Cutch Comes Home, The Playoffs Begin, and Jim Thorpe

It's been a jam-packed week, so let's get right on to various topics, as indicated in the headline.

CUTCH COMES HOME

The Pittsburgh Pirates made news this past week with the announcement that they had signed free agent Andrew McCutchen, 36, to a one year, $8 million contract.   This, of course, was greeted warmly by the Bucco fan base since it brings back, arguably, the greatest and most popular Pirates player of this century.  I, for one, will love seeing Cutch back wearing #22 for the Pirates and will be glad that he will get the chance, maybe, to "retire as a Pirate."   However, let's just suppose that the Pirates had signed some other 36 year old free agent who can be described as being well into the back nine of his career?

Would we be saying "same old cheap skate Pirates"?  I think that we probably would.  But, you say,  as the Post-Gazette's Jason Mackey did, "Cutch can still play."  Can he?  Last year for the Brewers, Cutch played in 134 games, had 515 at bats, hit .237 with 17 HR and 69 RBI, and sported a .700 OPS.  He's 36 years old and those numbers don't figure to get better come 2023.  Of course, Cutch will provide a veteran presence and elder statesman leadership in a clubhouse filled with young players, particularly outfielders Cal Mitchell and Jack Suwinski, and there is certainly value in that.  McCutchen is also expected to serve as a band-aid for the possible, if not probable, departure of Brian Reynolds, the man obtained from the Giants when Cutch was first traded away.  Why is Reynolds leaving?  Because the Pirates won't pay the market value price for him.  Surprise.

And don't think that this might not possibly occur.  Let's say that McCutchen discovers the fountain of youth (possibly from one of the new bars the team is putting into PNC Park) and by the All-Star Break has 15 HR, 50 RBI and is hitting in the .270 range.   The team still stinks and is headed for a 90-95 loss season.  Will GMBC then try to trade Andrew McCutchen to a contender in need of a hot bat in exchange for a basket full of prime prospects?  Will the Pirates become the first franchise in history to be pilloried TWICE by its fan base for trading the same player?

THE PLAYOFFS BEGIN

Wild Card Weekend, oh, excuse me, Super Wildcard Weekend, took place with five of the six games being incredibly good and exciting.  The only game that was not in that category was last night's easy win for the Cowboys over the Bucs, but that game was intriguing because it may well be the last time that we see Tom Brady playing.

Some quick hit thoughts and impressions....

• The 49ers looked incredibly good in their win over Seattle.  I see them playing in the Conference Championship game in two weeks.
• The comeback of the Jaguars from being down 0-27 to the Chargers to winning 31-30 was an unbelievable gag job by the Chargers.  
• The matchup between Trevor Lawrence and Justin Herbert could be this decade's version of Tom Brady v. Peyton Manning of the '00's.  Two incredible talents.
• Both Buffalo and Cincinnati won their games, but didn't look dominant in doing so, and it could be said that they were fortunate to win.  QB's Josh Allen and Joe Burrow did not play their best games, but, in the end, they won.  They meet this weekend in a rematch of the Monday Night game of two weeks back that ended up not being played.  One of them will end up playing the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game in two weeks.
• The Giants beat the Vikings, who may well have been one of the worst 12 win teams in history.   The Giants will meet the Eagles this weekend for the third time this season.  Philly finished shakily in the regular season, in large part due to Jalen Hurts injury.  I'm sure that the Eagles would rather be playing the Vikings instead of their divisional foe this weekend.

I am figuring that the 49ers, Eagles, and Chiefs will win their games this weekend.  The Cincy - Buffalo game will be the most intriguing one.  I am guessing the both Allen and Burrow will bounce back and perform better this week than last week.  I'll call it a win for the Buff Bills because the Bengals are, well, the Bengals.

JIM THORPE

I finally finished David Maraniss' massive (568 pages) and meticulously researched biography of Jim Thorpe.  As he was beginning the project, Maraniss had numerous people say to him something along the lines of "Jim Thorpe?  I think I read a book about him when I was in fourth or fifth grade."  I think that I did, too, and like many people, I knew the basics of his story.  American Indian born on Oklahoma, sent to the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA, great football player, won decathlon and pentathlon gold medals at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, then had medals stripped from him because he played bush league baseball in 1910.  One of the first great players in what is now the NFL, played major league baseball.  In 1950, he was Named the Greatest Athlete of the First Fifty Years of the 20th Century.   Had a movie of his life made with Burt Lancaster playing him on screen.  That was about the extent of my knowledge of Thorpe.

Maraniss give you more, a whole lot more, of what Thorpe's life was.  He pretty much spent his whole life scuffling to make ends meet.  He played minor league and barnstorming baseball well into his forties, he appeared in dozens of movies, usually as an extra, often uncredited (he was one of the native dancers in "King Kong"), fought for the rights of American Indian actors in Hollywood, dug ditches in California during the depression.  He was the front man for numerous bars, restaurants, and even a Nevada casino that always failed.  He drank too much, was married three times, and was an absent father to his seven children.   He died of a heart attack at age 65 in 1952.  He is buried in a town renamed Jim Thorpe, PA in the north east corner of Pennsylvania, an area where, for all of his travels, Thorpe never set foot.  Maraniss tells the story of how that came about in fascinating detail.

You will learn a lot about the plight of the American Indian when you read his book.  You will also learn who some of the villains were in Thorpe's story.  You  might be surprised to learn that one of them was fabled football coach Pop Warner.  You will not be surprised, if you know anything at all about the man, that another was Avery Brundage, Thorpe's teammate on the 1912 Olympic team and later the President of the USOC and the IOC.

"Path Lit By Lightning" (the english translation of Thorpe's Sac and Fox native name) is at times a ponderous read, but in the end, well worth it, I think.   I enjoyed Maraniss' books on Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente more, but I am glad I read this one.   It gets Two and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

In 2000, ESPN did a poll of the 100 Greatest Athletes of the Twentieth Century.  Thorpe, as noted above, topped the list in 1950, but in ESPN's 2000 poll, he fell to seventh, behind Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Wayne Gretzky, and Jesse Owens.

 

Painting of Jim Thorpe 

that hangs in the Oklahoma State Capital 

Building in Oklahoma City

This Post Is A Hodgepodge of Somethingness

Nope, I couldn't resist capitalizing on what was the buzz talk in Pittsburgh sports this week, BoSox announcer Dennis Eckersley's pronouncement that the Pirates lineup is a "hodgepodge of nothingness."  What I found out to be most entertainting about the whole affair was the reaction from Pirates officials over the whole thing.   The next afternoon I hear Bucco Chief Propaganda Minister Greg Brown with the afternoon guys on The Fan.  The tap dance Brownie was doing around it would have made Gene Kelly turn green with envy.  Then on Friday afternoon GM Ben Cherrington had a meeting with the local press to explain the progress that he has made with the overall organization since he and his team have been here.  That may be true from an organizational standpoint, but we sure haven't seen any results on the big league level as yet.  GMBC then went on to say that he wasn't going to comment on what Eckersley had to say, but if that were the case, then why hold a press briefing on some random Friday afternoon in August?

Anyway, on to other things.....

Here's the thing about baseball.  You know that your favorite team - the Pirates in my case - stink.  No need to go over all the reasons for that is there?  You know that they are going to lose 100 games  this season.  However, that doesn't mean that if you choose to go to one ball game on a nice summer's evening that the Pirates won't play well and win that particular game.  And even if they are playing a team that is only marginally better than they are, the Cincy Reds in this case, it doesn't mean that you won't see a well played and entertaining game.

And that is exactly what happened last night at PNC Park.  Very good starting pitching from Graham Ashcroft and Bryse Wilson, a couple of nifty defensive plays, and a couple of home runs which put the Reds in front 3-0 through five innings.  A run in the sixth and two in the seventh for the Pirates tied the game.  The Reds went ahead  4-3 in the eighth and the Pirates walked it off with two runs in the bottom of the ninth when Michael Chavis' bases loaded single scored the winning run.

Fun, exciting, a Pirates win, and it was all over in two hours and forty-eight minutes.   It can be done.

I haven't written about the Steelers 32-25 win over Seattle in last week's first exhibition game because, well, I just didn't get around to it.   Unless you've been living under a rock in Pittsburgh, or just really don't care about the Steelers, you know by now that the highlight of the game was the performance of the three quarterbacks.  Mitch Trubisky leading a 90 yard opening drive for a touchdown.  Mason Rudolph dropping a dime to rookie wideout George Pickens in the corner of the end zone.  And, of course, the second half, two TD pass performance of Kenny Pickett, including one that won the game with :03 left on the clock.

This all led to an interesting narrative on the talk shows and in the press.  For the first half of the week it was "Why are the Steelers continuing the charade with Mason Rudolph?  For his sake and the sake of the team, trade him now for whatever kind of low round draft pick you can get and turn things over to Pickett as the back-up to Trubisky."  By Thursday, however, the narrative changed, and the theme then became "Are the Steelers and the fans being unfair to Mason Rudolph?  Doesn't he deserve better?"

This is why I can only take sports talk radio in small doses.

Anyway, in a few more hours, the Steelers take on the Jax Jags in their second exhibition game of the season.  Trubisky will start, but by all accounts, Pickett will get the bulk of the QB playing time, including time with the first teamers, or "the varsity", as Mike Tomlin puts it.

For the first time in almost twenty years, the quarterback situation is making Steelers practice games interesting things to watch.

I am about 90 pages, or a little less than twenty percent, into this latest book by David Maraniss, "Path Lit By Lightning", a biography of Jim Thorpe.  Like Mariness' biographies of Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, this book is meticulously researched and well written.  You learn a lot and are entertained while doing so.  I will most certainly be writing more about this book once I finish reading it.

Book Review - "A Good American Family, The Red Scare and My Father" by David Maraniss

David Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and has authored over a dozen non-fiction books that include highly acclaimed biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, and Roberto Clemente.  Other books have focused on a particular battle in the Viet Nam War and the 1960 Rome Olympics. In his newest book, "A Good American Family", he writes a more personal story.  The story of how one of the more shameful episodes in American history, the "Red Scare" of the post-war 1940's and 1950's affected his father, newspaperman Elliott Maraniss and his entire family, including himself.

Like many students in the 1930's, Elliott was taken by progressive, liberal ideas, and flirted with the idea of communism.  He was disturbed by the racial inequities that existed in America at the time, and advocated such positions in his role as a reporter and editor of the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Michigan, where he was a student.  He became friends with a young man named Bob Cummins, who upon graduation from Michigan, left for Spain to fight for the loyalists against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.  While at Michigan, Elliott met and eventually married Bob Cummins' younger sister, Mary.

All of these activities brought Elliott to the attention of the FBI and, later, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US's entry into WW II, Elliott enlisted in the Army, rose to the rank of Captain, commanded one of the Army's all-black battalions and served and fought on Okinawa.  He was honorably discharged in 1946.  While serving in the war, Elliott quickly became disabused of the notion of communism as it was being practiced in the USSR, but he never lost his ideals as they applied to racial inequity and organized labor, and he never lost his pride and love for America.  He returned from the service upon discharge, began working at a Detroit newspaper, and began raising a family.

However, in 1952, when the HUAC held hearings in Detroit, an FBI informer named names, both Bob Cummins and Elliott were subpoenaed to testify, and lost their jobs.  This began a five year period of exile for the Maraniss family, certainly a "good American family", that involved him losing three newspaper jobs and moving his young family seven times. In 1957, he landed a job at a paper in Madison, WI where he stayed for over twenty-five years, rose to the rank of executive editor and even taught journalism classes at the University of Wisconsin.  It proved to be a wonderful life for the Maraniss family. He never talked of his ordeal before the HUAC and what it cost him.  David Maraniss, who was only two at the time of the 1952 hearings, knew very little of his father's past until he began the research for this book.

David not only tells the story of his father and his family on this book, but he also tells the stories of many of the other players in the drama, including John Stephens Wood (a staunch segregationist, a one time member of the KKK, and a man who had some involvement in a lynching in the state of Georgia in his youth) and Charles Potter (a certified war hero who later in life came to regret his role in the Red Scare days during his time on the Committee), two influential members of HUAC, and Frank Tavenner, the chief counsel of the committee, and Bereniece Baldwin, an unassuming Detroit area grandmother who worked undercover in the Detroit area Communist Party as a paid informant for the FBI.  It was  the unassuming Grandma who named the names that changed the lives of so many people, including Elliott Maraniss and Bob Cummins and their families.

"A Good American Family" is a terrific story - and ultimately an uplifting one - of how one man endured the unfair (to put the kindest face on it) charges against him and endured.  He was a man who had every reason to be bitter and NOT love his country, but he rose above it all and endured. It is also a story about a terrifying time in America, and the big lesson here is that there is no guarantee that such times could not come again in America.  The name most associated with his era is that of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, and his name is even given to what this era embodied: McCarthyism.  Elliott Maraniss never encountered Joe McCarthy.  McCarthy never mentioned his name, and, in fact, McCarthy may not have even known who he was.  The witch-hunting tactics of the HUAC preceded McCarthy, and was still doing it's dirty work after McCarthy was disgraced and later died.

However, consider this description of Joe McCarthy offered by David Maraniss:

"An insecure publicity hound posing as the ultimate patriot, McCarthy began his campaign of reckless charges used on flimsy evidence with a relatively obscure but soon-to-be-notorious speech...."

And then this one.  Following what became known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings that unmasked McCarthy for the charlatan that he was, Republican Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont  "utter(ed) a line that came to define McCarthy's bullying tactics: 'He emits war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist.'"

Sound familiar?  

Anyway, the tale of "A Good American Family" could serve as Exhibit A for the Santayana quote that "He who ignores history is condemned to repeat it."   It is a terrific book and an important one.  It is one you should read.

It gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Oh, and as a companion piece, I can also recommend he podcast "Ink In Our Blood" with David Maraniss and his daughter, Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff, who is also a writer of some distinction.  It's good listening.