CT Blue

According to Selena Roberts of the New York Times, football is up and baseball’s in decline. As a confirmed baseball fan who has zero interest in football, I am somewhat sanguine about this prediction, since, at my advanced age, I can recall similar predictions that were made 30 years ago. That being said, she has a point about these late night playoff games. The culprit is not the starting time so much as network greed. Baseball has discrete between innings pauses that can be stretched to any length to accomodate any number of commercials. It adds up. I confess I’m not watching the Sox, my theory being that if I watch I’ll make them lose. I might risk it, if I didn’t have to sit through interminable commercials. Saturday night I decided to watch a DVD after the first half inning. I watched the whole full length movie, then checked in on the game, which was only in the fourth inning.

Then again, maybe this perennial prediction will come true this time. I suppose football is more consistent with our national character. Baseball is a nineteenth century game, emphasizing both teamwork and individual skills. Football is simply a metaphor for war, in which skill consists of being able to bash your opponent harder than he can bash you. That’s American in the 21st century.

But this post is only partly about baseball. It’s also about logic and reasoning. In the course of her argument Ms. Roberts inserted this non sequitur:

Certainly baseball’s fat attendance is bursting with baby boomers. But the sport is an old flame for romantic types, as proved by numbers even sabermetric lords can wrap their seamheads around.

In baseball, there hasn’t just been the much-discussed flight of black players, but white flight, too. In the last 15 years, according to a recent study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the percentage of African-American major league baseball players has plunged to 8.4, from 18; the percentage of white players has slipped to 59.5, from 68.

Umm…, exactly what does this prove, other than that there are increasing percentages of Asians and Hispanics in the game? While she never identifies the races of the remaining 32% we must assume that this is how those folks are classified. These statistics don’t prove that whites and blacks are fleeing, they prove only that other “races” are producing better players that are driving down the percentages of whites and blacks. I.e. whites and blacks aren’t fleeing; they’re being pushed. Or is Ms. Roberts implying that Pedro Martinez would never have made it in the pro game but for the shortage of Americans willing to be paid ungodly sums of money to play a game? She goes on to compare those numbers to the relative percentages in college football, a comparison that makes no sense, since Asians and Latin Americans don’t, by and large, attend our colleges or play football.

I suppose this is trivial, but I do get discouraged by the innumeracy of our betters.

It was a sad day when the Hartford Courant was purchased by the Los Angeles Times empire, but a sadder day still, apparently, when the Times sold itself a few months back. These things happen gradually, but it has lately dawned on me that this once proud paper, the oldest in the nation, is descending into tabloidism in a big way. The major national and international stories of the day, if they appear at all, are relegated to the inner pages. This wouldn’t be so bad if important local issues dominated the front page, but they don’t. Not unless you think that the issues that matter are tawdry tales about rapists and murderers, human interest stories about locksmiths driven from their offices, or almost two full pages of text about a girls swimming team.

Maybe the Courant feels it has to compete with the local TV news, which I gather concentrate on stories designed to increase fear levels while keeping people safely ignorant of things that pose far greater dangers to them. It’s quite sad. The Courant was an excellent paper in its day. Done in by media concentration.

Before I leave the subject, I do want to say that despite what I’ve just written, I really need to know more about David Pollitt’s pending release to a suburban neighborhood in Southington. What I find remarkable about this story is the fact that it is apparently a unique event. Apparently rapists have never before been released from the prisons of Connecticut. Foolish me. I would have thought it happens all the time, and that our cities get a disproportionate number of them when the releases take place. But I must be wrong, else we would have been reading stories like the Pollitt story for the last several years. Certainly the fact that this particular rapist is going to the suburbs has nothing to do with the massive publicity the story is getting, does it? And it would be overly cynical to think that the media is stirring the hornets nest, wouldn’t it? And all I can say about Susan Handy is shame on her for refusing to keep him in prison illegally. What kind of example is she setting for the children? I much prefer the approach that Jodi and Dick took-asking a judge to do something they both knew and admitted she should not do. That’s real political courage, that is.