KEYS TO THE GAME

What Goes Down...

2011-04-08T17:47:00.005-04:00

When Jose was a tyke, he had a friend named Dan. Dan was creative and ingenious. While other kids played checkers, Dan played stock market. Dan once made a bid to get Jose to sell him his comics in an effort to corner the comic book market. While some played house, Dan played hotel. Jose distinctly remembers Dan buying a bunch of pastel mints placing them on his parents’ pillows and then assuming the right to charge them room fees. And while others played war, Dan played university. Dan’s father was a professor of philosophy, thus it struck Dan that universities were a gold mine.

Of course, Dan and Jose, as kids, lacked the academic credentials required to teach anything except MBA classes, so it occurred to Dan that we needed to pioneer new disciplines. The most memorable of these trailblazing fields of inquiry was barfology—the science of barf.

Barfology was not a terribly practical science, and there was relatively little to explore in comparison with, say, physics. Still, Dan was able to extract one great insight from his study, the cogito, if you will in the field of barfology.

What goes down must come up.

It applies to tainted food and it applies to the Boston Red Sox. For the first week, the Red Sox have gone down, and down and down, and now, they are coming up. Like a ghastly chum of half digested spaghetti, corn and bile, they are coming back harshly and violently, scalding the Yankees with the acid reflux of their heaving resurgence.

The Red Sox have been down, today, at last, they come back up.

Jose is fired up. He’s hulking up. Sing along to the tune of Hulk Hogan’s theme “I Am a Real American” by Rick Deringer

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, sad at the death of Lou Gor-man

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, Dru is in right, most every night!

When it comes crashing down, and it hurts inside,
It’s a ten game ho-ome stand, Yankees cannot hide,
You recall Eric Wedge, ‘member Curtis Pride,
You can’t keep swinging at, pitches way inside.

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, never liked Jose Offer-man

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, chanted all night, for Jo-ey Gathright

Well I’m on board with Carl Craw-ford,
And his wage is money Henry can a-fford,
Lackey’s contract may be bad as Lugo’s was,

but I don’t care right now, cause I’m kind of buzzed.

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, I think that Wakefield is the man,

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, Papi’s all right, has the green light!

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, I watched Belinda (comma) Stan

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, I think I might, watch Sunday night!!!!

It is with great sadness that Jose learned today that Red Sox legend Manny Ramirez has announced his retirement from baseball following word that he had, for the second time in his career, failed a drug test.

It breaks Jose’s heart to see the slow, sad end of one of the best hitters he ever saw. On one level it hurts him to see a player whom he enjoyed watching as much as any not named Martinez or Wakefield fall into such shame and disrepute. But even more, it crushes Jose to know that Manny Ramirez, even with the aid of performance enhancing drugs never once had a 50 home run season.

That had always been Jose’s defense for Manny. With his eye, with his swing, how could he be a juicer if he never hit 50 home runs? Brady Anderson hit 50 on the juice and Manny couldn’t? How is that possible?

Jose likes to imagine that the reason for this failure is that Manny never really took drugs, or at the very least didn’t take them competently. Perhaps when Manny took a female fertility drug, he really was doing it for fertility reasons? Maybe he wanted to have another kid, and just thought that a female was a male who worked for a fee—in his case $20 million?

Or maybe he thought that baseball had banned the use of rugs, rather than drugs and therefore opted for all wood floors and thought he was fine?

While these are all disturbingly possible explanations in the world of Manny, Jose must also accept the probability that Manny being Manny means Manny doing drugs.

It’s a sad way to end a career. Let’s hope that, at the very least, he manages to conceive.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

The Rules Don’t Apply to Jose

2011-04-07T17:20:00.003-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. They’ve driven Jose to it.

For four years or so, Jose has refused to start a game thread on the Sons of Sam Horn message board. He’s refused because of the awful burden of knowing that if he starts a thread and the Sox win, he will have to start a thread tomorrow. And if they win that game, he will have to start the thread after that, and… well… it gets to be a colossal pain in the ass. Once upon a time Jose was lean and hungry. He wanted to be there every day. He’d write KEYS on vacation, at six in the morning, whatever it took to feel like he was in the game. Not any more. Jose has long since entered the Mike Lansing phase of his career, he’s just showing up to collect a paycheck, and since Jose doesn’t collect a paycheck… well, you can follow the logic.

But this afternoon something just snapped.

The finale of the TV show Newhart is best remembered for Bob Newhart waking up next to Suzanne Plechette, who played his wife on his previous sitcom, and discovering his whacky adventures in Vermont were just a dream. What goes forgotten is that the episode also featured Darryl and Darryl, the two woodsmen who remained mute while their brother Larry spoke for them throughout the series, saying their first word.

In a flash forward sequence, the three brothers are married to a group of shrill New York harpies. After the wives have taken their annoying jabber to Suzyn Waldmanesque height, the two Darryls look at each other, then look at their wives and scream “QUIET!!!!!” When a stunned cast questions why they had never spoken before Larry answers “apparently they’ve never been this p.o.’d before.”

Jose too, has never been this p.o’d before.

At least not since 2004.

He’s p.o.’d and he wants to scream at the world.

So here’s the deal, Jose is going to start the game thread and write a full on three part KEYS for Friday’s Yankees game and every other game until the Red Sox lose again.

If they keep losing, he’s also going to keep starting threads until they win. There are the game thread rules, but Jose doesn’t care. He is too p.o.’d
And if you don’t like it QUIET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2. Jose did have other options to try to break the drought. Specifically, he may have received a message from God saying that the Red Sox will not win until Jose receives $50,000. Don’t laugh. When Orel Hersheiser’s said he needed to raise $8 million or God would “take him home,” he raised $9.1 million.

You see, Jose’s a federal employee and if there’s a prolonged shutdown, he might need some of that sweet, sweet blood money to tide him over (Note: Jose worked an alternative schedule starting at 5:30 this morning, so don’t go calling your Congressman and complaining that he is writing on someone else’s dime. Jose does not get paid to sit on his porch and drink beer. He’s not a farmer, a banker or Curt Euro in 2008.)

But truth be told, things have lined up kind of perfectly for him to go on a writing binge. He may well be unemployed while the government works out a budget deal, his significant other is leaving the country for two weeks and his cousin recently had an inspiring conversation with the drummer in his band Superpill that included the sentence “Holy Shit! Your cousin is Jose Melendez!”

Yeah, Jose still has what the people want.

Besides, being 0-6 is awful. There’s almost nothing worse than being 0-6 if you exclude being 0-7 etc. Jose thought about it on his commute home today, and tried to come up with all things that are worse than being 0-6 and here’s what he came up with: genocide, the musical Rent. That is all. Genocide is obvious and Rent? Why do those dead beats think they should live rent-free? Their friend who bought some property is the bad guy for wanting them to pay to live there instead of spending all of their money on heroin and… well, not condoms.

La Boheme could get away with such an obnoxious plot because the music was so good. Rent? Not so much. Rent is the Eric Gagne of musicals. You hear good things, but when you see it up close you can’t believe how bad it is. Jose would much rather watch musicals based on the lives of David Murphy and Kasson Gabbard then ever see Rent again.

Now some of you are going to be surprised. You’re probably saying, “Come on Jose. Sure an 0-6 start is bad, but do you really think that the only things worse are genocide and Rent?”

Yes. Yes Jose does. Please allow Jose to explain how the following awful things are still better than an 0-6 start.

Lice: With both lice and an 0-6 start one loses his dignity, but at least lice can be killed by putting them in a plastic bag for two weeks. If we put the Red Sox in a plastic bag for two weeks, there would be literally no decrease in their performance.

War: Have you ever heard of the military industrial complex? That thing creates jobs. Losing baseball games does not contribute to the economy in any way. Except possibly by increasing alcohol sales and the sales of lengths of rope.

Fever Pitch: Yes, Fever Pitch was horrendous, but at least it was over in two hours.

Trans fats: Can the FDA or an act of the state legislature ban 0-6 starts from Massachusetts? Didn’t think so.

Dogfighting: Dogfighting might be evil and vile, but it is probably at least more competitive than the baseball we’ve seen thus far.

Jose could go on, but you get the point, and if you don’t Jose suggests you watch Rent, it might be for you.

3. But Jose doesn’t want to be completely nonconstructive. The point of this exercise is not just to rant; it’s also to help. So Jose has compiled a list of possible explanations for the Red Sox awful start.

Once we know the problem, perhaps we can figure out a solution.

· Perhaps the Red Sox thought they were federal employees and the shutdown started last week.

· Are astronomical sticklers and refuse to start playing like spring training is over until the summer solstice.

· Have river blindness.

· Are on strike in solidarity with state employees in Wisconsin.

· Felt really bad for Cleveland fans after the LeBron debacle and wanted to cheer them up.

· Miss Bill Hall’s soothing voice.

· Are building their new spring training stadium on an ancient Indian burial ground.

· Can only play good baseball when new episodes of Lost are coming out.

· Are lacking adequately creative handshakes. (Note: Hi Bill Simmons!)

· Are playing cruel April Fool’s joke that lasted the entire first week of April.

· Are ust making it more dramatic before they start “hulking up.”

It’s not a comprehensive list, but it’s close. Anyway, get used to it. If the Red Sox keep losing, Jose will keep writing in a blind rage. If they start winning, he will be writing in a farsighted less rage.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Happy New Year--Let's Get Some Revenge

2011-04-01T00:10:00.002-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. For three long years Jose has been in exile. Whether one spends it in the warm heart of Africa or the steamy thigh of the American South, exile is awful. No place is Boston but Boston. The worst part of loneliness is being alone. And starting today, the fourth year of exile begins, this year from our nation's capital, from the arrogant id of our national consciousness. There will be baseball played in Boston this year—good baseball—and once again Jose will not be there to see it, to smell it, to savor it, and possibly, just possibly to throw up in it.

But while Jose needs baseball, it does not follow that baseball needs Jose. The work of bat and ball, of pitch and catch, of sign and trade continues. It continues today. It continues better.

2. One year ago today, Jose fell victim to the most ingenious, vicious, dangerous April Fool’s joke he’s ever been a party to.

It was a big day for Jose—he had a bunch of job interviews lined up in Washington—so he woke up at the impossibly early hour of six in the morning. As is his custom, he started the day by checking his email. Prominent among the normal assortment of spam for dog-training products and federally subsidized scam universities was a message from his friend Jared reading:

“Major News…Please don’t freak.”

When someone advises you not to freak before telling you something, it is never a good sign. “Please don’t freak” has never been followed by “I won the lottery” or “ The Red Sox got bullpen help.” It is usually followed by a phrase like “I lost all our money at the track” or “I’m carrying Alex Rodriguez’s baby.” This case was no different.

Dear Jose,

First off, let me say that I know I’ve been distant and kind of an asshole this semester. I’m sorry; I’ve had a lot of things going on.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve come to the difficult realization that I am wicked in love with you. I think I’ve picked up something from you to, and it’s time one of us is man enough to admit it.

Sorry to do this by email… but I don’t think I could get it out in person…

Jose’s initial, stunned reaction was “WHAT THE FUCK?”

But after a moment’s consideration, he was able to calm himself and develop a more measured reaction of “WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT THE FUCK?”

He then repeated the sentence to himself for another 10 minutes while in the shower.

Finally, his careful reasoning led to a decision: The most likely explanation is that Jared is playing some sick joke. In which case the correct response is “Go fuck yourself.” If this interpretation and response is correct, Jose looks smart. The less likely, but still plausible, explanation was that Jared was crying out in pain, in which case “Go fuck yourself” would be a cruel taunt.

Jose decided to err on the side of caution, and assume it was true. He did not want his friend’s pain or worse on his hands. He wrote:

Jared,

Not really sure what to make of this. Jose is 100% straight, so this is never going to happen, but Jose doesn’t see any reason why we can’t still be friends if you can handle it.”

Jose

Later that morning, Jose received a revelatory message:

“Ha! I got the same email from you. Someone must have hacked us! Check out the date.”

Jose was indeed the April fool. But that didn’t mean Jose’s decision was wrong. Yes, he looked like a fool, but he did the right thing—he believed what he was told, thereby ensuring that he avoided the worst-case scenario. There is a lesson there for Red Sox fans today.

We have been told by national media, local pundits and our own lyin’ mouths that the Red Sox are the best team in baseball this year, that they are the team to beat. That may be true, it may not, but Jose suggests we act like it is. If we assume it’s a lie and indeed it is, will we gain any satisfaction? No. We’ll be miserable the entire year. If we assume it’s true and it turns out to be a lie, at least we have today. At least we have opening day, when we can believe, hell when Nationals fans can believe, that we have the best team in baseball.

3. Of course, the story doesn’t end there. There is another lesson still to be learned.

Over the course of the morning, Jose told friends the story of his humiliation as he attempted to identify the perpetrator. One friend he called with vengeance in his heart responded, “I didn’t do it, but I wish I had. You know who that sounds like? Martha.”

Of course! Martha was a theatrical classmate of Jose’s who took comedy seriously. The previous year for April fools she had told her best friends that she was pregnant and didn’t know who the father was. Try doing that Chris Rock!

Jose waited for her inevitable taunting phone call, and he plotted. He seethed.

It came at 3PM, just minutes before he had a job interview.

“Hi Jose!” came her saccharine voice.

“Hey Martha” Jose responded coolly.

“How’s it going?”

“Lot of weird stuff going on,” Jose set the trap. “It’s chaotic here, and Jose got some really weird emails.”

“What kind of emails?”

“Ah Jose doesn’t want to talk about it,”

“Ooohhh…. Okay, well if you need to talk, you know you can trust me.”

“Well, Jose got this really strange email from Jared saying… well, saying that he’s”

“APRIL FOOLS!” she shrieked. “APRIL FOOLS!!!! I GOT YOU SO BAD!”

“Oh… Martha… you shouldn’t have done that,” Jose muttered.

“Whatever,” she responded. “I burned you.”

“You really, really shouldn’t have done that.”

“Yeah right, Jared’s not gay.”

“ Jose isn’t saying he is, but… well… you struck some kind of nerve. He’s really freaking out… and… well… Jose doesn’t know what’s going on, but this is going to take a long time to fix.”

“But… but it was just an April Fool’s joke,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean—“

“Well you did,” Jose snapped back.

“God, it was just supposed to be an April Fool’s joke. I didn’t think that—”

“APRIL FOOLS!!!” Jose snapped back. “You got Jose and Jose got you back.”

The lesson for the Red Sox here is, of course, as always, that revenge is immensely satisfying. And we have a lot of revenge to take this year.

Manny and Damon? Definitely need revenge.

The rest of that Tampa team? 2008 ALCS—revenge required.

The Angels? 2009 ALDS—you know what would help with that? Some vengeance.

The Yankees? They exist. That’s as good a reason for revenge as any.

So learn the lesson well men of Boston, and have a vengeful, vengeful New Year!!!

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

No More Perks

2011-02-26T15:18:00.000-05:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME

In the 2010 election campaign, Republicans around the country called for reductions in public spending and deep cuts in public wages, benefits and Perk. Yeah, Jose thought that they said “perks” too, but apparently they said “Perk,” and now he’s gone. All hail Congress in its infinite wisdom. (Note: Presumably Jose is correct when he assume the word “infinite” is an adjective that means “like an infant.”

Funny though, Jose doesn’t recall the Republicans insisting in reductions in Nate, Harengody or Erden, and all of those guys got dumped too. Perhaps, Turkish center Semih Erden fell under the anti-immigration or anti-Muslim parts of the platform? Jose will say this, he is curious to see how Sharia Law at the Garden would work when Kobe comes to town. Still, Luke Harengody? Jose thought the Republican Party was all about supporting goofy white guys from the mid-West.

The even more perplexing part is that part of the return was Jeff Green. And Jose has yet to see the Republican since Teddy Roosevelt who would characterize himself as “Green.” Also aren’t they the least bit concerned that the power forward will bring his house gases to Boston?

Yes, it’s silly and kind of stupid, for Jose to attribute Celtics GM Danny Ainge’s decision to deal the center from the championship team’s lineup while the Celtics have the best record in the East to a the act of a spiteful Congress, but it makes about as much sense as any other theory Jose’s heard. (Note: Jose doesn’t hear a lot of theories.) Just months ago we were talking about how if Perkins had been healthy for Game 7, the Celtics would be world champions, and now they’ve dealt him? On a crazy scale of one to 10, that rates a Charlie Sheen. (Note: Jose has no idea what that means, but he’s heard lots of jokes along those lines lately.)

Of course, there is one possibility that involves neither Congressional overreach or mental illness and that is that Perk, for the rest of this year at least, was not going to be Perk. As hard as he worked to hurry back, and as trim as he looked in his return, Perk’s sore left knee was a troubling sign of things to come. If Perk was going to be well-below 100% for the remainder of the season, suddenly trading him for a forward who can score points, play decent defense, and give Paul Pierce some rest makes a lot of sense.

So in the spirit of cooperation and lethargy, here are the things Jose likes about the deadline trades:

1. The Celtics acquired Jeff Green, who is an athletic, versatile forward, not Jeff Greene, Larry David’s manager on Curb Your Enthusiasm, who, while replacing Perk’s sheer mass on the basketball court, would have provided little additional value.

2. With Turkish Center Semih Erden gone, Boston’s large Armenian community need no longer feel ambiguous about rooting for the Celtics.

3. With Nate Robinson gone and Delonte West, Shrek and Donkey (note: Glen Davis and Robinson) have been replaced by Shrek and the guy who did LeBron’s mom.

4. Jose is now marginally less afraid to meet the Celtics in a dark alley.

5. Perk’s reported tears at hearing he had been traded suggest he is equipped to be Speaker of the House.

6. There will be an exciting race to see who leads the team in technical fouls.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Not Crazy Carl

2010-12-21T21:57:00.002-05:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. There are a lot of things Jose is excited about with the arrival of Carl Crawford: his speed, his defense, and his emerging power. But Jose is even more excited that this harkens back to a glorious age in Red Sox history. Did you know that Carl Crawford is the first Carl on the Red Sox since Carl Yasztremski?

Okay, technically that’s not true, but he is the first Carl who believes in dinosaurs and isn’t universally referred to as Tuffy since Yaz.

This leads one to ask a rather obvious question: How does a belief in the past existence of dinosaurs impact Not Crazy Carl’s game? (Note: Jose is seriously considering “Not Crazy Carl” for the official KEYS nickname for the left fielder.)

Jose has identified two obvious effects. First, it implies that Crawford believes in evolution. This is good. Evolution means that Crawford does not imagine that he was just created 6,000 years ago as the player he is and that nothing can ever change. He can become a better player and gain critical advantages, such as the ability to breath air or the growth of a prehensile tail, that will make him a more effective player.

Second, a belief in dinosaurs suggests an understanding of the concept of extinction, a knowledge of the fact that nothing—least of all baseball prowess—is forever. Ergo, win now.

2. Still Crawford’s game doesn’t remind Jose much of Captain Carl, based on the one time Jose saw number 8 play in the second to last game of 1983. In fact, Crawford’s game, particularly his defense in left, doesn’t remind Jose of damn near anyone in Red Sox history. For generations now, left has been a place to hide defensive liabilities rather than showcase defensive strengths. So Jose had to look outside of the Red Sox organization for comparisons. But Jose isn’t sure there’s a major league baseball player who has a game quite like Crawford’s.

Rather, the best comparison Jose could come up with is to a super hero. You know the one. The really fast guy. He’s so fast he can run on water. It’s like… Ummm.. Something with an F? Fuh… Fluh… Fla….

Jesus Christ!

Yeah, that’s the guy. Crawford is so fast that he can probably walk on water just like Jesus Christ.

Of course, there are a lot of other similarities. Both are regarded as saviors, both are black, and the only way opponents of either man could hope to stop him from doing what he was born to do is by nailing his feet down. (Note: Yes, in the spirit of the season, Jose went there, but before you get all offended, watch, he’s going to redeem himself, which, from what he has heard, is what Jesus is all about.) Of course, nails didn’t really stop Jesus from doing his job—the whole salvation thing. We can only hope Crawford is as resilient.

Yes, the two men are similar in an awful lot of ways. And that’s how Jose likes it. If Crawford continues to follow Christ’s career projections, he should peek in just about five years—when he turns 33. Of course, given that Crawford is signed through 2017, Jose hopes we get more production from him at age 34 and 35 than we got out of Jesus.

3. Since Jose has analyzed Crawford’s first name and comparables to death (note: wow, is that another Jesus joke?) it seems only appropriate that Jose take a look at his last name too. There have only been two other Crawfords in Red Sox history, reliever Steve Crawford, who served competently, if blandly, in the 80s, and Tampaxton Crawford the pitcher in the early 2000s who has, perhaps, Jose’s favorite KEYS nickname of all time. Of course, Jose expects much more from Carl than from Tampaxton. Tampaxton, as you may recall, was a roider, had a bizarre injury from a glass and flamed out quickly. In other words, as his nickname suggests, he was a bloody mess.

Carl, one would hope, will be more together. Certainly the fact that the most disgusting consumer product one can link to his first name is Carl’s Jr. hamburgers is a positive sign. It would suggest that, at absolute worst, his play will be unappetizing and cause severe intestinal distress.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

I Remember Clifford

2010-12-14T20:54:00.000-05:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

1. It is almost universally regarded as humiliating when a man in pursuit of a woman is defeated in his quest for her favor, and perhaps her bed, by a richer man who swoops in at the last moment in his fancy, jewel-encrusted car. The reason this is seen as a humiliation is obvious; the woman’s choice has revealed that the rich man is, at least in her eyes, superior to the poor man. This is not a surprise. It reaffirms what we all already know, what the poor man himself knows, that everything being equal a rich man is more desirable than a poor man.

Of course, all things are rarely equal. The rich man may be nicer, smarter, funnier or more charming than the poor man, but as casual observers, we can’t tell, so we make the most obvious assumption—she likes the rich man more because he is rich. In other words, the interaction tells us nothing that we didn’t already know. We jump to our conclusions and we are on our merry way.

What raises far more questions, however, is when the woman in the story is being courted by a rich man and yet leaves him when the poor man rolls up in his AMC Gremlin. An observer watching this transpire still knows that the rich man is wealthier than the poor man, however in this case, he also knows something else, that in some critical characteristic the poor man is the rich man’s superior. Either there is something very good about the poor man, very bad about the rich man, or both.

So what then, is the massive deficiency of baseball’s richest man, the New York Yankees? Why did Cliff Lee choose the certainly not poor, but far less wealthy Philadelphia Phillies over them? Sure, we could imagine that the Phillies have some tremendous advantage, but let’s be serious; we’re talking about Philadelphia. Unless Cliff Lee is a fan of cheesesteak, revolutionary history or being a dick, it’s hard to figure out what the draw would be.

So again, what is the massive deficiency of the Yankees?

If we were to go back to the example of the woman and the man, we might assume that the rich man is cruel, stupid, obnoxious, foul-smelling or sexually inadequate, and while we can safely assume all of these about the New York Yankees, it still fails to explain Lee’s choice because, let’s be honest, the Phillies aren’t great shakes in any of these categories either (note: except for Chase Utley, who, as any fan of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” knows, is dreamy). Thus, the only thing Jose can come up with is that the Yankees have some deficiency so vile, so perverse that it makes even the Phillies seem like a preferable partner for Lee.

Here’s what Jose’s come up with—the Yankees are in the mafia. Think about it. It makes so much sense. They act with impunity, they reside in the Bronx, they wear athletic garb to work, they cheat on their wives, they associate with a “Boss” who while clearly evil is treated as though he were a good man after his death, it all adds up.

Of course, the sexual inadequacy thing seems pretty plausible too.

2. When the Clifford Lee signing was announced yesterday and they started showing highlights on TV, was Jose the only one who as surprised to learn that he was neither a big red dog nor a Chinese man?

3. Now that the Yankees have failed horrifically in the marketplace, Jose keeps wondering if they will get a government bailout. Oh, that’s right they already got one, its called Yankee Stadium.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

Remembering the Lesson of '04

2010-11-20T12:01:00.001-05:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEY TO THE GAME.

As fall begins to easy into frigid winter, Jose ought to take a break from his busy schedule of sitting on the stoop and watching the world go buy to give thanks to the San Francisco Giants.

“But why, thank the Giants?” you may be asking. “You’re not a fan, supporter or even a well-wisher Jose.”

True enough. Nevertheless, Jose owes the Giants a heartfelt thanks, a big hug that includes backrubbing that goes on long enough that it gets a bit awkward. For you see, the Giants have reminded Jose of the greatest lesson of all—that God loves us.

Wait, that doesn’t sound like Jose.

Ah, here it is, the Giants have reminded Jose of the greatest lesson of all—the lesson of 2004.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

You’d think the lesson of 2004 would have stuck with Jose this long, that such a profound and valuable educational experience would have lasted far more than the six years it took to escape from Jose’s mind like so many facts about the periodic table of elements. And yet there, it went. All off to naught.

Some of you may be in the same predicament as Jose, struggling to remember exactly what was the lesson of that magical October. There are so many profound insights, that it is hard to remember what was the overriding lesson. Was it not to let us win tonight? Was it not to slap the ball out of a first baseman’s mitt? Or was it to never use Javier Vasquez in a seventh game? These are all good lessons, but none of them is THE lesson.

The lesson of 2004 is that the only way to break the cold chains of history is with focused will and brutal force. The Red Sox did it in 2004, and the Giants did it again in 2010. History repeats itself the first time as comedy, the second time also as comedy.

When the Red Sox won in 2004, Dan Shaughnessy, among others, suggested that at long last Lucy had let Charlie Brown kick the football, that finally, instead of yanking the football away and leaving old Chuck angry, distrustful and flat on his back, the bitch in the blue dress had left her finger on the ball, and let Charlie kick it swift and strong.

It’s a nice metaphor is some ways. The idea of the cycle being broken is appealing. Bruce Banner has stopped becoming the Hulk forever. Gilligan gets off the island. The sins of the father are not visited upon the son. But that’s not what happened.

Lucy did not let Charlie Brown kick the football. She wouldn’t. She can’t. Such an act of kindness would render her utterly un-Lucy. History is not made when the villains suddenly discover their kinder side.

No, what the Red Sox did it 2004 was seize their destiny by force. Charlie Brown ran to kick the football, and when Lucy yanked it back, instead of following through to the predictable, tragic confusion, Charlie floored her with a roundhouse kick. Then Charlie picked up the ball, as Lucy lay stunned, and drop kicked it through the uprights straight and true. 2004 was an act of defiance, not a concession.

The Giants in 2010 were a bit different. There was no clear Lucy, no Yankees to knock to the turf. But there is always a nemesis, whether tangible or implicit, and the Giants conquered theirs.

The lesson, to Jose, to all of us, is not to be a passive player in history, to allow one’s fate to be written by the Lucys of this world. Rather, we must realize that we have agency. The future is not written. The die is not cast.

Like the Red Sox, like the Giants, we can break the cycle if only we have the will, the strength and the flexibility to deliver that roundhouse kick.

I’m Jose Melendez, and that is my KEY TO THE GAME.

What Jose Is

2010-11-13T13:13:00.000-05:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEY TO THE GAME.

Some months ago Jose started a new job, a job he shall henceforth refer to as…

Wait…

No…

He’s never going to refer to it.

Never.

Anyway, Jose was at an event in his new home city of Washington, DC where there was an icebreaker. You know, it was one of those events where either a) boring people offer the one interesting detail in their pathetic little lives or b) interesting people try to one up each other. In this case the instruction was “Tell us something interesting about yourself that we don’t already know.”

Jose had precious few options, either he could reveal he was a Red Sox blogger, declare that he once did pushups and sit ups every day for four years without a single missed day, or he could talk about that time with the Olympic swimmer on top of Mt. Washington, and that’s neither appropriate nor true. So, Jose being Jose, he went with the blogging.

“Jose is a Red Sox blogger,” Jose pointed out. “His blog was named Boston’s best by the Boston Phoenix in 2005.”

And then the baton passed to the guy who went to Space Camp, to the woman who wrote the score to The King and I, and so on. But Jose felt no relief. Taking his turn had not proven to be the Alka Seltzer of self-revelation to the burning indigestion of his anxiety at revealing something interesting. No the anxiety had only increased as acid and base combined to a bubbling froth. But Jose had revealed something about himself, hadn’t he?

Yes.

He had revealed that he is a liar.

Where does Jose get off saying that he is a Red Sox blogger?

Jose could say he WAS a Red Sox blogger. That would be true. But IS? Jose hasn’t blogged seriously about the Red Sox since 2007. Sure he’s written the occasional piece, but he’s written far more about Africa in the last three years than he has about baseball, and he doesn’t even do that much anymore.

Jose doesn’t want to think of himself as a liar. It’s not a nice thing to be. A liar is someone like Rick Pitino, which would implies that lying is only a step or two away from having 35 seconds of sex with a woman at a seedy Louisville restaurant after closing time, and while calling Pitino “Quick Rick” is hysterical, Jose has no interest in being called “No Foreplay Jose.” Thus, Jose got quickly down to the business of self-delusion and rationalization, which, as Jose has pointed out before, are the Shinotism and Buddhism to his Japan. He would also point out that they are Objectivism and Aqua Buddhism to Jose’s Rand Paul.

So let’s wade into Jose’s case that he is a Red Sox blogger. First, Red Sox blogging is not something one does, it’s something one is. For example, if someone asked Jason Varitek if he is a major league catcher, he would answer yes, even though he clearly hasn’t done the work of a major league catcher for years. It doesn’t matter—it’s just part of his being. By contrast, if you asked Alex Rodriguez if he is a Yankee, if he were being honest, he’d have to answer no, because, as we all know, Yankees are not centaurs—they are more like pigdogs.

Second… Actually, that’s all Jose’s got.

But it’s something he can work with. For four years Jose wrote on damn near every game occurring on a weekday and not when he was tired, bored, antsy or otherwise uninterested in writing. That makes him something—a basement dwelling dork with way too much time on his hands. But it also makes him a Red Sox blogger, and nothing can take that away, not even never writing about the Red Sox, living far away from Boston, and having no idea prior to their Red Sox debut who Daniel Nava or Darnell McDonald were prior to their Red Sox debuts.

Now Jose is not going to make some Bill Simmons style declaration that he is back. Jose is categorically not back. 2004 is not walking through that door; 2005 is not walking through that door 2007 is not walking through that door. (Note: Jose is not even going to talk about 2006. Never.) And if they do… well, it would be awesome. But it’s not going to happen so who cares?

All Jose is going to say is that he needs this and he will try to do this from time to time. It’s who he is and he refuses to change. Jose needs a place where he can write flabby prose, where he can occasionally use the passive voice, and yes, where he can make completely unsupported statements without fear of consequence, and Jose thinks that maybe, just a little bit, you need it too.

I’m Jose Melendez, and that is my KEY TO THE GAME.

In Kristof Too Popular to Be a Good Reporter?

2010-07-15T15:32:00.003-04:00

My friend and fellow BU alumnus Jina Moore, who unlike me, is an actual Africa reporter rather than a dilettante who writes on Africa with an almost excruciating self awareness wrote a thoughtful piece in response to the recent exchange between the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof and Africa blogger texasinafrica.

For those of you who come to this space for my infrequent baseball posts rather than commentary on Africa, here’s the background.

Texasinafrica submitted the following question to Kristof “Your columns about Africa almost always feature black Africans as victims, and white foreigners as their saviors.” Yes, that is a statement and not a question, but forgive me, it’s a paraphrase of Texasinafrica’s paraphrase of the original question.

Kristof, to his credit, took the questions and the nut of his answer, as transcribed by NYTpick was

The problem that I face -- my challenge as a writer -- in trying to get readers to care about something like Eastern Congo, is that frankly, the moment a reader sees that I'm writing about Central Africa, for an awful lot of them, that's the moment to turn the page. It's very hard to get people to care about distant crises like that.

One way of getting people to read at least a few grafs in is to have some kind of a foreign protagonist, some American who they can identify with as a bridge character.

And so if this is a way I can get people to care about foreign countries, to read about them, ideally, to get a little bit more involved, then I plead guilty.

It’s also clear to any journalist that it’s very difficult to engage readers and viewers in distant crises. That’s why television has pretty much stopped covering public health and global poverty. Some years ago, Anderson Cooper went out to eastern Congo to report on the crisis there. It was expensive and risky for CNN — and his ratings for those shows fell. The lesson for any television executive producer is not to cover such crises, but to throw a Democrat and a Republican in a room together and have them yell at each other. It will be less expensive, more entertaining and will get ratings up.

Caught up? Good.

It’s at this point in our story that Moore comes in with a 2X4, albeit a thoughtful 2X4, and proceeds to beat Kristof about the head with it. That 2X4 is the implication that Kristof’s primary interest is either getting Americans to read his columns or, more generously, getting Americans to act in support of poverty alleviation and conflict reduction rather than reporting “The Truth” about various places and people in Africa.

Moore articulates three specific criticisms of Kristof’s response. First, she attacks his focus on eyeballs arguing that doing solid reporting on a place like DRC, even if few people read, watch or hear it is “a kind of journalistic corporate social responsibility.” In other words, she argues that good Africa reporting is the moral price a media outlet must pay for throwing talking heads into a room to scream talking points at each other the rest of the time.

While Moore does add that “we used to just call it journalism, but times have changed,” this old PR flack couldn’t help but be horrified at the invocation of corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility is slight of hand. It is the conjurer drawing your eye to his waving left hand while palming a coin with his right. In the context of journalism, it evokes newspapers that run “serious” stories about Africa so they don’t have to write valuable stories about Africa. History does not require American reporters to scribble the first draft of African history. African journalists can and do perform that function far better than any American. What the American journalist can do that his African partners often cannot is get some elements of this newly minted history into the homes of other Americans. Kristof does this with a success that is unequaled among American journalists.

Moore’s second critique is to challenge Kristof’s assertion that he engages more Americans in African issues by focusing on white interlopers. He has no idea how engaged his readers are, Moore points out, a truism if ever there was one. Measuring eyeballs, clicks or impressions is easy, measuring psychological impact is hard and measuring how an impact translates into action is harder still. But the fact that her statement about engagement is true does not mean that it is useful.

I like action. I think driving action is the point of reporting on ignored tragedies. Expanding the universe of knowledge is the realm of academics. The role of reporters is to diffuse knowledge, to give people the accurate information required to undertake (or decline to undertake) action in the world. For those who want facts analyzed with academic rigor there are the journals. For those who want constant updates or detailed narrative there are books and blogs. For people who are prepared to take action, there are endless resources to enable them. They will not be relying on Nicholas Kristof to tell them what Africa is “really like.” The Americans who care a lot about Africa have arrived there through different paths based on personal experience, academic interest or perhaps even plain circumstance. Surely none of them came to their deep commitment through reading Kristof columns. Rather, Kristof’s power is to get good people who don’t care at all about Africa to care a little, and in a nation of 300 million, that is a valuable service. (Though perhaps this is self-defeating. If Kristof got more Americans highly interested in Africa, wouldn’t it give him more American saviors to write about?)

Finally, Moore argues that the measure of a journalist should not be the number of eyeballs he draws to the word, but the “kinds of stories we see and whether they reflect the place that some of us have dedicated not only our professional but our personal lives to getting to know.” Her subtext appears to be that Kristof is a bit of a dilettante, that he has not spent both his professional and personal life getting to know Africa and that this constraint is reflected in his work. But it is far from certain that experience leads to accuracy. After all, Henry Morton Stanley was more deeply immersed in Africa than perhaps any white man of his generation (and most since), and yet he consistently produced fabulism. Of course, it does not necessarily follow from the fact that lifers can write schlock that short timers can write Truth. But the logic does not exclude the possibility either. For example, Tocquville spent less than two years in the U.S. before writing Democracy in America, which makes less of a dilettante than I, but more than the average Peace Corps volunteer

This rebuttal is not intended as a defense of Kristof’s reporting. Its value and its flaws are evident and widely discussed. Rather it is intended as a defense of his intentions. While it is reasonable to question whether Kristof’s writing overemphasizes the importance of foreigners in fighting Africa’s problems, it is unreasonable to condemn him for attempting to make his stories more accessible to the average American. The record of American media on Africa is poor. They bought into a false narrative that the Rwandan Genocide was caused by state failure. They perpetuated the myth that drought, rather than war/politics was the cause of the Ethiopian famine. They told us next to nothing, right or wrong, about the Congo War. Against this track record, I will gladly settle for accurately reported, widely read columns about Africa in a major newspaper regardless of whether they too often regard the white man as the white knight.

The Man is Dead--Long Live the Joke

2010-07-13T13:58:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALL-STAR GAME.

1. Jose is not sorry that George Steinbrenner is dead.

Of course, he’s not happy either.

For the most part, Jose feels what he does whenever any moderately below average human being whom he does not know personally dies—not much.

Sure it would be fun to rant and rave about how loathsome Jose finds the departed, how he was bad for baseball, a convicted felon and even, Jose has heard, a lousy shipbuilder. But that would give the man too much credit.

Instead, Jose prefers to reflect on the comments of an African man in a class for which Jose is a teaching assistant. As Jose mentioned to a friend that George Steinbrenner had died, the African interjected “He was a real guy? I only knew him from Seinfeld.”

To Jose that captures Steinbrenner perfectly. When one takes the measure of the man, sums up a lifetime of debits and credits, the sum, in this case doesn’t matter. The essence of Steinbrenner was neither philanthropist nor felon, industrialist nor instigator. He was a joke. He was a punch line ranting about eating a soup in a bread bowl for lunch every day on Seinfeld. He was the word David Letterman put before “sucks” to get a cheap laugh in the days before Joey Buttafuoco. He was someone who could be played by the tremendously unserious Oliver Platt.

Yes, Steinbrenner was bad for baseball. Yes, he did give a lot of money to the Jimmy Fund. But no, he is not deserving of much celebration or scorn as he returns to the dust. He was just a man, and today he is just a man who died. But the joke, the joke lives on.

I’m Jose Melendez, and that is my KEY TO THE ALL-STAR GAME.

Shadow Pricing

2010-06-30T12:28:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’ KEY TO THE GAME.

For the next month, Jose is working as a teaching assistant in a class designed to teach international development officials how to do cost-benefit analysis (CBA). The idea behind CBA is that in analyzing a project, one should calculate the total benefit and costs derived from the project over time, and then use a discount rate to account for the time value of money, how one values 10 dollars in a year versus 10 dollars today.

At first it seems quite simple, like all one has to do is project the revenues and expenditures calculate the net present value and rejoice.

But it’s not that easy. In order to do an economic analysis, not just a financial analysis, one must calculate all of the costs and benefits, not just those that are obvious. For example, in the case of a project that causes some pollution, one has to include the cost of pollution in the equation. One must also include the opportunity cost of the project. What is not getting done because this project is going forward? As Professor Robert Conrad put it, “Never let anyone tell you that sitting on a milk crate on your front porch drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, is not a socially productive activity.”

This endeavor has made Jose wonder if we are really valuing our baseball players correctly. Sure, the Sabermetrics crowd has developed lots of new statistics that measure what players are doing, but is that enough? What about what players aren’t doing? There are some statistics that have captured assess some of the things players don’t do, such as making outs, but Jose knows that isn’t enough.

For example, with Jacoby Ellsbury replaced by Daniel Nava, we know what we’re missing in terms of actions—we’re losing so many hits, so many stolen bases and so on, but what are the inactions we’re missing? What is the added value of the time in front of the mirror that is opened up because Ellsbury isn’t standing in front of it working on his puppy dog eyes?

We know that with Josh Beckett’s injury we have lost so many strikeouts, innings pitched and so on, but we have also gained valuable hours of our lives that are no longer being squandered watching Beckett wait 20 seconds between each pitch. From the perspective of the total economy, it is possible that Josh Beckett’s injury is a net positive.

CBA can be at its most useful in measuring projects where benefits are relatively clear, such as the construction of a bridge. Thus, Jose hopes that it might be useful in assessing what Jose regards as the Red Sox’s most urgent project need, constructing a bridge to the closer.

Given that Jonathan Papelbon is under contract for two years, Jose regards this as a two-year project. That is not enough. If we have to expend $X in talent and salaries this year and next to build and sustain the bridge, then we must derive enough benefit from that bridge this year and next year (note: at a discount rate of let’s say. 03 because that is the standard in health projects, and health is clearly the biggest issue here) if the project is worth doing. Jose doesn’t see this having a positive net present value. We’re going to have to invest a lot up front to get a benefit that will last a maximum of two years, and even that is speculative. Since the bridge is built to a shaky terminus (note: Papelbon) it seems completely possible that we may not even be able to enjoy the full life of the project. Therefore, if the Red Sox are to invest in a project, investing in the terminus, a closer, seems to be a wiser choice than investing in a bridge to the closer. And that’s if one doesn’t calculate a shadow price that accounts for externalities like pollution. If one includes the noise pollution from the nonsense coming out of Papelbon’s mouth, there’s absolutely no doubt that this bridge project is a dog.

I’m Jose Melendez, and that is my KEY TO THE GAME.

Tha Spanish Flu

2010-06-29T09:31:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. With Victor Martinez joining Dustin Pedroia, Jacoby Ellsbury, St. Josh Beckett, Jeremy Hermida, Mike Cameron, DJ Dru, Daisuke Matsuzaka and others among the sick and wounded, more and more people are suggesting that an epidemic comparable to the Black Plague has broken out in the Red Sox clubhouse. Jose thinks that this analogy is false, or worse, inapt. The Black Death wiped out about a third of the population of Europe and Jose is fairly confident that this particular epidemic will ultimately strike well over a third of the Red Sox clubhouse.

Jose suspects that the better analogy is the Spanish flu of 1918. There are three reasons that Jose draws this analogy. First, since a significant chunk of the injuries are caused by Hispanophone third baseman Adrian Beltre, comparing it to a Spanish germ seems appropriate. Second, in 1918, the Red Sox won the World Series, as they will this year. Finally, as Jose has sadly learned from associating with women in their 30s who are a little too in to abstinent vampires, the Spanish Flu marks the origin of America’s sexiest vampire. This current Red Sox epidemic has given us Daniel Nava who is definitely sexy and, thanks to his fixation on the unattainable Erin Andrews, possibly abstinent. Moreover, while Nava is not over 100 years old, he is, like the high school vampire, far too old to be doing what he’s doing. On the other hand, it is not at all clear that he is a vampire, as thus far he has shown no evidence of sucking.

2. Jose is really tired of economics, of the dismal science of dollars and cents, ruining sports. Jose tried to forgive Manny Ramirez. He really did. Actually, he succeeded. Jose wasn’t there for Manny’s return, but had he been, he would have stood and cheered until a mild fatigue set in and he decided to sit down and/or get another beer.

But no more.

Jose learned last night while watching ESPN News that Takeru Kobayashi has opted out of this year’s Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog eating contest due to a stall in contract negotiations. Do you remember where you were when you lost your innocence? Jose does. The Federal on Main Street in Durham, NC sucking down an Iron City Beer. It was one thing when money ruined baseball, basketball, football, hockey, billiards, bowling and scrabble. But competitive eating? It’s supposed to be about the love, man.

Kobayashi being Manny?

3. Whenever Jose’s brother Sam sees Darnell McDonald, he thinks about Darnell from My Name is Earl, aka the Crab Man. Ergo, Jose wants to call McDonald “the Crab Man.” This is not to be confused with the promiscuous Wade Boggs who was, of course, known as “The Crabs Man.”

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

WIth a Tangled Skein

2010-06-17T12:42:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO GAME 7.

1. It is typically the purview of prophets and sages to unwind the tangled skein of destiny (note: for metaphor see Piers Anthony) and see where each thread leads. But there are times, there are moments in the endless chain of history, where mere mortals can find an unknotted thread, where mere men can rise in the morning and perceive their thread extending into the distance. Today is one of those days.

Today, men clad in green and white have risen from their beds with the knowledge, with the certainty, that the events that transpire today will be a turning point in their lives. When next close their eyes, they will be Perseus, forever immortalized in the stars themselves, or they will be Sisyphus, endlessly reaching for a glory just out of reach. Those are the only options: death or glory, mice or men, pride or prejudice, sense or sensibility, paper or plastic, T or A, rock or roll, strut or stroll, Hall or Oates, Sanford or Son. This is not a dialectic. There is a thesis and an antithesis, but there ain’t gonna be no synthesis.

Let’s put it this way. When an irresistible force meets and immovable object, F- the Lakers.

2. It should come as no surprise that the key to Game 7 is going to be rebounding. The team that has won the battle on the boards has claimed each of the first six games in the series and tonight should be no different. However, with Red Sox draftee/Celtics center Kendrick Perkins out and Lakers center Andrew Bynum hobbled, it is increasingly difficult to project which team will collect the most rebounds.

Jose’s analysis suggests that the edge lies with the Celtics. Paul Pierce rebounded from 11 stab wounds to return to NBA dominance. Kevin Garnett rebounded from a career trapped in the basketball purgatory of the twin cities to win an NBA championship. Tony Allen rebounded from near terminal stupidity to become a defensive force. Rajon Rondo rebounded from not being 100% sure how his own name is pronounced. Ray Allen, played a character named Jesus, which Jose is pretty sure means he can rebound from his own death. Big Baby Davis rebounded from a brutal time growing up and, if the latest Shrek movie can be believed, a reality in which he was never even born. Nate Robinson rebounded from playing with the New York Knicks. And last but not least, Rasheed Wallace, based on his personal grooming, rebounded from a period of homelessness.

The Lakers by contrast have Kobe Bryant, who rebounded from being accused of a horrible crime. Ron Artest, who rebounded… kind of… from one of the NBA’s most celebrated psychotic breaks, and Pau Gasol, who even now must rebound from watching his beloved Spanish floppers fall 1-0 in World Cup competition to the Swiss, a country that is literally based on the idea of having no offense.

Edge: Celtics.

3. Jose does not like sports the way he used to. Sure he still enjoys going to the games, he gets a kick out of watching his teams on television, and sports continues to play a major role in his life. Still, it’s not the same as it used to be. Jose has seen damn near everything he wanted to see in sports at a time in his life when he could a) experience it while drinking beer and b) could go out on the town to celebrate without asking for permission, and that takes the edge off of being a sports fan.

The existential angst is gone too. Without the fear of “never seeing them win it all,” the terror is gone. But when the terror departs, so does the joy at having overcome terror. In 2002, Jose would have spent all winter ruminating about Paplebon’s Game 3 collapse. This year he spent a day, maybe two. The games, all games, simply don’t mean as much as they used to.

But that changes tonight. Tonight, for the first time since at least the Patriots’ last Super Bowl, Jose feels the terror. Tonight, the game means every bit as much as it used to. If the Celtics lose, Jose fully expects to wake up tomorrow with that old familiar pain, as if someone had died and the world is now a darker, more sinister place. If the Celtics win, Jose expects to rise in the morning committed to the absurd proposition that the world is a better place thanks to a basketball game.

Jose knows why too. This is not only about the Celtics winning; it is about the Lakers losing. Jose hates the Lakers. They, like the Yankees, fill the yearning for nationalist hatred that Jose’s liberalism and compassion prevent him from expressing in his politics. They are the other, the barbarians. If one follows Clausewitz’s famous axiom and “War is politics by other means” then surely basketball is war by other means, in the sense that it is an effort to impose one’s will on the other through sheer physical and psychological domination.

Jose is not so trite as to suggest that, in this time of real war, that basketball is anything more than metaphor for war. All he is saying is that he wants to burn Los Angeles to the ground, and sow their fields with salt.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO GAME 7.

Whatever Happens They Have Got.

2010-05-03T12:38:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

Jose is a little bored.

He’s done with school, hasn’t started with work and his car has a problem stopping which makes going on a long pointless drive to some place like Metropolis, Kentucky a less than great idea. He raised the issue of his ennui with Granny Melendez the other day, and she suggested that he take up a hobby. Jose wanted to respond that baseball is his hobby, but a hobby is supposed to bring some level of enjoyment and make the time pass more quickly, so baseball isn’t much of a hobby these days—it’s more of a burden really. So she suggested, that Jose go to Michael’s and take up some sort of crafts hobby.

This doesn’t seem terribly likely. First, Jose is not that crafty. He’s not Jamie Moyer. Second what exactly would Jose do? Could he make images of DJ Dru out of macaroni? Perhaps he could needlepoint inspirational messages like “Catch the bleeping ball.” Maybe he could make a scrapbook commemorating Adrian Beltre’s walks? Of course, that one isn’t going to kill much time.

Ultimately, it just doesn’t feel like the right kind of hobby for Jose. Still, Jose needed some kind of distraction, so he thought he’d return to the sort of thing he enjoyed back before his days as a scholar. Jose picked up some history books and began scanning them for historical events that he could compare inappropriately to the Red Sox. Given the current state of the club, he went directly to the tragic, and lo and behold, he found it, and fast.

Trust Jose, there is no better place to find analogies to the current state of the Red Sox than in the colonial history of Tanganyika. Immediately, the similarities were clear. Pre-colonial Tanganyika lacked broad central organization, so do the Red Sox. Colonial Tanganyikans had no idea how to play baseball, neither do the Red Sox. But the specific analogy Jose would like to draw is between the Maji Maji Rebellion and the 2010 Red Sox.

For those of you who are victims of our public schools’ tragic under-emphasis of early 20th Century East African history, the Maji Maji Rebellion was a revolt of various Tanganyikan tribes against German rule that lasted from 1905 to 1907. The maji, for which the rebellion is named, was a tribal medicine that, many believed, would turn German bullets to water. Armed with the confidence that they were impervious to the Germans’ terrifying machine guns, warriors treated with maji put up the last great resistance of the German colonial era. The problem, of course, was that the maji didn’t work. By one estimate, the final tally was 250,000-300,000 rebels dead compared with 15 Europeans, 73 askari (locals fighting for the Germans) and 316 auxiliaries (note: from John Illife’s excellent, if dense, A History of Modern Tanganyika p.200).

As miserably inappropriate as it is to compare slaughter on this scale to something as trivial as baseball, (note: not trivial), there is an analogy to be drawn.

The leaders of the Maji Maji Rebellion repeated often and loudly that the maji would work. The repeated it so often that many people, though far from all, began to believe it, despite all evidence. The Red Sox did the same thing. All summer, they told us about a charm called run prevention and how it would neutralize the maxim guns running up and down the Yankees and Rays lineups. And armed with this confidence in the magic, we the soldiers of Red Sox nation charged into the breech, and guess what? Yeah. Our stats look only marginally better than the Maji Maji.

Hillaire Beloc once wrote in his poem The Modern Traveler.

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not

Jose would suggest that when the line and verse is written for this season the most memorable line will be:

Whatever happens, they have got
Offensive teams, and we have not.

Perhaps, we don’t really need an offensive team. Perhaps if the pitchers had thrown as advertised and the fielders had picked the horsehide clean and crisp, the offensive struggles would not have been a problem. Of course, if the maji had worked, the rebels’ lack of machine guns wouldn’t have been a problem either. And so we are stuck outgunned relying on magicks both ancient and really ineffective.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Ask a Stupid Question…

2010-04-28T14:14:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. When Jose switched on sports radio this morning, the primary topic of discussion was whether it had been appropriate for Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland to ask Oklahoma State wide receiver Dez Bryant, eventually drafted by the Dallas Cowboys, whether his mother was or had been a prostitute. Now, this particular host, maybe it was Colin Cowherd, was arguing Ireland had every right to ask the question, as there was huge money at stake, but Jose thinks that’s utter nonsense. Jose doesn’t want to live in a country where someone can be denied a job just because his mother is a whore. That’s like saying Debbie Clemens shouldn’t be able to sell weird sequined pillows on the Internet just because her husband is a statutory rapist.

But now that the proverbial can of cats had been opened out of the bag of worms, it seems like perhaps it’s fair game to ask anyone affiliated with professional sports anything. Here are the questions Jose would really like to ask.

To Derek Jeter: Who did you get herpes from? Who did you give it to? (Note: This is not to stigmatize those with herpes, which is really not big a deal, according to an infectious disease specialist who yelled at Jose the last time he made fun of Jeter’s herpes. Jose just thinks that if Jeter was spreading herpes simplex around, it may be indicative of bad judgment that could harm his play as he ages.)

To Manny Ramirez: What city to the Los Angeles Dodgers play in?

To Pedro Martinez: Now that Sandra Bullock is single, will you pursue your life’s ambition of ing her?

To Mike Lowell: When Adrian Beltre took a liner in the groin and had one testicle swell up to the size of a grapefruit, did you consider asking him for half?

To Adrian Beltre: You really don’t wear a cup? Are you out of your mind?

To Kevin Youkilis: Why is this night different from all other nights?

To DJ Dru: When you think about your swing, does it excite you sexually?

To Theo Epstein: Does DJ Dru’s swing excite you sexually?

To Allan Embree: Are you aware of data linking chewing tobacco to mouth cancer?

To C.C. Sabathia: Would you like another doughnut?

To Bill Hall: You suck.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Failing Better

2010-04-27T15:32:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. As we contemplate last night’s miserable failure by should be ace Josh Beckett, it is, perhaps, compassionate to offer him a few words of somber advice from his namesake, playwright Samuel Beckett.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

That’s right a this point Jose is just hoping that Josh Beckett will fail better. He has failed quite a few times this year, and, in general, he has not failed better.

In his previous outing, Beckett yielded 7 earned runs in 7 innings. That is failing. In last night’s outing he yielded 8 earned runs in 3 innings. That is failing worse, not failing better. To make matters worse his ERA+ this season is 61, which based on Bill Simmons’ explanation of the statistic, means that if Beckett introduced Equal Rights Amendment on the floor of the House of Representatives, he would only get a pathetic 61 votes for it, plus a few extras if he threw in a subsidy for struggling congressmen. Not good. Not good at all.

Now Jose is not at the point where he is prepared to say that the Beckett deal was a bad one. Bringing Beckett and Lowell to the Sox for Hanley Ramirez, a deal done while Theo was in a gorilla suit (note: Jose wonders whether it was a lowland gorilla or the rarer highland gorilla. He will have to check with his primatologist friend), probably won the Sox the 2007 World Series. That alone makes it worthwhile. Still, Jose can’t help but feel like we should have gotten more out of Beckett. His ERA+ in 2006 was 95, not abysmal, but below average. Then there was that spectacular 2007 season where it soared to 145, before settling into a good but not great 115 and 122 in 2008 and 2009 respectively. He’s certainly been a good pitcher, but a great pitcher year in year out? Well, think of a pitcher as a…well… pitcher… if it leaks iced tea on you six or seven times a year, are you going to keep it for another four? (Note: Yes?)

If the Red Sox are going to succeed this year, Josh Beckett, may need to take more than just a verbal instruction from Samuel Beckett, he may need to take a life lesson. While living in France, Beckett is said to have often driven a young Andre Roussimoff to school, an enormous lad who would later become known as the Eighth Wonder of the World Andre the Giant. Beckett didn’t give this enormous passenger a lift because he had to, he did it because he could, because this man, this soon to be giant, had greatness in him. That is what Josh Beckett must do, because these Red Sox are like Andre, awkward, lumbering, with at best, a mediocre grasp of English and bad teeth. Beckett must slow down the old Renault of his body, allow the Red Sox to hop aboard and then take them to school. Only then, might they know the greatness foretold.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Too Close to the Sun

2010-04-26T16:15:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEY TO THE GAME.

1. Yeah, that’s not a typo. From now on Jose is only going to do a KEY TO THE GAME. Why? Well has this edition of the Red Sox shown any ability to handle three things at once? Certainly not hitting, pitching and defense. So Jose is just going to simplify it. Think of it as a not writing prevention strategy.

Every day, if Jose is going to post KEYS. He has to do three things:

1. Produce KEY 1.

2. Produce KEY 2.

3. Produce KEY 3.

That’s a lot. Too much really. Every day Jose would look at the burden, sigh and shake his head mournfully, saying “Not today, maybe tomorrow.” So from now on Jose is going to use himself as a short reliever. He’s going to try to be available most days, but only available for a little bit of the game. He will be kind of like Manny Delcarmen, but without the frequent bouts of sucking. Or maybe with them. Who knows? We’ll have to see how Jose adjusts to his new role.

But that’s not today’s KEY. Nope. Coming in with an explanation of what one is going to do and then declaring that the action is done makes no sense. Doing that would be like having to count each time Tito visits the mound as him having faced a batter.

So here is what Jose is going to talk about—John Edwards.

You see John Edwards, former Senator and Vice Presidential nominee and current subject of national scorn crashed the semi-formal function of Jose’s public policy school on Saturday night. We were just sitting around, a group o exceptionally good looking 23-40 year olds (note: Really. There are just terrific looking people in this program) and up comes Senator “I don’t need fidelity, fidelity needs me.” The next thing we know, he and two other middle-aged friends are hanging around at our private party. Now, this in and of itself is not such a big deal. It’s funny, which is why Jose got a snappy photo with Edwards. If Edwards had been walking down the street, no big deal, but when he shows up and your party? Well, it’s so pathetic as to be hysterical. What did bother Jose is that Edwards appears to have drank, albeit it in moderation, on our tab. The guy is worth millions of dollars and yet he goes off of a grad student groups bar tab. Not cool.

He stuck around for about two hours, drinking white wine (note: yes, probably Chablis) and watching people dance until finally he was on his way. All in all, it was among the most pathetic things Jose had ever seen.

But it bothered Jose. There is something sad about seeing someone fall so far, and trust Jose, running with a policy crowd is pretty damn far. You know how exhilarating it was watching Darnell McDonald win the game the other night, how thrilling it was to know you were seeing the highlight of someone’s life? Well, this was the opposite of that. This was watching a man in the throws of wretched defeat, absurdly tanned, perfectly coiffed, extremely wealthy defeat, but defeat nevertheless.

It is Jose’s worst fear.

Oh, it’s not Jose’s worst fear for himself. You have to get awfully high to fall such a spectacular distance, and thus far at least, Jose’s life trajectory is afraid of heights. It’s Jose’s worst fear for David Ortiz. You watch Papi night after night swinging that slow, heavy bat, pile on the positive drug test that we learned about last August, and it is impossible not to feel like you are watching a man fall off a cliff.

But it’s not the same for Ortiz and Edwards. It isn’t. It can’t be. First there is no way Papi would ever show up at a grad student function and go home alone as Edwards did, Jose supposes to his credit. Papi has way too much duende. Second, Papi, as low as he may fall, as far back as his glory days may recede into history, still accomplished great things. What happened has happened. What was, at the very least, used to be. For Edwards what was was that he snookered a lot of people who not only believed what he said, but thought he was a man who could address the evils he described. He wasn’t. Papi, whatever he is now, will also be the man who was as responsible as any other, for bringing a title to Boston.

So weep not for David Ortiz. He can drink white wine to moderation on Jose’s tab any time. On the other hand, if Roger Clemens shows up at Jose’s graduation party, Jose, for one, is not getting a picture.

I’m Jose Melendez and that is my KEY TO THE GAME.

Opening Day--Asserting the Unsupportable

2010-04-04T15:27:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. For the past two seasons Jose has been… relaxed? No, negligent in writing his daily musings. Ostensibly this has been because he has spent the better part of the last two seasons in some of the world’s most remote and isolated places, Malawi, Uganda… Durham. This year, however, things have changed. Africa is not calling and North Carolina is not confining, and Jose is once again free to try to chronicle, if not the entire season, at least some portion thereof.

But travel is not the whole story of Jose’s two years of negligence. While his world was expanding, in many ways his worldview was contracting. As some of you know, Jose returned to school last year. Jose had assumed that the experience would be broadening, that it would refresh the intellectual capital that had been spent over four years of writing.

Jose was wrong.

As much as his undergraduate studies broadened Jose’s cultural horizon, graduated studies narrowed it. Whereas old Jose could comfortable discuss the implications of Durkheim’s Suicide on the squeeze play and the role of Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox on the batting stance of Jimmy Foxx, new Jose is focused on the endless tedium of public policy. For two years, he has been able to think of nothing save how to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the Julio Lugo contract (note: the costs outweigh the benefits), how to do a risk analysis of signing Jason Bay to a big deal (note: very risky) and how to use a stakeholder matrix to evaluate the ideal batting order (note: people killing vampires are not necessarily stakeholders). See. Narrow, boring stuff.

The other problem is that Jose has come to realize that his four years of writing here at KEYS lack intellectual rigor. Jose is eloquent, sure. But eloquence is not evidence. For four long years, Jose reveled in making assertions rather than argument, backing up his points with nothing more than an elegant tangle of verbiage. You can’t do that in the academic world. Claims must be supported and documented. This mindset infiltrated Jose’s blogging, leading to more structured, less frequent and far less fun posts. No longer could Jose make a simple assertion like “Jeter is the worst fucking defensive shortstop in baseball.” Instead, he would have to drag up the 30 or so defensive metrics that prove it. That takes time, and time, suddenly, was something Jose did not have.

But graduation is coming, and with it the sacred time that Jose has sacrificed like so much paschal lamb. And it comes, thank God on this Easter Sunday, just in time for baseball…

So let’s get to the unsubstantiated assertions.

2. Jose’s unsubstantiated assertions to start the new season.

• Jose has heard that the Red Sox signed Marco Scutaro because he has the sound “scooter” in his name. Apparently, Theo and company though this mean he would play like former Yankees short stop Phil “Scooter” Rizutto. Also, they were planning on hitting up the money store to pay salary. While this is profoundly stupid, it is far less stupid than the alternative, that the Red Sox thought they were getting Scooter the baseball from the Fox telecasts.

• David Ortiz is going to have a great season. (Note: Assertions are so great. See how Jose offered no evidence. He just said it and now is going to act like it’s true).

• It is not fair to call Dice K’s time in Boston a failure. He is only a failure in the sense that there were tremendous expectations of him, he failed to meet them in any way and the process has left fans feeling like management thought we were stupid. If you used this repressive standard for failure, you would have to call Cop Rock a failure, and as we all know now, Cop Rock was simply paving the way for Glee 20 years later. Look for the Red Sox to get some really solid work out of a Japanese starter in 2030.

• Watching Ronan Tynan sing while wearing a Sox jersey at the St. Patty’s day brunch was like watching video of Sadaam Hussein’s Bar Mitzvah. You know, except more anti-Semitic.

• Now that Mike Lowell will be sitting on the bench, Jose hopes his teammates taunt him with the phrase “no play for Mr. Gray” from that commercial for hair coloring with Keith Hernandez. Don’t take this the wrong way Mike but your beard is weird.

3. With the unsupported part of today’s program out of the way, let’s move on to the supported part. In this off-season, the Red Sox have paid a great deal of attention to improving their defense. Nay sayers in the media (note: or is the horse faced Shaughnessy a “neigh sayer?”) have attacked the emphasis on defense as nothing more than a propaganda campaign intended to cover up insufficient emphasis on offense.

This is asinine, though nothing one wouldn’t expect from the historically ignorant Boston media. Defense has proven absolutely critical throughout baseball and throughout history.

Consider Prague 1419, when radical Hussites, lacking sufficient offense used defenestration, which sounds enough like defense that Jose will assume they mean the same thing, to overcome opposition by the town’s Burgermeister.

Same city in 1618, more angry Protestants defenestrate regents who land on a pile of excrement. YES shows the clip for the next 380 years and comments on the selfless way the regents sacrificed their body, in contras to the brooding Nomar Garciaparra who sat silently watching.

Same city 1948, Prime Minister Jan Masaryk, is found dead, presumably defenestrated outside of a bathroom window at his office, giving new meaning to the phrase “dropping a deuce.”

Belgrade 1903, military rebels supporting the Karadjordjevic (George the Black) dynasty defenestrate King Alexander and Queen Draga, thereby ending the Obrenovic dynasty and bringing George Steinbrenner to power.

China 1968, Deng Pufang, son of Deng Xiaoping is defenestrated by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. To this day, no one knows what made the security force for the Cincinnati ball club so angry.

So after all of these successful applications of defenestration, local scribes still want to claim that defen(estration) doesn’t win championships?

Of course, the Protestants lost in Bohemia, the Czech Republic is no longer communist, the Karadjordjevic’s have no more control over Serbia than the Obrenovic’s and Deng Xiaoping remade China in his image. So maybe defen(estration) really doesn’t win championships.

That’s it. This entire theory of building a team around the ability to throw opponents out of windows is bunk. Jose insists that the Red Sox immediately acquire some players who are skilled with the poison tipped umbrella. Adrian Gonzales is good at that right?

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Serious Health Care Reform Question

2010-01-20T02:43:00.002-05:00

Jose is in reasonably good health--no pre-existing conditions. Jose is currently enrolled in the Duke University student health care plan, which is okay, but not great. Jose has maintained MA residency and fully intend to purchase insurance there after Jose graduates provided that Jose can't find a job that provides insurance.

Here are Jose's questions. Imagine for a moment that Jose does not have MA residency:

1. Let's say something horrible happens to Jose, like cancer or signing Julio Lugo to a mutliyear deal, between now and graduation. If Jose weren't a MA resident, would Jose still be able to purchase insurance from someone? Anyone? Would my only option be to COBRA my Duke plan until COBRA ran out? And would Jose be fucked once COBRA ended?

2. Jose can get insurance through an employer. Yay! But can the employer's insurance refuses to cover me knowing that Jose is sick?

Jose is not being glib. Thankfully Jose is healthy, but these are situations that are realistic to me, and that Jose doesn't worry about because Jose is, at least theoretically, covered under the MA deal. Jose has been uninsured, not even for a day. Would Jose be certain that if something happened to me, Jose could maintain coverage?

This is NOT intended to be a debate about broader health care reform issues. Rather, this is intended to be a discussion of whether the current system allows, what Jose regards as the absolute minimum consensus. That if you've purchased insurance you're whole life, you should be guaranteed that you can keep it if you get sick.

Jose imagines that right or left, we would agree that if you have maintained coverage at all times, you should not be fucked because you are leaving school or changing jobs around when you get sick. Jose want to know if the current system protects against that.

Aside from COBRA, it is not clear to Jose that it does.

ALDS Game 3-- This is Terrifying

2009-10-11T05:11:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALDS.

1. Jose is terrified of tonight’s game. Not a little scared. Not badly frightened.

Terrified.

Jose has never been so terrified by a game in his entire life. Not in 1986, not in 2003, not even in 2004.

Tonight. Tonight is more terrifying.

It’s not that Jose is afraid of losing. Jose knows how to handle a loss… with great bitterness and by taking it out on the people around him.

It’s not that Jose is afraid that a loss means that winter has arrived. Jose lives in the south now; winter never arrives. Not real winter anyway.

It’s not that Jose is afraid that this is the last time he’ll see Jason Bay, Jason Varitek or anyone else named Jason in a Red Sox uniform. There are plenty of other Jasons out there, and all of them except Jason Marquis are better than what’s left of Tek.

No, the reason Jose is terrified is that to survive, the Red Sox are going to have to win three straight elimination games against the Angels, and you know what that means.

Death.

When the Red Sox complete the comeback, history suggests that some poor soul on the Angels is going to die by his own hand.

It’s awful.

Say whatever you want about the Yankees, but they know how to take a bone crushing, soul-destroying defeat, by being contemptible, whiny, but decidedly non-suicidal bitches. Good for them.

But the Angles? When the Angels lose three straight elimination games to the Sox, there’s always a chance that someone is going to take the name “Angels” a little too literally and is going to go for the quick path to the halo.

Jose just hopes that they have a good psychologist on staff.

2. Friday night started with such promise. As Jose drove to Raleigh to watch the game with members of the Triangle Red Sox Nation, he got regular updates on the Yankees collapse from Granny Melendez on the phone direct from Atlanta.

While Granny Melendez doesn’t have the finer points of baseball down and can’t always explain exactly what’s happening on the field, she can convey basic information such as the score and the inning in a pleasant and listenable way. In other words, she is a vastly superior broadcaster to Suzyn Waldman.

So as Jose drove, Granny Melendez informed him that the Twins had crept to a 2-1 lead and then a 3-1 lead. Jose even got her to say “Yankees Suck.” Admittedly, he tricked her.

“How about you give Jose a Yankees suck Granny Melendez?” Jose said.

“Yankees suck?” responded Granny Melendez, not sure that she had heard correctly.

“That’s the spirit, Yankees suck!” chimed in Jose.

“Oh, Granny Melendez, doesn’t like that phrase,” she replied in the third person as is Melendez family tradition. “She prefers Yankees stink.”

“Too late, Jose gets to quote you now.”

“Don’t do that.”

And yet here it is. Jose denied a request from his own grandmother. It’s not Jose’s fault, she should have said it was off the record.

3. No more jokes.
No more puns.
No more scoring zero runs.
When the anthem’s last note sounds
Red Sox need to bat around

No more KEYS to
No more games
No more Sox fans feeling shame
Since we’ve got the wild card
Clay Buchholz is throwing hard

No more losses
Errors too
No much giving up runs to
Angles batters, not at all
Because they can’t take a ball

No more squanders
No more LOBs
No more doing crappy jobs
Of taking bases, driving runs
When something wicked this way comes.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALDS.

ALDS Game 2--Incompetence Rewarded

2009-10-09T14:39:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALDS.

1. By the time Darren Oliver—freaking Darren Oliver—recorded the last out the bar had changed.

The night had begun as a gathering of grizzled Red Sox fans chugging Yuenglings and chomping on chicken wings cursing C.B. Bucknor, John Lackey and Torii Hunter all the while. But as the night wore on the undergrads flowed in. Young women dressed to the nines, despite being at a bar with sticky floors and sticky palmed frat boys stumbled in in packs like hyenas, cackling incomprehensible. The men in white caps, polo shirts and sweaters joined quickly enough, looking for all the world like everything wrong with America. Entitlement, arrogance, stupid looking caps.

It was, in a way, a metaphor for what had transpired in far away Anaheim that evening. A night had begun with one expectation had ended as something different, something sadder. Just as night with friends became a night surrounded by youth in the full flower of ignorance, a night to celebrate the glory of baseball and the Red Sox in particular had become a night to begrudge, to carp and to complain.

But thankfully, that is not where the metaphor ends. Come two in the morning, the undergrads are gone, and the bar has returned to its lonely natural state with naught but a urine filled trash can as a reminder of what came before. It is the same way with the ALDS. Today is not yesterday, the aggravations of Game 1 are gone, relics of history leaving behind nothing but the urine filled trashcan of a 1-0 deficit. Yesterday was bad; today will be better… It has to be.

2. Among the sub-dramas in last night’s game were the two blown calls by first base umpire C.B. Bucknor.

Bucknor is on the officiating crew for this series, despite being named in a 2006 Sports Illustrated players survey as the worst umpire in the majors, and possibly the universe. At first it might seem counterintuitive to reward massive incompetence with a prestigious job, but Jose would argue that not only is it not unprecedented, it is practically standard practice in this country. Consider the following examples:

• Robert McNamara and Paul Wolfowitz screw up wars royally and get to run the World Bank.
• Grady Little after making one of the dumbest moves in history gets a job managing the Los Angeles Dodgers.
• After staring in Joey, Matt LeBlanc gets a new sitcom.
• Fugitive Roman Polanski wins an Oscar and gets a standing ovation.
• Approximately 10 billion CEO’s who ran their companies into the ground get golden parachutes.
• George W. Bush is reelected in 2004 after screwing up the Iraq war and seeming generally clueless.

Still for every one of these injustices there is a reason that it happened. McNamara and Wolfowitz were being rewarded for loyalty. Little was being rewarded for Frank McCourt being very, very stupid, and basically the front man for his wife. LeBlanc was being rewarded for having once been on a successful show carried by other people. Polanski was being rewarded for Hollywood being full of degenerates. CEOs were being rewarded for being smart enough to rig the game. Bush, of course, was rewarded for hating gays or possibly terrorists.

So the lesson is that people are rewarded for incompetence happens all the time but that there is always a reason for it. The question is what is the reason in the case of one C.B. Bucknor? Jose wonders if his initials, which are not even explained on wikipedia might hold the clue. Jose has come up with a few theories:

1. Cuckolding Bud: For years, Bucknor has been sexually servicing commissioner Bud Selig’s wife, which, unsurprisingly, is the sort of thing Bud digs.

2. Cortland Brotherhood: Bucknor attend SUNY Cortland, and as we all know Cortland’s secret societies run the world.

3. Crack Baby: A crack baby made the decisions on who would umpire playoff games. Literally, an infant born addicted to crack chose Bucknor to be a playoff umpire. This seems like the most sensible option.

4. Coke Bottles: He’s a perfectly good umpire when wearing his Coke bottle glasses, but he doesn’t wear them because they make him look like a nerd. This doesn’t really make any sense, but Jose is a traditionalist and he doesn’t really see how you can mock an umpire without suggesting that he is blind.

5. Crazy Bitches: Man, the people who choose umpires are some crazy bitches.

6. Corns and Bunions: A better umpire was unavailable due to foot problems.

See, there are lots of perfectly reasonable explanations for why the worst umpire in baseball would be rewarded for his poor job performance by umpiring a playoff game. But Jose is going with cuckolding Bud. The only question is whether the commissioner also turns a blind eye to the use of performance enhancing drugs in the bedroom.

3. The big news this morning was that Victor Martinez will indeed catch St. Josh a Beckett in tonight’s critical second game of the ALDS. There had been speculation that Sox manager Tito Eurona might go with the corpse of Jason Vartiek in deference to Beckett’s preference for having base runners steal at every opportunity and having balls sneak by the catcher in critical situations.

The question of course, is whether Beckett will be comfortable with Martinez behind the plate. On the face of it, “Are you comfortable?” is an absurd question to ask in this situation. Maybe it’s appropriate to ask when you’ve invited a friend to take a seat or if you’re a doctor performing a colonoscopy, but to ask a pitcher? It’s kind of weird. Nevertheless, the issue seems to be there, so Jose wants to offer a few things for Beckett to remember if he starts feeling uncomfortable.

• Victor means “one who wins.” Jason means guy who ran all of Greece looking for wool made out of gold—not that bright.
• Heidi Whatney ditched Tek, who left his wife for her, to be with Nick Green. You’ll never see Chris Woodward taking Victor Martinez’ girl.
• The C on Varitek’s jersey does not stand for comfortable. Try to remember that.
• Victor Martinez isn’t great at blocking balls or throwing people out, but he can hit. Jason Vartiek… well, he punched A-Rod in the face once. We all enjoyed that.

So relax Josh. Get comfortable, and remember, it’s not like you’ve never thrown to another catcher in the post season. You threw to Ivan Rodriguez in 2003, and as Jose recalls, that worked out pretty well.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALDS.

ALDS GAME 1--No More Playing the Angles

2009-10-08T00:28:00.003-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS to the ALDS.

1. Well, this feels kind of familiar doesn’t it?

Jose, who let’s be honest, is aging worse than the bastard child of Curt Euro and Jim Rice, doesn’t have the fastball anymore, so he figured he could rely on trickery to fight his way through the playoffs this year.

The trickery he had in mind was going back to the ALDS KEYS from 2004, 2007 and 2008 to see if there was anything he could just recycle from past ALDS KEYS about the Angels.

No, is the answer. No there is not.

Jose has nothing that he hasn’t regurgitated at least once already. Basically, it’s all about Angles and Normans, Harold and William the Conqueror, and frankly its tired, somnolent even. One can only reference wrestling legend Norman the Lunatic in the context of the Norman invasion of the British Isles so many times (note: once) before it stops being funny or even mildly ironic.

So that’s it. No more. Jose will no longer pretend that the name of the team that our beloved Red Sox are playing this week is the Angles rather than the Angels. Nor will he claim that we are playing the Gleans, the Slag En or any other anagram you can come up with.

No, Jose will actually accept that we are playing a team of creatures that are small enough to dance on the head of a pin and look remarkably like John Travolta circa 1996 or so.

This does raise some serious questions for the series, however. For instance, if a whole bunch of angels can dance on the head of a pin, doesn’t this mean that they will have very small strike zones? How will this affect Dice-K’s ability to throw strikes? Is Michael Napoli the archangel Michael? You know, the warrior guy? Jose is just saying that he doesn’t look so tough.

The challenges run deeper than that though. When Jose thought they were Angles, the key to victory was simple, conquer their island and intermarry with them. But now? Angels don’t live on an island, and as best Jose knows, they don’t marry, so what do we do?

The best Jose can come up with is… bear with Jose… driving a stake through their hearts. Jose is pretty sure he saw a TV show once, Buffy something, where there was a guy named Angel, who Jose figures must be an angel, you know because of his name, who got killed when a blonde chick shoved a stake through his heart.

Jose knows it doesn’t sound quite right, more vampire than angel, but even when this guy Angel got killed or vanquished, which seemed like it happened about a million times, he always seemed to come back a year or so later, just like the Los Anaheim Angels, so Jose thinks he’s on to something.

So Jose says we should go with the stakes, either that or pitching, timely hitting and not playing Tek.

2. In Siren of the Titans Kurt Vonnegut wrote of Angels

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

It is a fair point. As Jose contemplates the Los Anaheim Angels’ legacy of postseason defeat at the hands of the Red Sox, a string of futility that has seen them win only one of their last 12 postseason meetings, he begins to wonder if Vonnegut isn’t right. Perhaps the Angels’ struggles are a function of organization as much as anything else. Certainly this was the case with the Red Sox in the era that ended in 2004. No matter how gifted the team was it was never well organized. The owner, the rock upon which an organization rests, was always either a drunk, or a racist, or the widow of a drunk or a racist, or the accountant of the widow of a drunk or a racist. And this disorganization flowed downward into managers who were drunks or racists, or who managed like the widow of a drunk or a racist or occasionally were neither drunks nor racists, but did enjoy the burning high of the coca leaf milled powder fine. (Note: Sorry Butch.) The base coaches were probably mostly assholes too, but who can remember?

The results of the disorganization were predictable—failure after failure, loss after loss, heartbreak after heartbreak. But when ownership changed, then management changed (note: after 2003) and then outcomes changed. The Red Sox became the sorts of cold blooded assassins who could let an aging Pedro Martinez walk away or cast DLowe the Paranoid Android into the icy void. And three years later, they won it all again.

But the Angles? The Angles do not appear to be organized like the mafia. For instance, imagine the classic opening scene from The Godfather if Mike Scioscia replaced Vito Corelone.

BONASERA: I -- I went to the police, like a good American... And those two bastards
they smiled at me. Then I said to my wife, "for justice, we must go to Don Scioscia."

MIKE SCIOSCIA (sitting behind his desk, petting a cat): Why did you go to the police? I wouldn’t have gone to the police. What you should have done was first gone to the pawnshop and gotten a pair of brass knuckles for your left hand. Then you should have traded them in for a pair of brass knuckles for your right hand. Then you should have traded those back for a different left-handed pair. Why didn't you come to me first, I could have told you how to do things much better than you did them.

BONASERA: What do you want of me? Tell me anything. But do what I beg you to do.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: What is that?

[Bonasera gets up to whisper his request into Don Scioscia’s ear]

That I cannot do. But I have a better way to do it. It doesn’t involve so much… force… but it involves a lot of running. Running this way, then the other way. Maybe some hit and running even.

BONASERA: I'll give you anything you ask.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: We've known each other many years, but this is the first time you came to me for counsel, for help, for assistance, for advice, for ideas…But let's be frank here: you never wanted my friendship. And uh, you were afraid to be in my debt. And that’s really too bad because I have a lot of really good ideas. I’m incredibly smart. Smarter than you. So smart that I won the 2002 World Series.

BONASERA: I didn't want to get into trouble.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: I understand. That’s why I like the hit and run. Keeps you out of double plays… or sometimes it gets you into double plays, which I like to call double trouble. But uh, now you come to me and you say -- "Don Scioscia give me justice." -- But you don't ask with respect. You don't offer friendship. You don't even think to call me Manager. Instead, you come into my house on the day of ALDS game 1, and you uh ask me to do murder, for money.

BONASERA: I ask you for justice.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: Technically, that is not justice; your daughter is still alive. Also do you really want David Justice, he only stole 53 bases in his entire career? That’s pathetic, stolen bases are so important.

BONASERA: Then they can suffer then, as she suffers. How much shall I pay you?

MIKE SCIOSCIA (stands, turning his back toward Bonasera): Bonasera... Bonasera... What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?

BONASERA: Be my friend -- (then, after bowing and the Don shrugs) -- Manager?

MIKE SCIOSCIA (after Bonasera kisses his hand): Good. Some day, and that day may never come, but it probably will. I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But uh,
until that day -- accept this justice as a gift on the day of the ALDS Game 1.

BONASERA (as he leaves the room): Grazie, Manager.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: Prego.
(then, to Tom Hagen, after Bonasera leaves the room)

Ah, give this to ah, Clemenza. I want reliable people. But then if he doesn’t get it done give it to Tessio, but if Tessio doesn’t look so good, go out and visit him, and then if he still doesn’t look so good visit him again and then take him off the and give it to Luca Brasi. And make sure they bring a baseball bat, but I don’t want them to swing the bat… too risky. Instead have them play it safe and just sort of tap these guys with bat, softly. Maybe our guy will get arrested, but it will be a productive arrest. I just want to make sure that we run a mafia the right way. Like the old time mafia. You know, maybe I’ll go and supervise, offer some pointers. Could David Eckstein do the job?

You can begin to see the contours of the problem now can’t you? This sort of organizational structure is too top down and too micromanaged to successfully rough up anybody, much less run rackets.

The flip side, of course, is that if Don Corleone or any other really top flight Mafiosi had been managing the angels for the last five years, the Angels would have absolutely beaten the Red Sox after Manny Ramirez freaked out when he found the carburetor from his prized Cadillac in his bed.

3. In his column yesterday in the Orange County Register, Bill Plunkett asked a provocative question: “Are the Red Sox inside the Angels’ heads?” At first it seems stupid, idiotic really. How could an entire baseball team fit inside a man’s head? But then you realize that it’s a metaphor and you always take things way too literally after 12 beers.

Which leaves the question, well it leaves the question the next morning anyway: Are the Red Sox figuratively inside the Angels heads?

And the answer is yes. Yes they are. After perusing the DSM-IV, Jose has concluded that the Angels collectively are suffering from hydrophobia. Wait, never mind, that’s rabies. The Angels don’t have rabies, that’s the Yankees, well Joba anyway, drooling idiot.

What the Angels have is aquaphobia, a fear of water—dirty water in particular.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALDS.

Just Like Roosevelt

2009-09-02T11:54:00.002-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. Jonathan Papelbon picked up a six out save last night.

Think about that. Jonathan Papelbon picked up a six out save last night. Dick Radatz got six out saves, but Jonathan Papelbon? Not so much. If it didn’t stretch the limits of his endurance, it was only a 28-pitch outing, it at least pushed the limits of tradition. In fact, the precedents for such a brazen rejection of traditional boundaries are limited. Jose has done a little research and come up with the following comparables:
• 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt seeks, and wins an unprecedented third term as President.
• 1996 Jasmin St. Claire, rather than stopping at having sex with a virginal 250 men in a day, goes all the way to 300.
• 2001 Takeru Kobayashi does not stop after breaking the world hot dog eating record of 25 in 12 minutes, but continues to eat until he has doubled the 12-minute record.

What all of these feats have in common is that they required competitors to push themselves a little harder than normal, to take some risks in order to master the task at hand. Jose has no doubt then when Ms. St. Claire pursued the sex record, many of you were screaming “Get her out of there Tito, let Daniel Bard finish this one off” but sometimes that’s not how it works. Sometimes a champion just has to… extend… him or herself to do what needs to be done, and last night Jonathan Papelbon did just that.

The exception, of course, is the 2003 ALCS, when Grady Little asked Pedro to do more than was possible, infuriating sox fans and online sports bettors alike. That was like asking FDR to run for a fifth term post mortem, insisting that Jasmin St. Clair go for 500 or insisting that Kobayashi should replicate his feat with foot long dogs.

There’s good crazy (note: the kind that leads to slashing prices) and bad crazy (the kind that leads to slashing wrists) and it’s not always clear until after the fact what kind of crazy one is looking at.

2. Jose is much angrier in America then he is in Africa. Jose won’t say that he is happier at home, per se, just less angry. In Uganda, if there is electricity in the wires, water in the pipes and no parasites in the intestines, it’s going to be a good day. But almost as soon as Jose got off the plane in Boston a few weeks ago, his ability to take solace in the flow of electrons dissipated. Here, you see, we have baseball. And baseball, it turns out, makes Jose an angry man.

Leigh Montville, as Jose recalls, once wrote that every day he looked at the front page of the paper to makes sure we weren’t at war and then went to the sports. Jose has a similar philosophy. Every day, Jose looks at the front page, discovers that we are at war, twice, gets angry, and then goes to the sports section, where if the Red Sox have lost, he gets really angry. If they’ve won, his mood is moderated, maybe he’s even happy, but if they’re lost… look out. Angry, angry, angry.

Sometimes Jose will even get angry about being angry, but that’s a negative feedback loop, bad things leading to bad things, which lead to more bad things. It’s kind of like a Nick Green at bat.

This is where Jose should preach about how in living in a poor country made him see things differently and not only appreciate the little things, but reject foolish passions like sports and celebrity. But here’s the thing: It didn’t. If anything it made him appreciate the need for escapism, the need to, from time to time, substitute the emotions of others for one’s own. Do you think that the villagers in Uganda are any less in need of escapism then we are? In Uganda, people pay what little money they have to sit on hard wooden benches in a sticky, airless room and watch a soccer match. Do you think even Red Sox fans would do that for a ballgame? Well, yes, they do it at Fenway 81 times a year, but do you think they’d do it to watch the game on TV? Well, not the pink hats anyway.

The point is that people, all people, want escapism. We want to live vicariously at least some of the time. All of the accoutrement of the modern sports fan, the fantasy sports the online betting, they are but catalysts, enzymes of the mind designed to accelerated and intensify the vicarious thrill. But to live vicariously is to live dangerously, to cede control of a tiny portion of one’s personal sovereignty to something over which one has no control. Jose may not have much control over the electricity in Uganda, but at least Jose can juice up while the power is on; Jose can prepare for darker days ahead. But as a Red Sox fan, Jose has no choice but to live with the consequences of the actions of others. And this powerlessness, is infuriating; it is intoxicating.

It is what makes Jose love being a Red Sox fan, and it is what makes him angry. But it is a good kind of anger, a pleasantly impotent rage, a substitute for staring at the madness of this world, at Darfur, Burma or Afghanistan and going daft from the righteous anger raised by man’s inhumanity to man. It does not deaden Jose’s concern, but it does deaden his pain, and enables him to think rationally about the needs and the horrors of the world. Jose gets angry at the Red Sox so he can think clearly about the war, so that anger, an irrational emotion, spends its time directed towards an irrational game while the logical focuses on all the trouble in the world.

3. Congratulations to Jon Lester, who last night set the Red Sox record for strikeouts by a lefty in a single season. While setting any record for a baseball franchise that has existed for more than 100 years is impressive, this one is special. Setting a left handed pitching record on a team that has had, among its stars, a pitcher actually named “Lefty” is extraordinary. Really, they don’t call someone “Lefty” because he’s only okay with his left hand.

Think about it this way. Jacoby Ellsbury setting the Red Sox single season steal record was impressive, but it would have been so much more impressive if Tommy Harper had been nicknamed “Two Legs” Harper. (Note: As Jose recalls, Ellis Burks’ nickname should have been “Three Legs” Burks.) Or what if David Ortiz had taken the single season home run record from a man named “Gigantic Freaking Biceps” Foxx. Hell imagine if Julio Yugo had set an errors record by beating out Edgar “Girlie Arm” Renteria. Yes, Jose knows that the previous record did not belong to Lefty Grove, but the argument still holds. If you set a record at anything and beat out a guy who is named for the critical body part in the record setting act, you’ve done something pretty special.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Of Skulls and Human Weakness

2009-08-22T15:33:00.000-04:00

In Rwanda, they count lives in skulls. Each chalky gray orb is a person, a Yorick to some Hamlet who, alas, knew him.

They count lives in femurs too, at a rate of one to two. Each pair is a man, woman or child who used to kick a football, walk to school or run from danger

Each pelvis is a life as well, a person who danced, made love or bore children. The bones, the scaffolding that supports tired flesh, are all that remain of 800,000 people. The hearts that pumped blood, that kept the steady rhythm of life, are gone. The brains that mastered algebra or planned the harvest are gone. All that remains are the piles of bones—in memorials, in mass graves, in farmers’ fields. Like the fossils of dinosaurs, they are reminders of life driven from this good Earth, scientific proof that something ghastly transpired.

The power of the memorials to the victims of the Rwanda genocide is that, save for the genocide museum in Kigali, they are not museums or monuments—they are crime scenes. When I visited Auschwitz on a sunny July day, it was possible, to mistake the death camp for the military barracks it once was. Even the crematoria, if one did not know what they had once been used for, could have seemed innocent. Only the careful collection of eyeglasses and hair and the films of starving Jewish victims crammed into the barracks showed the grim reality of the place.

This is not the case in Rwanda. The sites of massacres look like there were massacres there. In Nyamata, a tidy town 35km from Kigali, there is a church where genocidaires murdered 10,000 people. One knows this not because of archival footage, photographs, documentation or even survivor testimony, but because the victims are there. Their skulls, their bones are neatly sorted and laid on musty shelves in the catacombs beneath the church. In the sanctuary, tattered, blood splattered clothes carpet the floor, proof that these are not the bones of people who died, but of people who were murdered, regular people who had sought sanctuary in a church.

Above it all stands a statute of the Virgin Mary, right where she was when she witnessed the massacre. Her mouth cannot scream, her eyes cannot cry but surely, if she is the mother of God, her heart must be bleeding,

A few kilometers back toward Kigali, the village of Ntarama, another crime scene, tells the same story. The Hutu genocidaires threw a grenade into the local church before coming in with the machetes and slaughtering 5,000 souls. In an annex to the church, the wall is still stained with the blood of a baby thrown against by a genocidaire who treated him like a sickly chick to be culled.

I had had enough. As I drove through the countryside, everywhere white banners with purple writing noted a genocide memorial, but I did not want to visit them. Neither macabre curiosity nor my sense of obligation to the victims could compel me. I did not need to visit the school where not only the skulls, but the bodies of victims remain, mummified by lime, as the ultimate evidence of the crime.

If one travels through Rwanda today without knowledge of its grim history and oblivious to the signs marking genocide memorials, it would be shocking to learn that the country had been the site of one of history’s greatest crimes. Of the 15 African countries I have visited a list that includes continental powerhouses South Africa and Egypt, Rwanda is by far the most orderly. Rwanda’s main roads are neatly paved and traffic laws are widely observed. Even in the provinces, motorcycle taxis will only take one passenger and both driver and passenger always wear helmets, as is required by law. Even stranger, the Toyota minibus taxis, ubiquitous throughout sub-Saharan Africa adhere strictly to the law that they may not carry more than 18 passengers. Elsewhere in Africa, if such laws exist, they police enforce them only to the extent that they are useful in gathering bribes. In Uganda, for example, squeezing 25 people into a minibus is common.

Rwanda’s obsession with order extends beyond traffic to environmentalism. In a highly publicized move, Rwanda banned plastic bags, a major source of litter in Africa, going so far as to inspect visitors at the border for the polyurethane contraband.

Paul Kagame’s Republic even has mandatory community service. On the last Saturday of every month, all business in the country screeches to a halt from eight to 11 in the morning for Umuganda. Even public transportation stops as the Rwandans pour into the streets to clean up their communities.

The combined result of these and other state policies is a country that is safe, clean and remarkably orderly, in the heart of a continent where disorder, if not chaos, is the norm. So how did orderly Rwanda, of all places in Africa, become a place where lives are counted in skulls? I do not know what Rwanda was like before the genocide, but President Paul Kagame’s success in imposing law on his country in a continent where law is as often as not, nothing more than a tool for extortion, makes me wonder if there is something in the Rwandan culture, that imbues its people with a profound respect for authority. Perhaps this respect for authority can serve the good, as people obey the law, but also the bad, as the same people unquestioningly obey the mad orders of a genocidal state?

As a counterfactual, I considered the example of Uganda. Uganda had its own near genocides, Idi Amin took 300,000 lives and Milton Obote another 100,000, but in both cases, the character of the killings was fundamentally different from the Rwandan genocide. In Uganda, the massacres were exercises of military power—ascendant ethnic groups used military might to exterminate their enemies. Civilians were not a major element of the death squads. In Rwanda, by contrast, much of Hutu society was mobilized in the killings. It was as much a civilian genocide as a military operation.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Rwanda and Germany, two countries where deference to authority is, or at least was, built into the national character are the settings for two genocides?

I asked Ignatius, my Muganda friend and traveling companion, if he could imagine a genocide on that model happening in Uganda.

“I do not think so,” he said. “Even if people hated the other tribes enough, which is possible, I do not think the Ugandan civilian population could be organized enough to do something like this. Maybe some people would participate, but most, would not. Even, I think, some who would want to kill would not have the organization to do what they planned. They would not manage to show up.”

In a way, it is a sick joke. The lateness, the disdain for authority, and the culture of bending rules that sometimes makes Uganda an infuriating place to live, may also provide a sort of protection against the worst possible outcome. A government that cannot make the trains run on time, may also struggle to make the death squads run on time. But in Rwanda, a country whose organization evokes the West, they have duplicated the greatest sins of Western civilization. Not only can they pave roads like us, they can kill like us.

But this is just a theory, the desperate attempts of one observer to explain what he cannot possibly understand. I want to understand the genocide, to grasp its intellectual foundations because then I can explain it away; I can explain how a unique set of historical and social circumstances turned average people into killers and their country into a slaughterhouse. But I’m not sure that is possible. A people may be more or less violent, a country more or less chaotic, but those are contributing factors, not the fundamental explanation of the Rwandan genocide or any of the great historical crimes. The underlying explanation, I suspect is that the human animal, despite the moral sense that compels him to do good, is fundamentally weak. The Rwandans, the Germans, all of us, are engaged in a constant struggle against our demons, both personal and historical, against the forces that would turn farmers into killers, and other farmers into piles of bones. What happens in a place like Rwanda or Germany is that the structure we have established to fight our weakness, the rule of law and the rule of conscience are inverted as the state and moral institutions like the church go from being the opponents of human weakness to its exploiters.

It is not a coincidence, that there is no genocide where there is anarchy. Surely there is murder in anarchic societies, perhaps murder on an unimaginable scale, as in Congo, but genocide takes organization, and genocide demands the application of power. Human weakness alone is enough to unleash the horrors of war and murder, but a genocide cannot run on weakness alone, it is the weakness of the individual amplified by the strength of numbers.

The genocide, all genocides are not a violation of a human nature, an exception to the laws of man and God, they are a manipulation of those laws, an always lurking byproduct of civilization.

In Rwanda, as in Germany and Turkey before it, the weakness became powerful, murder became the law, and so they count lives in skulls, and deaths in hundreds of thousands, and still can we really say “Never again” and mean it?

Why Goma is Crazy: From Diseased the Right Ventricle of the Heart of Darkness

2009-08-17T17:05:00.001-04:00

Goma is crazy. The fact that a Congolese man showed me his penis, however, is not what makes Goma crazy.

In most other cities, a Congolese guy shouting what presumably translates as “Hey white man, look at this,” while yanking down his pants on a busy market street at two in the afternoon would be the yardstick by which all madness was measured. Schizophrenics would look on and say, “Well, I have issues, but I’m not as crazy as him.” In Goma, however, it barely prompted a glance from onlookers of all ages.

I was annoyed and maybe a little horrified, bellowing a guttural “NOOOOOO!!!” to show my disapproval. Ignatius, my Ugandan fellow traveler was more philosophical, stoically remarking “He must be proud of how bushy it is.”

The flasher does not define Goma’s lunacy because the Congolese town, bordered by Lake Kivu and Gisenyi, Rwanda, is a harmonic convergence of crazy and awful. It starts with the combination of lava, gorillas and guerillas and pretty much spirals from there. If Conrad was right that Congo is the heart of darkness, then Goma is its diseased right ventricle a chamber of the heart simultaneously battling heartworm, a murmur and at least three blockages.

The crazy began at the border as Rwanda’s well ordered, if secretly seething society, gave way to Congo’s poorly ordered and openly seething one. As soon as we officially entered the country, a Congolese gentleman who may or may not work for the government expressed grave concern over Ignatius’ absent yellow fever immunization card. Thankfully it turns out that the mere act of giving money to a Congolese gentleman who may or may not work for the government provides immunity against yellow fever.

“Mzungu has card, ok. But Uganda has no card… problem,” the official explained in a mix of broken English and French.

“But surely sir there must be some fine we could pay,” I said using the international standard for “May I offer you a bribe?”

“Twenty, twenty,” the man responded.

“But sir, I do not have 20, I have only 10 dollars,” I countered.

“I was meaning 10, not twenty,” the official replied, and just like that Alexander Hamilton negotiated the Congo border far more effectively than he managed Aaron Burr.

While I was proud that, for the first time in my exhaustive travels I had managed to pay a bribe rather than having a local fixer handle it for me, I did not regard this as particularly crazy. It was annoying, but it was utterly predictable.

What was crazy, however, was the obsessive-compulsive meticulousness of the immigration official who managed the formal migration process before we had even needed to issue a bribe. The matronly woman in the calico dress who handled our visa issues did not ask for any money beyond the official visa fees. That was not her modus operandi. To her, the key to controlling the cross border raids into Rwanda, the smuggling of goods and perhaps even the war itself was to draw perfectly straight lines on the book of graph paper that served as the immigration register.

We had the poor fortune to be the first visitors to Congo on a new page of the register. This meant that the matron needed to go through the lengthy process of creating columns on the new page that exactly matched those on the old page. After checking the old page she would jot a little hash mark on the new page before flipping the book back for the next chart.

Flip. Ten squares for name on the old page.

Flip. Count ten squares on the new page. Make a mark.

Flip. Two squares for gender on the old page.

Flip. Count two squares on the new page. Make a mark.

Only when she had flipped the page some 14 times to cover seven columns, did she finally take a brand new, clear plastic ruler from its polyurethane packaging and draw crisp lines formally marking each column. This was all well and good until a line went a bit crooked, then out came the whiteout. If you have ever wondered how the whiteout industry stays in business in the computer age, the answer is to be found in the Congo. There is no error so tiny that it is not worth applying a dab of liquid paper. Yes, it seemed that the fragile Congolese peace was dependent almost entirely on the ability of this border official to draw perfect lines.

The second indicator of craziness is that the streets are made out of lava.

That’s right the streets are made out of freaking lava.

Okay, okay, it is not the red molten stuff of nightmares and Ben Affleck movies, but the streams of porous black are a sufficient reminder, frozen in time, of the destruction that came before and could just as easily come again. In 2002, Mount Nyiragongo erupted creating what the few tour books that amazingly still include Goma refer to as an “African” or “modern” Pompeii.

I disagree. I have been to Pompeii; I have seen the ghostly, ashen figures vaporized, their faces contorted by fear, forever crying out with their dying breath. In Goma, the fear is also present but not in Pompeii’s petrified form. In Goma, the fear is alive. It moves, evolves changes, but never goes away. The fear is the constant. Today it may be fear of an eruption, tomorrow fear of the guerillas lurking in the mountains and the day after the fear of starvation, but it is always fear.

The people of Pompeii had it easy. Even if for week they watched the mountain threaten destruction, their darkest instant, their time to contemplate imminent extinction lasted for one horrible moment, before the very stuff of the Earth claimed them. The people of Goma must contemplate extinction for all horrible moments.

But the lava at least creates as it destroys. As it leveled homes and business, the lava spit new land into Lake Kivu. The black lumps of igneous rock that represent disaster in the old town present opportunity on the lakeshore. They also represent a new kind of crazy—separation of rich from poor through the sifting of trauma. In the old town, the poor, the old Gomans, those not savvy enough or ruthless enough to grow rich from the war live in a labyrinth of tattered shacks. The more fortunate among them enjoy the meager security of a corrugated iron roof and walls held together with cement rather than hope.

On the new land, the construction is grandiose. Everywhere, the trash-strewn streams of hardened lava are framed by gaudy new mansions. Tidy green lawns right out of suburban America front columned monstrosities right out of Lagos’ ritziest neighborhoods. Grotesque decadence and grotesque deprivation cohabitate in a fashion that even the elites of Rio or Johannesburg would regard as depraved. The question unanswered is who owns these houses?

The question is unanswered because it is unasked. Approaching any gate at any house seems like an exercise in futility at best or suicide at worst. Not only are the houses wrapped in menacing walls trimmed with razor wire, they are guarded by men with guns. They are not even earthbound men with guns. Instead, they sit high in fortified turrets behind the compound walls, watching eagerly for a threat or an excuse. While I imagine that the houses are built by Congolese warlords, ex pats who wish to live like proconsuls or both, I will not risk my life to ask.

And then there are the clashing go/guerillas. High on the volcano live a handful of the earth’s few remaining mountain gorillas. On the same mountains, lurk troops of Congo’s far to numerous mountain guerillas.

The competing homonyms dance along the mountainside, circling the crater’s lava lake as if they are playing some grand and terrible game of ring around the rosy where inevitably, we will all turn to ashes and fall down. The gorillas serene and gentle beckon visitors for naught but the high price $425. The guerillas, silent and deadly, warn tourist away by threatening to exact a far higher price. And on and on it goes, as a lake of lava somehow become this least frightening thing on a volcano.

And so it goes in Goma. Violence begets violence; madness begets madness and penises beget amusing anecdotes. “Goma is crazy!” I can now declare with authority.

And I am right, Goma is crazy, but it no longer seems amusing. As I left Goma, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was arriving to address the ongoing conflict in the region and the fallout. Among the issues she addressed most forcefully was the epidemic of rape in the hills, villages and refugee camps surrounding Goma.

I knew about the war, about the slaughter that began with the Rwandan genocide and still continues, but this aspect, the use of rape as a weapon and the tens if not hundreds of thousands of victims in the Kivu region alone had, perhaps willfully, escaped my notice. I wanted to go to Goma to see what it was like, to see up close how a war zone smells, and perhaps to revel in my own bravery and adventurousness, to applaud myself for stabbing into the heart of darkness like Conrad and Stanley before him. But I am not Conrad or Stanley. I am not even a Ben Affleck. The terrible actor whom I mocked above toured Goma in 2008 to raise awareness of the rape epidemic there. When one has failed in a comparison to Ben Affleck, it is time for some introspection.

It is adventurous for me to have gone to Goma, I suppose, but it is also narcissistic and pathetic in a way. On any different day for a different person, for a Congolese person, my story ends differently. It still begins with a man exposing himself, but he is not this man I saw, or maybe he is? He is drunk or mad, perhaps turned feral by war, and after it begins with this man exposing himself it does not end with a trip across the border to Rwanda, a cold beer at a hotel and a lifetime memory of how crazy Goma is. It ends instead in a life ruined. It ends with the horror. It ends with the darkness.

Goma is crazy. But I should not delude myself about what crazy means. Goma is not eccentric or quirky, a Van Gogh severing his ear to prove his love. Goma is psychotic. Goma is pathological. It is Jack the Ripper stalking the streets of London for someone to dissect or Stalin imposing his paranoia on a nation. Goma is not just crazy, it is criminally insane, and even in this age of wonders, of Prozac and plutonium of antipsychotics and antipersonnel mines, of lithium and largesse, we have no idea how to cure that kind of insanity.

Back on the Active Roster

2009-08-08T22:16:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. There is an old and prophetic saying in Uganda, in much of the Great Lakes region of Africa really, that is worth recalling in this, our darkest hour. Well, a dark hour anyway

“I will beat you.”

It is not a threat per se; it is a guarantee. It is an expression of certainty that the future is written.

What does a teacher say to a misbehaving student?

“I will beat you.”

What does a husband say to the man he has caught in bed with his wife?

“I will beat you.”

What does a humble social worker say to the family of a neighbor who has stolen from him as soon as he is absolutely certain that the thief, who might fight back, is nowhere in sight?

“I will beat you.” Well, not the family, the guy.

And what do the Red Sox say to the Yankees?

For eight games this season, it was “I will beat you,” but now for three games, who knows what they are saying?

“You can beat us now?”

“Please sirs, we can’t bear another thrashing?”

“I might beat you?”

“I will attempt to beat you?”

Whatever they are saying, it is not working.

Allow Jose to illustrate. Consider the story of a man who is sleeping with another man’s wife in the marital bed. The cuckolded husband returns unexpectedly to discover the indiscretion, and what does he do? Does he allow the fight to go on for hours without anyone scoring a blow? Does he concede defeat to a giant fat adulterer attempting to look skinny by wearing pinstripes? No, he declares simply, in cold and righteous anger, “I will beat you.” And then he does.

It is that simple. It is that brutal.

I will beat you.

I will beat you.

2. Among the difficulties of traveling to distant lands during the baseball season is getting the news of the day in the form of news of the month. For instance, Jose completely missed the Adam LaRoche era. Jose learned that the Red Sox had both acquired and dealt LaRoche at pretty much the same time. In a way, it’s like getting asked out on a first date and told there will not be a second at the simultaneously.

In the normal dating process, a couple (note: or more if you roll that way) starts by agreeing to go out on a date. Then each person gets nervous and maybe even a little giddy with anticipation. Each thinks about what to say, what to wear and where things might go. They have dinner or a drink perhaps take in a film and chat about whatever interests them. Then at the end of the evening, or perhaps even a few days after, they make independent decisions about whether the date was good enough to repeat. If both agree, then they proceed towards a future of some kind, but if even one rejects the premise of a second date, that’s all there is. You know, unless one of them is all stalkery.

But in the case of Adam LaRoche, for Jose it was like a date where a lady tells him even before the first sip of wine or bite of food, hell, as soon as the date is set, that it isn’t going to work. There’s no anticipation, no pleasant tingle, not even the chance for the exhilaration of success or the heartbreak of rejection. And what’s the fun of that? Oh that’s right, Jose didn’t have to watch Adam LaRoche take at bats for a team that is allegedly trying to contend. Very good.

3. Goma, Congo is a mad city. The streets are petrified rivers of lava, the houses are shanties of mud and tin and gorillas and guerillas dance cautiously on the side of a volcano. All of them, ape and man, terrorist and soldier, corrupt border guard and… other corrupt border guard live in fear that one day, one day soon, the conflicts and trials of life may be made irrelevant by a rain of molten rock.

Yet in this most hopeless of places, one man knows hope. Amidst the dust and debris, the chaos and the corruption, Jose saw a man brandishing a symbol of hope, a sign of all that is great and good. It was not a cross, begging the Lord for mercy, the Cross has done the Congolese little good. Nor was it the pale blue of the nations that are hardly united. Rather, it was a tattered blue T-shirt with the number 45 etched in fading red. Martinez, it read on the back. Martinez.

In this sad and struggling land, there was a reminder of something good, something decent in the world. Yes, there was a nice hospital and some good social programs, but damn it, this was a Pedro Martinez shirt, a symbol of all that was once good and can be again. And right then, just after he learned that $10 when given to a border guard can inoculate against yellow fever without an injection and just before a Congolese man decided to show Jose his penis, that shirt gave Jose just a little bit of hope for the Congo.

On the other hand, the Edgar Renteria Red Sox shirt Jose saw in Uganda signaled that the land of the crested crane is pretty much doomed.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

We Are So Happy

2009-07-18T06:09:00.000-04:00

I am deeply suspicious of people who sing about being happy. They are, as a rule, either liars or scoundrels. It’s not that I doubt that there are people who are truly happy in this world, I’m often one of them, but I am skeptical that the people who are truly happy are singing about it, and I am certain that they are not singing well about it.

While most of these joyful minstrels are liars, some of them, the ones who actually are happy, are just jerks. If one is genuinely happy and feels the need to express it in lyrics over a snappy beat, how can he be anything but a jerk?

Things are great for you? That’s terrific. It really is, but have you looked around at the world lately? To a lot of people, maybe to most people, the world is a kind of rotten place. Sure there are flowers, but flowers cause sneezing; there is love but love leads to heartache. And those are just the things with an upside. There are a whole host of other clouds that have linings made of soot. Try finding the upside of hunger, war, poverty or Dave Matthews fans. Singing about how happy you are floating on your cloud of good fortune is to giving a swift kick in the kidneys to the rest of us who are mired in the mud of this fallen world. Please, be happy. It’s good to be happy. Just don’t put it to music and play it on a boom box on the subway.

Besides, the jerks’ music is lousy. Happy people don’t write good music. The good stuff comes from liars. Good music comes from negative emotions: pain, resentment or even just plain melancholy. The creative process is a way to deal with negativity and struggle and to, if not overcome them, at least manage them. To a creative soul happiness only comes, if it ever comes, after laying down a nasty 12 bar blues. So if you hear a catchy song about happiness, rest assured that the singer, no matter what he says, is at least miserable as you and probably more so.

This is a good theory on happy music. It is functional—it denigrates people who are happier than me as musical incompetents; it is logical—it explains why the evangelicals, who are so happy to have been born again, are so utterly incapable of producing decent rock; and it is coherent—I have yet to find any music that seriously challenges the findings. Happy music is either heartfelt, bad and preformed by an SOB, or good, insincere and performed by a secretly tortured soul.

Until yesterday, I had not found anything to undermine my theory, but as we all learned from Annie, orphans have a way of derailing the best-laid plans.

The orphans kept singing “We are so happy” over and over again. For my theory to hold, these orphans either needed to be either unhappy or dreadful singers and awful people. They were clearly good people and competent singers, which means that for my theory to hold, they had to be deeply unhappy. And here’s where we run in trouble. These kids were genuinely happy. I can smell phony a mile away. I’m like Holden Caufield without the pretension or stupid name, and I didn’t smell it on these kids.

By all rights they shouldn’t have been happy. The kids at Providence House, a rehab and vocational training facility in Nkokonjeru, Uganda run by the Little Sisters of St. Francis, had every right to be miserable. On paper, they should have been perfect candidates for a Sally Struthers commercial, little urchins with flies in their eyes. Yet there they were singing.

“We are so happy.”

The lucky ones were just orphans, healthy young people who’s parents had succumbed to the misfortunes that plague an impoverished people. Others would have been lucky to be orphans. Their parents had sold them for use in witchcraft and their bodies bore the scars of the occult. Still more suffered from heads swollen by hydrocephaly, legs shriveled by polio or minds hobbled by retardation.

“We are so happy.”

They meant it.

These kids had lost the birth lottery. Born in a poor country, with poor health care to poor families, they were destined for lives of misery and hardship. But somewhere along the line there was a second lottery, and their tickets came out winners. In the rough heart of a rough continent, somehow they had found a place for them, a good place.

It is a place where the priest says mass to the thump of African drums. It is a place where the sweet smell of baking bread and the sour stench of the piggery combine to form the piquant bouquet of schemes to keep just enough money rolling in. It is a place where children who have no one can have, at least, each other. It is a place, where, contrary to everything I have postulated, decent, happy people can sing decent, happy songs.

The nuns call it Providence House because the funding plan relies heavily on divine providence. While the sisters follow the biblical dictum that God helps those who help themselves by planting gardens and teaching trades, they have a quiet confidence that when the red ink turns a deeper crimson, God will provide.

And so he does.

I am not a religious man. I do not believe in divine intervention in mortal affairs, destiny, or that good will always triumph over evil. I believe in coincidence, chance and, sadly, entropy.

Providence House is testing my lack of faith.

My parents, currently the only people gainfully employed in my family, asked me to make a donation to some worthy cause in my little Ugandan town on their behalf. At the recommendation of the local Peace Corps contingent, I settled on Providence.

When I went to make the transaction, Sister Juliet a warm, bespectacled nun, could not, having met me only briefly before, remember my name.

“You are called… Richard,” she said, uncertainly.

I am not called Richard.

My father, one source of the donation, however, is. It was as though Sister Juliet had seen through the medium to the source. It wasn’t as dramatic as if she had accidentally called me Susan, my mother’s name, but it remained curiously coincidental. Almost like a sign…

The donation had occasioned the singing. The children, in celebration of the donation and the contributions of time and energy by my colleagues from Duke, put on a show for us where wave after wave of children sang about how happy they are, interrupted periodically by an older child praying for us and my family.

Because of my parents they get beans, soap and seeds, because of my colleagues, they get a few precious moments of attention and affection. They need so much, and get so little, but today, at least, it is enough. And for them enough is everything. For them, enough is something to be happy about, and yes, something to sing about.

And so they sang and sang beautifully, neither jerks nor liars, neither hopeless nor helpless. They sang and proved me wrong. They sang and showed perhaps the world is not such a rotten place, that joyful music can come from joyful hearts.

“We are so happy.”

“We are so happy.”

“We are so happy.”

And I’m so happy too. I’m just not ready to sing about it.

Purchase direct from a Ugandan Artist

2009-07-10T07:39:00.002-04:00

Hello all,

I wanted to offer you an opportunity to help an artist friend of mine who lives here. He makes really nice stuff, and I will personally bring any order back with me to cut non-US shipping to $0. ALL PROCEEDS GO TO THE ARTIST.

You can see his work at facebook (if you are a member) at the link

If interested, tell me which piece you would like keystothegame@hotmail.com, and I will bring it back. We can arrange payment by check or paypal. Modest US shipping can be negotiated.

I'd say there are a number of gifts that are especially good for women, particularly the purses which are made from resonated paper beads.

Also, if you want a custom wood carving, that can be arranged for $60-$100 depending on the price of wood, plus shipping. I don't know if he can do Tek punching A-Rod in the face, but I am getting a lion eating a gorilla.

Some information:

Peter Sserugo is a second generation Ugandan artist, who specializes in craftwork made from natural fibers and local materials and mixed media paintings.

Peter’s work captures scenes from life in his rural village through art that combines traditional Ugandan techniques and media with sharp lines and defiant arcs that hint at the impact of modern life on tradition.

Peter lives in Nkokonjeru, Uganda, about three hours from Kampala with his friend Tony two cows, one calf, five goats, three kids, two sheep and two lambs. He is the youngest of ten children.

Somewhere South of Reality

2009-07-09T02:56:00.000-04:00

“One day people who work in international aid will be seen like the guards at Auschwitz,” the Kenyan sneered, his weathered white face grimacing in disgust. “Sure, they thought they were only taking people to the showers.” He was definitely high, probably drunk and possibly mad. And why wouldn’t he be? It was his bloody island, his private Eden.

Thirty-five kilometers south of Entebbe, 10 kilometers south of the equator and 10 million kilometers south of reality lay his smidge of an island, a little slice of Xanadu in the heart of Lake Victoria. Technically, it was part of an archipelago, a boisterous family of islands inhabited by shanty dwelling Ugandan fisherman. But every family has its… white sheep… and as close as the islands were, this island was impossibly isolated, cut off from its sisters by race, by circumstance and by reality.

To call it a resort, would be an act of violence against the term. It was a resort in the sense that one could rent rooms there, sit in the sun and slurp frosty beers. It was not a resort, however, in the sense that it looked like Cancun after the bomb. While no actual bomb had detonated, there had been an explosion. A kerosene tank had blow a few months back, leaving an aching stone skeleton where the bar had once been. The explosion was a disturbing if reasonable explanation for the sorry state of the bar. A kerosene leak was, however, a decidedly less coherent explanation for the pirate ship. While my cabin had a number of quirks, bat infestation with the resultants turds, painting supplies stored in the foyer and mosquito nets holier than the Vatican, all of these eccentricities fell well within the bounds of normal African weird. But the ship? That’s just strange.

Just outside of the cabin, a great wooden hull, 30 feet long and 12 feet high was moored, perhaps permanently, in field of shaggy grass, a gnarled tree holding it in dry dock. Even on a lake where a canoe with a mainsail fashioned from a garbage bag can pass for a yacht, the ship was not a seaworthy vessel. While the hull was painted black below the water line and brown above, both the top and bottom shared a skin of splintering boards, connected by shoddy ligatures of popping nails.

And yet it cast a shadow of grandeur. Elegant wooden railings haughtily enclosed the aft deck, and the lines of the hull, when not broken by bulging boards, betrayed a sleek and cocky style. Yet neither the ship’s past elegance, nor current decrepitude could explain its presence. It was far too large to serve as a ferry for an island that peaked at ten guests, and even if that were to be its purpose, the gap between ghost ship and something able to float was unbridgeably vast.

Elsewhere the ship would be a bewildering anomaly. Here, it was the norm. The dining area, called “the castle” was a pseudo-Mediterranean abode, with white plaster crumbling from the walls and a set of solar panels on the roof where the archers should be. The kitchen was a quartet of neoclassical arches holding up a roof but supporting no walls. And then there was the strangest sight of all. Then there was the Kenyan. Then there was Dom.

“There’s nothing about Malawi that couldn’t be fixed by white colonial government,” Dom declared, after I asked how he had enjoyed working there. It made sense that he would make that offensive statement. Born to British parents in Kenya in 1960 as the country lurched through the Mao Mao rebellion and towards independence in 1964, his comments, if not understandable, were at least explicable. As their contemporaries fled Kenya for the more certain white supremacy of Rhodesia or South Africa, Dom’s parents stayed put, taking Kenyan citizenship to accompany their UK passports.

“I’ll tell you what the problem is in Africa,” Dom opined in response to nothing. “People here are learning to be as greedy as Europeans. Before the Europeans came here, this place was the bloody Garden of Eden. Perfect weather, everything grows. You live in a place until there’s no game left, then you burn the village and move on. Oh, and don’t go down that mountain or the Masai will kill you. You live, you fuck, you drink, you die. It was perfect.”

This comment, this lecture, was less explicable. How a colonial, who had already heralded the restorative powers of white colonial government, could at the same time lash out at the very historical processes that brought his people to power was nearly incomprehensible.

The simplest explanation would be that Dom was mad. That just as the African sun had beaten his face until it was ruddy, it had pounded his mind until it was soft. That behind the dark glasses and mangy beard lay nothing but chaos. It is an appealing formula. Social alienation, plus excessive consumption of homebrewed banana spirit, plus dope, plus weird island with pirate ship, times 17 years equals absolutely bat shit crazy. Or should the bat shit go on the left side of the equation? But as elegant a solution as this equation offers, I think it is wrong

I think it is wrong because I have seen it before. Far from being some lone eccentric, Dom is one of legions. Throughout Africa, throughout the world, there remain, though there are fewer every year, colonial characters who are vocal and unapologetic in their belief that the past was better, yet have a disdain for their own race even more pronounced than their contempt for the locals. While it is simple enough to imagine that these fellows long for the day when the white man ruled Africa, the truth is, I suspect, more complicated; they long for a return to the even more distant past. If white rule was preferable to the nationalist disorder of today, then tribal rule is better still. For many of these lost souls, it is not only that they love their position of power and privilege in the old order, but that they truly love Africa… though perhaps not Africans… and genuinely lament the passing of an order that they never knew and could never possibly understand.

They are explorers at heart, wanting desperately to set off on the Congo with Stanley or to join Speke in his search for the source of the Nile. They are white men desperate to discover the secrets of Africa in an age when the secrets blare from televisions. And so they look inward. Unable to find the secrets of Africa, the improbable paradise lost in the breadth of the continent, they seek instead to find it in tiny corners of Africa, and in themselves.

I suspect that Dom imagines himself living a truly African life. He has his plot of land, he grows endless fruits and spices, feasts on fish, and draws power from the sun. Until the police confiscated his crop, he was even self-sufficient in pot. He spends his days, drinking, smoking, playing backgammon and entertaining his guests with anecdotes about the joys of life as an explosives expert in mines across the continent. To him, this is the African life, and to him it is paradise.

There is a case to be made that he is partly right. Not about minority rule, the evil of aid or even that pre-colonial Africa was Eden, but perhaps he is right about just how wonderful Africa is. For all of the misery there is on this continent, AIDS, starvation, war, poverty, there is extraordinary joy too. In so many cases, to be an African is to be surrounded by family, to enjoy deep faith, to truly appreciate good music and good friends. Of course, in many other cases to be an African means to be ill, to be exploited to be poor, but still it is not the poverty that defines the people. To be poor, even in this age of luxury, does not necessarily mean to be unhappy.

Not long after returning from Dom’s island, I asked a 22-year-old cell phone repairman what he would most like Americans to know about Uganda.

“It is very hard if you have no money,” he explained.

“So life here is very difficult?” I responded.

“No. Life is very easy if you have even a little money. Only if you have no money it is difficult.”

This young man with just a few shillings in his pocket had what no American, even the poor, would call an easy life, and yet to him, his life is easy.

But not as easy as Dom’s.

They Call It Uganda

2009-06-30T08:44:00.000-04:00

They Call it Uganda

Just the name “Uganda” should tell the educated observer that this country has internal security problems. “Uganda” is the Kiswahili name for the Kingdom of Buganda, which contains less than 20 percent of the Republic of Uganda’s population. A native of Buganda is a muganda, a group of locals are baganda and their language is called Luganda,

Got that?

The Republic of Uganda is named for the homeland of one of its dozen or so ethnic groups translated into the language of one of the other ethnic groups. In any language, that is pronounced trouble.

If you’re unfamiliar with African geography or history, think about it in European terms. Yugoslavia was a country with a Serb plurality with large helpings of other ethnic groups: Slovenes, Croats, Bosniaks, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Albanians and Hungarians. As you may recall, despite some periods of real prosperity, the federation did not end terribly well. The Serbs felt that they should be the dominant group to the consternation of the other nations. Now imagine that in order to soothe Serb demands the great powers had, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, named the country Serbia. (It was actually called the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes). The other ethnic groups would have been furious. So suppose that in order to cushion the blow, Wilson, George and Clemenceau decided that the best option was to keep the name Serbia but to have the official name be in Albanian. Would these linguistic gymnastics have prevented the country’s disintegration in World War II and again in the 1990s?

And yet this seems to have been exactly the plan for Uganda. The British named their protectorate after Buganda, whose people make up a bare plurality at around 17 percent of the population, but translated the name to Kiswahili, the speakers of which, are not even a plurality in Uganda and are much better represented in Uganda’s giant neighbors Kenya and Tanzania. Of course, the whole exercise makes a great deal more sense when one considers that the British had no interest in promoting ethnic harmony. Divide and conquer is as British as black pudding.

Still, the British persisted in promoting the fantasy of Uganda as an organic whole. Winston Churchill called the Protectorate “The Pearl of Africa.” For the master of metaphor, a man coined the highly accurate term “Iron Curtain,” it was either a rare failure of imagination or a deliberate misrepresentation. A pearl is the smooth little moon of a jewel that emerges when a tiny irritant, perhaps a grain of sand, becomes lodged in an oyster’s flesh. If Anglophone Africa has a pearl, even in Churchill’s time it would not have been Uganda. A better choice would have been another former British protectorate, Botswana, where a scant population of three million, ethnic homogeneity and the lack of anything of particular value until diamonds were discovered after independence allowed it to emerge as one of the most progressive economies and functional societies on the continent. Uganda, by contrast, resembles what might happen if one crammed more than a dozen grains of sand into a single oyster. If it is a pearl, it is a misshapen one.

A better metaphor for Uganda might be the costume jewelry of Africa. Each element is beautiful and unique. Perhaps Busoga is a feather, Buganda a rhinestone and Acholiland a clasp of gleaming brass. But thrown together they clash garishly, a mismatched trinket on the wrist of a continent that is already mixing polka dots with plaids. Its continuous existence is, as much as anything, based upon the insistence of its leaders and the Westphalian system that it must exist.

It is at this point that I should concede that after six weeks, I know almost nothing first hand about Uganda. Buganda, I more or less understand. I live and work here; I have traveled and relaxed here. While my understanding is flawed, it is about as good as it can be such a short stay. Buganda, however, is not Uganda.

This may come as news to the Baganda, who, due to the sophistication of their ancient civilization, have long dominated neighboring tribes. At the core of Baganda civilization was the kabaka, the absolute monarch. For generations, Buganda enjoyed competent, though not always compassionate, governance because of the nation’s embrace of a strong monarch combined with its rejection of royal primogeniture. Whereas most dynasties pass the crown onto the monarch’s first-born son, the Baganda explicitly forbade the first-born son from becoming kabaka. Instead, a council of advisors chose the next kabaka from among all of the other sons. The kabaka’s polygamy gave advisors a large number of legitimate heirs from whom to choose, creating the likelihood of a truly talented prince taking the throne, instead of a mediocrity blessed only in birth order.

Buganda’s preeminence was not lost on British imperialists who identified the Baganda as a people to be used as the protectorate’s commercial and administrative class, though the Baganda would have a lesser role in the economy than Indians shipped in from their corner of the empire. However, in classic British fashion, the crown separated military power from economic power giving most opportunities in the armed forces to the Northerners who were largely shut out from commerce. The British used the relatively short stature of the Baganda to disqualify most of them from military service. In the long run, having shillings without guns proved disastrous for the Baganda.

Since independence, the Baganda have been stuck in the odd position of dominating commerce, culture and language without ever actually wielding political power. While Kabaka Mutesa II served as the ceremonial President of Uganda after independence, the real power lay with Prime Minister Milton Obote, a Protestant Lango. When the Kabaka and his largely Catholic people declared independence in 1966, Obote and his army chief of staff, a Muslim from the West Nile province named Idi Amin, shelled the Kabaka’s palace, ultimately driving Mutesa II into exile in London. The Kabaka died soon after, perhaps as the result of poisoning, ending any hopes of Baganda sovereignty, much less hegemony, and solidifying Obote’s position as the most hated man in Buganda.

When Amin overthrew Obote in 1971 he became, at least for a while, a hero to many Baganda by virtue of his outstanding quality of not being Obote. His key role in the attack on the kabaka’s palace was largely forgotten. However, he was a homicidal lunatic, who killed 300,000 people, and deported the Indian population of 70,000 before being deposed by the Tanzanian army in 1979 after an ill-advised land grab.

Still, Amin, internationally reviled as one of history’s great villains, is remembered more fondly in Buganda than in other areas of the south. Perhaps this is because Obote took another 100,000 lives, many of them Baganda, after returning to power in 1981 following a series of short-lived presidents.

One Muganda, who is too young to remember Amin, responded to a question about her opinion of the former dictator by pointing out “that guy, if you listen to his speeches, was so funny.”

It is a peculiar choice of words. While there is a certain terrifying comedy to Amin’s daft insistence that he was the rightful King of Scotland, his portrayal of Mussolini in two films, and his friendly advice to Richard Nixon that the best way to deal with Watergate would be to execute Dean, Woodward, Bernstein and friends, “funny” remains a painfully odd adjective. Somehow, it is difficult to image even a fellow Khmer Rouge describing Pol Pot’s wonderful sense of humor, or even the most ardent of Serb nationalists talking about Slobodan Milosevic’s gift for the pun.

Even when Obote’s second reign finally ended and order prevailed, the Baganda did not win power. Instead, the Banyakole tribe from southwestern Uganda ascended. After placing poorly in the rigged 1981 election that returned Obote to power, Yoweri Musseveni, a Banyakole, and his National Revolutionary Movement took to the bush. By the time General Tito Okello deposed Obote in 1985, the NRM already controlled much of the western part of the country, and in 1986, they took Kampala.

The Baganda, have undoubtedly done better under Musseveni than under Obote. The NRM government even restored the monarchy, albeit as a purely ceremonial institution, in 1993. And yet the trend continues. In the country that bears their name, albeit in a foreign tongue, the Baganda remain politically impotent.

However, the dissatisfaction of the Baganda is the least of Uganda’s problems today. Even with Musseveni’s Banyakole tribesmen dominating politics and advancing in commerce, the Baganda are, at a minimum, free to do business, grow crops, tend cattle, and promulgate their ancient culture. If Buganda faces an alienating identity crisis, other regions face more tangible crises as ethnic conflict bloodily persists.

The most pressing security concern comes from across the border in Congo where Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed “prophet of God,” continues to lead the largely Acholi “Lord’s Resistance Army,” in rebellion. The LRA, a force peopled heavily by child soldiers and renowned for mutilating dissident Acholi and anyone else they can, has no political agenda save for the vague manifesto that Kony should rule all of Uganda in accordance with the ten commandments. In many ways, Kony is a grandiose madman in the tradition of Amin. For example, he recently invited Ramoush Hardinaj, the former prime minister of Kosovo and an indicted, though acquitted, war criminal to come to Uganda to mediate between the LRA and Musseveni. Hardinaj has no Africa experience. When it comes to statecraft, Metternich, Kony is not.

In the East, the Karamajong remain among the most traditional of Uganda’s tribes, facing intense pressure to assimilate into the mainstream of Ugandan society, while at the same time continuing with traditions that are, at best, antisocial. The Karamajong believe that all of Uganda’s cattle belong to them. If someone else has a cow, the only possible explanation is that the individual or his ancestors stole a cow from the Karamajong at some point in history. The Karamajong believe this gives them the right and responsibility to take cattle from anyone whenever possible, including fellow Ugandans and nearby Kenyans. Even in some cities, Karamajong carry spears, an ominous warning to anyone whose ancestors might have stolen a cow. Cattle rustling is sadly not a strong basis for economic growth or democratic governance, thus the Karamajong have remained a nation apart within Uganda.

While the Buganda’s problems are not as pressing as the Acholi, the Karamajong or a handful of other tribes, the glittering gem on the costume jewelry that is Uganda remain a troubled people. The restoration of the monarchy and the omnipresent framed photos of the current kabaka hanging on walls throughout Buganda cannot hide Buganda’s identity crisis.

The Baganda, the monarchy’s restoration notwithstanding, appear to suffer from the same problem as many kingdoms and empires that have perished from the Earth. Just as the Austrians struggled mightily to figure out what their country was absent the Hapsburgs and the Serbs struggled to maintain preeminence when Tito’s partisans ended the Karadjordjevic and Obrenevic dynasties’ waltz with power, the Baganda seem to be struggling to determine their role in this hodgepodge of a country. Are they the rightful lords of Uganda or just another of its constituent pieces? Is their destiny their own, or is it tied forever to the future of people from the north with whom they share no language and no culture save that which the British crown imposed?

In light of all of these contradictions and conflicts, all of the division and diversion, it is unsurprising that I have seen fewer national flags in Uganda than in any other African country I have visited. The horizontal stripes of red, yellow and black fly above the government buildings in Kampala, appear in a few hip hop videos and that is about it. The crested crane, the national emblem, that perches in a white circle in the flag’s center does little to unite the country. How can a nation of more than 32 million be represented by a bird that appears in just a tiny sliver of its territory?

Perhaps a better symbol would be the marabou stork, the huge, hideous bird that subsists on the garbage of major cities. It is not that the stork is a scavenger that makes it a fitting totem, but rather that it is a survivor. Despite being a vast and gangly mishmash of seemingly incompatible parts, two huge wings, long pencil legs, a dull red scalp and a yellow needle of a beak, it survives. Somehow this bird that looks as though it was assembled from spare parts holds together, somehow it finds food, somehow its disparate parts, which have nothing in common save a body, manage to do what must be done to live for the next day.

It is inelegant but hearty. It is awkward, but resilient. It is not Buganda, but perhaps it is Uganda.

Better than a Hole in the Ground

2009-06-25T08:08:00.000-04:00

“Good morning,” says the old man. His hands, gnarled from a lifetime of dragging a hoe through hard soil, clutch a dusty plastic bag of clinking change.

“I am ready to put my money in the bank,” he says as he places fistfuls of dirt smeared 500 Uganda Shilling coins on the counter.

This is how a banking crisis ends, with an old man, his life savings and an empty hole in the ground.

For this old timer, the Ugandan banking system has at last become a better risk than a shallow pit in the brittle red earth.

You won’t see this scene repeated in Peoria, Salinas or New Bedford. It can’t happen, because there hasn’t been an American banking crisis—at least not the kind that makes a hole in the ground seem like a shrewd investment.

The U.S. “banking crisis,” for all the pain it’s caused, has played out like a night with three friends and ten bottles of cheap red wine. Banks got good and liquored up on mortgage backed securities, and after that eighth or ninth bottle of wine giving a $500,000 mortgage to someone with no job and no assets seemed like a lark, like giving your watch and house key to the homeless guy who you’re pretty sure is Bill Gates in disguise.

Of course, the next morning it doesn’t seem like the impromptu show of charity was the best idea. If it were Bill Gates, why would he want a $20 watch? Also, one of your buddies is in jail, one is dead and you’ve got tannins eating away at your frontal lobe and some purple stuff on your teeth that is probably wine but could be blood.

The fallout from the binge banking has been terrible. Americans lost their homes, saw their 401Ks become 201Ks and got dropped by employers who couldn’t borrow the money to make payroll. But you know what happened to the bank accounts of average people?

Nothing.

Even if everything else collapsed, people who had put their money in a good old savings or checking account got to keep their money even when their banks drove into the embankment. No one is digging in the back yard. God bless the New Deal.

There’s still a credit crisis in the U.S., which is economically debilitating, but there’s no real banking crisis. Having a credit crisis is like having a kidney stone. It is unbelievably painful, can take a long time to resolve and can make you want to piss yourself, but it’s not going to kill you unless you do something like taking treatment advice from Rush Limbaugh or Rosie O’Donnell instead of experts with long chains of initials after their names. Having a banking crisis, on the other hand, is like getting a railroad spike through the brain—even in the best-case scenario, you are going to be debilitated for a long time.

Let’s take a look at what an actual economic intracranial railroad spike looks like.

It starts with some guys coming to town, any town. Say… Nkokonjeru, Uganda. They probably wear nice suits and may even have a powerful patron, maybe a former mayor. These sharp looking fellows set up a nice building and put a name on it that sounds helpful and reassuring: “Microfinance Bank.” They hold a few events, they answer some questions, and presto! People start giving these guys money for safekeeping. After all, banking shouldn’t just be for the rich, right? And not many in the village can afford the international banks with their fees and minimum balances.

Microfinance Bank provides the community with valuable services, keeping money safe for a nominal fee and maybe even giving out loans to creditworthy customers. They smile when you come in, they keep careful records of every dime and then, one day, they leave.

Poof.

Gone.

There’s nothing but the missing cash to remind you that they were ever even there, that and the certainty that even if you could find them, their political connections make them untouchable, above the law.

This is just about the time, right when the $300 you’ve worked your entire life to save vanishes in a flash of naked greed, that digging a hole starts to seem like pretty savvy investing strategy. A hole may get robbed, but a hole will sure as hell never rob you itself.

This is what an actual banking crisis looks like. It looks like confusion. It looks like betrayal. It looks like a couple of guys in expensive suits laughing themselves silly.

And here’s the kicker. It’s not just that these grifters have hurt their marks; they’ve ransacked a community. People need a place to keep their money; people need access to credit and now that genial George Bailey has ripped off a mask to reveal a sneering Jesse James, who is going to be so brave as to put their money into a bank again? Whom can simple folks keeping shop or sharing crop possibly trust with their money ever again?

Each other.

It turns out we are our brother’s keeper—his bookkeeper.

The Nkokonjeru Savings and Credit Cooperative is four-years-old and three years past the crisis started by the “microfinance bank” across the street. The secret to its success, to its survival, is that it is an old fashioned credit union. The customer is the boss, literally. When a customer joins Nkokonjeru SACCO, as it’s called, he kicks in USh 20,000, about nine dollars. For that he gets a USh 10,000 ownership share, a passbook and a bank membership. And, as Karl Malden always told us in reference to a different financial institution, membership has its privileges. In this case the privileges are attending the annual meeting, voting for the board and running for leadership.

It’s still a struggle though. People remember that they were robbed for a long time. When one asks locals their opinions of banks in general, they’ll often respond matter-of-factly “They steal money.” But the sinister “they” does not include the SACCO. People are signing up with increasing regularity. In the last month, SACCO has signed up to a member a day.

A credit union can’t solve the economic problems of this little rural town. It can’t give the kinds of big loans people need to start businesses that have enough capital to hire people. It can’t pave the road to Kampala or eliminate the West’s domestic agricultural subsidies. But it can, at the very least, earn more trust than a hole in the ground, and when the banks are truly in crisis, being better than a hole should never be taken for granted.

Pay Attention to me, PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!

2009-06-15T10:34:00.001-04:00

Yup, I'm in the Philly Inquirer on the subject of Africa and Obama.

The People in the Neighborhood

2009-06-11T06:35:00.000-04:00

The Christmas songs string together like lights on a tree. Jingle Bells… Here Comes Santa Claus… They come eight bars at a time, the refrain from one substituting as the verse for another.

The lyrics are missing, too complicated for the simple computer chip that chirps out the melodies to replicate. This is okay; I do not need them. I know the words and what they represent. They represent ice cream.

It is 82 degrees out, it is June, and the sounds of Christmas do not signify the coming of Christ or even of old Saint Nick. Instead of eight tiny reindeer pulling a right jolly old elf and a sled full of toys, there is only a thin Muganda (a person from Uganda’s Buganda region) peddling a bicycle with a worn cooler lashed to the back. The orange cooler is full of a thin pink slush that passes for ice cream in these parts. It is far from the strangest thing that Baganda lash to the back of two-wheel vehicles. For sheer shock value and calorie content, nothing can compare with the two live hogs I once saw strapped to the back of a motorcycle.

The ice cream man is a fixture in Nkokonjeru. He is one of the people in the neighborhood.

When I was a kid, Sesame Street had a bit called “People in the Neighborhood,” wherein a rainbow of Muppets sang about the various people one could find about town.

The fireman’s a person in the neighborhood,

In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood,
Well, the fireman’s a person in the neighborhood,
He’s a person that you meet,
When you’re walking down the street,
He’s a person that you meet— each— daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!!

Somehow, it always seemed to be civil servants that you’d meet in the neighborhood. There was never a corporate lawyer or millionaire CEO, which seemed odd when you grew up in a wealthy bedroom community like me. One time, I vaguely recall they had on Martina Navratilova and sung about how the tennis star is a person in the neighborhood, but that didn’t resonate with me either; I was a Chris Everett fan.

If the song failed to describe the experience of walking down the street in Belmont, Massachusetts in the late 1970s, it captures the experience of strolling in Nkokonjeru in 2009 even more poorly. Thus far, I have yet to meet a fireman, a mailman or even a tennis star while walking down the street each day. If I were to retrofit the song for Nkokonjeru, the first 50 verses or so would be about how the shopkeeper is a person in the neighborhood. Walking through the heart of town, one moseys—it is the only way to walk in the equatorial heat—down the red-brown dirt of Main Street, between through two rows of concrete shops. The shops represent what Adam Smith would call a state of perfect competition. Each of the dozens of little shops carries identical goods at identical prices. Contrary to what econ 101 might lead you to believe, it is no basis for a healthy economy. An economy cannot grow when it consist almost entirely of people selling bottles of Coke and three foot lengths of fraying rope to each other. The theory is that under circumstances of perfect condition, with profits reduced to a “normal” rate, people will divert their investment to other avenues, to innovation. That is not how it works here. Instead a profusion of small shops leads to even more small shops. Call it a bodega, a canteen or a general store, but owning a shop seems to be the Ugandan Dream.

And why wouldn’t it be? Talk to any shop keep, and I talk to a lot of them, and it quickly becomes clear that he is doing okay. He is not the richest man in town, but he has a full belly, strong concrete walls and a sturdy iron roof. He is not complaining.

The other people in my neighborhood, the people who have skills and trades rather than shops and trade, do not do as well.

The carpenter is a person in my neighborhood. He’s a person that I meet, when he’s knocked out on his feet.

Before a stack of newly made bed frames and amidst the spicy bouquet of fresh cut wood, signs I would expect of a thriving business, he laments his poverty. In the past year, there have been 10 months where his family has been hungry at least one day. His savings have been reduced to 5,000 shillings per month, about two US dollars. At the same time he aspires to more. When I ask him, as part of a study on the local credit union, what he would like for a loan, he suggests that USh 1,000,000 would be the right sum. He could work his whole life and never pay it back. He will not get the loan. Too bad that he didn’t ask Bank of America for US$ 500,000 to buy a house in Florida in 2007. That loan he could have gotten

The teacher is a person in the neighborhood too. He is more educated than the shop keep, better dressed and more respected. He is also poorer. While Uganda, with its school uniforms and O-levels is more an imitation of British education than American, it has borrowed a few features from the States—poorly paid teachers lecture to classrooms filled to bursting. Whereas the shopkeepers speak confidently about their ability to save 100,000 a month, teachers struggle to save even 10,000. While shopkeepers nap between customers, teachers grade piles of exams written on wafer thin paper between classes.

The nun is a person in my neighborhood.

She is my landlord. I live in a convent. This was not something I ever saw coming. Of all the certainties in my life, the fact that I would never sleep behind convent walls seemed like one of the surest.

Whoops.

When I learned I was going to live in a convent, I asked my mother’s friend Joannie, a former nun in training, what happens when one lived in a convent? From the stories, I had heard, it mostly involves sneaking out to meet guys, which isn’t really my scene. Thankfully, that has not been among my activities thus far, though I have had to jump the gate a time or two.

To say I live in a convent is a bit misleading. I live at a convent, in a guesthouse, safely away from the judging eyes of the penguins. Still, there is no mistaking where I am. Most rooms are decorated with a suitably gruesome crucifix and a piece of construction paper with the recommendation to “Be Still and Know that I am God” or both. And then there is the Library, an old hardwood cabinet, filled with books with names like The Eucharist in the New Testament and copies as far back as 1981 of the periodical God’s Word Today.

It is not by normal living situation, but it is comfortable, dry, electrified and has not only a flush toilet, but half a toilet seat. It is a good setup.

The nuns, each of them a Little Sister of St. Francis of Assisi, are charming. I am glad they are in the neighborhood. They are not, as I intimated earlier, the penguins despised and feared by Catholic school students everywhere. They are kind and clever, and do not even wear black and white, instead sporting beige habits that hide the smudges of Ugandan dirt beautifully.

They are here, 111 years after Catholicism came to Nkokonjeru thanks to Sister Kevin, a tenacious Irish nun, who defied the local witchcraft, thereby winning converts, and fixed much of Nkokonjeru in the Catholic camp. To this day, there are dozens of girls and women in Nkokonjeru named Kevin. Don’t tell them it’s a boy’s name.

The policeman is a person in my neighborhood.

This one might actually fit on Sesame Street. Of course, I don’t see him each day. I have seen him exactly once. As I returned two empty bottles of President beer to one of the many shops on the main drag, a policeman whose great round belly barely fit into his khakis, emerged from the dusty police station to ask if I had any beers for him. I turned the bottles upside down.

“All done,” I said with a shrug.

He burst into laughter. It is possible that if I had offered him a full beer at nine in the morning he would have taken it. One of the police officers, a man with a bad habit of drinking heavily and sleeping with other men’s wives, had gotten himself killed while drunk. After a few too many in a nearby town, he had responded to a request to stay away from another man’s wife, a woman he had known in the past, with a stark drunken refusal. He was ambushed later that night while riding home on the back of a boda boda (motorcycle) and was gutted in a drive by knifing. He did not survive.

These are the people in the neighborhood. Livingstone had it right, Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, shop keeps and carpenters, nuns, and teachers and cops. It’s all right here in my neighborhood. What there isn’t, however, is the prosperity Livingstone imagined. The slave trade, the primary focus of the great missionary’s campaign is long gone, but is that all we can expect?

Nkokonjeru has the three Cs, but that is not enough. For the people of Nkokonjeru to not only survive but prosper they need different people in the neighborhood. The doctor has to be a person in the neighborhood. The factory owner has to be a person in the neighborhood. The lawyer has to be a person in the neighborhood. God help me, even the tennis star could be a person in the neighborhood. The shop keeps are decent people, and then nuns are holy and even the police are cheerful, but this town needs more.

It had more once. There was one shining star to come from Nkokonjeru, a singer named Paul Kafeero, who was perhaps the most famous musician to ever come out of Uganda. His music and videos still play relentlessly around town. The themes of his songs, all of his songs, are girls and his fear of death. He complains that Ugandan women have more lust for chicken and chips than for men, and then explains that this is why he likes white girls. Apparently, white girls don’t like chicken.

After a lifetime of singing about sex and death, he died of AIDS a few years ago. The resulting funeral crowds led to the first traffic jam in Nkokonjeru history. Perhaps, for once, the traffic cop was a person in the neighborhood, though somehow I doubt it. His grave, still lies not far from town. He is Elvis and Graceland, Morrison in Paris; he is the no longer a person in the neighborhood.

Still, I’ll take the dead pop star over a tennis star. I’d just really prefer to have a doctor in the neighborhood.

Certain Threats to Validity

2009-06-06T04:06:00.000-04:00

There are certain issues that every researcher confronts sooner or later. What do you do if you discover that your research threatens the health or well being of subjects? How do you deal with a breakdown in random selection? What happens if your data is corrupted?

Thankfully, most basic statistics and econometrics classes provide at least a cursory overview of how to address these questions. I do not recall, however, any instruction on how to deal with interview subjects who are drunk. It must have been in Chapter 23 of Introduction to Econometrics; the bootleg Chinese edition, which I purchased new for 90% off, only had the first 22 chapters. Really.

The issue of drunken subjects raises other questions. Does it makes a difference whether the subject got drunk on beer or, for example, hooch made from sugar cane and bananas and consumed out of gourd through a long straw? In a study of banking habits, such as the one I am conducting, is it relevant whether the subject does his banking while intoxicated?

Circumstance forced me to address these issues only two days into my stint as a researcher in the rural Ugandan town of Nkokonjeru. While this may appear to be an awfully short time into a field research stint to run into an obstacle, it was not even the first challenge I had encountered. The first, and more urgent problem, was my discovery that field research is deathly boring. When I say “deathly,” I do not mean “very.” I mean that it causes symptoms that are indistinguishable from those of African sleeping sickness: fatigue, lethargy, coma.

For each interview, statistical rigor demands that I ask each question the exact same, boring way.

What is your20highest level of education?

How much do you save each month?

How many boats or canoes do you own?

The last one always draws big laughs, at least. Nkokonjeru is 10 km from Lake Victoria, making it inconceivable to residents that anyone would squander money on seafaring.

After the third or fourth interview, even the charming response to that absurd question (convulsive laughter at disbelief that even a mzungu could ask something so stupid) had lost its entertainment value to me, and while I had not yet contemplated the ethics of interviewing drunk research subjects, the ethics of conducting interviews while drunk had become a legitimate query. It would help pass the time, and what threats to validity or biases could it possibly introduce?

After an extensive review of the threats to internal, external and construct validity posed by researcher intoxication, I rejected the idea as unprofessional, dangerous and, worst of all, not something I could write about in a publi shed essay. Thus, I resolved to go into the field clean and sober, save for any intoxicating effects generated by the classic cocktail of malarone and immodium.

Paul, one of the nine interview subjects on my second day in the field, however, had a different approach. His approach to research seemed to be that getting drunk and answering questions from any strange white man who might happen by was an outstanding idea. Ignatius, one of the founders of the credit union with which I work, my interpreter for the day and a leader in the town was initially reticent about going ahead with the interview.

“This guy is drunk,” he pointed out with a toothy grin on his face. Just days before Ignatius, a teetotaler, had explained to me that there was no drinking problem in Nkokonjeru.

“Let’s give it a try anyway,” I said going with my gut. My hope was that Paul’s drunkenness would work in our favor. In my experience people who have been drinking are more likely to tell the truth, are friendlier to strangers, and speak second languages more fluently. Besides, with Paul the standard five-minute Luganda introducti on had already stretched beyond 10 minutes as he repeatedly forgot that he had already greeted me, so I figured we might as well proceed.

I was not disappointed. In his boozy breath Paul confessed to things that none of the 54 other subjects we have interviewed thus far admitted. He doesn’t save money anymore, his wife doesn’t have shoes, and he staged the lunar landing. In vino veritas, I suppose.

Yet, it leaves me with questions. I am not inclined to discard Paul’s interview. His intoxication aside, there was no evidence that he was lying, and discarding subjects is a poor way to maintain a random sample. But it did make me wonder about all of the other people I’ve interviewed, the ones who assure me that they save every month and have all of their children in school. Are they telling me the actual truth or is the truth like light, refracted by the confounding mists of sobriety until it appears as what the mzungu wants to see?

A colleague of mine in another African country, a doctor, once told me that if he believed what his patients told him, not a single person in the country had ever sex without a 0Acondom. This left the 18% HIV prevalence to be explained by heroin and blood transfusions. What could explain the stunning fertility rate? Well, maybe it is just a nation of Jesuses, or, far more likely, his data, and mine, would have been better if every interview came after a few shots of the truth serum called moonshine.

I don’t think I’m going to get that proposal by the Internal Review Board though—something about ethics and harm to subjects. That is, of course, unless they’ve been drinking.

Being Obama

2009-06-02T09:03:00.001-04:00

“Obama!” yells one man.

“Obama!” chimes in another

“Obama, Obama, Obama!!!” echoes a sympathetic third.

They are referring to me. As a 32-year-old white guy, this is a novelty. I am rarely mistaken for this particular president at home. I am much more accustomed to being hailed by people yelling “Arthur, Chester A. Arthur!” Hey, it happened once. I was wearing muttonchops.

I learn quickly enough that I have not been mistaken for our new president, but that “Obama” has become the catcall of choice for Ugandan vendors attempting to flag down Americans in Kampala.

This is a distinct improvement over the old catcall of choice “mzungu.” While, being called “mzungu,” which translates roughly as “white man” is technically more accurate than being called “Obama” it is distinctly less pleasant, at least if one is a Democrat.

Obama has replaced more than just epithets in Kampala. Teens who once wore shirts bearing the graven image of Tupac Shakur or David Beckham now sport Obamawear. Little shack restaurants now bear his name and visage. One restaurant, at the impossible tangle of microbuses that passes for Kampala’s main bus terminal, has chosen the name “Obama Take Away.” The eatery’s marquee shows the President looking confidently into the future, a future that, I presume from the sign, includes a plate of matoke, Uganda’s ubiquitous mashed plantains, and beans.

I am not sure what to make of it all. I am an Obama supporter. I voted for him in part because I believed that his election would change how the world sees America, but now I am face-to-face with the reality of that change. I can’t speak for the rest of the world but to Africans, at least, we are Obama and Obama is us.

On the face of it, this is a good thing. It is proof to the world that in the U.S. everyone not only has a place at the table but even has a shot at sitting at the head. It is proof that American exceptionalism means more than exceptionally powerful or exceptionally rich. Long oppressed and despised minorities do not get voted into power in other countries. Either they seize power, as did the Sunni in Iraq, or the Alewites in Syria, or they remain forever oppressed. We have proved we are different. Yes, we are exceptional.

Since November, I’ve had a wonderful time asking my French friends, who were rightly haughty not so long ago, if they remember that time when France elected a Muslim of Algerian descent President. It never happened? Huh. How about that?

Yet I worry about the Obamamania in Africa; I fear that he is being set up to fail.

The American relationship with Africa is not in a particular state of disrepair. In Christian Africa, the Bush years were not the diplomatic catastrophe they were in the rest of the world. While Africans are generally ecstatic over the election of Obama, many have kind words for Bush as well. Bush’s PEPFAR initiative has provided massive assistance to African nations in their efforts to halt the spread of HIV and provide drugs to those afflicted. Whereas Bill Clinton sided with drug companies at every turn, Bush actually put U.S. resources and prestige into fighting HIV in Africa. The program is not perfect, some of the prohibitions on family planning border on madness, but thousands of Africans received anti-retroviral medicines thank to George W. Bush and are alive as a result. I give the former president credit for almost nothing. He was incompetent, and I find most of his ideology revolting, but if asked to say two nice things about Bush, I would commend him first on PEPFAR and then on his ability to duck shoes. His reflexes are admirable.

Following a more or less successful Africa policy leaves Obama with less room to meet the lofty expectations. In military affairs, not starting a calamitous war will be a huge improvement. In economic affairs, reducing unemployment to 7 percent will be a success. But in Africa, he might actually have to accomplish something to claim victory.

I also worry that Africans, themselves might expect too much. One of the 16 people crammed into a microbus with me on a recent trip to Jinja, where the Nile begins its flow toward Egypt, became the first African I have met with harsh words for Obama.

The criticism came from Ken, a chatty, a very chatty fellow, who as is the Uganda custom, was practically sitting on my lap.

After showing me some videos of other times he has been in a minibus and attempting to persuade me to give him my $20 Casio digital watch, Ken, my seatmate offered a revelation.

“I don’t like Obama,” said Ken. “He’s selfish. Can I have your phone number?” Ken may not have liked Obama, but his distaste was not intense enough to hold his focus for more than 30 seconds.

This is why I worry. Obama can do a lot for Africa. He can support democracy, increase aid, facilitate trade and treat Africa nations with respect. What he cannot do, however, is make Africa as rich as America. And I worry that that is what people like Ken are hoping for.

Fortunately, I don’t think we actually have to make Africa as rich as the U.S. to win over guys like Ken because most Africans have no idea how rich America is. They know we are rich, but the level of difference is unimaginable. If we help them to get a little richer, if we can increase access to medicine, clean water and decent governments, if we take their concerns seriously, that will be enough, it will be more than anyone has done since Europe eviscerated the continent. But risks remain. If Obama does not give Africa some speck of his attention, if he does not improve on the humane HIV policies of the Bush Administration, then Ken will be right. Obama will have been selfish, and because, to the people here, Obama is us, we will have been selfish too.

Grand Marshal

2009-05-27T03:54:00.000-04:00

Once I watched Bob Newhart serve as Grand Marshal of the Tournament of Roses parade. I would watch Bob Newhart doing almost anything. I watched Newhart, where he played a Vermont innkeeper, religiously. After it went off the air, I would watch reruns of The Bob Newhart Show, the one where he played the psychologist in Chicago. I watched his failed shows too. I watched Bob, where he played a comic book artist and George and Leo where he hangs out on Martha’s Vineyard with Judd Hirsch and Justin Bateman. I even watched a few of the episodes of ER, which I don’t even particularly like, just because he was on.

I suppose that I had seen other grand marshals at other parades both on television and in person on a million different occasions, but I’ll be damned if I can remember a single one of them. I guess I just like Bob Newhart. Or maybe it’s what he did with the modest power accorded not just a marshal, but a grand marshal. As best I can tell, the weighty responsibilities of grand mashaldom are three: ride on a float, greet the captains of any affiliated sporting event and flip a coin.

For Newhart the coin flipping seemed to be the big deal, or perhaps less that he got to flip a coin and more that he got to have a coin. After Newhart had shaken hands with the captains of each Rose Bowl team, the referee handed him a large silver commemorative coin, a flip of which would be used to determine who kicked off.

Newhart shook the referee’s hand, pocketed the coin and began to walk off the field.

This made sense. Every character Newhart has ever played seems to be a grumpy comedic skinflint in the best tradition of Jack Benny. Still, while Newhart is a comedian, he could only take the joke so far. After ten yards or so, he turned, laughed sheepishly and walked back to the fifty-yard line. Finally, he flipped the coin. No damage done.

Well, almost no damage. After watching the spectacle, I concluded that I would like, someday, to serve as grand marshal for something. Anything. It falls under my umbrella policy of seeking self-esteem without sacrifice or, God forbid, strain.

But given my distinct record of non-accomplishment and tendency to have my finest moments in the shadows, quietly scoring points for my employer or cause, I have not had a chance to distinguish myself to the point where a grand marshal’s, I don’t know, Scepter? Float? Coin?, was a real possibility. Writing a baseball blog under a pseudonym does not get you noticed.

So I went on with life, as we must, hoping that someday, somehow, a chance to be simultaneously a marshal and grand might come my way. It wasn’t an obsession, or something I even thought about with any regularity. Instead, it was one of those vague life goals that one hopes to achieve somewhere over the course of 70 or more years, like visiting all seven continents, but will not go on one’s tombstone. In other words, if someone were to remake Citizen Kane but about me, “grand marshal” would not be my muttered final words in the opening scene. Those words would more likely be something like “Donald Duck Flip Flops.” I lost them on Cape Cod in 1982 or so, when the tide came in, and the fact that some kid in Spain probably ended up with them always bothered me. Still, being a grand marshal was something I have vaguely aspired to do for a long time.

I had always imagined that the Memorial Day parade in a small New England town would be my best bet. Significantly further down the list was being grand marshal of a municipal soccer match in an 11,000 person town in rural Uganda.

While enjoying an exalted position on a half unmowed grass, half parched earth field about 14 degrees north of the equator may not have the cache of marching in a town parade featuring both a high school and middle school marching band and two unfortunate reserve soldiers in a jeep with a recoilless rifle, the prestige of grand marshaling this match should not be dismissed. The stakes were frighteningly high.

There was a goat on the line.

Squads from some of the 12 villages that comprise Nkokonjeru, literally “White Chicken,” Uganda, had struggled and striven for this moment, for the right to compete for one delicious goat.

The two teams stood in a perfect line facing the crowd, half clad in red jerseys reading Nkokonjeru T.C. F.C. (Town Council Football Club) and half of them skin to the sun. And there they waited…. and waited… and waited… Finally, the referee called over Peter our lanky Uganda coworker and guide and chattered something to him in Luganda’s syncopated cadences.

Peter returned to us and stared directly at Alex, a fresh faced 20-year-old mechanical engineer on his first trip to Africa.

“Do you want to shake hands with the players?” Peter asked.

“Uhhh…” responded Alex.

Alex, while not shy about popping open an electrical contraption, jury rigging a mechanical contraption or otherwise indulging in the sort of madness for which engineers are know, is not nearly as fearless when it comes to interacting with people. Of the four in our group, his the most hesitant about using his limited Luganda and the most reluctant to enter the furious fray of market bargaining. Going out to shake hands with a bunch of strangers about to play soccer had precious little to do with the forces of physics and presented almost no risk of explosion, thus he was hesitant.

“Uhhh…” he repeated.

I, however, knew what was going on. I knew that this was a chance at being a grand marshal of sorts, a chance not to be squandered, so I did the only thing I could.

“Do it Alex, “ I cackled. “Go shake hands.”

That wasn’t right? I was supposed to say, “Don’t sweat it, man. I’ll go be the center of attention. I’ll be the one to walk of the field with the ceremonial coin.”

Didn’t happen. “Seriously man, do it.” I cajoled again.

At this point Peter chimed in and pointed out what should have been obvious—that he had not asked Alex, he had asked all of us.

And so we went, hesitantly, shyly even, down across the dried, almost brick, mud to the line of players. At last, I would be a grand marshal, chosen on the basis of a) being white b) having just shown up in a town where everyone knows everything about each other and strangers are an oddity to be investigated carefully.

Down the line we walked, shaking hands with each of the twenty-two players and the two-team managers. In Baganda society, this could be a lengthy process, as proper greeting might involve not only exchanges on how the day has been thus far but, obligatory inquiries on the condition of each others’ goats and so on, a discourse well beyond my limited Luganda. Thankfully, the magnitude of the project limited the length of introductions.

“Dan,” I introduced myself.

“Thomas,” the player would respond. We grasped hands and shook in the African fashion, a three part shake consisting of a standard hand shake clasp, then a quick move to an arm wrestling grip, and then back to the handshake.

“Good luck!” I pithily added for affect, or “The keeper!” when I could discern, by the curiously colored jersey’s that I was dealing with the goalkeeper.

The match itself was about what one would expert from a goat match, what wrestling commentators would call a slobber knocker. After a scoreless first half, red jumped out to a two goal lead in the second half before skins thundered back with a rocket from the penalty line and a header off of a corner kick to equalize. Ultimately, red won 4-3 on penalty kicks. It was an odd sort of shoot out. Neither keeper was eager to actually throw himself to the rock hard ground to make a save, so the only rules for shooters seemed to be do not kick the ball directly at the goalie and do kick the ball between the uprights.

In my expert analysis of the match the outcome came down to three factors. First, goal tending. Skins was a much better team, but their goalie had hands of stone. Second, shoes. Some players had proper sneakers, others had sandals and others played barefoot. I’m not sure which side had more shoes but it had to have been a major advantage. Third and finally, grand marshalling. I am not one to brag, but I am pretty sure that the red team shook hands with more enthusiasm and that it was decisive.

So I got to be a grand marshal, to see one of my lesser dreams fulfilled. This seems to be how it has been in Africa for muzungu ( white men) for some time. White men come here to pursue what they cannot have at home. People of modest means and low standing in their native countries can come here and be dignitaries. The Boers who came from the lower rungs of Dutch society violently asserted predominance in South Africa and fancied themselves as God’s chosen people. A tubercular nobody named Cecil John Rhodes founded an empire on the continent. The colonizers of many nations came to Africa and lived like kings, demanding tribute from their unwilling vassals. Even the NGO workers today have cooks to cook for them, maids to clean for them, drivers to drive for them and guards to protect them. These are not typically people who would have servants at home.

While my time as a grand marshal is just the manifestation of a silly and petty dream, in many ways indicative of nothing more than the friendliness and congeniality of the Baganda people, it does bother me that while at home I am just another guy, here I am noteworthy. I am not Rhodes, I am not Stanley, I am not even a scraggly diplomat in a compound in Kampala, but it is clear that here, I am someone. I’m just not sure that there is any reason I deserve to be.

Two Capes, Two Countries

2009-05-20T03:12:00.000-04:00

I am facing north, due north. To my left lies the green Atlantic, turbulent and cold. To my right, the Indian Ocean, warmer, more placid. Behind me they converge, two distant oceans melting harmoniously into one. Or do they collide? Perhaps their meeting is a swirling clash of distant rivals drawn close. Am I on the Cape of Good Hope or the Cape of Storms? Either way all of Africa, hell, all the world lies before me.

But what kind of a world is it? It is too big a question, so I refine it to what kind of a country? The answer, at least metaphorically, lies in the seas behind me, whether they converge or collide, whether they clash or commingle.

In the 1990s, South Africa went from being the Apartheid State to the Rainbow Nation. The pass laws are gone, the planned Bantustans are a distant nightmare, the ANC is in power and the nation rests upon one the world’s most liberal constitutions. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has reconciled as much as it can, Mandela is as respected and beloved a figure as anyone alive today and the World Cup is coming in 2010. If South Africa is indeed a rainbow, then why do I still see so much here in black and white?

One explanation is that I am the issue, that as a white man, an American, or even just as a student of history, I am unable to escape my prejudices and preconceptions and see the world as it is, instead of as it was.

Another possibility is that my itinerary has dictated my mindset, that it is impossible to think of anything but race when Robben Island and Drakenstein Prison, Mandela’s first and final places of imprisonment, and the Cecil Rhodes Memorial are prominent on the itinerary.

The final possibility is that I perceive only what it there; that in South Africa, much is still about black and white.

The trite yet probably true explanation is that it is a combination of factors, yet I find myself fascinated by the itinerary theory. While Robben Island’s long history as a leper colony, political prison and, finally, a monument has been the worthy subject of extensive thought and commentary, the contrast between the Rhodes Memorial and the tribute to Mandela at Drakenstein seems to reveal more about today’s South Africa, and certainly reveals more about my perceptions of it.

The memorial to Cecil John Rhodes is a masterpiece of colonial grandiosity and grotesquerie. In a forest of ionic columns, Rhodes’ spirit, though not his body, which rests in Zimbabwe’s Matobo National Park, is guarded by a pride of eight bronze lions. Within the temple sits a bust of the brooding Rhodes looking out over the city from which he ruled a personal empire.

He looks exhausted and sour. Even the inscription seems to agree that this was a pissy man.

THE IMMENSE AND
BROODING
SPIRIT STILL SHALL QUICKEN
AND CONTROL
LIVING HE WAS THE LAND
AND DEAD HIS SOUL SHALL BE HER SOUL

The epitaph is somehow ennobling and antagonistic at the same time, perhaps due to Rhodes’ complicated relationship with the Boers—he courted them and cursed them alternatively as it served his interests. A man must be astonishingly dour for even his eulogizers to describe him as “brooding.” And while the assertion that Cecil John Rhodes was the land in life and her soul in death, when he was not even from the land in question is breathtaking in its colonial arrogance, the expression that he shall “still quicken and control” does hint at the magnitude of his lust for power. Here is a man who knew what he wanted, and more importantly, who he wanted to be, and was prepared to do anything to achieve his goals.

Yet despite the bravado of the inscription, the bronze Rhodes inside the temple seems to know that he is beaten. He wearily rests his heavy head on his right hand while his left arm lies flat, bracing his body against his pedestal, as if trying to support the colossal weight of empire.

Forty minutes away in Paarl, just outside the front gates of Drakenstein prison, know as the Victor Verster Prison while Mandela spent his final years of confinement there, stands a statue of the great man erected in 2008. The bronze Mandela, looking tired but triumphant, raises his right fist in celebration of his victory, looking every bit the boxer he once was. He has taken his lumps and rolled with the punches—the fight has aged him—but after 15 brutal rounds, he has emerged victorious. The judge called History scores the fight for Mandela, noting that he will be remembered as one of history’s giants, a man with the patience and purpose to rope-a-dope an entire nation, absorbing blow after blow from the Apartheid regime with the certainty that it will punch itself out, leaving itself vulnerable to one well-place left hook. The judge called Morality scores the fight for Mandela too. While Mandela was not a pacifist, he supported armed insurrection, the justice of his cause, his reliance on sabotage rather than bloodshed, and his extraordinary ability to choose reconciliation over retribution has given him Morality’s card decisively.

But the fight was not scored unanimously for Mandela. The third card remains blank. The judge called The Future has not yet submitted a score. Rightly or wrongly, Mandela will be judged to some extent on the men who follow him. To be sure Mandela himself cannot be held responsible for the acts of Mbeki, Zuma or any of his other successors. But he is the father of the country, and rightly or wrongly, the behavior of the child reflects on the father. Mandela’s willingness to relinquish power was extraordinary. It showed an awareness of his limitations that is rare in politicians and an understanding that he was not the state. But the outcomes still matter. George Washington, who like Mandela yielded power freely, is judged a great success by history not only for his revolutionary achievements but for establishing the role of President. Had that role of a powerful but limited executive been undermined by his early successors, as John Adams nearly did with the Alien and Sedition Acts, Washington’s legacy would have been different. Perhaps he would have been the good man who preceded the age of tyrants, rather than the father of liberty.

If the new South Africa someday descends into chaos, if crime continues to expand, if vast inequalities in wealth persist or worst of all, if a South African Mugabe emerges, than Mandela may not win on that final scorecard. He will have won, the fight to be sure, but it is still too early to tell if the bronzed man standing on a platform of marble etched with images of barbed wire won by a unanimous or a split decision. Will his legacy be unambiguous or mixed?

It is puzzling that these two monuments can exist in the same country, that victorious Mandela and defiant Rhodes, that the liberator and the colonizer can both be lauded in the same province, can both be addressed with reverence.

The conventional wisdom is that this is the genius of Mandela; in victory he was magnanimous, that now even as Rhodesia is no more and South Africa has come under majority rule, Rhodes can be allowed to have his temple and his scholarships in peace. One hotel even ups the ante, taking the name the Mandela Rhodes Place, attempting to suggest that they are both, in their own ways heroes of South Africa.

But magnanimity is much harder in defeat and is perhaps even unwise, suggesting an excess of passivity. Which leads me to ask: Who really won? DeKlerk’s goal in negotiating the end of Apartheid was not to end white privilege, but to preserve it. Continuing to preserve white dominance with a legal system based on the presumption of white superiority was never defensible, but as the world changed and the cold war ended, it began to look absurd and even self-destructive. At some point, the black population would have launched a violent, full-scale revolt against Apartheid, and the consequences would have been terrible for the white minority. DeKlerk turned to negotiation because it offered the best chance for the survival of his people and his lifestyle.

And as we look 15 years after Mandela came to power, it seems from a walk around Cape Town that DeKlerk may have succeeded and that perhaps old Cecil Rhodes had as many tricks in death as he did in life.

After a week in the country, entirely in the Western Cape province save for one night in Johannesburg, I am hardly qualified to reveal any deep truths about South Africa. All I can report is what I see. And what I see, small sample though it is, is a country where, despite the overwhelming black majority, almost all the faces in the fine restaurants are white, where the shantytowns are exclusively black and where DeBeers, the company that Cecil Rhodes purchased and transformed into the world’s diamond monopoly is still an overwhelming presence.

So who really did win? Mandela or Rhodes? Do the oceans clash or combine? The answer seems to be both. Today’s South Africa is Mandela’s country. People of all races are free, elections are basically fair and there is a black elite that has earned a share of the country’s wealth. Today’s South Africa is still Rhodes’ country. The wealth is still controlled by a tiny elite consisting disproportionately of whites.

South Africa is the Cape of Storms and the Cape of Good Hope. While storms rage throughout the country, storms of crime and violence, storms of poverty, storms of inequality, Good Hope remains.

Dining Alone

2009-05-14T15:23:00.000-04:00

Tonight, I dine alone.

Don’t pity me. This is an upgrade on my earlier plan. Had I gone with that plan, the previous sentence would have read “Tonight, I dine alone in my room on a king sized Snickers bar while watching the Michael Rappaport comedy ‘The War at Home.’”

See, upgrade. Hooray for me. I am dining alone!

Dining alone, as opposed to not dining at all, is an accomplishment for me. It has taken a fair amount of psychic energy to leave my room this evening. It is not that I don’t want to leave, though the jet lag is a factor, but rather that leaving seems like such a burden. I am not one to fall for the Chicken Little warnings of guidebooks or, even worse, the U.S. State Department, but I have to be honest—South Africa intimidates me.

Actually, let me take that back a step. Johannesburg intimidates me. Joburg is the sort of place where if you ask one of its defenders how she likes it, she will cheerfully reply “I love it there. Sure, I’ve been carjacked a few times, but you can’t let that get to you.” This is not an exaggeration; I have had this conversation.

See, it is reasonable to be intimidated by Joburg. Of course, I am not in Joburg, so that explanation doesn’t carry much weight; I’m in Cape Town. Cape Town is not Johannesburg. Hell, Cape Town isn’t Baltimore. Rather than being a glorified mining town, Cape Town is one of those cities that positively must exist.

“The Atlantic Ocean meets the Indian Ocean, there? Well, of course we need to build something, and it had better be cool.”

And so it is. I went into town in the afternoon. At about 1:30, after sleeping off what I hoped would be the last of my jet lag, I hit the streets with Velaphi, my scruffy-bearded, Zimbabwean guide, friend and confidant. Velaphi will dispute my characterization of him as having a scruffy beard, retorting, “that’s just what happens when I don’t shave.” But I don’t believe him. I think it’s a fashion thing.

The last time I had seen Velaphi, nine months ago in Malawi he had pointed out, as I boarded my plane, “I will probably never see you again.” Wrong. I win he loses. Ha ha.

Our four hours of wandering, a brief time in a big city, revealed enough for me to conclude that Cape Town is, as advertised, a great city. Fine dining? Check. Art and culture? Check. Ocean adjacent? Check, check. African totem statue with numerous Bart Simpson heads sticking out of it in a prominent city square? Check with an exclamation point and a circle around it. Great city from A to Zed.

So why then do I feel intimidated after the sun goes down? Why after Velaphi and I part ways at 7PM, am I inclined to stick to my hotel room? You’d think it would be a reaction to sketchiness or a vague air of menace about the place. You’d be wrong. More than anything, it is the utter normality, the peace and passivity of the place that frightens me.

I like urban decay. I like decrepitude. Or at least I like what they signal, how they provide a clear warning that there is danger or risk. I like decay in the sense that I like rattlesnakes. A rattlesnake may kill you, but at least it gives you fair warning with a shake of its tail. A puff adder will get you in silence. It will kill you before you even know it’s there. All I can tell in Cape Town was that there is potentially some danger somewhere. Hell, Lonely Planet, not an alarmist source, warned me not to let the relaxed atmosphere get me to let my guard down, but I’d be damned if I can tell where the danger is. In the tin-roofed shantytown suburbs, sure, but in the city? Who can tell?

My reluctance to leave my room is not out of fear of danger, but more out of a fear of moderate inconvenience and embarrassment. I hate having to ask the hotel deskman whether it is safe to walk in a particular direction at night when, to the naked eye, it seems so perfectly safe. Somehow I feel that it denigrates both South Africans and myself at the same time, like I am asking “Are there people here so cruel that they might rob me on a safe seeming street, and am I such an obvious tourist that I look like an easy mark?” Or alternatively, “Am I a yahoo racist who has bought in t stereotypes of African cities?”

Finally I build up the courage to ask.

“Is it reasonably safe at this time of night to turn right down Main Street and walk to a restaurant?” I ask the man at the reception desk. He looks surprised, and then nods with a smile, saying only “No problem.”

I feel like an idiot. This may be because I am an idiot.

Nevertheless, with my excuses gone, I walk out the door and turn right into the cool evening air. I immediately start feeling stupider. The street is lively with a restaurant every block or two and a guarded hotel even more frequently.

After walking back and forth a few times, inspecting a few menus and even sitting down at one restaurant, before leaving without ordering when the American woman dining solo next to me starts to complain about aggressive panhandlers, I settle on the Hussar Grille. I am drawn in by the lively crowd and the promise of kudu on the back wall blackboard. I am a sucker for game meat. I like games; I like meat. How can I go wrong?

As I slice into my kudu, a dark lump of meat tangier than beef, yet less sweet, I realize that I am dining alone only in the sense that I am a table by myself. But in my isolation, I am at the center of everything. Conversations revolve around me, as though I am the sun. To my right, a conversation about a rosy-cheeked blonde’s birthday sets into orbit around me. But the gravity of the conversation behind me is far greater. A white American is talking about the consequences of the election of Barrack Obama to some white South Africa friends.

“The thing about Obama is that he’s already changed the racial dynamic in America,” explains my white haired countryman authoritatively. “People can’t say now, that ‘you owe me because by ancestors were slaves 140, 150 years ago.’ They know now that if they work hard and get an education they can make it.”

“Not so different from here,” responds the South African. “It’s only been 15 years but people know that since now that the ANC has power, and with our new President…. Well, they don’t have any more excuses.”

I look around the room. All the diners are white.

How lucky we all are to live in societies where at last merit is the only determining factor of success. How blessed we are to be able to discuss the end of racial inequality from the comfort of a restaurant peopled only by our own kind, save for a few black waitresses. How fortunate we are that freed from the demon of racial discrimination, we can all say with conviction that everyone gets what he deserves. The rich deserve their wealth; the poor have earned their poverty. And far away from the creeping decay of urban slums, we have nothing to fear but the chance that beauty is no guarantee against evil, or even just unpleasantness, lurking around the corner.

I cannot speak for South Africa. I have been here for three days. It is not my country, and I do not know it. But I can speak for my country, of which I have lately been so proud. I can remember that Obama is not an end anymore than Mandela was. I can remember that both men are means; they are transformers rather than the transformation itself. Obama does not signal the end of race in America any more than Mandela singled the end of race in South Africa. In a way, both are Bart Simpson heads sticking awkwardly out of an African fetish object, mockeries of the old ways, sublime in their sophisticated satire of the ignorance of the past generations while almost absurd to those viewing them out of context.

I suck the last bite of kudu; I slurp the last drop of pinotage and then walk out the door without fear, without anxiety, but filled with the humbling melancholy of the knowledge that however far we have come, we—I--have so much longer still to go on our long walk to freedom from fear.

Manny Being A-Rod

2009-05-08T10:06:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. Well, there’s no getting around this.

For a couple months now, Jose has been meaning to do a piece on performance enhancing drugs and he just never got around to it. First, he didn’t feel like he wanted to bring it up so early in the season. Then he got sick of you all and just stopped writing. But now, with Manny Ramirez being proven to take (note: though not testing positive for) the female fertility drug HCG, there is only one thing Jose can do.

He has to write about A-Rod.

That A-Rod—what a jackass. He did steroids. According to some writer he may have done them back in high school. And he only tips 15% at Hooters. He’s such a tool!

Actually, what Jose originally wanted to write about with regards to A-Rod was taking responsibility. As long time readers here know, Jose has an issue with people “taking responsibility” for something and then suffering no adverse consequences. For example, when Don Rumsfeld “took responsibility” for Abu Ghraib, that meant that he kept his job, suffered no formal discipline, and some young stupid soldiers went to jail. PEDs are kind of the same.

When A-Rod took responsibility for his actions, what happened to him? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No suspension, no loss of money. The only thing that happened was he took a huge PR hit, but one can argue that the hit was already coming once it was clear that he was guilty, and that “taking responsibility” may even have diminished it.

So here is what Jose suggests. Alex, if you are serious about taking responsibility give back the money. Jose is not saying that you should give it to the Rangers. Hell, they benefited from your malfeasance and should be giving back the money (note: if any) they made on you. Give it to some charity, any charity.

If you are really sorry for what you’ve done take the salary for the years you were on PEDs, you admitted to two if Jose recalls, and give it to an African AIDS charity, given to inner city kids, drop it from an airplane, but if you actually feel bad, don’t keep the money.

It’s not like you won’t still be rich. $25 million out of your lifetime earnings still leaves you fat and happy. Hell, challenge MLB to match you, they made out like bandits on your cheating too.

Jose doubts that you are sorry. He doubts that you really do take responsibility. But maybe he is wrong. Maybe you aren’t just a vapid, mirror-kissing douche.

Then prove it. Give the money away.

2. This brings us back, of course, to Manny, who whatever else you want to say, is giving money back. Under the terms of his suspension, Manny will lose $8 million. (Note to the Dodgers: Give it to charity.)

Jose will be honest that, perhaps naively, he never saw this one coming. The idea that someone with a swing as sweet as Manny’s would never hit 50 home runs while juicing just seemed inconceivable.

But Jose must conceive it now. Funny how that works. Jose has never heard of fertility drugs making someone who isn’t taking them conceive.

Manny was the Ruth to Papi’s Gehrig, but if instead of eating lots of hot dogs, Ruth had shot himself full of female hormones. But now? Well, Jose doesn’t know what he is now.

The punditry of course, is now driven by Manny haters gleefully declaring that he’s been a bum and a fraud all along and Manny fans, sadly shaking their heads and hoping against hope for the only reasonable explanation to emerge—that Manny is incredibly stupid.

But it’s not happening this time. Stupidity can take you far. It can take you to the top in our society, it can take you to Wall Street corner offices or the presidency itself, yet it cannot scrub that incriminating crimson off of red hands.

Jose could have believed anything. If he heard that Manny was violating the Endangered Species Act by buying powdered rhino horn to improve his sexual performance, he would have believed it. Had Manny been caught buying crack, and claimed that he didn’t even want the popcorn, he just wanted the prize, Jose would have bought that too.

But to buy that Manny was taking a drug used when cycling off of steroids to enhance his sex drive? Nope. That Jose can’t buy… not even from the lovable idiot named Manny.

3. Over the next three months, you will notice some changes at KEYS TO THE GAME. Most notably, Jose is basically never going to write about baseball.

In a few days, Jose will head off for equatorial Africa, the part of the world referred to as “darkest Africa” by people who do not know that the sun shines most directly on the equator. While there, Jose will have limited access to the Internet, no access to American television and will be surrounded by people whose native language includes no words for infield fly rule.

Jose plans to continue posting on keystothegame.blogspot.com, but he will be posting a radically different kind of writing. It will be first person. It will not be tripartite. And it will never, ever compare the political situation in Congo to the Buddy Leroux coup attempt. That said, he may occasional attempt to explain crop rotation in terms of batting DJ Dru lead off as part of shuffling the batting order.

If there is a major development, for instance, if Manny is proven innocent when he conceives twins in his womb, Jose may drop a little baseball, but don’t count on it. However, for those of you interested in a ground level view of life in Uganda written in Jose’s dreaded “serious voice” check in often.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Statement of Interest

2009-04-14T12:26:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. Jose spent a good chunk of a recent afternoon writing a proposal to go to Japan under a program that identifies promising, young U.S. leaders. As part of the application process, Jose had to write a 500-word essay explaining his interest and what he would like to learn in Japan.

It was hard enough for Jose to stick to a miserly 500 words, it was harder still for him to use the dreaded first person singular, but the hardest thing of all was to hide what he really wanted to write. Jose wrote a more or less (note: less) competent essay about his interest in learning the underpinnings of the Japanese economic miracle and seeing Japan take a leading role in international economic development, but that’s not what was in his heart. What he really wanted to write was

Japan is a most extraordinary nation. From its stunning transformation from a feudal backwater at the mercy of Perry’ s black ships to conqueror of the Tsars in just 50 years, from being conquered by Tom Cruise to convincing American children that Pokemon makes sense, Japan has been a nation capable of constant innovation and reinvention, without losing the ancient and serene traditions that underlie its civilization. But despite its brilliance, despite its marvels of technology, lies a dark and disturbing truth—Japan cannot produce a “national treasure” pitcher who can throw strikes.

How can the nation that invented the Walkman also produce… the Walk Man. How is it possible that Daisuke Matsuzaka can be so good, yet so infuriating? And before we push Japan to take a lead in international development, shouldn’t we consider this problem? Would we really want Japan to advise and assist the Dominican Republic on economic development if it turned walk rate of some budding Pedro Martinez into that of Dice K?

2. Okay, so this season is staring to turn into sort of a downer. There are a lot of things about the slow start that concern Jose, but none more so than the risk of 2009 turning into another 1996. As you may recall, in 1996, the Kevin Kennedy led Red Sox came into the season completely unprepared and started the season with Roger Clemens bowing to Texas’ Lynn’s own Ken Hill (note: never take Clemens over Ken Hill in a big game) before getting off to a 2-75 start.

But there are graver issues at play here. As you recall, the 1996 season turned around when the Red Sox traded Jamie Moyer to Seattle for Darren Bragg and Jeff Frye. Moyer, of course, went on to pitch effectively for another 90 years, whereas Darren Bragg emerged as a gritty white guy and perhaps the greatest man to ever come out of Waterbury, Connecticut save for noted war hero, Hogan from Hogan’s Heroes. Jeff Frye was nicknamed for a corn chip.

Jose has no interest in seeing Jon Lester traded for a midget and a gritty player, so Jose would really like to see the Red Sox turn it around, say, now.

3. A sideshow of this week’s trip to Oakland is that it represents the first time in his career that former Red Sox legend-to-be Nomar Garciaparra has played against the Red Sox. The natural temptation at a time like this would be to look at what has become of Nomar’s career, shake one’s head sadly, and wonder what might have been. Since Garciaparra left, the Red Sox have used five different regular starting shortstops, most of whom have performed poorly, and none of whom have managed to stick.

On the upside, the Red Sox did win two world championships and avoided paying big money to a player who declined rapidly. On the other hand, Nomar famously kept a red line around his locker that reporters could not cross, and given the cost of getting on the red line these days, the Red Sox really could have benefit from that revenue stream.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Being Drunk is the Optimal Explaination

2009-04-08T14:38:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. As Jose rolled into the bar somewhere during the third inning and settled in for seven hours of Yuengling pitchers, bacon cheese fries and baseball, Jose made a starling, shameful and disturbing mistake.

He looked up and the screen noted that Jason Varitek was at bat, and immediately went into a tirade about the captain’s diminishing skills. He was quickly shut up, however, by stinging shot to the gap. Jose was stunned. It just didn’t add up.

And then it hit him.

That wasn’t Jason Varitek. It was Kevin Youkilis.

The fact that Jose, on a casual glance, mistook Youk for Tek, has several possible implications—all of them bad.

Jose sees the following possibilities:

• Jose has been away from Boston for way too long, and can now do a better job of telling white Duke basketball players apart than two goateed Red Sox.
• Youk’s swing has gotten long, looping and terrible.
• Jose was drunk at four in the afternoon.

Jose, to be frank, is hoping for the third. There is so much less stigma to public drunkenness than to confusing two Red Sox… unless of course it is Hideki Okajima and Dice K, who as David Ortiz pointed out, look exactly the same.

2. Today marks the first Red Sox start for former Ray’s outfielder Rocco Baldelli, also know as the “Woonsocket Rocket.” He is, of course, known as the Woonsocket Rocket because he hails from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and, much like the rocket recently launched by the North Koreans, has a tendency to fall apart before achieving his objective.

Still, as aeronautic nicknames go, it does appear to be an upgrade on Manny “Unmanned Drone” Ramirez, Curt “Goodyear Blimp” Euro and Kevin “Midgetman Missile” Millar. That’s right Millar, Jose knows your humiliating secret.

3. Like many native Bostonians Jose was touched by Senator Edward Kennedy’s trip to the park yesterday to throw out the first pitch. It was hard for him to watch though.

Just watching Senator Kennedy make that sad, weak little toss that fell to the ground so short of its target brought back too many memories, too many gossamer recollections of days gone by. Who could help but think of past days of youth and achievement? Who could resist dwelling on images of Camelot lost?

Yes, who among us, while watching that sad toss couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for Johnny Damon?

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

All This Has Happened Before

2009-04-07T11:49:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. All this has happened before, all this will happen again.

That’s how it is on opening day.

The sweet smell of fertilizer, the piquant stench of watery beer, the first pitch thrown in anger, up high and tight on a hated rival.

All this has happened before, all this will happen again. In fact, it all happened before yesterday.

Then it rained.

Then Jose had to adapt this KEY that he had written furiously to today.

All this has happened before, all this will happen again.

It will happen, we know, because God decided that it will. Jose had never been terribly amenable to these creation science arguments. You know the ones.

“If it’s really complicated, God must have done it.”

Ben Stein (note: who, according to Jose’s sources, once gave a girl for whom he pined a bag of his toenails) couldn’t convince Jose, that creation museum in Kentucky that Jose didn’t visit couldn’t convince him, but Battlestar Galactica?

Sure.

Have some fictional angels resembling a fictional person and a fictional robot tell Jose God did it all, and he will buy right in. (Note: The subhead for Ben Stein’s creationism movie Expelled was “No Intelligence Allowed.” Jose almost went to see it thinking it was about the Grady Little era.)

Which bring Jose to his thesis statement, let’s see, eleven dubious paragraphs in (note to Jose’s students: never do this, it’s only cool when Jose does it)—Thank God for Opening Day.

Of course, as long as Jose is purporting that all this has happened before, and all this will happen again, he should probably concede that there are a few things that don’t seem to have happened before, and a few things that he hopes won’t happen again.

For instance, Jose does not really remember Seal ever singing the national anthem (note: though has he ever sung crazy for Papelbon’s entrance?) He remembers a seal barking out the national album, but it is possible that it was the Cowsills. (Note: Would Buster Bluth from television’s Arrested Development freak out if he saw Seal, or is it just the mammals that scare him?) Oh, but now, Seal isn’t performing the national anthem. See? Things are falling into alignment.

Jose also doesn’t recall opening against the defending American League Champion Tampax Bay Rays. He recalls opening against the Rays before, just not with them as champions of anything. Jose is pretty sure they were not even the champions of Tampa the last time the Red Sox opened against them. Well, maybe Tampa, but not. St. Pete. As Jose recalls, the last time the Sox opened against the Rays, there was then, as now, a Kennedy involved. Whereas today Sen. Ted Kennedy will throw out the first pitch, in 2003, his nephew Rep. Joe Kennedy started for the Rays. (Note: God rest his soul.) This one doesn’t seem to have been fixed by the delay. The Rays are still the champions of the American League… technically, in the sense that they beat us in the ALCS.

Jose just thought of another difference. He vaguely remembers us having a lunatic in left field last year, but maybe that was just a dream, a long, strange, sure thing 30 HR 100 RBI dream.

Also, there is this weird thing where Jose is not in Boston for opening day for the first time ever, and Jose must concede it is very, very strange. Here in Durham, North Carolina, Jose looks around and he only sees three people wearing Red Sox caps. Pathetic! And only one of them is wearing a jersey. And it’s a freaking Mosey Nixon jersey. Seriously, it’s like Jose has gone to hell, a temperate, basketball-loving hell with good BBQ and inexpensive housing.

But these small details aside, it’s all terribly familiar. It’s April in Boston, and the chance of rain is 90% (note: 100%)... so is the chance of a Red Sox victory. (Note: Damn it the chance of precipitation today is 20%, however, Jose has identified several threats to the construct validity of likelihood of precipitation as a measure of the Red Sox’s chances of winning. First, Tampa may play sweet baseball, but they are not made of sugar. Second, Jose can’t remember what construct validity is. Still, writing KEYS while in the warm afterglow of a statistics class is the closest Jose will ever get to being a SABR guy.

Oh, and so say we all.

So say we all.

2. Among the elements missing from the Red Sox roster this year will be Curt Euro’s contract. Euro’s contract retired recently after a season where it put up an impressive 0.00 ERA with 0 home runs allowed, while collecting $8 million in what the CEO’s call “compensation.” The actual person to whom the contract used to be attached retired at the end of 2007.

3. In today’s opener, St. Josh Beckett takes on the man they call “Big Game” James Shields. Jose says “they” because it is not Jose who says it. Actually, Jose is not sure who says it, so let’s try the lead again in the passive voice.

In today’s opener, St. Josh Beckett takes on the man who is called “Big Game” James Shields.

Better.

Jose prefers to call him “Soul” James Shields. As you might imagine, there is a story behind this. Not a good story, but a story nevertheless. When Jose was a senior in high school, and a hot shot trombone player in the marching band, section leader in fact, there was this freshman clarinet player named James. James was a skinny, freckly red haired kid, who in addition to suffering from the handicap of playing the clarinet, also suffered from not having a soul. Check that, not having soul.

This proved to be a problem when the band was playing Stevie Wonder’s classic “I Wish.” On the breakdown, the band was supposed to go into a maneuver called the “spread, tilt and wail” which, even though it sounds like one of those made up sexual maneuvers like the Dirty Sanchez or the Fat Free Agent Bust, is an actual band move, wherein musicians put their legs shoulder length apart, tilt back and play to the gods.

Poor James just couldn’t swing it—both literally and figuratively. He was too square, too shy, too James. It was as if, to quote the band teacher referring to something completely different, you’d taken this hip, swinging mariachi band and dropped it in a box.

So the teacher did the only thing he could. He tried to pump James up by giving him a nickname. Sure, in the last eight years nicknames have proven to be a poor basis for a system of government, but this was 1994, and we didn’t know that yet.

And so Soul James was born.

And he played with soul. He had a soul. At least he thought he did. And people looking at him thought so too. But if you looked long enough, if you focused hard enough, he was still just a skinny, ginger freshman.

“Big Game” James Shields is not so different. You can give him the nickname, you can start him on opening day, you can have him spread, tilt and wail before the entire world. And he might get lucky. The bravado might fool some people, but not forever. He is still the same scared little rookie with an ERA approaching five on a terrible team, and on that third or fourth at bat, hitters age going to notice.

Maybe some day the man will match the name, but that day is not today. Today, he is just plain James.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

One...Two.. Off-Season Review

2009-01-22T15:58:00.003-05:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

1. With pitchers and catchers reporting in just a few weeks and ending the darkest part of the winter, Jose thought this was as good a time as any to for Jose to review the Red Sox’s major off-season acquisitions. Unfortunately, they haven’t made any, so Jose will talk about two injured pitchers and a rehashed catcher instead.

Brad Penny
Of all of the Red Sox acquisitions this off-season, Jose loves this one the most. Yes, Penny struggled his way to a 6-9 record and 6.27 ERA last year, but Jose just sees so much upside in the guy. It’s not just that he had a terrific 2007, starting out 12-1, it’s his broader history.

When Penny was just a child of 11, he was already doing most of the work in helping his uncle, Inspector Gadget, solve mysteries and counter a major terrorist network. How could you not want someone with that kind of background on your team? Jose noticed that when he was with the Dodgers last year, Penny appeared to have neither his laptop computer or his laser wristwatch, which may explain his struggles. Both were critical in Penny’s success as a crime fighter. Also, as Jose recalls, Penny got a lot of help from a sidekick named Brain, so the Sox should consider signing Dave Brain, who last played in 1908 to catch for him. Sure, Brain was mostly an infielder, but a 107-year-old infielder can’t be dramatically worse than what we have catching now.

An option as starter number five?

2. John Smoltz
The way Jose sees it, Smoltz is really a replacement for Curt Euro. It is a tremendous upgrade. Basically, The Red Sox replaced 42-year-old usual starter and sometime closer with a 127 career ERA+ with a 41-year-old usual starter and sometime closer with a 127 career ERA+. Smoltz has 210 career wins, Euro has 216. Smoltz has a 3.26 career ERA playing exclusively in the easier National League, Euro has a 3.46 career ERA in a mix of the two leagues. Smoltz has a career WHIP of 1.17, Euro’s career WHIP is 1.137. Smoltz has 3,011 career strike outs, Euro has 3,116. They are practically the same guy. Almost the only difference is in saves and that Smoltz broke his labrum and Euro broke his diet.

So why is this a big upgrade? Because the Red Sox will only be paying Smoltz $5 million not to play, substantial savings over the $8 million they paid Euro not to play last year.

That makes Smoltz 37.5% better than Euro. It’s really a no brainer. On the other hand, you do lose Euro’s medical expertise, which came in handy when evaluating the game readiness of guys like Scott Williamson.

3. Josh Bard
For all of the griping about the sudden appearance of time travel on Lost last night, Jose has yet to hear any complaints about the Red Sox dabbling in time travel. But shouldn’t fans be griping? As we all know, the consequences of time travel for plot continuity are terrible, and Jose doesn’t want to create any paradoxes that wipe out the 2004 World Series.

The mess began when the Red Sox traded Bard and Cla Meredith to San Diego to bring Doug Mirabelli back in 2006. This was an effort to travel back to 2004 and was nothing short of a disaster. Bard and Meredith played well, and Mirabelli caught the knuckleball and did little else of consequence; the Red Sox missed the playoffs.

Now the Red Sox are trying to undo the paradox by bringing Bard back, but that’s not how it works. The timeline is already changed, and the consequences are dire. Cla Meredith eclipsed Jose Melendez’s San Diego Padres record for most consecutive scoreless innings pitched, and thereby all but erased Jose from history.

Jose supposes the Red Sox could try to reacquire Meredith to set things right, but you know how it is with time travel, trying to fix things only makes them worse. With Jose’s luck trying to correct the time line would have completely changed history, the Red Sox would never have acquired Jose, Phil Plantier would have gone down as one of the great Red Sox busts and this feature would be called Dario Veras’ KEYS TO THE GAME.

I’m not Dario Veras, and those are my KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

KEYS TO THE INAUGURATION

2009-01-20T00:05:00.001-05:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE INAUGURATION.

1. Jose does not often write politics in this space. It’s not that Jose doesn’t think about politics, aside from baseball and… something else, it’s almost all that he thinks about. It’s just that injecting politics into something as pure and virtuous as baseball, what with its illegal drugs and “beaver shooting,” seems like a bad gamble.

There is an old adage in politics, maybe from Barney Frank, that the problem with your candidate winning is that you will inevitably be disappointed. Jose doesn’t need that; he has gotten enough disappointment from baseball, at least prior to 2004. Thankfully, Jose hasn’t backed a lot of winners in politics, so it has been a minimal source of post inaugural disappointed. (Note: Jose just signed up on Facebook as a supporter of Michael Dukakis today. He’s no fair weather friend.)

But this year is different. This year Jose is not only setting himself up for disappointment, he is embracing it. He knows that President Obama will not make everything better, that he will not do everything right, and that he will invariably and categorically disappoint Jose and legions of other supporters sometime in the next four years. But Jose is up for it. He is eager to be disappointed by a president rather than disgusted. At this point disappointment would be a huge step up. George W. Bush disgusted Jose with his arrogance and complacent idiocy. Bill Clinton disgusted Jose with this willingness to put his personal appetites and power above the common good. George H.W. Bush, a man known for nothing if not civility, disgusted Jose with an effective yet cruel and gutless 1988 campaign against a decent man, and Ronald Reagan disgusted Jose with his indifference to the poor and his love of substituting his own Horatio Alger fantasies for the real lives of Americans.

Is there any wonder against this backdrop of indifference, arrogance, cruelty and will to power that Jose would crave the soothing salve of disappointment?

2. But today there will be no disappointment. Tomorrow perhaps, a year from now most likely, but not today. Today, like millions of Americans and perhaps a billion people around the world, Jose will witness one of those rare moments that suggests that America might be just as good as we aspire to be.

It is cliché, at this point to say that Jose never expected to see a black man elected in his lifetime, but he did not. It is not that Jose did not believe America had made progress since those gloomy days of Jim Crow or even that we are a heart a racist nation. Instead, Jose relied on practicality. He did not think that a person of color could emerge from the political process who could be viewed by the nation’s majority not as a “black politician” but as a politician who is black.

But Jose was wrong. Wonderfully deliriously wrong.

When we wake up on Wednesday, there will still be racism in America. There will still be poverty and we will still be at war. But everything will not be the same. We will not be a society that is “post-racial” whatever that means, but we will, at least, be a society that is capable of looking beyond race, at least on Election Day. Much like, baseball after Jackie Robinson opened the majors to black players, America will be, more than ever, a place where at the highest levels we are using the greatest talents of our finest citizens.

3. It hit Jose this evening as he was watching a clip of Pete Seeger singing, “This Land is Your Land” at the concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The old man was plucking away on his banjo and shouting out verses to the crowd with a gleam in his eye that hinted at joy bordering on disbelief.

It’s not that Jose agrees with Seeger’s politics, Jose is far too cynical for that, but he is enamored of the idea that someone who was literally blacklisted can be invited into the heart of the American celebration. Redemption, restoration, reunification, these are good values. These are American values. Jose only wishes that Lee Greenwood or Ted Nugent had been invited to sing along, though Jose doubts either would have accepted.

Jose hopes that Seeger’s inclusion is a symbol, a sign that not only will this administration be about moving beyond the racial and cultural politics that have been so divisive, but beyond the endless refighting of old battles. Jose no longer cares what you thought about Vietnam, he never wants to hear it in another election again, nor does he want to hear liberalism decried as communism or conservatism as fascism. He cares about a politician’s opinion on Vietnam about as much as he cares about his opinion on the Spanish-American War. Jose cares about someone’s red sympathies about as much as he cares about someone’s sympathies for the Cincinnati Reds.

What Jose saw it Seeger’s eyes that was so delightful was the acknowledgement that perhaps America really can change, that it really can be the place that we want it to be. And for today he is right. Today, if not tomorrow, America is as good as its promise.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE INAUGURATION

Jose to City: Drop Dead

2009-01-13T15:48:00.004-05:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

1. Jose has always thought that being a headline writer must be a wonderful job. Hell, it may even be the best $30,000 a year job in the world.

You get to take someone else’s work, something he struggled, sweat and perhaps even bled over if they are John Stossel covering pro wrestling, slap a label on it, which may or may not have anything to do with the piece, and then have many more people look at your work than the actual authors. Even better, you occasionally get to be incredibly clever and write a headline like the Boston Herald’s “Dr. Doom and Va-va-va-vroom” to describe the 1990 Massachusetts Democratic ticket of John Silber and Marjorie Claprood.

Perhaps the most famous American headline is the one penned by the New York Daily News’ William J. Brink on October 30, 1975 “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Jose would like to pay tribute to this brilliant, and technically untrue headline (note: Ford never said it, though he did say “things are more like they are now than they’ve ever been”), by writing the following headline some time this year.

JOSE TO CITY: DROP DEAD

As you may have noticed, The Yankees laid out $400 million to just three players in the last few weeks.

In unrelated news, the Bronx Borrowers also recently requested “$259 million in tax-exempt bonds and $111 million in taxable bonds, on top of $940 million in tax-exempt bonds and $25 million in taxable bonds already granted for its $1.3 billion stadium” according to ESPN.com.

Wait a second. That seems incredibly related. The Yankees spend about $400 million on Teixeira, Burnett and Sabathia and suddenly they want $370 million in tax-exempt bonds. Huh. Funny that.

When New York City, where from what Jose understands many wealthy people live, is entering a financial crisis so grave the Mayor Judas Bloomberg, a former Red Sox fan, must, for the good of the people, overturn term limits, does it really make sense to give the Yankees another $370 million on top of the $900 million they already got?

Jose can understand why smaller cities, say Pittsburgh, might feel obliged to subsidize a team—that’s the only way they can have one. But New York? The Yankees were going to flee to Jersey? Sure…

So here’s the thing. At some point, it seems possible that New York City may once again need a bailout; after all, everyone else is getting one. So what will America say? Jose’s simple response echo’s Ford, DROP DEAD.

Get it from the Yankees. Get it from A-Rod or CC or AJ or anyone with initials and a contract worth north of $75 million.

It’s bad enough that the poor, and apparently, incredibly stupid, people of New York are subsidizing this scam, but keep Jose out of it.

Really, paying the Yankees to be in New York? It’s like paying Paris Hilton to be a whore. She’s going to do it anyway, why bother paying?

Cows, milk, free etc.

A message for our times?

2. Jose noticed that Mark McGwire got fewer votes for the Hall-of-Fame this year. Jose wonders if his stats final had anything to do with it. There was a question on the exam in which Jose had to calculate a Z score (note: which Jose knows has something to do with either Carlos or Victor Zambrano, but he forgets which) related to McGwire’s record setting 1998 season.

Of course, Jose couldn’t remember how to calculate a Z-score, so he just wrote down “Jose doesn’t want to focus on the past, he wants to do something positive for the future.”

It had mixed results. On the one hand, for some reason the teacher seemed to think that Jose could not calculate a Z-score and gave him a zero for the problem. On the other hand, Jose has not been indicted, unlike several classmates, who issued sworn affidavits that they could calculate Z-scores even though they couldn’t.

3. Before everyone gets al upset about the Yankees swiping Mark Teixeira from the Red Sox, can we take a minute to think about this linguistically? The first baseman’s name is pronounced Tesh-era.

Did anyone really want to have a Tesh Era in Boston? John Tesh is terrible. Not very good at all. Except for that old NBA music, that was pretty good. Seriously, Jose would rather sign a player named Yanniera. At lest Yanni has a Kevin Kennedy moustache.

I’m Jose Melendez’s, and those are my KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

Henry: Red Sox are not X-Factor

2008-12-18T23:36:00.004-05:00

According to the Boston Globe the Red Sox will not "be a factor" in the bidding for Mark Teixeira. The Red Sox were long believed to be the favorites for the All-Star first baseman.

Jose isn't exactly sure how he feels about this. On the one hand, if it was really going to take $200 million to sign the guy, Jose is sort of happy to let him walk, at that kind of value he would be far too appealing a target for Somali pirates. (Note: Jose is pretty sure he stole that joke from someone, but he has no recollection of who.)

On the other hand, Jose was looking forward to Teixeira coming here, so he could finally get an explanation for how the hell the "X" in his name makes a "zh" sound.

Of course, this might all be nonsense, as Sox owner John W. Henry sent word by email. Maybe he was just really, really mad about how things were going so he wrote down an angry email, with no intention of sending it, but then accidentally clicked send. That seems at least as plausible as Texiera getting $200 million from Baltimore or Washington.

The other possibility is that the Yankees have suddenly jumped into the running. This would make sense. As usual the Yankees can exceed any cash offer the Red Sox might make. Also, unlike the Red Sox, the Yankees have an open Senate seat to offer.

Oh, Jose just though of one other possibility. Maybe the word "factor" in the statement is a clue. As Jose recalls, in the early days of the comic X-Factor, the original X-Men joined together and pretended to be a group of vigilantes called X-Factor that captured mutants. After they seized a mutant, they would secretly train him and take care of him. Maybe the Red Sox have a similar plan. They are going to pretend to be anti-Teixeira, and then will capture him and secretly train him to play catcher, thereby allowing Mike Lowell and Kevin Youkilis to remain on a team including Teixeira.

Come on, it's at leastas likely as the guy actually wanting to play in Baltimore.

Delcarmen for President (of Zimbabwe)

2008-12-08T16:49:00.001-05:00

For the last few days, Jose has been working furiously on a paper about the ongoing crisis in Zimbabwe. But he will confess, it has been a struggle. First and foremost, it is challenging to write about a government so thoroughly destroying a country without becoming terminally depressed. However, Jose has also struggled with confusion.

It’s not just that he can’t click properly for the Ndebele words, it’s that he can’t figure out the opposition. Among the big issues is whether the duly elected MDC will actually get to take over the government. Here’s where it gets complicated. Jose cannot figure out for the life of him, why Manny Delcarmen would do a good job as President of Zimbabwe. Does he know anything about agriculture? Banking?

Besides, if Zimbabweans are looking for someone who performs erratically when things are their worst, why wouldn’t they stick with their current President Robert Mugabe?

But seriously, the Mugabe regime is as though Zim were run by, well, Zim. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is run a lot like Zimmer’s Red Sox. Arbitrary use of power? Check. Senseless commitment to an old way of doing things? Mmm hmm. Ability to turn something fantastic into a humiliating disaster? Yup.

So what Zimbabwe really needs is not Manny Delcarmen but for someone to sent Pedro Martinez there and toss old Mugabe to the ground. Or South Africa could just stop coddling him. Either is good.

End of an Age

2008-12-05T12:43:00.001-05:00

NOTE: In the coming weeks, Jose is going to experiment with a change in format, here at the KEYS. Rather than writing long tripartite diatribes every six weeks, he is going to toy with a more traditional blog style of writing short, one-partite diatribes more regularly. We will see how it goes.

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

1. The second great age of rococo is over.

The playfulness and lightheartedness evident in centerfield for the last three years has ended with the trade of Rococo Crisp to the Kansas City Royals for Ramon Ramirez.

Some critics appear thrilled by the end of the era. Noted baseball enthusiast and architect Jacques-François Blonde, for instance, heralded the trade as an escape from a "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants."

Of course, they are not thinking about what comes next. If history is any guide, the end of a rococo period is followed by the “empire” or neoclassical period. And you know what neoclassical means, right? Greeks and Italians. Of course, Empire means Sith. So expect either Rocco (note: not rococo) Baldelli to be roaming centerfield for the Sox at some point next year or possibly someone named Darth.

2. Back in college, Jose had a few guys he hung out with pretty regularly. A few of them he saw almost every day. They’d shoot the shit, drink some beers and watch some sports. Then graduation came, they moved away and Jose never saw them again, except on facebook, which doesn’t count.

For many of them, once they were gone, as soon as they were gone, Jose realized that he barely knew them at all. That’s how Jose feels about Rococo Crisp. Jose watched the guy most days for three years, and now that he’s gone, Jose feels like he knows almost nothing about him as a player. Is he the guy you can’t sneak a fastball by, or is he the king of groundouts to second? Is he the best centerfielder Jose has ever seen at Fenway or the guy who seemed to be in defensive decline?

Some players, even mediocre ones spend three years here and Jose knows a lot about them--Jose Melendez, for instance. But a serious example would be Bill Mueller. Bill Mueller was here for the exact same amount of time, won the exact same number of World Series and lost the exact same number of ALCSs as Rococo yet Jose feels like he knows him so much better. He knows exactly what kind of a baseball player Bill Mueller was, and he even thinks he has a pretty good grasp on what kind of person he is—a religious fanatic.

Years from now, someone will mention Bill Mueller and Jose will think about his clutch hits, and that he was a “professional hitter.” Yet when someone mentions Rococo Crisp, Jose will, think “Yeah he seemed like a good guy and a decent player, wonder what happened to him?”

And maybe this is a function of the post 2004 ethos. Even the most useless guy on the 2004 team, say Doug Mirabelli gets to be “one of the 25.” On the 2007 team, another dramatic comeback, another World Series, contributing players will be, if not forgotten, at least not cherished. But that’s not how Jose wants it to be. He wants to remember the Rococo era. In fact, he’s going to go buy a painting with shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants right now.

3. Wow. Dustin Pedroia won the MVP. Really?

Little Dustin Pedroia? Trusty Dusty? This must now move him into the all time elite Dustys along with American Dream Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Springfield. Dusty Baker need not apply. But MVP? We’re talking about the most valuable player MVP? Dusty had a great season and all, but Jose never really saw it coming from the little guy. The last Red Sox MVP outweighed him by approximately 300 lbs.

Maybe this is a different MVP. Could he have been awarded the Midget Veracity Prize for being the most honest little person in baseball? What about the Most Verbal Player, because he can’t shut the hell up? Most Venal Player maybe? No, that’s got to be A.J. Pierzynski. Everyone hates that guy.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that the little second baseman with the”big ol’ swing” was actually the best, the most valuable, the most outstanding player in the American League in 2008. Or maybe it was Albert Belle, he should have won the MVP in 1995 over Mo. He was definitely the league’s most venal player that year.

I’m Jose Melendez and those are my KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

Summer's Gone

2008-10-20T10:53:00.002-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO 2008.

1.

And I couldn't get away from you
Even if I wanted to
So I hang around
'Till the leaves are brown
And the summer's gone
--Aberfeldy, Summer’s Gone

Summer's Gone--Aberfeldy

That’s the story isn’t it? This year? Every year?

We couldn’t get away even if we wanted to. Jose went to Africa and he couldn’t get away, so he went to someplace even more remote, Durham, and he still couldn’t get away.

So he hangs around, ‘til the leaves are brown, and the summer’s gone.

And that’s where we are today. Summer’s gone. Bye. (Note: Waves.)

We could have gotten another week of summer. That’s what a World Series birth buys you. Jose thought we’d get that extra week. He was sure of it. But he was wrong. We didn’t. The leaves are brown and the summer’s gone.

The funny thing is that this is okay. It’s not ideal, to be sure. Jose likes summer. Jose likes baseball. But it is genuinely okay. Fall is inevitable. Winter is inevitable. All we can do, all our Red Sox can do is postpone them, fight them off for a few weeks, and they did that. They kept us hanging around, ‘til the leaves are brown and the summer’s gone.

But if fall and winter are inevitable, so too is spring. And the wonderful thing about baseball is that spring starts in February, when an old truck drives out of the Fens, stuffed full with hope, memory and the promise of summer.

Oh, and there are more lyrics to the song, one’s that we would do well to remember.

But I won't give up
And I won't give in
And I know it's tough
But I need to win

The Red Sox may have lost, but they did not give up. They did not give in. It is tough, but we need to win. We will just have to do it next year.

2. So it is fall now, yet something unexpected has transpired. The sun is still shining in Boston.

This is a change. Five years ago, in 2003, the sun did not shine. The sun did not shine for a long time, weeks, months. For day after day, the skies offered nothing but the impenetrable grey of unrelenting melancholy. And it was not the good artist’s melancholy either, not the kind that breeds creativity, the kind that breeds depression and madness.

After 2003, Jose thought about that game every day for months, every day until Johnny Damon ended the grief with one grand swing.

But today the sun is shining. Jose will think about this game today. He will think about this series next week.

And then he will not.

He will move on with his life. He will focus on the year ahead, and he will bask in the warm sun of winter.

3. It is not just the championships in 2004 and 2007 that have kept Jose out of the fetal position. It’s that we lost to a better team.

Jose can accept that. He does not like it. In fact, he hates it. But he can accept it. They won it; we did not loose it. They took it from us; we did not give it to them. We may have given them Game 2, but they gave us Game 5 right back.

We lost because they pitched better than us, and hit better than us. We lost because, we had a void in the bottom third of our order and they had something, rather than nothing.

We lost because they are young and hungry, and we are a mixture of young and not that hungry and old and fuller than Curt Euro at an all you can eat buffet.

But there is no Zimmer. There is no Grady. There is not even a Buckner or a Graffanino, though Alex Cora really wanted to be one.

There is only a very good baseball team that was beaten by an even better baseball team. Jose does not like it, but he does not like the cold or the rain either, yet he accepts them as the inevitable and natural order of the universe.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO 2008.

ALCS Game 7--Don't Bury Me... I'm Not Dead

2008-10-19T13:26:00.002-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALCS.

1. Don’t bury me… I’m not dead.

That was the tag line for the 1988 Wes Craven film The Serpent and the Rainbow, based painfully loosely on a book by ethnobotanist Wade Davis describing search for a scientific explanation for Haitian zombie myths. It might as well be the tagline for the Boston Red Sox.

The Red Sox are not dead; they are never dead, and yet year after year, teams come to throw piles of moist black earth upon them.

In 2004, the Yankees buried them pretty deep. They dug a hole, threw the Sox in and dropped six feet of loam on top of them. They should have patted it down though. They should have compressed the dirt with a bulldozer. They left too much wiggle room, and the Sox were able to kick loose the cover of the coffin, and reach gasping for the surface. (Note: By the way, is there any chance the cadaver used to practice the Curt Euro surgery was stolen? Because there was definitely some grave robbing in The Serpent and the Rainbow. You could make a cool movie about a zombie with a bionic ankle bent on revenge.)

In 2007, Cleveland was much sloppier. They tossed the Red Sox in a shallow grave and just hoped we would never be discovered. It was not a great plan.

This year the Rays did a far better job. They locked the coffin, they piled on six feet of dirt, they patted it down and they grew an oak tree on top of it. And you know what? It still didn’t matter. Like The Bride in Kill Bill 2, like Spiderman when he was drugged by Kraven the Hunter, the Red Sox punched their way out, making the impossible possible, and with two out in the seventh on Thursday night, we saw that angry hand stretching out from the dirt of the grave.

Now that the Red Sox are out of the grave, they are feeling exactly how one would expect someone who has been buried alive to feel—incredibly pissed off and bent on revenge. This is why the Sox have gone on seven or eight game rampages after being left for dead the previous two occasions. When you fight your way out from the eternal dirt nap, you want to do some damage on the people who put you there.

And now Tampax Bay has to suffer the consequences and the Phillies after them. Don’t ever bury the Red Sox, unless you are absolutely sure they’re dead.

2. Dear Jon,

By the time you read these lines, we’ll be gone. Life goes on, right or wrong. Now it’s all been said and done.

It is hard for us to write this letter, harder than you can imagine. This is not how we wanted things to be when we started this crazy adventure, and it’s certainly not how we imagined it would go even recently. We used to feel really good about this thing we have, but then something went wrong.

You know what it was, so we probably don’t have to explain, but coming clean is good for the soul. Last week, we did something we never thought we’d do, that we never imagined we’d do—we hit you. We hit you hard. It was awful for you, we know. Also, we buried you when you weren’t dead. That was a real dick move by us.

It’s a dark part of us, a bit of nastiness in the recesses of our souls. We hit other pitchers too. We hit Beckett before we hit you. We hit Wakefield and Matsuzaka after.

But somehow, you are different.

When we saw you again on Sunday night, we just couldn’t hit you again. We wanted to. The frightening hunger was there. But we just couldn’t do it.

Maybe we’ve shown just a touch of humanity. But that seems unlikely. More likely is that we’ve shown fear. We’ve realized that if we hit you, there’s a very good chance that you and your friends are going to hit back, and hard.

So we’re leaving.

We’re the bad guys here, so you stay, we’ll go. You keep on playing, and we are going to take some time off. We are going to do some soul searching, play some golf.

Maybe we’ll see you next year.

Yours truly,

The Tampax Bay Rays

(Note: Jose does not mean to diminish the serious problem of domestic violence. He just felt like he needed to do something on the subject in order to get ready to face Brett Myers in the World Series.)

3. Game 7 or not, Jose could not let the occasion pass without devoting at least one KEY to TBS’s stunning broadcasting failure last night. At the beginning of Game 6, millions of Red Sox fans and dozens of Rays fans were infuriated to find that TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes and the Steve Harvey Show were on instead of the Sox-Rays contest. While it would have been incredibly funny if this were in fact a TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes bit, it sadly, was not. By the time TBS had repaired at least one of the two blown transformers responsible for the disaster, the Rays were up 1-0 in the bottom of the first. (Note: Jose sort of thinks that the run shouldn’t have counted. Couldn’t they have followed the old professional wrestling rule that if it’s not on TV it didn’t happen?)

Jose can believe that this happened, after all TBS is the Grady Little of television networks. What Jose can’t understand is why it happened now. They had no problem broadcasting each of 10,000 Braves games Jose didn’t care about.

What it reminded Jose of was KEC, the Kosovo Electric Company. In Kosovo, the power goes out pretty close to daily. As a result, when anything fails to function, a colloquialism is to shake one’s head and lament “No KEC.” Jose happily adopted this expression as his own, and has used the expression “No KEC” regularly to comment on things ranging from broken flashlights to Jason Varitek’s bat. (Note: Plenty of KEC last night for Tek.)

But now the expression “No KEC” seems quaint and outdated. When Jose thinks of something that is broken from now on, he is more likely to say “No TBS.”

What was responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina? No TBS. The Vietnam War? No TBS. The Assassination of Lincoln? No TBS.

Fortunately for the Sox, tonight, in Game 7, the Rays will have no TBS… and the Sox will have plenty of TNT.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALCS.

ALCS Game 6--Don't Call It a Comeback

2008-10-18T13:59:00.002-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALCS.

1. Don't call it a comeback, I been here for years.
--Ladies Love Cool James

Jose did not expect to be typing these words—ever—but LL Cool J is talking sense.

In the day and a half since the Red Sox recovered from a 7-0 seventh inning deficit to defeat the Tampax Bay Rays 8-7, the commentatiat has been abuzz with discussion of the “comeback.”

They are wrong. There was no comeback.

For something to be a comeback, it is a prerequisite that there was a point when defeat was the most likely outcome. While it may seem to those who have not been paying attention that defeat was the most likely outcome in Game 5 and in the series, to those of us who have been watching this team for the past five years, it is evident that victory was the most likely outcome.

Rockin my peers and puttin suckas in fear Makin the tears rain down like a MON-soon Listen to the bass go BOOM

BOOM. Ortiz homers.
BOOM. Dru homers.
Making runs Rain down like a MON-soon.

The thing about monsoons is that they don’t come out of nowhere. You see them coming. They happen every year like clockwork. What the Red Sox did last night was like a monsoon, terrifying but predictable.

Ever since Pokey Reese picked a little grounder on a cold October night in the Bronx, victory has been like a monsoon. Predictable, powerful. Victory has been the new normal. Before 2004, it was different. Defeat was the monsoon then. If now, being down 3-1 almost ensures victory, then being up 3-1 nearly guaranteed defeat. It’s not a choke if everyone expects you to lose; it’s just normal.

Explosion, overpowerin Over the competition, I'm towerin Wreckin shop, when I drop these lyrics that'll make you call the cops Don't you dare stare, you betta move Don't ever compare Me to the rest that'll all get sliced and diced Competition's payin the price

Don’t ever compare this to the great comebacks of the past. This is different. When the Bills came back from 35-3 at halftime to beat the Oilers, that was a comeback. When the Celtics reduced a 20-point deficit to zero in six minutes against the Lakers that was a comeback.

This was not a comeback, this is just how it’s gonna be. The Red Sox explode, they overpower, they competition pays the price.

I'm gonna knock you out (HUUUH!!!)
Mama said knock you out (HUUUH!!!)

Don't Call it a comeback.

2. You are Josh Beckett, and tonight you are pitching for your life.

It is game six. Your team is down three games to two and you literally have no purpose on this Earth other than to win tonight’s game. This is not a misuse of “literally” a la Joe Biden. Jose is not saying “literally” when he means figuratively. If you do not win this game, you will in the most meaningful sense, cease to exist.

You are not like other people. Other people, even when the stakes are high, have things to fall back on. When Dice K pitched poorly in Game 5 he got to fall back on an adoring nation. When Wakefield pitched poorly in Game 4, he got to fall back on his reputation as a humanitarian. When Lester pitched poorly in Game 3, he got to fall back on a loving family. (Note: Lot of poor pitching on that list isn’t there?) They get to do this because they are people, complex and multi-faceted, three-dimensional entities in a three dimensional world. You cannot fall back on something else because you are not a person. You, Josh Beckett, are a pitcher.

People do not like you. And by all reports, this is with good reason. You are, they say, not a pleasant fellow. You lack social graces. You do not tell amusing anecdotes. In fact, you are kind of a dick. You do not bring comfort to the afflicted, or joy to the sad. You do not nurture, and you do not nourish. All you can do, all you are good for is throwing a horsehide on the corners at frightening velocity.

So do it already. Hit the corners. Snap off the curve.

Pitch, you bastard. Pitch.

If you cannot pitch, then you are not. That is not a typo, there is not a noun missing from the end. A drill that cannot drill is not, and a pitcher who cannot pitch is not. Absent the ability to thrown strikes, to make hitters swing and miss, you are the null set, a void, utter nothing.

So when you take the mound tonight, do not do.

Be.

You are a pitcher.

And all a pitcher does it pitch.

3. Jose has muttonchops now.

They’re quite stylish in an 1860s kind of way. He got them in the way that everyone from New England got whatever odd deformity, affect or odor they have right now. He acquired them after the fifth inning. Now he has to keep them.

After the Sox bowed in the fifth, Jose did what all right thinking people did; he changed his facial hair and went to a bar. The playoff beard wasn’t working so he reduced it to Yaz style mutton chops and a goatee. His house wasn’t working so he left and went to a bar. Not singing Cab Calloway classics wasn’t working so he sang Minnie the Moocher at karaoke. And presto change-o by the time he had finished belting out “Poor Min, poor Min, poor Min” The Sox had one in, two on and Big Papi at the plate.

Jose is well aware that none of this works and none of this matters, but it can’t possibly hurt, right? Well, except for Jose’s possibility of getting a job. Muttonchops tend not to impress employers unless one is seeking work in the Grand Army of the Republic.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALCS.

ALCS Game 5-God Does Not Play Dice

2008-10-16T15:05:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALCS.

1. “God does not play dice.”

That’s what Einstein said when faced with the problems of quantum mechanics. He was wrong, of course. God does play dice. And he makes some stupid bets too. Horn high yo? Please.

What Einstein did not discuss, however, was the inverse. While God may or may not play dice, we know for certain that tonight, Dice plays God.

To play God, or at least a god, is to have the power over life and death. And that is the awful power that the man from Japan has on this fall evening. If he pitches well, the Red Sox live, if he pitches poorly, the Red Sox die. Heads or tails, on or off. It is really that simple, and that difficult.

So what do the Red Sox want tonight? What all those on the verge of death crave—to remain alive. We would like to remain alive for another month, but we would take another week, another day, even another hour. The Red Sox know this craving; we have felt it before. We felt it in 2004, when we remained on life support for days and in 2007. We know what it is like to fear that each breath is your last. But we also know how divine it is to taunt death, to escape his icy grip and flip him the bird.

Justin Masterson knows. The pious pitcher informed his Facebook friends that he is “happy to be alive. He gets it. Masterson has taken to heart the simple message of a preacher from Pittsburgh “It’s such a good feeling to know you’re alive.”

And on Friday morning, when the series is 3-2 Jose, and Justin Masterson and Dice K will make a snappy new day. Jose will be back, when they day is new, and he will have more KEYS for you. You’ll have things you want to talk about. Jose… will… too.

2. According to Wikipedia, Tampa is a Calusa Indian word that means “sticks of fire.”

Having watched the Rays brutalize Red Sox pitching, for three straight games, it seems that the first settlers of what is now Hillsborough County saw something coming. The Tampa sticks have been alight.

But Jose knows a thing or two about fire (note: he got his fireman ‘chit as a Scout), and it gives him reason to be hopeful. Let’s put it this way, there is a reason that eternal flames are not fueled by wood. Wood burns bright and beautiful crackling and colorful, but all of sudden, a funny thing happens—it goes out. There is no doubt that the Rays’ sticks have been burning bright for three nights now, but they cannot burn forever. They are not the Maccabees, we are not the Syrians and this is not Chanukah.

3. Jose spent much of Monday and Tuesday hanging around with a dog named Kazmir. It might have been Cashmere on Kashmir, but those are all really just regional variations on spelling. Little did he know at the time, that his aunt and uncle’s dog would get the call to start for Tampax Bay in the crucial fifth game of the ALCS.

Joe Maddon has managed brilliantly this series, but you’ve got to wonder what he’s thinking right now. Given the opportunity to choose between pitching Jamie Shields, who has been brilliant in the post season and a dog, he went with the dog.
What’s that, tonight’s starting pitcher is a man named Kazmir and not a canine? Are you sure? Well, what’s the difference? Neither of them is going to pick up the win tonight and either of them would have been a good acquisition in return for Victor Zambrano.

Actually, check that, there is one difference. The dog, when he barks enough can actually convince people that he’s dangerous. There’s nothing the lefty can do these days to scare anyone.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALCS.

ALCS Game 4--My Name is Wakefield

2008-10-14T00:41:00.001-04:00

It's time for Jose Melendez's KEYS TO THE ALCS.

1. Jose though a lot about not writing for today’s game.

Why should he? If the Red Sox aren’t going to bother to show up for a critical ALCS game, then why should Jose? The Red Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit in 2004 and a 3-1 deficit in 2007, so why should Jose even worry until the season is on the line?

In fact, it made sense for Jose to skip out on writing. He had a long day of touring Montgomery (note: move along, nothing to see here) and traveling to Atlanta and he was tired. After sucking down half a burger for dinner with his cousin Chris, Chris’s girlfriend Jen and his fellow travelers, catching a little bit of blues at the Northside and then going to sleep seemed like a perfectly reasonable alternative to writing a baseball blog about a team that was humiliated and didn’t even seem to care.

But something happened at the Northside, a dank Atlanta bar where upon entering one seems about as likely to be murdered as to see some good blues. The band showed up late. They showed up late, but they showed up. On a Monday night they showed up. In front of ten people they showed up. For almost certainly no money, they showed up. And they wailed. In front of ten patrons, half shooting pool or playing Donkey Kong, the other half quietly pulling on Pabst tall boys, they wailed. Johnny Triggers and his accomplices played as thought it were Friday night at CBGB, as if they were Robert Johnson on the Mississippi Delta. They played with all the fire and fury of a Baptist revival.

The patrons showed up too. Not many, but the folks who were there, well three of them anyway, roared into action as the band struck up Folsom Prison Blues. A graying lump of a man, a San Antonio native turned Atlanta long timer, sucked from a pitcher gripped tightly in each fist as a tromped around the dance floor, hopping up on to chairs, making sweet love to a supporting column for the roof and writhing on the floor like a fish on the door of sweet death. He was joined by two other men, younger fellows, but at least as drunk, swinging each other around, gesticulating like an epileptic on crack… convulsing.

“I have seen some crazy things in this bar,” said Jen. “I have seen a couple go at it on the bar. I have seen men who did not know it dance with prostitutes but I have never seen this.”

It was a Monday night.

It was a Monday night and fueled by nothing more potent than beer and Jack with a chaser of self-loathing, these men had shown up and given it their all.

So why couldn’t Jose?

Why couldn’t Jose show up on the proverbial Monday night of the ALCS? Why couldn’t the Red Sox?

What the Red Sox need, what Jose needs, is to go mad. We need to writhe on the floor; we need to convulse; we need to double fist pitchers of watery suds. It’s what Kevin Millar would do. It’s what the Red Sox must do. It’s what Jose will do.

2. You know what? Maybe we don’t understand the Rays? Maybe we have to get inside of their skulls to have a chance at beating them. Jose has done some research and he has turned up some insights from one of the most celebrated Rays of all, Ray Kroc the founder of McDonald’s, which Jose assumes is some kind of Scottish restaurant.

Kroc said, and this is important, that “We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.”

Think about that. Consider the fact that the Rays have had access to that kind of wisdom for the entire year and we just got it now. Wait, that doesn’t seem right. The difference of hamburgers in yesterdays game was at most two runs and we lost by like eight.

“Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.” There we go, that makes some sense. The Rays know what they have to do between now and Tuesday (note: today). Do the Sox?

We need to hit. That’s creativity. We need to pitch. That’s creativity. We need to catch—creativity. We need to throw—curiously, not creativity. If watching soccer has taught Jose anything, it’s that Kroc is right. Matches are won by creativity, specifically creativity in the midfield, and if the Sox have it Jose has not seen it. It’s Tuesday men, let’s create.

3. It’s up to Wakefield. That’s fine Weezer is down with it.

My name is Timmy
I'm hurling for my team
Haven’t pitched in weeks
But this is now a theme

Come and pitch Game Four
Don’t let Tampa Score
I don’t need the dome
I’ll pitch fine at home
In the LCS
I have pitched my best
On two weeks of rest.
Let me tell you 'bout it

The knuckler can travel through time
A break that makes you lose your mind
The batter said, "Hey man, how’s it move that way"
They couldn’t get the ball into play.

My name is Wakefield
I keep my nails filed real fine
Ain’t got much of a fastball
But this game is still mine
It’s still mine...

“Tell me what to do.
We can’t hit this guy.
Never pitches flat”
And you know what else?
Guess what I received in the mail today
Words of deep concern from my manager

The series goes not as he planned
Big Papi has injured his hand
Beckett can’t throw for a strike
So he grooves them right down the pike.

The Red Sox are playin’ at home
The Red Sox are playin’ at home
The Red Sox are playin’ at home

Yeah

The Red Sox are playin’ at home
The Red Sox are playin’ at home
The Red Sox are playin’ at home
Yeah yeah yeah

My name is Wakefield.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALCS.

ALCS Game 3--We Need to Be More Desperate

2008-10-13T00:30:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALCS.

1. On Saturday, for the first time since 2003, Jose missed parts of a Red Sox playoff game. There were innings that he did not see on television, that he did not hear on the radio, that he did not even follow on Gamecast.

Jose was in Chattanooga, Tennessee on vacation and was doing what one does in Chattanooga, namely, going out to eat ribs. Jose had made the perfectly reasonable assumption that at any rib joint, the ALCS would be on at the bar. He was wrong. Apparently, in Chattanooga people would rather watch a college football game between two non-local games that will probably give everyone watching it eye cancer than a critical contest in the national pastime.

Jose wasn’t sure what to think. At first he was angry. How dare these people claim to be the real Americans, when they won’t even watch the national pastime? Any yokel can wear a flag pin, but sitting through a 5 and a half hour game? That takes some real patriotism and commitment to country.

Next he felt pity. How sad that these people don’t know the joy, the salvation that comes from Red Sox baseball.

Then he felt angry again. Finally he felt hungry, so he relied on the four different varieties of pork ribs to sooth his agitated soul.

The point is that when Jose left his hotel room, the Red Sox were up 2-0 with two outs in the bottom of the first, and when he returned, seven home runs later, they were down 8-6. Perhaps, the Tennesseans were on to something. Yes Jose missed five innings, but what had he really missed? Heartbreak? Anger? Despair? A $500 tab for smashing a hotel television?

By almost every normal standard, it would appear that Jose had made the right choice. He avoided pain (the blown lead) and received pleasure (ribs). He should have been a happy man. And yet he wasn’t.

Jose looks forward to this; we look forward to this. We crave the opportunity to feel. We are addicts. And like any addict we have built up tolerance. It is no longer enough to enjoy the elation of victory. We need it to hurt, to drag us through excruciating pain to create an ever-sharper contrast with the pleasure. We came back from 3-0 against the Yankees. We came back from 3-1 against the Indians. We will not feel truly alive in this series until we have to come back from down four games to the Rays. And that is where the danger lies. You can’t go down by four games. It is against the rules. It is up to the Red Sox to remember that in the relentless pursuit of thrills, of greater and greater highs, getting down four games is the overdose of playoff baseball—exciting but fatal.

2. Following St. Josh a Beckett’s second straight horrendous post-season outing, it is probably safe for us to assume that his oblique is not fine and that he is seriously injured. This is a problem, a big problem, but it is not unsolvable. There is precedent for remedying this. It’s just a few simple steps:

1. The team physician invents a procedure that temporarily fixes a strained oblique.
2. The physician practices the technique on dead people.
3. Beckett receives the procedure before each remaining start.
4. Beckett bleeds out of his wound and on to his jersey.
5. People talk about how heroic Beckett is.
6. Red Sox win the World Series
7. Beckett puts on 40 pounds.
8. People who don’t like Beckett start suggesting that the blood was fake and he just spilled marinara sauce on his shirt because look at him, he’s a fat slob.

If the Red Sox pursue these simple steps, Jose is pretty sure the old Josh Beckett will be ready for Game 6.

3. Sons of Sam Horn Stalwart Tudor Fever raised a great question the other day. “What is ‘Kotsay’ Pig Latin for? Jose is not a Latin Scholar, his second tongue is Gibberish, but he still knows enough—he thinks—to give it a try.

So we decline it right? And then decline it again? And we remove the “ay,” move the “s” to the front. And we get “Skot.” Suddenly, the reason for Kotsay’s inability to hit becomes clear—he’s a Scott. Think of the Scott’s in Red Sox history, Scoot, Williamson, Scott Sauerbeck, Scott Cassidy, Scott Bankhead and Scott Taylor were all pitchers. Scott Fletcher wasn’t a pitcher, but he hit like one. That leaves us with Scott Cooper, the worst two-time All-Star in MLB history as the upside for Scotts.

Of course, there is some evidence that while our translation is correct, our interpretation is lacking. Skot, is the translation of Kotsay’s last name, so perhaps the better historical analogy is George Scott. If Kotsay can hit like Boomer, that would help.

On a related note, since Jason Bay’s name ends in “ay” it is presumably Pig Latin as well, but what can it possibly be Pig Latin for? It would have to just be “B” right? In which case it’s good he’s playing in Boston, because if his name is “B” and he had a “”P on his head, like in his Pirate days, it might really confuse people.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALCS.

ALCS Game 2--Jose Sees the Future

2008-10-11T00:31:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALCS.

1. Jose is taking a terrible risk here and breaking a cardinal rule. He is writing this KEYS before Game 1 even happened. It’s not that Jose wanted to do this, it’s just that this seemed like the only way to guarantee that there would be an actual KEYS for Game 2. You see, as you are reading this, Jose is somewhere on the road between Asheville and Chattanooga, which are, as best Jose understands, cities in the United States. Jose just somehow got it in his head that since he had a few days off, it would be okay to hit the road, even with the ALCS on. It works out pretty well. Jose gets to travel, and probably to still watch the games. The only loser is you. Instead of getting to read a 264 line epic retelling of the Bhagavad Gita via the story of Rays pitcher Scott Kazmir, you get this meta KEYS written on Friday 1AM. Suckers. Err… Patrons.

What Jose was trying to figure out was whether he should write this as if the Sox won Game 1 or as if they lost it. After careful consideration, Jose decided to assume the Sox lost Game 1, so then if the win everyone will be happy and not notice that he is kind of a jackass. Also, Jose was concerned that if he wrote that the Sox won game one and they lost, players might get confused and think that they only needed three more wins to get to the World Series. But then Jose remembered that Manny is no longer on the team, so he stopped worrying about that.

Here we go.

This was not how Jose imagined this series starting. In retrospect he should have known it was a bad sign when Gerald Williams threw out the first pitch. Still, he couldn’t have imagined that after hitting Jacoby Ellsbury to start the game, Jamie Shields would set down the next 25 batters in a row.

What he could have seen, what he should have seen, was that DiceK was going to struggle. Yes, Jose was an advocate of starting DiceK in Game 1 to eliminate the awful risk that he might have to start an eventual Game 7, but he couldn’t have foreseen that Dice would throw 240 pitches over five innings, walking 15 and scattering three runs. Wait, actually he could have foreseen it. It’s like pretty much every other DiceK playoff start.

On the upside, since, Dice did what he always does in the ALCS, when Jose writes his KEYS for Game 3 before Game 2 is over, he can write that St. Josh a Beckett won, because Beckett always pitches great in the ALCS. As anyone who plays the stock market can tell you, past performance is always a guarantee of future results. Right?

2. While Jose is not going to right a poem about Scott “Disputed Territoty” of Kazmir, Jose does feel like he is obliged to give you some background information on Tampa’s starter for tonight’s critical second game. So, let’s open it up. Any questions?

Yes, you. Why is Scott Kazmir disputed?

Well, no messing around from you is there? Does anyone have any questions about his childhood? Maybe his prom? Jose can tell you how Kazmir lost his virginity. It’s a funny story actually. No?

Well, on to the meat of the subject then.

As best Jose can tell, Kazmir, going back centuries, has been sacred to both Mets fans and Rays fans. Not so long after Tampa was given independence from the Yankee Empire, which had claimed it is a minor league fiefdom, it set up a major league team called the Devil Rays. Whereas the Yankees once had control over all the talent flowing into and out of baseball in Tampa, the new Devil Rays team was independent, and, however, clumsily, feeling its oats.

Freed from interference, the Devil Rays got any number of independent players to agree to side with them, such as Wade Boggs, who defected from the Yankees and Fred McGriff. Under the terms of the partition, Tampa could even deal with the New York Mets, the Yankees hated cross-town rival.

Under attack from a Yankees team that made the playoffs every year in recent memory, New York Mets acting GM Jim Duquette made a desperate agreement to cede Kazmir to Tampa under the condition that he would receive Victor Zambrano and Bartolome Fortunato to help him fend off Yankee aggression within the New York baseball market. When the deal was made, Mets fans, an overwhelming majority of whom wanted to keep Kazmir, were incensed and demanded Duquette’s firing. Ever since, Rays fans have insisted that the deal was legal and valid, while Mets fans have claimed that it cannot be valid as the man who signed it must have been brain dead.

As the Mets have suffered through intense turmoil over the past several years, the cause of Kazmir remains a focal point in public dissatisfaction. Major League Baseball has attempted to manage the hostility, but it turns out that they have even less power than the UN and only slightly less corrupt management.

3. It is really too bad for the Rays that they are not a hockey team. It just kind of seems like a waste to have, in Grant Balfour, the child of two of the greatest goalies of all time, Ed Belfour and Grant Fuhr, and no net to put him in. (Note: Why they changed his name from Belfour to Balfour Jose doesn’t know. Maybe they Americanized it when he immigrated from Canada.)

Do you think if they started to call the innings periods they could get him to pitch three instead of just one? Jose bets they’ve tried that, because Joe Maddon is awfully clever. Do you think Balfour spends his seven to eight innings in the bullpen wondering what infraction got him put in the penalty box for two hours and 45 minutes? When the Rays are at bat with the bases loaded does he get confused and thing that the Red Sox have a five-man advantage on the power play?

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALCS.

ALDS Game 1 Good vs. Neutral

2008-10-10T00:56:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALCS.

1. In years past, this would be where Jose wrote about an epic struggle between good and evil, of the forces of light and darkness twirling in their endless tango, or dancing the forbidden dance--lambada. Jose was not exaggerating. The Red Sox are good and the Yankees are evil. (Note: Well, now the Red Sox are good and the Yankees are bad.) The Cleveland Indians, if not outright evil, are at least racist and insensitive. While good vs. insensitive isn’t quite as potent as good vs. evil, it at least has a little bit of kick. But Tampa? This year’s ALCS is more of a story of good vs. neutral.

The story of good vs. neutral has already been told in comic form in the cartoon Futurama. In the relevant episode 25 Star General Zapp Brannigan takes the Democratic Order of Planets to war with “the neutral planet.” It reminds Jose quite a bit of the Red Sox current crusade against neutrality, though Tito does not, blessedly, wear Brannigan’s crushed red velour uniform. (Note: He can’t; MLB discipline chief Bob Watson has ruled that velour violates the MLB uniform policy.)

This is a problem. We are in a battle of good vs. neutral, and neutral is simply hard to get excited about. If one were to put together one of those head-to-head charts that reporters without ideas so love, it would be a one sided affair.

Food
Boston: Clam Chowder
Tampa: Meh
Edge: Boston

Historic Sights
Boston: Old North Church
Tampa: Meh
Edge Boston

Favorite Sons
Boston: JFK
Tampa: MEH
Edge: Boston

Local TV Show
Boston: Cheers
Tampa: Meh
Edge: Boston

Local Movie
Boston: Celtic Pride
Tampa: Meh
Edge: Tampa

What? Staring at a grey screen for three hours would be dramatically better than Celtic Pride. Damon Wayans as an NBA star? The Jazz winning a championship? Please.

So it is hard for Jose to get too fired up about a series that can only be described as meh. Still, it is Jose’s job to get fired up and get fired up he will. Bring on the kiln!

Since we have established Tampa as neutral, think of it as Switzerland. Switzerland is neutral, and everyone loves them, what with their excellent chocolate, versatile knives and $35 bagels.

Not Jose.

Jose is pissed off at the Swiss.

Some of you may remember a Kids in the Hall bit years ago about a guy named Ed who hated the Swiss. Jose is not imitating that. That was a joke. Jose is not joking. He really hates the Swiss. He is probably a little racist towards them. (Note: Okay, maybe he is joking a little bit. Please don’t sick the Anti-Swiss Defamation League on Jose, he can’t bear to issue apologies in their unintelligible German, French, Italian and Romansh.) \

His hate, like most hate, is simple. The entire Swiss economy for nearly 80 years has been built on money laundering. The Swiss launder money for anyone: terrorists, tax evaders, drug dealers, the CIA, the KGB, Nazis, everyone. They are the Zoots of money laundering. Now, normally if a country did this, like say Vanuatu, we would shun them. Maybe we wouldn’t shut them off from the world, but we would point out that they were a bunch of jerks profiting on the misery of others. But not the Swiss. No, no, they get to have UN institutions, even though they weren’t even a UN member until recently, and the International Committee of the Red Cross and to guard the Pope. Everyone loves the Swiss.

But at root, neutrality veers awfully close to amorality. There are individual people who are neutral like the Swiss. There are people who, like the Swiss, look only to their own interests, steering clear of committing to any position save their own personal good. We call these people sociopaths. We do not give them UN offices (note: Kurt Waldheim excepted). We do not let them guard the Pope.

So as we head into this series with Tampa, remember that there is nothing quite so insidious as creeping neutrality. Demand that the Tampa Rays give up their stolen Nazi gold.

2. Over the years, Jose has had a lot of fun with the Rays, calling them Tampax Bay and comparing the to tuberculosis. Back when they were the Devil Rays or D Rays, Jose may even have suggested that they should change their name to the Tampa Bay Dres and have a picture of the Yo! MTV Raps star Dr. Dre on their caps. Dr. Dre could also be team physician. (Note: He would probably not be noticeably worse than former Red Sox physician Dr. Arthur Pappas. As best Jose knows, Marty Barrett has never sued Dr. Dre for malpractice.)

Now that the Tampa Rays are good, people have asked Jose if he needs to change the way he talks about them. Are feminine hygiene jokes really appropriate when one is talking about the reigning A.L. East champions? It’s a fair question.

After a lot of thought, Jose has concluded, reluctantly that it is no longer fair to call them the Tampax Bay Rays.

It just isn’t fair… to Tampax.

Tampax is the number one selling brand of tampon, and Jose doesn’t think it’s right to connect them to a baseball team that will finish only second in the American League. Also, it didn’t take Tampax ten years in existence for their product to be successful. If Tampax had waited 10 years to perform adequately, then… well, let’s just sat it would have been sloppier than the Rays’ pre-2008 defense. So not only is Jose renouncing the use of the term “Tampax Bay” (note: at least until tomorrow) Jose is demanding that the Rays remove the libelous TB from their caps. Jose suggests that they replace it with a nice OB, which Jose understands, is a less successful brand of tampon.

3. How weird is it that the Rays have decided to start Jamie Shields in Game 1? Have the Red Sox ever beat two pitchers named Shields in consecutive games before? (Note: The Sox defeated Scott Shields to win Game 4 of the ALDS.)

Also, what is David Price, who is Jose’s Congressman here in Durham doing pitching for the Rays? Can he stay in Congress, or did he just get elected from here when he was playing for Tampa’s AAA affiliate the Durham Bulls?

This just makes Jose really mad. There’s a financial crisis, a war and some sort of emergency involving commemorative coins going on, and this guy Price is going to be sitting in the Tampa bullpen? Some congressman. Jose knows, Price will probably claim that there’s a phone in the bullpen, so he can do work from there, but Jose does not believe that for a second. Price needs to get out of the Tampa bullpen and back to Washington so he can work hard on getting Durham the bioweapons lab we need to defend ourselves against Raleigh.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALCS.

ALDS Game 4--Must Win Game

2008-10-06T12:01:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALDS.

1. The Sox may be up 2 games to 1, but let’s not kid ourselves, tonight is a must win game.

There are plenty of reasons it’s a must win. Jose doesn’t want to go back to Anaheim, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to see Dice pitch another winner take all game. Dice in a decisive game is like having ulcer surgery. It will probably work out but there will be a lot of nausea and discomfort. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that if there is a game on Wednesday night, Jose is almost definitely going to fail his microeconomics exam at 8:30 Thursday morning.

Think of Jose as the Mark Kotsay of microeconomics. You look at Jose’s resume, his background and his skills and you think, “Hey, Jose should be a pretty nice fit here. He’s the sort of guy I might like to have doing microeconomics for me. I wouldn’t want him to be the first guy I go to when I need to do a utility maximization problem, but having him as a second or third option might be pretty good.”

So you trade some junk to another team to acquire Jose as a backup economics student, and you have him do a problem when one of your economists goes down with, social anxiety disorder probably. So far so good. But then you see him work. Awful. Abysmal. Just flailing at the problems really.

Jose’s approach to economics is a lot like Kotsay’s approach to a critical at bat. He gets in there, guesses a few times and then ends up looking foolish.

On the other hand, no one has ever asked why Sean Casey isn’t doing Jose’s microeconomics problem sets.

2. One of the headlines in an Orange County Register blog this morning was “Hunter Escapes Ridicule.” The entry points out how unspeakably awful the Angles centerfielder was last night; he allowed a ball to drop for a three run single and was thrown out trying to stretch a single by what the Register calls the “length of a bowling ally” and Jose calls the length of a candlepin bowling alley. They are right, he was awful, but they go on to suggest that because the Angles won he will escape ridicule.

Wrong. Maybe he’s escaped ridicule so far but that ends now.

Torii, sure Jose could pick on you for the things that happened last night, or for hurting your knee jumping up and down in protest of a call. Jose could do that… and he will. You suck. Your judgment is poor at best! Snap.

But that’s not really what Jose wants to talk about. What he wants to talk about is your parentage. Torii Hunter? That’s really your name? You sound like singer/songwriter Torii Amos and Spider Man villain Kraven the Hunter had a baby.

Wait... did Jose hurt your feelings? Does the ridicule sting?

Jose is just saying he could see you sitting there at the piano singing weepy songs and breathing audibly, all while wearing a vest made from the head of a lion. And you know what? That would still be less humiliating than your performance in last night’s game.

These are your parents Torii Hunter. Feel the shame.

3. As Jose did his research for tonight’s game, he discovered that there was once a dot com called mylackey.com, which Jose can only assume, is affiliated with tonight’s Angels starter John Lackey. The idea behind mylackey was that busy professionals could use it to schedule services like dry cleaning and dog grooming. True to its namesake, mylackey guaranteed excellent service in non-essential situations. If you needed your dry cleaning done in two days but four days would be fine, no problem. However, in a really important situation, say if you needed a suit cleaned for a big meeting, mylackey would almost definitely come up short. Not only would it not get you your suit on time, it might set it on fire.

For example, let’s say you needed some flowers for your girlfriend’s birthday. With mylackey you could order them sent to her no problem, but there was a good chance that she would end up getting a bouquet of poison ivy with a wasps nest in it.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALDS.

ALDS Game 3--Jose Ain't Got His Taco

2008-10-05T10:56:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALDS.

1. Jose was hungry.

Not hungry like the Yankees after an impossibly long eight years without a championship, but still pretty hungry. He wanted something salty, something savory.

“Tacos!” he thought to himself. “Tacos would be fantastic.” To his great good fortune he no longer lived in the Mexican food wasteland known as Boston, so there was an actual chance of getting some decent Mexican food.

An authentic dive taqueria emerged from the glare of the noontime sun to his left, and Jose lopped a lazy left into the parking lot. Excited, obsessed even, he scampered out of the car and stomped towards the impending deliciousness.

Something wasn’t right. Jose felt too light, empty almost. At first he thought it was only his ravenous hunger but then he realized that he was literally too light. His keys were missing.

Now at first this might not sound too bad. So what if Jose didn’t have his KEYS. Why would he need KEYS for a taco stand? That was not the problem. Even if Jose doesn’t have KEYS, he always has KEYS. Right up here. (Note: Jose is pointing at his head.) Jose had his KEYS, what he didn’t have was his keys. Those were dangling from the ignition of his still running car.

Realizing his mistake, Jose yanked at the door of his Carolina blue Corolla. No luck. The door was locked tighter than an Angels team down two games.

Desperate, Jose turned to the middle aged Latino fellow one spot over.

“Hi, sorry to bother you, but you don’t know how to pop a car door do you?”

The man flashed a sheepish, embarrassed grin. “ No, I don’t know how to. Sorry.”

What he meant, Jose is pretty sure, is “You think that because I’m Latino I know how to pop open a locked car door? That’s racist.”

This would be a reasonable assumption, but Jose isn’t racist, he just really needed to get into his car, and this guy was the closest possible person. Also, how could this guy have though Jose was racist against Latinos? He must somehow not have known that Jose pretends to be a Latino on the Internet.

As panic gave way to calm, Jose noticed that across the street there was a garage. He walked over and approached the two mechanics as they took a break from working on an elevated automobile.

They were two black guys. “Great,” thought Jose to himself. “They will think Jose is racist too. And maybe they will be right. It’s not like Jose pretends to be a black guy on the Internet.”

“Sorry to bother you guys,” Jose began. “But do either of you know how to pop a locked car door?”

“Sure,” chirped the taller one, his short dreadlocks framing a gleaming grin. “He used to steal cars!” He pointed at his colleague, a round-faced fellow with cherub cheeks.

“He’s joking,” the cherub cheeked mechanic added, after allowing enough to for it to be awkward.

These two fellows, Kenyans it turned out, were decidedly not car thieves. They spent ten minutes reading an instruction booklet on how to break into a car, and shoving wooden wedges into Jose’ door before finally managing to wriggle a tool in and depress the window switch. It was not quick work with a slim Jim, but it did the job.

Jose thanked them profusely, gave them $10, all the cash he had on him, and they returned to work, and Jose returned to…. Shit. Jose had given all of his cash to the friendly Kenyans who had earned it. This left him unable to purchase even a single taco.

This brings us to the point, which as you recall, is that this is a Red Sox blog. As Royce Clayton might put it, “Jose ain’t got his taco.” Therefore, the Red Sox absolutely must make the World Series. As Jose recalls, when you get to the World Series, if someone steal a base, you get a free taco, and Jose still really wants a taco.

2. St. Josh a Beckett will pitch tonight despite a strained oblique, which is pretty amazing given that we were all concerned that his season might be over a week ago. What Jose wonders is whether the Catholic Church has started the process of certifying that this is indeed a miracle. Obviously, St. Beckett doesn’t need it to be a miracle. He’s already got the two required for sainthood, the 2003 and 2007 postseasons, still, it seems important that these things be properly documented.

As Jose understands it, the first step of the process takes place within the diocese, so presumably Cardinal O’Malley has sent a team to Fenway tonight to interview the witnesses to this miracle.

Jose feels pretty good about the chances that this will be certified. It’s probably not a first-degree miracle such as resurrection from the dead, we haven’t seen that here since October 2004, but it seems like it could absolutely be a third degree miracle, recovery from an illness in a remarkably short period of time.

Either way, it puts Josh Beckett way above that other St. Beckett, who couldn’t even keep England Catholic four hundred years after his death.

3. In tonight’s do or die game, the Angels throw Joe Saunders against St. Josh a Beckett. Jose is not worried. He has seen the show French and Saunders a few times on Comedy Central, so he knows that Saunders is a slightly overweight British woman. Jose has seen weirder things in the playoffs (note: see Eric “I don’t need to touch home plate, home plate needs to touch me” Byrnes.) but he just doesn’t see the Red Sox being shut down by an aging comedienne.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALDS.

ALDS Game 2--SNAP!

2008-10-03T09:52:00.002-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALDS.

1. George Elliott, the famous transsexual author, once wrote “The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

Jose is not sure exactly when (s)he wrote that, but he suspects it was after one of the ten consecutive post season games the Red Sox have taken from the Los Calanaheim Angles.

Unlike many moments in the history of the Boston Red Sox, these games against the Angels have been golden moments, all of them. From Hendu’s homer, to Roger Clemens inexplicably winning a Game 7 (note: thank God, Jeff Suppan wasn’t starting for the Angles that night), to Papi’s walk off, to Manny’s fly into the night last fall, the good moments against the Angels are wound together in such a smooth and subtle continuum that it is easy to miss exactly how special, how golden each of these shimmering singularities is.

This series will fade. We will not remember most of its splendid moments. The 2004 ALDS is absent from the World Series DVD collection. The same holds for 2007. These series are forgotten, picayune overtures that hint at Act I and Act II before being retired to hazy memory. Despite the dramatic walk off homers in 2004 and 2007, do we remember those moments the way we remember ALDS moments against other opponents? Will anything from this series remind us of O’Leary seven RBI’s in the 1999 ALDS finale or Pedro’s six no hit innings? Will any pitch seem as extraordinary as Derek Lowe’s back door breaking ball to strike out Terence Long in 2003?

These series against the Angels begin with haste and end as quickly and unceremoniously as a series in May. We cannot see them and savor them. We know them only as something has passed and is then forgotten.

Jose never thought he would say this after reading Silas Marner, George Elliott is making sense.

Still, the story in incomplete. There is more going on here then the abrupt evaporation of golden moments. There is something more sinister, violent even.

There is another quote about the Angels that is a partner in describing the long streak, and the short series. Jack Handy of Saturday Night Live once said over soothing music and calming images “It’s true that every time you hear a bell, an angel gets its wings. But what they don’t tell you is that every time you hear a mouse trap snap, an angel gets set on fire.”

SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!

Huh, that was 11. Funny.

2. In 1867, Japan began the period of transition from feudalism to industrial society and colonial power called the Meiji Restoration. The Restoration came in direct response to Commodore Matthew Perry’s success at forcing Japan to open in 1853. The superior firepower of Perry’s black ships convinced elements in Japan that the country needed to modernize rapidly or else it would succumb to Western power. In other words, the Japanese needed to learn from their enemies and make fundamental adjustments in how they organized themselves in order to compete.

Over the past year, the Angels have undergone a similar process. After being humiliated by Commodore Tito, and his black, err black, white and Dominican, fleet in 2007, the Angels realized that they needed to learn from the Red Sox if they were to compete with them. As a result, they shifted from being a team that relied entirely on speed and acquired Mark Teixera to give them the best possible (note: though still inadequate) facsimile of Boston’s 3-4 slugger combination.
It worked. Just like Japan in the Meiji period, the Angels went through a rapid and spectacular transformation.

The crowning validation of the Meiji Restoration was Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Japan won despite the fact that Jose’s great-grandfather had gotten the hell out of the country one-year prior, so they were at a huge disadvantage.

So the validation of the Angels Restoration should be a victory over the Boston Red Sox. But where is it? It is as though a strong and modernized Japan laid siege to Port Arthur and then gave up after three days because it was hard and kind of boring. If the Angles don’t show some spine, the Red Sox won’t even need to Teddy Roosevelt to cut us a sweetheart deal in Portsmouth, we will just dictate terms.

When all was said and done, the British presented the Japanese with a lock of admiral Nelson’s hair, to commemorate their victory in the battle of Tsushima. If the Angels keep playing like they have been, they won’t even get a lock of Jeff Nelson’s hair.

3. Orange County Register columnist Randy Youngman, which Jose assumes is his porn name, joined in the Greek chorus of columnists muttering in monotone that the Angles postseason losing streak against the Sox goes back to 1986. But Youngman breaks free from the crowd and distinguishes himself as the choragus by invoking the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in his recollection.

While he does not explicitly compare the losing streak to Chernobyl, the comparison is implicit and it is devastating.

People died as the result of both events (note: Donnie Moore and Chernobyl victims rest in piece) and the impacts of both disasters continue to this day.

But the analogy is profoundly imperfect. Whereas Chernobyl destroyed an entire city, the Angels losing streak has only destroyed Orange County. Also, the Chernobyl reactor was enclosed in a massive concrete sarcophagus in order to contain the radiation. As best Jose knows, no one has considered building a massive sarcophagus to contain the Angels, even though teammates of 1986 team member Reggie Jackson regard him as radioactive.

If one insists on comparing the Angels losing streak to a Soviet disaster in 1986, Jose would suggest that the obvious analogy is the sinking of the SS Admiral Nakhimov, a passenger boat that collided with the bulk carrier Pyotr Vasyov in the Tsemes Bay, killing 423. The Pyotr Vasayov, was Japanese built, lending credence to the notion that the Angels will, this evening, be sunk by something built in Japan.

In addition, much like Angels skipper Mike Scioscia, the Admiral Nakhimov’s captain Vadim Markov seemed utterly unconcerned about the impending disaster, saying, “Don't worry. We will pass clear of each other. We will take care of everything."

There is one major difference, however, that may prove decisive. The Admiral Nakhimov did not have monkey.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALDS.

ALDS GAME 1—Why We Are Different

2008-10-01T00:08:00.006-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE ALDS.

1. The setting is new, but the scene is the same.

It is North Carolina here, yet it is still Boston within these walls. A semi circle of cardboard is lashed to the top of the closet, a flimsy backboard to a flimsier hoop. On it is an image, frozen, eternal, perfect. Orlando Cabrera dives into a jubilant crowd, Dave Roberts edges Kevin Youkilis for position in the scrum and even Johnny Damon, the good Johnny Damon, the bearded Johnny Damon embraces a still ambulatory Mosey Nixon.

As Jose’s eyes drift to the left a poster hangs, long since denuded of the glass that once gave it sheen. Ramirez, Damon, Martinez, Foulke. They are all there, jolly specters of the best of days.

Still further to the left, the other closet flaps open. There amidst the striped shirts and khaki slacks Jose can see the crisp white of his number 19 jersey, MELENDEZ stitched across the back, a necessary error if he is to distinguish his jersey from Josh Beckett’s. It is a good jersey, a prized possession and a generous gift, but it is not Jose’s playoff jersey. That honor goes to a grey road uni with 49 and WAKEFIELD framed neatly across the back. Jose got the jersey in 1995 when he was slinging fries at Fenway. It still has streaks of red face paint on it from the 1999 ALCS, when joy turned to grief and from Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS when grief descended like night, only to be broken the next day by four years of shimmering dawn. The shirt bears the stains of history. It bears the stench of history. It has not been washed in nine years.

To the closet’s left side a license plate/clock declares Jose to be the Red Sox “#1 FAN.” The clock does not work. Its white hands stretch across a compass rose of a clock and freeze at 10:40, the exact time the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series. It is eerie. Sure, Jose set the hands there about two minutes ago so he could write this sentence, but still it is strange and wonderful.

Just below the clock hangs a final poster.

BATTLE FOR THE AGES
FENWAY PARK OCT. 16
PEDRO MARTINEZ vs. ROGER CLEMENS

Pedro’s smiling face perched a cross a slim cartoon body face stares across at Rahjh’s impudent mug. Game 3, 1999. Until 2004, it was the happiest day of Jose’s life. Not only did the Red Sox crush the Yankees, but Jose also saw Jimy Williams at a bar sucking down scotch after scotch.

And that is all. Except for the Red Sox coffee cup on the table to Jose’s right.. and the four KEYS books atop the bureau to his right… and a Wakefield t-shirt… and a Red Sox Hideo Nomo t-shirt… and the sleepy dork, happily typing away in the voice of a long forgotten relief pitcher while the world passes him by.

This is who Jose is. This is who the Red Sox are. It is who you are too. It is why we will win. While Jose feverishly types his youth away, the Orange Country Register lists yesterday’s top five most read stories as:

For Kobe, 30 is the new 20
New O.C. football Top 10 released
Lakers keep an eye on the beasts in the East
Mr. October: Angels need to improve post-season approach
5 things to watch for in Lakers training camp

These are the guys who will defeat us? The guys who play in this town? 100 wins, guaranteed home field throughout, good pitching and a monster lineup, and on the eve of the playoffs they rank below two off-season Laker stories and high school football in their own hometown? Thank God that last night there was no high school field hockey or they might have dropped out of the top ten.

The people of Anaheim are not us, nor are they we. They just aren’t. We let jerseys putrefy for nine years. We get memorabilia for players who were terrible. We brood and rejoice and brood a little more. They are fans, barely, but we are more. We are a religion, we are a movement, we are a people.

Yes we can? Certainly, but that is unremarkable. Yes we will.

Yes. We will.

2. On his blog yesterday, Tony Castrati suggested that the suddenly muscular Angles (note: not a typo, see KEY 3, or any think Jose has ever written about that team) have switched places with a Red Sox squad that had the league leader in stolen bases for the first time since Nixon was riding high. Specifically, he compared them to the plots of three movies: “Freaky Friday,” “Trading Places” and ""Like Father, Like Son.” While Jose admires any effort to work Kirk Cameron, the star of Like Father, Like Son into a baseball column, Jose categorically rejects Castrati’s analogy. Also, why not work in Malcom-Jamal Warner instead? This season has resembled the plot of at least three episodes of Malcom and Eddie. Also, unlike Warner, Cameron does not have a surprisingly good jazz combo, though Jose regrets that Warner’s group is not named “Theo and the Trio.”

But back to Castrati’s poor analogy. First, let’s start with the fact that these three movies have almost nothing in common. One is about two white guys trading bodies, one is about two white girls trading bodies and one is about high finance. And ff one wants to compare “Like Father, Like Son” to something, how can one ignore the Judge Reinhold vehicle “Vice Versa?” The only difference between the two films is that Reinhold changes bodies with Fred Savage thanks to a mysterious skull while Cameron trades bodies with Dudley Moore due to mysterious potion. They were made within a year of each other and can be purchased together as a two DVD set. Doesn’t Castrati do any research?

Now, let’s examine why each of the three films Castrati cites is a bad analogy.

In “Freaky Friday” a coke addled teenager trades bodies with her technically a man mother. Or, if your prefer the 1976 version, an FBI agent/Astronomer trades places with a voiceover woman from the underappreciated 1977 Doonesbury special, and inspires John Hinckley to shoot Ronald Reagan. Jose thinks it’s pretty clear where this analogy goes off the tracks. While Red Sox-Angles playoff series have inspired players to shoot their wives and themselves, they have never once inspired anyone to shoot an elderly actor/president. Also, Jamie Lee Curtis is twice the man John Lackey is.

What about Trading Places? In this one, two rich white investors destroy lives before eventually destroying themselves. Actually, this one sounds like it might be just about right. Wait, that’s the banking crisis Jose’s thinking of not the playoffs. Never mind.

And actually, the plot is less centered on the rich brothers than on the subject of their manipulation of a black hustler and a white commodities trader. Jamie Lee Curtis plays prominently in this one too as a hooker who is three times the man Chone Figgins is. To Jose’s mind, the only way this analogy holds up is if current Angle and former Red Sox Darren Oliver teams up with Jon Garland to bankrupt the Red Sox commodity trading owner, John W. Henry, by cornering the market on concentrated frozen orange juice. If Oliver and Garland do corner the market on concentrated frozen orange juice in the next few days, Jose will concede that the Red Sox could be in trouble.

This leaves us with “Like Father, Like Son”/“Vice Versa.” Here’s why this one doesn’t work. For this analogy to hold, you’d have to assume that the Red Sox were Dudley Moore /Judge Reinhold to begin with and were magically transformed into Kirk Cameron/Fred Savage. Castrati argues that would be a bad thing, but he is wrong. Does he know that Dudley Moore is dead while Kirk Cameron prominent evangelical Christian actor? Also Dudley Moore was the star of a film called “Arthur,” and playing a carton aardvark is not exactly a great career move. So if this transformation did transpire, it would be to Boston’s benefit, which destroys Castrati’s model.

Still, Jose will give Castrati some credit. He had the right instinct in going for a Kirk Cameron analogy, he just picked the wrong film. Given the troubles the Angles will have driving in runners in this series, the correct Kirk Cameron film analogy is “Left Behind.”

3. There have not been a lot of Normans on the Red Sox throughout their storied history. There was Norman Zauchin, who played a few years in the 50s and Norman Siebern, who played on the Impossible Dream team before wrapping up his career a year later. Nelson Norman coached for the Sox in 2001. But that’s pretty much it. At least it was until today.

Today that changes. Today we are all Normans. As we head into Battle against the Angles, 25 Normans will don helms of blue and Terry Eurona will prepare to be crowned Tito the Conqueror.

Norman Schwarzkopf will be watching. He’ll be in camouflage, so you can’t see him, but he’ll be there.

Norm and Norma Nathan will be watching from the great gossip column in the sky.

Norman the Lunatic, back to his asylum , his wrestling days long gone, will beg to watch the game just like Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Even Greg Norman will take a break from winemaking to see what a champion looks like.

Today, the Battle of Hastings will be replayed just a few days shy of its 942nd anniversary and, then as now, the Angles will be defeated and subjected to 1,056 years of subjugation minimum

Watch out Angles, the Normans are coming and it's Hastings all over again.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE ALDS.

Announcement

2008-09-25T10:24:00.001-04:00

It's time for Jose Melendez's KEYS TO THE GAME.

Jose has suspended KEYS TO THE GAME in order to focus on fixing the U.S. financial crisis. Now, more than ever, we need to come together and hit the economy with a chair, perhaps several times.

I'm Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

For more of the same visit http://keystothegame.blogspot.com

Our Competitive Advantage

2008-09-23T08:24:00.000-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

This seems like as good a time as any for Jose to point out the one small concern he has about this team: They may not be very good.

It’s an odd thing to say right now as the Sox stand with 91 wins, just one victory or Yankee loss away from clinching a playoff birth, but Jose really wonders. What exactly is this team’s competitive advantage? It’s certainly not the offense. Sure, the Sox have some guys at the middle of the lineup who can mash, but we also have a bottom of the lineup that includes a too old Varitek, a suddenly too young Lowrie and a too never very good Mark Kotsay-Hey Kid. (Note: Sarcasm.)

The relief pitching? It’s fine Jose supposes. Papelbon is still picking up saves for the most part, but somehow he seems a little unsteady. Like a drunk working the high iron, he never looks good but he always hangs on. Of course, when a guy on the high iron doesn’t hang on it’s messy. The same holds true for Paps. Oki’s been back on track and Masterson’s been good, but can they compare to the young guns in Tampa or the man from Anaheim who rendered Jose’s Bobby Thigpen card even more worthless? (Note: Jose traded a Lou Whitaker card for that Thigpen card the year Thigpen set the save record. In related news, did you know that Jose was once president of Lehman Brothers?) That leaves us with the starting pitching. This should be the strong point. Beckett, Lester and Dice. That’s a pretty good threesome. It’s like Garnett, Pierce and Allen, but without the foul stench of Connecticut. (Note: Just kidding, Jose is indifferent to Connecticut. By the way is Connect Four the official state game of Connecticut? It should be. And why is the second “C” in Connecticut silent? Jose bets it is for insurance reasons.) But how confident are you about Dice’s ability to not throw 150 pitches in the first three innings of a big game? And Beckett hasn’t looked like himself. And Lester? Jose is good with Lester. Lester is easily the best ventriloquist dummy of all time, well, after Franklin and Gabbo.

So maybe our competitive advantage is at manager. Tito is probably the best in the game right now. Jose thinks we should consider putting him in charge of the $700 billion bailout, since he’s already managed Manny Ramirez a.k.a. the $160 million bailout. The only problem is that his competition will be pretty good too. Scioscia has recovered nicely from his radiation poisoning in Springfield to emerge as a first rate skipper, Joe Maddon is a genius with his Tina Fey glasses and Ozzie Guillen… okay Ozzie’s sort of nuts.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us relying on Wally the Green Monster. Can you name the Tampa mascot or Chicago’s? The Angels have that monkey, but Jose has seen a bunch of monkeys up close in the last year, and they don’t seem so tough. As long as Korean tourists don’t give them any cookies, they’re generally not a problem. If Jose was going to take a bush animal for his mascot he would have gotten a hippo. Those things are scary. If the Angels had a hippo for a mascot, Jose would worry.

Anyway, Jose at least hopes that the mascot is our advantage or else he is going to be spending the next few weeks comparing and contrasting park organists and ushers in search of that one little advantage that will make the 2008 Sox special.

2. Jose has a new friend. He thinks we might be BFFs. His name is Justin… Justin Masterson. He will probably be the best man at Jose’s wedding. Okay Jose’s not engaged or anything, but at the very least, Justin will probably come over to watch WrestleMania.

It’s funny that Jose and Justin became friends so quickly. Jose usually takes time to build up friendships. Half of his friends are people he’s known since kindergarten. The other half are folks he’s known since college. The third half are people who are not great at math. Jose becomes friendly with people fast but he takes his time becoming friends. (Note: No he doesn’t.) But with Justin it was somehow different. The friendship was almost instantaneous. Jose invited Justin to become his friend, and Justin agreed.

It’s probably that they have so much in common. Justin’s favorite book is The Bible and Jose owns a Bible. It’s somewhere. Justin loves Jesus and Jose really likes Jesus. Justin likes to quote Virgil and Jose once saw Virgil with Ted DiBiase at the old Boston Garden. Justin is a right-handed pitcher and Jose often uses his right hand to pour from a pitcher. Justin loves Adam Sandler movies and Jose… well, there’s no link on that one.

The point is that we’re now excellent good friends, like Hamlet and Rosencrantz except without the Justin having Jose killed.

And now that we’re friends on Facebook, we will probably hang out a lot and get beers and jalapeño poppers. Unless, of course, Justin decides, based on this piece, that Jose is stalker… which he’s not. Seriously. Stalking seems like a lot of work and Jose just doesn’t have that kind of stick-to-itiveness.

If you’re worried, just ask Jose’s old BFF Curt Euro. He’ll tell you that Jose had almost nothing to do with his season and perhaps career ending injury. It was completely Euro’s fault for not tapping out of that hammerlock.

3. Jose is glad that DJ Dru got an epidural; Jose is not a big believer in this natural childbirth crap. But now that he’s done giving birth, can Dru please get back into the line up? Jose knows that maternity leave is normally three months and all, but that’s not really going to work this time. And the Kotsay-Hey kid will probably make an excellent wet nurse. (Note: Actually, he probably won’t, not if his mammary glands are anywhere near as dry as his bat.)

I’m Jose Melendez. and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.

Celebrate Good times? Come on.

2008-09-22T10:45:00.001-04:00

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. Lost amid the hubbub of the Yankee Stadium closing is the news that the Red Sox will clinch their fifth playoff birth in six years tonight. Jose is excited about this because it means an insane celebration that will make Jose love this team.

But what if that doesn’t happen?

What if this group is so much more professional and serious than teams past that they refuse to cut loose? Millar is gone, Manny is gone, Pedro is gone, Damon is gone. Hell, we’re down to one Jew, so seeing anyone dance the Hora is unlikely. (Note: Who would lift the chairs?) All that we have no is Papelbon who, in fairness, may be crazy enough to compensate for all of them. But one lunatic does not an asylum make. Jose’s fear is that Papelbon will, like last year, celebrate by stripping down to his jockstrap, but that Sean Casey will quickly hand him a towel and tell him “Put on some God damn pants and quick making an ass of yourself.”

Will DJ Dru just celebrate with an understated fist pump? Will Mike Lowell party with a glass of chilled Chablis? Perhaps Dice and Oki will do nothing more than offer a simple bow. Maybe Mark Kotsay will do…well, whatever it is that Mark Kotsay does.

Frankly, Jose is worried. This is not the gang of idiots, so perhaps they need a more structured way to celebrate. So Jose will step in and offer a suggestion for a fun yet responsible way to celebrate.

Here’s what Jose has come up with: An arcade party at the Dream Machine in the Watertown Mall followed by pizza at Papa Gino’s. Jose knows this may sound like it lacks in drama, but trust him, it’s super fun. Jose did this for his birthday like five years. For an hour you can play all the video games you want for free. Like Curt Euro isn’t going to be in to that? Also, as a plus, there’s an Old Country Buffet there, so Mike Timlin will be good. On the down side, it seems absolutely possible that DJ Dru could injure himself playing skee ball.

2. Yankee Stadium is not the only New York institution to fold this week. The musical Rent also left Broadway after a 12-year run. Despite the fact that the 5,124 performances of Rent, greatly exceeds the number of games played since this Yankee Stadium finished construction in 1976, the close of Rent has not gotten nearly the same press attention. Thus, Jose presents a list of reasons why the closing of Rent is more important than the closing of Yankee Stadium.

Rent is not being replaced with a new, $1.3 billion publicly funded musical.
Rent only made Jose want to slit his wrists on one occasion in 1999. Events in Yankee Stadium made Jose want to slit his wrists annually from 1995-2003.
While Rent includes many long annoying songs, it has never featured a 45-minute rendition of God Bless America.
Amazingly, far less slapping in Rent.
If a 12-year-old kid, had interrupted a performance of Rent, he would not have been put on television and given really great seats to the next performance.
In Rent, the rich guys are the villains.
If the star of Rent’s vocal repertoire can barely reach one octave, he is not praised for his amazing range.
Even though Rent is a remake of an old opera called La Boheme, people don’t count performances of La Boheme in Rent’s run. Yet, people do count games at the old Yankee Stadium in the new Yankee Stadium’s run.
Rent addresses many adult and disturbing issues, but nothing as disturbing or perverse as Wade Boggs on horseback.

3. They called it the House the Ruth Built, even though George Hermann Ruth never played in the iteration of Yankee Stadium that closed last night.

Still, there is a certain appropriateness to the appellation. The big, ugly concrete bowl does look like something that a fat alcoholic might have built. (Note: Actually, given that it was built by contractors in New York, it probably was built by a fat alcoholic.)

No, the architecture, the aesthetics were never what made Yankee Stadium great. What made it great, what allowed it to transcend its structural mediocrity, were the events that transpired there: A-Rod’s slap, Beckett’s gem, D battery night. There are probably some good things that happened to the Yankees there too, but they were so long ago that Jose can’t really remember them.

By contrast, Fenway Park, despite its innumerable flaws, is remarkable for what it is, an uncomfortable yet quirky gem. If Fenway is the Eiffel Tower, an elegant proof of its own importance, Yankee Stadium is Tokyo Tower, a gaudy affront to elegance made important only by its own self-importance. If Fenway is a Pollock painting, discordant yet somehow lovely, Yankee Stadium is a work by Thomas Kinkade “Painter of Light,” widely liked while completely lacking in merit.

It will be easy for critics to say that Jose is just bashing New York, and that is certainly the case. But, Jose would say the same thing about the Boston Garden. It was a dump that was important for what happened there, not for what it was. In that regard, perhaps Yankee Stadium is more like the 99 Restaurant in Charlestown. It’s not famous because it’s beautiful or interesting but because some bad, bad stuff went down there.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.