Roth ERA

Baseball managers aren’t known for saying profound or even particularly interesting things. They tend to talk a lot about how the team needs to avoid distractions and play one game at a time, or how this or that player consistently gives his teammates 110%--the laws of physics be damned. Lately I’ve noticed that every time Washington Nationals manager Davey Johnson is asked some predictably benign question, the first words out of his mouth are, “There’s no question about it.” Which seems to me another way of saying, “I see your banality and raise you one.”

I used to think there was at least one managerial quotation that was both memorable and amusing: when, one time, some crusty old skipper, having been asked what he thought about his team’s poor execution on the field, looked squarely into the TV camera and quipped, “I’m in favor of it.” Meaning, their literal execution. But when I searched for the source of that line earlier today, I discovered that a football coach—John McKay, then of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had uttered it. (He’d actually called mass homicide “a good idea,” but, same message.)

At any rate, precisely because baseball managers never say anything of note, I was caught off guard earlier this week when a member of that fraternity said something that truly resonated with me. And that even alluded to a critically acclaimed film.

The speaker was Clint Hurdle, manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was speaking in the aftermath of his team’s 11-0 pounding that night by the Los Angeles Dodgers, the latest loss in a precipitous August swoon by a ballclub that by nearly all measures vastly outperformed expectations throughout the 2012 season’s first four months. For the past fortnight, however, the team’s offensive output has been sinking steadily while the pitchers' earned run average (ERA) has been just as quickly rising.

Here’s what Hurdle said:

“What does that guy say in The Godfather? ‘This is the life we’ve chosen’? This is the life we’ve chosen. It’s hard right now. Figure it out. We’ve got to play better.”

Never mind that he got both the movie and the quote wrong. The film was The Godfather Part II, and the line was, “This is the business we’ve chosen.” Never mind, too, that by vaguely identifying the quote’s source as, simply, “that guy,” Hurdle did vast injustice to a brilliantly drawn character—Hyman Roth, the steely onetime business partner of Vito Corleone, as conceived by the novelist Mario Puzo—and to the man who portrayed Roth in the Oscar-winning 1974 film. Never was the adage “those who can’t do, teach” so utterly disproven than when the eminent acting coach Lee Strasberg turned Roth into one of the more indelible screen presences of any film year—most notably in the scene Hurdle inexactly referenced.

In that scene, a seething but controlled Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) wants to know who ordered the hit on a mobster who’d been a Corleone ally. He knows full well that Roth gave the order, and Roth knows that he knows. But rather than confirming his role in the murder, Roth—sitting wearily on the couch, looking well past his prime in his unbuttoned shirt, his old-man chest spilling out—responds with the story of how, when Roth’s mobster friend Moe Green had been gunned down many years before—a hit that both Roth and Michael know damn well had been the handiwork of Michael’s father, “I let it go. And I said to myself,” Roth adds, “this is the business we’ve chosen. I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!”

First of all, go find that scene on YouTube. It’s awesome. Second of all, I don’t blame you if you deem the connection to baseball obscure. I mean, who ever ordered a hit on anybody on the baseball diamond? And, steroids aside, where’s the criminal connection? Yet I completely got what Hurdle was trying to say. Which was this: Baseball is the life—the business—to which Hurdle signed up. It can be an uplifting life, as it was through the month of July, when the Pirates were threatening to overtake the division-leading Cincinnati Reds and seemed likely to cap their first winning season in 20 years with a playoff spot. Or, it can be a crappy life, as has been the case lately, with the team playing so poorly and its breakdown so complete that even a winning record no longer seems a lock.

Interestingly, too, Hurdle, a former player, arrived in the big leagues in the 1970s as a can’t-miss prospect, but he never achieved anything close to stardom. So, he has double-dipped when it comes to the peaks and valleys of his chosen life—or business, if you prefer.

What viscerally struck me about Hurdle’s muddled reference to Hyman Roth, and idea of accepting one’s lot, might be apparent to anyone who remembers my blog post of April 8, 2011. Which of course you don’t. Why would you? Among the dozen or so people (forgive that optimism) who regularly visit this blog, most aren’t baseball fans. In fact, I’ll be lucky if three or four people read this post all the way through, given that “baseball” is its first word. But, to refresh your memory (or to inform you, if you quickly switched Web sites last April or fell asleep at your computer), that post , headlined “The Boys of Bummer,” laid out in excruciating detail my then-41-year obsession with the same Pittsburgh Pirates who lately have been tanking like Panzers under Allied bombing during World War II.

In that post, I described how what had begun as casual fandom at age 12, born of antipathy toward the New York Mets, quickly and cancerously grew into a sick obsession in its own right, characterized by and manifested in all manner of OCD behaviors and laughably over the-top mood swings. Except that I’ve seldom laughed, and rather have mostly been miserable, given the Pirates' aggregation over the years of (as I put it then) “on-field mediocrity, front-office incompetence and hope-draining budgetary miserliness.”

So, enter the 2012 season, which has thrown a big twist into the Six Stages of Grief I typically experience during any given Pittsburgh Pirates campaign. Actually, most years are dominated by Acceptance—resignation that the team is dreadful and has zero chance at a winning record. (Not that I don't Bargain for better, regardless, or Grieve when better never comes.) This year, however, per my earlier allusion, the Pirates played four full months of pretty solid baseball. Even at this writing, after the horrendous events of the last couple of weeks, they still stand a better than even chance of beating that sub-.500 curse and concluding the season with more wins than losses. This is where such grief stages as Shock (“They’re winning?”), Denial (“It can’t last, right?”), and, lately, Anger (“Damn you for suckering me!") all figure prominently.

But you know, I think Hyman Roth—or was it Clint Hurdle?—said it best when he observed, “This is the business”—the life, whatever—“we’ve chosen.” By “we,” I mean obsessive sports fans like me, whatever our particular poison might be in terms of sport or team. By “chosen,” I really mean something closer to “temperamentally or perhaps chemically devoted to.” It’s a consuming thing. It’s almost operatic, like the Grand Guignol of the Godfather saga—except that the stage isn’t quite so grand. It's more rock-operatic, perhaps.

Whatever, we can’t really help ourselves. Or at least I can’t. As Michael Corleone himself exclaimed much later his criminal career, in a sequel, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” I spend each baseball offseason swearing I will change, and sometimes, in the cold light of January, I feel as if I have. Even at my lowest ebbs, I try to be a mature and reasonable adult. I really do. Just last night, at Lynn’s very strong urging (shall we say) I bit back my sorrow and fury over a blown 3-0 Pirates lead for long enough to truly enjoy a film and reception we attended in Washington.

But tonight I’ll again be a bundle of nerves. The Pirates face off in St Louis against a Cardinals team that looks all too certain to leapfrog them in the National League Central Division standings and to claim the wild card playoff spot that once seemed theirs for the taking. More important to me, there will be no winning record without at least 17 more triumphs. Will that rather modest goal, at least, be achieved?

Unfortunately, disinterest isn’t an option for me. As always, the Boys of Bummer have got me by the, well, you know what they've got me by. Because this, you see, is the business I’ve chosen.

Rolling Stone Blows Smoke

As firmly perched as ever on popular culture’s cutting edge, I recently started subscribing to Rolling Stone magazine—45 years after its electrifying debut and at a time in history when print magazines are well into their death throes and Rolling Stone itself fights a mostly losing battle for relevance.

Like all magazines that have been around for a while, Rolling Stone is smaller and far thinner than it used to be, and its once-heralded long-form articles on political, environmental and social-justice issues have been abbreviated to better reflect the shorter attention spans of 21st-century readers. Still, I’d been finding that I often would pick up a newsstand copy, attracted by a cover article about some iconic musical artist who was big in my youth, or an intriguing profile of a newer artist about whom I felt I should be conversant, or a well-researched piece on something topical about which I could stand to be better informed. (Also, frankly, I’m of an age and disposition that I simply like the idea of buying something from a “newsstand” while such old-school purveyors of periodicals still exist.)

So, I decided it was cheaper to subscribe than to keep buying individual copies by the issue. This being the age of multimedia added value, however, becoming a subscriber also meant that I began receiving daily e-mail news roundups from my friends at Rolling Stone. Most of the linked pieces concern musical artists, but others reflect the magazine’s standard left-of-center political and social interests. It was by this means that one recent afternoon, my work day was enlivened by an intriguing teaser in the form the headline “Pot Legalization is Coming.”

I immediately clicked on the link—not because I long for the ability to toke openly, or even because I’ll seize any excuse to screw off on the job, although the latter certainly is true enough. No, I immediately clicked on it for two reasons—the first being that it struck me as being the kind of headline the once-young  hippies who still run Rolling Stone probably have been hopefully writing every five years since 1972, and the second being that the magazine’s proclamation seemed on its face so wildly improbable that I wanted to see whether this bold prediction was based in hard data, selective trend analysis, the writer having hit he keyboard while stoned on killer weed, or what.

Well, no big surprise, the lengthy article by Julian Brookes, the magazine’s online political editor, was enveloped in a haze of caveats. As it happens, voters in three states—Colorado, Washington and Oregon—will vote in November on whether to approve legalization of marijuana sales for recreational use. Those ballot initiatives may or may not pass. And even if they are approved, there’s still the not-insignificant matter of whether, or to what extent, the federal government will crack down on states that have elected to ignore the federal ban on marijuana sales. This all seems a rather far cry from the certainty suggested by “Pot Legalization is Coming.” (Although I guess a strict reading of the headline affords plenty of wiggle room. I mean, the gay-rights organization the Human Rights Campaign might similarly have forecast in its initial newsletter 32 years ago, “Right of Gays to Serve Openly in the Military is Coming.” That statement proved accurate—eventually.)

Proponents of marijuana legalization pose provocative arguments for their stance; Brookes’ piece hit many of them in a single paragraph:

"The prohibition on marijuana—a relatively benign drug when used responsibly by adults, and a teddy bear compared to alcohol and tobacco—has done an impressive job of racking up racially-biased arrests; throwing people in jail; burning up police time and money; propping up a $30 billion illegal market; and enriching psychotic Mexican drug lords.”

It’s no secret that the so-called War on Drugs has been about as successful—and bloody, and expensive—as has been the War in Afghanistan, or was the War in Iraq before that. Much firepower and piles and piles of cash have been expended, with the lasting results (beyond the requisite death and destruction) being that corrupt Afghani and Iraqi politicians, iron-fisted warlords and brutal cartel leaders seem as solidly in control as ever. So, why not, in historical effect, repeal Prohibition and let market forces do with marijuana what law enforcement has been unable to do: control it? Flood the market with product, set prices, and affix taxes to transform a big net drain on the federal treasury into a big net gain. That’s the argument behind a federal marijuana legalization bill introduced last year by congressmen Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX). It makes a certain amount of sense.

I come back, however, to Rolling Stone’s description of marijuana as “a relatively benign drug when used responsibly by adults.” First of all, even Rolling Stone concedes by its wording that pot use by non-adults tends to be neither responsible nor benign, and that use surely would  increase dramatically in a landscape in which marijuana is legal for adults and thus is ubiquitous—easier to obtain, even, than raiding the old man’s liquor cabinet. (Indeed, picture a world in which mom and dad regularly are getting high and it’s no stretch to envision open bags of weed tumbling out onto kitchen counters and family-room sofa cushions, where Mr and Mrs Stonington somehow forgot they’d left them.)

But beyond that, is pot’s effect really so “benign” when it’s used “responsibly” by adults? I have to wonder. And, OK, a big reason I have wonder is because I lack a frame of reference. I know from experience, for example, that I can drink a beer or two and still be fine to drive—and probably even to operate heavy machinery, if that was something I regularly did. But I’ve no idea how well I’d steer a car or react to road conditions after having smoked a joint or two.

It’s not that I’ve never been offered one, or even that I’ve never sucked on one. It’s that—and I really debated whether to reveal this here, for fear of somehow becoming the laughingstock of Cheech & Chong’s Twitter feed—I’ve never inhaled.

Yeah yeah, I know: “You and Bill Clinton.” But whereas the former president almost certainly lied for political reasons about whether he ever allowed the active ingredients in cannabis to reach his lungs, I spent years lying for social reasons about my inability to internalize those same ingredients.

You see, I just never figured out the whole inhaling thing. Not with pot, nor with regular cigarettes. I still haven’t. It’s not something my throat ever has seemed to want to do. As for my brain, I’ve always preferred to think it colludes with my respiratory system to protect me from the harmful effects of internalized smoke. Because the alternative explanation is simply that I’m pretty damn stupid.

I’m serious about this. From my very earliest days as a would-be cigarette smoker, I closely observed what presumably successful smokers were doing, but was unable to emulate it. Instead, I sucked smoke into my mouth, held it there and gradually expended it after what I deemed to be an acceptable amount of time had elapsed.

The great thing about pot smokers is that they’re always too stoned to notice whether those who purport to be getting high along with them really are doing so. This made it easy for me to fake my way through pot parties in college, and later I found myself in such situations far less often. I did, however, start, in my 20s, to bemoan my total lack of a misspent youth when it came to drug use. So, I seized upon my limited opportunities to snort coke and drop acid. I did neither more than a handful of times, and I have no stories more colorful than watching a Randy Newman poster breathe one night in the early 1980s. But to this day I’m happy to have a narcotics resume of sorts to share during “Back in the Day” reveries with contemporaries—who often seem surprisingly taken with my daring, unaware that I’d gladly have exchanged a few hallucinogenic moments for the mellow, giggling fun all the pot smokers seemed to be having.

So, I can’t really say from personal experience whether being a little bit high from marijuana is any more or less a threat to personal and public safety than is being a little bit tipsy from alcohol—or even if it’s easier or more difficult, after smoking a single joint, to say no to a second joint than it is to decline that second beer or martini. Still, it strikes me as unwise for government to sanction an additional mind-altering substance, thus encouraging the potential for widespread abuse among minors and adults alike. Sure, legalization might force some of the drug lords to alter their business plan and change up their narcotics mix, and yes, this might create the most lucrative government sin tax since states approved casino gambling. But if the end result is more stoned people stumbling around on our streets, more vehicular and pedestrian accidents, and quite possibly more addiction to harder drugs by people who come to find pot boring rather than enticingly illicit, is legalization really the answer?

I concede that I’m perhaps being an alarmist. (More likely, I subliminally dread the prospect of an endless stream of strangers insistently telling me their “really funny” stories that are far less amusing than incoherent, or enthusiastically recommending to me horribly unhealthy convenience store snacks that taste like gourmet fare when you’re high, much as Pink Floyd seemed as profound and moving as Beethoven to my generation of potheads.) Regardless, legalization strikes me as altogether a bad idea.

Not that, optimistic Rolling Stone headlines aside, it appears likely to happen anytime soon. If and when it does, the magazine itself likely will be history, given the realities of modern-day publishing and the dwindling numbers of aging rock fans and lefties who’ll pay good money to read cover articles about Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, and raptly consume doomsday warnings about scenarios Americans now seem happy to ignore, such as the global warming and economic stratification.

In the meantime, though, I must say that I’m thoroughly enjoying my subscription. Sure, Rolling Stone’s cutting edge now is a rather dull blade, but I still find its content interesting and edifying. And, as a guy who, actuarily speaking, is getting closer and closer to his own death throes, and who never has had any great illusions about his own relevance, I can relate, man.