Milton Bradley Lost the Media Game / 5-11-11

Milton Bradley, the baseball player, has his fans.

They're here, here, here, here and here. Just a sampling. (I freely admit the third link is lame. But still fun.)

Anyway. This seems like a lot of fandom calories dedicated to a guy who has the reputation not just for sowing seeds, but planting entire crops of discontent wherever he lands. He played 216 games with the Dodgers, and that was the most he logged with any one team over a 12-year career. Easy to do if you're Jamey Wright. Harder to do when you lead the AL in OPS in 2008.

Well, to offer a slight understatement, Milton hasn't made best friends with everyone at every stop.

"You understand why they haven't won in 100 years here," is how he described the environment in the Chicago Cubs organization. They traded him before he played another game wearing their uniform.

"You wonder what his problem is," one ex-teammate reportedly said.

Mariners manager Eric Wedge is personally aware of MB's uncuddly side.

There's plenty more along those lines. You don't need the whole resume. It's fun/maddening to remember he threw the ball in the stands after two outs against the Twins a couple years ago. Use that googly thing if you want more anecdotes.

Milton inspires a wide range of emotional reactions. It's not so hard, in the game of baseball, to become a villain, a laughingstock, or a feared offensive force. It's not so easy to pull all three off.

I'm not sure that the apparent trichotomy -- if it even exists -- comes from MB being somehow deranged, bipolar, manic depressive, although one of those may well be a real condition of his. Not a shrink here. Let me repeat: I'm not capable of telling if anything ails him, mentally. What I do know is that he treated the media like dogshit year after year after year, and he paid the price.

Milton Bradley spent his career losing the media game. Maybe he cared too much about what people thought of him; maybe he cared too little. Those are equally valid theories. What's not in dispute, though, is that he made it very, very easy for people who covered him to dislike him. The consequence: bad press. Simple cause and effect.

I don't know that individual reporters across the country deserved his disdain. Maybe they did. Speaking as a former sports reporter, journalists are just as capable of being jerks as the next guy. Humans!

Point is, you can treat the media like stinky stinky doo-doo if you're anonymous little me. Works less well if you're a public figure of any kind.

That being said, Milton earned some of the unflattering words printed about him.

Earlier this year, an arrest for what might or might not be domestic violence (no charges were filed) doesn't make him any more endearing or defensible to those who would work to endear him to us or defend him in the court of public opinion.

But digging a little further, why should any of us rely on the impressions of any media member to form a judgment on a player's inner qualities and deficiencies? Why should any of us try to ascertain if a socially distant guy is someone we'd like, or wouldn't? And by socially distant, I don't mean reclusive. I mean, if we can't get to know our sports idols (and very few of us fans get to do so), then why should we act like we do?

Come to think of it, that explains why I can't stomach comments from people who purport to know the guy beyond the player. Get over yourselves.

To conclude with a non-conclusion, our lack of understanding of Milton, the man, is why this blogger's piece from Monday is so spot-on. He admits he bought a view obstructed ticket to Milton Bradley: The Show.

We all did.

Not Exactly Cops and Robbers / 5-2-11

When Osama bin Laden's planes hit those towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania ten autumns ago, he announced himself as Public Enemy Number 1.

He graduated instantly from distant little terrorist nuisance pest dude to The Bad Guy. Deservedly so: He and his followers perpetrated an evil act on 3,000 innocent bystanders. And in the end, whether the mastermind was in fact bin Laden himself or not, that part is of little consequence. Al Qaeda did this to us, one way or another. (Conspiracy theories are fun, but flimsy.)

There is little way to deny that Osama and his minions, in this battle (I hesitate to call it a war), became the bad guys. We were victims of aggression by an evil band of murderers. We watched it happen. We were struck by evil.

But that didn't automatically turn us into the good guys.

We could have seized the moment and been the goodies, as the Brits like to say. Except that 100,000 dead Iraqis -- real, live men, women and children who perished in an subsequent unnecessary war waged under false pretenses at best -- would like to object. If they could.

So when you celebrate the death of a real bad guy, a mass murderer, for sure, see if you can copy me and try desperately to squeeze three competing thoughts in the back of your crowded mind.

One's from a friend of mine who posted this last night on facebook: "Being glad that anyone is dead is still being glad someone is dead."

Then, this gem, pulled from some clever bumper sticker author: "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

At last, something from yours truly: "My opponent's wrongness is not some sort of redemptive purifying elixir that absolves me from making compassionate choices. Sometimes, a conflict might not have any good guys."

Ladenfreude / 5-2-11

Watched President Obama last night announce the capture and death of Osama bin Laden.

Then read up on what others had to say -- journalists, friends, strangers.

Is there a word for less-than-glad, yet highly relieved, with equal parts excitement and disbelief? There should be. That's what I am, so the word is required.

Less-than-glad is not exactly what these people, or these people, or even these people, are. (And that last one's from stuffy old NPR's facebook page.)

Yet... I just can't bring myself to dance on a grave, because no matter which bones lie in that coffin, the fact remains that if you look down, you find that you're still dancing on a grave.

That having been said, if we're being honest here, and now is as good a time as any to start with a truth-based strategy, I'm actually quite relieved. Not happy, mind you. Just relieved that a mass murderer is no longer free to let his particular brand of hate loose on the world. Quite relieved that bin Laden will never again strike my country. I exhaled all last night.

At the same time, adrenaline kicked in the instant I received the news alert. This bad guy, this mass murderer of people of every ethnicity and religious stripe, he's finished, and it's a f*cking big deal. W called it a "momentous achievement."

To boot, it doesn't feel real. Maybe because Al Qaeda has been on a decentralization kick as of late, at least according to most counter-terrorism experts, including Jack Bauer, so the news doesn't exactly spell the end of organized terrorism anyway.

I kid, I kid with the cheesy "24" reference, but when you spend a day sleeping in, doing yard work, watching baseball, and reading in the sun, your system just might reject serious news that forces it to revisit the last ten ugly years of world history. Did this really just happen?

Still looking for that catch-all word to sum up what I'm feeling. Good luck with that, self.