Curseburg

I am extremely happy that the Washington Nationals got drummed out of the NL playoffs early, and for as long as Stephen Strasburg is playing baseball, I want for them never to advance to the World Series.

Stephen Strasburg himself?  If he goes to another team in a trade or free agency, he can win all the World Series rings he wants.  Just none with the Nationals.

Why?

So two years ago, the Nationals has Stephen Strasburg on an innings limit because he was recoving from Tommy John surgery, and when the Nationals advanced to the playoffs, they refused to let Stephen Strasburg pitch because of this innings limit.  This was a controversial decision, and a decision that I disagreed with strenuously.

It's not that I am opposed to any innings limits for pitchers.  My 16-year-old nephew has been playing a lot of baseball in both spring and fall leagues from Little League on.  I've never noticed my brother to be one of those fathers who wants for his son to win at all costs, but such fathers exist.  And there are coaches who don't care about the kids and make coaching kids all about them.  And there are kids who need to be protected from themselves, just like there are NFL players who need to be protected from going back out onto the field with a concussion.  In fact, there should probably be stricter limits on kids playing baseball than there are, since it's so much easier now than was once the case for a kid to do baseball, baseball and more baseball twelve months a year with spring little league leading into summer travel league leading into fall league.   Everything in moderation, and the arms of young growing teenagers ought to be taken care of.

But when it comes to Major League pitchers, teams have all sorts of policies about how to take care of their pitchers, but there's no actual evidence that any of these things work.  It's not like the Nationals went all out with Strasburg before his injury, but there he is having Tommy John surgery in 2011, and that's hardly unique in the sport.

And most Major League players will tell you that they play to win the World Series.  And to earn money, of course, but winning the World Series is right up there.

If there was actual evidence to show that Stephen Strasburg needed to be protected from himself or from his manager over-working him -- shut him down.  If the Nationals aren't in the playoffs -- shut him down.  If you aren't comfortable with the risk, then don't undertake when the reward isn't there.

But the Nationals were in the playoffs, playing to get to and win the World Series.  And you never know what tomorrow will bring.  Look at the Nationals.  After their big 2012, they went nowhere in 2013.  And after their big regular season in 2014, they went nowhere in the playoffs.  Part of their bad 2013 was that everyone was going on the DL.  At least 7 Nationals pitchers went on the DL in 2013, and then hardly any went on the DL in 2014.  That happens a lot in baseball.  Teams have good and bad years for injuries.

But nobody actually knows how to protect pitchers in the Major Leagues from injuring their arms.   Yes, the Nationals GM said loud and long that anyone who was criticizing his decision in 2012 just didn't know the facts and the evidence, but if the Nationals know so much, how did they end up putting so many pitchers on the DL in 2013?  The Nationals  should've given Strasburg the chance at his World Series ring in 2012.  I'd love for Strasburg to win a World Series ring, just not with the Nationals.

The After Sandy

So it's been an interesting last ten days or so!

For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does.  It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous.  But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding.  All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise.  But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice.  And I had power!  Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.

I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled.  Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles.  Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair.  I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur.  Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is.  One of the world's richest cities should do better.  I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis.  Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be.  When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.

On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6.  Five wins in a week against top 20 players.  The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one.  Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention.  Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.

Comic books.  DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes.  The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good.  This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid.  Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant.  First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest.  I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.

And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.

I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.

Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.

The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events.  But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.

So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?

If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event.  Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain.  "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside.  All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security.  And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.

As to extreme climate events?

Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much.  Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done.  It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening.  We're not talking about that at all.  We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs.  It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.

What gives?

For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly.  It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt.  Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out.   Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs.  We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses.  And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago.  It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.

Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods.  An example:  you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit.  It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps).  Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money.  The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time.  If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline.  There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.

And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.

Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them.  There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly.  And since government is us, all joined together...

So what do we have?

The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding.  I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots.  And all that money might better have been spent on something else.

I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much.  The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past.  And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.

Bouchercon

The World Science Fiction Comvention is always exhilarating and exhausting for me.

Bouchercon is a little different. Named for the mystery fiction critic Anthony Boucher, it is the World Fantasy of the mystery genre in that it is a heavy networking convention, a busy bar scene for the professionals, but without the membership cap, and more fans, and people who actually go to panels.  It isn't near as exhilarating for me as a WorldCon, but I also have fewer clients, so there's a little less scheduling pressure.  And while there's a strong bar scene at night, there aren't the room parties and hospitality suites that are such an important part of the scene, social and business and fannish all in one, at the major sf conventions, so it doesn't require as much after hours time.

So I had clients to see and award ceremonies to attend, I was also able to use the weekend to see some of Cleveland and really, most importantly, to recharge the batteries a bit after an exhausting September with so many long days in the office that I didn't have energy at night to dig into the reading pile.

So, seeing Cleveland:

I saw my first game at Progressive Field, the baseball stadium formerly known as Jacobs Field, the home of the Cleveland Indians.  I'd gotten tickets on Stubhub when there was still a chance the Indians could make a wild card run, possibly the best seats I've ever had for a ballgame in the third row behind home plate.  Expensive for Cleveland, but a bargain by NYC standards where you can pay $100 for a bleacher seat at Citi Field.  In retrospect I overpaid because the Indians collapsed, fired their manager the week before, weren't in it, and they were playing the Chicago White Sox who had just been eliminated from the AL Central race.  The ballpark fits in nicely at the edge of downtown. It was nice, but with three levels of suites even the first row of the upper deck looked awfully high up and I'm not sure how happy I'd be seeing a game from there.  I got to see the Chicago White Sox hit 5 homers, several of them quite impressive, including Dan Johnson becoming only the 15th White Sox player and 4th visiting player in Jacobs Field history to hit 3 homers in a game.  Paul Konerko needed 2 hits to tie Frank Thomas for #3 on the all-time White Sox hit list but got only one.  Ketchup, Mustard and Onion all seemed to be cheating in the footrace.  All in all, it was a nice evening.

On a free afternoon, I visited my 136th and 137th Whole Foods Markets, in the rich eastern suburbs.  It was a gorgeous fall day, and the two stores were located around 4.5 miles away from one another, providing a nice excuse to have a very pleasant stroll on a very nice day.  The Whole Foods at Cedar Center is very, very nice.  The one in Chagrin is a a former Wild Oats location, a little bit smaller, but pleasant enough.  And in the same mall as an outlet of Malley's Chocolates.  I got some "good luck" boxes for my award nominated clients, and some to save for when everyone is back in the office next week.

And after the convention was over, I walked down Euclid Ave. in the rain out to University Circle where Case Western is located along with many of the major Cleveland cultural institutions, with a detour to Shaker Square, the second oldest planned outdoor shopping area in the country, or so the sign said.  It's a nice area, the cultural insitutions set in a parklike setting, a very attractive Little Italy tucked alone one end.  The day would have been nicer if it wasn't raining, but I felt as if I'd really gotten my feet on the ground in the city.

I only needed a couple spare hours to walk 1.5 miles out to West Side Market, which is nicer than Lexington Market in Baltimore but maybe not quite as nice or diverse as Philly's Reading Terminal Market.  The bakeries were "enh," but there were lots and lots of fresh fruit vendors and meat vendors and cheese vendors and etc. etc.  The market is celebrating its centennial this year.

Cleveland was one of the very first cities in the world to build a train line out to its airport.  This was quite nice, $2.25 for a quick ride from the airport to the heart of downtown.  There are a couple other light rail lines heading out to the rich eastern suburbs.  Cleveland is also one of the cities that is using BRT, or Bus Rapid Transit, as a substitute for light rail. The "Health Line" runs several miles from downtown past the Playhouse Square theatre district, Cleveland State University, and then to the Cleveland Clinic, the Case Western University Hospitals, the Stokes Hospitals, etc. etc., thus having its name.  BRT uses fancy looking buses, limited stops, prepaid boarding that allows all door exit/entry, dedicated bus lanes, and other features, to make it an attractive alternative to standard bus service.  In a big city like New York, you've got to have subways that can avoid traffic.  The problem with BRT for really high density locations is that none of these things change the fact that you're stuck in traffic with all the other traffic, this is why LA really needs to have the so-called "subway to the sea" running under Wilshire Blvd., instead of the Metro Rapid lines that sit in Wilshire Blvd., even in the DC suburbs I don't think BRT would work as a substitute for the "purple line" because there's too much traffic too much of the time on the East-West Highway for anything that's going to share the traffic lanes to be really appealing.  But on the I-270 corridor in suburban DC, or in someplace like Cleveland where you can have traffic but not absolute killer traffic, BRT probably is a cost-effective substiture for laying rails.

But there's plenty not to like about Cleveland.

Everyone at Bouchercon got to go to to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Thursday night for the opening ceremonies courtesy of Amazon's Thomas & Mercer mystery pubilshing imprint.  I wasn't impressed with the Hall of Fame.  It didn't have an actual Hall of Fame with information on all of the inductees, the Hall area had glass inscribed signatures of all the inductees and plaques on the newest class, but not on everyone.  The exhibits didn't do much for me at all.  I've listened to plenty of rock and roll in my life, I'd expected to like this more, I was disappointed not to find much to like at all in the museum.

Like other cities, every bit of Cleveland is carved into a district, the Warehouse District and the Flats and the Gateway and Playhouse Square and Midtown and Fairfax and University Circule and Civic Center and this district and that district.  But let's say that the renaissance of Cleveland is still a work in progress.

Bouchercon was being held in the heart of downtown, the Civic Center/Tower Center Districts.  Tower Center is the tallest buidling in Cleveland, above a rail crossroads.  With some hotels and a cheesy mall and a movie theatre and a casino, there's some life here.  But, the only restaurants in the mall were food court, Houlihan's, Morton's, and Planet Hollywood.  In fact, the restaurant options are very limited.  A small restaurant row on E. 4th St.  Lots of sports bars near the baseball stadium and arena.  The Warehouse District has some eateries.  Further afield, you could find a handful of places in the Playhouse Square district.  But honestly, just not a lot of "there" there.  And downtown living was concentrated almost entirely in the Warehouse District which is full of renovated old warehouse buildings that now house yuppie lofts with a few new builds, and then there's the Flats district on both sides of the river with a lot of housing on the river's west bank.

On the other hand, the downtown area also didn't give this sense that you can get in parts of Philly or Baltimore that you'll go one block from the fancy museum and find yourself in a combat zone.  And the Playhouse Square district is full of many beautiful theatres, all in active use, believably the second biggest concentration of active theatrest outside of NY. And the cultural institutions out in University Circle are among the nicest cultural campuses you're going to find.

And the architecture!

The arcade where the Hyatt is, it's the most beautiful old shopping arcade, stunningly gorgeous.  And there are the Colonial Shops across the street. And you can peek in beautiful old office building after glorious old department store and spectacularly restored theatre, place after place after place of incredible beauty.  This is an asset that you don't have in a lot of other downtowns.

The convention itself...

The opening ceremonies at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame could have been better done.  If the program book had said "Hall open at 7, ceremony starts at 8," maybe there woudln't have been this flood of people arriving right at 7 when the doors weren't even open, so that it took until 7:45 for the line to finally die down, with the earliest arrivals sitting for an hour waiting for the ceremony to begin when they could have been visiting the galleries.  And there wasn't any official announcement or indication that there were going to be awards presented at the opening ceremonies.

The dealers room didn't have a Larry Smith or anyone selling a wide mix of new releases.  Mostly used/rare dealers selling mostly books by Bouchercon attendees.

Announcing raffle winner after raffle winner after raffle winner after raffle winner before the presentation of the Anthony Awards wasn't such a good idea.

There was some weird architecture to the hotel, with a new ballroom attached to the old original ballrooms in the hotel, which was erected in 1918.  Some oddities, like of the Grand Ballroom was sectioned into A and B parts, getting from A to B meant taking the stairs down a level and walking to another escalator up.  On the other hand the ballroom had a beautiful balcony seating area.

But by and large, people were having a good time.  The panels were well-attended.

And really, I can't complain too much about a convention where a client of mine wins two different awards!

Charlaine Harris hadn't been optimistic going in about her chances of winning in the Non-Fiction/Related categories for either the Macavity or Anthony Awards for her Sookie Stackhouse Companion.  Understandably so, in a way, you think of these awards as going to major important works of non-fiction, this isn't a category where I'd want to be competing for an Anthony against a Pulitzer-winning author like Michael Dirda of the Washington Post.  Add to that, we were all very close to the Companion, which had been a lot harder to put together than had been anticipated going in.

So were were all surprised and delighted on Thursday night when Charlaine and The Sookie Stackhouse Companion were announced as the winners of the Macavaity.  With the one surprising win, we had to think more seriously that maybe there would be an Anthony Award in our futures as well, but still, I think we were all still a bit surprised to come up with a double victory when the Anthony winners were announced on Saturday.

It's a little strange to say about an award in a non-fiction category, but I do think part of the success of the Companion is because it has a great novella by Charlaine, "Small Town Wedding," that is certainly the best piece of Sookie Stackhouse short fiction, if not one of the best pieces of Sookie fiction, period.  And when you add to that all of the excellent non-fiction in the Companion, the timetables and concordance and interviews and recipes, it is a potent brew.

I had lunch with Charlaine Harris and her personal assistant Paula Woldan at the Chocolate Bar, an interesting idea for a restaurant in a nice setting at the century-old Arcade shoppng area, but not actually a nice restaurant.  My alfredo badly needed pepper, the cupcakes were like fresh-from-freezer Sara Lee.

Another lunch was with Joe Clifford Faust at Skyline Chili, an Ohio institution where they serve chile atop spaghetti and then top it all with generous handfuls of shredded cheddar.  I think I prefer the New York equivalent of chili mac, where chili and macaroni and cheese reside on the same plate.  Afterwards we went to a comic book store in Parma that had been around for an impressive 28 years.

Jeri Westerson and Toni Kelner were the other current JABberwocky clients at the convention.

Jeri has ten award nominations for her first four Crispin Guest novels and was up again here.  I don't think we were surprised that she didn't win, but her Crispin Guest books are awfully good, and it would mean so much to me to see her win one of these some year.  Jeri travelled far afield to go to a library event and a bookstore event.

Toni is launching a new mystery series under a pseuodonym that promises to be a lot of fun, and she continues to help Charlaine edit wonderful paranormal anthologies, the most recent of which is An Apple for the Creature.

I had drinks with Rochelle Staub, a muliple award nominated author for Who Do, Voodoo.  We look forward to having Rochelle on our client list!

There were multiple publisher cocktail parties or receptions, so I had my full of cheese cubes and chicken tenders.

So that's a quick glimpse at Bouchercon.  I've got to tell you, there are worse jobs I can have than this one.

Literary Lunch at Citi Field Shake Shack

Once upon a time I was a very big Mets fan.  Over the years things have changed to where I am more a tennis fan than a baseball fan.  But I have enough residual Mets-loving in me that I was feeling the tug of Citi Field, where I'm not sure I've been since Opening Day.  The siren song got very loud indeed today.  A day game.  The last home game of the season.  Nice September weather, not as sunny as I'd have liked but sunny enough.  And R. A. Dickey going for his 20th win.  20 wins is a major milestone in baseball, enough of one for Dickey to have a chance at at being the first Met to reach it since 1990.  Enough of one that Dickey is a strong contender to win the NL Cy Young Award for the league's best pitcher.  In a Mets season that got off to an unexpectedly pleasant start which made the team's ultimate collapse that much more disappointing, Dickey's great season has been the one solace for a Met fan.

So I took a long lunch.  It was lunch.  Just about the only thing I really like about Citi Field is its Shake Shack.

And it was such a nice way to spend an afternoon.

One of the things with baseball more than just about any sport is the very real chance that you can see something in any given game that you truly haven't seen before.  There were examples of that today.  

I might have seen someone rob a home run before, but I don't know if I've ever seen it the way I saw today, Travis Snider of the Pirates gripping the top of the right field fence with one hand, stretching the other hand with his glove about as high over the head as you could possibly go and stretching it back a bit too, and somehow getting a ball that was over and past the fence into his glove for an out.  Mike Baxter seemed a little surprised to be ending his home run trot just past second base.

And then the play where the Pirates centerfielder dove for a ball, did a wonderful job of acting like he caught it, I thought he had.  But the umpire called it safe, that the ball had hit the ground or been trapped.  There was a runner at first base who had held up on going to second to see if the ball had been caught.  The centerfielder managed to throw the ball to second to get him for a force out -- maybe he should have just let the ball fall in front and thrown him out.  So I've seen players dive for the ball, I've seen acting jobs, I don't think I've ever seen that combine with a force out at second on a missed fly ball to center field.  And then to add a cherry to this unique baseball sundae, the center fielder was injured on the play and left the game.

R.A. Dickey is a rare baseball breed, the knuckle-baller, the successor to Tim Wakefield for the title of last knuckle-baller standing.  Alas, he didn't have his knuckle ball working in the early innings, and the Pirates took an early lead.  A liner to left that went over the head of the left fielder.  A fly ball to shallow center that was up in the air for an awfully long time but not quite enough time to be caught.   A slow roller to third where the Mets didn't get the out at first because the third baseman thought a little too long and hard about trying for a play at home.  It looked like that kind of Mets game, where the Mets weren't doing the job on defense, the Pirates were leaping the outfield fences to take away home runs, that Dickey might muddle through without his knuckler and still lose the game not so much because of his pitching as because he was playing for the Mets.

But it didn't play out that way.  Ike Davis hit a solo home run.  The Mets got another run here, another run there, and then David Wright hit a three run homer to give the Mets a 6-3 lead.  And R.A. Dickey found enough of his knuckler, mixed in enough change-ups to keep the Pirates off balance, that he managed when all was said and done to pitch 8 2/3 innings.  To get 13 strikeouts tying a career high, to get within a fraction of an inch of getting a 14th strikeout as the final batter he faced fouled off several pitches before earning a walk.

Jon Rauch comes in.  It's the Mets.  At the end of a miserable season that started off with such promise.  He comes in to relieve Dickey, the first batter he faces comes within a yard or two of hitting a 2-run homer.  In the 9th inning, he does give up a 2-run homer.  Close isn't good enough.  1 out, none on, Mets up by 1.  Bobby Parnell comes in and gets the final  outs to save R. A. Dickey's 20th win.

And then in another first, at least for a game I've attended, the Mets showed the postgame interview from the Mets TV channel on the scoreboard.

Some decades ago when the Mets were in another period of protracted badness, their ad slogan one season was, if memory serves, "At any moment, a great moment."  Which sums up today pretty nicely.  

And just to say:  when R.A. Dickey was warming up before the top of the first inning, his music was from Star Wars, a chunk of the finale from Episode 5 or 6 that started with the Imperial March theme, and then just a little bit of the next reprisal before the game began.  And when he came to bat, which pitchers get to do in the NL and which R. A. Dickey got to do three times today, his "walk to plate" music was the theme from Game of Thrones.

So that little spark of Mets fan in me got fanned a bit, and the sf nerd in me as well.  If there's going to be a first pitcher in 22 years to have 20 wins for the Mets -- well, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

I really would love for him to get the Cy Young Award.

WJR

And while I'm linking from the Washington Post...

Columnist Tracee Hamilton gives some love to long-time Detroit Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, who passed away this past week.

Harwell was a great baseball announcer. I had the honor of hearing him often during my college years, including during the 1984 season when the Tigers dominated baseball.

And the lines Tracee quotes from which Harwell recited at each season's opening -- they were in my family's Hagaddah as well and recited every year at Passover. The man had taste.

Jane Jarvis

The Sunday NY Times carried an obituary for Jane Jarvis. She was the organist at Shea Stadium for fifteen years. Much more to her life than just that, according to the obit, but it's for that which I will remember her. According to the article, she left the Mets in the late '70s, only a few years after I first started going to Mets games (1977, I think, was my first), but in my memory she had to have been pounding her organ keys longer into my Mets attendance than that. It's a tribute to her that I feel as if she must have been part of my life longer than she actually could have been. Thinking of Jane Jarvis brings back memories of what is now a long distant age when you could go to a baseball game without being assaulted by loud non-stop music. Even after Jane left there was a certain civility to the soundtrack at a Mets game, like having Sunday in New York played before every Sunday home game. I must be getting old, to be getting sentimental about the quiet old days at the ballpark, when all the music came from two hands on an organ keyboard.

Banner Day

The New York Times around a week ago put up this wonderful 31-year-old image from Chester Higgins, Jr. as part of a post on their baseball blog (which also ran in the printed paper) setting up a contest for entries in the Banner Day that is no more, winners of which can be found here.

It's a real trip down memory lane for me which I had to comment on.

Banner Day was a uniquely Mets promotion.  Between days of a doubleheader, fans could parade their banner on the field to be judged by a distinguished jury which might include some obscure person with a Mets connection, a radio host for a show I never listened to, and maybe an actual celebrity or half celebrity.

It was a wonderful day which exists no longer.

For one, it was a doubleheader.  The Mets continued to schedule a Banner Day doubleheader well into the 1980s at a time when doubleheaders were no longer scheduled.  While it was once quite common for teams to play two, it fell out of favor for many reasons.  Attendance grew and baseball became a bigger business, so giving up a gate was unpopular with management.  Games got longer, which meant a doubleheader could become a very long day at the office.  It just wasn't done.  And oftentimes, as businesses get bigger their skins get thinner, so letting the fans have their say becomes less and less appealing.

For a year or two the Mets had a non-doubleheader Banner Day, and then it went away.

It was a fun day.  Two baseball games, the old-fashioned charm of the banner parade.  I miss it.

I love looking at the original Shea Stadium scoreboard, which was very state of the art when the stadium opened in 1964 but which came to be very old, fickle, crotchety, etc. with ancient relays that sometimes did not want to go to the right letter or number.  I'm almost surprised looking at it in 1978 that everything appears in its proper place because my memories of it from not too many years later are of watching it struggle valiantly to display each "r."

You'll note the line score for that game and for the AL out of town games had a "1G" column for the first game scores.  Because certainly when the scoreboard was installed in 1964 and for many years thereafter, you would often have a doubleheader and need a place for the first game score when the second game had started.  You don't see that any more.

The out of town, line score, and lineup areas were all dedicated, even space for the umpires, and a little space for official scoring so you could tell if something was a wild pitch or a passed ball, an E2 error on the throw or an E4 on the catch at second base.  Before the game, during the game, between innings, no matter when you could see who was playing where for which team and what was happening out of town.  Now, even some stadiums that have a good out-of-town scoreboard, like in Seattle, it will often disappear for advertising or some other message at various points in the game.  Even the new Yankee Stadium doesn't post both lineups at the same time.  I loved the out-of-town board at Shea.  Many of the newer stadiums have these fancier set-ups where you can see the pitch count, how many runners are on base, all kinds of stuff, but it's so busy that it's hard to just focus on keeping track of the scores.  Shea, you could see at a glance who was up, who was pitching, what the score was, without it taking major mental effort.  This photo doesn't capture the little red dots in the line-up and out-of-town scores that told you who was up.  And goodness, the idea of keeping score is kind of old-fashioned now, even I've stopped though I inspired my friend Mark who still keeps a good scorecard, so the idea that a stadium will make it easy for somebody attending the game to know what to mark in the scorecard is totally Not Done any more.

This was 1978.  In 1982 the Mets introduced Diamond Vision, a video board in left field, and then the central part of the old scoreboard was covered up with a Budweiser sign.  A little bit later the creaky ancient balky old scoreboard you see above was replaced with a modern video board.  The 24/7 out-of-town and line-up sections were retained but replaced with newer equipment that actually worked.  The line-score section was replaced with a slightly taller video board that alternated the line score with rah rah scoreboard stuff.  Neither had a "1G" space!  There was still a Budweiser sign.  The NY skyline that was taken across to the new stadium and overlooks the Shake Shack was installed.  

Can you still buy Schaefer?  Manny Hanny was merged into Chemical Bank and then Chemical merged into Chase.  Before computerized ticketing, there was a brief time when you could buy Mets tickets at a Manny Hanny branch.  Somebody would call the Mets ticket office, give information on available seats, and this would be written out for you at the bank branch.  Now we have uniquely barcoded print at home.  Pepsi is now served at CitiField.

Not every picture is worth a thousand words, but the moment I saw this one in the NY Times last week all these memories and more just started to flow in a big big rush.  

Tie a Scorecard Ribbon Round the IRT

So I spoke a week or so ago about Citi Field, now it's time to dish dirt on the new Yankee Stadium, which I attended for a Mariners/Yankees game on July 1.

As with the new Mets ballpark, it's very disappointing to see that the subway hasn't gotten much investment.  No handicapped access to the new park.  The main post-game entrance to the #4 train is still a block away by the old Yankee Stadium, though the front-of-train crowding is a little reduced because there are some mid-platform entrances that are along the way from some of the gates in the new stadium that take up some of the pressure.  And the entrances to the C/D trains are all still best accessed from across the street without much improvement.  However, there is a new Metro North stop a 5 or 15 minute walk depending from the new stadium that offers direct daily access to the Hudson Line and on weekends to the Harlem and New Haven line as well, and that makes getting to the park much much much more convenient for wide swaths of the suburbs North and East of NYC.

You can kind of circumnavigate the outside.  Going down the right field line beneath the #4 tracks, the stadium abuts a subway electric sub-station beyond which is a narrow parking garage, so it's not too many steps to walk around the parking garage.  That faces a park and has nice plantings in front so it's very bucolic.  And if you walk down the right or left field line you can enter the Stadium thru gate 2 or gate 8 and avoid some of the lines at the other gates that are closer to the old stadium, to the subway, and to more of the best-known parking garages.  The facade facing the subway on River Road is really ugly.  The facade facing Jerome Ave. and 161st St. is stately but doesn't relate to the buildings across Jerome Ave. at all.  Architects can debat the importance of relating to your surroundings.

Security at Yankee Stadium is much more annoying than at Shea.  You have to turn your cell phone on to prove it's a real cell phone, much pickier about allowing in any bags, no empty plastic bottles to fill at water fountain.  Doesn't make me want to go there very often.

There are some ramps to get to the upper decks, nice and wide and not very steep and in that regard much nicer than the highly enclosed stairwells and the escalators at Citi Field.  There area also elevators, escalators, etc., but I do think ballparks and ramps go together.

The Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys formed a company called Legends Hospitality that runs the concessions and vending at Yankee Stadium. Citi has better food for sure.  Shake Shack beats Johnny Rockets any day.  

I wasn't able to walk around the inside perimeter at Citi Field on my first trip.  I was impressed with the openness of the upper and field deck concourses at Yankee Stadium.

My seats were way out in right field in the upper deck.  Very far from home plate.  A large chunk of right and right center field couldn't be seen from our seats.  That's not very nice.  And you couldn't see the whole field even from the front row of our section.  We were in the back row, with nice views of the anti-bird spikes in the roof of the upper deck.

The scoreboard situation at Yankee Stadium is awful.  Awful.  AWFUL.  They have a really nice big video board, a good chunk of which I couldn't see and which couldn't be seen at all without tilting head from game.  They have this mammothly long ribbon scoreboard around the whole ballpark, but the only game or other fan-friendly information is a little chunk with the score and another little chunk with the batter stats.  I had an awful seat at Citi Field but could follow the pitches and the out-of-town scores on a ribbon scoreboard, but here, nothing.  I couldn't see an out of town score at all the entire game.  Also, the only line-up that appears is for the team that's batting in a particular half-inning, while Citi Field gives both line-ups for both teams during the game.  This makes it easier to keep track of fielding changes, like if a pinch-hitter comes in and then goes to play right field while the right fielder moves to first base, or that kind of thing.  Essentially, all that money spent to build a new ballpark and they managed to make the scoreboard situation worse.

There's less obnoxious music at Yankee Stadium.  Big plus Yankees.

We had a nice view from our seats to the north, looking over a park, and in back of us a good view of the stately courthouse atop the adjacent hill.  That was nice.  All the views from the old Yankee Stadium sucked.

In the old days, I didn't like going to Yankee Stadium very much at all because it was cramped and claustrophobic.  Now, it doesn't seem quite as cramped or claustrophobic.  But tickets are still overpriced, the experience of passing thru security is still more unpleasant, and the food definitely not as good.  I believe there is now a narrower gap between the two ballparks.  But I'm not sure with either that I'm eager to pay a mint so I can buy a better infield seat at either to experience each when they're showing their best instead of comparing bad obstructed distant outfield seats.  It's a lot of money, an awful lot of money.  I spent $47 last year to sit on the field level behind home plate at Coors Field last summer, and now in NY you can pay twice that for garbage seats.

Citi Field

Many years ago I was a regular at Shea Stadium with a 60-game ticket plan.  That ended in the mid-1990s.  No money when I started my own business, and the baseball strike cooled my ardor as well.  The ardor is still cooled some.  The "security" restrictions (i.e., the Yankees and Washington Nationals are among the teams that will let you bring in a factory-sealed water bottle but not that same bottle empty) after 9/11 make going to a game less pleasant.  At least with the Kindle I can now bring plenty of reading material just like the old days, gone post 9/11, when I could take in a backpack full of manuscripts and other reading which ain't so easy to fit when the allowable bag size is 16x16x8.    Even though I can now afford even over-priced NYC ballpark tickets, I wasn't rushing to go to the new Yankee Stadium, and the Mets' Citi Field.  (& yes, the Mets do allow plastic bottles full or empty, but no glass or hard containers.)

But when one of my friends ended up with extra tickets for Yankee Stadium this upcoming Wednesday and another told me last weekend the Mets still had seats if we wanted to go for last night's Subway Series game...  Well, I wasn't complaining.

So Citi Field:

Annoyance #1, the city has spent all kinds of big bucks helping to support these stadiums in ways that avoid saying they're actually paying for them.  Providing city-backed bonds, or "infrastructure" improvements, or sweetheart rent deals, etc.  Yet, they haven't found the money to really upgrade the subway stop that's now called Mets/Willets Point.  If you can't navigate stairs, you can kind of get to the stadium from Manhattan or closer-in parts of Queens by taking existing ramps on the wrong side of the stop that lead to a new ramp to street level where you have to cross the street.  Going home, there's still no wheelchair access at all to the Manhattan-bound platform so you would have to take the train one stop further out and then head back in.  That's incredibly obnoxious.  This could easily add a half hour or more to a return trip if you even want to bother trying.

Nice touch #1. while the 60s era circular stairs were taken down in favor or a straight staircase, there's now a really nice promenade leading from the subway to the main entrance, which is much closer to the subway.   If you want to get to the early-opening gate 2 1/2 hours before to see batting practice, you are just steps away from it.

Enh #1.  The exterior of the ballpark is very attractive, but it follows designs intended to relate to a cityscape that doesn't exist around Shea Stadium.

Nice touch #2.  You can circumnavigate the stadium.  I think there's something nice and festive about being able to walk around the entire perimeter of a ballpark and take it all in.  I don't like places like the new Busch or the new Comiskey which turn one wall into a private dead end preserve.  And the new stadium does present a real street front to 126th St.  There's nothing across 126th St. but auto parts junkyards that the city's never bothered to supply with sewers and which they hope to relocate (maybe then the exterior will relate to some cityscape) but at least right on 126th St. there's some real sense of place.  The official entrance to the Mets offices is on an actual city street instead of facing a massive parking lot.

Enh #2.  It's like going to a Marriott.  Everyone's wearing a name tag with the place they live on it.  They're somewhat friendly.  Friendly is nice, but do we need the places on the name tags?  & the vendors (or are we supposed to call them "Hospitality Attendants" now, according to one namem tag I looked at) still have garish uniform colors that make them look like escapees from an Alabama chain gang.

Enh #3.  Nice wide main concourse with good views of the field and plentiful rest rooms and room to walk around and etc. etc.  I would give this a Nice Touch, except this is stuff every new ballpark has so it doesn't make me feel at all special that for these ticket prices and the public subsidies and everything else that we in NYC get to now use a baseball stadium that looks like Camden Yards or Seattle or Nationals Park or...  

Nice Touch #3.  Like many of the new stadiums there's a plaza area back behind the outfield.  What makes this one nice is the Shake Shack.  Some years ago a little outpost by this name opened in Madison Sq. Pk in Manhattan where all the people from Tor Books can wait on line for their entire lunch to buy burgers and fries of rare quality.  Now you can wait on line for the same thing for 30 minutes at Shea Stadium.  Dang this stuff is good.  The burger was very good.  The fries tasted like pieces of potato and had no need of ketchup to be totally chow-downable, and the shake was excellent.  $17 for the meal, but the best food I've ever gotten at a baseball stadium.  

Annoyance #2:  But with all the people waiting on line for Shake Shack and BBQ from Blue Smoke and picture-taking with Mr. Met, the centerfield plaza had no sense of place and no comfort.

Annoyance #3.  And it's hidden behind an advertising bedecked back of one of the scorecards.

Annoyance #4.  And the pre-game music like the during game music was loud and blaring and assaultive and obnoxious and makes me never want to go to Citi Field again.

Enh #3.  For old times sake you do get a nice view from one end of the plaza to the UHaul sign that used to be the Serval Zipper sign that used to be one of the things off in the distance beyond Shea's outfield fence.  I doubt most people will care about this.  But if they do redevelop the auto junkyards I hope they put a street down there so it will protect the view corridor.

Annoyance #5.  We paid $98 for a seat beyond the edge of the outfield fence near to the left field foul pole.  We couldn't see right below in the left field corner.  We couldn't really see deep center field very well. We could see all of the scoreboards with lots of head tilting.  Yeah, tickets are overpriced big time.  This might have been field level, but it wasn't a good seat.  The raking wasn't even so good, so if a tall person were sitting in front of me I wouldn't have seen much.

Enh #4.  But I learned quite a bit about the operations of a Canon HD 100 Camera with Sony monitor attached.

Enh #5.  Way too many advertising signs all over the park, but that's to be as expected as the wide concourse.

Annoyance #6.  Mets got only one hit.  That was one too many.  I'd have rather seen a no-hitter at that point.  And the stadium was full of Yankee fans.

Annoyance #7.  No ramps.  I like walking up and down ramps in ballparks, not stairs that are encased in stairwells with views of nothing.  Not elevators, not escalators.  Ball parks should have ramps.

Nice Touch #4.  We exited thru the Jackie Robinson rotunda, which is very grand and attractive.

Nice Touch #5.  I noticed on my way out more than on my way in how the plazas surrounding the stadium are full or benches or circular floral displays with actual nice places to sit.  It makes waiting for somebody to meet much more pleasant, or to just people watch after a game.  Very very nice.

Because I was going with a friend and waiting on line for Shake Shack, I didn't explore the view from the top row or walk around the entire inside of the stadium.  Because of the head-tilt for the main scoreboards I can't really comment on that part of the experience.  With more annoyances than enhs or nice touches, and with the overpriced tickets, I'm not even sure if I'll be in a great rush to return to the stadium to kind of do the full thing.

Hunger and Sugar

Hunger, seen Saturday April 11 2009 at the IFC Center, Aud. #3.  3.5 slithy toads

Sugar, seen Saturday April 11, 2009 at the AMC Empire 25, Aud. #5.  3 slithy toads.

I saw these two films prior to heading off for London Book Fair, almost 2 months ago.  Sugar is still hanging around here and there, such as at the Cinema Village in New York City.  Hunger, you'll want to keep an eye out for on DVD.  I'd certainly recommend renting both.  Hunger is the better movie, but Sugar the more enjoyable.  I've been meaning to blog about both, but as you can tell from the small # of posts in May, it's been a busy time in the weeks since I got back from London, and the blog often feels the brunt of my busy-ness.

Hunger is about a 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland led by Bobby Sands.  But while about Bobby Sands' hunger strike, the film makes an interesting and even courageous decision to NOT approach the story directly from Sands' point of view.  Rather, the first chunk of the film takes us into Sands' story by way of a couple other prisoners participating in a "blanket" strike, where the prisoners refuse to wear prison issue and go into their cells with blankets instead.  And more.  Not for the squeamish, we get to see quite vividly how you can avoid using a bathroom by smearing your feces on the wall and building mashed potato culverts to put your urine out into the cellblock hall.  Quite, quite vividly.  The purpose of all of this is to attempt to get the Thatcher government to recognize the IRA prisoners as political prisoners instead of garden variety criminals.  The authorities do not take well to this, and there are scenes of great brutality and power as the guards attempt to assert authority and give the prisoners haircuts or clean their cells.

Sands embarks on the hunger strike as a way of escalating the stakes, and the second half of the movie is devoted to that hunger strike.  He sticks to it until the bitter and fatal end, and the movie has a Kubrickian chill in depicting how the hunger strike plays out.  If you could imagine a wasting body inserted into the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the old man star child of that film being turned in bed and his bed sores treated with ointment, his parents looking on, that's about what you're getting in Hunger.   And to me, there's no better praise for the movie than to say that it's one of the most Kubrickian pieces of cinema I've seen since Kubrick himself.  Its structure as a play in three acts is reminiscent of 2001 and Full Metal Jacket.  The art and set direction, the symmetry of things, the use of music through most of the film, it's all Kubrick.  I think it very safe to say that your attitude toward Kubrick's work may well be indicative of your interest in Hunger.

There's only one flaw in the film which keeps it from getting the last half toad.  The middle act of the movie is an extended sequence in which Bobby Sands discusses his plans for the hunger strike with a visiting priest at the prison.  On the one hand it's a brilliant scene with rich,  vivid and provocative dialogue.  On the other hand, it's a godawful indulgent scene that drones on and on.  And on and on.  And almost set me into a deep and lasting slumber for what was to come.

This isn't a film to see again and again, either.  Kubrick has a chill to a lot of his work but also a kind of brute genius that makes me want to see his major films once every five years.  Hunger is a brilliant work with almost all the same ingredients, but once is both a must, and enough.

Sugar is a baseball movie that really isn't about baseball.  It comes from the writing/directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck who attracted considerable attention a few years ago for a film called Half Nelson that I only half-liked.  It was about a school teacher played by Ryan Gosling with a lot  of problems and baggage besides his work, and it was worthy but flat.  I was interested in Sugar from the first reviews of it I read coming out of Sundance in 2008, but also ambivalent.

Happily, this one wasn't flat at all.  The central performance by Algenis Perez Soto as a Dominican baseball player who comes to the minor leagues in the US is totally winning.  Soto is a charmer, totally engaging.  There are some small scenes of big grace.  My sister and I both liked one where Soto visits a diner in the US, is unable to order eggs because of his inability to know what kind of egg is which, and gets the assistance of a kindly waitress who brings him a plate full of eggs in different varieties with a quick English lesson to go along with it.  I enjoyed some of the scenery.  Soto's minor league team plays in a stadium in the shadow of a bridge across the Missisippi, and there' s something about the play of the big bridge and the minor leagues that I cottoned to.

This so-called sports movie takes an interesting turn when it leaves sports behind.  Soto's Sugar decides that he isn't going to cut it and abandons his A-level minor league team to seek  friend in New York City, and the last third or quarter of the movie turns from sports to immigration assimilation drama.  Soto's absolute charmer of a performance takes the viewer along because we care about him more than the balls and strikes.  However, the downgrade on the toad scale for me in this movie comes about because I didn't feel as if the lead character's pivot from lifelong pursuit to total abandonment of baseball was sufficiently justified by what was on the screen.  This didn't bother my sister as much, because she feels from working with latino kids as a school teacher that there's a kind of macho that totally justifies what the character does without it needing to be spelled out, and she and I have agreed to disagree on that.

But we would both recommend Sugar.  It's charming, approachable, likeable, and worth the ride.

Nationals Follies

So I just got back from seeing a ballgame at Nationals Park with a friend.

Now, even in the height of the fluid rule stuff when flying, when you couldn't bring on any liquid of any sort at all, I was able to bring on an empty plastic bottle which I could ask the flight attendants to fill up for me the moment I got on so that I would have some water at my seat during the flight. Even once when I had to go thru the security check with my empty bottle and then one of the random checks they were doing when you boarded. Even today, I still bring an empty half-liter soda bottle with me so I can go to the drinking fountain and have water without having to buy a new bottle of bottled water all the time.

So when I read up on the Washington Nationals web site about their security rules and saw this "one per person, a factory sealed water bottle of up to 1 liter," I decided to test it. Knowing I was doing evil, I had an empty 16 oz plastic bottle in my bag, which I hoped to fill with water at the drinking fountain. And the security people at the First Base Gate at 6:05 on a Friday night were having none of it. The supervisor grabbed the A to Z brochure to show me their Rule, and my empty plastic bottle had to get tossed.

There is no possible justification for this. I could have a 33 oz bottle of water, factory sealed, take it 5' further thru the turnstile, dump it on the ground, and that's OK. And that is the exact same thing that I was just forbidden to bring in.

This isn't because the Nationals want to be the only people to sell you food. You can bring in the 1 liter bottle of water, and other food in small quantity. I wasn't trying to bring in some Colored Liquid that could be Anything. It was an empty clear plastic bottle, just like a factory sealed water bottle would be if I dumped it out 5' from where I was standing. Any evil thing I could do with the 16 oz plastic bottle I had to toss I could do twice that with the allowed factory-sealed 1-liter water bottle.

Well, two possible reasons. The Nationals are on a water meter, and they can afford to give people refills but not give everyone their entire water for the game. Or, the US idea that there might be somebody like me who thinks it crazy not to re-use a plastic bottle, thinks it crazy not to use the drinking fountain at the airport or the ballpark or the wherever instead of buying new petroleum-based plastic water bottles all the time, is so alien to the culture of America right now that it never occured to the Nationals that somebody might want on a hot day to reuse a water bottle, and bring in an empty.

Both of these would be very sad.

Six degrees of separation ... if you know anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone in Nationals land, let them know about this silliness. The same empty bottle I take on plane should be fair game for Nationals Park.

I filled out a complaint form at the stadium, I will write to the Nationals, I will write to the Washington Post. If I ever go to a Nationals game again I do not want to be forced into buying another bottle.

And my friend is upset that none of the level 3 garnish stands for the hotdogs had been filled with onions. You can have all the relish you want with none of the onions, and all the factory-sealed plastic bottles one per person, but no empties.