On May 29, as many thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest the death of George Floyd in police custody and a much smaller group of people took advantage of the situation to engage in looting, arson, and rioting, left-of-center filmmaker Michael Moore fired out a tweet with a simple proposal that summarizes the woke worldview that has taken root among the elites of the Anglo-American world. …
Moore suggested that the police headquarters in Minneapolis should be demolished as a show of contrition to “black America.” The police department should then be rebuilt with “decent kind ppl aka ppl of color.”
In days past, this would have been considered an odd statement among the political left. The left’s civil rights tradition was based on equal treatment and evaluating people based on their character rather than their skin color. The abusive treatment of Floyd by the four police officers who detained him—all of whom were fired by the department and charged—rightly shocks people’s consciences, but it wasn’t an assault on an entire racial group by an entire police department.
Instead of burning buildings as an act of contrition, as Moore called for, shouldn’t it be the police involved apologizing to George Floyd’s loved ones, first and foremost, and then to the entire Minneapolis community for betraying their trust by abusing their role as public servants?
I also wonder what exactly makes nonwhite people inherently “decent” or “kind.” Like anyone else, we are capable of both good and bad, of both peace and violence.
Even when it comes to police violence you cannot reliably predict someone’s behavior just by their skin color. A 2018 study from Rutgers University found that nonwhite police officers are no less likely to use lethal force against minorities.
Additionally, while acts of police brutality are horrible, the killing of unarmed suspects is actually very rare, and not exclusive to one racial group. In 2019, 41 unarmed people were shot and killed by police; nine of them were African American.
By presenting these facts, I am not denying the reality of racial discrimination in some of America’s policing. Just look at this recent study of police traffic stops by the Stanford School of Engineering. The researchers analyzed 95 million traffic stop records and found that fewer black drivers tend to be stopped at night because a “veil of darkness” prevents police from seeing their race. The color blindness that many progressive-minded people, including myself, pine for has not yet been achieved by all of America’s police; it should not take the sun setting to treat people fairly.
We tend to make snap judgements based on the information available to us—social psychologists call this the availability heuristic because we use stereotypes and limited information to try and make sense of the world.
In both the case of Moore’s patronizing tweet and the racial profiling that plagues too much of our policing, people are using limited information informed by stereotypes to reach unfair conclusions. The filmmaker probably has seen the familiar string of YouTube videos featuring white police officers abusing or killing black suspects unjustly, or read one of the many prominent articles in the media highlighting these incidents. From that limited information he may have constructed a worldview where whites embody a form of inherent sin; meanwhile, minorities are seen as virtuous victims, rather than what we really are: individuals who are capable of good or evil, violence or peace.
Meanwhile, the police who are engaged in racial profiling may be aware of data showing that African Americans are disproportionately represented in some crime statistics; they use this bit of information to unfairly stereotype the African Americans they encounter as potential criminals, leading to innocent people being stopped and questioned at least partly due to the color of their skin—every police interaction increasing the odds that one will end in tragedy.
One of the goals of 20th-century race liberalism was to chip away at distorted thinking created by the availability heuristic. We shouldn’t evaluate individuals by stereotypes about groups created by limited information, liberals correctly argued.
Psychology research tells us that seeing people as individuals, rather than as members of groups, helps reduce social prejudice. The psychologist Susan Fiske showed exactly how easy this is, if we put our minds to it. In a 2005 neuroscience study, she found that when white participants saw photos of black faces and had two seconds to judge whether the people in these photographs were over the age of 21, they showed activity in the area of the brain called the amygdala, which indicates a high level of alertness and emotional arousal. In other words, they saw a threat.
But she discovered a neat trick to defusing this automatic fear response. In some cases, her research team asked the white participants to judge what sort of vegetable the people in the photos would prefer to eat. In those cases, where they were prompted to see the people as individuals with their own personal tastes and preferences, the amygdala activity looked the same as when participants saw white faces, suggesting that they were able to individuate, that is see the faces as individuals, rather than group them into a category perceived as “other.”
Unfortunately, the process of individuating has come under furious assault in recent years. More and more, elites in media and politics are encouraging us to think about ourselves as archetypes of groups rather than as individuals. Stereotyping about white people in particular is now not only accepted, but encouraged and seen as a political good. Every white person is expected to acknowledge that they have white privilege at all times, regardless of their class or personal background, and to affirm that it is impossible for there to be any situation in which nonwhites ever enjoy any advantages over whites. As I have written elsewhere, this is a problematic belief structure—not because it will usher in some kind of reverse Jim Crow that subjugates whites, but because it leads to a flattened image, effectively stigmatizing even the suggestion that whites might be disadvantaged or suffering. This blinkered view of race and privilege can be particularly harmful to whites in situations where many are underprivileged (for instance, the white suicide rate is many times higher than the Asian, black, or Latino suicide rate).
But equally problematic is the way some on the left talk about members of ethnic minority groups as if we are simply virtuous victims, cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy over which we have no control. Basically everything in our lives is determined by the Leviathan of structural racism, a term that is both increasingly vague and ever more expansively used to explain every feature of the social conditions of America.
To those who adopt this worldview, it may come as a surprise, then, that some of the worst racial disparities in marijuana arrests, for instance, can be found in locales where elected officials and those in power are overwhelmingly African American Democrats, like Atlanta, where 90% of arrests for marijuana offenses in 2016 were of African Americans.
It’s hard to chalk this up only to racial profiling. One reason you see these disparities in low-level drug arrests is because there tends to be heavier policing overall in areas with more violent crime; across the United States, many of these areas tend to be heavily African American and Latino. Police may be more heavily patrolling a certain neighborhood due to gun violence, but that doesn’t mean they won’t arrest you for something as simple as a nonviolent drug crime.
The leadership of Atlanta did not need to wait for a woke white savior to rescue them from “400 years of racism,” a reductive phrase commonly employed by Democratic elites to explain basically every social phenomenon where ethnic minorities are involved. In 2018, Atlanta moved to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana; after all, you don’t have to worry about the disparity in a social malady between two groups if you simply eliminate the malady.
It’s hardly a surprise that African American mayors like Atlanta’s Keisha Lance Bottoms and Birmingham’s Randall Woodfin were among the most unequivocal in condemning the looting and rioting committed by a small minority who exploited the chaos created by the George Floyd protests for their own ends. This is not because race has any essential characteristic—it obviously doesn’t. But in the modern Democratic Party, liberal whites are increasingly encouraged to coddle ethnic minorities and deprive them of the humanity that comes with taking responsibility for our own actions. So it’s also not a surprise that Seattle’s Jenny Durkan, for instance, made pains to emphasize the number of “white men” engaging in violence in her city. In normal times, it would be wildly inappropriate to single out a racial group as especially violent.
But in the time of woke politics, white men are basically the only group that is granted the blessing of both power and responsibility for using it. If you want to stop violence, you have to, as the leadership in Minnesota attempted, blame it on “white supremacists.” Clearly, there have been some racists who, like looters, have tried to exploit the chaos caused by the protests to destroy property in black communities and egg on violent confrontations with police. But there is no proof at all that white supremacists have been anything more than marginal players in this drama. The disproportionate focus on outside “white supremacists” from both politicians and media figures is just another way of awarding white men agency—they are the ones who caused all the things we don’t like to happen—and denying it to ethnic minorities who remain perpetual victims.
I would be lying if I said I’ve never faced bigotry or discrimination as a result of being a Pakistani American Muslim. But it never really occurred to me to think about the entire United States as antagonistic to my existence. Now I’m starting to wonder if the coddling promoted by some of its elites will prevent liberals from seeing me as a fully human person.
The far right often dehumanizes Muslims by portraying us as inherently violent. That’s what the website Jihad Watch does—it’s just a running hit list of some of my worst co-religionists.
But when I learned that British police were wary of investigating Pakistani child grooming gangs in the United Kingdom because they were fearful of angering the British Pakistani community and being labeled racist, I saw that as another form of dehumanization—this time from the left.
The left always tells us not to blame the victim. But victims by definition do not have social or political power. I want to have power, and you cannot have power unless it is paired with responsibility.
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You might call this a transition day in rock music history. For instance, one year to the day after the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” …
… Brian Jones left the Stones, to be replaced by Mick Taylor.
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The Rolling Stones had a big day today in 1963: They made their first TV appearance and released their first single:
The number one song today in 1975:
Five years later, Gary Numan drove his way to number nine:
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We begin with a song that was set on this date (listen to the first line):
The number one song today in 1955 was probably played around the clock by the first top 40 radio stations:
Anniversary greetings to David Bowie and Iman, married today in 1992:
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The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg:
Like many other industries, entertainment companies have issued statements of support for the protests against racism and police brutality now filling America’s streets. But there’s something Hollywood can do to put its money where its social media posts are: immediately halt production on cop shows and movies and rethink the stories it tells about policing in America.
For a century, Hollywood has been collaborating with police departments, telling stories that whitewash police shootings and valorizing an action-hero style of policing over the harder, less dramatic work of building relationships with the communities cops are meant to serve and protect. There’s a reason for that beyond a reactionary streak hiding below the industry’s surface liberalism. Purely from a dramatic perspective, crime makes a story seem consequential, investigating crime generates action, and solving crime provides for a morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion.
The result is an addiction to stories that portray police departments as more effective than they actually are; crime as more prevalent than it actually is; and police use of force as consistently justified. There are always gaps between reality and fiction, but given what policing in America has too often become, Hollywood’s version of it looks less like fantasy and more like complicity.
There’s no question that it would be costly for networks and studios to walk away from the police genre entirely. Canceling Dick Wolf’s “Chicago” franchise of shows would wipe out an entire night of NBC’s prime-time programming; dropping “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and a planned spinoff would cut even further into the lineup.
But the gap between what some companies and executives have promised this week and what they have done in the past cannot be ignored. As reality television critic Andy Dehnart points out, at ViacomCBS, cable networks chief Chris McCarthy pledged “to leverage all of our platforms to show our ally-ship.” One of those platforms also airs “Cops,” a decades-old reality show with a troubled history of participating in police censorship and peddling fear of black and brown criminals. If McCarthy means what he says, canceling “Cops” would be a start.
But simply canceling cop shows and movies would be easier than uprooting the assumptions at the heart of the problem.
Say writers made a commitment not to exaggerate the performance of police. Audiences would have to be retrained to watch, for example, a version of “Special Victims Unit” where the characters cleared only 33.4 percent of rape cases, or to accept that in almost 40 percent of murders and manslaughters, no suspect is arrested. If storytelling focused on less-dramatic but more-common crimes such as burglary and motor-vehicle theft, the stakes would shrink — along with the case-clearance rate.
In addition to revealing the world as it is, art has the power to show us the world as it can be. But when reform doesn’t seem like a real possibility, even modest optimism risks souring into mockery.
The closest thing to a reformist police show right now is “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” a sitcom that alternates explorations of the policies and identity politics of the New York Police Department with fantastic gags and one-liners.
Series co-creator Dan Goor told me in 2016 that he hoped that the show was “Modeling what a good police-community interaction would be like.” I’ve never doubted his care in pursuing that ideal. This week, Goor and the cast donated $100,000 to the National Bail Fund Network and announced that they “condemn the murder of George Floyd and support the many people who are protesting police brutality nationally.”
Still, as Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk put it this week, the show can’t escape what it is: Neither the show’s good intentions and genuine good work nor “its silliness … change the way it prioritizes police perspectives over anyone else’s,” VanArendonk wrote.
One way forward might be to emphasize the dialogues, and sometimes fierce struggles, that take place within police departments. “The Shield,” which aired on FX from 2002 to 2008, follows the reign and eventual downfall of corrupt Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his Strike Team, based on the division at the center of the real-life Rampart scandal in Los Angeles. In the finale, Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder), Mackey’s longtime colleague and a truly decent officer, wins a small victory. Mackey, in exchange for his cooperation in an investigation against the surviving members of his team, is not prosecuted for his crimes, but he is required to spend three years in a deadening desk job at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It takes seven seasons to even achieve that much on “The Shield.” It’s been almost six years since Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., and no one can be blamed for feeling like national reform has moved at a similarly petty pace. If the entertainment industry truly believes change can no longer wait, it should start with its own storytelling.
Rosenberg’s anti-police idiocy prompted these comments:
- While we’re at it let’s burn books and send those who disagree with so called progressives to re-education camps.
- Great “article “; please tell us which books at the library we should burn.
- Perhaps we should also get rid of televised sports? Grown men and women beating each other up for money like 21st century gladiators? The owner class throwing money at the entertainers like…yeah, you get it. Somehow I doubt you’d get a lot of advertisers buying time on “ESPN’s Wide World of Poetry”.
- Ridiculous. People don’t break out into song to explain their feelings. Cancel Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. Keeping up with the Kardashians? Only the 1% lives like that. Not realistic. Cancel it. Brooklyn 99? Please. Cancel it. Don’t even get me started on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Bottom line? The common folk can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. Our betters need to protect us from it. Thank God Alyssa Rosenberg is here to lead us out of the morass.
- Let’s assume I agree with the writer (which I do not). How would one address the nearly 250,000 a year malpractice deaths ? Or alchohol related deaths ? Cancel any show that has booze or doctors saving lives ? Maybe make a show called “Law and Order: Malpractice” or “Law and Order: SJW”, oh wait SVU is already too political. Fact is, television and movies and video games are ENTERTAINMENT. They aren’t there to provide life lessons, ideology or political commentary. They are an escape from real life, which is horrifying enough. Thankfully, neither the writer or anyone commenting here will change the way hollywood does things. It’s about the money…
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Sure. Censorship is always a good idea in a free country. The Supreme Court has already opined on this matter. Read about it.
- Plato uses the same logic in the Republic when he demands that the poets be banished. Is entertainment properly understood propaganda for the masses? How do people get paid to write this stuff?
The last comment is the question of the day.
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In this year that may be without baseball (and numerous other things), it has been entertaining to read chronicles of the 1982 Brewers season, courtesy of the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers page, which has been chronicling 1982 in simulated real time.
The ’82 Brewers are actually a story that started four years earlier. The Brewers, remember, started as the Seattle Pilots, the last major pro sports franchise to go bankrupt in its first season of existence. Milwaukee car dealer Bud Selig, a former minority owner of the former Milwaukee Braves, purchased the Brewers in bankruptcy court during 1970 spring training, and thus begat the Brewers … and eight years of mediocrity.
Then Selig hired former Baltimore Orioles general manager Harry Dalton, who in turn hired Orioles pitching coach George Bamberger to be their manager. The Society for American Baseball Research shows how Dalton was successful before coming to Milwaukee.
The cupboard was not entirely bare when Dalton and Bamberger arrived — 22-year-old shortstop Robin Yount was a four-season veteran already, and the Brewers had previously swapped first basemen with the Red Sox, getting future star Cecil Cooper for aging star George Scott, while the Brewers had drafted Paul Molitor in the 1977 first round. But the 1977 Brewers won only 67 games (at least they were consistent — they were 11th in runs scored and 11th in earned run average) while the 1978 Brewers won 93 games and, for the first time in their existence, were a contender.
How did that happen? “Bambi’s Bombers” emulated the style Bamberger’s former manager, Earl Weaver, used in Baltimore — pitching (for the first time), defense and three-run home runs. (Instead of 11th, they led the league in runs scored, though pitching improved only from 11th to eighth.)
Dalton replaced Jim Wohlford (.248, 2 home runs, 36 RBI) in left field with Larry Hisle (.290, 34 home runs, 115 RBI), and Von Joshua (.681 OPS) with Gorman Thomas (.866 OPS) in center. Nearly everyone else’s hitting improved. Molitor, having played all of 64 minor-league games, played well enough to finish second in American League Rookie of the Year voting.
As for pitching, Mike Caldwell, whom the Brewers had obtained from Cincinnati’s farm system when the Reds were making annual postseason trips, went from 5–8 with a 4.58 ERA to 22–9 with a 2.36 ERA. Lary Sorenson went from 7–10 and a 4.36 ERA to 18–12 with a 3.21 ERA. Every starting pitcher who was with the team a year earlier had a better record than the previous season.
Dalton must have taken a big gulp before trading his best pitcher of 1977, Jim Slaton, to Detroit for outfielder Ben Oglivie, but Oglivie batted .303 in 1978 for the Brewers. Slaton, meanwhile, came back to the Brewers as a free agent in 1979, and ended his career as the Brewers’ all-time winningest pitcher. (Which says volumes about the traditional state of Brewers pitching, but we’ve already covered that here.)
The Brewers remained a contender for the next four seasons, though Bamberger had to step down for health reasons during and at the end of the 1980 season, replaced by Rodgers, his third-base coach. Thomas led the AL with 45 home runs in 1979 and 39 home runs in 1982, and Oglivie tied Reggie Jackson for the lead with 39 1980 home runs. “Benji” and “Stormin’ Gorman” also got more than their share of RBIs despite relatively low batting averages because of how well Molitor and Yount got on base in front of them. Cooper was the quietest elite hitter in the league, with an OPS of .833 or more every season between 1978 and 1983.
Then came The Trade. In November, Dalton traded outfielder Sixto Lezcano, Sorenson and pitcher Dave LaPoint and David Green, the Brewers’ top minor league prospect, to St. Louis in exchange for starting pitcher Pete Vuckovich, relief pitcher Rollie Fingers (who had been with the Cardinals for four days as part of a 10-player trade) and catcher Ted Simmons.
How did that trade work out? Fingers won not just the 1981 Cy Young Award but the 1981 American League MVP. Vuckovich won the 1982 AL Cy Young Award. Simmons didn’t hit well for a season and a half, but was a big improvement behind the plate, moving out Charlie Moore, who found a spot in right field, as Reggie Jackson would find out:
(Sorenson, by the way, pitched one year for the Cardinals, then went to Cleveland as part of a three-team trade to get outfielder Lonnie Smith from Philadelphia. Lezcano was traded with shortstop Garry Templeton to San Diego so the Cardinals could get shortstop Ozzie Smith. LaPoint was part of a group of players traded to San Francisco to get Jack Clark, the hero of most of the Cardinals’ 1985 season, but a World Series goat.)
The 1981 Brewers made the postseason for the first time …
… and there was considerable hoopla about 1982. That hoopla didn’t pan out at first, and by the start of June the Brewers were 23–24 and in fifth place in the AL East.
There was considerable underperformance, and there was considerable disgruntlement with Rodgers, who one year earlier decided to move Molitor from second base (where Jim Gantner was waiting to play) to center field, pushing Thomas unhappily to right field (Lezcano’s former position), until Molitor got hurt and the 1981 baseball strike interrupted the season.
Then in 1982, Molitor moved to third base, pushing Roy Howell unhappily into a platoon at designated hitter with Money, while Moore went from behind the plate to right field. All these moves might have been all right if the Brewers were winning, but through the first two months of 1982 they were not.
All may have come together in a 5–4 11-inning loss in Seattle June 1 that dropped the Brewers to two games below .500:
Once again, the Brewers blew leads (2-0 in the first, 3-2 in the ninth and 4-3 in the 11th). This time, it was the trifecta.
With a runner on second and two outs in the ninth of a 3-2 game, manager Buck Rodgers went to the bullpen in an attempt to retire lefty Bruce Bochte. Was it Rollie Fingers, the closer? No. Rodgers went with usual-starter Mike Caldwell, who many fans remember had given up a home run to Bochte into the third deck of the King Dome in the 10th inning two years ago.
Bochte hit a single to score Rick Sweet and force extra innings. It was only then that Fingers came on to get the final out. It would be the only batter he would face.
Why? In all likelihood, words were exchanged between innings.
Fingers after the game: “That’s probably the final nail in the coffin,” Fingers said, presumably referring to Rodgers’ fate. “Does he think I can’t get a left-hander out? I’m getting good money to do that.”
Fingers wasn’t done: “That’s my job, to come in save situations. Mike Caldwell is paid to start. I’m paid to relieve.”
Did Rodgers panic, over thinking the move? “I shot my wad in the ninth inning,” he explained. “I was trying to get the game over in the ninth.”
Other players in the clubhouse weren’t shy when talking about the current state of the team. “We’re in serious trouble if we can’t beat these guys,” said Cecil Cooper, “especially when you take the lead three times and can’t hold it. There’s just no answers. What do you do? What do you do now? We’re losing every way we can. Those two games we lost in Anaheim, we were up three runs and we lose. We’ve lost three games on this trip and we should have won every one of them.”
[Jim] Gantner made a not so subtle hint at the change he expected to be made: “You can’t fire 25 players. Sometimes the manager’s at the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s really too bad. We’re going to have to do something to shake up this club. I’m not saying fire the manager, but something has to be done to shake up this club.”
It was the Brewers’ 14th loss in 20 games, dropping back to two games under .500. For the first time since April 18 when they were 6-9, the Brewers are in sixth place.
(Note to current coaches and managers: The phrase “shot my wad” is probably one you should avoid today.)
The next day, Dalton fired Rodgers:
Yesterday, Harry Dalton told us that the job of a general manager is to remain patient. Apparently, his patience has run out. …
“I think Buck’s a good baseball man,” Dalton said today. “The chemistry went sour. We hadn’t been getting what we had the right to expect with the talent we have available. I recognize everything that happened wasn’t Buck’s fault. I wanted to give Buck every opportunity to right the ship.”
And that opportunity ran out. Brewers fans would argue that Rodgers was given far too much time to “right the ship.” You can’t right a ship that’s sinking, and water’s been flooding a gaping hole in the SS BrewCrew for quite some time.
It’s interesting this announcement was made today, given the Brewers beat the Mariners 2-1 yesterday. But the rumor is that the decision to make the move had already been made prior to yesterday’s game, which would make sense considering the collapse that led to three blown leads in that game. Dalton knew that change was coming when he spoke of patience. Rodgers was a dead man walking and he was made aware of the change this morning.
In something of a surprising move, the Brewers have replaced Rodgers with longtime coach Harvey Kuenn… at least for now. “We have appointed Harvey Kuenn as interim manager,” said Dalton. “That can mean anytime from two to three weeks to the end of the 1982 season. We have been looking for someone to take over on a permanent basis.”
So who will be that permanent solution? Good question. It won’t be former team captain Sal Bando, long rumored to be waiting for the opening. He isn’t interested in committing to managing.
The interesting twist in all of this is that the man the Brewers really want, former manager George Bamberger, is no longer available. Bambi stepped down due to health concerns and Rodgers took over. Had the Brewers not made the playoffs last season, they were primed to invite Bamberger back. Instead. they did take that next step and felt obligated to bring Rodgers back. Meanwhile, Bamberger took a job to manage the Mets.
A couple of possibilities are on Bambi’s staff. Jim Frey, the former manager of the Royals and current coach on the Mets, could be an option. Frank Howard, a former Brewers coach who was fired after managing the Padres last season, is also a coach on the Mets’ staff who could be on the Brewers’ radar.
Contacted for his comments on being fired as manager of the Milwaukee Brewers today, Buck Rodgers tried to be diplomatic.
On whether he feels like he failed: “Sure, there’s a little sense of failure. I thought this club could win. I’ve never failed in my life. I don’t like to fail. But that’s all part of the game, you know that. It wasn’t exactly unexpected. I’ve had my mind made up for the last two weeks it might happen.”
Then Rodgers decided that if he were going to go down, he’d take someone with him. He went down swinging.
“I think there are a couple of cancers on the club,” he said, not mentioning their names. “I think you’ve got 18 or 19 players who want to win. You’ve got three or four who will go any way the wind blows. I’m not going to name the cancers, and I’m not going to name the ones who blow with the wind.”
… leading to speculation about to whom Rodgers was referring:
We’re left guessing about the two players he’s speaking of, but those following the team tend to believe they are Mike Caldwell and Ted Simmons.
Caldwell was often a critic of the way Rodgers handled pitchers. In fact, as recently as May 23, he made this comment to the press following a loss to the Mariners: “I don’t know. I’m just a player. I’m just trying to do my job. I don’t know if I’m getting a chance to do it.”
The Brewers also tried unsuccessfully to trade Caldwell during the winter. Knowing that the team didn’t want him likely didn’t make relationships with management or his performance on the field any easier. Caldwell is sporting a disappointing 2-4 record and 4.70 ERA.
While Ted Simmons didn’t provide the juicy quotes like Caldwell, he and Rodgers did not see eye-to-eye. Rodgers, a former catcher who prided himself on his defensive ability, was thought to prefer Ned Yost and Charlie Moore as defensive backstops. Simmons has yet to live up to the hype as an offensive producer either, and Rodgers may even prefer Don Money or Roy Howell as the DH.
In other words, Simmons was forced upon him, and Rodgers wanted him off of the team. Some believed that if Simmons stayed with the team all season, Rodgers would quit.
If Rodgers wasn’t referring to one or both of Caldwell and Simmons, he may also have been talking about Roy Howell. Howell has received very little playing time and has been a thorn in the side of the team since spring training. Unable to trade him, Howell has sulked and thrown tantrums while producing very little.
Not Howell? It could also be Gorman Thomas, Rollie Fingers or Pete Vuckovich. But at this point, we’re reaching. And to be honest, it’s why making the comment without naming names is a cowardice act.
Rodgers’ former players didn’t seem heartbroken at their former manager’s departure:
Mike Caldwell, who many believe is one of the “cancers” that Rodgers referred to, thinks that his former manager didn’t give the pitchers equal billing on the team: “He’s the one who said we didn’t have a team leader. He mentioned several players who could be leaders. None of them were pitchers. I think there are some pretty good pitchers around here who have the guts and integrity, who are the types who could be leaders.”
Cecil Cooper: “I think we needed a change. Not necessarily the manager, but something had to be done. We’re not a .500 team. Harvey told us if something is bothering us to come in and we’d talk about it. That might have been harder with Buck. Guys didn’t feel relaxed with him.”
Just two days ago, Jim Gantner seemed to know what was coming. Always willing to speak his mind, he had this to say: “You can’t fire 25 players. Sometimes the manager’s at the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s really too bad. We’re going to have to do something to shake up this club. I’m not saying fire the manager, but something has to be done to shake up the club. Make some changes somehow. That’s not my decision, though, that’s the front office.”
We know that Buck Rodgers was a bad fit. We tried to accept him for a while. We blamed a bad attitude here, bad luck there. But Brewers fans have collectively come to the realization that the reason for their team’s under performance may have been much easier to explain than we thought.
When rumors surfaced of Rodgers’ demise weeks ago, you couldn’t find a player who had their manager’s back. And whether it was Rollie Fingers, Ted Simmons, Mike Caldwell, Pete Vuckovich, Roy Howell, Jim Gantner or the countless other malcontents, someone was always spouting off.
Players weren’t happy. They didn’t respect their manager. The inmates were running the asylum, and they were plenty crazy. Should it be any wonder that they played below expectations?
Roy Howell is a role player. He never understood his role. As a result, he was never happy when each day passed by and he wasn’t on the lineup card. Isn’t this a communication issue? Howell should never be surprised about when he will or will not be playing.
Buck Rodgers lacked confidence in his starting pitchers, often giving them the hook rather than letting them fight their way through jams. Based on complaints from Mike Caldwell, it’s also possible that he lacked respect for pitchers in general. Is it any wonder that the rotation as a whole has been shaky?
In steps Harvey Kuenn, destination unknown. He’s known as a loose leader, one who wants his players to relax and have fun. He’s a communicator. He’s everything that Buck Rodgers wasn’t.
The change, whether directly or indirectly, resulted in a win. One win in one game. But what we saw were things we had seen rarely during the past two months. A starter fought through his own jam and pitched a complete game, shutting down the opposition during the final three innings. The offense was timely, collecting 12 hits. And the defense didn’t commit an error.
Most importantly? The players are happy. For the most part, that was rarely the case under Rodgers, even after a win.
Soon after being fired, Rodgers didn’t hold back when referring to two cancers on the team. Given the time to cool off, he hasn’t backed down: “I can’t say too emphatically how good this club is, except for a couple of players. I know who they are, the players know who they are and the front office knows who they are. They may have tried to stab me in the back, but they didn’t get me fired. They’ve stabbed everyone they’ve been involved with in the past, and they’ll do the same in the future.”
We shouldn’t be surprised about reports surfacing that Mike Caldwell, during a card game on the May 30 flight after a 7-3 win over the Angels, said, “I hope we lose 10 games in a row just to get rid of that sucker.”
The Brewers are littered with strong personalities. They need someone to lead them. They don’t need someone who is paranoid, constantly worried about who is trying to stab them in the back. This happens when a leader fails to communicate or loses the respect of his team.
Keep in mind this was not the same era of baseball as today for numerous reasons. There were managers known as disciplinarians who were successful — Fred Haney was not friends with his players, but won the 1957 World Series and got the Milwaukee Braves into the 1958 Series. Dick Williams took Oakland and San Diego to the World Series and Montreal to the cusp of the playoffs; Dallas Green, who was perfectly fine with his players not liking him, was the manager of the 1980 World Series-winning Phillies (who wrote an interesting book about his dealings with his players), and Earl Weaver won four pennants (three in a row) and the 1970 World Series with Baltimore. There were also managers known as, shall we say, colorful yet successful — Billy Martin took Minnesota, Detroit, the Yankees (during his four stints as manager) and Oakland to the playoffs, getting fired afterward in each case; and Tommy Lasorda won two World Series and managed in two more with, as one sportswriter put it, his “outrageous combination of pasta and theatricality.”
The pattern in pro sports for decades used to be that a team would hire a disciplinarian, get some wins (they hoped), and when the winning stopped hire a so-called “player’s” coach or manager, get more wins (they hoped), and when the winning stopped go back to the disciplinarian. Or if the franchise started with the nice guy and he failed, bring in the head-knocker. (None of this, you’ll notice, includes how well the GM does, or not, in bringing in players, nor the manager’s ability to manage in-game situations or use players correctly during the long season.)
Rodgers was far from the last manager who had to deal with players who disliked him. (Casey Stengel’s famous line about one of his Yankees teams was that one-third of his team liked him, and he was trying to keep the one-third of his team that hated him away from the one-third of his team that hadn’t made up their minds yet.) The next player who says he likes his manager but feels misused or not used enough will be the first, since the latter always outweighs the former. Rodgers was far from the last manager who appeared to have disdain for his pitchers, or vice versa, or was accused of mishandling pitchers. (Lasorda, a pitcher, was accused of burning out Fernando Valenzuela, and Martin was accused of burning out his entire starting rotation in Oakland. Sparky Anderson took disdain for beyond pitchers when he announced to his team that he had four stars — Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez — and the rest of the team, including all of the pitchers, were all, to directly quote him, “turds.” The manager known as “Captain Hook” for his pulling of starting pitchers nonetheless won five division titles, four pennants and two World Series in Cincinnati.)
But Gantner was right then (and certainly now) when he observed that it’s impossible to fire 25 players, at least during the season. Whether it was Rodgers’ fault, it was Rodgers’ responsibility, and it appears from nearly 40 years’ perspective that he failed to get his team to play better than it should have. (If the “cancers” included the three players for which Dalton traded, that probably made Dalton think it was time to change managers.
Rodgers went on to win more games than he lost as a manager, though he fit in better with a young Montreal team than he did with a veteran Brewers team. Kuenn, meanwhile, followed Rodgers’ start with a 72–43 finish, winning the AL East on the last day of the season, and then coming back from an 0–2 hole to win the American League Championship Series and go to the World Series for the only time in team history.
That, however, has yet to be covered.
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Not that my parents were paying attention, but the number one song two days into my life probably described what my mother thought about my constantly eating:
Twenty-eight years later, the number one song was by a group that sang about aging nearly two decades earlier:
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“I Can’t Breathe” George Floyd protesters have been marching in Montgomery County for the last several days.
A large group of white liberals in Maryland took their activism to the next level on Tuesday and turned a protest into a reeducation camp.
Thousands of white people were groveling in front of blacks begging for forgiveness at the Connie Morella Library in Bethesda, Maryland on Tuesday.
The crowd of mostly white people raised their hands and repeated ‘anti-racist’ slogans like a bunch of zombies during the outdoor reeducation camp.
Click on the link for video evidence if you dare.
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Jonathan Chait wrote in 2015:
The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon. “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox’s German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.
The direct costs of violent protests are fairly self-evident. People who may not have anything to do with the underlying grievances get injured or killed, their livelihoods are impaired, the communities in which the rioting takes place suffer property damage that can linger for decades, and the inevitable police response creates new dangers for innocent bystanders. The pro-rioting (or anti-anti-rioting) argument portrays this as the necessary price of worthwhile social change. Rioting can generate attention among people who might otherwise ignore the underlying conditions that give rise to it.
It is surely the case that some positive social reforms have emerged in response to rioting. Lopez highlights the Kerner Commission and diversity efforts in the Los Angeles Police Department. But the question is not whether rioting ever yields a productive response, but whether it does so in general. Omar Wasow, an assistant professor at the department of politics at Princeton, has published a timely new paper studying this very question. And his answer is clear: Riots on the whole provoke a hostile right-wing response. They generate attention, all right, but the wrong kind.
The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.
Determining just what caused the change in public opinion is obviously tricky. Wasow approaches the problem in different ways. One method he uses is to compare the public’s concern for civil rights and its concern for “social control,” with violent and nonviolent protests. They match up pretty closely. …
Wasow has another even more persuasive method. He looks at county-by-county voting and compares it with violent and nonviolent protest activity:
Examining county-level voting patterns, I find that black-led protests in which some violence occurs are associated with a statistically significant decline in Democratic vote-share in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. Black-led nonviolent protests, by contrast, exhibit a statistically significant positive relationship with county-level Democratic vote-share in the same period. Further, I find that in the 1968 presidential election exposure to violent protests caused a decline in Democratic vote-share. Examining counterfactual scenarios in the 1968 election, I estimate that fewer violent protests are associated with a substantially increased likelihood that the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would have beaten the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. As African Americans were strongly identified with the Democratic party in this time period, my results suggest that, in at least some contexts, political violence by a subordinate group may contribute to a backlash among segments of the dominant group and encourage outcomes directly at odds with the preferences of the protestors.
Wasow finds that nonviolent civil-rights protests did not trigger a national backlash, but that violent protests and looting did. The physical damage inflicted upon poor urban neighborhoods by rioting does not have the compensating virtue of easing the way for more progressive policies; instead, it compounds the damage by promoting a regressive backlash.
The Nixonian law and order backlash drove a wave of repressive criminal-justice policies that carried through for decades with such force that even Democrats like Bill Clinton felt the need to endorse them in order to win elections. That wave has finally receded and created space for sentencing reforms, demilitarization, an emphasis on community policing, and other initiatives that even have bipartisan support. If the violent protests in Ferguson and Baltimore supercede nonviolent protest, Wasow’s research implies that the liberal moment might give way to another reactionary era.
One year after Chait wrote that, Donald Trump was elected. Four years later, after a summer of (legitimate) protests that metastasized into (illegitimate) looting in cities controlled by Democrats, what will the result be in November?
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I was hours old when the Rolling Stones released “Satisfaction”:
Four years later, the Beatles released “The Ballad of John and Yoko”:
The short list of birthdays today includes Roger Brown, who played saxophone for the Average White Band …
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 