Leave it to Fox Sports to screw up what should be the easiest shot in baseball: The ceremonial first pitch. But that’s just what the bozos did at tonight’s All-Star Game in St. Louis, when we saw President Obama, clad in a Chicago White Sox jacket, throw the first pitch.

Except, we never saw the whole pitch, just Obama’s windup and delivery. We never saw who caught it (Albert Pujols was IDed about two minutes later) and we never saw it actually go over the plate. A graduate student director could have gotten that shot (hint: use the camera behind home plate, or a camera behind Obama). And there was no replay as they went into commercial. So we have no idea whether Obama did a good job or would make the blooper reel.

I had the obvious immediate reaction–CONSPIRACY–and though that was a joke, one that only conservative media obsessive Tim Graham seemed to flirt with (“Murdoch Goes Gentle on Obama’s First Pitch“), watching the wide-screen video replay this morning is making me stroke my chin and wonder about birth certificates.

Why?Because even though we already knew that they used just one camera in a location where they had dozens of the things (including the traditional centerfield view, which you can see in this famous President Bush strike at Yankee Stadium just after 9/11), and even though we already knew that that the lone gunman hand-held camera missed the money shot of whether the pitch crossed the plate, what I didn’t fully grok until watching the footage below was that the cameraman jerked his lens away from home plate just as the ball was approaching, then jerked it back after the deal was done.

See for yourself; it’s at the 0:44 mark.

Note that the full width of the shot–showing catcher Albert Pujols–was only available to viewers on HD; the rest of us never did see the ball’s destination.

So until I hear an explanation from the execrable Fox Sports,  I am going to assume, even more so than usual, that Donald Sutherland was right all along.

Someone get a restraining order

The senior senator from Utah is still pissed that his undefeated University of Utah Utes football team was not awarded the national championship this year by the National Collegiate Association of America’s Bowl Championship Series system. I have heard that there are plenty of non-Mormons out there who share Hatch’s unhappiness with the BCS. Unlike the singin’ senator, however, they don’t have access to massive, pointless power. Here’s Hatch writing at ESPN.com:

[M]any of the schools from the BCS’s privileged conferences enjoy a number of legitimate advantages, including enormous budgets, attractive locations, winning traditions, and market attractiveness.

BCS officials have claimed that the inequities of their system are the natural result of these pre-existing factors. If the only problem were that SEC schools typically have better teams than schools from the Mountain West, it would difficult for anyone who believes in the free market to complain.

The problem with the BCS is that it creates disadvantages that are systemic. At the most basic level, it is an agreement among schools and conferences that are supposed to be competitors to reduce competition among themselves and, even worse, to limit the competition they receive from the outside.

This is precisely the type of arrangement that our antitrust laws are meant to prevent. That being the case, the ultimate consequence of the BCS’s refusal to acknowledge the outcries of football fans throughout the country may end up being intervention by the courts or the Justice Department.

This, of course, would be regrettable. But, up to now, the architects of the BCS seem to have purposefully eliminated any more desirable options.

This, of course, would be regrettable, and not just in a sadness-more-than-anger way.

I neither follow college football nor really understand those adults who do, but if one was really intent to misuse antitrust law on the billion-dollar industry, wouldn’t the discussion begin at the fact that the NCAA cartel prohibits the primary employees from being paid?

“He has basically a voting record that the people of this state like,” said state Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, one of those considering a primary challenge to Bunning. “The only reservation that you hear anybody say about Senator Bunning is can he win or not.”

Hmmm, I wonder why he couldn’t win? Could it be … that he’s stone crazy?

Bunning’s increasingly erratic behavior — including a prediction that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would die of pancreatic cancer within nine months and his bitter criticism of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a fellow Kentuckian, during weekly conference calls with reporters — also has raised concerns.

“For some reason he insists on having these Tuesday morning conversations, and every Tuesday morning it seems to get a bit worse,” Williams said. “I don’t think it’s wise for him to do that.”

Let’s see, “erratic” behavior getting progressively worse…. What say you, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn?

“I don’t know. I think it’s really up to Sen. Bunning.”

“Sen. McConnell and I both tried to make clear that those folks who are not going to run again would do the rest of us a favor by letting us know early and letting other potential candidates who want to run — give them a chance to get prepared.” [...]

“The last two times around Sen. Bunning had tough, close races, and he knows that. It’s a fact,” Cornyn said.

Note that Bunning has already announced that he will run, so Cornyn’s comments amount to “Don’t you dare, Jim.” Though, confusingly, Bunning has given the blessing to other Republicans — such as Rep. Ron Paul’s son, whose first name is “Rand” — who want to start exploratory committees, just so long as they don’t plan on running if he’s still in the picture.

From a Politico article entitled “GOP pressures Bunning to quit“:

Concern that Bunning could be jeopardizing a Republican seat peaked after he didn’t show up for the eventful opening week of the new Congress, missing several key Senate floor votes. He later said he was on vacation but refused to offer details about his whereabouts, and even many Republican senators had no idea where he was.

“I have another life besides the U.S. Senate,” Bunning told the Louisville Courier-Journal last week. “My family is more important than the U.S. Senate. It always has been and always will be.”

His untimely absence — and seemingly dismissive response — caused heartburn among Republican campaign officials, who already were gearing for a grueling campaign. They fear his unexplained absence could become a theme of attack from a Democratic challenger.

Much as it’s delicious to imagine yet another clinically insane man in the U.S. Senate, there’s ample evidence to suggest that Bunning’s just sorta always been this way. There was his 2004 campaign comment that Democratic challenger Daniel Mongiardo, an Italian American, looked “like one of Saddam Hussein’s sons” and “even dresses like them, too.” ). Bunning denied ever seeing amphetamines in the amphetamine-littered Major League clubhouses of the 1960s, despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary about the historic 1964 Phillies team that collapsed on Bunning’s back. He not only thinks all baseball records set by players who used forbidden drugs should be erased from the record books, he introduced legislation to make that federal law. He has talked about “little green doctors” lying in ambush at public gatherings, ready to pound his back (no really).

So when the Kentucky senator unleashes another “goddamn” on a conference call with reporters, when he tells the New York Times that dealing with Stan Musial was much more challenging than dealing with any modern-day Republican (even though Bunning never once faced Stan the Man), when he threatens to sue his own party if they don’t get behind his re-election campaign, there’s an explanation even more frightening than early-onset Alzheimer’s: Maybe Jim Bunning has been this crazy all along.

Boogity-boogity!

1) Oh god PLEASE let it be boner pills. I realize that the chances of human chorionic gonadotropin being used for ED rather than post-PED are slimmer than Juan Pierre’s isolated power (or Nook Logan’s, for that matter), but at some point the twin absurdities of treating athletes who ingest perfectly legal drugs as criminals while passing the time between innings by calmly watching Bob Dole (or Rafael Palmeiro!) commercials should and will converge, spectacularly.

2) Bill Plaschke, the stone-dumb L.A. Times columnist and even dumber talking head, should be sent on the slow boat to Mauritius, preferably on a vessel powered by Tommy Lasorda’s excess lard. “Now I think about the amazement I felt in watching Ramirez hit .520 last postseason,” Plaschke wrote yesterday, “and think, well, of course, nobody is that good at age 36 without help.” Begging the question: What kind of “help” was Pops Stargell getting (I mean, aside from double cheeseburgers) when he unleashe3d a postseason line of .415 with 5 home runs in 1979 at age 39? Or Johnny Mize, when he dropped a .400/.500/1.067 World Series beatdown against the Brooklyn Dodgers three months before his 40th birthday?

3) Not that anyone needed reminding, but Red Sox Nation is the most unappealing collection of dully aggressive meat-faces since the last time I covered a Serb nationalist rally.Seriously, you people apologized for him for seven glorious years, as he brought you two World Championships, five top-10 MVP finishes, and a thousand blooper highlights, all while making the All-Star team every year. It was you who invented “Manny being Manny.” And now, after making a great trade to get rid of the third-best hitter to ever wear those girly little socks, you’re all hi-fiving one another? Really?

4) Biggest (and most welcome) surprise of the day: “The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee…won’t be taking up the issue.” That’s the first step. Step Two is “Government REFORM Committee???? WT living F?”

5) I look forward to the same sense of outrage directed at Manny to be applied to Tony LaRussa, Jim Leyritz, and 2008 World Champeen J.C. Romero, for starters. What’s that you say?

Image by mrjorgen via Flickr

Ignition interlock devices are on their way in the state of California. If and when the bill passes the full Assembly and receives Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature (and there is zero reason to think that it won’t), first-time DUI convicts in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Alameda, and Sacramento counties (which comprise more than 50% of California residents) will be required to pay for an Ignition Interlock Device (IID) that will be affixed to their cars for five months. Some quotes from the story:

“Nick Adenhart, whose future, a very promising future, has been ruined because of a drunk driver. Nick is dead,” said Assembly member Jose Solorio (D) from Santa Ana. [...]

“That habitual use of this device assures that they are in a condition in the future to drive sober again,” said Assemblyman [Mike] Feuer.

Near the bottom of the article is this one terse, facts-are-stubborn-things sentence:

California’s own DMV concluded the IID’s were not effective in reducing DUI convictions or incidents for first time offenders.

Which is followed immediately by this bit of objective reporting:

Still, there’s no denying what might have happened had Assemblyman Feuer been successful in getting the ignition lock bill approved last year. The suspected drunk driver in the Adenhart crash, Andrew Thomas Gallo, already had a DUI conviction and the Orange County District Attorney says he was three times over the legal limit this time.

“If we had this law, those three young people in that car quite possibly would have been alive today. The offender would have an IID as a protection device, not so much as a penalty, but to protect him too,” said Mary Klotzbach, from Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Italics mine. “Denying” aside, if they had had this law on the books even 10 years ago, Andrew Thomas Gallo’s car (or cars) would have been breathalyzer-free by  … 2006, or at the latest 2007 (depending on whose reporting about his prior DUI conviction you believe). Either way, he killed Adenhart and two other people in 2009. And also, his prior DUI conviction was in San Bernardino County, which is not covered by the new bill. And there are always those six other laws he knowingly broke last week.

And yet the San Mateo County Times, as if to perform a demonstration project for how newspapers, activists, and government officials collude on ambulance-chasing legislation, “reported” that:

The driver who killed Adenhart was driving on a suspended license for previous DUI infractions, which would have required him to use an ignition interlocking device under [the] bill [...]

Studies show that a five-month period of enforced sobriety teaches first-time offenders to break their habit of getting into a car drunk.

Shockingly, the Times neither quoted from nor even named said “studies,” in a fairly lengthy article.

But what of the prevention argument? Won’t requiring a breathalyzer physically prevent drunks from getting behind the wheel, because it will be so hard to drive? Consider this: Los Angeles County, with its 9.9 million residents (so, half the population affected by this bill), has a world-beating 1.8 cars per capita. When you subtract the under-16 crowd and adult non-drivers, that means there are more than two cars per eligible driver in the county.

First-time DUIs with .08 blood alcohol content will now be forced to pony up for thousand-dollar ignition breathalyzers, while booze-addled human scumfruit like Andrew Thomas Gallo will simply borrow mom’s minivan, or have their girlfriends blow through the no-drive device, then get busy with the reckless driving. Such are the joys of legislating through the front page.

Boras on Adenhart, YouTube

Now, let’s see how the agent in question behaved in September 1978, after the pennant-race murder of Angel Lyman Bostock. Cue Don Baylor:

Buzzie Bavasi called downstairs and asked if I would come to his office. When I got there Buzzie started ranting and raving. “Son of bitch” this and “son of a bitch” that. I did not understand what was going on until Buzzie told me that Lyman’s agent, Abdul-Jalil [al-Hakim], had called within hours of the accident requesting money from Lyman’s paycheck, supposedly for some unfinished business deals that Lyman’s wife was not aware of. Buzzie was incensed, having already given Lyman a check to cover the agent’s fee — $145,000 — and he stood there vowing not to pay out another dime to anyone but Lyman’s widow. I was angry, too. Lyman was not even buried yet.

Buzzie told me right then and there that he would never, ever deal with Abdul-Jalil again and I should go tell that to Abdul-Jalil’s other clients on the team: Ron Jackson, Ken Landreaux, and Danny Goodwin.

I went down and called the three guys over and delivered the message. I told them about the request for money Abdul-Jalil supposedly had made. I did not tell the amount, which Buzzie told me was in the thousands of dollars. “Buzzie didn’t think it was time to do that,” I said. “So he does not want to deal with this agent at all.”

The three did not react, so I left it at that. The next day I got a mailgram from Abdul-Jalil informing me that he intended to sue for $1 million for defamation of character. [...]

I did question his character. I did so even more when I found out a few days later Lyman had no will, leaving the way open for the state of California to get paid before Lyman’s widow. Then I learned that Abdul-Jalil had rejected the club’s request that Lyman take out an insurance policy instead of the club. If he had done so, the benefits would have gone to his wife, tax-free. Instead the beneficiary was the club and Lyman’s widow then received the money as taxable income. What would have cost Lyman about $11,000 wound up costing his widow about $500,000 in taxes.

While Baylor is a bit of an unreliable narrator, his account is backed up (nearly word for word!) in L.A. Times beat writer Ross Newhan’s definitive franchise treatise, The Anaheim Angels: A Complete History. And Bavasi indeed traded all three other Abdul-Jalil clients before the 1979 season, to the Minnesota Twins.

Image by befrank via Flickr

When I first conceived of writing this True/Slant blog about “the violent intersection between politics and sports,” I was thinking more along the lines of stadium welfare and senile blowhards like Sen. Jim Bunning (R-1964 Phillies) than, well, violent intersections. Certainly the last thing I wanted to write about was the senseless death of a nice-sounding young man and terrific pitching prospect who happened to play for the one team in all of sports that I truly, and madly, care about. But as the poet once sang, sometimes it snows in April.

There are some thoughtful, heartbreaking reactions to the tragic slaying of Nick Adenhart that you all should read in case you haven’t already: Bill Shaikin’s account of Adenhart’s dad Jim grieving at Nick’s locker, Angel clubbie Shane Demmitt’s intimate portrait of a young man his dad helped coach, the Orange County Register’s photo gallery of Angel fans making an ad hoc Adenhart shrine, and the reflections and comments (particularly from fans of rival teams) over at the great Angel fan site Halos Heaven. Since they’ve all got the emotion stuff covered like a blanket, I will focus on a far more marginal issue that hits closer to the purposes of this blog: How baseball player Nick Adenhart’s death is being used to further a political agenda.

Who would dare do such a thing? Well, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. That’s how they roll — using high-profile tragedies to help push anti-drunk driving legislation through the political process. In this case, the bill in question is a proposed California law that would require DUI convicts in four populous counties to use only cars with breathalyzer/ignition-lock devices for a minimum of six months. I disagree with that idea, for reasons we’ll get into, but first take a look at MADD’s revealing lead paragraph:

The suspected drunk driving crash that led to the death of three innocent people including Los Angeles Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart and the serious injury of another could have been prevented with a strong ignition interlock law in California.

Really? Let’s summarize what we know about the contemptible Andrew Thomas Gallo. 1) He was driving despite not having had a valid drivers license since at least 2007, possibly 2006, due either to a May 2006 DUI conviction or a subsequent parole violation. 2) He was almost certainly still on parole for some crime or another (his 2007 rap sheet alone includes a marijuana conviction plus drunk and disorderly conduct). 3) He was driving despite having “almost three times” the legal blood alcohol level of .08. How much booze is that? Probably somewhere around 10 drinks. 4) According to cops, Gallo was driving well in excess of the speed limit, doing 50-65 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone. 5) Oh yeah, he also blew through a red light. 6) After he smashed two cars, obviously hurting multiple innocents, he ran away.

So that’s at least six laws Gallo knowingly and brazenly flouted. Which begs the question: Why on earth would we suspect that somehow the seventh law would be the charm? Even on the very slim chance that a scumbag like Gallo would actually go through with installing an expensive breathalyzer on his ignition, the only thing stopping him from driving another car was opportunity. Which Southern California abounds in. Oh, and anyway, wasn’t the MADD law only supposed to cover the first six months after the original DUI?

It is a very difficult, and very unhappy thing to accept that when it comes to preventing the foul deeds of evil men, the criminal code is often somewhere between inadequate and impotent. There are people for whom the usual deterrence just doesn’t apply. While this doesn’t automatically mean that you shouldn’t pass new criminal laws, it does suggest caution and a sober cost-benefit analysis when reacting to a headline-making tragedy. Which, unfortunately, is about as rare as an unassisted triple play.

Here’s a story from Sunday’s Riverside Press-Enterprise, which has been doing a bang-up job covering the Adenhart crime and its aftermath:

A state bill to require ignition interlock devices on vehicles driven by anyone with a previous drunken driving conviction may gather more support after last week’s crash that killed Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart.

Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries, R-Lake Elsinore, co-authored a bill , AB 91, which would create a pilot program to require DUI offenders to install ignition interlock devices on their vehicles or any vehicle they drive.

“It’s a good idea long before tragedy occurs,” Jeffries said by phone Saturday. “When you have these really tragic stories occur, it tends to move public opinion, and move legislators.”

Italics mine. Quick — think of a sports tragedy that moved public opinion and legislators enough to substantially change the criminal code. The first one that comes to my mind is the 1986 cocaine-induced heart failure of basketball phenom Len Bias. How did that change our legal system? It created an enormous disparity of sentencing between crack and cocaine, a development that — even though it was originally championed by black legislators trying to combat the scourge of crack in their communities — has for a long time been seen as effectively racist, in addition to helping stuff our prisons and jailhouses with people guilty of nothing more than consuming a substance deemed by the authorities to be illegal.

Would the kinds of asset forfeiture and mandatory minimum sentencing imposed by the Bias-insipired Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 done anything to prevent Len Bias from taking that fatal hit? Oh hell no. But by the time people got around to complaining about the new law’s government-enhancing and rights-reducing powers, the only people still talking about old Len were traumatized Celtics fans.

My personal case against ignition-breathalyzer laws is brief and shallow. I don’t want to live in a world where drivers with clean records have to blow through a device to start their engines. There has long been talk about making ignition interlocks mandatory on all vehicles within certain states, and if that state happens to be the one where I currently live (the District of Columbia), then I’d be grappling with a local police force that delights in handing out DUIs to people with far lower than .08 blood alcohol level. I am creeped out by laws being enforced on me through automatic machinery installed on my personal possessions, and in general I don’t think the most cost-effective way to deal with deranged (and thankfully rare) criminals like Andrew Thomas Gallo is to hassle comparatively law-abiding (and plentiful) citizens like Matthew Lee Welch.

It is the most human of responses to react to a tragedy by wanting to Do Something that, had it been done beforehand, just maybe would have prevented the atrocity from happening in the first place. Over at Halos Heaven I’ve seen talk of maybe cutting off beer sales at the Big A by the 6th inning, or knocking off with the tailgating already, or just making a symbolic show of pouring out your own beer at the stadium. But rules, and most especially criminal laws, have unintended consequences that end up affecting different people in different ways than the supporters intended.

We’ve gone through a spasm of tough-on-crime laws these past four decades, often in the literal name of whichever victim just made the front page, and in the process we have shredded many of our constitutional protections against search, seizure, due process, and even speech, while watching the prison and jail population swell northward of 2 million people. We all have our different ways of mourning Nick Adenhart. But mine certainly won’t include rushing through another ambulance-chasing piece of legislation.