core beliefs, the most notable of which was the decision to invade and occupy Iraq and not raise taxes. As a consequence, America went deeply in debt, and jeopardized the long-term viability of our economy. And yet our government continues to spend more than it earns; an economic condition replicated in the lives of average Americans, who also spend more than they earn–typically financing their debt with home equity loans.

The administration’s unwillingness to call for a real sacrifice produced a mentality where we have refused to deal with the long-term. As a result, the President has not prepared Americans for the coming decades of dramatic oil shortages and possibly devastating weather produced by global warming.

Experts leave little doubt that in order to prevent the worst consequences of both occurrences Americans must turn away from materialism and begin to conserve energy at an unprecedented pace. The conservation practices we could be asked to enact in support of the war in Iraq could serve as the first steps in this process.  Nonetheless, conservation remains a dirty word with conservatives.

President Bush and conservatives, in general, don’t like to talk about real sacrifice. They prefer to pretend that Americans can have it all: wage an expensive “war” on terror and continue to run a deficit economy fueled by tax cuts; enjoy artificially priced gasoline and ignore global climate change. They are materialists who prefer to focus on the present: argue that tomorrow is another day, and until then, personal sacrifice is unnecessary.

This shortsighted approach could very well be leading us down the road to ruin.  It’s time that our leaders see in us what we already know is there…the ability to accomplish great things when we are called upon to do so.

Meet me at my girl’s. I gotta go home and tell her I lost the rent money again.

I have always loved that quote from Billy Walsh, a.k.a. the resident madman/genius of HBO’s Entourage.  Maybe it’s the fact that I have indeed walked a mile in the man’s shoes (on that issue at least)  or I just get to harness my inner-asshole by showing some love for Billy and Ari Gold.  It’s real a toss-up on that one my friends.

And right now I am really, and I mean REALLY, in Billy Walsh mode.  After a summer that brought us more disappointment than joy, and say what you want about The Bourne Ultimatum, Superbad and Transformers, the rest of the summer fare was a let down. Now it seems we are going to miss out on a little diamond in the rough called Gabriel. 

The atmospheric Australian action flick GABRIEL is one of those underdogs, a passion project made for less than what Brett Ratner probably gets for daily blow allowance during his productions. The story follows the archangel of the title as he journeys through a seedy city on a quest to smite the holy hell out of his former peers that have fallen from grace, and the result is a pretty slick-looking affair with plenty of action.

The film arrives this November in its home country of Australia courtesy of Sony and Screen Gems — unsurprising as they also released the UNDERWORLD flicks, which superficially have a similar tone even if GABRIEL’s premise is decidedly different (the flick is apparently closer to THE CROW or HIGHLANDER). The release will then expand based on its performance Down Under, so you Aussies check it out so the rest of us can see it.

Realistically, unless the thing is a runaway hit in the former penal colony, chances are our only hope of ever seeing this thing will involve bitorrent or a purchase from some Hong Kong website pushing craptastic quality dvds in the near future.  Neither of the those choices exactly excites the movie lover in me.

Some people have a little desire to watch smaller-budgeted genre indies, but I’d often rather see what aspiring filmmakers can concoct with limited resources, and a some big cojones, than some of the rubbish that gets made for $100 million.

After a summer where I was bludgeoned over the head with more mediocre sequels (Pirates of The Caribbean: At World’s End, Spider-Man 3, Rush Hour 3, Ocean’s 13, Daddy Day Camp, to name a few) than quality ones (Live Free or Die Hard, The Bourne Ultimatum and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) it is infinitely disappointing to see Hollyweird turning it’s back on what looks like a cinematic breath of fresh air.

A big part of me is becoming more and more dissatisfied with the lack of quality in Hollywood movies. Hollywood is, obviously, run by Big Business (a.k.a. “fuckin’ suits”), and everyone hates and distrusts Big Business. Or at least they should. But the worst part is that the films are looking like they were built and packaged on an assembly line, devoid of any soul.   

What the world needs is for more visionary artists to draw a line in the sand and cry out “‘I won’t let you douche bags fuckin’ Aquaman-ify my movie you worthless suit”.

The Crisis of Global Capitalism…as shown by Hannah Montana?

It looks like the “Hannah Montana” ticket fiasco has finally caught the eye of Uncle Sam. On Monday, a federal judge prohibited the use of automatic software to purchase mass amounts of tickets from outlets such as Ticketmaster. Little did I know that a Disney star, the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus no less, would be the harbinger of things to come.

The decision was brought on by a lawsuit Ticketmaster filed in April against a Pittsburgh company, RMG Technologies. Ticketmaster successfully argued that the company’s software allows scalpers to move ahead of other customers in line and purchase mass amounts of tickets that can be resold at higher prices. “They’re cheating consumers out of a fair shot at these tickets, and we’re not going to stand for it anymore,” said Joe Freeman, a lawyer for Ticketmaster.

Frankly, we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised by this recent trend in ticket sales. Incidents like this, along with predatory lending practices that have brought us the brink of a real estate collapse in some economists eyes, are symptomatic of a much larger issue.

This “free market fundamentalism“, a combination of unregulated “robber baron capitalism” merged with merchantism, is also becoming known as “corporatism”. The usage has expanded to well beyond it’s original definition, one that was strictly industrial, and has come to include political and governmental structures.

The underlying belief is that free markets provide the greatest possible equity and prosperity, and that any interference with the market process decreases social well being. I, for one, disagree. I truly belive that there is such a thing as “too much of a good thing”.

Corporations are similar to sharks in that they exist merely to consume and our pocket books are their food of choice. I don’t say this to imply that they are inherently evil or to be demonized in any way. They are a vital part of our nation’s fabric. That being said, we should be hesitant to just “hand over the keys” to either the economy or our national treasury. Remember a shark is a shark and we all know that sharks tend to bite anyone & everyone, even each other.

“Moderation in all things” is universally considered wise counsel. We as a people should heed this advice.

Say it ain’t Joe…the end of an era

 A little bit of a shocker out of Gotham today.  After weeks of speculation the New York Yankees offered an incentive based contract to their beleaguered manager Joe Torre.  And somewhat surprisingly, he turned them down.

This was the first action on Torre’s future since Yankee owner George Steinbrenner told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., on Oct. 6 that he didn’t think he’d bring back Torre if the Yankees failed to advance to the AL Championship Series. Cleveland then eliminated New York in four games, the Yankees’ third straight first-round exit.

Now I am not altogether amazed that they offered him a new deal.  But it is somewhat of a shocker that Torre turned them down.  Yes, “The Boss” is notoriously difficult to get along with.  But Yankee stalwarts like Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera, both of whom enter free agency at season’s end, openly campaigned for his return, even intimating that they may not return to wear the pinstripes if Torre was canned.

And the outpouring from fans has been even more impressive.  Online petitions sprung up over night, callers bombarded New York sports talk shows pleading for the Yankees to bring the man back and a rally supporting him was held in time square.

So it appears that enough was enough for the 67 year old veteran manager.   Whether he was insulted by the “play for pay” aspect of the contract or he had just had enough of Steinbrenner we may never know.  What we do know is that we are now at the end of an era.

But I’m not sad.  Simply put, Joe Torre was somewhat overrated as a manager.  He was without a doubt the best I ever saw at dealing with the pressure cooker that is Zoo York.  He seemed to have an uncanny ability to handle an incredible menagerie of personalities.  But he didn’t do all that good a job of managing within the game itself.  That’s not to say that he didn’t know what he was doing, he just came up a little bit short.

To this guy, who is A. a diehard Yankee fan (I still have vivid memories of crying my 9 year old eyes out as I watched Willie Randolph take a called strike three at the knees from the Royals Dan Quisenberry to end the ALCS in 1980) and B. a baseball junkie (it is not a game…it’s my religion mind you), the Yankee era took a turn for the worse when Don Zimmer left the franchise a few years back.

With both Torre and Zimmer (who then served as Torre’s bench coach/consigliere), the Yankees had the perfect marriage of both personnel management and baseball acumen.  Torre served as the affable paternal figure of the team, keeping a steady hand on the rudder while Zim was Torre’s baseball encyclopedia come game time.  Combined with the most storied franchise in sports, loaded with young talent and based in the nation’s largest market, their presence created a “perfect storm” of sorts.  A storm that produced 5 world series appearances between 1996 and 2001, yielding 4 wins in the process.

But after watching Torre be outmanaged, and make no mistake the man made an inumerable amount questionable calls the last few years, by the likes of Terry Francona, Mike Sciosia, Jim Leyland and Eric Wedge the last four seasons it doesn’t sadden me to see the man go. 

The entire modus operandi of the organization at this point is to get young and prepare for the future.  Melky Cabrera, Robinson Cano, Phil Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, and Ian Kennedy are just a few of the rising superstars the Yankees field.  And with Humberto Sanchez, Eric Duncan, Jose Tabata (who has been described as a “Manny-esque” hitter by ESPN’s Peter Gammons) ready for the call-up when the Bombers open up their new stadium in 2009, it is only going to get better for the team.

Now is the right time to find a manager who is more of technician of sorts, to share their “baseball IQ” the youngsters.  Whether the team chooses to go with someone like Tony LaRussa, a veritable Bobby Fischer in the dugout, as a bridge to fan favorite/Yankee legend Don Mattingly or goes with reigning National League Manager of the Year Joe Girardi, who played on those Yankee dynasty teams of the late 90’s (and squeezed 78 wins out of the 2006 Florida Marlins, in spite of a total payroll that was less than $15 million), remains to be seen.

All I know is it is going to be one hell of a winter in the Big Apple.

Can I get a Hazmat team in here?

No, this doesn’t have anything to do with Katrina, Bush’s lack of response to said hurricane, or anything else of substance.  But it DOES have something to do with one of our nation’s greatest natural disasters…Britney Spears. 

Word came down to day that the troubled pop star may not even visit with 2-year-old Sean Preston and 1-year-old Jayden James — who are in the custody of Spears’ ex-husband, Kevin Federline — until she complies with a court order, Superior Court Commissioner Scott Gordon ruled.  Evidentally this stems from her failing to provide contact information needed to conduct the court ordered random drug screenings. 

Now I don’t want to kick a woman while she is down, but what the f@#$ woman?  Do she realize just how f@#$ed up you have to be to lose custody to K-fed?  The entire system is set up where short of a woman being Halle Berry in Losing Isaiah she gets to keep the kids.  It is just that simple.

Yet somehow, someway she has managed to lose all of her visitation rights.  ALL of them.  Right now her behavior is somewhere between Paula Abdul and Nicolas Cage from Leaving Las Vegas.  I know that with Anna Nicole’s passing there is now a power vacuum in the region known as “Bimbodom”, but for god’s sake let Paris take her rightful title as that nation’s queen.

But then again, why should we be at all surprised by this recent assault upon our senses?  The woman was the flag bearer for what was arguably the most shallow and vapid era in music & entertainment.  I know, it’s hard to believe anyone could ever make a claim like that one, but that is pretty much what the late 90’s were. 

Talentless purveyors of candy coated kid crap thrived, and none more than her.  They bombarded the airwaves with some of the most contrived shite that was ever thrust upon the american public.  And we lapped it up like a kitten does a bowl of milk.  And they raked in money like a private contractor in Iraq…by the truckload.  Well, at least the ones that didn’t have the misfortune of signing with Lou Pearlman  back in the day.

Now most of them seem to have adjusted rather well to adulthood.  The Justin Timberlake’s, Christina Aguilera’s and Nick Lachey’s of the world have moved onto other things.  But not poor old Britney.  For years she desperately clung to the belief that she was somehow relevant, rather than recognizing she was just the lucky recipient of an unjustifiably large amount of fame and fortune (her net worth has been estimated at $150 million).

She now tries to paint a picture of herself as a victim, trapped by her own fame.  And while I have no doubt that the attention can be suffocating, I refuse to feel sorry for her.  She did it to herself.  Over and over and over again.  When we tried to cast her aside to land of the forgotten she would pop up like a real life version of whac-a-mole, marrying an old high school buddy only to have it annulled 55 hours later.

Now it is time for her to remove her head from her now less-than-sculpted-ass and smell the java.  Hopefully her family (if she lets them back into her life) and her friends (whatever ones she may have left) can come together to help her get through this.  Because as entertaining, in a macabre kind of way at least, as this has been, her children’s well-being is at stake here. 

Slappy Dooooooooo!

Is it just me or did I just witness a little slap action in a Red Sox game?

And nah, I’m not watching the incident with Alex Rodriguez slapping the ball out of the glove of Bronson Arroyo in 2004 on ESPN Classic. It’s the slapping attempt that no one is talking about. Not one soul on ESPN is talking about it, surprise surprise. Even when the incident happened, FOX didn’t even acknowledge it.  Granted that’s because Tim McCarver can’t see past his bottle of Johnny Walker this time of year,but it doesn’t excuse the ommission.  They all veered away from that one like we all do that “crazy uncle” at our family reunion.

I’m talking about the slapping attempt one Dustin Pedroia took at Victor Martinez in the top of the first inning of Game 4 of this years ALCS.  And before any of you Massholes (that is a complex term describing diehard Red Sox fans in the greater Boston area fyi) try to claim he was just sliding into first to avoid the tag just look at his hands and then sing that song.  Only Cecil Fielder and Greg Luzinski took the “belly flop” approach on a head first slide in recent years.

Pedroia is constantly being described by many to be a “scrappy player”, even earning the nickname “Scrappy Doo“, while A-Rod is vilified as a “choker” and “Mr. April”. I’m with you on all of that. However, none of that changes the obvious.  Most sane people would call bullshit on a “media double-standard”.

When the A-Rod slap incident happened, the Yankee fan in me hoped against hope that the umpires got the original call “right” and A-Rod was safe at first. I shook off the slap attempt after the legal call was made and I didn’t think about it… that is, until FOX talked about it a bit after it happened. Then, the media picked up the story and ran with it.  The incident still follows him, earning him the nickname “Slappy” from the Boston Dirt Dogs blog, and adding to the animosity he has received in the past few years.

In fact, if you quickly do a Google search on “Alex Rodriguez slap”, you will find numerous articles written by supposed professionals that were more than willing to pile on the corpse that was both A-Rod and the 2004 Yankees.

I watched the highlights of Game 4 of this year’s ALCS on ESPN a couple of times. There was no mention of Pedroia’s slap attempt.  I was surprised then and am still surprised now on why this incident hasn’t gotten at least some coverage. There is no mention of it in the ESPN recap of the game and there was no mention on how Pedroia’s play was bush-league in any way.  Yankee fans haven’t made a nickname for Pedroia yet (though “Slappy Doo” seems rather fitting), and unless the media chooses to run with the story, Pedroia’s A-Rod-like slap attempt will probably fade into the distance.

I understand that Pedroia isn’t exactly a lightning rod for animosity that Alex Rodriguez is. Pedroia is a rookie and some people may give him some slack for that. Not me. I refuse to give him any slack for that for two main reasons:

1. Anyone who has followed baseball, especially the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry, can tell you about the A-Rod slap and the biggest post-season choke in baseball history.  In fact, I am sure that Pedroia was one of the millions who watched Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS. If you know something was illegal and you know that people all over the country (and world) are watching the game you’re playing in, why try and perform that action? I thought Dustin Pedroia would know better, but I guess not.

2. After sliding into second base, Alex Rodriguez allegedly took out the slap happy wee man at second base on May 21st that Pedroia characterized as “cheap.” Pedroia was quoted as saying this (from The Providence Journal):

“It was kind of late,” said Pedroia after the Sox’ 7-3 win. “He kind of threw an elbow. It was kind of cheap, but it was no big deal. I play second base and we play the Yankees 19 times. So I know now when he comes in to get my arm slot to drop to the floor.”

If Pedroia thought that slide was cheap, I wonder: what is his opinion on his own slapping attempt?

The fact of the matter is that the slapping attempt will most likely not get any more media coverage, aside from a few blogs here or there. It was the first batter of the game, and he was out at first base anyway. The attempt didn’t even make contact with Martinez’s glove. The Red Sox ended up losing 7-3 and, like the Yankees after the game with A-Rod’s slap attempt, the Red Sox are one game away from having a disappointing end to their season.

However, questions still arise from this: Why hasn’t the media cried foul against Dustin Pedroia and the Red Sox for “cheating”?  Could it be that ESPN, Fox and others have yet to get over their disdain for the Yankees?  It doesn’t quite seem that way from where I sit.

Pedroia took a page out of A-Rod’s past history and made it his present. Dustin Pedroia’s play was indeed the definition of a “cheap play”, though I could guarantee that no one in Red Sox Nation (including ESPN’s headquarters that lie in the heart of said commonwealth) will acknowledge it as such. Double standard? Most likely. Bush-league? Without a doubt.