No Clock

On Walter O’Malley:

Former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley was selected for the Hall of Fame yesterday to a great deal of criticism. Journalists in New York are still bitter that he moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. Commentators claim he was instrumental in establishing the unjust hegemony ownership had over players until free agency. This is all true.

O’Malley moved baseball West and we have all seen how badly that turned out for the sport. Baseball is ruined everywhere and New York City’s shattered ego has yet to be repaired. To this day, residents walk with their heads down in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Dodgers have not sold 3 Million tickets for something like twenty consecutive years. Nope. They can barely fill that Chavez Ravine place up.

And contracts in baseball are way too low. It is a wonder these fine athletes can play 162 games what with all the starving. Owners have far too much power of their contracts. What tragic abuse.

And Walter O’Malley? O’Malley was only Branch Rickey’s assistant general manager.

His role in the signing of Jackie Robinson was just a coincidence. Helping develop the farm system as a paradigm for player development? Fluke. Walter O’Malley was just an old coot.

Lastly, Walter O’Malley looks exactly like the prototypical baseball executive of his time. Heavyset, well-dressed, glasses, slicked back hair. He smoked cigars and came off more like a high-powered mobster or robber baron than baseball man. If anything, he deserves to be in the Hall for just the image.

And for my (optimistic) money, letting too many people into the Hall of Fame is a trivial error.  The real injustice lies in keeping the wrong people out. But more on Shoeless Joe and Buck O’Neil later.

On the Marlins-Tigers Trade Today:

The Marlins today, sent two huge commodities to Detroit in one trade. Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis for a group of talented young players and prospects. I have no real interest in the trade; its effect on the Dodgers will be negligible. But I find the deal surprising on both sides.

By packaging two of their most valuable possessions, Florida marginalized the value of both. That is the nature of selling in bulk. In order to move more product, prices are lowered across the board.

Why did Florida do this? Obviously they did not find the individual markets for Cabrera and Willis as satisfying as they would have liked. Early on, their negotiation strategy seemed to be just hold onto Cabrera until a sufficiently exorbitant offer came along. No offer came. So to sweeten the deal, and get the types of guys they wanted, they had to include Willis. The whole thing just reeks of desperation and dangerous impatience.

After all, Willis is a valuable player. He remains, despite his recent decline, a talented, cheap, and at the very least competent left handed pitcher. Consider the markets for similar (albeit better) players like Johan Santana and Erik Bedard. It seems that Florida would have been wise to market Willis as an individual piece. He would have had greater value as a consolation prize for those more lucrative sweepstakes.

On the Detroit side, this trade is equally perplexing. Quite simply because they bargained the future for the present. Over the past few years, the Tigers have moved to a more and more traditional, veteran based front office policy. But this is a massive leap. Miller and Maybin are almost sure to be successful major league players and would have remained under Detroit control for much longer and at a lower cost than Cabrera and Willis.

I sit here, splayed out on an eighteen-dollar couch in a nineteen-dollar apartment building, somewhat bored with life at 21. Big paper due tomorrow, and a lot of personal dissatisfaction right now. But Wild Things is on TV, and nothing seems so bad. It might be too much to say that this movie always cheers me up. Truthfully it is not good enough to have that kind of effect. Instead, Wild Things reminds me of some less wild things. It offers a little perspective.

You could say that when I first saw this movie I was discovering myself. It came out in 1998, the year I turned 12. I probably did not see it until a year later at 13 when it debuted on HBO. It had to be HBO; that much I know for sure. I also know that I was an inexperienced 13. An awkward 13.

My memory is pretty average. I only know I saw Wild Things on HBO because of one particular scene. But that scene was enough. It was the scene. The scene that every male peer of mine made his bones on. The scene that involves Denise Richards, Neve Campbell, and I think some guy in there somewhere.

When I first saw it, that scene was epic. It was the greatest thing ever. Ever. It was The Godfather, it was the Mona Lisa, it was my Rushmore. It was everything I could possibly want in this world. It seemed to last for hours. And it took days to get out of my head. The scene was an epiphany. Not the first sex scene I ever saw, but the first one that mattered.

God knows that Wild Things or not, I would have eventually realized how much I liked girls. Just like most other boys, it happened in steps for me. But girls, believe it or not, are not the subject right now. I am far too self-centered for that. The subject is me.

I just watched that scene again. And to be honest, every time I do (which I swear is not that often), it seems shorter. Pretty good, but not spectacular. Wild, but not transcendental. That said, I get another kind of pleasure from watching this movie now. I get nostalgic. Wild Things reminds me of my own innocence. An innocence that fortunately, is not completely lost. I think about the way I was then, and the way I am now, and nothing feels different. Girls, for example, I think I still know nothing about.

But regardless of my instinct, some things are different. Which is why I am capable of enjoying Wild Things on another level these days. I can enjoy it now as a fun, but awful movie redeemed by some pretty faces, a memorable sex scene, and Bill Murray.

So here I sit. Matt Dillon just tried to kill Kevin Bacon on a sailboat in the Caribbean. And I find myself more absorbed by my past than by the movie itself.  The whole situation reminds me how much more there is to discover in the less wild things.  And now, sunk deep into the lumpy sofa, nothing seems so bad.

 *Note: Married…with Children is on right now and features a cameo appearance by Vlade Divac.  More evidence that Vlade Divac is the greatest human being in the history of the NBA and Serbia.

Start me up. If you start me up I’ll never stop. Actually I probably will stop eventually. But for the moment I am starting up again. After some months of only creative writing I need some nonfictional balance in my life. Enjoy the new look. That two page thing was pretentious and way too complicated to manage.