October Surprise – Phillies Interrupted – You Could See The Radar On The Internet
This Bud’s for you. We are talking about Bud Selig, the baseball boss, who waited till the middle of the sixth to stop the game, allowing 45 thousand people to sit in blinding and wind swept rain, not even counting the players who could have risked limbs playing in that kind of mud.
The game started dry, but the rain was so bad, and the radar so ominous that the Commish still waited until the score was tied to suspend the game. During the 4th inning, on TV, and on the internet, anyone could see that the radar was bright green from North Jersey in a line down to Maryland.
The rain was not going to stop. The Phillies were ahead in the fifth. It should have been suspended at that point. But Bud waited. Bud let baseball off the hook when he suspended the game after 5 and a half. That was AFTER the Rays tied it. Bud says if even if the Phillies were still ahead he didn’t want the World Series to end that way.
Too bad Bud has his way. The Phillies and umpires would never have allowed the weather-stained farce to go on for more than a few innings. The issue is not the score, or even the broken rules of baseball. The issue is the reality that the field was unplayable, and the game should have been stopped earlier. The fans of baseball deserve better than the decision-making.
Oh, by the way: charging Jimmy Rollins with an error for that dropped fly ball that was twirling in the eye of a hurricane was another blot on this questionable team of umpires.
The Rays are lucky the series is not over, as it could have been.
The good news we are still up 3 to 1. And whenever we finish the game, we will finish the whole deal.
Comments(21)
Larry,
The dropped pop-up is scored an error by the official scorer, who is a member of the press usually, and not the umpires. Otherwise, I agree with you 100%.
Larry,
I totally agree with you. Baseball will be alot better off when Ed Rendell becomes commish !
I agree. If the score had not been tied, I don’t think they’d have suspended the game. It should’ve been over after the 5th inning.
I meant to say, it should have been called after 4 1/2 when it could have counted as an official game, giving us the championship.
The most miserable conditions I’ve ever endured at a sporting event but I don’t remember anyone in the section complaining.I’m not surprised Selig waited ’til the game was tied to suspend it,he sure as hell didn’t want a rain shortened game to decide the series.Would blemish his “legacy”,ya know ?
Larry,the umpires don’t make scoring decisions.There’s an Official Scorer for that purpose.
I think Larry needs to get back on the horse and get a special prosecutor appointed to investigate 1) the bad officiating and 2) the obvious attempt by Bud Selig to increase TV revenues by splitting one game into two separate TV events. Of course, the special prosecutor will only be able to look into this issue once she has resolved why it is that neighborhood gas stations sometimes charge different prices for a gallon of gasoline.
In other news, I heard that Taco Bell is giving away free tacos because of a stolen base earlier in the series. Larry, do you think you could use your clout to persuade gas station owners to give away FREE AIR whenever you post a new blog topic? They’d only have to do it once or twice a week.
Larry, I agree with you for once. Selig is a complete fraud. MLB has been a joke since he’s been Commissioner. Steriods, All Star game fiasco, now Watergate in Philly.
Not sure Fast Eddie would be an improvement though. What does he know about baseball or successfully running an organization?
Taco Bell free taco: 2-6PM today
OOOJ, I love your suggestion! I’m going to eat a bunch of tacos and then:
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Ahhh! Great Day in the markets today, maybe the worst is over and LArry’s portfolio will bounce back and he will stop negleting the election and his faithful bloggers.
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George, I was actually quite proud of the new symbol. ))….
Larry has the site as a status symbol. He must be actively involved blogging on someone else’s blog site. Smerconish’s site? Maybe we should join him over there…
I feel sorry for you folks up there. Snow showers tonight and windy and cold tomorrow. It is time for Bud to seriously consider shortening the season.
We feel sorry for you folks down there when it is 95 degrees and 90% humidity during the summer.
Michelle did pretty good on Leno, maybe she will grow on us. I bet when she ))…
Barack and the kids clear the room for awhile.
Barrack has had Michelle on Valium for the last 5 months and keeping her away from the public. She’s still a loose cannon and a liability.
Larry, your buddy Joe Biden has made some bold statements about Obama being tested. “mark my words, if you never remeber anyting else I say, he will be tested in first six months” . Does Joe drink a cup of crazy every morning? If McCain talked like this you’d say he was playing 9/11 card or a war monger. Is Joe a war monger? Let’s ask Pat Buchanan what he thinks since you don’t want to talk about politics anymore. Pat, please tell us your view:
What if SNL Mocked Barack Obama?
Print By Patrick J. Buchanan
Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is beneath that of Congress is the media. Both have won their reputations the hard way. They earned them.
Consider the fawning indulgence shown insider Joe Biden with the dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin.
Twice last weekend, Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a great crisis is coming early in the term of President Obama: ”
Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. … Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said … we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
A “generated crisis”? By whom? Moscow? Beijing? Tehran?
This is an astonishing statement from a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who has access to the same intelligence as George Bush. Joe was warning of a crisis like the Berlin Wall of July 1961, where JFK called for a tripling of the draft and ordered a call-up of reserves, or the missile crisis where U.S. pilots like John McCain were minutes away from bombing nuclear missile sites in Cuba and killing the Russians manning them. (Column continues below)
Is Russia about to move on the Crimea? Is Israel about to launch air strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites? What is Joe talking about?
If one assumes Joe is a serious man, we have a right to know.
Instead, what we got was Obama’s airy dismissal of Joe’s words as a “rhetorical flourish” and a media – rather than demanding that Joe hold a press conference – acting as Obama surrogates parroting the talking points that Joe was just saying that new presidents always face tests.
Had John McCain made that hair-raising statement, he would have been accused of fear mongering about a new 9/11. The media would have run with the story rather than have smothered it.
Contrasting McCain with his hero, Joe declared a few weeks back, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and … said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”
Nice historical reference. Except when the market crashed in 1929, Hoover was president, and there was no television.
Can one imagine what the press would have done to Sarah Palin had she exhibited such ignorance of history. Or Dan Quayle?
Joe gets a pass because everybody likes Joe. Fine. But Joe also has a record of 36 years in the Senate. Has anyone ever asked Joe about his own and his party’s role in cutting off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the greatest strategic defeat in U.S. history and the Cambodian holocaust?
Has anyone ever asked Joe about the role he and his party played in working to block Reagan’s deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, and SDI, which Gorbachev concedes broke the Soviets and won the Cold War?
In the most crucial vote he ever cast – to give Bush a blank check for war in Iraq – Joe concedes he got it wrong.
Is Joe’s record of having been wrong on Vietnam, wrong in the Cold War, wrong on the Iraq war, less important than whether Sarah Palin tried to get fired a rogue-cop brother-in-law who Tasered her 10-year-old nephew to “teach him a lesson”? “I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know,” says Joe humbly.
Given his record, it is understandable Joe has forgotten so much of it. Saturday, the New York Times did a takeout on Cindy McCain that delved back into her problem with prescription pills.
Yet when Hillary’s campaign manager, Mark Penn, brought up Obama’s cocaine use on “Hardball,” he was savaged by folks for whom the Times is the gold standard.
The people apparently had a “right to know” of Bush’s old DUI arrest a week before the 2000 election, but no right to know about how and when Obama was engaged in the criminal use of cocaine.
The media cannot get enough of the “Saturday Night Live” impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all.
Can one imagine “Saturday Night Live” doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her “I’ve never been proud” of my country, this “just downright mean” America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent? “Saturday Night Live” would be facing hate-crime charges.
How do we know? When the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, New Yorker editors had to go on national television to swear they were not mocking Michelle, but the conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and the Messiah.
Is there a media double standard? You betcha.
Ka-whaa, ka-whaa. Poor Pat. Pat Buchanan is the same guy who said white males belonged on the endangered species list. What a fool.
There were jokes about the Obamas back during the primaries. I guess Pat wasn’t watching SNL back then, though. He only tunes in when they’re poking fun at a 24 karat nitwit in the Republican party.
And what accent is it that Michelle Obama purportedly has to mock? She speaks in the neutral Midwestern manner that is prevalent in news broadcasts. It’s not as if she’s speaking Ebonics, whereas Palin is clearly speaking high-plains nitwit. (And why is it that none of Palin’s friends from Wasilla whom I’ve heard interviewed speak like that? Did Palin undergo a Clockwork Orange-type conditioning session in which she was forced to watch Fargo over and over?)
The modern GOP is great at whining and attacking the media. But even conservatives have expressed serious doubts about Palin and her bone-headed remarks, which are just as bone-headed in context, unlike the selective parsing (or flat out distortion) of Barack’s or Michelle’s or Joe’s comments that Pat is engaging in.
George great blog,,,John McCain and Sarah Palin are up against obama,a billion dollars,the bias media and the bias media poles and george bush and they are still are only 5 points down with a week to go,,,no surprise that lb is a bias media apologist he also will go to bat for rev wracist,bill ayers and calypso louie farrakhan .
It’s funny to see anti-Obama comments on this page.I’ve come to regard them as bait,with predictable results.
Two & a half hours & the bait is untouched.Must be a shift change.
People,don’t believe the polls.McCain still has a chance,make your vote count.McCain-Palin in 08.
Arrrrr. I spends me time in Tampa Bay, me hearties. McCain will come back and so will the Rays, says I.
Is everyone busy watching the Obama informercial? It could swing the polls to his favor or backlash. Things are tightening up, but I don’t think anyone knows what the wild card of an inexperienced black man with radical ideas running for president can be. The issue of race is obvious, but its complicated by his shallow resume and controversial ties. We’ve never had such a thing, which makes me wonder if the shock on Wednesday is that McCain pulls it out. If he were an experinced centrist black politician like a Colin Powell, I’d trust the polls, but there is just too much pubic hair on the Obama story for pollsters to know the outcome with the kind of certainty historic polling has provided.