Birthdays today start with the singer of perhaps the most inappropriate song for a Western in the history of movies, B.J. Thomas:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Aug. 7
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Baseball player Alex Rodriguez got what might amount to a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball for his use of performance-enhancing drugs.
The suspension issued Monday is for the rest of this season and all of next season. But with 20 seasons in baseball, taking more than a year off is likely to end his career.
Wisconsinites may forget where Rodriguez’s career began. It began in Appleton, where the Foxes, Seattle’s Class A affiliate, played at ancient, amenity-free Goodland Field. My wife and I saw Rodriguez play (and not well this particular night) before the Mariners promoted him to Class AA, and then to the big club before sending him down to Class AAA just before the 1994 baseball strike so that he could continue to play. Once the strike ended, Rodriguez was in the major leagues to stay.
The Foxes were not, exactly. The next year, the Foxes moved to Grand Chute and became the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, whose Fox Cities Stadium hosts the WIAA spring baseball tournament. Rodriguez has signed a few lottery-grand-prize-size contracts — one with the Texas Rangers, two with the New York Yankees — but those days are certainly over.
David Vecsey writes about Rodriguez in his Foxes days:
In the summer of 1994, I was the clubhouse manager for the Peoria Chiefs, a job that entailed washing hundreds of dirty uniforms, setting out pregame meals and vacuuming copious amounts of chewed-up sunflower seeds out of the carpeting, all for about 40 cents an hour. Best job ever. I was paid to come to the ballpark every day, where I shagged balls in batting practice and traded obscenity-laced barbs with Jimmy Piersall. …
The No. 1 overall draft pick from the year before, Rodriguez was perhaps the top prospect in all of baseball. The Seattle Mariners had given him a $1 million signing bonus and a three-year, $1.3 million contract. Everybody in the ballpark knew he was a big deal, and his natural talent was obvious. As with any teenage phenom, the only question was whether the big deal could be the real deal. And it was trial by fire, with fans riding Rodriguez mercilessly and jeering every move he made.
I don’t recall what he did on the field over those couple of days. What I do remember was something that I, and almost nobody else, saw him do off the field. Standing outside the clubhouse one night, he peeled off a few bills from that million-dollar bonus and sent my assistant to get a stack of postgame pizzas for his teammates. …
People will puzzle over and debate this strange, spectacular athlete for years to come. And that’s fine. He deserves it. Rodriguez is responsible for his own legacy, whatever that may yet be. And I don’t begrudge anybody’s opinion of him, of his ambition or his ham-handed public-relations fiascoes. I don’t come to praise A-Rod, nor do I come to bury him.
In the end, just as I did 19 years ago at a minor league ballpark in central Illinois, I won’t remember him for whatever he did to amuse the cheering mob of the bloodthirsty coliseum. I won’t remember him for his postseason struggles or for dating Madonna or for kissing his own reflection. Or for Biogenesis. Or for eating popcorn out of Cameron Diaz’s hands. Or for any of the other ridiculous chapters this epic failure will ultimately comprise.
I’ll try to remember him as an 18-year-old with the whole world in front of him, riding the buses and buying pizza for his teammates.
The Times’ George Vecsey makes you think:
The singular event in the life of Alex Rodriguez is not his imminent suspension, or the career home run record that now will never happen.
The event that makes him so remote, so rudderless, took place when he was 9, when his father disappeared. This is not pop psychology to explain a man who blundered into the airplane propeller of adult reality. This is his own theory.
Back when he was a young major leaguer, Rodriguez would occasionally explain himself in terms of his missing father. His mother was strong and smart, and remains so to this day, but he expressed bewilderment that a father could just take off.
People who knew him in Seattle accepted that as the flaw in that apparently perfect equipment — the willowy shortstop with power, who worked so hard and innately understood the game but not life. He went from earnest to clueless, with no warning light — “always on the outside of whatever side there was,” as Dylan wrote about the gangster Joey Gallo.
Barely into his 20s, Rodriguez once told a reporter a poignant tale that in his spare time on the road he visited college campuses, like Harvard, asking students how they chose the college, and what they studied. He had once feinted toward taking a few courses at the University of Miami, probably as a negotiating tactic with the Seattle Mariners, before taking their huge bonus. Now he claimed he was sampling that alternative life — but common sense, self-protection, could not be grafted on by visiting a campus or accumulating elegant business suits.
Many athletes, many people, grow up without a parent or two. Some get through it. But Rodriguez stands on the brink of the suspension that will take him out of baseball, perhaps through the 2014 season, or forever. It is quite safe to say he would not be paying his newest set of lawyers — he is always changing authority figures — if baseball did not have a huge case against him. …
One does not have to be a Yankees fan to understand that there are two kinds of Yankee stars: Rent-a-Yankees Yankees and Real Yankees. Roger Clemens, that swaggering bully, apart from any drug or legal issues, was not a Real Yankee. Wade Boggs was just seeking the brass ring on the merry-go-round. What about Dave Winfield? Ask the Bleacher Bums to take a vote. But Paul O’Neill and Hideki Matsui became Real Yankees, instantly.
Maybe A-Rod never had a chance to be a Real Yankee, but he ruined his image permanently with his scandals and machinations and posturing. He missed the voice in his childhood saying, “Alex, cut that out.”
“Dad left us when I was 9,” Rodriguez told Bob Finnigan of The Seattle Times in the spring of 1998. “What did I know back then? I thought he was coming back. I thought he had gone to the store or something. But he never came back. … It still hurts.”
His father ran a shoe store, but after moving from New York to the Dominican Republic to Miami, he suddenly left.
“He had been so good to me, actually spoiled me because I was the baby of the family,” Rodriguez told Finnigan, adding: “I couldn’t understand what he had done. To this day, I still don’t really know how a man could do that to his family: turn his back.”
His mother remarried and did well in business, but Rodriguez said he was still upset over the split.
“After a while, I lied to myself,” Rodriguez said. “I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care. But times I was alone, I often cried. Where was my father? To this day, I still can’t get close to people.”
By contrast, Derek Jeter has a father, Charles, who was a drug counselor and a mother, Dorothy, who was an accountant, as well as a sister. The family seems to have sent him a message: “Derek, whatever you do, don’t be a jerk.” Which he never has been.
He is heading for the dreaded Sargasso Sea of sports, where banished athletes wait, becalmed, hoping for winds of pardon. Shoeless Joe Jackson, who never ratted on the plot to throw the 1919 World Series, never reached the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose hobbles around on his aging stumpy body, paying for being a knucklehead when baseball caught him betting on his team’s games, as a manager. Lance Armstrong is downsizing his life in Texas. Many behemoths of the past generation are hoping baseball writers forget why they aren’t voting all those fantastic career statistics into the Hall. And good luck with that.
Alex Rodriguez, just turned 38, is about to fade away. He never had that stern voice in his ear that said, “Alex — don’t!”
You wonder if Rodriguez’s father, wherever he is now (assuming he’s still alive), thinks about that.
A lot of people envy athletes and other celebrities, or at least the money they make. (As you know from this blog, they shouldn’t.) In older days, many star athletes had, shall we say, complicated relationships with their fathers. (That can be seen with some high school athletes today.) There may well be a disproportionate number of pro athletes who grew up not knowing their fathers, or not knowing them for very long. For many pro and college athletes today, growing up in single-parent families in poor areas, the money of sports is their only ticket out of repeating the life of their parents. Fathers are, for better or worse, the first and most important role models for boys. It’s hard to have a role model when the role model isn’t there.
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Michael Auslin of the American Enterprise Institute compares two major cities on Interstate 94 — now-bankrupt Detroit and Chicago:
Having just been downgraded three notches by Moody’s, Chicago is suddenly hearing the uncomfortable shifting of deck chairs, as people wonder if the nation’s third-largest city is about to slam into the same debt-and-pensions iceberg that sank the SS Detroit last month.
It was once inconceivable that the Motor City would become the setting for post-apocalyptic visions of burned out, abandoned neighborhoods, a corrupt and incarcerated city government, and all-but-nonexistent public services. Yet Detroit’s collapse took but a few decades. Now, the same disbelief and denial about Chicago is being heard, yet the evidence for the inescapable bill of mismanagement and bad policy is still making headlines just a few hundred miles north of the Windy City.
For all its manifest faults (such as being the world’s most dangerous global city), Chicago is not yet close to matching Detroit’s mismanagement, hollowed-out tax base, or loss of productive sectors. Neither is it the one-industry town that Detroit was, nor has it been hemorrhaging residents for decades. In fact, it is a far more vibrant place than when I was growing up here in the 1970s and 1980s, with lots more young people, gentrified neighborhoods (which, admittedly, reduces its gritty charm for an erstwhile resident), and money sloshing around. Even those decades, though, were an improvement over the city’s near-death experience in the 1960s when faced with the decline of traditional industries like steel. Then, Mayor Richard J. Daley, the “Boss,” saved the city, or at least argued that he did, by building vital transportation lifelines into the downtown, making real development of the suburbs and exurbs a viable proposition. Of course, to do so, he had to drive the Dan Ryan Expressway through vibrant ethnic neighborhoods like Little Italy. It was messy and highly controversial, but it was focused solely on making the city economically competitive again.
Today, Chicago faces another threat, shared by many Democratic municipal governments. The city may seem healthy on the surface, but its finances are shaky, to say the least. Chicago is staring at a massive, $340 million budget deficit, which, if pension plans aren’t radically changed, may open up to a $1 billion shortfall as soon as 2015. The Moody’s downgrade was tied directly to the looming budget hole and lack of progress on restructuring its pension and health-care obligations. All too predictably, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has addressed this by focusing on increasing revenue and getting a bigger slice of state taxes.
The next decade will likely determine the city’s future, and mordant urban death watchers should track every step Emanuel and City Hall makes from now on. Whatever you think about Emanuel, he’s no deer-in-the-headlights politician, and his battle with the Chicago Teachers Union last year showed his willingness to take on heavyweight opponents, regardless of the outcome. He knows that Chicago will face the same fiscal pressures Detroit did, the same political battles to preserve pension plans, and the same pressure on businesses to relocate to friendlier confines in Indiana and Wisconsin. And there’s no hope for help from the state capital: Illinois’s situation is far more dire, with unfunded pension liabilities topping $100 billion. Time will tell whether Emanuel adapts and forces Chicago to make the tough choices, or follows the Detroit model of slow, inexorable collapse.
One thing both Mayor Emanuel and Illinois governor Pat Quinn can be sure of: Their neighbors aren’t standing still. A friend who runs a Chicago food-industry business told me that one of his subcontractors looking for new land in Indiana personally was contacted by then-governor Mitch Daniels. Daniels apparently had standing orders that he be informed about any company considering relocating to Indiana, so he could reach out himself to sell them on the virtues of the state. Daniels and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker are just as sharp-eyed as Rahm Emanuel but happen to understand that the key to prosperity is creating business-friendly conditions that will lead to more and higher-paying jobs. Meanwhile, as the excellent Illinois Policy Institute reports, Illinois has the nation’s second-highest property taxes in the U.S., which comes on top of 2011’s 67 percent increase in income-tax rates. Quinn and Emanuel may win their fight to limit pension benefits, but none of that will matter if they don’t create a viable economic environment for entrepreneurs and manufacturers.
Meanwhile, society is suffering. A large part of the city’s budget deficit comes from higher-than-expected costs for public safety. Of course, with an elevated murder rate, one can see why Chicago’s Finest are putting in lots of overtime. Already, however, warnings are coming that Emanuel may have to start cutting city services to bring down the budget deficit. That could send Chicago into a Detroit-style death spiral whereby the affluent flee the ever more dangerous city, taking their tax dollars and investments with them.,
Anyone who has driven through Chicago’s northern suburbs knows that’s already happening.
Regardless of the state of Chicago’s finances, the aforementioned “world’s most dangerous city” appears to lack the ability to keep its citizens safe, as WBBM-TV reports:
Lit fireworks thrown into crowds. Purses and phones stolen. Gangs beating up people and fighting with each other on Oak Street Beach.
Those are some of the occurrences callers reported to 9-1-1 operators on the night of the July 4. …
At 9:34 p.m., a caller at the beach says a fight is breaking out: “Yeah, we need the cops down here on Oak Street Beach. There’s a whole gang of hoodlums fighting and kicking each other in the head and jumping on each other.”
A caller also mentions people trying to escape the chaos by crossing a busy roadway.
“We need cops out here ASAP,” he says.
Later, a caller reports purses being stolen at Division and Oak.
“People are running, things are getting stolen,” the caller says. “People are hitting the ground.”
Another caller says: “We’re at Oak Street Beach and there are gangs of kids beating up people here. I don’t know if there’s any cops in the area.”
The Chicago Police Department says its staffing was appropriate on July 4.
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As with any publication in which work is done in public, or the result of work is seen in public, journalism is not a profession for you if you can’t endure public second-guessing.
Right Wisconsin, part of Journal Communications, questions the editorial decisions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of Journal Communications (and by the way, I used to be part of Journal Communications);
Not even two months ago, the media, Democrats, and liberals everywhere spoke with glee about Wisconsin being ranked 49th in six month economic forecast from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve bank.
But in the matter of just two months, the economic forecast for Wisconsin has taken a stunning trajectory up.
First, the April numbers (released at the end of May) that were the topic of headlines and press releases were revised upward to rank Wisconsin at 40th.
Then, the May numbers (released in June) saw Wisconsin jump to 20th.
And with new numbers out today for June, Wisconsin is now ranked 5th in new rankings among states on their six month economic outlook. For those keeping track, that’s 40th, to 20th, to 5th in just a couple months.
And in another leading economic indicator, the coincidence index, Wisconsin ranks 2nd. …
And what of the state’s largest newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel?
Nothing.
Nothing on Tuesday. Nothing on Wednesday. Nothing [Thursday]. …A Journal Sentinel reader asked why. The answer, from assistant managing editor Chuck Melvin:Since reporting on the Philly Fed’s rankings in early June, we have determined – with input from the governor’s staff as well as state agency experts and independent economists – that the rankings’ volatility diminishes their value. The monthly index, for instance, gives great weight to each state’s monthly employment report, which is based on a small sample size with a margin of error that is sometimes greater than the number of jobs the state gains or loses in that month.
We have reported that the Philly Fed rankings are squishy, in each story we’ve written about them. Regardless, we decided that because we had played the June story on the cover of the paper, we followed with a story about the next month’s rankings – which were sharply better for Wisconsin – and used that on Page 1A as well. The jump in the rankings, however, was another clue to the volatility of the numbers – not a sign that the state had, over the course of a single month, suddenly become either a leader or a trailer. And we also noted that the previous month’s rankings had been revised sharply, reinforcing their questionable nature.
So we pointed out the flaws in the data, and we then came to the conclusion that the Philly Fed rankings were too unreliable to be reported on a monthly basis. After one report on the rankings that could be viewed as negative for Wisconsin and another that could be viewed as positive, we decided it was a disservice to continue reporting this as if it meant more than it does.
We are well aware of how politically sensitive, and even emotional, any story on job creation or the economy can be. We have done many, many stories about the state’s economy, and suggesting that there is some political bias in them, in any direction, is simply not borne out by the facts. We keep our economic reporting politically impartial and factual to the best of our ability. (The state workforce agency, in fact, just today sent out a notice highlighting our story on the national growth in construction jobs, pointing out Eau Claire’s prominence in the report.)
Which generates this response:
We are supposed to believe that this month’s decision just coincidentally happened when the data shows that the outlook for Wisconsin’s economy is among the best in the nation.
Dead tree fail.
But they’ll dismiss these concerns as merely emotional. As emotional as say, deciding whether or not to subscribe?
Truth be told, “subscribe” is less of a threatening word in that last sentence as “advertise.”
My first thought is that if you’re going to be criticized one way or the other, being right, as in correct, is better than being consistent. If you agree, though, then you better have a good explanation for why you’re not being consistent.
If the Journal Sentinel had a reputation for down-the-middle, unbiased reporting that lets the reader decide, then Melvin’s response would be more persuasive. I doubt you could find five conservatives in this state who would believe the Journal Sentinel engages in down-the-middle, unbiased, reporting.that lets the reader decide.
Part of this is because of the Journal Sentinel’s habit of putting columnists with opinions somewhere besides the opinion pages. The most egregious offender in this regard was Eugene Kane, who got to spout off his opinions on the left-side column of a news page. Kane was joined by Whitney Gould, formerly of The Capital Times (to the surprise of no one who read her), who espoused building owners’ spending more of their own money on aesthetic improvements to suit her taste, and government expansion to further enforce her aesthetic standards. That’s one way you get a reputation for bias. It’s not that they gave Kane a column; it’s where the column was. Not replacing the one actually conservative columnist they had, Patrick McIlheran, with a staff columnist after McIlheran left is another.
The Journal Sentinel now has a group of blogs they call “Purple Wisconsin,” which includes conservatives Rick Esenberg, Aaron Rodriguez and Christian Schneder and right-leaning Jay Miller. Lest you give the JS points for that, only Schneider’s column appears in the printed version, as do the thoughts of Kane and liberals John Gurda and James E. Causey. And for a newspaper that claims to be a statewide newspaper, none of the Journal Sentinel’s column-writers appear to pay much attention outside the 414 area code except for state politics.
(The C(r)apital Times deserves something, though I’m not sure what, for its at least consistent “reporting” of the story the JS eschewed: “Those banking on Wisconsin’s economy tanking in hopes it might cost Gov. Scott Walker his re-election are not going to like the latest numbers from the Philly Fed.” Ideologie über alles, or perhaps that should be Идеология над всеми.)
Meanwhile, the Chattanooga, Tenn., Times Free Press wrote a scathing editorial of Barack Obama’s latest focus on jobs, headlined by “Take Your Jobs Plan and Shove It, Mr. President.” Which increased unemployment, because the writer of the headline, editorial page editor Drew Johnson, was fired for that headline.
The Times Free Press explained thusly:
The headline was inappropriate for this newspaper. It was not the original headline approved for publication, and Johnson violated the normal editing process when he changed the headline. The newspaper’s decision to terminate Johnson had nothing to do with the content of the editorial, which criticized the president’s job creation ideas and Chattanooga’s Smart Grid. The Free Press page has often printed editorials critical of the president and his policies.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press is unique in that it has two editorial pages, the conservative Free Press page and the liberal Times page. This newspaper places high value on expressions of divergent opinion, but will not permit violations of its standards.
Johnson has a different view, as reported by the Times Free Press’ competitor, the online Chattanoogan:
Soon after his dismissal, Mr. Johnson sent out this tweet, “I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper’s most-read article.” . . .
He also wrote, “The policy I ‘broke’ did not exist when I ‘broke’ it. It was created after people complained about the headline & was applied retroactively. Any time the paper wanted to change the headline online (which is how most people read the editorial), they could’ve.
“We change headlines all the time at the last minute. I had a filler headline in that stunk and thought of that Johnny Paycheck song.”
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto is a bit skeptical of both sides:
TFP management says it fired Johnson for a violation of procedure, but it’s abundantly clear that a disagreement over content is at the heart of this dispute. The TFP statement acknowledges deeming the Johnson headline “inappropriate.”
That strikes us as a highly defensible position. To be sure, Johnson’s play on “Take This Job and Shove It” was a clever pop-culture reference. When he wrote the headline, he was evidently focused on the cleverness, not on the rudeness of the exhortation to “shove it.” Conservatives who think the firing unjust and politically biased might want to ask if they would have the same reaction if the scenario were reversed and a liberal editorialist were fired over a similar headline addressed to George W. Bush.
Johnson has a defender in Betsy Phillips of Nashville Scene, an alternative weekly. A liberal and two-time Obama voter, Phillips calls the headline “rude and unwelcoming,” but she argues there’s nothing wrong with being rude to the president: “He is not our king.” She thinks the Johnson-TFP dispute emblematic of a clash among Tennessee Republicans between “the brash folks who tell it like they see it” and “the folks who think putting on a polite, reasonable face is important.”
But one could just as easily construe that as a justification for Johnson’s termination. If the TFP’s owners wish the Free Press’s editorial page to be a voice for “polite, reasonable” Republicans, they are within their rights, and it seems a sensible thing to do, to let go an editor who is a poor fit because he turns out to be too “brash.”
All that said, the TFP’s claim that Johnson was fired for violating editorial procedures is incredible. He tells the Daily Caller that the rule in question was imposed in reaction to the disputed editorial headline: “I was fired retroactively for violating a policy that was not in place when I violated the policy.”
The “policy” does sound like a pretense–an effort by management to duck responsibility for what was in fact a decision based on editorial content (a decision, we should note, that is likely to offend a substantial minority of the paper’s readers). And whether the policy was established before or after the fact, it is, quite simply, bizarre. What kind of newspaper gives a man the title “editorial page editor” while denying him the authority to write headlines for editorials?
Phillips is right, by the way. In the same sense that Gov. Scott Walker shouldn’t complain about being criticized in print (and as far as I know, he hasn’t complained), journalists are under no obligation to be, in Phillips’ words, the opposite of “rude and welcoming,” because neither Obama nor any other politician is our king.
The only daily newspaper I worked for was considerably smaller than the Times Free Press, or the Journal Sentinel for that matter. But in a quarter-century in print journalism, my understanding of the title “editor” is that you are responsible for every word in the newspaper that is put there by people who answer to you. That includes editorial page editors. So one concludes that the Times Free Press fired Johnson because management above Johnson couldn’t stand the heat they must have gotten from fans of Obama. (Who undoubtedly would not have complained about a similar headline addressed to a Republican president.) If the headline was that egregious, it seems to me someone with a shorter title —say, “editor” — should have gotten the ax, because the unacceptable (by their definition) headline got into print.
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First, a non-rock anniversary: Today is the 91st anniversary of the first broadcasted baseball game, on KDKA in Pittsburgh: Harold Arlen described Pittsburgh’s 8–0 win over Philadelphia.
Today in 1966, the Beatles recorded “Yellow Submarine” …
… and “Eleanor Rigby” …
… while also releasing their “Revolver” album.
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The first birthday today isn’t a rock music birthday, but fans of the trumpet have to recognize Louis Armstrong:
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Today in 1963, two years and one day after the Beatles started as the house band for the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the Beatles performed there for the last time.
Three years later, the South African government banned Beatles records.
Five years later and one year removed from the Beatles, Paul McCartney formed Wings.
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One of the first Milwaukee Brewers I can remember, first baseman George Scott, died Monday.
Scott was arguably the first Brewers star. He came up with the Boston Red Sox …
then was traded to Milwaukee before the 1972 season. He was a teammate of an 18-year-old shortstop, Robin Yount, and career home run leader Henry Aaron for Aaron’s final two seasons.
Scott generated national notice by leading the American League in runs batted in and tying for the lead in home runs with Reggie Jackson in 1975.
The Hardball Times remembers Scott fondly, beginning with a necklace he wore:
When a curious reporter asked him to identify the material that comprised the necklace, Scott answered matter-of-factly, “Second basemen’s teeth.” Whatever the actual composition of the necklace, the jewelry made the feared slugger that much more intimidating when he strolled to the plate or delivered a rolling block on a middle infielder.
Much like his contemporary, Dick Allen, Scott wore a helmet while playing first base for most of his career. Scott began wearing the helmet because of the idiotic behavior of some fans on the road who threw hard objects his way. Rather than take any additional chances, Scott ditched the usual soft cap for a hard helmet. He continued the practice, both at home and away, for the rest of his career.
The helmet and the necklace were ever-present during games in the 1970s, but Scott had another unusual fashion habit that trademarked his pre-game workouts. During his second stint with the Red Sox, Scott wore a rubberized suit in an attempt to lose some of the weight near his midsection. As Don Zimmer revealed in the first of his two books with New York sportswriter Bill Madden, Scott managed to sweat off a few pounds during each workout, but by the time the start of the game rolled around, Boomer seemed to have gained all of the weight back. Whatever he tried, he just couldn’t rid himself of the excess poundage.
Scott’s weight, helmet, and necklace tended to distract from one other important consideration: He was a very, very good player. Amazingly agile for a man his size, Scott’s quickness, footwork, and soft hands made him arguably the best defensive first baseman of the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Perhaps only the Dodgers’ Wes Parker was better.) At the plate, Scott had “light tower” power. When he connected, his ferocious swing and sheer strength produced an array of tape measure home runs. …
The 1968 season saw Scott begin the year in a deep and mysterious slump from which he could not recover that summer. He batted a meager .171 with three home runs in 124 games. It was a lost season, but Scott bounced back to put up decent numbers in each of the next three seasons. A 24-home run campaign in 1971 had some thinking that Scott would remain in Boston for years, but the Red Sox decided to take advantage of his growing trade value and turn him in for some speed and pitching. The Sox packaged Scott with outfielders Billy Conigliaro and Joe Lahoud, catcher Don Pavletich, and pitchers Jim Lonborg and Ken Brett, sending them to the Brewers for 30/30 outfielder Tommy Harper, right-handers Lew Krausse and Marty Pattin, and minor league outfielder Pat Skrable.
The massive 10-player deal took Scott away from friendly Fenway Park and into the relatively unfamiliar environ of County Stadium. Though he hit only seven home runs in Milwaukee that summer, he put up a better OPS at home than he did on the road. For the entire season, Scott hit 20 home runs while adding the surprising dimension of 16 stolen bases. He remained a solid player, earning MVP votes and winning a Gold Glove in each of his first three seasons with the Brewers. In 1973, he batted a career-high .306 while actually increasing his power output.
In 1975, Scott’s bat exploded. Reaching career highs with 36 home runs and 109 RBIs, Boomer tied Reggie Jackson for the league lead in the former category and captured the league crown in the latter. He also paced all league hitters in total bases. With his violent, all-out swing and raw power, Scott emerged as the most feared right-handed hitter in the American League.
After a downturn in 1976, the Brewers decided to cut bait with their 32-year-old slugger. The Red Sox, looking for another right-handed slugger, thought it was a good time to bring back their former first baseman. They sent the left-handed hitting Cecil Cooper to the Brewers for Scott and veteran outfielder Bernie Carbo.
Enormously popular in Boston, Scott enjoyed a happy homecoming with the Red Sox. He blasted 33 home runs and slugged an even .500. Scott helped the Red Sox win 97 games, but Boston ran second to the eventual world champions in New York. …
As fine a player as Scott was, he had even great impact as one of the game’s most colorful characters of the 1970s. Friendly and outgoing, Scott happily chatted with fans and regularly signed autographs at the ballpark. Willing to talk after both wins and losses, he readily provided quotes to members of the media, whether in Boston or Milwaukee. He even developed his own terminology, referring to home runs as “taters.” (Other players, like Reggie Jackson, caught on and began to talk about hitting taters, too.) Scott also had a nickname for the dark first baseman’s mitt that he used, calling it “Black Beauty.”
Scott played in the first Brewers game I ever saw, against California (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or something like that) and pitcher Nolan Ryan June 14, 1975. Aaron homered, the game ended on a 4–6–3 double play, and the Brewers won 6–4. (And Aaron waved at me after the game, thus cementing his place as my favorite baseball player of all time.)
Boston sportswriter Leigh Montville remembers Scott’s two Red Sox stints:
He was a sweetheart. That was what he was, this one-time leader of the American League in home runs and runs batted in, winner of eight Gold Gloves, who died on Monday, sick and old before his time at 69 in Greenville, Miss. There were pieces of Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson in him, mixed with pieces of Jackie Gleason and Falstaff and, I don’t know, maybe Louis Armstrong and maybe your father’s brother, the big guy who comes to the house and makes everybody laugh for the entire evening.
He moved through his nine seasons in Boston, 14 in the major leagues, with thunder and charm. As soon as he arrived at Fenway Park in the summer of 1966, he dropped the word “tater” into the baseball lexicon as a better word for “home run” and promised to make so much money that he would be “driving an Oldsmobile with a Cadillac hitched up behind.” How could anyone not fall in love with a ballplayer like this?
He had a squeaky, different voice for a big man, memorable from the first time you heard it. He boasted in that voice. He pouted. He laughed. He complained. The voice made you smile, no matter what the words were. …
In baseball, his rookie season was a fine window to his future. He led the American League with 152 strikeouts. He also led the league in grounding into double plays with 25. Oh, wait a minute, he also hit 27 home runs and drove in 90 runs. Switched from third base to first, a position so new to him he had to find a glove to play it, he became a stylist, a dancer, a vacuum cleaner around the bag. He was selected to the All-Star team, first year at the position, and named that new glove “Black Beauty.”
A strikeout or a homer. That was George Scott’s modus operandi at the plate. The fielding was his constant. …
He would have two stints in Boston, traded to the Milwaukee Brewers in 1972, traded back to the Red Sox in 1977 for two more years, then part of a third. The 1975 season was his statistical best, as he led the league with 36 taters, 109 RBIs. He would finish his career with 271 taters, a .268 batting average, numbers that probably should have been better, could have been better, but at least were real. He probably never lifted a weight during his career, certainly never ingested a steroid. He was a big man doing big man things.
He was natural. He was clean. He was fun.
“Is it true that you once hit a ball onto the Massachusetts Turnpike?” a Boston radio host asked the Boomer last year, talking about the highway that runs well behind the left field wall at Fenway.
“I don’t know,” that voice replied, last time I heard it. “But I hit some that were going in that direction.”
Scott was one of the players who personified ’70s baseball. Jim Bouton, Seattle Pilots pitcher and author of Ball Four, wrote that as of 1969 the baseball establishment’s idea of color was a player’s wearing his cap at a “jaunty angle.” By the time Scott arrived in Milwaukee, baseball had Afros (even among white players), creative facial hair (see the photo), creative accessorizing (see Scott’s necklace) and jerseys ranging from Cleveland’s blood red (which made first baseman Boog Powell look like a giant tomato) to Oakland’s kelly green to Houston’s “tequila sunrise” multiple colors.
The Brewers traded Scott back to the Red Sox in exchange for a left-handed-hitting first baseman who couldn’t seem to get into the Sox lineup regularly. That would be Cecil Cooper. That trade worked out well for the Brewers.
Scott was fondly remembered in Milwaukee, though, to being honored with his own bobblehead:
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I try to avoid discussing politics in this space on Fridays, but a moment of economic stupidity took place earlier this week.
I wrote earlier this week about New York Post columnist Kyle Smith’s claim that a McDonald’s McDouble, for $1, is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history.”
That corresponded with a series of strikes, including in Milwaukee, by McDonald’s workers (led by a $130,000-per-year labor leader) who want their pay doubled from the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. (Which is not McDonald’s average salary.) Some threatened to contaminate food, which is an excellent way to make sure no one eats fast food, which would result in higher unemployment among minimum-wage workers, wouldn’t it?
Regular readers would rightly conclude I am skeptical about the minimum wage anyway. The New York Times took the correct position in 1987 that the proper minimum wage is zero. Businesses pay their employees as little as they can, because a business’ first responsibility is to make a profit; no profit, no business. Labor is generally the largest expense for a business, and businesses that pay their employees more than they can afford end up with higher prices than their competitors and lose business as a result. Ultimately, an employee is paid based on the costs — mostly, but not all, financial — of replacing that employee. That’s why valued employees make more money than less-valued employees.
The majority of minimum wage workers are teenagers and young adults, people who are paid what they are because they are new in the workforce and therefore have few provable workplace skills, and because there is a lot of available labor for that salary in the workforce. (I got hired for my first part-time job 32 years ago right about now, a bus boy at the late Bridgeman’s Restaurant and Ice Cream Parlour near Fire Station 5 in Madison, for $3.35 per hour. It took me about eight months to get that job, two months after my 16th birthday, a traditional hiring age.) The average family income of a minimum-wage worker is not $15,080 per year (what you’d make in a year of full-time work at $7.25 per hour), it’s more than $53,000 per year.
The Huffington Post earlier this week reported claims from University of Kansas student Arnobio Morelix that if McDonald’s doubled its employees’ pay, the price of their food would increase only 17 percent.
That got noticed by self-admitted Big Mac eater Adam Elliott of WOLX in Madison:
68 cents is literally chump change to me. 17 cents on top of a Dollar Menu item is even less of a concern to me. If the research in this article is valid, then Isay we should just chalk up the extra cost as a personal tax for eating food that we know isn’t very good for us. Jeesh! 68 cents?! Give those poor workers a raise already.
The first problem with Elliott’s opinion is based on those eight words, “if the research in this article is valid.” It isn’t. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto begins:
Morelix’s “study” has a back-of-the-envelope quality to it. He looks at the company’s 2012 annual report and observes that its labor costs amounted to 17% of its total revenue. Therefore, he concludes, the consequence of doubling wages would be a 17% price rise–17 cents on a Dollar Menu item, times 4 for the $4 Big Mac.
There’s a let-them-eat-cake quality about [Puffington Host writer Caroline] Fairchild’s dismissive reference to a 17% increase in prices. Sixty-eight cents may not amount to much, and the hypothetical increase in the cost of a single meal, even adding fries and Coke, would break hardly anybody’s bank.
But people have to eat several times a day, every day. “Working- and middle-class families make up the bulk of McDonalds customers,” as blogger Tom Maguire notes. A 17% increase in one’s food budget would be much harder for them to bear than for a comfortably salaried professional journalist or for someone who is independently wealthy and thus can afford to write gratis for the Puffington Host …
The aforementioned Tom Maguire picks up from there by actually reading the entire McDonald’s Corp. annual report:
From the Consolidated Statement of Income (p. 30) we see that “Payroll and Employee Benefits” came to $4,710.3 (in millions, or $4,710,300,000, which is even past A-Rod territory.) Total Revenue was $27,567 (in millions). Dividing 4,710 by 27,567 yields 17.1%, which we take to be the 17% used by Morelix.
However! McDonalds reports a net revenue from both the stores it operates and its franchise fees. The McDonalds franchisors are separate businesses which pay a fee to McDonalds Corp and are responsible for their own payroll, as is discussed in the annual report (p. 13).
So Morelix has not included the payroll figure for the franchisees in this calculation. Is that a big problem? Huge, actually. From page 11 we see that their are 6,598 outlets run directly by McDonalds Corp and 27,882 franchised outlets. Sales from franchised outlets totalled $69,687 (in million) in 2012, which far exceeds the $18,602 (mm) revenue figure for company-operated stores. That $69 billion figure is condensed down to $8.9 billion of franchise revenue on the Consolidated Statement of Income (The rest of the $27,567 MM in total revenue comes from sales at McDonalds run stores).
Which leaves us where? Doubling all the salaries at McDonalds headquarters and in their 6,598 stores would be offset by a total revenue increase of 17%, but the franchisees won’t be agreeing to pay more in franchise fees and won’t be raising their payroll (the size of which we haven’t found in this report) in the 27,882 stores they operate. And yes, that slides right past the question of how to deal with their international operations.
If I were inclined to press down this road I would compare the $18 billion of revenue from McDonalds run stores with the payroll figure of $4.7 billion; that ratio is 26%. By that calculation, McDonalds would need to raise all its prices by 26% at its own stores in order to double all of its direct payroll expenses, which presumably includes a lot of non-hamburger flippers at headquarters. Hey, 17%, 26%, de nada – that is only a 50% error and it’s not my money anyway!
Or from a different tack – the McDonalds-operated stores average $2.8 million in sales per store. The franchisees average $2.5 million per store, so they are on average a bit smaller but close enough that maybe we can wave our hands and pretend they are the same. That suggests that if the franchisees cost structure looks like the parent company then they can double their payroll and recoup the additional expense by raising prices by 26%.
Of course, that is a big if. And it assumes that there are no elasticities – consumers don’t switch to Wendy’s, franchisees don’t finally buy that expensive whiz-bang machine that eliminates two jobs, and so on. One might argue that if minimum wage legislation obliged Wendy’s and other fast food chains to also raise payroll costs that all of them would be obliged to raise prices and some of the consumer substitution would be mitigated. One might also wonder why McDonalds and their franchisees have been so beneficient as to forebear a 26% price increase, taking all that new revenue straight to the bottom line. Have they forgotten to be greedy, or are they already charging as much as they think consumers will pay?
Moreever, there is yet another problem. The fundamental premise is that McDonalds customers will pay more, thereby raising the living standard of the McDonalds employees. That would be fine if Mitt Romney and his sons were over-represented in the McDonalds demographic, but I bet they aren’t. My guess is that working- and middle-class families make up the bulk of McDonalds customers, which means the working class and middle class will be reaching into their non-capacious pockets to elevate the lifestyle of McDonalds workers, not all of whom are themselves in the working class. …
House Representative Keith Ellison (D, MN) loves the idea of McDonalds charging more to pay more. …
“I would pay $0.17 for somebody to be able to feed their family,” Ellison stated.
Seventeen cents?!? Big spending from a Congressman making well over $100K. But here in reality, we are asking Joe Walmart to pay an extra dollar on a four dollar tab to boost the fortunes of Jane McDonald. Since a Big Mac meal already runs more than that, well, mangia!
Smith also noticed that most of McDonald’s customers are of the working class and middle class, defined for purposes of today’s blog as someone who makes less money than a government employee in Madison. To actual working people with families, a 26-percent more expensive trip to McDonald’s is, to quote Vice President Joe Biden out of context, a big f—ing deal. It’s not as if a McDonald’s McDouble that formerly cost you $1 will cost you $1.26 (plus tax) tomorrow; it’s that it will cost you 26 percent more every single time you buy it.
And forget Elliott’s occasional Big Macs. If I get a McDouble ($1), small French fries ($1.19), and sweet tea ($1), the total with tax will be $3.37. If the Dollar Menu becomes the $1.26 Menu, my two Dollar Menu-and-small-fries meal now costs $4.24. If I ate that every weekday for lunch, I would have to pay an additional $226.20 over a 52-week year. Given what I know about the salaries paid in radio, I doubt $226 per year is chump change for Elliott or his WOLX colleagues.
When the $20 trip to McDonald’s for your family of four becomes a $25 trip to McDonald’s, you will be making fewer trips to McDonald’s. You may go to Burger King, Wendy’s, or some place where the food costs less, or you may not go out at all. Either way, less business for McDonald’s means less employment by McDonald’s.
Which the Huffington Post had to admit Wednesday:
On Monday, The Huffington Post published a story entitled “Doubling McDonald’s Salaries Would Cause Your Big Mac To Cost Just 68¢ More.” HuffPost has since learned that the research used as the basis of the story contains significant errors that cast doubts on its claims. This story has replaced the one originally published in this space. …
A typical fast-food restaurant spends 30 to 35 percent of its income on labor, according to a recent release from the Employment Policies Institute, a research organization whose work is often cited by those who argue against increasing the minimum wage. The institute estimates that small-business owners who run McDonald’s franchises spend about a third of their income on wages, which would mean the price of a Big Mac would go up by $1.28 to $5.27. …
By the reckoning of Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant industry analyst at market information and advisory firm the NPD Group, a doubling of wages for all McDonald’s workers is “not even in the realm of feasibility.” With fewer and fewer Americans eating out at restaurants due to factors like the payroll tax hike and increases in gas prices, Riggs said restaurants like McDonald’s are trying to discount prices as much as possible to get customers through the door. This means the company’s profit margins could not withstand a labor cost increase of this magnitude, she added.
While we’re on the subject, let’s also repeat a point Smith made:
Driving up McDonald’s wage costs would drive up the price of burgers for millions of poor people. “So what?” say activists. Maybe that’ll drive people to farmers markets.
For the average poor person, it isn’t a great option to take a trip to the farmers market to puzzle over esoteric lefty-foodie codes. (Is sustainable better than organic? What if I have to choose between fair trade and cruelty-free?) Produce may seem cheap to environmentally aware blond moms who spend $300 on their highlights every month, but if your object is to fill your belly, it is hugely expensive per calorie.
Junk food costs as little as $1.76 per 1,000 calories, whereas fresh veggies and the like cost more than 10 times as much, found a 2007 University of Washington survey for the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. A 2,000-calorie day of meals would, if you stuck strictly to the good-for-you stuff, cost $36.32, said the study’s lead author, Adam Drewnowski.
“Not only are the empty calories cheaper,” he reported, “but the healthy foods are becoming more and more expensive. Vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods.” Where else but McDonald’s can poor people obtain so many calories per dollar?
And as for organic — the Abercrombie and Fitch jeans of food — if you have to check the price, you can’t afford it. (Not that it has any health benefits, as last year’s huge Stanford meta-study showed.)
Moreover, produce takes more time to prepare and spoils quickly, two more factors that effectively drive up the cost. Any time you’re spending peeling vegetables is time you aren’t spending on the job.
“Any time you’re spending peeling vegetables is time you aren’t spending” doing anything else. McDonald’s got to where it is today because it conveniently provides inexpensive food of consistent quality. (That’s why they call it “fast food.”) If you have little money in your pocket, you’re away from your home and you have limited time, you know what you are likely to get from the McDonald’s near you anywhere in the U.S.
And for those who do, try something that isn’t on the visible menu — a McGangBang (double cheeseburger and McChicken in one sandwich) or a Land, Sea and Air Burger (Big Mac, McChicken and Filet io’ Fish) or a Monster Mac. Add a McLeprechaun (Shamrock and chocolate shake) or Neapolitan (chocolate, strawberry and vanilla), and make sure your next physical is at least a month out.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
