Monday 12/5/22
I was wrong about TCU--not only did they get in, they're the #3 seed. I do think they had a better year than Alabama--I'm just really doubtful that they could beat Georgia. Then again, I'm pretty doubtful that Michigan or Ohio St. can, and the chances of repeating in college football are low, so statistically-speaking, it figures that someone else other than Georgia will win. I'd still take Georgia.
But I was right about Fred McGriff and I think his inclusion in Cooperstown is so deserved and long-overdue. You don't want to get in the habit of thinking that someone should have been a second-ballot Hall of Famer, or a fourth, but the way I think it should have gone is he would have gotten in on his second or third pass back when he was on the regular ballot. He's that clear-cut. Carlton Fisk got in on his second ballot. That made sense to me and it would have made sense with McGriff.
I knew that the committee wouldn't take any of the controversial guys, and that probably Dale Murphy and Don Mattingly would fare the best after McGriff. The people on the committee wouldn't want to deal with the fallout--it's a small committee and who was on it was public information--of being the guys who elected any of those players.
The mob influenced how that was going to go, which is what the mob wants. The mob never really cares about right or wrong. The mob is almost always more in the wrong than the people accused of doing wrong. The mob wants to wield influence.
I saw Dan Shaughnessy gloating on Twitter today about Curt Schilling not getting in. The former's act was so cartoonish when I was a kid in 1987. I remember reading what he wrote--or skimming it--and thinking it was sad--and I was just a boy--that an adult had devoted his life to being such a miserable man-child of a person.
When we say "man-child," we think of the meathead or that type. But Shaughnessy is that kid on the playground who collects slights that are not there so he can tattle when no one is looking. He's typical of Boston Globe people: no talent, no morals, so much hypocrisy, someone who tries to use the system to their advantage, as with his kid.
That old plagiarist Ron Borges--again, just so much human scum beneath the boot and the reason you never wear shoes indoors--popped up out of the crypt he and his career reside in to also gloat. You're a plagiarist, man. You're just so lowly when you're a plagiarist. The plagiarist forfeits their voice--if they ever even had one--for all-time in my book.
Then you see people say, "But Ty Cobb is in!" when getting into matters of the so-called character clause. A lot of people point to Cobb. They think he's this mega-racist. Again, no one knows anything. It's all the ass voice. Cobb was not a racist. A man named Al Stump had written a book with Cobb. It wasn't commercially successful. Cobb died, and Stump wanted money. He then wrote a book about Cobb in which he invented almost all of it. He knew that making Cobb into a whole cloth racist would sell this book. And it did. Other people came along and redressed Stump's falsehoods later. There was a bestselling Cobb biography that told the truth, but people just say anything they please because the "Cobb is a racist" thing has been around for a long time and has stuck. They don't know. Cobb isn't a good example as a racist.
These are the people arguing vehemently on Twitter like they're experts. They often have the blue checkmark, they make six or seven figures a year talking about sports, and they say this because they have no actual knowledge about anything. They may--or they may not--have slightly more polish than your drunken uncle going on about the Jets with Bud Lite beer spittle flecking his lips.
As I've been saying, these jobs, acclaim, awards, platforms, they're all about other things than ability. They're not even about the lowest-level of basic competence.
Speaking of playgrounds: When I was on the playground as a boy and I heard the other children say, "I know you are but what am I?" I was annoyed that they were so dense and unimaginative, and comforted myself by thinking that at least they'd grow out of it.
I now realize that people never do. Most do the "I know you are but what am I" thing for the remainder of their lives. They are seen to do it more commonly now in this cesspool era where language erodes even further thanks to social media, gif culture, and all of the anger everyone has, a lot of it having to do with their inability to express what they feel.
But you can't override the feelings in people--they want a voice because they want to "count" and matter, but they've destroyed any ability to express themselves as an individual. You can't void those feelings out of people, so what you get is people desperate to matter who have to look everywhere but within to find any damn thing to actually say.
Look at Twitter. Everyone uses the same language. "Checks notes." Notice how much you're seeing the witless term, "nothing burger" now? How many tweets can you go without seeing it?
We retain a vestige of what it means to be an individual human, but it's only that. If you were human, and you only had one life to live, wouldn't you want your words to be your own?
Or would you prefer to look at someone else who was devoid of intelligence and copy them?
How emasculating is it--this is not a gender thing--to have to copy others because you can't think of your own words? Who are you then? Are you even you? What's you?
If you can't speak for yourself, you can't speak to anything.
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