Pedro to the METS?!

Say it ain't so, Pedro, say it ain't so. Just found out that Pedro Martinez has agreed to terms with the New York Mets on a 56 million dollar, guaranteed 4-year contract. So one of the greatest pitchers in the history of the Boston Red Sox is leaving the year after they win the big one to go join a team that isn't going to win a damned thing.

Pedro's Game 3 performance against Roger Clemens and the Yankees in the 1999 ALCS was the reason I became a Red Sox fan, and now he's leaving. This sucks. This really, really sucks. I'm not mad at Pedro - just disappointed in him. But baseball is a business, and this kind of sacrilege happens once in a while in the natural course of doing business.

For a few wonderful years, Pedro was absolutely thrilling, virtuosic, and even when he lost that ability, he always gave the team everything he had, every time he pitched. The fans in Boston gave him the benefit of the doubt to an extent unparalleled in the history of the relationship between the team and its fans. Maybe that was because we were afraid to make him mad - we always knew in our hearts we'd have been fucked if it weren't for Pedro - but we still loved the guy.

I can't help but think of this as another sign of a potentially disastrous trend for the Sox, though. The fact is, the new ownership and Theo Epstein weren't the only people responsible for putting together this team. It was made up of a mix of older, proven, high-dollar stars (holdovers, by and large, from the Duquette era - Pedro, Manny, Varitek, Damon - with the obvious exception of Curt Schilling) and Epstein's sabermetrically-perfect supporting cast (Millar, Mueller, Cabrera, and to both a lesser and greater extent, Papi). The fact is, sabermetrics and statistical analysis don't build great teams on their own. If they did, Oakland would be a dynasty by now. Dynasties in this modern era of baseball have to be built, from the standpoint of the front office, by a good mix of stats and stars. And despite the World Series, which will live in legend forever, I'm worried that this front office will continue to emphasize the statistical approach to team building until they choke the much-needed element of a few stars off. And then, the Sox will end up being a $100 million version of the Oakland A's.

Then again, Epstein offering to pay Pedro as much as Schilling was beyond generous. For Pedro to demand more money AND more years was just preposterous, and all anyone in Red Sox Nation can do is wish the greedy rat the best of luck. He will be missed.

We'll always have 1999-2000.

Not to mention the Commissioner's Trophy.

Ted Williams and Plato

So I've spent the last two days feverishly preparing to write a philosophy paper that was due on Friday. I hope to have it finished by Tuesday morning. The process has surprised me. I'd forgotten what it felt like to come up with an idea in response to someone else's thoughts. I enjoy doing it while I'm doing it, then forget about it as soon as I'm done. So everytime I write a paper, there's a point at which I go, "Hey, I don't hate doing this at all. I'm actually pretty good at it, come to think of it." Yet during the prolonged periods of procrastination that have always been the real hallmarks of my scholarly "career," I'm constantly thinking that I do hate it.

Nothing to do but soldier on, one man against his demons, tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That's Shakespeare, by the way. I'm Dr. Chuck. And I'm going to bed.

Kerik withdraws his nomination

Now comes my first foray into political blogging. That didn't take long.

Bernard Kerik, the former commissioner of the NYPD, recently nominated by President Bush to be the next Director of Homeland Security, has just withdrawn himself from the confirmation process. Apparently, he balked right when his background check was getting down to the nitty-gritty. Damn, I wonder what this guy has to hide. My first thought when I saw him was that he looked like a thug, and I don't mean that in the way that a lot of people use the word "thug" to describe any one of the countless number of ruthless political hacks whose faces are constantly shifting in and out of wide circulation; I mean that when Bush announced his nomination a week ago, this guy stepped up to the podium with Bush looking like he could very well have been freshly returned from dumping a guy's corpse in a hole somewhere in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

Kerik has the face of a permanently disgruntled interior lineman with the body to match. Frankly, I thought he was a good choice - what with the DHS always acting like its main function is to rough up members of any demographic that might make Fox News viewers uncomfortable - a visual match made in heaven for an administration that has taken "style over substance" to a new level. But I digress (though only by way of setting up the gist of this post)...

What was so bad about this thug that the Bushies weren't even willing to wait and try to deal with it at the confirmation hearings? The way I see it, it had to be an internal decision. Consider:

1) If the Democrats knew that Kerik had a rotting corpse in his closet, they would have waited until the hearings and used it to rip Bush like a bottle of cheap vodka.

2) Kerik's supposed reason for withdrawing his name - that he just discovered during the process of background checks that he "might have" employed an illegal alien as a housekeeper - isn't bad enough, at least on its own, to ruin his chances of being nominated (He's not Zoe Baird, after all).

These two things lead me to believe that the White House didn't find out about whatever it was that's occasioned today's events until after they'd already nominated Kerik, and apparently they thought it was bad enough to tell him to resign and cite a bogus reason for fear the Democrats would find out (or perhaps they thought the Democrats already knew).

I hope some reporter from the Times has nothing better to do over the weekend than dig up some dirt. I'm researching a term paper on Plato's ethics and half-hoping that Kerik pays me a visit.

Should I post a picture?

Is it a good idea to put up my picture here? Not that I mind having my picture up for anyone to look at: I'm an actor - being visible is my job; but I'm not entirely sure it wouldn't be better to have my legions of readers all left to their own devices to come up with a mental image of what I look like.

Inaugural Post

Well, I try to take a day off from working on papers, and what do I find... all of my friends are still working on papers. So I spend a lot of time bumming around my apartment, and bumming around the internet, and bumming around in the present tense because you can't change tenses in the middle of a paragraph...

So I started a new one and thought about nothing in particular. I tried to write about it, but you can see what kind of luck I had. What can I say - the day's been pretty boring.