Lee Lowenfish

All the major MLB awards have been given out and I have no real problem with the award-winners.  I am a little concerned that there are repeat winners in three big categories - Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani as MVPs, the Guardians' Stephen Vogt and the Brewers' Pat Murphy as Managers of the Year, and the Tigers' Tarik Skubal and the Pirates' Paul Skenes as Cy Young winners.  The result suggests that there are no new teams and pitchers breaking into the limelight. 

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I certainly hope that Skubal stays with the Tigers at least through the end of 2026 when he will be a free agent.  His owner Mike Ilitch Jr., heir to the Caesar's pizza chain and according to a google bio "the producer of Christian movies," is not very visionary in his stewardship so there have been no hints of an extension being offered to Skubal and his omnipresent agent Scott Boras. 

 

Skenes is a different case in that he won't be a free agent until after the 2029 season and already rumors are floating that he wants to be a Yankee which he has denied. 

He is a remarkable athlete.  Was both a pitcher and a catcher in HS and attended the Air Force Academy to start fulfilling his dream of being a pilot serving his country. 

He was so good at the AFA that his coaches begged him to transfer to a top division I school to hone his talents against better competition.  All he did was to lead the LSU Tigers to the 2023 College World Series title.  Pittsburgh had no choice but to draft him number one in the country and he has not disappointed Sadly, the Pirates' lack of offense and very few winning players have left the loyal fans and Skenes himself frustrated. 

 

Skenes is a quick study in all he does. Recently he became one of the first players to sign baseball cards for the Japanese market in a rare language that combines Japanese and Chinese characters. Predictions for the price of those cards on the eBay market stretch into several hundred thousand dollars.  Skenes' girl friend Olivia "Livvy" Dunne, the star gymast he met at LSU, is also no stranger to creating big ticket marketing opportunities.  Late in the now-settled "House vs. NCAA" federal trial trying to establish a fair price for  the services of college athletes, Dunne was vociferous in charging that her economic worth had been grossly undervalued while at LSU. 

 

I predict that there is one happier note ahead. The World Baseball Classic - which stretches from early March until a week before the opening of the MLB regular season in late March - will be another feel-good story.  Almost every player wants to participate.  Skenes, who reportedly would like to start an Air Force career after his baseball work is done, was honored to be selected to the American team.  There were NINE nationalities represented in the just-concluded thrilling World Series and some of those players are also likely to be on WBC rosters.  

 

The WBC is reportedly the one enterprise in MLB that the owners and the players share equally in its production. But I also predict a more troubling occurrence once the MLB season starts:  the rise of a barrage of stories about a likely lockout of the players by the owners after the current Basic Agreement ends at the end of December 2026.  I don't think the lockout will work - rich teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, Mets, Blue Jays - want the revenue from TV and the box office plus the glory of carrying a trophy around. (Although it pales aesthetically compared to hockey's Stanley Cup.) It promises to be a particularly ugly negotiation. Commissioner Rob Manfred has been openly telling players that the MLBPA has served only their richest brethren.  Recent stories have also been broken in major outlets like espn.com and The Athletic about misapproporiation of funds by MLBPA director Tony Clark. 

 

Baseball has a long history of owner-player struggles that I described in three editions of THE IMPERFECT DIAMOND, 1980, 1991, and 2011.  I made reference in the first edition of the late Mort Sahl's comment about Richard Nixon's memoir SIX CRISES - it should have come out in a looseleaf edition so you could add the crises.  Baseball has tried lockouts many times and they have not been successful. It is possible that saner heads may prevail sometime in 2026 before the deadline.

 

Here's some ideas: 

**Adjustment to the one-year qualifying offer for a player not yet a free agent is one area for reform.  Attached to a draft pick the signing team must surrender, the price tag of over $20 million seems quite high. Can it be reduced somewhat without players' claiming foul? 

 

**Establishing a salary floor that the non-big spending teams must obey is another area for possible reform.  Even reducing the number of years for free agency eligibility to 4 or 5 years seems like a workable idea from afar, but reason has never been a strong suit in baseball labor history.

 

One thing I will say in defense of the Phillies Bryce Harper who had a well-reported run-in with Rob Manfred when he visited the team during the season.  Harper noted that when he signed out of a community college in Las Vegas, he received a bonus of over $10 million as the number one pick in the country.  15 years later, that pick's bonus has not been any higher and for some players considerably lower.  Of course, no one is going to shed tears for the players in this battle.  It does show what monopoly rule by the owners can achieve as their franchise values soar and soar. 

 

 For now let's relax, prepare to enjoy the blessedly non-religious holiday of Thanksgiving, and become aware of some TCM highlights ahead.

 

Su Nov 16 12:15A & 10A - Noir Alley:  "High and Low" (1963) a classic Kurosawa film about a prominent father who has to cope with a serious legal charge against his son 

8P Jeff Bridges and John Goodman in the classic "The Big Lebowski" (1988)

Followed at 1015P Jeff and his brother Beau (sons of Lloyd Bridges)/Michelle Pfieffer in "The Fabulous Baker Boys" (1989) a believable take on struggling jazz musicians

 

M Nov 17 6P "M" (1931) the original German film about the hunt for a child killer played by Peter Lorre, directed by Fritz Lang

 

W Nov 19 from 6A-8P Films written by Billy Wilder, born in Vienna who as a teenager traveled to Berlin to write stories about the touring Paul Whiteman band and the great doomed trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke.   

6A "People on Sunday" (1930) Robert Siodmak follows young Berliners one Sunday cavorting in a park in what will turn out to be the last 3 years of the Weimar Republic. Siodmak in America in the 1940s will make some great Noirs including "The Suspect" with Charles Laughton, "Christmas Holiday" with Gene Kelly as a real bad guy snd Deanna Durbin, "The Killers" that made Burt Lancaster a star, and in a lighter vein George Sanders being overly protected by his sister the stunning Geraldine Fitzgerald (on a LIFE cover in the summer of 1945), "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry".

 

9A "Ninotchka" (1939) Wilder works with Ernst Lubitsch on a hilarious and rather profound story set in Paris about the romance of an American, Melvyn Douglas, with a ultra-serious Russian commissar Greta Garbo - "Garbo laughs" went the promotional trailer and she does.  Sadly, she made very few films if any after this one.

 

130P "Irma La Douce" (1963) with Shirley MacLaine also set in Paris but the times in the 1960s were changing and Wilder doesn't really ride well with them

4P "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957) maybe Wilder's best last film - with Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich - ads at the time forbade fans to give away the ending, I won't either! 

6P "One, Two, Three" (1961) with James Cagney - A Coca-Cola executive travels to Berlin to prevent his boss's daughter from marrying an East German Communist. with Arlene Francis, yes that Arlene Francis of "What's My Line?" fame. 

 

Th Nov 20 Neo-Nors including

8P "Point Blank" with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson

10P "The Late Show" (1977) with Art Carney, Lily Tomlin

 

Sat Nov 22. Nathan Lane introduces a classic noir and classic neo-noir:

8P "Double Indemnity" (1944). Edward G. Robinson under control without much screen time investigates Fred MacMurray/Barbara Stanwyck

10P "Chinatown" (1974) Polanski slices Jack Nicholson's nose, literally, but you keep watching. With Faye Dunaway.

1230A repeated Sun at 10 Noir Alley presents "The Strip" (1949) with Mickey Rooney as a struggling jazz drummer and Louis Armstrong playing and singing "A Kiss To

Build a Dream on". 

  

That's all for now - always remember:  Stay Positive Test Negative, and Take It Easy But Take It! 

During the first week of July I taught another class in the Special Studies program at the Chautauqua Institution. This year I called it: "Can Baseball Survive The 21st Century?"

 

I had a very receptive class of attentive adult listeners who asked good questions. I was glad that there was rewarding interest in my first book THE IMPERFECT DIAMOND: A History of Baseball's Labor Wars.

 

The topic of the endless player-owner conflicts in baseball seems especially relevant these days because the sport has always has been peopled by nay-sayers who think the game was always better in the past. 

 

As early as 1912, sportswriters were complaining that the games were too long!  Around the same time, John Montgomery Ward, the polymathic leader of the 1890 Players League which actually outdrew the established National League in its one season, gave up his brief job as president of the Boston Braves because he felt the players of HIS day were more serious about the game than contemporaries. 

 

I'm not a cockeyed optimist about the future of the sport in an expanding spectator sport market, but here is what I see as some positive signs: 

 

**The games in 2023 are shorter by a half-hour on average from last year's unacceptable average of over three hours a game. 

 

**The All-Star Game was more exciting than usual even if Felix "The Mountain" Bautista, closer for my Orioles, served up the game-winning 8th inning HR to Rockies catcher Elias Diaz. (Happily, Bautista suffered no hangover from his defeat because he successfully closed the Birds' first two post-ASG wins.) 

 

Diaz, a 32-year-old journeyman, is probably having a career year for one of the few teams that has no prayer of making the playoffs. The most obscure of the All-Stars, Diaz's heroics proved yet again that baseball remains the most delightfully unpredictable of all our sports.

 

As always I offer a fervent wish that the analytic hordes swarming around every MLB franchise don't try to take that unpredictability away from us in the name of "the next big thing." 

 

In addition to the disproportionate rise of the analytic crowd, there remains the unwholesome marriage of television and MLB. I realize younger fans like all the new bells and whistles, but personally I can do without the in-game interviews.

 

It reached a new low in the ASG when pitchers Nathan Eovaldi and Josh Hader were interviewed as they were pitching. Thank God a line drive didn't rocket towards them at the mound while they were chatting with the prattling Fox Sports broadcasters Joe Davis and John Smoltz.  It also looked like Padres outfielder Juan Soto might have caught a foul ball in the right field corner if he hadn't been distracted by an interviewer.   

 

Since I prefer to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, let me add some more comments on my Chautauqua experience.  Located in southwestern New York State about 50 miles from Erie, Pennsylvania, the Institution was founded in 1874 as a retreat for Methodist Sunday school teachers.  (Somewhat remarkably, there is no evidence that [Wesley] Branch Rickey ever spoke there - I guess his baseball work in St. Louis, Brookly, and Pittsburgh and devotion to his southern Ohio roots kept him from coming.)   

 

There is important political as well as religious history at Chautauqua.  William Jennings Bryan gave his "Cross of Gold" speech there during the 1896 campaign against eventual winner William McKinley.  Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his "I Hate War" speech during the 1936 campaign.

 

Today's Chautauqua has become more secular and it brims and overflows with inspiring music, art, and dance as well as stimulating lectures every weekday morning at 1045.

 

On the Fourth of July I heard an especially memorable talk by Scott Simon, the longtime host of NPR's Saturday morning news and features show.  I knew he was a big Chicago Cubs fan but I didn't realize his father's best friend was Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse and his aunt married Charley Grimm, legendary Cubs first baseman and manager.

 

An author and journalist who has traveled the world, Simon told a moving story of attending a soccer game in Kabul between the Afghani national team and a British team that took place during the brief interval when the Taliban had been routed by Allied forces. 

 

When the Afghanis scored the first goal of the match, a British woman paratrooper showed her support by

taking off her burqa letting her hair become visible.  It was the first time in six years that Afghanis could revel in the beauty of flowing female hair and the crowd went wild. Soon women all over the stadium took off their

burqas too. 

 

Simon could not hold back tears telling this story of a moment that did not, alas, lead to freedom and self-expression in a country now ruled again by the Taliban.  It did show the transcendant qualities of sport at its best. 

 

Chautauqua's summer programs last nine weeks through the end of August.  It is a gated community so everyone there must carry a gate pass although Sundays the grounds are open without charge to the larger community.  For information on programming this year and the themes for 2024, the sesquecentennial anniversary of Chautauqua, check out chq.org

 

As readers of this blog surely know, I had to see live baseball not just talk about it.  I attended the Fourth of July day game of the high-flying Jamestown Tarp Skunks against the Elmira Pioneers, two teams in the Perfect Game Wooden Bat Summer League. 

 

The Tarp Skunk nickname is a homage not only to the spunky animal in the area but also to Howard Ehmke, Connie Mack's surprise choice to start the 1929 World Series against the Cubs. Ehmke hailed from Chautauqua County and later became an inventor of a tarpulin used in many ballparks. 

 

In this age of inventive logos, there is now a skunk tail featured through the last number on the back of every Tarp Skunk uniform.  I'm not sure I like it, but it certainly is different.

 

There are only three regular season home games left for the Tarp Skunks, the last one on Fri July 28. They play at classic Diethrick Park built in 1939 and located 20 minutes from Chautauqua. Brief playoff series will follow.  For more info, check out tarpskunks.com

 

That's all for now - heading to Baltimore to talk about my new book on scouting BASEBALL'S ENDANGERED SPECIES at the Babe Ruth Museum Tues July 18 at 4p. Missed the Orioles split of the four game series at Yankee Stadium because I was at Chautauqua. 

 

Looking forward to seeing live the last two games of the Orioles' three-game series against the Dodgers. I'm not ready to call it a preview of a sequel to the 1966 World Series, but I can dream, can't I?  More on this

adventure in the next post.

 

In the meantime - Always remember:  Take it easy but take it, and stay positive test negative.