Which is, of course, exactly zero.
Bryan Preston points out that the president picked the Heat to win, so that the inerrant Obama Jinx remains in force. If Obama says “recovery,” bet on recession. If Obama says “peace,” bet on war.
Category: Sports
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
Emerson, 10, Reagan, 8, and Jefferson, 12,
at Municipal Stadium after Sunday’s Hagerstown Suns game.
My wife’s boss had extra tickets to Sunday’s Hagerstown Suns game, and we took our three youngest kids to watch the Suns win 6-5 over the Greensboro Grasshoppers.
It was a big crowd — 4,592 in attendance at Municipal Stadium — because Ryan Zimmerman, third baseman for the Washington Nationals, was playing in a rehab appearance for the Sally League Class A farm club. Zimmerman, recovering from a pulled abdominal muscle, was 2-for-2 with a double, a triple, an RBI and scored a run. Suns shortstop Blake Kelso also had two hits, and catcher David Freitas drove in two runs with a first-inning double.
Greensboro starter Jheyson Manzueta was wild, and three Suns were hit by pitches, including rookie right fielder Bryce Harper — an 18-year-old first-round draft pick for the Nationals — who left the game after been struck on the ankle by one of Manzueta’s wild pitches. Harper had been batting .338 with 13 homers this season for the Suns (now 35-22 on the season). Apparently the injury was not too serious, as Harper was seen near the Suns’ clubhouse walking normally a few innings later.
The rookie phenom’s injury, however, created an opportunity for outfielder Wade Moore, who came in as a pinch runner for Harper, scored in the Suns’ four-run first inning, and later had an RBI triple in the fourth inning. The 10-hit performance by the Suns helped starting pitcher A.J. Cole get his first win of the season, and right-handed reliever Wilson Eusebio got his second save, pitching two scoreless innings to end the game. (Complete box score here. And there’s a Washington Post story about the game here.) Here are a few pictures from our family outing:
Me, Reagan and Mrs. Other McCain. Notice that I was keeping score. An old habit from my days as a sports editor. My wife and I have been married 22 years, and she still refuses to learn to keep score.
Reagan waits with her glove by the left-field fence, hoping to catch a foul ball.
Wow! She caught one! (OK, she actually didn’t. My wife posed this photo. One of the ballboys gave Reagan a foul ball, just because she’s so cute.)
Emerson chills out in the picnic area at the stadium. His rugged good looks? Yeah, you know where he gets that.
Jefferson eats ice cream in the picnic area before the game. Notice the stadium has an old-fashioned manually operated scoreboard, but a big TV screen.
The kids get autographs from catcher David Freitas after the game.
Suns pitcher Shane McCatty hands an autographed baseball back to Emerson.
Reagan poses on the sideline. She takes after her mother. But maybe there’s still time to teach her to keep score.
Anyway, so that’s how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Kind of a welcome break from a week of Weiner. If you feel the urge to hit the tip jar — hey, don’t fight the feeling!
Albert Haynesworth, Victim
He’s 6-foot-6, 335 pounds, a former first-round draft pick and two-time All-Pro. Yet the Washington Redskins’ defensive end is a victim of . . . err, discrimination:
Washington Redskins player Albert Haynesworth has been indicted on one charge of sexual abuse after a Feb. 13 incident at the W Hotel, in which he allegedly fondled a cocktail waitress’ breast. According to the indictment, Haynesworth told a security guard, “I didn’t touch her” and that the waitress was “a little black girl” and he “doesn’t even like black girls.” Later, according to the indictment, Hanyesworth told detectives “I know what this is about, she is just upset I have a white girlfriend. I couldn’t tell you the last time I dated a black girl. She was trying to get with me.”
As any feminist will tell you, women never lie about this kind of stuff. Continue reading Albert Haynesworth, Victim →
To Hell With ‘Gender Equity’
That’s my reaction to a New York Times story about how universities are faking their way around Title IX, which mandates an artificial “equality” between men and women’s sports programs.
Americans have for too long been tortured on the Procrustean bed of “equality,” which aims to destroy all custom and tradition — indeed, to destroy liberty itself — in order to render individuals as atomized and interchangeable units in a one-size-fits-all regime.
As the denunciation of Larry Summers proved, recognition of actual differences between people, or between groups of people, is permitted only to those radical egalitarians who propose to eliminate those differences in the name of “social justice.” And if you question the wisdom of their project, either in its ends or its means, you will be demonized as an apologist for oppression.
To hell with “gender equity” and to hell with Title IX.
(Remember: National Offend a Feminist Week starts May 2.)
At the Old Ball Game!
My son Jim, 18, hoists son Emerson, 10, atop his shoulders and son Jefferson, 12, joins in a thumbs-up Wednesday night at Camden Yards after the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Minnesota Twins 5-4. Jim got four free tickets from his boss, and the seats — Section 26, Row 17, behind the home-team dugout — were excellent.
It was also an excellent game, with Baltimore getting home runs from Matt Weiters and Vladimir Guerrero, plus two RBIs from Adam Jones, to build a 5-1 lead after the third inning. The Twins battled back, led by Danny Valencia, who helped Minnesota pull within a run in the eighth inning. Orioles reliever Koji Uehara managed to work his way out of that jam, and then Baltimore’s ace closer Kevin Gregg shut ’em down in the ninth.
So I did The Dad Thing yesterday, and you probably ought to hit my tip jar as encouragement.
Al Bethke’s Baseball Philosophy
In pursuit of answers to that Eternal Blogger Question — “How’s traffic doing today?” — I checked SiteMeter and saw that I’d been linked by Al Bethke, a Milwaukee Brewers fan who describes his blog thus:
If you are a believer in respecting [on-base percentage], throwing strikes, and keeping the ball in the park, you may have found the place you’ve been searching for. I don’t believe in paying a no hit/good field [shortstop] $7 million per year (Jack Wilson, I’m talking about you). I don’t think it’s a good idea to “play for a run” early in the game. Build up your minor league system, and watch success follow.
Which is to say, Mr. Bethke believes in common-sense fundamentals. His point about building up the minor-league system is on the mark.
This is the great secret (although it’s not really secret at all) by which Bobby Cox turned the Atlanta Braves into perennnial pennant contenders. Continue reading Al Bethke’s Baseball Philosophy →
Thugland, USA: Baseball Fan Brutally Attacked Outside Dodger Stadium
A 42-year-old paramedic is hospitalized with critical head injuries after he was savagely stomped in the parking lot while leaving a Dodgers-Giants game last week. The injured man, a father of two young children, is a Giants fan and the Los Angeles Times depicts this atrocity as a sports-rivalry-gone-wrong. But Southern California blogger Donald Douglas headlines it differently:
Hispanics Suspected in Savage Beating
of Giants Fan at Dodgers’ Opening Day
That headline elicited raised eyebrows from Doug Mataconis, who asked on Twitter: “Why is it relevant what race they are?” While I suppose Dr. Douglas can explain this himself, let me suggest two possibilities:
- Perhaps Dr. Douglas has attended Dodgers games and had direct experience with such rowdies.
- There is a $50,000 reward for the suspects, who are still at large, and yet the media reports give no indication of the ethnicity of the suspects, although that information might be helpful in terms of identifying them.
So if political correctness forbids the L.A.-area media from mentioning that the suspects are Hispanic, could this be part of the problem? There were 72 arrests reported at Opening Day at Dodger Stadium and if it is the case (as Dr. Douglas seems to suggest) that Hispanics are disproportionately represented among the troublemakers, why the fearful need to tiptoe around that fact?
But ask yourself this: What if a black fan had been beaten half to death by two white men outside Dodger Stadium? Would a potential ethnic factor in such a crime be ignored or dismissed by the media?
Furthermore, given the fact that Los Angeles is about a three-hour drive from the Mexican border, and that Hispanic criminals in Southern California sometimes flee to Mexico, wouldn’t such a crime tend to highlight certain public-safety aspects of U.S. immigration policy?
All of this, you understand, is posited hypothetically, because it is impossible to know from the media accounts whether the suspects were Hispanic or not. However, Dr. Douglas says: “Don’t be surprised if we find out that the suspects are MS-13 operatives.” And we do have this description:
The attackers are believed to be between the ages of 18-25 and have shaved heads and thin mustaches.
One had a goatee, and the other had tattoos on his neck.
The “tattoos on his neck” description might indeed indicate gang affiliation, or these two might just be a couple of young baseball fans who got too drunk during the game. But if it weren’t for the MSM’s long, sad history of politcally correctness, perhaps Dr. Douglas would not need to be so suspicious. And if he is proven right, it will be the media coverage — and not his suspicions — which require an explanation.
Obama’s NCAA Bracket, Revisited
Tonight, UConn meets the Cinderella boys of Butler in the NCAA basketball championship and, with the finalists set, I decided to take a look back at Obama’s brackets.
The first thing to note is how “safe” Obama played it: He picked all four No. 1 regional seeds to make it all the way to the Final Four. In fact, none of the top seeds made it to the Final Four, and Obama’s unwillingness to pick any of the No. 1’s to lose before the semi-finals cost him badly — beginning with No. 8 Butler’s defeat of top-ranked Pitt in their second-round Southeast regional game March 19. He lost a second of his Final Four picks on March 24, when No. 5 Arizona upset top-seeded Duke in a third-round West regional. The next day, March 25, No. 4 Kentucky knocked off No. 1 Ohio State in the third round of the East regionals, leaving Obama with just one remaining hope for the Final Four, Kansas, seeded No. 1 in the Southwest. Alas, the Jayhawks lost to Virginia Commonwealth in the quarterfinals.
Obama’s best region was the West, where he correctly picked the winner in every game in the first two rounds. But again, his success there was not because of any uncanny insight: He merely picked the higher-seeded team in every game, in a region where there were no upsets in the early rounds.
In other regions, Obama did accurately pick a few minor first-round upsets (e.g., No. 12 Richmond over No. 5 Vanderbilt, No. 11 Marquette over No. 6 Xavier), but he missed a bigger upset: No. 13 Morehead State over No. 4 Louisville.
Given the reliability of the Obama Jinx — which inevitably doomed whatever team the president supported in the NFL playoffs — I’m thinking this means that Butler (which Obama picked to lose in the second round) will triumph over Connecticut (which the prez picked to lose in the fourth round). Your mileage may vary.
Exit Question: Does the Obama Jinx apply to the Libyan rebels?
UPDATE: After the ugliest first half in living memory, Butler leads UConn 22-19. So the Obama Jinx appears to be working.
UPDATE II: Strong second half for UConn, which beats Butler and the Obama Jinx, 53-41.