For those readers who ignore the EA baseball posts: this isn’t one, except for this brief note on baseball competence. Isiah Kiner-Falefa of the Toronto Blue Jays pulled a (as it turned out) game-losing brick in the 9th inning when he was out by a mini-micron trying to score the winning run from third base. He was out in a force play, with the catcher barely scraping home plate before the base-runner’s shoe hit it. At the time, I thought, “Why is he sliding?” then forgot about it in the excitement of the play and all that followed the rest of that incredible game. But it is being pointed out in some post-game articles this morning that if Kiner-Falefa had just run straight to the plate, he would have been safe….and there was no reason for him to slide. It isn’t hindsight. The bases were loaded. It was going to be a force play at home if the ball was hit on the ground, and it was. A slide always gets a runner to a base a bit slower than running through. The catcher, Will Smith, didn’t need to tag him, and a slide is only necessary to avoid a tag. The Jays infielder’s mental mistake lost the Series as surely as “Snodgrass’s muff” or Bill Buckner’s error (more than that one, actually), but I bet nobody remembers it in the wild collage of everything else that happened. Poor Jays catcher Kirk will feel like the goat for hitting into a DP with the tying and winning runs on base with only one out to lose the game in the 10th. . But the #1 culprit was Kiner-Falefa. An MLB player should know the rules.
Now on to more mundane matters…
1. It is doubtful that Democrat Abigail Spanberger will lose to Winsome Sears despite the former refusing to condemn her Attorney General running mate for stating emphatically that he believes in violence as a legitimate way to handle political adversaries. However, Democrats were worried enough to release this ad, portraying Sears as an “angry black woman.”
If a white male GOP candidate used this tactic on a black Democrat, he would be excoriated for racism and sexism. As an extra annoyance, Spanberger approved an ad that makes the ethically incoherent argument, crafted for people who can’t think clearly about abortion, that it is somehow extreme to oppose abortion in cases of rape and incest. If one believes that abortion is the unethical taking of a helpless human life, it doesn’t matter how that life came to be. The human being involved has just as much right to live. It’s not that difficult a concept to grasp.
2. The up-side of popular culture. Gordon Lightfoot’s creepy song about a real-life shipwreck has kept the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy from obscurity, which is the fate of the roughly 6,500 other ships that sank in the Great Lakes before that one in November of 1975. The AP takes some credit for this since Lightfoot said he was inspired to write the dirge after reading the first Associated Press story about the wreck. Now the “Edmund Fitzgerald” polls as the third most famous shipwreck after the “Titanic” and the “Lusitania.” (Wait, everyone has forgotten The Maine? ) Thus does that relatively minor historical event join others that were suddenly the object of renewed interest and scholarship because of a song or a movie. Country singer Johnny Horton had two such hits: “The Battle of New Orleans,” which is credited with bringing the War of 1812 out of the historical shadows, particularly in Great Britain, and “Sink the Bismarck,” which imprinted the story of the Royal Navy trapping a killer Nazi battleship before the U.S. entered World War II. “Jaws'” famous monologue about the S.S. Indianapolis not only increased public knowledge of that tragedy but ultimately led to the posthumous exoneration of the ship’s captain.
3. The Name Game. Yes, it is true that U.S. Presidents have had a disproportionate number of rare names compared to the general population; they also have been overwhelmingly odd ducks. Naming one’s child something strange is not recommended by child psychologists, as it tends to make a kid the object of unwanted attention and anxiety. (I had a college room mate whose name was “Worldman” and he felt like his father was setting him up to fail outsize parental expectations.) On Tablet, Rena Rafael decries the current fad among Jewish families of devising creative names (“Afternoon”) for their offspring:
“Jews, of course, are not immune to cultural trends, and what’s trendy now is “uniqueness.” To have people snickering over your kid’s moniker is the point: if people are talking about it, you’ve presumably succeeded. We live in the attention economy, after all. But it does make you wonder what kind of uniqueness my peers are seeking, because there are differences in why people choose distinctive names. Novel baby names have increased in our era of hyper-individualism, but really took off during the ‘90s, according to researchers at San Diego State University who analyzed more than 300 million baby names recorded from 1880 to 2007. In 1900, more than 90% of all kids had names among the top 1,000 most popular names. By 2000, those numbers dropped to 75% for girls and 86% for boys. As JSTOR Daily points out, the highest sustained level of creativity is found in modern African-American naming conventions, dating back over a century.”
Naming ethics is a tag at Ethics Alarms; I’ve written about it before. The short version: Naming a child something difficult to remember, spell or pronounce is only slightly less unethical than naming a boy Sue. The Boston Red Sox have a hot prospect named Jhostynxon Garcia. Everyone calls him by his nickname: “The Password.”
4. Here’s alleged comedian Wanda Sykes openly admitting racial and sexual bias, and doing so without any fear of opprobrium.
Discuss.
5. New York Times pundit watch:
A.Is it unethical to write about how the Democrats are in denial about why they lost, and to ignore the main reason why they lost? In this op-ed, Ross Douthat writes,
“It is completely obvious that the party lost in 2024 because it overcommitted to a range of unpopular left-wing positions, some of which yielded disastrous policy results (like the Biden migration wave) while others merely persuaded constituencies that had voted Democratic in the past (like blue-collar Midwesterners or culturally conservative Latino men) that the party now cared more about climate change and various academic fixations than cheap energy and good-paying jobs.”
Hmmmm….1) They aren’t “migrants,” Ross: they are illegal immigrants, and 2) Gee, what big reason is he leaving out? Something’s missing…Oh! I’ve got it! The Democrats really lost because they nominated an unqualified, inarticulate idiot who ran a terrible campaign.
B. Jamelle Bouie, always in the running when the topic of “Who is the worst, most biased, incompetent Times pundit?” comes up, offers “A Third Trump Term Is Not the Charm.” I’m not even going to provide a link, because obsessing over the Trump Derangement fear that the President will somehow force a third term on the nation is tied right now with White House ballroom hysteria as the clearest sign that a Trump-hater’s brain has left his or her skull for a weekend in Vegas.
That means, NYT, that its your responsibility not to give lunatics a platform.
6. And speaking of hate…Here’s Jonathan Turley on “The Hill”:
It seems that the left has learned how to hate. Hateful speech is in vogue as Democratic leaders ramp up violent rhetoric and political violence rises. The key is to get voters to hate your opponent so much that they forget how much they dislike you. The irony is crushing. For years, liberals have sought to criminalize hate speech while expanding the range of viewpoints considered to fall within this category. Democratic leaders, from senators to former presidential candidates, have falsely claimed that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment….What few today want to admit is that they like it. They like the freedom that it affords, the ability to hate and harass without a sense of responsibility. Rage is addictive, and it is contagious. What rage-addicts cannot tolerate are those who cling to residual impulses of decency or humanity. In an age of rage, reason is viewed as a reactionary tendency.
Yup.
Ethics Alarms 
2. As a fan of Gordon Lightfoot, I’m so glad you referenced the Edmund Fitzgerald. As you mention, shipwrecks on Lake Superior are legion, but this one achieved its lofty status because, not only did Lightfoot’s imagination take us back to that stormy night and onto the ship’s deck, radio stations had the courage to play (and listeners had the patience to listen to) an eight-and-a-half-minute song that could probably never get air time today.
Instead of the word “creepy”, I might use the word “haunting.” In fact, I did use that word years ago when writing a short piece about Lightfoot, whose birthday is just two weeks away (11/17). Here’s the full quote:
As it happens, I was afforded the opportunity to attend a Lightfoot concert when I lived in Cedar Rapids, IA in 1993. Thirty-plus years on, it still might be the best show, music-wise, I have seen.
Now I have to queue up that song again.
Thanks Jack for the reminder…and rest in peace, Mr. Lightfoot.
Fact-checking myself…because I pulled up the song and sang with Gordon. It’s six-and-a-half minutes long.
There was LOTS of BAD baserunning throughout the Series.
I believe you are correct, and most of it from the Blue Jays. One reason, I think, why they got so much traffic on the bases and so little to show for it.
I’m thinking especially of the inning in Game 7 where they started Springer on a 3-2 pitch to Guerrero, on the thinking that Vlad rarely strikes out. But his rare strikeout made a hobbled Springer a dead duck on the basepaths.
As well, thinking about it, the Blue Jays had two men who were physically unable to run well — Springer and Bichette. It kept them from taking full advantage of several hits whilst those folks were on base. And my goodness I think Springer must be black and blue all over after so many times being hit by a pitch or by his own foul balls. You could tell it hurt every time he swung the bat.
4. The notion that minorities can’t be prejudiced is preposterous.
6. Hey! Wait! You left out the obligatory book plug! What’s up with that?
Regarding names, I’m just really disappointed that I can’t get my wife to agree to Brunhilde…
For the Edmund Fitzgerald, I have to admit ignorance of the ship or the song until our stint in Ohio. And that came from an incident when I had purchased some Edmund Fitzgerald Porter from the Great Lakes brewery to share with my in-laws who were visiting. My step-father-in-law had to explain the shipwreck and the song, at which point we listened to the song, and I became further edified. I did like it, and thought it tragic, not creepy.