Just when you thought it was safe to turn off CNN ...
Just when you thought the only chads you'd have to worry about this year were Krueter and Durbin ...
Brace yourself.
America's next great hanging-chad crisis is about to explode upon us.
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Face it, friends.
Compared to this All-Star voting system, Florida was a model of 21st-century electoral
perfection. |
So approximately 17 Mariners were leading the All-Star voting with a week to go, huh?
So David Bell had more votes than Ellis Burks and Jim Thome combined, huh?
So only a major voting miracle could prevent Charles Gipson from starting ahead of Manny Ramirez, huh? (Oh, OK. Not really.)
Face it, friends. Compared to this All-Star voting system, Florida was a model of 21st-century electoral perfection.
Ever tried to fill out one of those All-Star ballots at the ballpark? By the time our kids were done voting the other day, there were more dangling chads just on our row than there were in all of Broward County.
So now here we are, with the All-Star Game itself looming just days away. And controversy racks our great land, threatening to tear our once-strong union asunder. What should we do? What should we think? How should justice prevail?
Heck, we don't know. We just figure out funky baseball stats for a living.
So we're following the only precedent we can recall in recent times in a case like this. We're assembling a talk-show panel.
With us tonight, here on a very special edition of Week in Review Vote Line, are our panelists:
First, there's Jeff Greenfield, the brilliant host of "Greenfield at Large" on CNN and the author of a new book on last fall's chad-ravaged election entitled, "Waiter, One Helping of Crow, Please."
And to his right (or is it his left?), it's the ingenious, hilarious Mo Rocca, of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," as well as the co-host of the tongue-in-cheek "World Domination" show, Friday afternoons on MLB radio.
Finally, we have a man who might have made more appearances on the hanging-chad talk-show circuit last fall than any living American, former Democratic National Committee chairman Ed Rendell.
Gentlemen, our first question is: Is there any conclusive evidence that millions of baseball fans went to the bleachers in good faith, intending to vote for someone other than a Seattle Mariner -- even, perhaps, a Devil Ray?
"I do find it peculiar," Rocca said, "that Izola Foster (Pat Buchanan's vice presidential candidate) is now on the All-Star team. To me, that's a real sign that people were confused."
Ah, no doubt. So how, then, after the fiasco in Florida, could baseball have possibly gone ahead and perpetuated the disastrous hole-punch voting system? Wouldn't there almost have to be some better, more accurate and efficient system?
"Well," Rocca mused, "they could just use an applause meter. But I say: Pack the stadium, like 'Gladiator,' and bring them all in, one chained to the other.
"Or they could do the Olympic thing and judge them all like figure skating. The scores would drop from highest to lowest. So if Mike Piazza falls on his triple-axle, you only deduct half a point because he's trying something really difficult."
Then again, Piazza hasn't even hit a triple this year, let alone a triple-axle. So we see flaws in that system, too.
"I say: Let the Taliban handle it," Rocca suggested. "You know, the crazy guys in Afghanistan who won't let women leave their houses? Then there's no confusion. They just declare who gets on the team -- and who gets killed."
Uh, we're thinking that might be a slightly more tragic outcome for some of these candidates than we had in mind. So Mo, chill a minute, until you expunge all Taliban thoughts from your brain cells. Mr. Rendell, let's turn to you.
"When I was doing all those shows during those 35 days last fall, I often used this baseball analogy on the air," Rendell said. "I've been going to baseball games for years, using these same punch cards. And if I dislodged one out of every five chads on those cards, that was a lot. Then I'd spend the rest of the game, from the third inning on, picking the back of the chads off the cards.
"So when they'd ask me how could those people in Florida not punch all the way through those chads, I said, 'Hey, I was a chad-picker long before this presidential election came along.' And I'm a big, strong guy, not an 80-year-old woman. And I couldn't even dislodge the chads on my All-Star ballot."
That, of course, is an experience all of us ballot punchers can relate to. So let's ask Mr. Greenfield: If, as Mr. Rendell suggests, that casts significant doubt on the accuracy of this balloting, does this mean we need to turn, once again to the courts? As we recall, those courts didn't exactly handle that last voting crisis quite as smoothly as Alomar and Vizquel turning two.
"The first question," Greenfield said, "is this: Is this an area where the Supreme Court can step in? And my feeling is, this is an area where you can trust the court's impartiality, for two reasons: One, Washington doesn't have a baseball team. And two, William O. Douglas was the last Supreme Court Justice with ties to Washington state."
So with no inherent Mariners biases and no chance of any Washington Senators winding up in the starting outfield, the judicial route looks promising. But is it really? Is it possible these justices have other leanings that could turn this voting flap in a whole 'nother direction?
"Two of these justices do have ties to Arizona politics," Greenfield said. "William Rehnquist was very active in the Arizona Republican Party. And Sandra Day O'Connor was a majority leader in the legislature there.
"So the next question," Greenfield concluded, "is: Does this mean four Diamondbacks wind up on the All-Star team?"
Well, as long as those four Diamondbacks are named Johnson, Schilling, Gonzalez and Kim, we could live with that -- unless the Court names them to the American League All-Star team. Uh, don't rule that out.
"Remember," Greenfield cautioned, "a lot of people think the Court overreached on Gore v. Bush. So if they get this case, God knows what might happen."
Good point. But when we spoke before the show, you mentioned that the key here is to analyze the composition of the court, as it might relate to this issue. And alarmingly, Justices Stephen Breyer (from Boston), David Souter (from New Hampshire) and Clarence Thomas (Yale guy) could all have latent Red Sox leanings. What might that mean?
"Could we have a New England conspiracy," Greenfield speculated, "where it gets to the Supreme Court and there are enough New England ties where they might declare that Red Sox have actually won the World Series, which is the only way they're ever going to win it?"
Hoo boy. Talk about your scandals. Makes us think this court strategy might not be the way to go here. Mo Rocca, your thoughts?
"At the end of the day," Rocca said, "somebody just needs to ascertain if Katherine Harris is really having an affair with Bud Selig."
Ah, fortunately for all concerned, we've just about reached the end of the day, too. We don't know if we've solved this mess. But at the very least, we see the potential for a new marathon of round-the-clock talk-show programming -- which, ultimately, is all that really matters in life.
"Let's just say I'd much rather spend 37 days worrying about the All-Star Game than the presidential election," Greenfield said. "But the great thing about sports is, when 5-3 is the final score, they don't have recounts."
What we do still have, though, is chads. And Mr. Rendell, what the heck should we do about those chads?
"It's time to put those chads to bed," Rendell said. "R.I.P. for all the chads -- the chads in Florida and the chads in all the baseball parks all over the land. What we need to do, to put them to rest, is pick the all-Chad team. That would be perfect. In honor of Florida, we have the all-Chad team play, on the Monday before the game. The rookie team can play the all-Chad team."
Man, are we ever happy to see that's about all the time we have. But after a tremendous suggestion like that, how can we not present the all-Chad team? So before we move on to other stuff, here goes:
1B: Chad Mottola
2B: Chad Meyers
SS: Chad Fonville
3B: Chad Ogea (sorry, ran out of Chads)
LF: Chad Curtis
CF: Chad Hermansen
RF: Chad Allen
C: Chad Kreuter
Starting pitcher: Chad Durbin
Relief pitcher: Chad Fox
Anthem singers: Chad and Jeremy
Spring training site: (where else?) Chad
SB of the week
Fourteen different men stole a base during a big-league ball game Tuesday.
But only one of them was a manager.
And only one of them stole first base.
That would be Mr. Lloyd McClendon, the fiery, kleptobaseiac skipper of those Pittsburgh Pirates. Anybody can argue a call at first base. It takes a special guy to yank the base right out of the ground and cart it right on up the tunnel into the clubhouse.
|  | | Pirates manager Lloyd McClendon, with first base in tow, angrily walks off the field. |
But apparently, McClendon wasn't that pleased with first-base ump Rick Reed's call on a bang-bang Jason Kendall play Tuesday. So he dug up the bag and marched off with it -- for his first stolen base since Aug. 5, 1992. (Rickey Henderson has stolen 308 bases since then, if you're keeping track.)
"You've got to give Lloyd credit for ingenuity," Pirates left-handed witticist Terry Mulholland told Week in Review. "Everyone's done the water cooler, throwing the bats on the field, throwing the hat, kicking dirt. I can't recall ever seeing a manager take an integral part of the game with him."
Well, that was one way to make sure those Pirates-Brewers highlights made it onto SportsCenter, instead of the dreaded score-only panel. And McClendon's players were dutifully impressed.
"In baseball, they always talk about fast guys who aren't good hitters and use the expression that you can't steal first base," Pirates rookie Rob Mackowiak told the Beaver County Times' John Perrotto. "Well, Mac disproved that old adage. He really did steal first base."
And Mulholland found that of particular personal fascination, since one of his claims to fame is that his move to first is so quick, he's considered the master of preventing the stolen base. (He's allowed five SBs in the last five seasons put together.)
But even he said: "There's no way to defend that. I wracked my brain all night trying to figure out, if I was on the mound and the opposing manager tried to steal first base, how I'd defend that. But it's non-defendable."
So who knows? You might see more of this in the future, because when you really start analyzing the art of stealing first base, it has many advantages. Start with this: If you steal first base, you can accuse every hitter on the other team of running out of the baseline.
"It's true," Mulholland said. "You've got no real direction out of the box. Should you go straight to second? You're kind of left in limbo. Fortunately, with this new state-of-the-art stadium we have, we had spare bases. Obviously, our grounds crew knows Lloyd better than the players. They had that spare base ready."
Yes, alas, that out-of-the-baseline strategy was foiled immediately by the umpires and grounds crew. They went and ordered a substitute first base, even while McClendon was heaving the other one up the tunnel, and Brian Giles was scooping it up to throw into his locker and keep as the ultimate PNC Park souvenir.
"It's a one-of-a-kind item I just had to have," Giles said. "I just wish I wouldn't have been on deck when it happened. I wanted to laugh so badly, but I couldn't, because I had to hit."
He's had plenty of chance to laugh about it since, fortunately. But once the laughter subsides, it's going to be time for the serious issue: What in the world is McClendon ever going to use as an alibi when baseball's own chief justice, Frank Robinson, gets ready to hand down a sentence?
"I would say he should get F. Lee Bailey to defend him," Mulholland proposed. "Then maybe he could concentrate on the theory that that was a defective base. There seemed to be a couple of bang-bang plays at first that resulted in questionable calls. Maybe the bag wasn't regulation size, and he saw that and decided to do something about it -- in the best interests of the game, of course."
Right. Of course. Or if that didn't fly, maybe McClendon and F. Lee could just go to the history books and talk about the long tradition of managers stealing bases.
Why, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, a manager really did steal a base as recently as Aug. 6, 1986, when Pete Rose pilfered one while serving as player-manager for the Reds (and got 3-to-1 odds against it, too).
We even had a manager steal 57 bases in a season once, when Frank (Don't Call Me Tinker or Evans) Chance pulled off that string of player-manager burglaries for the 1906 Cubs.
And let's recall that Robinson himself was a distinguished player-manager, back in the mid-70s in Cleveland.
"Maybe Frank Robinson can relate to that," Mulholland said, "being a manager and stealing bases. Been there, done that, pal."
Whoops. Been there. But not done that. Turns out Robinson never stole any bases when he was a manager.
So it's possible that the best course of action here is for McClendon to take whatever sentence Robinson hands down and accept it, just to help all of us parents explain the consequences of stealing first base to the children in our viewing and reading audience.
Asked what he would tell the kids out there who witnessed this innovative -- but still heinous -- crime, Mulholland had to give it deep thought.
"I'd say it's not easy managing in the big leagues, and sometimes grownups get upset, too," Mulholland said. "Oh -- and don't try this at home. These are professionals."
Crime scene of the week
As long as we're talking crime, it's clear somebody on the Florida Marlins has a future in criminology himself. And we think we know who.
Our story begins last Sunday, when Marlins left fielder Cliff Floyd went motoring back at just below the speed of sound in a clearly heroic attempt to catch a rocket off the bat of the Phillies' Bobby Abreu.
Except he forgot that in between the lush, emerald grass of the outfield and those chairs where the paying customers sit is a structure known, in the baseball biz, as ...
The Wall
So Floyd splattered himself into that wall at extremely high velocity, then crumpled into a human mashed potato as Abreu loped around the bases for an inside-the-park home run.
As Floyd lay on the ground, trying to remember his name, number and e-mail address, he said he asked himself: "How could I not know that damn wall was there? It's been out there all year. It's been there since they put up the stadium in '93."
Good point. But it was a point that didn't encourage his teammates to show any extra sympathy for him, either.
So the next day, when Floyd arrived at the park, he had a suspicion his pals were up to something.
"They told me, 'There's a beautiful girl on the bench.' " Floyd said. "So I went out there. But hey, that's just manhood."
When he got to the dugout, though, Floyd did not find Jennifer Lopez waiting for him. What he found was the outline of a human outfielder, painted on the left-field wall, right about where he'd run into it with his face the day before.
Immediately, Floyd fingered his buddy, Preston Wilson, as the prime suspect in this caper. So being the crime-stoppers we purport to be, we approached Wilson with the charges at hand.
"I don't know what happened," Wilson stammered. "I don't know how I got labeled. All I'm saying is, maybe I did. And maybe I didn't. It did happen. But there's so much love in this locker room that even an act like that can be overlooked for the cause of friendship."
Hmmm. In other words, he's guilty as Bonnie and Clyde.
"OK, I did it," Wilson confessed. "But hey, the way he crashed, we didn't know if he was gonna make it back. And when there's a scene of a crime, you usually put an outline there for the people in charge. I was just trying to do whatever I could to help the proper authorities."
Wow. What a guy. But Floyd found more than just that paint job out there. He also found all the Marlins' bat boys lined up to imitate him smashing into that wall and knocking themselves into the Land of Oz.
"You know, that wall wasn't in the same place it was before," Wilson said. "It slid over a few inches when he hit it."
"Hey," Floyd retorted, "if they just made those fences swivel at the bottom so you could just run right through them, like Turner Ward, it would be a lot easier on everybody."
And by everybody, of course, he meant: himself.
The great part about any legendary baseball practical joke, though, is that it is normally followed by an equally legendary practical joke in reverse. And don't think Floyd hasn't given that some thought.
"He's just lucky he's got the biggest field in the world to play," Floyd said of Wilson, who patrols Florida's vast center field. "So he'll never run into the wall."
"If I ever do," Wilson said, "he might not be able to sleep all night, trying to think of stuff to do to me."
"Know what?" said Cliff Floyd, his faculties, clearly, fully back in working order. "If he can run into a wall 434 feet away, I won't just paint the wall. I might bring the whole circus into town."
Long-distance vulture of the week
Some pitchers will do anything for a win.
Take Steve Reed, brand new bullpen addition, Atlanta Braves.
Most winning pitchers go about it the regular way. They wake up in the same city they pitch in. They actually arrive before the game starts. And they don't have to be introduced to their own managers at the same moment they're being handed the ball -- on the mound.
But Steve Reed has made a tradition out of winning games in more non-traditional ways. Trade for him one day. Keep playing the next day, for as many innings as it takes, until Reed just shows up at the park.
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You won't find many pitchers who can be 20,000 feet up there in the sky when a game starts and be the winning pitcher by the time it ends. But with Steve Reed, it's practically a way of life. |
Then warm him up and get him into the game as soon as possible -- because Steve Reed will be your winning pitcher that day, or your money back.
"It's guaranteed," Reed told Week in Review. "If you just need one win, I'm your guy."
You can look this up. When Reed collected a win Saturday in his first game as a Brave, it was the ultimate déjà vu experience.
Back on July 23, 1998, Reed got traded from the Giants to the Indians. Two days later, in his first game as an Indian, he literally swooped out of the sky in mid-game and got a win out of the deal.
"It was the same scene," Reed reminisced. "Arrived in the sixth inning. Got to the bullpen in the seventh. Pitched the eighth and ninth. Travis Fryman hit a home run in the 10th. Got a win."
So Steve Reed knew the drill. Little did he know he'd even top that script when he starred in the sequel last Saturday.
His saga kicked off the night before, when he and Karsay became just about the last people on the planet to discover they'd been traded from Cleveland to Atlanta for another relief pitcher you may have heard of -- some guy named John Rocker.
On TVs in every clubhouse in America, ESPN analysts were dissecting every last ramification of this deal. But even as they did, there were Karsay and Reed, hanging out in the Indians' bullpen in Kansas City, completely oblivious.
"Everyone else knew in the second or third inning," Karsay said. "Everyone except Steve and I."
Karsay, in fact, even was brought in to pitch the eighth inning -- for the Indians -- not knowing it was his Cleveland sayonara. In retrospect, he said, he was glad he didn't know.
"If I'd known," he said, "I don't know if I would have been able to concentrate on getting three outs."
But he got his three outs. Nobody said a word. He headed up the ramp to the clubhouse. And when he walked in, he found a few teammates who had already left the game watching TV.
"They looked at me like I was crazy," Karsay said, "like I had three heads or something."
He saw Chipper Jones talking about the deal on "Baseball Tonight." And suddenly, he figured it out.
It took Reed another inning. He headed into the clubhouse after the game, with no inkling whatsoever he needed to call a moving van. Immediately, Robbie Alomar came up, gave him a hug and said, 'We're gonna miss you.' "
"I said, 'No. Come on.' " Reed said. "Then I saw (Chuck Finley) on the couch. And he just said, 'Oh, yeah.' "
After that, they got the news from more official sources. They said their goodbyes. And they were up at 7 the next morning for their next adventure.
The plane took off at 9:30. It was supposed to arrive in Newark right at game time, or about 1:20 p.m. Then came the weather issues. The plane circled for 45 minutes, then finally landed at about 2.
Reed and Karsay went sprinting for the nearest cab and headed for Shea Stadium.
Rain was pouring down. Traffic was moving at the standard New York metropolitan-area rainy-day pace of minus-four miles per hour. The Braves-Mets game was on the radio.
"To be honest with you, I was still in a little bit of a daze," Karsay said.
But as the official New York native in the cab, Karsay also became Reed's personal traffic forecaster.
"All I could think about was how we weren't going to make it," Reed said. "So Karsay would say, 'When we get over this next bridge, it should loosen up.' And it didn't. Then he'd say, 'After we get through this next stretch, it should loosen up.' But it never did loosen up."
It eventually took them two hours just to get from the airport to the ballpark.
"I think it took longer to get from Newark to Shea," Reed said, "than it took to get from Kansas City to Newark."
But finally, at nearly 4:30, the cab pulled into the parking lot. Karsay and Reed shook hands with the traveling secretary and headed for the clubhouse. Karsay had pitched the previous night, so he wasn't activated. Reed, meanwhile, threw on his uniform and ran straight for the bullpen.
"I was out there no more than 10 minutes, and I was in the game," Reed said. "Obviously, you want to make a good impression. But it was a weird feeling. I'm coming into this game. This team had battled hard all day. And I didn't want to let them down. But I didn't even know them. So I figured this was either going to be a real good thing or a real bad thing."
Only when Reed arrived at the mound did he even meet his manager, Bobby Cox. He then shook hands with Chipper Jones and Javy Lopez. As introductions go, it wasn't exactly a get-acquainted dinner.
"I said, 'Javy, I'm Steve Reed. You know what I throw: A little slider. A little sinker. Let's go,' " Reed chuckled.
And he went. All he had to do in his Braves debut was face Mike Piazza, who was 7 for 13 off him, with no one out in the 10th inning and the winning run on first. But Reed got Piazza to hit into a double play, got through a shutout inning, then vultured himself a win when the Braves scored six runs in the top of the 11th.
You won't find many pitchers who can be 20,000 feet up there in the sky when a game starts and be the winning pitcher by the time it ends. But with Steve Reed, it's practically a way of life. He just hopes word doesn't get around about this, or he could be doing this every year for some new team or other.
"Yeah, if it ever comes down to, 'You're one game out on Sept. 30 and you need to win one game,' I guess I'd be your hired gun," Reed said. "I could be the David Cone of Sept. 30."
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Week in Review appears each Friday.
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