"The Black Box" by Michael Connelly (No Spoilers)

There are few better police / detective novelists out there than Michael Connelly.  His novels featuring LA police detective Harry Bosch are among the best of the genre.   I just finished reading the latest, "The Black Box", and it is par for the course.

Harry, now working Open and Unsolved cases, stumbles upon one that is personal for him.  A foreign journalist, was killed in 1992 during the riots in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdicts.   Harry was the homicide detective who was called to the scene at the time, but the case was never solved.   Now, the cold case file has fallen on Harry's desk and he won't stop until it's solved.

It's a good story, to be sure, but I do have one beef with the Bosch series.  When you read one or two of these books, they stand well on their own, but when you read a lot of them, and I've probably read a dozen or so of them over the years, you start to get tired of the way Harry is constantly butting heads with his superiors.  They always seem to have something in for Harry, and he never, and I mean never, follows procedures and orders.  He always has to do things his way, and he always seems to be under investigation by Internal Affairs, and he always to be just this close to being suspended, fired, or even arrested.  

I get tired of that. 

Gerrit Cole Arrives, and Other Pirates Thoughts

Gerrit Cole, the young man who was the subject of so much sturm und drang  on Facebook's Pirate Chat and other social media when he was sent to the minors at the close of Spring Training, will make his debut as a Pirates this coming Tuesday when he starts against the San Francisco Giants.   This start will come just a little over two years after Cole was selected by the Pirates with the overall Number One selection in the major league entry draft.  Despite all the criticism - much of it coming from this particular Grandstand, I admit - of the Pirates and the NHR for keeping guys in the minor leagues too long, Cole's ascension to a starting pitching assignment, against the defending World Series Champs, no less, has been remarkably swift.  In the grand scheme of things, Cole's "long-awaited" debut, will not have taken all that long after all.

I had promised myself that when Cole did make his first start, I would be at PNC Park to see it.  Turns out that Tuesdays happen to be our Caring Place night, so, alas and alack,  I will not be there to usher in the Gerrit Cole Era.  Perhaps this is a good thing, because I recall being at Three Rivers Stadium for the debuts of both Doug Frobel and Chad Hermansen, so Cole doesn't need that particular mojo going for him.  The DVR will be cranked up and I will rush home to see what I hope will be the first of Cole's 200 wins, give or take a few, that he will register for the Pirates over the course of his career.

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It was a tough week for the Bucs who after taking 3 of 4 from the Tigers, were swept by the Braves and lost 2 of 3 to the Reds.  At the beginning of that stretch, I had wished for a 5-5 record, but I'll take 4-6.  They will have to do better against the Reds in future match-ups, but the important thing is that there WILL be more games against the Reds this season, and remember, the Pirates are 4-3 against them so far in '13.  And, of course, there are still a lot of games to be played against the Cardinals, who don't seem to ever lose a game. 

It also looked like the best cure for such a stretch was a three game series against the Cubs, as the Pirates go for a sweep today.

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Speaking of the Major League Entry draft,  the Pirates selected 41 players this week, many of whom will be selling insurance or coaching high school baseball five or so years from now (as will most guys drafted by the other 29 MLB teams), but it will be fun to see which guy drafted after the 30th round will catch fire and become the Next Big Thing in the Pirates system and, we hope, at PNC Park someday.  Wasn't Dave Parker drafted after the 30th round?  And, of course, all eyes will be on the two first round choices, OF Austin Meadows and C Reese McGuire.  As high schoolers, they are a long way from Pittsburgh and PNC Park, but the potential of big things lie ahead for both of them, and, as I said, it will be fun following them along the way.

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I am ready for the following headline when young Mr. Meadows becomes a Pirate and has his first multi-home run game:

AUSTIN POWERS BUCS TO BIG WIN

Of course, by the time Meadows finally does arrive in Pittsburgh, the pop cultural reference to "Austin Powers" will be completely lost to everyone reading the newspaper, if, indeed, there still are newspapers then.

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Sticking with the theme of Pirates draft choices,  one of the more intriguing story lines over the past two seasons has been that of Stetson Allie.  You all know the story, a high school pitcher who could throw at close to 100 mph, Allie was drafted in the second round in 2010, right behind Jameson Taillon, given first round bonus money ($2 Million) to sign, but then bombed as a pitcher to the point where the Pirates decided to make him  a first baseman.  In 2012, Allie didn't do much of anything, and he was starting to look like another very expensive bust of a draft pick, but in 2013 playing in Low Class A West Virginia, Allie has become Babe Ruth:

AB - 224

BA - .326

HR - 16

RBI - 55

OPS - 1.016

But here is the curious thing.  If you go to the Pirates website, you can link into the the Pirates "Top 20" minor league prospects to follow how they are doing, and Allie does not appear in the Top Twenty.  I am not sure what this means.  It could be that he is #21 on the list and will crack it once Cole get promoted, or it could mean that he is the next Brad Eldred. Whichever it is, it will be fun to watch the Stetson Allie Story play out over the next couple of seasons.

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One of Allie's teammates in West Virgina, OF Josh Bell, is on that Top 20 list, and is ranked at Number Six.  His numbers in 231 AB's are as follows...BA of .277 with 8 HR, 45 RBI, and an .815 OPS.  Good, but not as good at the numbers Allie has posted.  Again, I don't know what it all means.

On Mark Appel....

Last July 13, after it became official that first round draft pick Mark Appel would not sign with the Pirates, I wrote the following in this blog about the possible ramifications of Appel's non-signing...

It forces Appel back into next year's draft, and any number of things could go wrong for the kid at this point: he could get hurt, he could fall lower in the draft because of the abilities of the other players available in the 2013 draft, he could be exposed in his senior year at Stanford as just another Bryan Bullington, and any one of those factors could and probably would end up costing him millions of dollars.  

So, in conclusion, the new spending restrictions on the entry draft have ended up screwing the kid and screwing the Pirates, but the Yanks and Sawx are no doubt happy about it, which means everything is OK.

It was reported that the Pirates offer to Appel was in the neighborhood of $3.8 million.  It will be interesting to track both what Appel signs for next season and how his career progresses over the next ten or so years.  Time will tell how much this non-deal really hurts the Pirates.  

Well, goes to show you what I know.  Appel excelled in his senior year at Stanford, and last night he became the #1 overall draft choice in MLB, taken by the Houston Astros.  He will no doubt get more than the $3.8 million the Bucs were offering last year.  The kid rolled the dice, and came up a winner.  Of course, how he actually pitches in the majors is still TBD.

Tonight's MLB Draft

I made this post on Facebook earlier today, and thought I'd put it out here as well:

The year the Pirates drafted Kris Benson #1 (and, don't forget, he was THE undisputed choice of everyone to go #1 that year), the guy who eventually became the best player of that entire draft class was Roy Oswalt, and he was drafted in the TWENTY-EIGHTH round. It is the most inexact science in all of sports. So, barring some obvious screw-up like Bullington-at-#1 or Moskos-Instead-of-Weiters, I'm going to try not to get too excited, one way or the other, over who the Pirates select tonight, and just hope that of the 50 guys they draft over the next few days, four or five will turn out to be good major league ballplayers, and maybe one or two will be all-stars. 

That would make it a very good draft class, I believe.

An H.A. Citation

Everyone knows that I normally eschew politics on this Blog, but Brian O'Neill's column in today's Post-Gazette is too good to pass up:

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/brian-oneill/state-rep-incredibly-strikes-real-phony-pose-690500/

For those of you who haven't read it, it is about Pennsylvania State Representative Jesse White from Washington County (to be honest, I do not even know whether Mr. White is a Democrat or a Republican, and I have not looked it up in order to remain apolitical and bi-partisan on this one).  Anyway, it seems that Rep. White has taken to Facebook and Twitter to attack his opposition, which is OK in an of itself, I suppose, except that Mr. White is doing so while using phony identities, usually as young women.  As I say, read the O'Neill column.

For twisting the Social Media for his own ends in a sleazy and, frankly, creepy manor, The Grandstander awards an H.A. Citation for PA State Representative Jesse White.  Here you go, Jess!

(Photo Courtesy of Dan Bonk Enterprises)

D-Day, 69 Years Later

I posted the following one year ago today, and will no doubt post it on June 6 next year as well......

Every year on this day, I always go back and re-read a section from Andy Rooney's 1995 book, "My War."

There have been only a handful of days since the beginning of time on which the direction the world was taking has been changed for the better in only one twenty-four hour period by an act of man. June 6, 1944, was one of them.

What the Americans, the British, and the Canadians were trying to do was get back an entire continent that had been taken from its rightful owners and whose citizens had been taken captive by Adolf Hitler's German army. It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people ever did for another.

The Biennial Garage Sale

The Biennial Stonebrook Village Garage sale took place.  It must have been the phases of the moon, but it seemed like every other neighborhood along Rochester Road had their garage sales yesterday, too.  Opinions were mixed as to whether or not this was a good or a bad thing.  Did the preponderance of such sales increase traffic, and, hence, sales, or did the preponderance of such sales mean that everyone spent all their money before they got to our neighborhood?  I'll leave that one to the boys in Market Research to sort out.

Loyal Readers may recall me writing on this topic two years ago after our first Garage Sale (http://www.grandstander.blogspot.com/2011/06/neighborhood-garage-sale.html), and many of the things mentioned then held true once again yesterday - the things we thought would sell didn't, the things we didn't think would sell (an old harmonica, e.g.) did, and the glimpse of human nature you get as people try to get you to come down from two dollars to one dollar on some piece-of-crap widget that you are trying to unload ("it's two lousy dollars, you jerk!").  Anyway, we did manage to get rid of a lot of "stuff", which was the main point of the exercise, and we cleared fifty-eight bucks in the process, so what the hell?

I will close with one anecdote from the day.  One of our big ticket items that I was sure would sell was a TV stand.  It was a pretty nice one, was only two years old, and cost us around a hundred and thirty bucks when we originally bought it. We had it marked at $25, and were hoping we'd get twenty for it.  Turns out, no one was in the market for it.  In the last hour of the sale, we were at the "make us an offer" point.  Some guy comes up with his wife, checks out the stand and asks what do I want for it.  I say "we were asking $25".  He says "how about $5?".  I say "How about $10?"  And at this point, our neighbor says from her driveway "you don't even have to put it together".  The jackwagon then says "Five."  And, as much as I wanted to get rid of the TV stand, I say "No".  Something inside of me just would not let me give in to this tightwad.

I won't print here what I REALLY wanted to say to this cheapskate.

So, if any  of you readers out there need a TV stand, get in touch with me.  It's back down in our lower level.  Just don't offer me five bucks for it!