Which Player Would You Take?

Here's a fun little game I like to play from time to time.  Here are the stats of two ballplayers.  Looking at these two guys, which one would you select for your team?

Player A

AB - 283

H - 65

BA - .230

HR - 14

RBI - 36

OPS - .730

Player B

AB - 283

H - 70

BA - .247

HR - 12

RBI - 44

OPS - .758

Not a whole lot of difference on the surface, but if pushed, you would probably take Player B, and say, "what the hell, he's better, but not by all that much."

OK, I'm not going to wait until tomorrow to identify these guys.  Player A is the combined statistics of Rod Barajas and Mike McKenry.  Player B is Matt Weiters.  (If you have to ask why I am making such a comparison, then you probably shouldn't be reading this blog!)  I do realize that no defensive abilities are included in this comparison.

Not making any judgements here, just having a little fun with numbers, while recognizing the famous quote of Benjamin Disraeli, "There are three kinds of lies:  Lies, damned lies, and statistics".

I also thank Dan Bonk whose recent Facebook post inspired this little but of game playing.

Movie Review: "To Rome With Love"

Marilyn and I wasted no time this weekend taking in the newest movie by Woody Allen, "To Rome With Love".  This one follows Woody's recent trend of filming on location in different European cities (London, Barcelona, and Paris), and, as with those other locations, this movie wants to make you immediately board a plane and visit Rome.  Really, having Woody Allen make a movie in your city has to be the greatest thing that could happen to a Chamber of Commerce.  Rome looks positively beautiful in this movie.


Anyway, this one involves four separate stories taking place concurrently in the Eternal City:

• Woody (actually appearing in one of his movies for the first time in several years) and his wife (Judy Davis, a vet of several Allen movies) traveling to Rome to meet their daughter's fiance and his family.
• An ordinary Italian citizen (Roberto Benigni) suddenly, inexplicably finds that he is a huge celebrity, famous for being famous.
• An older, famous architect (Alec Baldwin) becomes a Greek Chorus of sorts to a young architect (Jesse Eisenberg) who is experiencing some romantic entanglements with his girlfriend and her visiting friend (Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page).
• A young Italian couple in Rome on their honeymoon become separated and become involved with a sexy Italian male movie star and a high priced call girl (Penelope Cruz).  Don't ask how this all comes about.

The four stories are not interrelated, but each tells a separate tale in typical Woody fashion.  Nice to see Allen, now an old man, back on screen playing the "Woody Allen" persona with which fans are familiar.  And we even get a bonus in that area, since Eisenberg also plays the "Woody Allen-part" in this movie.  All the characters are great, but I especially liked the roles played by Allen, Davis, Baldwin, and Cruz, and they are great in them.

In his later years, Allen seems to be taking a more positive tone in the stories he tells, and each of the four stories told here end on an upbeat and positive note.  There a lot of laughs in this one, and we liked it a lot.

One word of warning: about half of this movie is spoken in Italian with English sub-titles, so be prepared for that.

Album Review: "That's Why God Made The Radio"

The Beach Boys are back!

I have to admit that when I heard that The Beach Boys were releasing their first studio album in like a million years, I had my doubts.  I had the thought that The Beach Boys recording a new album FIFTY YEARS after their first one, and forty-six years after their epic, "Pet Sounds", well, I had visions that this would be the musical equivalent of Willie Mays playing center field for the Mets.  However, Brian Wilson was back and fully involved in the writing, singing and recording of the album, "That's Why God Made the Radio", and I did read some fairly good reviews of the album, so I went to the record store (my desk, laptop, and iTunes) and made the purchase.

And I gotta tell you...The Beach Boys are back!  Oh, there may be no classic tunes like Good Vibrations, Wouldn't It Be Nice, or Warmth of the Sun, and this album may not be an equal to "Pet Sounds", but it is a far, far cry from Willie Mays as a Met.

The Beach Boys do not try to be twenty-something kids on this one.  You know that these are older - if not just plan "old" - men singing songs of love and good times, and, yes, we also get songs about  summer, the ocean and beaches, but with a wistful tone, a tone that says we're not kids any more.  The opening track is called "Think About the Days" and it sort of sets the tone for what is to follow.  Some of the great tunes on the album are "Spring Vacation", "Daybreak Over the Ocean", "Beaches in Mind", and "Summer's Gone".  It is this wistful nature of these songs that really appealed to me, and make this a really good album.  That, and that unmistakable "sound" of Brian Wilson and the rest of the Beach Boys.

I am sure that the only people who are going to buy this album are people like me, people on the far side of age 50,  which means this album will probably not be a huge commercial success for the Beach Boys, and I suspect that they knew that going into the venture.  I am glad that the Boys put all of their familial and artistic and business squabbles aside for this effort to make this album.  It makes a statement of sorts that I will enjoy listening to time and again.

There's Something Happenin' Here....

To Absent Friends: Andy Griffith

I recently became involved in a discussion on Facebook about the overuse of the word "iconic" in our everyday language.  One Loyal Reader in particular constantly bristles when the term is used, and I don't disagree, but, really, is there any other word that can be used in describing Andy Griffith, who passed away today at the age of 86?


"The Andy Griffith Show" (1960-68) stands as one of televisions all-time classic sitcoms.  That alone confers, sorry, iconic status on Griffith. That series produced one of THE all-time great characters in TV history, Don Knotts' Barney Fife (full disclosure: I pretty much stopped watching this show once Knotts left the cast), and other classic characters like Gomer Pyle, Floyd the Barber, Otis Campbell the town drunk, and many others, and it also introduced the talent of Ron Howard to the world.  Pretty good blood lines, I'd say.


Griffith went on to star in another popular series, "Matlock" which ran from 1986-95.  


Before series television, Griffith made a name for himself as a story-telling comedian, and many of those routines can be found on YouTube and are surfacing on Facebook today.  He also made a most impressive debut in Hollywood in 1957 in a movie called "A Face in the Crowd", which I saw for the first time a few months back.  This is what I had to say about it back in February:


I watched a movie last night called "A Face in the Crowd" from 1957, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal. Good movie. All about the power of the media and it's cultural and political influence. Still very timely, and, from the viewpoint of 2012, this was one way ahead of its time. Griffith was really good in this dramatic role, but don't expect the folksy, friendly Andy of Mayberry if you watch this. Andy, playing a guy named Lonesome Rhodes, was not a very likable guy in this one. As Robert Osbourne observed on TCM, he never played another character like this again.


A native of North Carolina, Andy died in his home on Roanoke Island, a house that was pointed out to us many years ago on a boat tour of Manteo Sound in the Outer Banks many years ago.


RIP "Ange".

Johnny Mathis: Wonderful, Wonderful (which he didn't sing!)

My fears, expressed on Facebook yesterday, that going to see Johnny Mathis last night and worrying that he may have lost his touch at age 76-soon-to-be-77 proved, happily, to be unfounded.  He looked great, sounded great, and in a one hour and fifteen minute set, backed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, sang everything that the audience wanted to hear.  No new material for Johnny Mathis, just all his classic standards (with the exception, as noted above, of "Wonderful, Wonderful"), which is exactly what his audience wanted to hear.


My only gripe with the show, and it is a small one, is that at times the music from the Orchestra drowned out Mathis' vocals.  Was this poor acoustics (not likely at Heinz, Hall). or a sign that maybe Johnny can't his all the notes that he used to?  Who knows, and who cares.  It was a fabulous show.


Did I mention that he looks great?  He had on this absolutely beautiful suit on that was gray with shoes that matched the color of the suit exactly and a white open necked dress shirt.  The suit, I am sure, cost more than any ten suits that I ever bought in my life.  Man, did it look great!

The NFL, MLB, and Bob Walk

No one will argue that the National Football League stands head-and-shoulders above all other North American sports institutions in terms of popularity, marketing, the ability to read the pulse of its fan base, and in a myriad of other ways.  There are many reasons for this, and allow me to offer just one.


NFL followers do not obsess and whine incessantly whenever a team with roots in the original NFL, say the Pittsburgh Steelers, play a regular season game against a team from the original AFL, say, the Oakland Raiders.  They look at it as a part of the schedule and, in many such instances, they embrace and look forward to such contests.


NFL fans do not feel that the climactic event of its season, the Super Bowl, is tainted just because the two teams in it might have previously played each other in the regular season.  In fact, such games hold the possibility of becoming historic in the sport.  The Super Bowl between the Giants and Patriots that followed the 2007 season springs immediately to mind.


The NFL makes rules changes every year, some of them quite significant - there is talk of eliminating kick-offs, although this has not been adopted - and the fans accept these changes as part of the natural evolution of the game and do not rend there garments because the NFL punjabs are tampering with the very heart and soul of the game.


What causes me to mention this are the diatribes that Pirates announcer Bob Walk has been delivering of late against Inter-league play (been with us since 1997) and the designated hitter (been with us since 1973; that FORTY SEASONS now). Now I happen to like Bob Walk a lot.  Loved him when he pitched so nobly for the Bucs back in the day, and think he is a very good and insightful announcer, but he really needs to get off of this particular 




bandwagon and shut up!  I don't think he realizes that with the move of the Astros to the American League next year, two 15 team leagues means that there will be inter-league play every day next year (remember when three NFL teams moved to the "American Conference," which was the old AFL, in 1970 when the leagues merged? Worked out OK for football, I think).


As for the designated hitter, 2012 represents the FORTIETH season that it has been with us. What the American League adopted as an experiment in 1973 is now in use in every professional and amateur baseball league in every country on the globe where the game is played, except, as we all know, in the National League.  Sorry, but when it comes to the DH, it is the National League and it's adherents who look  like the goofballs by refusing to adopt it, and the completely ludicrous concept of MLB playing it's Championship Event each season under two sets of rules is so completely wrong that I can't even begin to find the words to address it.


Hey, those who know me know I love baseball - and the National League - first among all sports, and I love the "old school" nature of it (for example, I saw nothing wrong in Cole Hamels "welcoming" Bryce Harper to the big leagues with a fastball to the ribs!), but baseball shoots itself in the foot so often by clinging to the past, it sometimes drives me crazy.