Manny Machado and the Free-Agent Log Jam

Sssshhh. Did you hear that? It almost sounded like a pen on paper. 

Wait—it was!

Holy crap! Could the collusion really be over? Are baseball players once again free to sign decades-long guaranteed contracts for outrageous sums of money? And are addled MLB owners once again able to protect their pockets from the stacks of cash burning a hole in them?

Oh great day in the morning! We are saved! Saved!

Like you, I'm relived beyond description to learn that Manny Machado has signed a ten-year, three-hundred million-dollar guaranteed contract with the San Diego Padres. And that the disconcerting free-agent log-jam may soon be history.

This because I am amused by the sight of successful businessmen tossing logic to the wind as they unlearn everything they (presumably) learned while (presumably) building-up their businesses. Perhaps Bill James has done a cost-benefit analysis of long-term contracts and assigned them a WAR rating. 

But I haven't seen it.

So I'll fearlessly expose myself to public ridicule and venture to say that a MLB owner has to be certifiable to even entertain the idea of one. At least as certifiable as an athlete would be to turn one down.

Is there a soul extant who feels that Albert Pujols or Miguel Cabrera or Robinson Cano or Prince Fielder are anywhere near the players they were when they signed these contracts? Or will be when they expire?

Are major league owners even semi-cognizant of this?

Sure, I'm jealous. Aren't you?

Where jealousy turns to agitation is when it becomes apparent who pays for these contracts. And that's me. Granted, appearances tend to obfuscate this fact, driving as I do a mass-market Japanese sedan and living in a modest home.

But it's true.

And sports fan, you do, too.

As you swallow those thirty-dollar parking fees and twenty-dollar hamburgers and an ever-spiraling cable bill, remember Alex Rodriguez. David Price. And Giancarlo Stanton. Clayton Kershaw. Zack Greinke. And Max Scherzer.

Someone's paying those salaries, and it ain't the boss. (Which is, incidentally, how rich guys get rich in the first place.)

While the players receive the brunt of our derision when discord rears its ugly head, we shouldn't forget those who entitle the young men we call professional athletes.

Once upon a time, professional athletes were very underpaid. But that argument is as relevant as the pony express is to communications. A middling ballplayer like Edwin Jackson (who couldn't hold Jose Quintana's glove, much less Clayton Kershaw's) has earned sixty-six million-dollars playing ball.

Edwin Jackson. Think about that.

When you or I perform our jobs in kind, we usually find ourselves in the bosses office being educated in the finer points of our employer's performance plans. (This if we're not being made available to our respective industries, as a favorite euphemism goes.)

Major-league baseball is a TV show. It's a consumer product—just like laundry detergent and tires and those packs of underwear at Walmart.

If I may be so bold, I'd like to suggest that MLB owners and players think really hard about market saturation and price points. About the fiscal limits those of us in the ninety-nine percent have for non-essential consumables.

Is it understood by owners and players that there are not nearly enough people in the one-percent to support thirty professional baseball teams? Or thirty NBA squads? Ditto our thirty-two NFL franchises. And the thirty-one NHL aggregations we share with Canada.

I'm happy for Manny Machado. Seriously. Hell, if someone's going press three-hundred million-dollars (guaranteed) into your hand you'd be a fool not to take it.

But as a sports fan whose access decreases with every bump in a player's salary, I'm forced to relegate my fandom to the same category as my crush on Melanie Liburd and follow from a distance.

The players can strike and the owners can incinerate their fortunes on long-term, nine-figure contracts and hawk their over-priced merch until the future is female. But even as an ardent, lifelong music fan who reveled in the joy of attending concerts, I learned to live without them when their cost exceeded their benefit.

I can do the same with professional sports. And suspect I'm not alone.

Aurora

In the wake of our latest mass shooting (I forget whether it's number 39 or 43 or even 45—keeping up with them is a full-time job), much of the local media is asking a curious question: why did the shooter (Gary Martin) have a gun?

I can answer that question: this is America.

America's gun policy (or rather the lack of one) is set by a trade association. Like any business organization, the National Rifle Association is bent on ensuring that the maximum number of guns are available to the widest-possible body of consumers.

It's just that simple. It's business.

Unlike other trade associations, the NRA has been spectacularly successful in blocking change that might inhibit—in any way—the availability and consumption of the products it advocates for. Even when that product is used for for things far less-innocent than going squirrel-hunting with grandpa.

(I should mention that the NRA did allow President Trump to sign into law legislation that will soon make bump stock illegal. So there's that.)

But even when a gun-owner's permit is recalled because of a felony conviction (as was Martin's), there's an amazingly naive policy in place that requests that the newly-denied owner turn over their gun to law enforcement or someone with a valid permit.

Yep. You read that right. Want to guess the rate of compliance?

(Hey—can you excuse me for a minute? I have to go to my local police department and confess I was speeding in a school zone last week. Be right back.)

OK. So yes, this is why Gary Martin had a gun. A better question to ask in 2019 America is why wouldn't Gary Martin have a gun?

Gun permits aside, in our warped take on democracy guns are available to everyone. No questions asked. And they should be. Just ask the NRA. They fight tooth and nail every day for just this kind of access.

So yeah. Another five innocent people are dead. Dads, brothers, sons, uncles, neighbors, friends. But who really cares? In the face of advancing market share, five people (or should I say five more people) are just not that important.

And even when they are, our elected representation is afraid of alienating the NRA and falling prey to their soft on crime slander. Come on. Face it: like every other gun out there, Gary Martin's prevented a lot of crime.

Right?

To the silent majority who are troubled by this, I will say the country we make today is the one we must live in tomorrow. Think about that.

Not Quite Breakfast at Tiffany's

Dear Tiffany Van Dyke,

Your husband murdered—in cold blood—a confused, aggravated but ultimately harmless young man by shooting him sixteen times as he walked away from your spouse.

Realizing the potential fallout of his actions, your husband's employer buried any and all evidence of the event. His co-workers concocted a lie and submitted it in writing to the Chicago Police Department as fact.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel aided in the cover-up, knowing the dash-cam video was inflammatory and would unite opponents of an overly-aggressive police department. Closer to home, this would also have a negative effect on his bid for re-election.

All was well until the court-ordered release of the video thirteen months after the fact.

It was as inflammatory as your husband, his co-workers and his employer feared. The murder was as brutal as it was senseless.

Even uglier were the lies your husband, his lawyer and his co-workers persisted in. They gave the city and the Chicago Police Department a black eye neither could afford, cementing in the public imagination the idea that our law enforcement feels itself above the very law it was created to enforce.

Your husband's flimsy and preposterous arguments thankfully gave way to justice when he was found guilty of second-degree murder. For a brief, shimmering moment, right appeared to have triumphed over wrong.

At sentencing, your mate dodged yet-another bullet (please excuse the pun) when he inexplicably was handed a sentence more appropriate for car theft. It was a slap in the face to anyone who has ever been a victim of the Chicago Police Department and its over-zealousness.

Yes, the family name has been besmirched. Yes, your husband is temporarily out of a job. But knowing the intransigence of his supporters, I am confident he will have an offer waiting when he walks in just three short years.

Conversely, his victim will be dead forever.

I was hoping we had heard the last of your husband. And of his hideous crime. That we could flush this from our system and move on.

But after being transferred to an out-of-state prison, your spouse was roughed-up by some of his fellow inmates, which unfortunately isn't an uncommon occurrence in jail.

You had the temerity to wail in front of a media assemblage that “...the number-one fear for my husband has always been his safety, that someone was going to get him and hurt him and the worst has happened.”

Interesting words, indeed. 

Has it occurred to you or those mercenaries you have on retainer that Laquan McDonald and his loved ones could have said the same? That you have unwittingly expressed the very thoughts that have been on their minds for the last four and-a-half years?

And if it has, what are your thoughts? What is your reaction?

Tiffany, not to belabor the point, but your husband is a very lucky man. He is serving a soft sentence in a minimum-security prison for a crime that would have netted you or I or practically anyone else a lifetime behind bars.

Please. No more press conferences.

Kindly go away, will you? 


Sincerely,

La Piazza Gancio 

The Undeclared Emergency

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Run! Run while you still can!

Beware. The Illinois State Legislature is on the verge of approving a new minimum wage of fifteen-dollars an hour for Illinois employees. But don't assume this is good news. For the apocalypse is upon us.

Business owners and conservative voices are already warning that this could backfire spectacularly upon working people. Cited most-often is the ominous threat that a wage-hike will impede job creation.

Which is certainly an interesting argument when you consider that even with one of the lowest minimum wages in the nation ($8.25 p/hr.), Illinois pretty much remains Typhoid Mary when it comes to seducing employers to her doorstep.

Nope. I think something else is impeding job creation in Illinois.

It's routine for business owners and conservatives to whine and wag the finger of doom whenever hourly workers stand to improve their lot. Having lived in several areas of the country, I can assure you it is not an Illinois-only phenomenon.

The ski resort of Aspen, Colorado has faced this challenge many times, and each and every time the minimum wage is raised the business community forecasts disaster. But um, the last time I checked (which was today), Aspen remains a thriving community and a high-charting travel destination with some of the most-valuable real estate in the nation.

If this constitutes disaster, could you please ship some to Illinois?

Santa Fe, New Mexico faced a similar problem when the workers employed in the hospitality industry couldn't afford to live there. Once again the minimum wage was raised amidst predictions of ruin.

Shockingly, even the most cursory check assures us that Santa Fe is still a viable and in-demand travel destination even without its wait staffs, hotel staffs, resort and retail staffs living in near-poverty.

So tell me, small business owners: when do Aspen and Santa Fe turn into ghost towns, anyway? Because I'd like to pick me up me some of that gorgeous property—cheap!

It's just my opinion, but I believe one of the most insignificant and infinitesimal problems currently facing the United States is whether the minimum wage is too high.

In an economy that can absorb the fiscal lunacy of an executive receiving a $120 million-dollar severance package, I'm pretty sure a minimum wage-hike portioned out over six (!) years isn't going to put anyone out of business.

And while my yawning, libtard maw is agape, let me add this: no one working forty-hours a week should ever be staving-off homelessness because of an insufficient wage.

No one.

The Immigration Conflagration

It's pretty clear that immigration is the new abortion.

With the latter more or less conceded to conservatives, the left is fighting tooth and nail for the former. As proven by the government shutdown, it is equally divisive.

Like traditional Republicans, Donald Trump has resorted to the party playbook and is crying the sky is falling over immigration. Yes, filthy, crime-ridden vermin are streaming across the border like cockroaches after the light goes out.

Predictably, his base is kept awake nights by this. Which adds to the Trumpsteria demanding a brand new border wall.

Please ignore the facts which show conclusively that the majority of illegal immigrants currently in the United States overstayed their visas and didn't clamber over or through a crumbling wall.

But that doesn't give Don any inflammatory talking points to bellow about at his validation rallies, does it? Or Fox any blood pressure-raising video.

Yeah.

On the other side of the aisle, immigration-centric Democrats believe the wall is immoral and endorse sanctuary cities, where federal immigration law mysteriously disappears and illegal immigrants are protected from deportation despite being, well, illegal.

I'm not a fan of either approach. As unpopular as it is in twenty-first century America, clear and sober thought is required.

We need to stop making illegal immigration a United States versus Mexico thing. Illegal immigrants come from all over the world. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Liberia and Myanmar. For the geographically-impaired, the United States doesn't share a border with any of these countries. The entry point for these immigrants is, um, airports. Seaports. Not our southern border.

All of which renders Don's new and improved wall as stupid and useless as the man himself.

Overstaying your visa is, at the end of the day, illegal. Cloistering yourself in a sanctuary city should not be an option. Sorry if I skew a bit Republican here, but I'm not partial to rewarding people who successfully break the law with citizenship.

Granted, there are many people who have urgent need of the political asylum the United States can offer. One example are the translators who work with our armed forced in places like Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq. If anyone is in need of sanctuary, it is them.

Sadly, there are tens of millions of others. Given the finite resources of the United States, it is impossible to offer all the world's deserving candidates protection.

Ideally, the United States could forever remain the place espoused by the Statue of Liberty. It would remain into eternity the lamp beside the golden door, offering shelter to the world's huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

But those words were inscribed one-hundred thirty-two years ago. At the time, America was a growth stock. It was a teenager just beginning to sense its potential. The future seemed unlimited. There was no reason for America not to dream big.

All these years later, so very, very much has changed. The population has grown nearly six-fold. After a century of almost unbroken middle-class expansion, the nation is in the throes of a deliberate, on-purpose contraction.

The rest of us are holding too much of the wealth that is the one-percent's birthright, and aided by their strumpets in Congress and sitting on the Supreme Court, they have set about getting it back.

And they have been—and continue to be—wildly successful.

To the point where the United States now enjoys the wealth disparity of a third-world country. Current figures show that forty-percent of the United States' wealth is held by just one-percent of its people.

Does that sound like a democracy to you? Or Idi Amin's Uganda?

Left unchecked, the jackals setting policy will turn the United States into an oligarchy with an emphasis on feudalism, presumably making it less attractive as an immigration destination.

But until that happens, sensible immigration policy needs to be set.

In addition to the ideas sketched out above, I'd like to suggest measured immigration. We accept the refugees suffering unspeakable horrors in their native countries. We accept limited numbers from the rest of the world. We eliminate sanctuary cities. We issue visas and follow up on them.

Yes, this will require additional staffing in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office which will lead, inevitably, to big government. But if the big businesses and gigantic banks Republicans endorse are okay, so is big government.

Go big or go home.

We also need to make the security on our southern border more robust. While not the festering sore Don likes to tell us it is, there is an undue amount of criminal activity that takes place it would behoove us to monitor.

By now you may be looking up from your phone and thinking “What's the big deal? This isn't any radical new idea.” And you'd be right. This isn't radical. It merely sands off the extremes on the left and right.

Where I get all crazy-ass and unhinged is in suggesting that we implement a concentrated public awareness campaign about substance abuse.

We got people to wear seat belts. We got people to stop smoking. We have cut drunk driving incidents by fifty-percent since 1980. All of this was accomplished by coordinated media campaigns that crossed federal, state, county and municipal agencies.

And even if that didn't work, think of the debate it would generate.

America's $54,000 question is why can't we keep our population drug-free? Why are people in what is supposedly the end-all and be-all of human existence ingesting dangerous, life-threatening substances in record numbers?

There would be another significant benefit: What happens to Mejico when we stop taking the drugs that are the backbone of its economy—and its corruption? Does the quality of life get better? Or worse?

Let's say it gets better. Then what happens to the tens of thousands of citizens who want to jump the wall and escape the corruption and murder which makes Chicago look like a fragrant garden by comparison?

This is a conversation we really need to have.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Cold, Cold, Cold

Another decade, another polar vortex.

For the first time since Madonna, Prince and Bruce Springsteen ruled the pop charts, I was made privy to extremely cold temperatures. Wednesday, January 30^th greeted me with temps reading minus twenty-five (F), while Thursday morning—the 31st—revealed they had sunk even lower, to minus twenty-nine (F).

Ah, winter. The leaden air mass that sits upon us like a cruel older sibling evokes memories.

I share them here.

The eighties were cold. And no, that isn't a tacit reference to the Reagan administration.

For reasons known only to itself, the weather pattern shifted and brought Arctic cold to the upper Midwest on three separate occasions during the decade: 1982, 1983 and 1985. In a cosmological fusion of the real estate maxim location, location, location and the more-general one that states timing is everything, I was able to participate in all three.

Arctic cold is extremely efficient. It does in a few minutes what non-Arctic cold takes an hour to do. Sadistically, it freezes and then numbs one's flesh, providing a prickly burn as it does so. Accounts that include phrases like “a thousand tiny razors” are not far off.

Add wind and the process is exponentially accelerated. The sensations are deepened. Accountants steeped in cost-benefit analysis applaud wildly. It is very, very efficient.

My first immersion experience with Arctic air occurred on January 16, 1982. I had taken it upon myself to head into the city for some record shopping. Being young, I instinctively knew the emergency weather warnings being issued about dangerously cold temperatures did not apply to me.

They were for other people.

Dressed as I would for any other winter's day, I set off downtown. All was well until the trip home.

Waiting on the Fullerton El platform (so named because this particular conveyance is elevated above street level, thereby exposing patrons to the full effect of any and all wind), I became aware of a painful, incessant chill.

Surprisingly, the sneakers I wore did little to insulate my feet. My ears were on fire thanks to the ability polar breezes have for reducing human skin to pin cushions.

At least I hadn't inconvenienced myself by wearing a hat.

One of the more amusing qualities of Arctic cold is its ability to provoke profanity. As I stood on the El platform completely exposed to the minus forty-degree wind chill, I could do little but hop up and down and spit “Fuck!” from between my clenched teeth.

Yes, it was cold.

And thanks to a perversion of generosity, the fun wasn't over yet.

Since this was Saturday, the bus that would normally take me to within a block of my home was not in service. Which meant a one-mile walk into the same westerly winds I had combated on the El platform.

No alcoholic, no junkie and no crackhead ever went to the lengths to satiate their addiction than I did that day.

God smiles on us in many ways. On this day, he—or she—had decided to teach a young man about vulnerability. About exposed skin's sensitivity to polar temperatures. About hats.

While I had successfully avoided the social embarrassment that goes hand in hand with having the beautiful young women who frequented record stores on Saturday mornings from pointing and laughing at my hat hair, I had risked permanent (and painful) skin damage.

After arriving home, I inspected my ears for the small, white patches that indicate frostbite. Finding none, I dove into bed. I minimized pillow-to-ear contact for fear they would snap and break off.

There were other experiences, most notably December 24, 1983 (minus twenty-three with steady twenty MPH winds) and January 20, 1985, which bottomed out at twenty-seven below with similar wind speeds.

But chastened by my El platform experience, I limited my exposure. If I wasn't attending a holiday party or periodically starting my car, I was inside. The way God intended. So instructive was the Arctic cold that I only needed to suffer it once. 

Regrettably, Jack Daniels, Stolichnaya and Heineken couldn't say the same.