Lee Lowenfish

My last post introduced a new nickname for yours truly, The Prince of Paranoia, courtesy of eminent Baltimore sportswriter Jim Henneman whose name will be affixed permanently upon the Oriole Park at Camden Yards press box. 

 

When word came last Thursday on the first day of pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training that two key Oriole pitchers, Kyle Bradish and John Means, will start the season on the injured list, my gulp could be heard most of the way to Sarasota. 

 

Bradish had a breakout 2023 and would likely be the number two starter behind newly-acquired Corbin Burnes. Kyle has now been diagnosed with an UCL sprain (ulnar collateral ligament) that often leads to Tommy John surgery.  Means has still not recovered fully from his TJ surgery two years ago.

 

There is also news of the stress fracture in throwing elbow of Samuel Basallo, the Dominican catcher-first baseman who is not yet 20 years old. He is not expected to make the team this year, but he won't be playing in the field until later in the season.  Throw in a fourth, supposedly minor injury, the aching oblique of Gunnar Henderson the 2023 AL Rookie of the Year, and all those "experts" picking the Orioles for the World Series should be taking a step back.

 

It helps me to recall a great adage, "Every season is different". Last year's record means next to nothing in a new season. Nothing really counts for the Birds until March 28 when their regular season begins against the Ohtani-less LA Angels.  The Padres and Dodgers start 8 days earlier in Korea as part of the international "grow the game" philosophy that the owners and Players Association seemingly agree is a good idea.   

 

I still pledge that the Prince of Paranoia won't really get rolling until the games actually count.  And now I'm introducing a more benign nickname,

Captain Culture. This was bestowed upon me decades ago by a colleague at UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County), the late philosophy professor and world educator Thomas Luther "Tom" Benson.  

 

There is nothing like the arts opportunities in my overpopulated but very stimulating home town. About a week ago, Captain Culture was enthralled by a delightful NY City Ballet rehearsal of Jerome Robbins 1956 satirical ballet, "The Concert."   

 

It takes great talent to deliberately make mistakes in any art and this piece spoofs the inability of certain dancers to make the correct hand gestures and leg kicks. Adding to the hilarity is a dancing role for the pianist who plays wonderful Chopin throughout the piece but is hardly agile chasing with a net the dancers costumed as butterflies in the last scene.

 

There are two more chances to see "The Concert," aka "The Perils of Everybody," as part of the ballet program at the Koch Theatre in Lincoln Center:

Th Feb 22 at 730p

Th Feb 29 at 730p     Info on tickets at nycb.com  

 

I've always felt great athletes are like dancers in their grace, stamina, and technical prowess.  Yesterday Su Feb 18, I saw on ESPNU one of the most intense basketball games I ever saw.  The Columbia women's basketball team improved to 9-1 in the Ivy League with a grueling 71-63 victory at third-place Harvard (7-3). 

 

I had never seen a game where no team led by more than 4 points until midway in the fourth quarter when Columbia finally got some breathing room.  Outstanding team defense and balanced scoring were the keys to the victory with junior Cecelia Collins leading the Lions with 20 points, including six vital free throws in the last minutes.  (Collins, a Scranton PA native, is one of the best advertisements for a wise use of the transfer portal - she previously played two seasons at Bucknell in Lewisburg PA.)  

 

Columbia hosts the much-anticipated rematch with Princeton (10-0 in league, #25 in the nation) on Sat Feb 24 at 2p.  It's the last regular season home game for the Lions but the Ivy League four-team post-season tournament will be held in the same Levien Gym from Mar 15-17.  If you haven't seen Abbey Hsu, the senior sharpshooting guard who is in the running for Naismith Player of the year, don't miss these last chances.  Ticket info at

gocolumbialions.com.   

 

Establishing a "winning culture" - the phrase du jour throughout all sports these days -  is not easy, but Megan Griffith the youthful Columbia coach now in her 7th year, and her staff have done it. Everyone associated with the team contributes to a winning culture. 

 

One of the nice touches this year was earlier this month when Noah Dayon, one of the team managers, sang an excellent no-frills acapella National Anthem before one of the games. 

 

I was a manager of men's basketball for three years and never was asked to sing. Mercifully.  But I did hit a 30-foot jump shot in coaches-managers game in the old University Gymasium and 30 years later a jump shot in a media game at Madison Square Garden.   

 

One last word on Columbia sports - Brett Boretti's Columbia Lions open the home season very early this year because of unexpected cancellations.

Marist from Poughkeepsie NY visits for a four game series over the weekend of Mar 1 - with single games Mar 1 & 3 at 3P and twinbill Mar 2 at Noon.

Big Ivy League matchups come early this year - SaSu Mar 23 with Harvard and SaSu Mar 30 defending league champion Penn.  

 

The news is not as good for my other favorite team the Wisconsin men's Badgers.  They have lost 5 of their last 6 games and their seeding in both the post-season Big Ten tournament and the national tournament is plummeting.

 

It is hard to put a finger on one particular reason for the slide.  I always think back to former coach Bo Ryan, who is on the ballot again for enshrinement in the Springfield (MA) Basketball Hall of Fame, who once said, "We judge our players by what it takes to discourage them."   

 

It seems too many of the current Badgers can't put together consistent games. It will be up to current coach Greg Gard, Ryan's longtime assistant, to find the key to re-ignite a talented squad that looked so good and so deep in the first half of the season.

 

Although Gard's contract reportedly runs for three more years, Ohio State fired once-heralded coach Chris Holtmann after a loss last week to the Badgers in Madison.  The Buckeyes responded with a win at home yesterday over national title contender Purdue. 

 

I still am wary of quick fixes. But in this age of NIL funds for top talent at one end and the wide-open transfer portal for all players, it will take wise

leadership from administrators to navigate these new currents that were overdue but seem to border now on the chaotic.   

 

In closing sad notes - RIP basketball coach Lefty Driesell, 92, died Feb 17. Brought top-notch basketball to the University of Maryland and earlier Davidson and later James Madison and Georgia State. His Basketball Hall of Fame acceptance speech was a classic.   

 

RIP Don Gullett, 73, died Feb 14, outstanding southpaw with 109-50 career record.  Only pitcher in MLB history to win four World Series in a row, two with one team (Reds 1975-76, Yankees 77-78).  Injuries and illnesses curtailed career at age 31. Remained lifelong friend of Gene Bennett, the scout who signed him and projected his greatness from 7th grade on. I tell story of their heartwarming relationship in the Bennett chapter in my recent book BASEBALL'S ENDANGERED SPECIES (University of Nebraska Press).   

 

That's all for now.  Take it easy but take it, and stay positive, test negative.

The New York Met family and its legion of fans were saddened last week by the news of the passing of Bud Harrelson, 79, on Jan 11 at an hospice house after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. 

 

He was the starting shortstop on the 1969 Miracle Mets and the 1973 NL champs that lost a hard-fought 7-game World Series to the Oakland A's (who were in the middle of their three-peat of world championships.) Harrelson became a national figure when during the championship series against the Reds, he and the much sturdier Pete Rose had a skirmish when Rose slid too hard into him at second base.

 

I was watching on TV when the incident happened. I will never forget the peace contingent including manager Yogi Berra, Tom Seaver and Rusty Staub  walking to the left field wall to plead with upper deck fans to stop littering the field lest the umpires call a forfeit in favor of the Reds.  

 

Harrelson also was the third base coach for the victorious 1986 Mets, becoming the only Met to wear the team's uniform for both Met world championships.  In the famous video of Ray Knight scoring the winning run in Game 6 of the World Series after first baseman Bill Buckner's error, it is Harrelson running towards home plate side by side with Knight. Bud later quipped that he made sure he didn't beat Ray to the plate. 

 

He also managed the 1990 Mets to 91 wins, but in another example of impetuousness in the agonizing history of the franchise, he was fired in the middle of the 1991 season, still finishing his MLB managerial career with an overall 145-129 record.  He made Long Island his permanent home and became an original and continuous part-owner of the independent Long Island Ducks whom he managed to an Atlantic League championship in 2004. 

 

Harrelson was born on D-Day June 6, 1944 in the East San Francisco Bay town of Niles but he grew up a little south in Hayward.  Despite his small frame - his listed 5' 11" 160 pounds was an exaggeration - he was a great all-around athlete and attended San Francisco State on a basketball scholarship.  But he only played baseball there. According to Bill Nowlin's characteristically informative SABR Bioproject essay, Mets scout Roy Partee signed Harrelson after his 1963 college season. 

 

It was two years before the introduction of the amateur free agent draft and Partee, a former Red Sox catcher who wasn't much bigger than Harrelson, won Harrelson's services over the Yankees and a few other teams with an offer of probably a little over $10,000. Harrelson arrived in Queens in 1965 and when Seaver arrived in 1967, two key pieces were in place for the 1969 triumph.

 

My guess is that scout Roy Partee probably came to work for the expansion Mets with Johnny Murphy, the former great Yankees relief pitcher who worked for over a decade in the Red Sox player development system and became the Mets first scouting director and later general manager. 

 

For those of you so drunk on analytics that you don't think pitching and defense are important, the 1969 Mets scored only 15 more runs than the sad sack 1962 Mets. Though Harrelson's career BA was only .236, all but the last three seasons with the Mets, he was a 1970-71 NL All-Star and solid defensive shortstop.   

 

My most vivid personal memory of Harrelson is when he spoke in Babylon, Long Island in 2010 at the dedication of a cornerstone to mark where the Cuban Giants first played in 1885. The team consisted of African-American waiters at the nearby Argyle Hotel who, given the virulent racial segregation of the time, could not openly admit their slave ancestry so posed as "Cubans".  

 

Harrelson told the gathering that he knew about the Negro Leagues of the twentieth century, but the story of the Cuban Giants as the first organized black baseball team was new to him and he was glad to learn the story.  He told me afterward that his own family roots were in Minnesota but they were "Grapes of Wrath" people who moved to California to find a better life.

 

Bud's father worked as an auto mechanic and never had a chance to pursue an athletic career. He passed on his love of the game to his son and Bud Harrelson wound up serving it very well.  He became one of baseball's good guys and his quiet passion and level-headedness will surely be missed. 

 

Too often in blogs and other publications errata are buried at the end.  So let me mention here a couple of changes from my last post.  The recently-retired Astros outfielder is Michael Brantley.  Mickey Brantley was his father who also played in the big leagues.

 

And Columbia's women's basketball great senior guard is Abbey Hsu, not Abby.  The Lions keep on rolling and are 3-0 in Ivy League and 12-3 overall, riding a 10-game winning streak into formidable Princeton on Sat aft Jan 20 for a 4p matchup that will be broadcast on ESPN News. 

 

My other favorite basketball team, the Wisconsin Badger men, lost at Penn State on Tu Jan 16), suffering their first Big Ten loss game of the season.87-83.  They simply could not contain the swift Nittany Lion guards, Kanye Clary and Ace Baldwin, Jr. who led virtually all the way in a 87-83 win. Max Klesmit, a recent breakout scorer for Wisconsin, was plagued with foul trouble and scored only 10 points.  His defense was sorely missed this night but

then again it was the speed of the Penn State guards that caused his lack of playing time.    

 ,

As I mentioned last post, the 20-game Big Ten schedule is a severe test of skill and endurance.  I guess you can say that about most conference play but there is a special intensity in the Big Ten - which of course is now the Big 14 and soon will be the Big 18. Maybe it comes from dealing with the ferocious weather at the height of the season.  

 

On the movie front, "American Fiction" blew me away with its amazing ability to move from hilarity to tenderness without missing a beat. Cord Jefferson, who used to write for "USA Today" and was an editor of the defunct "Gawker" e-zine, both wrote and directed the movie based on the 2001 Percival Everett novel, "Erasure".  Jeffrey Wright leads an impressive cast with Leslie Uggams as his mother.  Yes, that Leslie Uggams still bringing it at age 80.

 

My best experiences seeing films have always come with low or no expectations.  I had seen the trailer for "American Fiction" but had read nothing else about the puckish story of an English professor frustrated that his high class novels don't sell while other dumbed-down books are best sellers so he decides to do somethng about it. 

 

I really hadn't read that much about "Oppenheimer" either, but had high hopes for it because I lived through the Red Scare and the civil defense craze of the 1950s and knew that Robert Oppenheimer had been instrumental in developing the atomic bomb.  I must say though I left the film mainly disappointed because the sound track was far too intrusive. It even overwhelms the dialogue at times. I saw it at an IMAX theater and it is not a film made for IMAX.  The acting is fine but three hours without intermission was too much for me.

 

On the other hand, my first opera of the season, Verdi's "Nabucco", thrilled me to the marrow.  It is considered Verdi's first major opera, debuting in 1842. The early first act trio featuring the rival Babylonian half-sisters Fenene (sung by Maria Barakova from Kemerova, Russia) and Abigaille (sung by Liudmyla Monastryska from Kiev, Ukraine) and Ismaele, nephew of the King of Jerusalem (sung by SeokJong Baek from Seoul, Korea), matches in power and beauty anything I've heard in a long time.   

 

Like most operas, the libretto strains credulity.  Unlike most operas, this one ends with the death of only one of the protagonists although plenty of common people do get wiped out off stage in the incessant wars around the Babylonian Captivity of the Israelites in 600 B.C.E. 

 

The famous third act chorus, "Va, pensiero," sung by the lost Israelites, always brings the house down. It was moving to read in the program that when Verdi died in 1901, there was a public memorial in which thousands sung this famous chorus conducted by the future lion of American conducting, Arturo Toscanini. 

 

There are three more chances to hear this "Nabucco" all with the same cast conducted by Daniele Callegari (from Milan).  

Thursday Jan 18 8p; Su Jan 21 3p; and F Sep 26 at 8p.  

 

The set for "Nabucco" is 20 years old and some people have tired of it.  A new production of "Carmen" can be seen F Jan 19 and Tu Jan 23 at 730p.  

It is worth noting that there will be no performances at the Met from Jan 28 thru Feb 25.

 

Rush seats from as low as $20-$25 are often available if you were willing to wait on line before the Met box office opens at 10AM.  More info available

at metopera.org   

 

One TCM tip - Tu Jan 23 at 1130A - Joe E Brown as a swimmer vying for young Ginger Rogers in "You Said A Mouthful" with Preston Foster.

 

And fond retirement wishes to Clayelle Dalfares who broadcast her last WQXR radio programs last weekend.  She is also a great baseball fan who around this time or a little later would make reference to the coming arrival of pitchers and catchers in spring training. 

 

Time is on our side.  The equipment trucks will be heading to Florida and Arizona before my next post and just remember when the Super Bowl is over Feb 11 the next week the camps will open. 

 

Re: the Super Bowl, I'd love to see the Lions make it after all the suffering of their fans for decades. And I'm torn between rooting for long-suffering Buffalo Bills and Baltimore's Ravens.

 

Baltimore quarterback Lamar Jackson seems to be a maturing star with enormous talent and a very admirable off-field profile - he is his own

agent.  A story worth exploring in an upcoming blog.

 

For now, always remember:  Take it easy but take it and stay positive, test negative.