by John Walters
Tweet Me Right
MIB is our favorite celebrity couple.
Starting Five
Changeup
This afternoon the Orioles and Yankees will meet for the 12th time this season—and it would be the 13th were it not for a rainout last week that has yet to be made up. It’s not even Memorial Day yet and neither team has played its 50th game.
In short, the Yanks and O’s have spent more than 25% of their seasons playing one another and the season is nearly one-third over. And they still must play each other seven more times. There’s got to be a better way, baseball.
Chalk it up to the vicissitudes of the schedule? Perhaps, but why must interdivisional foes meet NINETEEN times per season? It’s 2019, here’s a better idea. Every team from both leagues plays each other at least one series per season. Here’s the breakdown:
–Intradivisional foes: play 14 times per season. There’s four interdivisional foes in each division thanks to baseball’s six-division, 30-team symmetry, so that’s 56 games.
–Interdvisional foes in same league play six times per season. There’s 10 such foes for every team so that’s 60 games.
–Interleague foes meet at least three times per season. There’s 15 teams in the other league so that’s 45 games.
That’s 56 + 60 + 45 = 161.
That leaves you one game short. Fine. Everyone play the Mets one more game. Or something. It’s still better than what we have now.
And for that person among you who’s going to ask, “What about the designated hitter?”, our answer is, “What about it?” Interleague play is already here. We just want to expand it.
The Walkout
The president was supposed to have a meeting with Senate Democrats Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi about one of the “I” words (Infrastructure? Immigration?) but instead stormed out of the room because what was really on his mind was a third “I” word (Impeachment). Then he addressed reporters on the South Lawn behind this just-happened-to-be-there sign.
By the way, the president has cost taxpayers more than $100 million via his golf habit in just a little over two years in office. Is there a sign for that?
Don’t Blame The South (-ern Hemisphere)
We heard one of those Doomsday/Man’s Fault analogies the other day. Goes like this: If the lifetime of the planet were one day, then civilized man came along in the last four minutes before midnight and he basically destroyed the earth in the final 10 seconds.
Think about it: the Industrial Revolution began less than 200 years ago, as did the introduction of fossil fuels and plastic. All of these three “innovations” have done far more harm to the planet than all those centuries of silly little wars.
But we are here to basically absolve the folks of the southern hemisphere. Of the planet’s 20 largest cities, only three are south of the equator: Jakarta, Indonesia; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. And all the inventions that have, at least for a time, made life easier while slowly choking the planet, have come from folk above the equator. So we’d like to pretty much absolve the southern hemisphere.
Think about that the next time you don your “We The North” t-shirt.
Everest To Eternal Rest
Up for a little news about another death on Mount Everest? Of course you are. American Don Cash, 55, became the third climber to die on Everest this climbing season, but at least he reached the summit first.
Cash lost consciousness shortly after reaching the summit and two sherpas carried him 200 feet down to the Hilary Step (“Lock her up!”). However, the HS is infamous as a bottle-neck point on the trio had to wait two hours for climbers heading up the HS to clear before they could proceed down. In that time, Cash died.
He may have died anyway, of course. But whether you’re atop the world or in an ambulance on 9th Avenue at rush hour, there’s only so much first responders can do to save you if there’s traffic.
The Winklevi Revisited
Twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the famed “Winklevi” of The Social Network,are getting an image-polish from the very man who first turned them into a dual 6’5″ dumb-hunk punchline: Ben Mezrich.
A Harvard alum (’91) himself, Mezrich is the author who wrote The Accidental Billionaires, which Aaron Sorkin turned into The Social Network.
Now Mezrich is back with a tome on how the Winklevi took much of their payout from nemesis Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook stock, then saw the stock soar, then invested a couple of hundred thou of that windfall in Bitcoin back in 2013, and now have become billionaires themselves. The book, out this week, is titled Bitcoin Billionaires.
We’ve read four of Mezrich’s books. He’s entertaining and definitely prolific, but he readily admits in this one and in another book of his we’ve read (Once Upon A Time In Russia) that some of the scenes in his books are IMAGINED. Not a good look for a non-fiction author. Basically, Mezrich tells the stories (almost all of them based around Harvard figures; he lives in Boston) that Michael Lewis doesn’t have the time to write about but would do a better job with.
