Radical Georgia Moderate

• I could spend years at the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center and still not read everything I wanted to read. The Atlanta Journals and Atlanta Constitutions I read from the 1930s on microfilm were amazing, as were the collections of high school yearbooks from the 1920s and 1930s. You should check it out sometime. More on my research project later.
• I agree with Shelby and Thomas Friedman. The McCain-Clinton gas tax holiday is the basest sort of pandering. Some of you may not like Friedman, but that particular column he wrote was spot-on:
  

  It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

• Provocative commentary from former governor Roy Barnes:
  

  “Out of a nation of 304 million, is this the best we have?”

  That was how Roy Barnes, former governor and lifelong Democrat, replied when asked about the presidential contest featuring Republican John McCain and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

  “I’m not excited about any of them,” Barnes added.

  Sounds like sour grapes that his boy Edwards never caught on. I hope we can all at least agree that the candidates on both sides are better this time out than they were four or eight years ago.

• File under “sweet baby Jesus we’re still having this discussion?” Enjoy this segment from Bob Costas’ show. Do a shot every time you hear the phrase “Wild West” or “anything goes” correlated to “the blogospehere.”

  Prop yourself up on something, call ahead for a cab home, and try to suppress your giggles when Bob Costas opines about the “tone of gratuitous potshots and mean-spirited abuse in the blogosphere,” which is immediately followed by a torrent of gratuitous potshots and mean-spirited abuse from Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights.

  I wish people would quit pretending like asshattery is somehow limited to a particular medium.

I never really blog about baseball, which would probably be a surprise to some people who knew me growing up. For almost 15 years, playing and watching baseball were the central activity in my life.

I started collecting baseball cards when I was 8 or 9 years old, buying packs of 1988 Topps and Donruss sets.

The card industry has changed a lot since then. There used to be one set at the beginning of the year with 600 to 800 cards, and then a “traded” set near the end of the season with 100 to 200 cards or so featuring traded players and September call-ups. That was it. No rare issues, special editions, and glossy sets. Only a couple of different manufacturers, not 20.

Still, my brother and I were like little stock brokers with our Beckett’s price guides, and could recite hundreds of prices from memory. In retrospect I’m not sure why we did this, because we rarely sold any of our cards.

When I was 10, my interest in cards prompted me to sign up for Little League at East Marietta, a league which gained national recognition for winning the 1983 Little League World Series. Most kids who play there don’t start much later than 6 or 7, and many start playing T-ball at Terrell Mill around four or five.

I was pretty lousy the first year, but my brother and I spent the entire summer between when I was 10 and 11 walking a mile or so with our equipment to the ball park and practicing with an older kid. I came back the next year still looking a little awkward, but having developed pretty good hitting skills and a strong throwing arm.

East Marietta had an A-league and a B-league. I was one of those kids who was good enough to dominate the B-league but wasn’t quite good enough to make the A-league. This was a pattern that continued all the way through my playing days. Freshman year of high school, I made the JV team as a pitcher, but only got a couple of innings, and rode the bench the rest of the time. I was cut the next season, and worked harder than I ever had worked at anything to try to make the team the following year. Didn’t make it.

When I quit playing after my junior year of high school, I had worked my ass off for years without a lot to show for it. I’m not going to whine about not making the team junior year. Sure, there were some politics involved that didn’t work in my favor, and I didn’t get much of a look from the coaches. Maybe I was better than the bottom three or four players who made the team.

But I wasn’t good enough to be indispensable. And even if I was better than the bottom three or four players, they sucked in a way that looked more athletic than my sucking a little less did. And my mouth occasionally got me in trouble (big surprise there).

Nevertheless, I was bitter about the experience for a long time. That doesn’t entirely explain my loss of interest in baseball though.

Part of it was a couple of years later when college football captured my imagination in a way baseball had years earlier. There’s not enough room in my life for two sports obsessions.

Part of it was that it seemed nothing in baseball would ever compare to the magical feeling surrounding the early 1990s Braves teams. The only events in pro sports I’ve ever attended that compare to an SEC football environment were the 1991 and 1992 NL playoffs, and a regular season series between the Braves and the Dodgers in (I think) 1992. After the curse of decades of petulance was lifted from the organization, fans became complacent and much of the crowd’s energy was zapped. I then started to hate being around those people, which made me part of the problem.

Part of it was a trip our family took in summer 1994. Months in advance, we planned a trip to the northeast to visit Cooperstown and to attend games at Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium and the Skydome in Toronto. The strike started the week before our trip, so we didn’t get to attend any games.

So, I’ve never watched a game at Yankee Stadium. I meant to in 1994, but was thwarted. This is the last season the Yankees will play there before they move to a new stadium. I think I owe it to myself to take another shot at watching a game there before that happens. I feel like I have some karma to balance out.

Anybody want to come with? In addition to balancing karma, we could also get drunk.

Ric Flair says: “To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man.”

My colleague Jmac views last night’s Super Bowl as a good argument against a college football playoff. I don’t agree with him, but I must admit it’s a nice piece of quick abstract thinking to make the connection. He writes:

Granted, the Giants played a great game against the Patriots, but are we really to believe that New York is the best team in pro football? Or a Patriots team which broke every record in NFL history which happened to play its worst game out of 20 this season (and beat the Giants just a month ago)?

[examples of other teams that didn't prove anything by winning in the postseason]

And the Giants aren’t the best team in football this season … the Patriots are.

Rooting for the underdog may be fun, but when they win all it does is cheapen the whole season.

(The snarky Tennessee fan in me wants to bring up that Georgia seems to win more hypothetical championships than any other college football team.)

It’s the nature of a contest that the team perceived to be the best entering the game doesn’t always win. There would be no reason to play the games if the favorite always won.

Yesterday the Giants beat the best team in the league when it counted the most. That makes them the best team in the league.

The real argument against a playoff comes from some of the lousy Super Bowls we’ve had to endure in the past. On paper, it looked like this one might turn out the same. If you want to use this game to argue against a playoff, describe it as the exception that proves the rule; a game that ended up being worth watching in spite of itself.

Quick two cents about Bill Bellicheck: walking off the field before the game was over was a no-class move.

Mark Bradley is quickly becoming my favorite punching bag at the AJC. I may have to start doing a Griftdrift-style “Morning Bradley” at this pace. Today, he parrots Jeff Schultz’s asinine comparison (emphasis mine):

The Falcons have lined up to take shots at Petrino, and every one of them is justified. He dishonored a team and a profession. I thought he was a real pro, but he was only pro-Petrino. For all the damage Vick did to this organization, Petrino has done just as much.

Really? A coach taking another job and being somewhat of a douchebag about it is a PR debacle of equal magnitude to the team’s star quarterback murdering and torturing dogs? Just like in Schultz’s column, I think the real source of outrage here is said columnist’s lack of real insight into the inner-workings of the organization was exposed by the move:

Obviously, I was wrong about Michael Vick being a good guy, wrong about Bobby Petrino being a good fit, wrong in the belief that Petrino was actually warming to the NFL. “We need to finish the season and find something to build on,” he said Monday night, and 18 hours later it became known that he wouldn’t be doing either thing.

A lot of people distrusted Petrino from the start. I wasn’t among that number. I’m not going to pretend I knew him well, but I thought I knew a little about his methods and his aspirations. Turns out I knew nothing about anything. He was the first man to the exit.

I really should know better than to take this sort of bait at this point. I guess admitting he was wrong is more than Wooten does, which means maybe he deserves a little more credit. But just stop with the pearl-clutching already! This is not even remotely comparable to what Michael Vick did.

It’s funny to me how people are acting surprised that Bobby Petrino ditched the Falcons for the open Arkansas job. Sure, it was a douche move to quit before the season is over. And sure, it was an even bigger douche move for him to submit his resignation by phone. But is any of that really surprising, all things considered?

That team was doomed before it ever stepped on a field, and will be doomed for several years to come.

The most egregious pearl-clutching comes from Jeff Schultz at the AJC, whom I normally think is a pretty good writer, but who gets it wrong here:

Michael Vick lied to Arthur Blank. Bobby Petrino lied to Arthur Blank. The second guy didn’t break any laws, but the two are closer than we could have imagined in the character department.

What kind of idiot would tell his boss he’s looking for another job? How is that even remotely comparable to lying about murdering dogs?

I think Jeff is just pissed because he somehow didn’t see it coming. I’m only surprised Petrino stayed for 13 games.

Update 11:56 p.m. Ooh, this just occurred to me: if Petrino’s Arkansas team wins the SEC West, he’d have to play the championship game in the Georgia Dome. I would pay to see that even if UT wasn’t the SEC East representative.

I would form a group of investors to buy out this shopping center:

Then I’d tear it down and build a new minor league baseball stadium in its place in the mold of Poncey:

The following would be outlawed inside the new park:

• Player names on uniforms
• Anything piped over the P.A. system that isn’t either organ music or a game-related announcement. Especially not player entrance music
• Electronic scorekeeping
• Jumbotrons and television monitors
• Hand-held electronic devices, especially cell phones
• Concessions other than beer, Coca Cola, hot dogs, roasted and boiled peanuts, Cracker Jacks, giant pretzels and cotton candy
• Souvenirs other than jerseys (home team only), fitted caps (home team only), and programs. Scorecards and non-branded writing utensils will be provided for free upon request
• Sleeping, unless induced by alcohol consumption
• Sponsor signs that are not hand-painted on a wall or fence
• Anything inflatable or made of foam

That is all.

Photos from the Atlanta Time Machine

If there was any question before, I think that window is pretty close to shut.

Two co-defendants of Michael Vick say the NFL star helped execute dogs that didn’t fight well, according to federal court documents.

The court papers, filed as Quanis Phillips and Purnell Peace pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges Friday, said all three men “executed approximately 8 dogs that did not perform well in ‘testing’ sessions” in April of this year.

Vick’s co-defendants also stipulated that the money behind the Bad Newz Kennels dogfighting operation came “almost exclusively” from the Atlanta Falcons star.

Federal prosecutors had given Vick until 9 a.m. ET Friday to accept a plea deal that would require him to spend at least one year in prison on federal dogfighting conspiracy charges, reports say, but there was no immediate word on what he decided.

I mean, I guess the co-defendants could be lying. But then, it would be stupid to make an accusation like that without some evidence, wouldn’t it?

I recorded this tonight with a snapshot camera that kinda-sorta does video, so be gentle. This spirited rendition didn’t help the Cubbies rally from a 4-1 deficit against Philadelphia. It really wasn’t as close as the final score made it look. The Phillies were hitting balls hard and leaving runners stranded even when they weren’t scoring, while the Cubs looked like they left their bats at home and were fortunate the starting pitcher (”send him back to the minors,” said several bleacher bums) didn’t walk more people than he did.

Also, earlier today I recorded baby chicks at the Museum of Science and Industry! I have several little videos I want to piece together and actually, like, edit together. I might do it on the plane ride home.

I do have something from day 2 of BlogHer I want to write about, but for now, I give you Dokie Ookie:

Image by Deadspin, h/t Georgia Sports Blog

I don’t generally buy into the “AJC hates Georgia” argument, but jeez, with headlines and ledes like this, I can see where people get that impression:

I see that headline, and I’m thinking the score was 22-0. The final score? 11-4. Why so negative AJC?

That’s one of the harshest ledes I think I’ve ever read. Again, why so negative?