Female Knuckleballer Debuts In Japan

Check This Out!

Eri Yoshida age 17, is a side-arm knuckleballer, who is also the first female professional baseball player in Japan.It's an indie league that's far, far away from the NPB, so we probably shouldn't get too excited, but it's a kind of pro-ball league all the same.

This is her throwing out a ceremonial first pitch.

Here's a news story on her.

In the second video, Emoto, a critic says that if she doesn't have a fastball to go with it, she won't be able to get her knuckle to be effective. Well... the next video is where things get more interesting

Atsuya Furuta, one of the great catchers in the NPB history, who played in the 1999 Intercontinental Baseball Cup against Australia takes on the 17 year old Eri Yoshida and her knuckleball in this video.

In that video, you'll see her fast ball is a gyroball.

Yes, you read that right, the mythical gyroball happens to be Eri Yoshida's fast ball! (so eat your heart out Dice K!). The ball spirals on the axis heading towards the plate. You see it in super slow motion.

Then, the knuckleball demonstration in super slow motion shows that the ball heads towards the plate with virtually no spin. Atsuya Furuta who catches it says, "It really moves quite a bit". This observation then turns into Furuta stepping into face Yoshida and her arsenal, only to end up striking out swinging on a full count.

Furuta explains that even if the last pitch looked high, he thought if he could hit it before it came down, he would be hitting it before it moved. He swings wildly over the knuckleball - He couldn't even tell if the ball went over or under the bat. In fact, he didn't even foul off a pitch in the 6 pitch sequence.

This video is the news story on Yoshida getting her first strike out having walked her first batter. Walking a batter on 4 pitches isn't great, but the strike out is worthy. So worthy it traveled the wire to ESPN.

OSAKA, Japan -- Japan's first female professional baseball player made her debut Friday, striking out one batter in the ninth inning.

Eri Yoshida, a 17-year-old who throws a sidearm knuckleball, took the mound during Kobe 9 Cruise's 5-0 season-opening win over the Osaka Gold Villicanes in the newly formed Kansai Independent League.

The 5-foot, 114-pounder walked the first batter leading off the inning on four pitches and allowed a stolen base before striking out the next batter swinging at Osaka Dome. She was then replaced after facing two batters.

"I wasn't thinking about anything other than just going out there and giving it my all," said Yoshida, who is hoping to stick with the Kobe team. "I think this was a bad result but the stadium is great and the fans were really cheering me on. I want to be able to pitch more innings and become a pitcher who can be relied upon."

Which is great. And so Rob Neyer chimes in with this rather uncharitable commentary:

Hmmm, let's see … five feet and 114 pounds … what happens when the enemy hitters start dropping bunts into that tricky area between the pitcher's mound and the third-base line? Will Yoshida have the quickness and the arm strength to throw anyone out at first base? And speaking of arm strength, what happens when the count is three balls and no strikes? Or what happens when there's a grounder to the first baseman and she has to cover first base and gets run over by some burly first baseman?

A publicity stunt? Why would anyone think that?

David Pinto writes, "I've thought for a while that the path for women to professional baseball would be through the knuckleball. Glad to see that happened in Japan."

Well, yeah; it might be. You have to admire her dream and her persistence and her skills (or skill). But you can't play if you don't have the requisite physical tools, too.

I like Neyer, but his comment is clearly under-researched. She has a gyroball to go with her knuckleball, she throws sidearm; heaven knows if she has or hasn't another pitch, but it's not out of the question to learn another one - she's still only 17!  I think the team that drafted her might have seen it as a stunt, but at the same time it's clear she's got technique. She's got game.

The resulting brouhaha on BTF is fascinating too. I don't know just how far she can go, but then again she's only 17. It may yet start a trend of Japanese grils throwing the knucler, the gyroball, sidearm and deceptive. Maybe some of them might just get the NPB. Maybe some of them might even crack the MLB. Maybe the possibilities for baseball skipping over the gender barrier has just opened up?

Yankees Update 25/03/09

Xavier Nady In RF Over Nick Swisher

This is not the choice I would make, but for the possibility that Nady is being burnished for a trade.

“If we were to break today,” Girardi said, “Xavier Nady would be my right fielder.”

At the start of camp, Girardi said right field would be a competition between Nady and Swisher. Each has played roughly to form, and because Nady had an edge at the start, Girardi said, he was comfortable giving Swisher the news Monday morning.

“I’ve been thinking all day about what I wanted to say,” Swisher told reporters after Monday’s game, an 8-3 loss to Philadelphia. “I’m the type of guy, I want to play every day, there’s no doubt about that. I guess we’re just going to see how it plays out.

“I love this team. I love the coaches, players, I love it all. I think it’s a great spot. But that’s the biggest thing; we’re going to have to wait and see how it plays out.”

Not happy to read that at all. Swisher is younger, more patient, has a better track record until his last season which was bad - which enabled him to be brought to NY, and he's a better defender.

Another thing sort of did occur to me. Nady came up as a 3B. If they really like his bat that much they could throw him at 3B while A-Rod recovers and put Swisher in RF.

AJ Burnett Beats Bosox (in Spring)

The kind of news you have when it's not news.

A.J. Burnett, who is 5-0 with a 2.56 ERA in his career against Boston, allowed one run on three hits and two walks in 5-2/3 innings, striking out four. He threw 82 pitches, 49 for strikes, extending his pitch count as high as any Yankees starter has this spring.
"I heard lots of cheers and boos," Burnett said of his first Yanks-Sox experience. "When David (Ortiz) came up the first time, he was covered in them. It's awesome. I can't wait to get in there during the season and see what that's all about."

Well, it's nice to know he can beat those guys so well, so often.

Jeter Is Back From The WBC

Jeter came back to Yankee land where he is most beloved and needed. His inability to lead the hastily assembled host of 'yankees' notwithstanding, that is.

Now that the whole world has seen just how bad his range is, you'd think the mystique has eroded on Captain Crunch.

“I need to play,” Jeter said. “I’ve had enough days off. We just had three days off before our last game. With tomorrow’s off-day, I didn’t feel I needed to miss three more days. I wanted to come and play today.”

Jeter hopes to play most of the Yankees’ final nine exhibition games, which is fine with Girardi. Even before Jeter arrived, Girardi penciled him in Tuesday’s lineup, batting second behind Johnny Damon. Girardi also listed Jeter on the travel squad to Clearwater for Thursday’s game with the Phillies.

“I told him, after today, give me what he wants to do, whether it’s one day off or two days off,” Girardi said. “Just let me know what you need, because you know better than what I do.

“I think there’s enough time for him to get ready. I do. But we’ll find out.”

Since Jeter has been gone for about three weeks, his return prompted a series of “hello stranger” moments. The bench coach Tony Peña greeted him with: “Cap’n Crunch! How you doing? About time you showed up.” Tino Martinez, Jeter’s former teammate and a special instructor in spring training, stopped by for a visit.

There were no insights if he had any, no new experiences he could incorporate or convey to the press, no new information. He remains oddly elusive from giving us a piece of his mind. You'd think he never went away and played those games for the USA. It's bizarre.


Graig Nettles Is Better Now

Graig Nettles is recovering from prostate cancer. That' good news.

Nettles had surgery to remove his prostate in April of last year.
"Hopefully that's all been taken care of and I'm cancer free,"  said Nettles, taking a break from working out with the Yankees in Tampa. "I still have to go every six months to get it checked out, but my health is good."
Cancer hasn't stopped the 64-year-old Gold Glove legend, who's already talking about making his way to the Bronx this season.
"I'll make it out there to the new (Yankee) Stadium a few times this year," he says.
Nettles spends his springs with the current Yankees as an instructor and is more than familiar with the parade of havoc that comes with wearing pinstripes. He invited fans into his crazy days in the Bronx with his book entitled "Balls," released in 1984, so he's no stranger to the absurd. He once summed up his Yankee career succinctly and perfectly in 1978 by saying: "When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a baseball player and join the circus. With the Yankees, I have accomplished both."

As with so many of my heroes in my life, I loved him because he was funny as well as good.

"I'm indebted to the Yankees for always inviting me out to spring training," says Nettles, who came to Yanks in trade with Cleveland in 1972. "I know I can't do the things I used to anymore, so I live through the players. It's all in memory what I did."
And Nettles did a lot, enjoying his best season in 1977, when he picked up his first of two Gold Glove and crushed 37 homers and 107 RBI in helping lead the Yankees to a World Series win over the Dodgers. The following season, Nettles earned his second Gold Glove and  made diving stop after diving stop against the Dodgers in what was back-to-back World Series championships in the Bronx.
But his most cherished memory?
"The biggest thrill I got was when (Chris) Chambliss hit the home run to put us in the World Series in 1976," he says. "That was it."

The memories that stay on and on. I remember that shot.

John Brattain Passes Away

No More Laughs From John

This isn't April Fools. He's not going to pop up anymore with a line.

John Brattain was a witty man who posted over at BTF and Baseball Primer before that. He was always ready with a funny line and would sign off his posts with "best regards John". His distinct style was remarkable in that his wit was accompanied by charm and generosity. He was probably one of my favorite posters. He also contributed regularly to The Hardball Times. The news come as a rude shock. He was a Toronto Blue Jays fan and was always keen to share his insight.

I'm going to miss this internet luminary. :(

RIP John.

WBC Ends

Japan Wins 5-3

Japan thus defended its WBC title, but it was no easy pickings.

Seattle Mariners star Ichiro Suzuki hit a two-out, two-run single in the top of the 10th, and Japan beat reigning Olympic champion South Korea 5-3 Monday night to win its second straight WBC title before a boisterous crowd of 54,846 at Dodger Stadium.

The Japanese won the inaugural tournament three years ago, beating Cuba 10-6 in the finals at Petco Park in San Diego.
South Korea had tied the game at 3 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth on Lee Bum-ho\'s run-scoring single off Japanese closer Yu Darvish (2-1), who got in trouble by issuing one-out walks to Kim Hyun-soo and Kim Tae-kyun, the 3-4 hitters in the lineup.

Darvish struck out Choo Shin-soo before Lee lined a 1-1 pitch into left field, with pinch runner Lee Jong-wook scoring easily from second.
Seiichi Uchikawa opened the 10th with a single, was sacrificed to second and took third on a single by Akinori Iwamura. After pinch-hitter Munenori Kawasaki popped out, Iwamura took second on defensive interference.
Suzuki managed to foul off a pitch after it had bounced then lined the eighth pitch of the at-bat from Lim Chang-yong (1-1) to center for his fourth hit. The Mariners' star entered with a .211 average and three RBIs in eight previous games.

Given the lead, Darvish worked around a leadoff walk to retire South Korea in the bottom of the 10th, setting off a wild celebration when he struck out Lee Jin-young to end the four-hour game.

I had 6 heart attacks watching the game from start to finish. Korea were a lot tougher than USA as it turned out and deservedly were in the finals. You don't really get a view of how tough a team plays until you sit there and watch the grinding at-bats and the dirty big flyballs. They swing the bats hard in South Korea. the power hitters in the heart of their lineup were every bit as scary as the best of the MLBers from any country. And they played great defense.

The Japanese knocked out 15 hits over the 10 innings and seemed to get a runner in scoring position in just about every inning, but somehow the Koreans kept squirming out of these tight spots and keeping Japan within distance. There were no blow out innings, no long sequences of hits. Every at-bat was contested hard by the Korean hurlers, and the Japanese never looked like they were going to run away with it.

The Koreans caught up with the Japanese twice, the second time in the bottom of the ninth with 2 down, and strikes on the hitter. They're mentally tough guys, and you just have to respect that- and the wonder of Baseball.

Hisashi Iwakuma was a revelation. The guy can really gather his strikes nice and low and pitches to both sides of the plate. The command was sufficient to stifle the Korean bats for 7-2/3 innings, holding them to 2 runs.

It was also the second time I've seen Yu Darvish pitch. His 9th inning was all tense and herky jerky, but his 10th was a lot more powerful and precise, even though he gave up a lead off walk. He's got great tools but he\'s got a way to go yet in the experience stakes. It was very uncomfortable watching Darvish walk 2 guys and give up a hit after letting the count go to 3-1.

Then there was Ichiro who battled the Korean closer Lim Chang-Yong for 8 pitches to slap a 2-run single, who I think is going to go down in the annals of baseball as having balls of steel. That was just a magnificent at-bat. Also, full credit to the Korean manager In-Sik Kim for not walking Ichiro who was 3-for-5 at point in the evening, his bat suddenly finding form in the heat of a tense final. It was a gutsy, honorable call.

The really telling stats are how the only team to beat Korea was Japan and the only team to beat Japan was Korea. They played each other 5 times in 17 days, while playing other teams in between, which in retrospect seems like a novelty. It was one heck of a tournament an I'm already exhausted.

WBC Update 23/03/09

So Much For That

Japan beat the USA to advance to the final. I have mixed feelings about all this because either team winning would have been good for me - but my glass is half empty when one of them loses too. :)

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Daisuke Matsuzaka remained undefeated in the World Baseball Classic and defending champion Japan beat the United States 9-4 at Dodger Stadium on Sunday to reach the final against South Korea.
"Can you believe this? Look at the score. I feel so bad about this," Tom Lasorda, Hall of Fame manager and WBC global ambassador, said from his seat behind home plate.
"I'm very, very disappointed. We had high hopes. This is the second time we were supposed to win. We taught these people the game."
Instead, Japan gave the lessons on American soil.
Matsuzaka sent his country into Monday night's title game against South Korea, a 10-2 winner over Venezuela in Saturday's semifinal. Japan won the inaugural tournament in 2006, defeating Cuba in the final.
Akinori Iwamura's RBI triple was the key hit in a five-run fourth inning against starter Roy Oswalt, and the U.S. absorbed its first loss to Japan in major international play since the 2005 World Cup. The Americans had won four in a row, including an 8-4 victory in the bronze medal game at the Beijing Olympics.
"We didn't play as well defensively," U.S. manager Davey Johnson said. "We made it a ballgame through seven innings, and made some mistakes, walked the leadoff hitter in the eighth, and that's not the way you win ballgames."

Oh well. Derek Jeter was the goat with his error in the 8th. Not happy about that at all.  This comment is disturbing:

Jimmy Rollins went 4-for-4 with a walk and a two-out triple in the seventh. Masahiro Tanaka struck out Wright to end the inning.
"We had a lot of fun being an underdog, knowing that we were at somewhat of a disadvantage as far as having time to prepare," Rollins said. "It shows the support and passion these other countries have for baseball. In America, we have many sports, so our attention is at whichever sport season is going on at that time."

Come on Jimmy, you're the MLB! You can't be underdogs in playing NPB Japan! On the other hand Daisuke Matsuzaka continues to amaze as he is now 6-0 in WBC games. He lives for this stuff. So now it's Japan vs Korea part 5. *sigh*.

You Just Don't Get It

"Suck On This!" He Cried As He Pulled The Trigger

I often think that most of life's lessons are hard-earned or lucked-upon. It's good in the cyber-age when people can write something and the idea travels the globe. Pleiades sent in this one which, you MUST read to get just how arcane and corrupt 'the system' has become. At the end of it you realise that it's still a case of 'Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss."

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

It's pretty bleak. There's a whole section on how the US Fed has been secretly buying up bad debt to bail out these banks from the back door, all the while TARP was being argued over. It's harrowing, but enlightening to know that US$3.1trillion of the US$13 trillion of Derivatives got accounted for through the back door, while Congress haggled over $700billion.

While I don't necessarily buy into the conspiratorial angle of the story, I do accept that the US government in the end is an oligarchy of the rich that keeps it that way. It's not the different to how democracies end up being run. It's just that some bother with appearances more than others. Rome was thus, China was thus (and still is), England was thus and still is, and even France will forever slip back with the Ancien Regime. Germany and Japan have long devolved and Spain is only ever stable under oligarchs. Russi is nothing but, while the singular lessons learnt by Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War seems to be how to run a conemporary capitalist oligarchy o the rich. Afria has't learned it, neither has the Arab world.

It's universally a crappy deal, but what can you do? You've been bought and sold long before you were even born. It's depressing, but these are the lessons we keep learning and learning again from history and in life.

And Now For Some Good News

Sometimes You Need Quantity

The slate of Australian films for this year is going to be 35, which is pretty amazing. Heaven only knows how this was achieved, but it seems the Australian industry is finally headed back to producing some kind of volume. It's not quite a geyser, but it is much better than the trickle of the previous 2 -3 years.

Such is the time-lag between financing and release that nobody in the industry seems to have realised the impact of a move by the now-defunct federal government agency, the Film Finance Corporation, to boost the struggling production industry using the tax offset scheme that was introduced in 2007. That agency, which funded most of this country's films for two decades, was merged with two other film bodies to create Screen Australia last July.

As a result, the film industry's apparently perennial famine could turn into a feast if these films are as good as their film-makers hope. There is certainly more variety in the line-up than the recent domination of small, dark dramas by first-time directors.

But industry hardheads question whether cinemas will have space for so many Australian films, fearing the crush will force a series of painfully short releases.

"I really do see it as an exciting year," the chief executive of Screen Australia, Ruth Harley, says. "There's a lot of films and there are some really good ones and there are films of scale by experienced directors. So I think there's every chance that we'll get films that meet big audiences as well as films that meet their niche audiences."

The slate has started promisingly with the controversial Lebanese-Australian drama The Combination taking almost $600,000 in three weeks, despite being temporarily pulled from Greater Union cinemas after two violent incidents involving audiences.

So what we're seeing is the last gasp spending of the late FFC coming into play. Of course, the usual caveats apply, seeing that they are Australian films and more importantly, come from the FFC's odd development guidelines that favored  many an uncommercial product.

While there is an excellent chance to better the meager Australian share of total box office - 4.4 per cent on average recently - these films face some brutal realities. Outside the Hollywood-backed Happy Feet (which took $31.8 million) and Australia ($37.2 million), none of this country's films has taken $3 million since 2006.

That reflects their limited interest to mainstream audiences and their small-scale releases, often on fewer than 30 of the country's 1900-odd screens, which puts them in art-house and independent cinemas rather than multiplexes. By comparison, the Hollywood comedy Confessions Of A Shopaholic opened on 309 screens last weekend.

Hollywood can cleverly market average movies like Confessions, but Australian releases need to be above average to succeed.

The executive director of the Independent Cinemas Association of Australia, Mark Sarfaty, is guardedly hopeful about the year's prospects. "From what we know, there does appear to be a more commercial mindset applied to some of them. But equally some of them seem to be the same types of Australian films that audiences haven't responded well to. If you double the output of those types of films, they'll struggle to find screen space amongst films that cinema operators have got more faith in."

Sarfaty says that while national box office jumped 5.6 per cent last year, takings for films released on 30 or fewer screens crashed, showing that films in art-houses, like their multiplex counterparts, need to be "events" or "special" to succeed. "My concern is that if we don't manage the mesh between production and exhibition very carefully, we'll be a bit like the container ships lining up outside Newcastle looking for uploading facilities. We'll have all these films lined up and nowhere for them to go."

Oh well. It's still better that it rains a bit too hard than to have more drought. Like the article says, with any luck, one of these films will inspire more people to come and watch Australian films, and there are 35 shots at that this year. It's better than 14-15 attempts.

Criminality And the Aussie Mindset

I have a friend who is a Kiwi and wants to be in the movies. The nly poblem is that there isn't much of a industry to break into in Australia. Anyway, he told me today that he noticed something about Australian audiences. They like criminality.

"What? That's a bit broad isn't it?" I asked. (maybe I should've whined 'you can't generalise...')

"Naah. Think about it. Superman flops but Batman works. Why? Because the leading Aussie plays the crim. Some of the biggest hits in the Australian consciousness are about crims."

"Larrikins," I said,

"Naah. Convicts mate, convicts. It's the convict mentality. The criminal mindset. Heath Ledger does Ned Kelly? They're interested. Bana's turn as 'Chopper'? Aussies are in for it. Heck, they love the books. 'Dirty Deeds'? Great. 'Underbelly'? Ratings winner. Even with American stuff, the Aussies like a good crook.  'Pirates of the Carribbean' series is such an ordinary bunch of movies but they're huge here. Why?"

"Johnny Depp, I guess," I said

"No, no, it's not just because they have Johnny Depp. It's actually because he's playing a crim. Nobody likes Orlando Bloom's character in those movies. It's the shifty criminal pirate that the Aussies love. Then there's 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Reservoir Dogs' by Tarantino - both about crimnals galore. They should just do reality shows with criminal themes like 'Safe crackers' or 'Con men' 'hooker for a month' and the TV Station would never lose in the ratings"

"How did you figure all this?"

"It's because Aussies and Kiwis are so similar, but there are just some crucial differences in our outlooks on things; and I keep thinking about those. Australia really was a convict settlement and hasn't shaken off that cultural heritage."

Whoah! I thought. He went on and on with examples which, while not being completely conclusive, one had to sit there and think about the mass of evidence. That's all just his theory - but it was so out of the blue that I thought I'd blog it here.

As If To Underscore The Above...

David Dale's column says this:

Bert Newton's unfortunate resemblance to a melting wax dummy has not discouraged cool young adults from watching his nostalgia series 20 To 1. It's the 10th most watched show of the week with viewers aged 16-39. The explanation may lie in Channel Nine's ploy of putting the words "Adults Only" in the title, thereby suggesting 20 To 1 has developed the attractions of Underbelly, which is No. 1 with younger viewers.

The violence and nudity of Underbelly has not turned off the senior citizens of Australia - it's the fourth most watched show with viewers aged over 55, although their favourite is the sentimental Find My Family.

The Gruen Transfer stabs at the very heart of capitalism - the right of big business to con poor people out of their money - yet it is the second most watched show of Wednesday (after Spicks And Specks) by the rich - or "OG1/2" (the highest- and second highest-earning occupational groups). Sadly, it is only ninth with "Grocery buyers", who might benefit from Gruen's advice. They prefer Criminal Minds and Australia's Got Talent, where advertisers reach them unfiltered.

In the new demographics of TV, aka the niching of Australia, programmers no longer ask: "How many people watch that show?" but instead: "What kind of people watch that show?" Each morning the ratings measurement agency OzTAM gives its subscribers a dissection of the previous night's audience by age, gender, geography and wealth. Advertisers then know where to get the biggest bang for their buck.

It's possible to answer the questions all viewers shout at the screen sooner or later: "Why did they take off that terrific program, when it has plenty of viewers?" and "Why do they keep showing that ridiculous program, which only an idiot would watch?" The answers will be: "Because it doesn't attract the niche the advertisers want" and "There's always something you can sell to an idiot."

I kid you not!

Remembering Tatsunori Hara

Remembering Tatsunori Hara


There's a brief mention of Tatsunori Hara here on ESPN.

As a young boy, Japanese manager Tatsunori Hara often raced to the library after school to read his favorite book: the biography of former American slugger Babe Ruth.

Hara idolized the bombastic American icon, and the tales of Ruth begat a love of baseball that carried Hara through a 15-year playing career with the Tokyo Giants, and later a managerial career with those same Giants.

Even now, Hara modestly smiles at the thought of those days as a boy spent learning about the American baseball game through Ruth.

But in this World Baseball Classic, Hara is trying to build his own legacy and one for his country, perhaps one that young Japanese boys will read about in books in the future.

If Hara leads Japan to a victory against the United States on Sunday in the World Baseball Classic semifinals at Dodger Stadium, then a new era in Japanese baseball will take form.

Beating a team of major league players would surely be a boost for the country's baseball morale, one that took a hit last year when a team of American minor leaguers defeated Japan twice in the Beijing Olympics, including an 8-4 thumping in the bronze-medal game that was seen as an embarrassment in the home country.

"I'm very excited about playing against the Americans," Hara said. "When I first started watching the major leagues, I was very impressed. We needed to catch up to the major leagues and then we needed to go beyond that. That was my education and the circumstances of how I played baseball. I have a great deal of respect for American baseball, and here is a great opportunity sitting right in front of me."

I don't know about you, but to me, that's a slightly patronising account of the dude. I went digging around in Wikipedia late last night and stumbled on the Japanese page for Tatsunori Hara, the current WBC manager for Japan. My memory of Hara is vague and fragmented. I heard about him a lot in the 1970s as a kid and never saw him play as a highschooler and varsity player. He set all sorts of records, so he was a little like the Nagashima of his day. He was drafted by the Tokyo Giants in 1980, making his debut in 1981.

My maternal grandfather was a big fan of the Yomiuri Giants. They're a bit like the Yankees in the sense that they're the team that sets the benchmark for fame in Japan., but being an actual Yankee fan straight back from NYC, it was a bit hohum for me. I was in Japan for only 5 months so I didn't really get a grip on who was playing or how in the NPB.

The next time I saw Hara was in August 1993, during his worst season, later in his career. He just didn't look anything like any kind of slugger, let alone hitter. This was way before anybody introduced to me to sabermetric thinking so I was left to judge players by things like Ave and RBIs alone. The stats flashed on the screen didn't look anywhere near good. Hara was somewhat better when I saw him again in 1994, but he retired as of 1995. If you look at his English page in Wikipedia you see his career average was .279, and he hit 1675 hits in 15 seasons. It doesn't even tell you his HR total, OBP or anything like that. He sure didn't hit anywhere near 500HRs, so even the impression of him as a slugger seemed weak after Sadaharu Oh hit 868, and Nagashima hit 444. Hara hit 382 - not even half of Oh's tally.

So my impression of Hara was of somebody that was more hype than substance, a player who never fulfilled the massive potential that was promised in the 1970s. I don't know how I got that in my head, but it goes to show just awful he looked in 1993, and basically how disconnected I was from Japan in the 1980s.

If you go to the lengthy entry in Japanese, there's his career chart.



The column on the far right is his OBP and the second from the right is his Slugging percentages. The guy had a career OBP of .357 and SLG of .523, peaking with an OPS of .999 in 1986.his miscellaneous awards include Rookie of the Year in 1981, a MVP in 1983, 2 Golden Gloves as a thirdbaseman. He's not quite Nagashima, but in his peak years he was slugging .570+. He also drew a good sum of walks and his K/BB throughout his career is  very respectable 894/705.

The thing that gets me when I look at Hara's career is how the last 3 season sort of see him sputtering as injuries robbed him of power. One of the supsects in all this is the move by the Giants from Korakuen Stadium to the current Tokyo Dome which is on artificial turf. The artificial turf has been hard on many players, including Hara and Kiyohara, and even arguably Hideki Matsui's knees. I have a feeling Hara might have had at least 3-4 more productive years had it not been the transition to artificial turf in 1988.

Here are some links to Youtube that shows him hitting:

A collection of his homers. He's got a sweet pull swing that comes around nicely. Apart from the first shot in the montage that is hit to the opposite field, he naturally slams them into Leftfield stands.

Playlist result for Tatsunori Hara.

In 1975 as a 16-17 year old, playing in the national comp. This is his only homer at Koshien as a highschooler, but he hits a triple in the following at-bat. Goodness it's 34years ago! He crouches deeper in this video.

An At Bat in 1989's post-season. Trademark swing on a 2-2 pitch sends the ball out over left.

His final Homerun on the day he retired. He comes around on a slider fading out of the zone and takes it deep to Left. Classic Hara swing.

So I kind of wish I saw him in his best years in the early to mid 1980s but alas I was here in Australia watching cricket, so what can you say? Thanks to the wonder of Wikipedia and Youtube, I got to figure out just what kind of player he was in his heyday (and what I missed), and I'm actually bummed that I missed watching him with my grandfather who passed away in 1983. More poignantly, the man himself is now 50.

Generalising the General

You Can't Generalise...

This post is going to be a little unpopular, but I do want to write it down before I forget.

One of the most irritating discussion points that has been on the increase in the last 20years is the notion that we cannot generalise things. For instance, if somebody makes a claim about the characteristics of an 'x' population as defined by age or grouping, the counter argument is always "but you can't generalise..."

The "you can't generalise" trope has permeated so much of our discussion to such a degree that it has made certain types of conversations moot. You can't talk about ethnicity, or gender, or for that matter religiosity or beliefs once somebody pulls out the "you can't generalise about..."

Let's consider this for a moment. Demographers, statisticians, marketers and scientists are always chopping populations up by characteristics in order to draw knowledge from such procedures. You have to set general categories in order to get to the specific. This is the nature of ordered thought; that we proceed don the order of things, such as say, Plant kingdom and Animal kingdom; or vertebrate and invertebrate; and each step along the way we find specific characteristics about these populations.

Indeed, we can go a good deal along this path in order to talk about species  and even breeds of dogs or cattle. The moment we get to human populations, we hit an idiotic chorus of "you can't generalise...."

Well, yeah, you can, and if it's done right, it's more meaningful than denying it.

I was watching Q&A last night and host Tony Jones, with guest panelists Tony Abbot and Kathy Lewis were all carrying on with the "You can't generalise" mantra, most of the time where I thought it suited them not to draw general conclusions about a general tendency or *gasp* a political persuasion. It's even in the general parlance of everyday discourse where people say, "you can't generalise women of the ages 19-24!"

So I beg to differ. Marketers and demographers and statisticians do so all the time and draw salient conclusions - certainly enough for these people  to continue to find employment, and for their clients to sell these people what they've been led to believe they want.Whether we like it or not, if we fit into a demogrpahic, somebody has studied how we think, what we do, hat we want, how we go about it and so forth.

Even the politicians do this very kind of generalising of whole population segments when they poll people. And they must draw meaningful conclusions in such exercises, otherwise they wouldn't do them.It's critical in polls to find out about demographic segments in detail.

The point I'm making here is very concrete and it is this: you can split up populations according to category and yes, you can draw general conclusions from such studies. The caveat is that there is a sample size that meets a criteria, and that we should not be tempted into essentialist arguments.

By essentialist arguments I mean, the variety that ascribe the generalised characteristics to being essential to the studied group.

• e.g. 1  Lebanese Australians have a higher representation of criminality, ergo Lebanese Australians are criminally oriented.


• e.g. 2  Jewish Australians are well represented in the affluent, so the Jews are naturally good with money.


• e.g. 3 White Australian women are over represented in the prostitution trade, therefore White Australian women are naturally more slutty than other types of women.

The only way the second clauses can follow the first clause premised in each of these examples if you think that these characteristics are essential to the character of this population. In most cases we come across in life, they are correlations without cause.

These essentialist arguments are wrong not because they are generalisations, but because they are veiled racist/sexist arguments ascribing essential characteristics to a group of people.

I don't know how this "you can't generalise..." trope of argument got started, and then adopted. I suspect it happens in Highschool education where people struggle to be politically correct and this shorthand has replaced actual thought and analysis. However it really needs to be put back in the box where it popped out. If we stopped drawing general conclusions about categories we set for studies, we'll never draw and conclusions. The next time somebody pipes up with "you can't generalise..." we really ought to point out the fallacy of their premise.

Yankees Update 19/03/09

Injured Vets On The Comeback Are Doing Fine

Jorge Posada was mostly missing from the Yankee lineup last year, and Hideki Matsui was hampered by a knee problem for the better part of 2/3rds of the season. They've both had surgery - as has Mariano Rivera - but so far they're doing well in spring training.

If Posada can healthily catch 120 or so games, then he's certainly going to contribute to the offense. I'm bullish on Posada, in as much as his problem ilast year was his shoulder and not his knees, ankles and hips. His lower body still seems to have juice, an that's important for a catcher.

Mastui is designated to DH duty and is unlikely to take the field this year until the Inter-league games begin, but his bat is going to help greatly. While it is often discussed as if he is now a spare part, his OBP and OPS still projects to be better than Xavier Nady, Johnny Damon, and Nick Swisher. Declarations that Matsui is passed his use-by-date for the Yankees  are just a little premature. If he doesn't have to field, he can surely offer more than enough value over replacement level than the OF who will.

Mo? He's Still Mo from all indications. Mariano Rivera is coming from surgery to remove some calcified tissue in his shoulder. Apparently he played the whole season with the pain last year. Goodness know how good he's going to be this season without the pain. :)

So yeah, I'm bullish on all three.

The Predicted Demise Of Derek Jeter, Shortstop


Derek Jeter is 35. He's at the point where most players who play shortstop  get moved off. Watching him in the USA-Puerto Rico game where he let 2 critical grounders go by sort of made me cringe. He never could get those, but now it's pretty obvious he can't get those.

"Past a diving Jeter!" - *Cringe!*

Still, his projection sits at about an .800 OPS, and that's pretty darn good for a shortstop. He probably will stumble to the end of his contract as a shortstop and with the addition of Sabathia and Burnett, the Yankees are going to have to worry a lot less about balls in play than at any time in the last 6 seasons, so it just might not matter this season. When you do the maths, even in the recent past, his deficiency in Zone Rating has been worth 2 singles up the middle in a fortnight of games.

The future beyond this season is a lot more cloudy. It may come to pass that the Yankees do sign a real shortstop, but at that point they're going to have to figure out where to play Derek Jeter, and live with the fact that new Shortstop is not likely to post an .800 OPS.

Aaron Boone Headed For Heart Surgery

Aaron Boone - that's Aaron Fucking Boone in Boston - is going under the knife to correct an aortic valve.

Boone, 36, has known about his heart condition since the early 1990s, when he played for the University of Southern California. A recent physical and follow-up exam revealed that he needs an operation soon, and Boone will schedule it in the coming days.

“I’ve monitored it all these years,” Boone said in an interview after the news conference. “I knew this day was out there. I just didn’t know it was now.”

For Boone, the news was another unexpected turn in an eventful career. In January 2004, three months after propelling the Yankees to the World Series with a homer in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Boston Red Sox, Boone tore a knee ligament playing pickup basketball. He forfeited most of a $5.75 million salary and cleared a path for Alex Rodriguez to join the Yankees.

He's not even in my Top 100 Yankees of all time, I'd imagine. He was only around for 3months, displacing Robin Ventura. Now Robin Ventura, I liked - he just never had a big moment for the Yankees, but he was a 3B who could hit for an .780-.820. OPS, and therefore a better bat than Scott Brosius who had retired at the end of 2001. I know Ventura was struggling at the time but Boone hardly seemed like an improvement at the time. He had about the same ISO as a declining Ventura, but Boone gave up 40 points in OBP for not even a marginally better glove.

But all that is mere detail. His resume has that one blast, and together with Bucky Dent - That's Bucky Fucking Dent in Boston - I'll never forget Aaron Boone. That, and the fact that he got himself foolishly injured in a game of basketball which paved the way for A-Rod to land in the Bronx. My goodness, the Yankees have been  soap opera this decade, and Aaron Boone was more than a bit player in that production.

So, here's wishing the operation is a success and to many happy years for Aaron Boone.

That Brings Us Up To The Weirdness of A-Rod

I really don't know what to make of A-Rod when he goes and gets pieces done on him like this.

The night before his life changes forever, Alex Rodriguez calls from Miami with an urgent request. A-Rod is worried about something he said during our interview last night. I've been hearing mysterious warnings all afternoon: Alex needs to talk. Alex wants to clarify something. Can't say what. Alex will call you from his car.

"Listen," Rodriguez says. "I was thinking about one thing that I spoke about—it's something that's kind of trivial but will give me a hard time for no reason." He pauses. "The song."

Aha. Last night, he let slip his favorite Madonna song. The curious relationship between A-Rod and the pop icon makes for delicious gossip, of course. Is Rodriguez terrified that Madonna will resent the tongue-wagging? Or, better still, has he picked the wrong song as his favorite, and fears that an offended Madge might march her stilettos over his back? No: Rodriguez believes that revealing the song would lead to its being played every time he stepped to the plate during an away game. "The last thing I want to do is go to every stadium and have them play that song," he says. Fine—to be honest, it's not even a great Madonna song (if it had been something juicy like "Justify My Love," forget it).

Looking back, his preoccupation seems surreal. Just the day before, Selena Roberts, a reporter from Sports Illustrated, had confronted Rodriguez at a Miami gym, asking for his reaction to evidence that he'd tested positive for illegal steroids in 2003. And now here he was, sweating a Madonna song. It's like worrying about the in-flight movie as your plane is belly flopping on the Hudson River.

At least he seems to be recovering nicely from surgery.

WBC Update 19/03/09

Why Can't They Beat These Guys?

Japan beat China 4-0 and then demolished South Korea in the round 1 match, only to lose a 1-0 duel with the South Koreans in the seeding game. In Round 2, Japan then beat Cuba 6-0, a convincing effort at any time, only to play South Korea again and lost 4-1. Japan then played Cuba again and beat them 5-0, which must be giving Fidel Castro indigestion and fits.

Defending champion Japan advanced to the World Baseball Classic semifinals Wednesday night, leaving mighty Cuba in the fog of another international failure.
Japan beat Cuba 5-0 on a foggy night at Petco Park to clinch the final spot in the semifinals this weekend at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
Japan scored two unearned runs with two outs in the fourth inning when Cuban center fielder Yoennis Cespedes committed a two-base error on Michihiro Ogasawara's high fly ball. Even though it was hit into heavy fog and Cespedes had a long run, he seemed to see the ball and had it in his glove before it popped out, glanced off his cap and rolled to the wall.
Norichika Aoki went 4-for-5 with two RBIs and one run scored. Ichiro Suzuki went 2-for-5 to raise his WBC average to .214. He tripled in the ninth and scored on Aoki's single.
Hisashi Iwakuma and Toshiya Sugiuchi combined to five-hit the Cubans.
Baseball long has been Cuba's soul, and the WBC and Olympics are among the few major forums it has to show off the country's talent away from home.
But the Cubans are in a funk.
The WBC elimination came seven months after South Korea upset Cuba to win the gold medal at the Beijing Olympics.
Three years ago at Petco Park, Japan beat Cuba 10-6 to win the inaugural WBC.

Thus, the final 4 are Venezuela, USA, South Korea and Japan. It's kind of weird that Japan has shut out Cuba twice and can't seem to down Korea in the money matches. Now we find out the 2 Asian nations are going to face each other again for the seeding of Round 3. It's all a bit barmy and there's still a 1/4  chance they might play each other in the finals if they beat their respective opponents in the Semis.

Manny Dons The Pads

Nothing to do with the WBC, but this article came in from Walk-off HBP.

The made-for-the-media event took place on a sunsplashed field often used by the Arizona Cricket Club, one of an estimated 750 cricket teams in this country. The event paired two men who make their living with a bat -- although the bat wielded by Ramirez on Wednesday had an elongated handle and was flat, like a paddle.

Marsh is a left-handed opening bat who plays for his country and for Kings XI Punjab in the Indian Premier League. Like Ramirez, Marsh is coming back from a hamstring injury that he said had sidelined him for about six weeks.

Marsh said he had been looking forward to meeting Ramirez.

"I've heard a little bit about him, but I really don't follow baseball too much," Marsh said. "I read up about him when I was coming over here. He's certainly an icon in American sport."

Marsh gave Ramirez a few quick pointers on the rules.

"It's pretty simple, mate," Marsh said. "You just make sure you're nice and relaxed. You keep your eyes on the ball, just like you do in baseball."

With Marsh standing nearby, Ramirez swung and missed at his first pitch before lining the second one past the bowler's ear as yellow-jerseyed members of the Arizona Cricket Club chased down the ball.

On the third delivery, Ramirez let the ball hit the wicket, which would have been an out in an actual game.

"That's an out?" Ramirez said. "Give me one more chance."

A few minutes later, Bhuta fired a ball that bounded behind Ramirez, who danced out of the way.

"Am I allowed to charge the mound?" Ramirez said.

It was a funny line, but cricket uses a shiny 5½-ounce ball that feels every bit as hard as a horsehide. Marsh said later he wasn't worried that the Dodgers' expensive property might take a ball in the noggin.

"They weren't bowling too quick," Marsh said.

Fair enough. Manny being Manny, when he was told Marsh once had a 9hour stint at the crease, he said such an at-bat would be just too long.  Of course, there's more to the story.

But, after the last pictures were taken, Ramirez turned back toward the field and said, "Can I hit some more?"

That's Manny.

Aniston As Bond Girl

Please Jen, No Means Dr. No

I must be bored to be piqued by this today: The Vine reports that Jennifer Aniston might get a shot at being the next Bond Girl.

The 40-year-old actress - who recently expressed an interest in appearing in the British spy film franchise - is set to be offered a screen test for the follow up to Quantum of Solace which will star Daniel Craig as James Bond.

A source at EON, the production company which makes the James Bond films, said: “Jennifer has all the qualities we are looking for in a Bond girl. She has to be beautiful but she also needs to have brains.

“It helps if she’s athletic and able to keep up with intense stunt work a Bond movie demands.

“It is likely she’ll be called in to meet producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson soon.”

Jennifer previously said of her Bond aspirations: “I get offered funny, quirky, pretty roles. But I’d love to do an action movie. James Bond - glamour. Daniel Craig. Sh*t-loads of fun.”

I sure hope this won't come to pass. Before I totally dismiss this notion I have a confession to make and it is this: while I loathed 'Friends' and thought none except the chudly Matt Perry could actually act on the show, I was always impartial for Aniston's ass.

There, I said it. I'm not an ass-man, but Aniston's ass in that tight black outfit as she jiggled around to the dumb theme song of 'Friends' was a 'bit-of-awright'. Otherwise, I'm not entirely impressed with anything she has done and on the whole her charms are that of the girl next door. She's certainly no great shakes as an acting talent. The best thing I heard is that one "wouldn't kick her out of bed... until the next younger starlet came along".

Her string of movies are equally unimpressive, in direct proportion to her minute acting chops. She says they're the only roles she gets, but I've never had an inkling she was capable of more than the soap suds she's had blown her way. She's show-biz but distinctly TV for a reason.

Oddly enough she chose to wait until she was 40 to do a nude photo session, which suggests prudery and emotional repression that has given way to over-confidence or joy at the results form the plastic surgeon. Or it's a faint admission that straight acting is not going to help her career from here on in so she's had to take her clothes off, just to keep her profile up. We'll never know. So, to see her put herself forward as a Bond Girl candidate and then be willing to screen test is a little rich.

Halle Berry's stint aside, over-aged Bond Girls are a bit of a downer. Terry Hatcher was plain yuck. Maude Adams wouldn't cut it today. One has to wonder if the producers seriously see any merit in casting the forty-something Aniston in the next Bond Movie. Even Kim Basinger was still in her 20s for 'Never Say Never Again'.

Then again it might be the role she proves me wrong. I roll my eyes in anticipation (of the worst).

Ambivalence About The ABC

The Problem With Aunty

I used to work for the ABC in Gore Hill. I was a lowly TOPO, filling in hours, doing the most menial of audio jobs. I worked long hours, being bullied by producers and directors and editors and sound mixers. I made their coffee, I sat around watching the reels turn in the machine room of the dubbing theatres, I got bullied around by people who were largely contemptuous of the guy at the bottom of the rung. It was the place where I made one vow: that I would never ever mistreat that guy in the back room when I got to be the director. It's a vow that I have kept.

I ran away to AFTRS as soon as I could. When I got to AFTRS, EH the editing lecturer said bluntly, "You probably have bad habits from having worked there," without ever actually seeing any of my own work. When I quizzed EH about what she meant, she said she meant that the ABC crew are often given 3 times the schedule to do a job compared to the commercial stations and that this led to a certain lax-ness in how an ex-ABC person approached the work.

It was a preposterous claim.

The people I knew who worked in drama at the ABC worked like demons. They worked around the clock and pursued details like nobody's business. I didn't like what they worked on - it all looked like pretentious shite to me, but then again, so did most of the short films we made at AFTRS  - Nonetheless I have to say everybody worked until they dropped. If it took 3 times as long, it was probably because they needed all of that time to make it technically 'good'. they were all sticklers for correct production procedures and protocol.

Thus, in my estimation from personal experience, I thought EH was being way too harsh about the ABC, even if it were true that I had no talent for editing. In any case, in accordance with her prejudices, EH marked me pretty harshly on my editing assignments, saying really subjective unjustifiable things which I've never forgotten. Including: "you have no talent for this." - Thanks EH, I'll never forget your instructions. It felt so unfair because all the while I could never escape the suspicion that she was tarring me with same brush she used to tar and feather the ABC of her imagination.

After I graduated AFTRS, I never went back to the ABC. I didn't see the point of going back to the bottom rung again to be bullied around by those people, after having been bullied around by people who didn't like those people. I still have very mixed feelings about my time there.

With that I want to link to this article sent in by Pleiades:

One senior ABC executive told me the ABC was unlikely to get into anything like a popular commercial series such as Home and Away in the extra 70 hours of Australian drama.

“Why not,” I asked. “A lot of people might like the ABC’s take on that style of show before the news.” It seems to work for the BBC.

“We’ve been there, done that,” he said. “It was called Bellbird.”

So it was. And wasn’t it great?

In a submission to the 2020 Summit last year, ABC boss Mark Scott outlined his view of the corporation’s digital future as six channels under which ABC1 would be 80 per cent Australian content, ABC2 on 50 per cent local and ABC3 a dedicated children’s channel with at least 50 per cent Australian content.

“In an environment of almost limitless choice and multiple delivery systems, the current reliance on Australian content quotas on analogue channels will be obsolete, and will fail to deliver the cultural outcomes they were designed to achieve,” Mr Scott said.

“Australians will be swamped with foreign content at the same time as fragmentation of audiences and revenue reduces the profitability of high-cost Australian content for the commercial media. “The ABC brand, synonymous with quality Australian content, will be an even more important source of Australian content in this environment, and a key mechanism for achieving cultural policy objectives.

“It will be the means by which Australian audiences can find quality Australian content, and the connection between the creators of Australian content and a mass audience.”

If the Rudd Government meets its election promises, Mr Scott will soon have the opportunity to live up to those words.

His 2020 address gave a brief glimpse of what he had in mind — and Bellbird, or anything like it, doesn’t seem to be in the picture.

What he saw for more drama content was “telemovies, mini-series and longer form drama”. This was explained as “a landmark series of dramas based on the great canon of Australian literature, providing an educational resource as well as content for TV and broadband”.

It's tough to figure out just where the ABC should position itself. I would prefer to see them be a little more accommodating towards a broader television market without sacrificing their technical superiority. I can't remember the last time I switched on the ABC to watch one of their dramas, but I watch so little television in general these days.

I still feel ambivalent about the ABC. I'm not a cultural elitist enough to accept its claims to better quality, and I'm not yobbo enough to demand they make reality shows or cop shows. I still feel an affinity with the organisation even though it has been years since I worked there, and yet when I reflect on what that time was like, I really don't have much positive to show for it. It's a funny thing that time has not dulled that sense of disappointment.

On Monopolies And Oligopolies

Trying To Untangle Success From The Moral Failures


Last week in the Sydney Morning Herald was this piece about Paul Keating and his perhaps ever-so-slightly self-aggrandising account of Australian Banking in contrast to what has happened elsewhere with their crappy banking failures.

US bank stocks weakened so much that nationalisation seems to be the only remaining option to put them quickly out of their misery.

Australia's banks, by contrast, are strong, said Keating, because of his decision as Treasurer to create the "Four Pillars" policy. This requires that the four big banks remain separate, barred from taking each other over. This prevented them "cannibalising each other", in Keating's words. As protected species, they had no need to mount risky takeovers to bulk themselves up defensively.

Their strength certainly wasn't due to the brilliance of their managers, whom Keating described as "counterhopping clerks" who had managed to work their way up the bank hierarchies. A further source of the soundness of the Australian banks, he said, was that they had learned well the lessons of risky speculative lending as a result of "the recession we truly did have to have".

In sum, Tim Geithner is a gigantic fool, the IMF the gun that can't shoot straight, Alan Greenspan a bungler. The big US banks were run by the greedy and the hopeless, the Australian banks by counterhopping clerks. It's a world of many villains. And only one hero.

That there would be our old PM Paul Keating, brandishing his legacy from the graveyard of politics. Yeah, it's a bit rich when he's the only person who called it right. The Australian Banks are in less trouble because they weren't prompted to take stupid risks - they were busy ripping us all off with excessive fees.

But then I came across this interesting account from Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus and FiveThirtyEight.com fame.

Why do baseball teams seem to thrive as seemingly every other investment fails? How can the Yankees, in the midst of a recession, get away with shelling out $161 million to three-hundred-pound pitcher CC Sabathia, or with charging $500 a head for premium seats at the new stadium? Will the baseball bubble ever collapse?

There are, arguably, some signs of weakness. More than half of baseball's thirty clubs are freezing or reducing season-ticket prices, according to USA Today. And while Sabathia and the Yankees' other new blue-chippers, Mark Teixeira and A. J. Burnett, have made out very well for themselves, an unprecedented number of free agents were still searching for a home as the snow began to thaw, including All-Stars like Manny Ramirez, Adam Dunn, and Ben Sheets.

A catastrophic collapse of the baseball market remains unlikely, however, for two reasons. First, major league baseball is a monopoly with a legal exemption from antitrust laws, and therefore it's not subject to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. In 1908 — the last time the Cubs won the World Series — there were sixteen major league baseball clubs for about 89 million American citizens, or one team per 5.6 million potential fans. But now there are thirty clubs for around 300 million Americans — just one to go around per 10 million of us. If not for its monopoly status, there might be forty or sixty major league baseball clubs, and the individual franchises would be less valuable. But because of it, buying a piece of a baseball club is a bit like marrying into the Rockefeller trust.

So on the one hand you have Paul Keating praising the picture with 'the four pillars of wisdom' in his banking oligopoly, and then Nate Silver pointing out that Major League Baseball with its monopoly is just as robust. You'd have to be a mug not to put two and two together and realise just how powerful this idea is.

Think about this for a moment. Even in this most dire of dire moments, Microsoft is still turning a large profit, even as they cut staff. Microsoft of course has a virtual monopoly on the operating system market. They're not the only one: against a world wide deflationary pressure, Apple computers just announced they are raising prices on their wares. And much as they might deny it, they do have a monopoly on Apple machines - they do go after any vendors that might try to sell ordinary Intel PCs with OSX loaded up.

What this says quite plainly is that the total control of a monopoly or a collusive oligopoly actually smooths out the ups and downs of a market. And there are even sociological observations to back this up.

The economists' model says markets are composed of many firms competing vigorously with each other, with the aim of maximising their profits. Paradoxically, the competition keeps profits in check and ensures the customers do best.

When sociologists look at markets, however, what they see is quite different. Neil Fligstein, a professor of economic sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, once wrote a paper on markets as politics.

Huh? Well, he was arguing that the producer side of markets is composed of people in organisations seeking to exercise power - both within their organisations and between organisations.

Like all sociologists, he sees markets as a social institution rather than an impersonal economic mechanism. The firms that dominate markets have their own objectives: not to maximise profits or give customers value for money, but simply to survive and prosper.

If markets really worked the way economists' theory says, they'd be a lot more unstable than most markets actually are. Prices would move up and down erratically and a lot more firms would go out backwards.

Most markets don't work that way because the goal of firms is to create a stable world and find social solutions to competition.

"The social structures of markets and the internal organisation of firms are best viewed as attempts to mitigate the effects of competition with other firms," Fligstein says.

It's clear from the outset that, whereas the economists' basic model assumes a large number of small firms in a market, the sociologists assume a small number of large firms. Economists call the latter "oligopoly", and it's ubiquitous in the real world.

Trouble is, economists don't know much about how oligopolies work. So maybe they have something to learn from the sociologists.

The sociologists argue that certain "social institutions" are necessary preconditions for the existence of markets. By institutions they don't mean organisations, they mean shared rules, which can be laws or just collective understandings. Such understandings are held in place by custom, or explicit or tacit agreement. (This is a part of reality than economists simply don't see.)

That's from a Ross Gittins article from back in June. So you see where I'm going with this. I'm beginning to think that may be we have to resign ourselves to collusive oligopolies if we want to have a stable society, and that the current chaos we're seeing in the Global Financial Crisis is actually a direct result of deregulating markets for full competition.

In other words, when the Free Marketeers got exactly what they wanted under GWB by getting full deregulation and non-regulation, the picture got so scary, the rich simply pulled their money out of the markets. The semblances of stability all these years in various capital markets were more a result of this non-transparent, almost corrupt collusion rather than the robustness of the capitalist system itself.

That's just a thought.

WBC Update

My Goodness The Dominicans Are Out

If it happened once, you say it's miraculous. The second time the Dutch beat the Dominican Republic, you have to scratch your head and wonder at the marvel that is the WBC. The Dutch even got close to toppling Puerto Rico. They're not beating about the bush, these Dutch 'honkballers'.

They don't have a big time fully pro-league in the Netherlands - just a bunch of sport nuts, very much like us Aussies. And here they are beating one of the treasure troves of talent. It's a little like... like if the Dutch beat the Windies of the 1970s and 1980s vintage in cricket, 2 one-dayers in a row.

“These guys, they did it,” David Ortiz said. “They beat us. I tell you, the whole world is shocked now. Even in Japan, they’re like ‘What the heck?’ in Japanese.”

The Dominicans were considered one of the favorites to win the event, but they could not overcome a team with a modest baseball tradition. The Dominicans had a speedy chance for redemption against the Netherlands, who jolted them, 3-2, on Saturday, and they did not grab it. After falling behind by 1-0 in the 11th, the Netherlands rallied with two runs in the bottom of the inning to grab the game.

“It’s a miracle,” the Netherlands Manager Rod Delmonico said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

As Ortiz stood near the first base dugout, he said that the players were in “in shock” and were pained by how difficult the jolting losses would be for their relatives from the Dominican. The Dominican fans did not expect their heroes to lose to the Netherlands, a country where soccer and swimming are more popular than baseball.

“Oh, God, thank God I don’t have to go back home for a while,” Ortiz said. “I’m telling you right now, in the Dominican, there had to be a blackout right now.”

That one tells that tale of the tape. I guess they can't blame it on A-Rod if he didn't play a single game.

Italy Upsets Canada

Mike Piazza is helping out the Italians. It seemed unlikely, but they've managed to win one for Mike, eliminating Canada.

Third baseman Alex Liddi, a native Italian who played for Seattle’s Class A team last season, was 2 for 4 with two runs batted in. Center fielder Chris Denorfia, a Connecticut native who plays for Oakland, was 4 for 4 with three doubles and two runs batted in. Both players sparkled on defense.

The loose eligibility rules of the World Baseball Classic recall the “Simpsons” episode in which the boss stuffs the company softball team with major leaguers to win a bet. The Italian team is stocked with players who were not born or raised in Italy.

Very quickly, though, the group has come together. The public-address announcer gives each name an Italian flourish, and players born in Royal Oak, Mich., like the veteran reliever Jason Grilli, sense a brotherhood.

“The guys who joined the Italian nationals, and the other guys they’ve compiled so wonderfully, you just could tell that this team was going to get along,” Grilli said, adding later: “I always say it the same way: when you are around Italians, you become more Italian. And you see why we take such pride in who we are.”

Grilli, who has worked more major league games than anyone else on the staff, was the pitching star on Monday. The loser on Saturday against Venezuela, Grilli blanked Canada for the final three and a third innings.

I'd hate to be the Canadians right now. Eliminated by Italy is a bit like being eliminated by Zimbabwe at the cricket World Cup. Then again I think that has happened to the Canadians in cricket too.

Aussies Fail To Upset Cuba

Fidel's boys squeaked by the Aussies 5-4. It's a lot closer than it's ever been between the two nations. The loss sends Australia to go back and face Mexico in an elimination round. You sort of hope the Aussies get a bit of Dutch mojo going and can repeat their thumping win against Mexcio.

UPDATE: Australia got an almighty shellacking from Mexcio in the return match and were promptly sent how, It puts into stark relief just how amazing the Dutch accmplishment at this tourney happens to be.

Iceland, O Iceland

Michael Lewis Writes Again!

This time he's penned a piece on that litarery nation that has gone bankrupt.

An entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, “We can do that.” For a brief moment it appeared that they could. In 2003, Iceland’s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland’s G.D.P. that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.”

At the same time, in part because the banks were also lending Icelanders money to buy stocks and real estate, the value of Icelandic stocks and real estate went through the roof. From 2003 to 2007, while the U.S. stock market was doubling, the Icelandic stock market multiplied by nine times. Reykjavík real-estate prices tripled. By 2006 the average Icelandic family was three times as wealthy as it had been in 2003, and virtually all of this new wealth was one way or another tied to the new investment-banking industry. “Everyone was learning Black-Scholes” (the option-pricing model), says Ragnar Arnason, a professor of fishing economics at the University of Iceland, who watched students flee the economics of fishing for the economics of money. “The schools of engineering and math were offering courses on financial engineering. We had hundreds and hundreds of people studying finance.” This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously. (March 2006 Bloomberg News headline: iceland’s billionaire tycoon “thor” braves u.s. with hedge fund.)

Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland’s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot.

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration.

It's one hell of a ride. The crux of it is here:

I spoke to another hedge fund in London so perplexed by the many bad LBOs Icelandic banks were financing that it hired private investigators to figure out what was going on in the Icelandic financial system. The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. “They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,” says a London hedge-fund manager. “This was how the banks and investment companies grew and grew. But they were lightweights in the international markets.”

It sure makes you wonder just how they were allowed into the door of the lenders in the first place. Anyway, Michael Lewis amazingly lands on gender as the distinction - that is to say, Icelandic males really are testosterone charged, ornery and mad - and reading through the article, one gets the feeling that as politically incorrect as it sounds, he might just be right.

There's a Q&A over here.

Watchmen (Filmed Large)

Who Watches The Watchmen? - We Do!

It sure snuck up on us, but the release of 'Watchmen' came and went and with a gush of marketing I found myself in the theatre watching this adaptation of the famous Graphic Novel. It's been a while since I've read the damn thing,but I did give a copy to my brother this last Christmas, just so he could rest his brain from his arduous research job, and get briefed on what this movie was going to be about.

I'm a little surprised that there was less of a run up than there has been. Consider the colossally long run up for 'Quantum of Solace' as well as the new 'Star Trek' which is meant to arrive some time in May. It sure feels like this one crept up on us all, like a skulking stalker. Or Rorschach himself.

What's Good About It

The good news is, that the film looks just about what I thought I remembered of the book. I'll be digging out an old copy soon to get my head back into it and reflect on the movie, but as movies go, it stands alone nicely.

As adaptations go, it seemed very faithful to the book and there were many a shot that was framed exactly as I had remembered it. That counts as good, I guess, in a world where you sometimes think the director hasn't even read the script properly.

The film's action sequences are heavily stylised, and brutal as well. It's a lot less mannered than 300, Zack Snyder's previous excursion into violence on screen, but it's still very mannered compared to say, a Dirty Harry movie or even any Die Hard movie. In this instance, the less-mannered-than-300, actually counts as 'good'.

The casting is also good. Apart from Billy Cruddup who plays Dr. Manhattan, I wasn't really distracted by a face that carried a previous role into the film. Billy Craddup will forever be 'Russell Hammond', Lead guitarist for Stillwater to me.All the same, iIt's a brave way to cast a big movie like this, but you can see why they would do it; and I do applaud the bravery. It's a a very good call.

The exception to the casting strategy was Malin Akerman whose Laurie Jupiter was pretty weak. She's a pretty thing with some nice moves in the combat bits, but her acting is less than compelling. I actually wanted her to die so they could bring somebody else on, knowing that wasn't the story.

What's Bad About It

Which ever way you dice it, a film this close to the source is going to live and die by the source.In a sense the writer, director and producer yield their creative veto and vision to the original man, Alan Moore, which may not be quite the right thing to do. All the things that are not quite right in the film can be traced back to the concept and therefore the book. It's like having a very high degree of execution on a not so good idea. While it's not quite bronzing a turd, it's a little like gilding a McDonalds Hamburger.

The film has high ambitions and maybe I'm wrong and it will be remembered as a cinema classic, but I constantly felt a nagging disagreement with the framework of the story. A lot of the Nixon story was plain awful and almost incomprehensible except as pastiche. What the film gained in restaging certain scenes, including the Kennedy Assassination carried out by The Comedian, were then undercut by the need to have Nixon as a kind of political villain. More on that in a moment.

The other problem with the film is the narrative where it jumps back and forth with voice over to patch the gaps. It's not quite Citizen Kane, but then citizen Kane actually makes sense even if you turn down the sound. This thing has no chance. I watched it with a non-native English speaker who had no familiarity with the story, and they had absolute zero understanding of what was going on. The devices that worked in the graphic novel are not working on screen.

Are We Here Kicking Around Richard Nixon Again?


A Parallel universe dystopia where Nixon is still president and Kissinger is still his sidekick could only be a product of the 1980s. If I may say so bluntly, in the years since 1986, we've seen the Reaganite Iran-Contra affair; the George Bush I presidency which gave us Panama and The Gulf War I; The Clinton Administration with Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, the Bosnian conflict with its bloodshed culminating with the Kosovo air strikes, the Iraq sanction situation with Desert Fox; The George W Bush administration which let 9/11 happen as well as the War Against Terror, and the Global Financial crisis. And that's just the short list. In a sense Reagan's USA alone turned out to be much worse than the imagined USA still under Nixon.

If the worst political problem was Nixon staying on until 1985, it seems almost acceptable. I'm not repatriating him, I'm saying the subsequent Presidents have all proven to be just as problematic as Nixon himself. I guess Moore admonition that we shouldn't trust any of these bastards holds true. Yet, to see Nixon as the guy we're kicking around seemed way too tame.

Kubrick's War Room

Related to the issue above is the war room in which the movie Nixon presides over his generals and Secretary of State Henry Kissingger. The war room in this film is a lift of the War Room in 'Dr. Strangelove'. It simply does not exist, and it never did. It was one of those beautiful Kubrick creations that was so compelling Ronald Reagan asked to see it the moment he was inaugurated as President.

To see it reproduced in this film seemed less an homage and more as plain lack of design. If they did it unknowingly, then they're lazy bums. If they did it knowingly, they forewent an opportunity to make a truly lasting work of cinema. It's actually a bad moment in the otherwise good execution of this film.

The Nuclear Anxiety

One of the things this film did bring back was the nuclear anxiety of Mutually Assured Destruction. If you're too young to remember, then let me just say it was a particular kind of neurosis. I don't know how many times my nightmares in my teens were filled with mushroom clouds and a wavefront of hot radiation spreading out from the clouds speeding towards me, back in the 1980s. If you knew about it, you couldn't sleep right knowing the people in charge of the red hot button to start it all were people like Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev.

While its true we've backed off significantly from the 5minutes to midnight on the nuclear armageddon clock, just how much that has alleviated the anxiety was unknown to me until I saw the nightmare sequence. We've come a long way, thanks to Glasnost, the Berlin Wall coming down, and the rise of jihadism instead. Yes, we may still go to war with Nuclear Iran, but I have a demented backdoor thing in my mind that says it probably won't go to Mutually Assured Destruction in which case those who would die in a nuclear holocaust will be elsewhere on the planet. It's insane but strangely comforting - but it's how I feel today. You can tell I lived through the nuclear anxiety.

Remembering 1985

It's like 'Back To The Future', to go back to any 1985, but here we are watching an alternative 1985. Where were you in October 1985 might define greatly how you see this film today. In October 1985, I was doing my exams, but also falling deeply in love. :)

Today's WBC Update

Australia Thumps Mexico
Last time they did this WBC thing, Australia went home without making any impact on the world stage. This time, they have done some damage, to none other than Pool B 2nd favorites Mexico.

MEXICO CITY -- Chris Snelling homered twice and Ben Risinger hit a three-run shot as Australia powered past Mexico 17-7 on Sunday in the World Baseball Classic.

The game was stopped after eight innings because of the 10-run mercy rule.
Risinger, Lake Hughes and Andrew Graham each drove in three runs for Australia, which has no players in the majors and was considered one of the underdogs in Pool A. The Australians will play Cuba on Tuesday for a berth in the second round in San Diego.
Mexico will face South Africa in an elimination game.

"The main objective is to move on to the next round, " Mexico manager Vinicio Castilla said. "Today's game holds us back, but we haven't lost anything yet. We have to keep moving forward. ... No one expected this. We are going to stick together and try to get the next one."

Graham's RBI single in the sixth inning scored Brett Roneberg and broke a 7-all tie. Daniel Berg and Trent Oeltjen followed with run-scoring hits to make it 10-7, and Australia's lead was never in jeopardy the rest of the game.

That Andrew Graham, is Andrew Graham of the Kuringai Stealers, thank you very much! He\'s flying the green and old for both Ostraya and the Stealers. The 17-7 score line shows it was an utter slugfest in the late phases of the game, and amazingly, Australia got a mercy rule 8th inning win. Australia set a record for hits in a game for the fledgling WBC tournament on the way to the win. Now, all they have to do is beat Pool B Favorites Cuba or South Africa to get to round 2. Hey, why not?

Thanks to Walk-Off HBP, coach at the Stealers for that heads-up.

Now, is the Sydney Morning Herald reporting this historic win? No.



UPDATE: Here's The Australian's take. It's the AFP version.

USA Crushes Venezuela

It's one of those games where you think the USA is doing to Venezuela what GWB wanted to do to Chavez. :)

It was an 87-mph fastball thrown by a 25-year-old Venezuelan right-hander who's never sniffed the major leagues. And when Adam Dunn saw it, he smoked it, and then a small smirk pursed his lips as he looked into his home dugout.

"I thought that was going to hit the top of the dome," second baseman Dustin Pedroia said.

It didn't reach that high, but Dunn's mammoth shot to right field in the seventh inning of this World Baseball Classic game seemed to be the punctuation mark in Team USA's 15-6 win over Venezuela on Sunday night. The Americans will be advancing to the second round of this tournament, and in their first two games, they've proven they can win close in a hostile, playoff-like atmosphere in a packed dome, and via blowout before 13,000 people, most of whom were yelling, whistling and waving flags in support of Venezuela.

On Saturday, it was J.J. Putz closing a 6-5 win against Team Canada in front of a raucous, pro-Canada home crowd at the Rogers Centre, a scene that led Putz to say it was the most intense experience of his baseball career. A night later, it was a cumulative effort by a Team USA lineup that pumped out 16 hits and 15 runs against seven Venezuelan pitchers.

Now, if you really want to see a classic Derek Jeter interview, watch the video on the page. The Yankee captain and now Captain America actually mouths the classic 'one-game-at-a-time' cliche. Talk about Mr. Dependable.

Phil Hughes News

Breaking Records, Eclipsing The Don

The Aussie Phil Hughes became the youngest player in history to score a century in each innings of a Test as Australia cruised by South Africa. That's pretty remarkable. Here's the report.

The 20-year-old Hughes followed up his first innings 115 with an unbeaten 136 to break West Indian George Headley's record set against England in 1930 and move Australia to 3 for 292 at stumps, an overall lead of 506.

Hughes could scarcely have been more impressive in besting Headley's mark by almost six months, striking 13 boundaries and two sixes in a virtually chanceless innings.

In a day of milestones for Australia, Ricky Ponting earlier surpassed his predecessor Steve Waugh as the fourth-highest Test run-scorer of all-time behind Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara and Allan Border.

If this form stays good, the reconstruction of the Australian Test side seems to be going at a good pace. It kind of did better than Rachel Hunter's advice about shampoo: it did happen over night.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game

A-Rod Circus Continues

This week saw the WBC begin, and with it, some Yankees scattered to national squads. Jeter went to captain Team America and even took on the Yankees in a warm up match. A-Rod went to the Dominican squad, watched Jose Reyes and decided he looked the like of Reyes and said he wished he was with the Yankees. It was a colossally stupid thing to say because the press went to town on it.

After that, A-Rod went to meet the MLB authorities about his steroid admission, following which nothing seemed to come of it, except that now he is going to get hip surgery and will be out 10 weeks. During the last 72 hours it's gone form a cyst to a torn labrum; from being able to play through the season with the injury, to must-operate-now.

One imagines that the MLB reps told A-Rod he has to take 10 weeks off, even if it wasn't in their power to suspend him for steroid use when there weren't any regulations against it. A-Rod in turn probably said, "fine, in that case I'll get my hip looked at because it didn't get any better this winter".

Who knows?

The guy seems to be a headline magnet no matter what he does, and he does choose to do and say some stupid things that by their nature make him newsworthy in ways almost tangential to playing baseball. One wonders what kind of movie Billy Crystal would make out of the Derek Jeter- & A-Rod thing, having seen his take on Mantle and Maris in '61*'.

The media is jumping the gun in trying to find a replacement, but there is no replacing A-Rod in the lineup. That's the point of his $275m over 10 year contract. A-Rod didn't grow on some tree, and even if he did, there's not another one waiting to be picked.

World Baseball Classic Begins

It's here again, the fast-tracked arbitrary international professionals' Baseball Comp. For what it's worth, this is the one Ichiro takes seriously - he's never taken any interest in the Olympics, but he's always been dreaming of this kind of competition. It's fast-tracked in the sense that it's only been 3 years since the last one (my, how time flies!) but from here on in, it is once every 4 years.

Japan won the last one and kicked off this tourney with a shutout over China. Korea beat Taiwan and everything is rolling now. Things are going as predicted even as we speak.Apparently it's all part of a bid to repatriate baseball at the IOC. I can't imagine two organisations more diametrically opposed in attitude than professional baseball the world over and the largely amateurism-worshipping Olympic movement.

I enjoyed baseball's moment at the Olympics, but it just seems wrong to have those guys compete alongside people who need sponsorship from Uncle Toby's to live while training. Even having professional Tennis in the fold with the likes of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer alongside th Uncle Tobys Non-Stars is pretty daft. Worse still, even if say, Derek Jeter  or A-Rod were to turn up, it's not like the Olympic audience is going to appreciate them more. Furthermore, winning the gold medal for their country at the Olympics is not going to be more important than... even the WBC. So really, they should all collectively let that one go. Baseball ought not go back to the Olympics - and it's no great loss., now that there's the WBC

The only thing is that the IOC should reinstate Women's Softball. There's no reason why those Uncle-Toby gals should be punished for Barry Bonds' and A-Rod's and Roger Clemens' perceived faults.

Outrage In Pakistan


Not to do with Baseball now, but Cricket. The week's big news was how a bunch of terrosist unleashed a hale of bullets on the visiting Sri Lankan team's bus. Some guards and drivers were killed, some players were injured. The greater part of it hs been the shock of how they actually took to shooting professional athletes. Apparently there was a common understanding that athletes were off-limits.

I had no idea such a tacit agreement was in place. It was probably more wishful thinking.  That attack has torn asunder such day-dreams about world terrorism, and with it the notion that the Australians were somehow cowardly in not wanting to tour Pakistan. They had good reasons, as it turns out. Pakistan is likely to miss out on hosting a part of the 2011 World Cup. It's a total mess.

On another level, you wonder why it took them so long to attack professional sport. It's the pinnacle of our capitalist entertainment-led lifestyle ideology. There's us sitting in our couches watching the big-screen TV, eating our fatty foods and scoffing nutrition drinks, as professional athletes earning mega-bucks do some athletic thing on screen; meanwhile angry bearded jihadist terrorists with minimal education and nutrition live in muddy caves polishing their AK-47s wanting to kill us all and take it all back to the Dark Ages.