Reckful Baseball Predictions / 3-31-11

Baseball!

For your amusement (and your amusement only), here is how the 2011 season will play out. No no, it's true, I confess, I'm cheating a little here, because 0.12 percent of this year's games have already been played. And I'm not taking a whole lot of chances. Whatever the opposite of reckless is -- that's how my foreseeing organs foresee the future.

American League, Final Standings

WEST

1. Oakland, 88-74

2. Texas, 85-77

3. Seattle, 77-85

4. Anaheim, 76-86

CENTRAL

1. Minnesota, 90-72

2. Chicago, 88-74

3. Cleveland, 79-83

4. Detroit, 78-84

5. Kansas City, 67-95

EAST

1. Boston, 101-61

2. Toronto, 89-73

3. Tampa Bay, 86-76

4. New York, 83-79

5. Baltimore, 59-103

National League, Final Standings

WEST

1. San Francisco, 89-73

2. Los Angeles, 86-76

3. Colorado, 85-77

4. San Diego, 80-82

5. Arizona, 56-106

CENTRAL

1. Milwaukee, 91-71

2. Cincinnati, 90-72

3. Chicago, 88-74

4. St. Louis, 81-81

5. Houston, 66-96

6. Pittsburgh, 63-99

EAST

1. Philadelphia, 99-63

2. Atlanta, 90-72

3. Florida, 82-80

4. Washington, 76-86

5. New York, 67-95

Playoffs (aka Crapshoot Rounds)

American League

Boston def. Oakland 3-1

Minnesota def. Toronto 3-2

Boston def. Minnesota 4-1

National League

Philadelphia def. Cincinnati 3-1

San Francisco def. Milwaukee 3-2

Philadelphia def. San Francisco 4-1

World Series

Philadelphia def. Boston 4-1

Explanations and Rationale, Top Ten Style

10. So fun to root against the Yankees. They are one significant pitching injury away from a .500 season. (Bad year for NY, with the Messed-up Mets finishing in last place.)

9. Mariners will surprise the world by reaching .500 in August. Then they will fold, as expected.

8. Yes, everyone is picking Boston and Philly. There's a reason for that. Many reasons actually. Both teams are deep, flush with starting pitching and offense, and both squads are hungry for more success than they experienced last season.

7. Blue Jays will profit most from the Yankees' temporary demise. Toronto last made the playoffs in 1993. That was before the wild-card was invented. Now they get to be one.

6. A's win a weak AL West; Giants overcome injuries to take the NL West almost by default.

5. Seriously, never root against the Twins. What are you, an idiot?

4. Ichiro racks up 240 more hits and bats .355, second in the league.

3. Cliff Lee is the World Series MVP. (Risky predictions are overrated.)

2. Batting champ Dustin Pedroia is the AL MVP; Tim Lincecum is the NL MVP and Cy Young; AL top pitcher is Trevor Cahill.

1. A record six no-hitters are pitched. One by Felix Hernandez, one by Lee, one by some guy nobody has ever heard of before this season. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens both serve time in jail for perjury, and nobody hits 50 home runs. Coincidentally.

No, Huck You / 3-19-11

Fox "News" commentator, former Arkansas governor, and sometime presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, lecturing on same-sex marriage:

"The ideal world is a man and a woman, you don't go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal, that would be like saying well, there's some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them."

His words verbatim, from a radio interview February 28 of this year with host Steve Malzberg.

This has to stop. Comparing relationships between loving adults to relationships between molesters and molestees -- this has to stop. This can no longer be part of our national conversation, and that kind of talk needs to be called out for what it is: one part fear-mongering, another part ignorance, and clearly part insult.

I get it, though. Huckabee believes -- or at least pretends to believe, for political expediency -- that marriage is a covenant reserved for heterosexual unions. He doesn't want to expand that covenant outside that circle. That's the way it's been for millennia. I get it. Tradition!

So just say that. And stop there. Just state that gay couples are barred from marriage, for reasons of gender. If that's all it is. (It may be less defensible to acknowledge that you think that inheritance rights, visitation rights and custody rights are special privileges reserved for state-sanctioned heterosexual lovers. But that is the legal core of what you're implying.)

Anyway. More sentences beginning with "just": Just admit that you want traditional marriage to continue in its present form. There is very little shame in sticking to the dictionary definition of a term. Just take that route and you'll at least escape with some decency left.

Or even... just say "you don't go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that's against the ideal." Leave out the incest line.

Just say that traditional marriage is the ideal, and no substitutions are permitted. That's all. Leave room for the other side to politely argue that gender doesn't figure into the ideal. Have your conversation on those grounds.

But don't say that marriage between two women will lead to creepy old guys marrying their great-niece. Then you join the haters, and you deserve to be called out for it.

And no, it's NOT ironic to call someone hateful. It's not an ironic act for me to heap scorn on a hateful statement. I don't become hateful or intolerant for doing so. I become the person who brings daylight to a dark comment. When we get home from a two-week vacation and I tell you, "Oh man, the fridge is broken," and you open it, and you get tackled by the ripe stench of rotting asparagus dipped in curdled milk, you don't blame me for pointing out the malfunctioning appliance. (Well, not successfully, at least.)

I'll give people a chance to retreat if they want from cruel remarks. I say stuff I regret. I have compassion.

However, I don't have to tolerate hate.

To wrap up neatly: If the day comes when more than just some crackpot pervert wants to legalize incest and possibly brand it with a governmental seal of approval, then at that time, we can have that conversation. But this isn't it.

You Probably Won't Even Remember This Headline / 3-16-11

I'm not a history scholar by any means.

But it sure seems to this untrained observer that world events move at a different pace now.

In 1989-1991, an entire empire (one built on the quicksand of totalitarianism disguised as communism) disappeared from the face of the earth, just like that. My senior year in high school, a whole quarter of our social studies course was to be dedicated to studying the U.S.S.R.; it was naturally meant to fall under the rubric of geography. Yeah. That ended up being a history lesson instead.

We marveled at the breakneck speed of revolution. Boy, were we ever young.

(And before I go on, hell yes, those were awesome times to be a teenager! The world was on fire. [Hey! Billy Joel is NOT playing in the background. You're not hearing that song. You're really not. You might be hearing this one, however.] Relatively bloodless revolutions toppled regime after regime in Eastern Europe. Borders opened, walls fell, and a speedy war in Kuwait placed America so very squarely on top of the international food chain. Outside the food chain, even. For a decade.)

And to think, at the time, we didn't even have cell phones, the Internet, digital cameras, music downloading, DVD's... those things spent the 90's becoming ubiquitous.

So instead of experiencing another round of political upheaval, we held on the rest of that decade for dear virtual life as technological advances raced ahead with maniacal all-obsoleting speed. CD's used to mean something. Cordless phones used to mean something. 1 megapixel used to mean something. Digital cameras used to mean something. Huh. 128 megs of RAM was once considered ostentatious.

But you were there. You know all this.

What does it mean?

It means we're living in an uncertain era of change, and sometimes we don't even know what brand of change is lurking around the calendar's corner. Unhyperbolically, we're passengers in an era of hyper-accelerated cause and effect. Facebook and Twitter and other platforms have brought the reality of constant motion and constant contact to every doorstep, or to every doorstep's neighbor. You can be unconnected, but it takes an advanced degree in Hermitology and a will of titanium. Or a trip to the inner reaches of, say, Congo. (In a pinch, a week of watching Fox "News" will fill you with enough untruths that your connection becomes spotty.)

Everything is everywhere -- even in Congo, truth be told -- if only we want it. Sometimes when we don't want it, hm. The next thing is always about to happen; the last object in your rear view mirror is way, way, way farther than it appears.

Sudan voted to split into two nations way back in January. Remember? More than 100 people died in a bombing in Moscow a couple weeks later. Anyone recall the New Zealand earthquake that killed 200 people? Yeah, me neither. That was all the way back in February. Three weeks ago already.

Who was the president of Egypt from October 1981 until last month? Can't think back that far. That was one 9.0 quake, one tsunami, two near-government shutdowns, one bloody civil war, five major civil unrests, one oil spike, four nuclear explosions, one stock market hiccup and one Charlie Sheen ago. (Come to think of it, Charlie's kind of old news.)

I'd like to offer three conclusions from the observations above:

1. No longer does the phrase "We've always done it this way" carry any weight. For better or worse, traditions are measured in weeks and months, maybe years, but certainly not decades or longer. One-day-old news is exactly that. No, not news -- one day OLD.

2. People resistant to change are going to have a very, very, very hard time the rest of this century.

3. September 11, 2001 will be 10 years old when we go back to school after summer vacation. It might as well have happened a thousand years ago.

For Nothing / 3-13-11

I don't mean this in a rude manner, because there are serious cataclysms going on, but posts on Libya and Japan can wait. (There's still, in any case, at least three weeks until the Rapture, by my meticulous reading of biblical fortunetelling texts. And shouldn't there be locusts first anyway?)

No, the Wisconsin shenanigans have pissed me off, and the blood continues to proverbially boil, even a few days later.

(Six points of reference before the real post begins: 1. WI is a middle-of-the-road swing state and should be governed as such and not as some wet-dream political laboratory for the far right; 2. Stripping collective bargaining rights from teachers but not from firefighters? Really? I mean, really...; 3. Why have quorum requirements at all if they be bypassed with trickery? Makes no sense; 4. The WI Senate probably violated open meeting laws; 5. Don't try and disguise your power plays as budget solutions; 6. It's just plain wrong to try and legislate unions out of existence.)

Recent events in the Midwest (Ohio and Indiana passed similar measures, although to be fair, how would you know, with Charlie Sheen leading a band of Libyan-Egyptian rebels as they seek to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act while dodging suicide bombers) have been jarring. They have managed to push me back from the terrifying brink of courteous bipartisanship, where I tried to live last week, and have thankfully returned me to my natural home of unvarnished partisan liberalism.

With that out of the way, I think it's safe to say now, politely, factually, but also aggressively, that the Republican Party is officially the Party Of Against.

Somethin' like this has been said before. It was fashionable in many circles to call the GOP the "Party of No" immediately following Obama's election, and for good reason: that was their only move, outnumbered in Congress and the West Wing of the Mixed-Race House. In those happy months, the few remaining R's were virtually powerless to stop the slothlike, icebergian, tectonic-plate-speed advancement of Democratic-sponsored legislation. After all, all they said -- whimpered -- during that golden age was No, no, no.

And while that was adorable for a while, elections have consequences, and R's enjoyed a giant Boehner for the duration of 2010, which climaxed with them retaking the House and almost the Senate, and pushing the president EVEN farther to the right.

But back to the polite, factual, aggressive mutilation promised earlier. And maybe less gutter humor along the way, you ask? Eh. We'll see. I guarantee nothing.

Rules Of The Game: I will make none of the following statements up. I might embellish with Johnvented words. You can't stop me. All claims will be accurate; all opinion will be supported with D-cup arguments. (All worked up, can't help myself.)

I'd wager that some statements found below will even be perceived as complimentary, in the eye of the right kind of conservative beholder.

Crucial Disclaimer: I may generalize at times (i.e., not every Republican disbelieves in climate change), but that will not and should not detract from the accurate nature of what follows.

Opening Salvo: The Republican Party is best defined not by what it stands for, but instead by what it sets its sights on blocking.

List Of Illustrations:

1. R's are against more regulation anywhere, in principle.

2. R's are against more power being consolidated in the federal government's hands.

3. R's are against taking steps to combat climate change.

4. R's are against allowing a certain legal procedure to be performed. (We all know which medical procedure this refers to; it's the one the Supreme Court has declared legal in each of the past four decades.)

5. R's are against legalization of marijuana. 'Cept for my Kentucky buddy Rand Paul, The Perfect One.

6. R's are against same-sex marriage. One fair poll here.

7. R's are against taking steps to prevent accidental gun deaths (30,000 a year). When trigger locks become mandatory, they do their darndest to overturn that kind of life-saving legislation. Next.

8. R's are against universal health care. (Except Mitt Romney, 2006 model year.)

9. R's are against raising taxes in any economic situation on any segment of the population, for any reason. (Still trying to decide if that's hyperbole or not. Still trying.)

10. R's are against any expansion of the social safety net.

11. R's are against the power of unions to collectively bargain. Ohio, Indiana and now Wisconsin legislatures have removed those rights. Michigan's working on it. Pennsylvania too. Conservative darling and New Jersey Governor -- and noted liar -- Chris Christie is tinkering with the idea.

12. R's are against Muslims and Islam in general. (Link, link, link, more links are easy to find but that should be enough.) Free admission: this is a broad generalization I make here. But a good one. And by good, I mean highly defensible. Click the links.

13. R's are against amnesty for illegal immigrants and their children, no matter how long any of the family members have lived stateside. Besides Reagan, of course, he was a fan. But nobody listens to him anymore.

14. R's are against campaign finance reform.

15. R presidents are, in practice, squarely against balancing the federal budget. They're against even trying.

16. R legislators are against equal pay for equal work legislation. The vote in the House two years ago on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: 250-177. (The big number was the Democrats. The teeny tiny number was the other guys. Emphasis on guys.)

That ought to do it. Did I forget anything? (Like reparations, or habeas corpus, which I didn't forget, but decided to leave out?) Well, if I did, this guy probably said it, since his like-minded post went live while I took a break to work for a living. Jerk.