It's Opening Day!

Yes, today is Opening Day, actually, Opening Night, of the 2026 Major League Baseball season, and joy reigns throughout the land.  It starts with a nationally televised game between the Yankees and the Giants.  The game will be played at the Polo Grounds!  Well, the Polo Grounds are long gone, and it's not actually televised, it is being streamed on Netflix, so you have to pay to see it.  MLB tapping another revenue source.  The rest of MLB opens tomorrow, and the Pirates opener against the Mets will be nationally televised on NBC.  

Why would NBC, back in the baseball business after many years, choose the Pirates to open the season?  Well, this guy no doubt played key role in that decision:

Yep, that is 2025 Cy Young Award winner Paul Skenes, fresh off of a great showing in the World Baseball Classic who will be the starter for the Bucs tomorrow.

Why is it, Grandstander, you may ask, haven't you written about your favorite baseball team all winter and throughout Spring Training?

It's a good question, and the truth is, there is no good reason for it, other than, perhaps, laziness on my part?  Or, perhaps the performance of the Pirates and their chickenshit, cheapskate ownership has just turned me into a complete cynic when it comes to them.  In fact, the Pirates did make some moves this off season that might make you feel encouraged.  They actually traded for and signed some significant, we hope, players over the off season - Brandon Lowe, Ryan O'Hearn, and Marcel Ozuna to name three.  After years of doing NOTHING in the off-seasons, they actually did SOMETHING this past winter, but the question is, will that SOMETHING  be good enough to actually make a difference?  

One thing that the team does have is good starting pitching, led by Skenes, who, if he isn't the best pitcher in baseball, is certainly among the top three or four.  Other starters include Mitch Keller, Brandon Ashcroft, and Bubba Chandler, plus the hope that Jared Jones will be available to pitch by Memorial Day.  With exception of Keller, these are young guys with great potential, but they haven't shown that they can do it in the Bigs just yet.

The problem last year was that the Pirates couldn't hit or score runs.  Perhaps the additions of Lowe, O'Hearn, and Ozuna will rectify that, but there are still giant question marks at third base, short stop, catcher, and the outfield, which figures to be a sieve defensively.  Looming over all of the Bucs' offensive questions is 19 year old Konnor Griffin, the #1 prospect in all of MLB.  He will start the season in Triple-A Indianapolis, where the team hopes to get him some AB's against a higher level of pitching.  (He has never played above Double-A and only there for half a season.)  It is hoped that he lights it up at Indy, joins the team by Memorial Day, and begins a career at short stop where he will become a combination of Cal Ripken, Derek Jeter, and Honus Wagner.

Some people are saying that the team has a chance to make MLB's expanded playoffs this year.  They were a God-awful team last year, and it is hard to imagine that they could make the leap from Pathetic to Post-Season in a single year.  The betting lines have set the Over/Under on Pirates wins at 76.5.  Seventy-seven wins would represent a six game improvement over 2025.  That doesn't seem like much, but, the Pirates have made me very skeptical about their chances.  I saw my first Pirates game in 1959, and the fact that the ownership of this team has turned someone like me so cynical may be their greatest crime of all.

I bet the OVER.  Maybe they can improve by seven games, but I would still be shocked if that break .500 this year.

Hope I'm wrong, and, as always, LET'S GO BUCS.

March Madness 2026

 

If you are like me, you spent much of the this past weekend, Thursday through Sunday night, watching the opening rounds of the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament.  It was great.  Saw a lot of good games and some great players, and I look forward to the Regionals that will be contested this coming weekend. 

Since the weekend, I have heard a number of people bemoaning the fact that college basketball as it exists today has "killed Cinderella" due in large part to NIL money and the transfer portal.  They point to the fact that all of the sixteen teams remaining in the tournament are "big programs" from power conferences, and that the fact that mid-majors just "can't compete anymore".  To that I say....it has always been thus.  Oh, sure, first round upsets are always fun, but when the smoke clears after the second round, there are usually nothing but blue-bloods left standing.  Once in a while a George Mason or VCU manages to advance, but those occasions are few and far between.  Rather than me go on and on about it, let me cut-n-paste from the today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column from sports writer Paul Zeise:

• People complaining about the lack of a “Cinderella” advancing in the NCAA tournament are people who have a romanticized view of the event that isn’t based in reality. The truth is one or two of those mid-major teams pulling an upset is fine. A run like George Mason had to the Final Four once in a while is fine. But the tournament is best when the best teams and best players continue to be showcased as the tournament goes on.

The power conferences should field the best teams, as this is the tournament to decide the national champion. I enjoyed watching the High Point win against Wisconsin as much as the next guy, but I don’t want to see five or six High Points winning, and I certainly don’t want to see more than one of them in the Sweet 16.

I know that there are many theories as to why the mid-majors have been shut out of the Sweet 16 the past two seasons. The transfer portal and NIL are a big part of it — the mid-major schools have essentially become feeder programs for the power teams. But there are other factors as well. And it is OK that the power conference teams are taking control of the tournament. As I have written many times, the landscape of college athletics is changing and will continue to change, so you might as well embrace it.

Nailed it!

As for what lies ahead, I will give you a prediction:  Houston over Arizona in the Championship game.  Had not seen Houston play all year, but when I finally saw them this weekend...Wow.  They was one strong team.

And speaking of strong teams, I watched the women's tournament game between Connecticut and Syracuse on Monday night, which UConn won by a score of 98-45.  It was 65-12 at halftime, and Syracuse scored only 4 points in the second quarter.  Watching the Lady Huskies on Monday night was positively jaw-dropping.  Maybe Syracuse just had an off night, a very, very bad off night, at the worst time possible.  

Or maybe Connecticut is just THAT good.  I don't see how any team can beat them.  

By the way, that win over the Orange was their 52nd win in a row.

Finally, one of the highlights of the weekend for me was watching Iowa's Alvaro Folgueiras make the shot at the end of the game that gave the Hawkeyes a 73-72 win over defending champion Florida.  Folgueiras was the Player of the Year last year in the Horizon League when he played for Robert Morris and led the Colonials into the NCAA Tournament.  He transferred to Iowa after the season (see Paul Zeise's comment above about mid-majors becoming "feeder programs"), and now he has contributed to a Big Ten team making it to the Sweet 16.  

Always nice to see a Colonial, even a former one, make good!

Folgueiras hits the winner!

To Absent Friends - Neil Sedaka

 

Neil Sedaka

1939-2026

I did not want to let too much more time pass before registering this tribute to singer/songwriter Neil Sedaka, who died last month at the age of 86.

A musical prodigy on the piano, Sedaka teamed with his Brooklyn high school classmate and friend, Howard Greenfield, and together they produced hit records out of New York's Brill Building like "Oh Carol", "Happy Birthday, Sweet 16", "Calendar Girl", and perhaps his biggest hit, "Breaking Up Is Hard to do", which was Number 1 on Billboard Top 100 in 1967.  Like many of his contemporaries, Sedaka was swept away by the British tidal wave of bands and singers that was led by the Beatles in 1963.  Sedaka continued to write music and perform, but his days as a star appeared be over.

In the mid-seventies, however, it was one of those British stars, Elton John, who encouraged Sedaka to come back, and John helped produce the album "Sedaka's Back", the album that brought Sedaka back into mainstream popular music, and after that, he never really went away.  His comeback  was also helped immensely when the duo of The Captain and Tennille recorded his song, "Love Will Keep Us Together", a song that became one of the biggest hits of the decade of the 1970's.  (If you listen closely to the closing chorus, you will hear them sing the words "Sedaka is back".)  In one of his obituaries he was quoted as saying that after "Love Will Keep Us Together", he went from an annual income of about $50,000 to one of over $4 million.  He even re-recorded his biggest hit, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do", this time as a slower, more romantic ballad, and it once again hit the Billboard Top Ten in 1975.

Neil Sedaka had a long and prolific career, he was said to had written close to a thousand songs, but I will close by saying that my own personal favorite of his was "Laughter In The Rain".  You can see him singing it live in a performance recorded in 1975 HERE.  The fashions and the hairstyles are way out of date, but that song never will be.

RIP Neil Sedaka.

Movies: Reviews, The Oscars, and A Book

Catching up on Movie Stuff....

In a post I made a few days ago, I had alluded to the fact that I had seen none of the movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and only one of the twenty nominated acting performances.  In an effort to not be totally ignorant while watching the Academy Awards show on Sunday night, Linda and I watched two of the Best Picture nominees over the weekend.  These are going to be Quicky Capsule Reviews.

The first was Marty Supreme.  Timothee Chalamet, who apparently has become a lightning rod for "unlikeability" among his peers in the movie business, was nominated, deservedly so, for Best Actor for his performance as Marty Mauser, a champion ping pong table tennis player in the early 1950's.  Supposedly loosely based on a real person (Marty Reisman), Marty Mauser was a hustler, a womanizer, perhaps a thief, and, while he was a champ at ping pong table tennis, he just was not a real nice guy, certainly not a character with whom you could sympathize.   In fact, many of the people in this movie, were pretty much unlikeable.  Chalamet plays the guy perfectly, and he shows his real acting chops in a scene at the very end of the movie when, maybe, he sees what a shit he has been and lets you think that maybe he will change how he is going to live his life.  Maybe.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

On the face of it, Sinners is not the kind of movie that appeals to me.  I mean, there are vampires in it!  However, the movie was nominated for sixteen Oscars, a record, everyone that we know who saw it simply raved about it, so we made it a point to see it, and after seeing it, all we could say was WOW.  Simply a great movie, one that stays with you long after you see it.  Michael B. Jordan plays a duel role as twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, who return to their home in the Mississippi delta - after being away for many years in Chicago, where they were involved in probably criminal activities -  to open their own juke joint.  In addition to booze and gambling, their joint is to feature authentic Mississippi Blues music.  Some strangers, white Irish folks, show up and want to be a part of the scene.  Smoke, or maybe it was Stack, resists, and these strangers then decide to make themselves a part of the scene anyway (this is where the vampires come in).

Yeah, yeah, vampires.  Ridiculous, you say, and normally I would agree with you, but the way screenwriter and director Ryan Coogler tells the story, he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, you buy into it completely.  And the music! The blues music featured throughout the movie is simply terrific.  It is as much a character in the movie as any of the actors.

Jordan took home the Oscar for Best Actor, and I believe that it was well deserved. I also liked the fact that after the ceremony, Jordan took his Oscar statue and celebrated at an In-and-Out Burger restaurant in Los Angeles.  A Man of the People.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.  Oh, and when you see it, either in a theater or on your TV set, watch until the very end of all of the credits.

Then there was the movie that was the big winner of the night, One Battle After Another.  

I remember seeing a trailer for this way back last summer, and thinking, "hmm, not so sure about this one", but the critical acclaim and all those Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson, and Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn) has put this on our "We Have To See It" list.  That will probably happen sometime this coming weekend.

I did read one post-Oscar comment that said, that while "One Battle..." is a good movie, it will not be the 2025 movie that everyone will still be talking about ten, fifteen, or twenty years from now.  The one that we'll all remember will be Sinners.

That Oscar won by Penn is the third one of his career.  He now joins the pantheon of  these actors who have won three Oscars: Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Ingrid Bergman, and Walter Brennan (yes, Walter Brennan!)  Pretty good company for someone who will probably be most remembered for playing high school stoner Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High way back in 1982.

By the way, all of this actors listed above are still one behind Kathrine Hepburn, who won four Oscars in her career.

As for the Academy Awards show itself, it was no better or worse than all of the ones that preceded it.  It was too long, Conan O'Brien was pretty good as the host, the musical number from Sinners was tremendous, the In Memoriam tributes to Rob Reiner, Diane Keaton, and Robert Redford were great, it would have been better had we seen more of the nominated films and performances, and the award for the Most Ridiculous Dress of the Night went to Demi Moore.

Oh, and I promised you a book review, and I include it here because it its about the Movies.

As you can see from the subtitle of the book, it focuses on the rise of perhaps the three most prominent American film makers of the last fifty years, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, oh, and throw in a healthy dash of both Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, and you've got a book that movie lovers will thoroughly enjoy.  Here is my take on the "stars" of the book.  Spielberg comes across as the most normal and likeable, Lucas as odd, and Coppola as a total screwball in his we-have-to-do-this-my-way method of doing business.  All are brilliant, but all of them are, shall we say, different than you and me.

The book is chockfull of stories about some of the greatest movies of our times: The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars, American Graffiti, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, Raiders of The Lost Ark, and Raging BulI among others. I really enjoyed the book.

Three and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

Fifty Year Old Movies

The Motion Picture Academy Awards will be presented this coming weekend.  This is a topic that I usually write about in great length, but I have not done so at all his year due to the fact that I have seen only one nominated performance for 2025, Best Actress Nominee Kate Hudson for Song Sung Blue, although Linda and I do plan on watching Sinners before Sunday's awards ceremony.

So, I am going to take a look at the movies today in a different light, and talk about some of the movies that will be turning fifty years old in 2026.  In a world where Google exists, it is easy enough to find such films by Googling, say, "best movies of 1976".  In fact, you can find all kinds of such lists, and it is hard to say that any one of them is definitive.  However, all of them include these movies:

All the President's Men

Alan Pakula directed this story of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as they dug in and reported on the Watergate break in that eventually led to the resignation of the President of the United States.

Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese directed and Robert De Niro starred in this story of New York City taxi driver Travis Bickle.  It is a grim portrait of a a troubled  - to say the least - person. It also stars Cybill Shepherd and a very young Jodi Foster.  It is disturbing, but unforgettable.

Network

An inside look at a television network and how it operates its news division.  Peter Finch (he won an Oscar for this), Faye Dunaway, and William Holden star.  The movie is, sadly, still amazingly relevant today.

Rocky

This story of an underdog tomato-can of a boxer who gets a chance to fight for the heavyweight championship is considered by many to be the greatest sports movie ever made.  It won the Best Picture Oscar that year, and it launched the career of Sylvester Stallone.  As one write up I saw today said, the many, many sequels to this may have dulled the luster of the original, which is a shame, because it really is a terrific movie.  (Purely Personal Opinion:  In retrospect, the Oscar should have gone to All The President's Men.)

The Shootist

The story of a legendary Old West gunfighter who has been stricken with cancer and now seeks to see how to end his days with a "minimum of pain and maximum of dignity". The movie stars John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, and James Stewart.  It is remembered today because it was Wayne's last movie.  The fact that Wayne himself was battling the cancer to which he was eventually succumb, adds to overall tone of the movie, making it almost autobiographical.

In no particular order, here are some other notable movies that are also turning 50 this year, all of them worth watching:

• Murder by Death - Screenplay by Neil Simon makes this one worth watching
• Marathon Man - Great thriller starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier
• Silver Streak - Great comedy starring Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, and Jill Clayburgh. Some comedies don't hold up after fifty years; this one does.
• The Bad News Bears - Walter Matthau coaches a team of misfit Little Leaguers whose best player is a girl played by Tatum O'Neal, who won and Oscar for her performance.
• Family Plot - Should be watched if for no other reason than it was Alfred Hitchcock's last movie.
• The Front - Woody Allen stars in this movie drama (he neither wrote not directed it) about the Hollywood Blacklist Era.
• A Star Is Born - The one with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson.

These are all movies that I have seen, and I think that I will make a point of watching all of them at some point during this fiftieth anniversary year of their release.  I can highly recommend all of them to you.  In researching material for this post I saw two movies on every list that I had not seen, and I am going to make it a point to see them too.

• The Outlaw Josey Wales - A western directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
• Assault on Precinct 13 - A thriller set in contemporary Los Angeles directed by John Carpenter

And just to show that not everything was groovy back then, 1976 also saw the first remake of the 1933 classic King Kong.  This movie was universally panned by critics.  The miracle of this one was that the careers of Charles Grodin, Jeff Bridges, and Jessica Lange (in her very first movie role) did not go down the drain along with it.

Book Review - "The Correspondent" by Virginia Evans

February has been a brutal month.  The northeastern part of the country, including Pittsburgh, has been hit with frigid temperatures and way above normal amounts of snowfall, the leadership of our federal government continues to take us deeper and deeper into the proverbial shitter, and here in The Grandstand, I have made eight posts this month and seven of them have been Absent Friends posts extolling the lives of nine significant people that we have lost this month. 

So, in what may well be my final post of the month, let me offer you a bright spot with a Four Star reading recommendation.

This novel currently sits in the #1 spot on the New York Times best sellers list.  It was brought to my attention by my pal Dan last year.  He read it on a neighbor's recommendation and said it was the best book that he had read last year.  Linda bought it for herself, but before she could read it, I picked it up myself and, as the cliche goes, I could not put it down.

The novel tells the story of Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, a retired attorney, divorced, a mother and a grandmother, who lives in Annapolis, MD and spends her days reading, tending to her gardens, and writing letters.  Old fashioned, handwritten letters and notes to her children, her brother, her sister-in-law, to just about anyone in her life, including customer service representatives of companies with whom she deals.  And there is one letter that Sybil writes throughout the book that she never finishes and never gets sent.  What is that all about?

The novel is written purely in the form of the correspondence both sent and received by Sybil over the course of ten years, 2012-2022.  It is certainly a different way to tell a story, but through this, we learn all about Sybil's life, about her parents, siblings, marriage, children and in-laws.  We also learn about one particular court case in which she was involved that is now coming back to her in a disturbing way.  Also, about a Christmas gift that her brother gave her that ends up having a remarkable affect on her life in these years covered by the book.

As I said, the whole structure of the novel and the story that it told was fascinating to me, and I polished it off in just a couple of sittings.  I highly recommend it.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

In reading more about the book after I finished it was interesting as well.  "The Correspondent" is Virginia Evans' first published novel.   It received little pre-publication hype or promotion from the publisher.  It was not a book club selection by Oprah, Reese, or Jenna.  It seems that this became a hit in an organic and old fashioned way.  Someone bought it and read it, and told two other people about it.  Those people told two more and so on and BOOM!! A best seller was born.

Virginia Evans and her best seller

To Absent Friends - Jesse Jackson

 

Last week death claimed one of the towering figures of the American Civil Rights Movement, and indeed, a dominant figure in American culture since the 1960's, when the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson died at the age of 84.

Far be it from to enumerate Jackson's contributions to both the Civil Rights Movement in particular or to American society in general.  I will only say that I admired him, and that his death takes away another bit of America's conscience when it is most sorely needed here in 2026.

I will also remember Jackson as one of the greatest orators of our time.

How about this for inspiration when he told a crowd that everyone can be Somebody.

And could any minister, priest, or rabbi deliver as moving a eulogy and moving as was Jackson's eulogy for Jackie Robinson?

And to show that he never took himself too seriously, listen to him here on Saturday Night Live when, in a tribute to Dr. Suess, he read Green Eggs and Ham in pure Jesse Jackson style.

RIP Jesse Jackson

"I am.....somebody!"

Jackson (L) with Martin Luther King in Memphis 

moments before King's assassination

1968