Baseball HOF = Sanctimonious Hypocrisy

12 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Youth

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Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Baseball, Baseball Hall of Fame, Baseball Writers Association of America, BBWAA, Exclusion, HOF, HOF Voting, Major League Baseball, PEDs, Race, Racial Exclusion, Sanctimony

The front entrance to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, NY, July 15, 2012. (Beyond My Ken via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons 3.0.

Major League Baseball has made a couple of headlines in the past few days to remind us of the Whiteness that goes beyond its four-seamed ball. Between Alex Rodriguez’s deserved second-suspension and the constant weirdness of the Baseball Writers Association of America’s Hall of Fame voting, the sport’s continuing sense of self-importance and piled-high-and-deep hypocrisy knows no bounds.

I stopped watching baseball nearly twenty years ago, and lost interest in the sport right around the time Barry Bonds won the second of his seven (7) MVP awards, that one with the Pittsburgh Pirates in ’92. But lack of interest never compelled me to completely ignore baseball news. And with the ongoing attempt of MLB and the BBWAA to forget about a sixteen-year period in which both ignored the prominence of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) has come a shunning of potential HOF players (Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire excepted) year after year.

Dung heap mixed with farmyard straw, near Granborough, England, UK, May 12, 2007. (David Hawgood via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons 2.0.

My rule would be simple for the simpleton set of baseball writers who worship at the altar of the holier-than-thou, folks whose mindset is best represented by mouthpieces like Mike Lupica and Bob Costas. If you turned a nearly blind eye to the falling of baseball records to the likes of Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, et al. between ’88 and ’03, then you should vote most — if not all — of the folks with HOF numbers into Cooperstown. Otherwise, you’re hypocrites, and your stances now are ones that reek of bullshit.

Your group, your sport and your HOF continues to be the most hypocritical of all the major American sports. You excluded Black and duskier-Latino players from baseball throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Yet you worship the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, uber-racist Ty Cobb and Cy Young as the all-time platinum-gold standards of the sport, knowing that this can’t be really true. You excluded generations of players from your sport, only voting them into your HOF once they were gray, hobbled and/or in the grave. If this isn’t hypocrisy at its highest, then Richard Nixon should’ve never resigned from office in ’74!

I’ve got another rule for the sanctimonious HOF voters to think about. Until you reconsider the HOF and asterisk the sacrosanct records of the game prior to April 15, 1947, don’t talk to me and the public about PED users as the scourge of the sport. You didn’t seriously complain about it in your reports and columns before ’01, so stop sitting on your guilt-ridden hands now.

Cold Snap 1994

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Cold Snap, John Modell, Media Coverage, Polar Vortex, The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

East Cold Wave Compared To 1994, January 13, 2009. (http://www.accuweather.com).

This week’s so-called polar vortex is hardly the coldest weather I’ve ever experienced, whether living in New York, Pittsburgh or DC, or visiting places like Chicago and New Hampshire in the dead of winter. But like all things driven by traditional and social media coverage, anything that happened five minutes ago becomes the penultimate event of all time.

But imagine a day that was so cold that when the temperature rose to -20°C (that’s -4°F) three days later, it felt like a heat wave. A day that produced multiple states of emergency for much of the country. A day where your windows had thick sheets of ice on their panes, and your breath turned into icicles before you started to take in air.

I’m remembering a day twenty years ago exactly like that, one very different from the current cold snap across much of the Northern US right now. And yes, the term is and will always be cold snap, as a vortex conjures end-of-times climate change similar to the movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Torrents of snow fell in the ‘Burgh, in New York, in Chicago and DC. So much snow fell in Pittsburgh that both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon shut down — something that only happens on near apocalyptic days. By the end of that month, Pittsburgh had already set a seasonal record for snowfall at 96 inches. Of course, that was nothing compared to Chicago, Cleveland or Buffalo that winter.

Frozen Pittsburgh, panoramic three rivers shot, January 7, 2014. (Steve Mellon, http://www.post-gazette.com).

What made it worse was the record cold weather. Over the course of nine days, between January 10 and 19, the temperature fell from a bearable 15° to 10, 8° , 5°, -2°, -10°, -15°, and to -22° on Wednesday, January 19, ’94. The wind chill that day made it feel like -50°. New York was -15° that day, and DC a balmy -11°. Only Chicago had it worse in terms of major cities, a -26° degree day with Lake Michigan wind chills of -70°. It snowed on most of those days, making conditions about as bad as living in Fairbanks, Alaska in the dead of winter.

I awoke to a cold studio apartment on January 19, even though the heat was at full blast and I’d sealed my windows with plastic. I turned on the TV, and found that the Pennsylvania governor had declared a state of emergency because of the cold and because the state’s electrical grid was on the verge of collapse. All businesses, schools, and colleges, as well as all non-essential state work, was to stop that day to preserve energy so that we wouldn’t freeze to death. To a business, everyone complied with the governor’s order.

Everyone except Carnegie Mellon, that is. They cited that they were a private and not a state institution as the reason for them not shutting down that day. Never mind that students who lived off campus would have to brave the killer temperatures to come to class. Or the fact that Pitt, a private institution with far more students than Carnegie Mellon, only two blocks away, was completely shut down. Or the fact that Carnegie Mellon, like the rest of the state, relied on the same overloaded power grid and was stretching limited resources.

So I prepared to go to my 2 pm course. Normally I would’ve walked the 2.75 miles from East Liberty to campus. Even I recognized that -22 was too cold for me to be out in for more than a half-hour, and this a forty minute walk for me in the ice and snow. I wore long-johns and sweats, two layers of socks insulted in plastic Giant Eagle bags that I’d put in my high-tops. I wore six layers of upper body clothing, snapped my hood on my winter jacket, pulled down my black wool cap to my eye lids, and wrapped my blue scarf around my mouth and neck.

I tried to time the bus so that I wouldn’t outside more than a few minutes. With the twenty-mile-per-hour wind gusts, it was like someone was trying to suck the life out of me. It hurt to breathe. Yet I found it funny to feel the icicles forming on my nose hairs and mustache. I took the first bus that came, the old 71C, which didn’t stop close to Carnegie Mellon, did stop right across the street from the Cathedral of Learning, about a half-mile from Baker Hall and my class.

Pitt, of course, was a ghost town. On the bridge that connected Pitt to Schenley Park and the southern entrance to Carnegie Mellon, two idiot joggers passed me, proving once again the dominance of brave alpha males in their attempts to control the world.

Michigan lighthouse entombed by ice, St. Joseph, Michigan, January 6, 2014. (Thomas Zakowski, HotSpot Media, via http://dailymail.co.uk).

Upon entering Baker Hall, I was told by security that Carnegie Mellon was closing after all. I learned from the departmental office that the governor had personally called the president of Carnegie Mellon and ordered the closing under the threat of a $1 million-per-day fine, or something pretty close to that. So the elitist university was shutting down after all, at 2 pm. We could all go home. Or so we thought. John Modell decided that our classes were too precious to cancel over a little thing like a state of emergency. Now I knew that the man had taught for years at U Minnesota, so -22 for him was just a normal winter day, I guessed.

An hour later, with the heat off, we could all see our breath as Modell yammered on and on about cultural anthropology and the meaning of objectivity in that discipline. All I know was that it was way too cold to sit in a classroom wondering what would kill us first, Modell’s disjointed diatribes or the bitter cold classroom. If we’d been ten years younger, Modell would’ve gone to jail.

Finally, Modell released us from his professorial grip, around 3:20 pm. He even acknowledged that is was just too cold to continue class. “We’ll make this up next week,” he said. Yeah, as if he couldn’t have said that an hour before.

Lies We Tell Each Other When In College

04 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Big Lies, Campus Climate, College Culture, College Retention, College Success, Dishonesty, Disidentification Hypothesis, Grade Inflation, Higher Education, Lying, Stereotype Threat

Every lie is two lies quote, Robert Brauilt, January 4, 2014. (http://izquote.com).

Every lie is two lies quote, Robert Brauit, January 4, 2014. (http://izquotes.com).

I thought about posting this at the beginning of this week, but decided against it, figuring that I should end ’13 on a more positive tip. But it must be said that one of the critical issues that we in higher education face in terms of college retention and success is the sheer lack of honesty surrounding student performance, especially in the first year or two of any student’s enrollment. No, I’m not talking about grade inflation — for students doing okay, especially at elite colleges, that’s another rampant issue. It’s about the lies students tell themselves, each other and their loved ones about their performance prior to either being caught in a web of them or, worse still, dropping out altogether.

As a college student and as a professor, I found and find it fascinating and disheartening when I’ve learned of the fantasy life of a student’s alleged good grades being shattered by reality. I fell into this trap myself during my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh. I only tell part of this story in Boy @ The Window. Yeah, I was nowhere near dropping out after a 2.63 GPA first semester (A in Astronomy, B- in Pascal, C in Honors Calc I, and a C in East Asian History), but I relied on an annual GPA of a 3.0 or higher to maintain my academic scholarship.

Yet from about the second week in December ’87 until I received my grades from Pitt on this date twenty-six years ago, I maintained the lie that my GPA was “around a 3.2.” The main difference — I gave myself a C+ in Honors Calc and a B in East Asian History. Mind you, I hardly showed up for either class most of the month of November! I was homesick, heartbroken, and unhealthily horny (and on two occasions hung over) most of the last six weeks of that semester.

The lies we tell ourselves (self-deception), Scientific America, February 4, 2012. (Richard Mia).

So I told my former classmates like Laurell and Erika that my GPA was a 3.2. I told my dorm mates Samir and Chuck the same. It was a mild lie, I realized even at the time, and I knew that if I buckled down, that I could overcome my own lie, especially since I could lose my scholarship if I didn’t. And with a 3.33 second semester in Winter ’88, I did pull my GPA over the 3.0 mark, and in the process, decided not to tell any lies that big ever again.

But over the years, I’ve learned that I was hardly alone in the lying-about-my-college-experience category. The first time I figured this out was at the end of ’88, twenty-five years ago this week. It was a lunch outing with Laurell, her friend Maria and former classmates JD and Joshua at a pizza shop in the Fleetwood section of Mount Vernon. After the previous sixteen months of the Phyllis obsession, rage and grade-raising campaign, homelessness and financial struggles, I was finally fully on track for graduation and potentially, grad school. With this group of former classmates, though, almost all White, all but Laurell with upper middle class resources, I realized too that their struggles, or blues, weren’t exactly like mine.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

There was a lot of “everything’s goin’ well” type of discussion going. Yet I got the sense that things weren’t all that great. Then JD admitted that he was a semester away from academic probation at Berkeley. His engineering classes were kicking his butt. From the looks of things, he was doing much better athletically than anywhere else, having bulked up to 190 with twenty extra pounds of muscle. Josh then admitted that his academic and social life wasn’t exactly going as planned. “I don’t know which one is worse,” he told us. He’d grown four or five inches since MVHS, good enough to put him around five-five or five-six. Laurell, of course, had a killer GPA at Johns Hopkins…and just loved things there. What she didn’t mention, between home and school, was that she was on the verge of burnout, 3.6 average or not…As for me, I talked a bit about some of my new friends and a couple of my classes. Nothing, though, about the drama of the previous year.

Umm, New York style pizza, Vesuvius Pizza, Brooklyn, NY, January 4, 2014. (http://yelp.com).

Given how they had reacted to my previous revelations of tiny nuggets from my life while we were in high school, I knew that they would have nothing to say about overcoming homelessness and my Phyllis obsession, much less my now 3.2 GPA overall. At the same time, though, I thought it better to say nothing at all than to tell half-truths and bald-faced lies about my college performance and experiences.

I’ve seen so many students do what I and my former classmates did during our first semesters of college over the years. They lie to me about their issues with my courses, they lie to themselves about their performance and preparation. Mostly, they lie to their friends and family to protect themselves from embarrassment. They lie until the truth of their performance shows up, in their grades, in academic probation, in suspensions and expulsions, in dropping out, in other myriad and dangerous ways.

And we in higher education encourage these lies, as if the money and grade trail won’t expose the reality of struggle and failure for so many. This is where we as educators and administrators need to be much more proactive, to encourage students to seek help, to tell the truth and not bury themselves in a coffin of lies.

Observation and Action, Before and Now

01 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Acceptance, Action, Activism, Coping Strategies, Growing Up, Inaction, Observation Mode, Resolutions, Self-Awareness, Self-Reflection

Michael Cerveris as The Observer, code name “September,” via Fringe (2008-13), January 1, 2014. (http://fringepedia.net/wiki/The_Observer).

Believe it or not, I’m a naturally shy person. I realize that this sounds like a contradiction, especially since so much of my life is out there for the world to read and see. But shyness doesn’t necessarily mean introverted and scared of people and the world. That came later, my preteen and teenage years. The crush of cliques and ostracism that forced me into becoming a loner helped shape the way I saw people.

On the one hand, I’ve always found our tremendous capacity for love and hate, compassion and coldness, creation and destruction fascinating. On the other, I have a well-developed sense of disdain for the great human capacity for willful ignorance, bigotry and shallow thinking. It means that there are times that I love being around family, friends and people in general, and there are times I could put a good portion of humanity in a sack and drop them over Niagara Falls.

For both sides of my love-disdain relationship with my fellow humans, I developed a coping strategy more than thirty years ago that I’ve come to recognize as my “observation mode.” It was especially helpful to be an observer during my Boy @ The Window years at Davis Middle School and Mount Vernon High School. I saw so many things occur that aren’t in my memoir, but informed my thinking about people and life and myself. Things like young women yanking out hair and earrings and nails over some idiot guy. Or a Class of ’87 student giving birth near the Cosmetology Department. Or teachers driving out of the parking lot at warp factor nine within fifteen seconds of that end-of-the-school-day, 2:50 pm bell.

USS Enterprise at warp screen shot, Star Trek (2009 – alt reality), January 1, 2014. (http://static3.wikia.nocookie.net/).

Most of all, I observed that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how smart I showed myself to be, that I would never be one of them, at home or at school. At 616, I was a brother, the usurper eldest brother who was also a bit of a father, uncle, worker, husband, and resistance leader, but not part of a functioning family. In Humanities — at Davis and MVHS — I was an underachieving smart guy who never said anything and too uncool to be around, even though I said plenty — and attempted to do plenty — while I was there.

I understood back then that my observations and my actions in response to my observations didn’t and couldn’t match up. I had very little control over my life prior to the University of Pittsburgh. I had precious little access to money, time and the physical and mental space necessary to act upon my observations. So much so that I could easily stay in observation mode in my own life for months at a time, turning one of my key coping strategies into a ball and chain, allowing opportunities to change how I saw myself and others go by in the process.

There were a few areas in which I acted beyond observation. My efforts to get into college, my constant resistance to my then idiot stepfather Maurice, taking care of my younger siblings, trying out for football and baseball, and tracking down my father Jimme for money. And though this was hardly enough for a growing young man to live on, it was enough for me to survive Mount Vernon before moving to Pittsburgh.

Artist rendering of supernova SN 2006gy, May 7, 2007. (http://science.nasa.gov).

Artist rendering of SN 2006gy, the brightest supernova observed to date, May 7, 2007. (http://science.nasa.gov).

But it would take my five days as a homeless student before I decided to be the actor I needed to be in my own life, and not just an observer. I found my way because the only other alternative I had was to go back to Mount Vernon and 616 and wait around for something to happen, and I’d long grown tired of waiting, even on God. It was beyond time for me to help myself, to come out of the bleachers and get on the playing field as the quarterback in my own life. That bout with homelessness was the supernova I needed and used to shoot myself forward to three degrees, a career as a historian, educator, nonprofit manager and writer, to dating and marriage and fatherhood.

I still have an observation mode, though. At conferences, particularly academic conferences, and especially ones in which I am not a presenter. At literary festivals and other gatherings in which I feel the brown-nosing bullshit quotient is just too high. But with Boy @ The Window now out in paperback after more than seven years of interviewing, writing and rewriting, with my son more than halfway toward adulthood, and with me within two years of the middle ages, I need to be done with observation for now.