| 24 October 2006
Pine Tar
The last two weeks of politics are a breathless time. The levers of power are at stake, and hyperbole is the coin of the realm.
I make of point of doing my breathing exercises quietly at my desk when some bit of news flies by that upsets me. Puff-puff, exhale. Repeat. It keeps me from getting too much oxygen, and then saying something stupid.
I had to do several sets of those drills yesterday. The media seems to be taking a sort of grim satisfaction in the body count in Iraq, giving almost hourly updates to the Jihadi box score for Ramadan. Presidential Spokesman Tony Snow says that we aren't “staying the course,” though of course we are, though we never were, not the way you might think of it.
I had to breath very slowly when a banner popped up on my news-tracker. The bones of 9/11 victims were found beneath a manhole cover near the construction site, apparently overlooked. There may be more in some of the utility vaults around the perimeter of the property, just as remains were found on the roof of a condemned building adjacent to where the Trade Center had been located.
I have no idea how they might have gotten there, and the thought made me shiver at the violence of those towers coming down.
Many of the victims have never been found. Steve Canyon's brother-in-law was one of them, a guy who went off the tower to work and vanished into thin air.
The remains were present when I was at Ground Zero last year. Makes me feel a little queasy, though the Mayor says the discovery is not going to slow down construction, a very New York approach to unpleasant news. I hope they look around a little before they pave it all over.
The New York papers were up in arms about Kenny Rogers, the ace Detroit Tigers hurler. Both the invincible Yankees and the amazin' Mets bowed out of the championship series to the hardscrabble Motown and the Gateway City.
In Game Two' first inning, the one the Tigers won, the cameras caught a smear of some brown substance on Kenny's hand. The buzz in the announcing booth was that Kenny was applying some foreign substance to the ball, which would cause it to move in an erratic manner over the plate and make it difficult to hit in the chill fall weather.
The umpire talked to Kenny, and he said it was just dirt, and it was gone by the second inning.
It should have been case-closed, since this happens all the time and is as old as the pitcher's mound. But the papers are making a big deal about it. Kenny isn't saying anything, but Hall-of-Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry is very comfortable in explaining how it works, basking in the reflection of Roger's glory.
In his time, he used rosin, spit, baby-oil, Vaseline, hair-tonic and pine tar to make the ball do improbable things around the plate. One of those substances is legal. He won 314 games doing it, and in my mind that makes him the expert leading subject matter expert.
Perry said that the whole thing was psychological, anyway. Whatever the substance was, it was gone in the second inning, and he pitched seven more scoreless stanzas. That puts him at twenty-three in a row, and another certain start to improve that.
Perry says there are colorless pine tars, and that would be his recommendation. He used to have a strange ritual of touching the brim of his cap, his hair, armpits, ears and other places to make the batter think he was loading the ball with something that would make it drop abruptly at the plate.
It confused and frustrated the batters, whether there was anything on the ball or not. Baseball is a mental game, just like politics. I think Kenny Rogers is going to make the Cardinals batters think that he might be putting something on the ball, whether he is or not.
It strikes me, by the way, that North Korea's Dear L'il Kim might be a major league baseball fan. He is the only one in his country with an internet connection, and he might watch the Atlanta Braves. Why else would he wear his hair like that, except as a place to keep some pine tar to put on the ball?
Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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