OLD 210 West Magazine

They're not THAT bad

For a weekend, the Tigers were the best team in baseball instead of the worst team of all time. Dan Nied savors the most precious moment in a season nearly fully devoid of precious moments altogether.

By Dan Nied [send email]

when the pitch scooted past the Minnesota Twins' catcher in the bottom of the ninth inning Saturday night Tigers' center fielder Alex Sanchez scooted home from third base and, for that one second, the Detroit Tigers were the best team in baseball.

Sanchez's run capped a comeback from an eight-run deficit and gave the Tigers a 9-8 win as the scarce crowd at Comerica Park erupted with elation at the fact that their team, officially, could not be the worst of all time.

The Tigers, 119 losses already in hand with two games left to top the major league record of 120 set by the 1962 New York Mets, showed the chutzpah it took to rally. When they beat the Twins 9-4 Sunday to hold their record at 43-119, the city of Detroit could not have been more proud of one of the worst teams of all time.

Just a week earlier the record was in the bag as the Tigers were 38-118. But Detroit rallied to go 5-1 in its last six games and finally proved a little bit of scrappiness.

Lets forget for a second that the final four-game series against the Twins meant nothing to Minnesota and everything to Detroit. Lets forget that Minnesota manager Ron Gardenhire sat most of his regulars and limited his starting pitchers to 50-70 pitches. There is no use diluting the three games the Tigers won against the Twins. The only thing that matters is that the Detroit Tigers may have been the happiest team in Major League baseball this weekend.

The main problem with this Tigers team is that up until Saturday night they weren't all that loveable. At least those ‘62 Mets were peppered with characters who saturated the media with soundbites The best soundbites the Tigers could muster all year were those of manager Alan Trammell running out of excuses around the 80-loss mark and just admitting defeat.

Where the Mets were an expansion team with bottom of the barrel talent, the Tigers had been around for over 100 years and actually built a team this bad through a series of bad long term contracts (the underachieving Bobby Higginson, the injured Dean Palmer, the departed Damien Easley) and minor leaguers playing dress up in big league uniforms (Ramon Santiago, Omar Infante).

But there they were Saturday proving, on the field, that they were a loveable team. Down 8-1 at the seventh inning stretch, No. 120 was just two and a half innings away. Then the Tigers showed their character. Four runs in the seventh, three in the eighth to tie. Then Sanchez walking to lead off the ninth, stealing second and third and finding home plate on that wonderful wild pitch and, just like that, the Tigers were better than someone.

Now, does a 5-1 final week make up for a 43-119 season? Well, no. Have the Tigers turned the corner? Well, no. Are they still an inept franchise? Well, yes. But now, as the season is over optimism can run free the way it does every offseason. Owner Mike Ilitch has promised to heighten the payroll and General Manager Dave Dombrowski has a knack for finding talent. While no one is touting the Tigers as a playoff contender in 2004, the organization and its fans, like every other team, still have the next six months to dream.

And it makes it just a little bit easier that they weren't the worst of all time.

Drugs, lying and book deals. The guide to living the life

Cocaine sniffing, quote lifting Jayson Blair got a book deal for being fired from the nation's most respected newspaper. So honest living Vince Guerrieri has one question: Know where I can score some blow?

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

This wide wicked world is such a funny place to be
--Woody Guthrie, “I Ain’t Got No Home”

I told my boss the other day that I was going to develop a cocaine habit and start making things up at work. She wasn’t amused, but I gotta do what’s best for me, and this might be my best shot at getting a book deal.

I put her on notice after reading that Jayson Blair would receive a six-figure advance for writing Burning Down My Master’s House, a book about his exploits at the New York Times. Blair quit the Old Gray Lady earlier this year amid rumors of plagiarism. It turned into a full-blown investigation that revealed that he lifted other people’s works and outright made things up. Eventually, two editors – including Howell Raines, the man at the top – resigned because of it.

Jayson Blair’s only a couple of years older than me. We could’ve worked at the college paper together. He didn’t graduate college, fabricated quotes for stories in his internship and wound up with a job at the Times and a cocaine problem. After he quit, he’s getting a six-figure book deal.

I graduated college (with honors, thank you very much). I’ve been known to drink too much, but not as a habit. I’m scrupulously honest and make sure to get my stories right. I make $500 a week before taxes.

I’ve decided now that everything I learned is wrong. Crime does pay and playing by the rules is for suckers. Money talks and bullshit walks. There’s no percentage to doing the right thing, and Jayson Blair’s case is by no means an isolated example.

At one point, Blair was contracted by Esquire to write a review of “The Fabulist,” a movie he’d be in a unique position to review. “The Fabulist” is based on a book by Stephen Glass, who was fired from the New Republic for yep, you guessed it, making things up. For his fabrication, he, like Blair, was awarded a book deal.

I grew up in a town that can generously be described as a moral vacuum. My high school diploma is signed by a convicted felon. The Youngstown City Schools’ treasurer embezzled more than $80,000. The director of the local
sanitary district embezzled more than $2 million. Neither of them will
ever see the inside of a prison cell unless they’re on vacation in San Francisco and tour Alcatraz.

Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron, will never see the inside of a prison cell, either. Neither will many of the other thoroughly corrupt executives who cooked the books for companies like Tyco or Adelphia to the tune of millions, if not billions of dollars. But goddammit, the feds are going to throw the book at Martha Stewart for insider trading. They say she made a whopping $40,000 on a stock deal using insider information. I can sleep better at night knowing this.

Oliver North has a television show. He should have been hanged for treason during the Iran-Contra Affair in the 1980s. If selling arms to Iran when we’re fighting them isn’t giving aid and comfort to the enemy, then I don’t know what is. He’s published more novels than I have, and that pisses me off.

Bill Clinton was almost removed from office. He was disbarred, but that doesn’t seem to hurt his career any. He also got a book deal.

Clinton’s offense was to get a hummer and not admit to it under oath. California Governor Gray Davis is in the midst of a recall because he drove the state into debt. President George W. Bush is allowed to operate unfettered after running up the largest deficit in American history and getting us involved in what appears to be a protracted occupation of Iraq (did I mention that Osama bin Laden is still on the loose?) for spurious reasons.

Priests who violate children are shuffled around with the chance to do more evil. It took a massive scandal in Boston to wake up the country to pedophiles with Roman collars, and their day of justice is finally starting to come around.

Turning now to sports, Pete Rose is banned from baseball for gambling, but players with drug problems are given every chance to rehabilitate. Steve Howe, a pitcher for the Yankees in the 1980's, was banned from baseball for life seven or eight times for a cocaine problem, but he kept coming back. But gambling is still a big no-no, and the only way Pete Rose will get into the Hall of Fame is by buying a ticket like the rest of us.

And don’t get me started on Art Modell. I suffered with the Browns for close to 20 years, through the Fumble and the Drive, and I didn’t get to see the Browns in the Super Bowl. Art Modell leaves Cleveland because he can’t make any money there for Baltimore, discovers that the Cleveland thing wasn’t a fluke because he can’t make any money in Baltimore, and decides to sell the team, but not before he gets the Super Bowl victory that he – and all of Browns Nation – has been looking for.

He celebrated. Browns fans cringed. It’s been almost three goddamn years, and I can still feel the bile creep up my throat when I think of that rat bastard motherfucker holding up the Vince Lombardi trophy.

I believe in a next life because I have to believe there’s an existence better than this one. I believe that what goes around comes around. But if instant karma doesn’t start getting some people soon, I might have to turn to a life of crime.

They’ll never take me alive.

Partied out

Zach Baker doesn't quite see the sense in Political parties and wonders what politics would be like without them.

By Zack Baker
210 west Writer [send email]

Have you ever met a person who said they are a member of a political organization, but cannot explain why?

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it. Sometimes I am certain that we need to get rid of political parties altogether.

My problem with political parties is that they divide more than unite, and give people reason to dislike each other without knowing anything about them.

I am guilty of this. I have praised Ronald Reagan and bitched out the joke that was the Clinton administration many times, yet I imagine that had I met him, I'd like Bill Clinton more.

We both like golf, pizza, and women.

The point is that recently at the University that I attend, there seemed to be a great deal of division between Republicans and Democrats on campus. Someone chalked up the sidewalks one way, and someone responded, and pretty soon you'd have thought that chalk would have to be outlawed at Bowling Green.

Sound stupid? Yeah, it was, but at least it got Democrats and Republicans to argue over who was responsible for it, which is good, because Republicans and Democrats just don't argue enough.

I recently saw an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. I have no one to blame but myself for this, but then again, I like messing with my own sanity.

The Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe was jubilant over George Bush's declining numbers, and lumping all nine (NOW TEN) Democratic candidates together, saying that they were all great and would be better than the current president.

Whoa, where to start here?

First of all, a party does not define a person. What exactly do right-friendly Joe Lieberman and left-winger Dennis Kucinich have in common aside from the "D" in front of their name? Sure, maybe a few issues, but on the important ones, such as the Iraq war and reconstruction, they are essential opposites.

Secondly, the person does not define the party. I am a registered Republican, but would rather put Clinton back in office than some right-wingers like Pat Buchanan or Trent Lott.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting little support in Hollywood, probably because of the "R" in front of his name. He's yet to take a real stand so far, but when has that ever stopped anyone from getting support I'm guessing that if Arnold ran as a Democrat, he'd be having Hollywood banquets held in his honor. He comes across as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, which is basically what a Republican calls themselves when they are trying to be liked by everyone.

Imagine for a minute what would happen if every candidate had to defend their own position without the safety net of political parties. What would we do? Who would we vote for?

Actually, it sounds kind of nice.

Big MAC attack

College football has changed to the point where Mid Majors can have a piece of the pie. Vince Guerrieri points to Saturday's Mid American Conference assault on the top 25.

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

There is no better conference right now in college football than the MAC
--Tony Kornheiser, Pardon the Interruption, Sept. 22, 2003

On one of the too many days I spent in the BG News newsroom, the college football schedule came out. It included the unlikely matchup of Nebraska (then in its Tom Osborne-led heyday) and Akron, and prompted one of my colleagues at the time to ask, “Has any Division I team ever scored 100 points in a game?”

Oh, how times have changed. Major schools are no longer looking past those early-season non-conference opponents, particularly if they’re in the Mid-American Conference, and MAC schools are no longer just taking a payday for a butt-kicking.

The irony in all of this, though, is that every MAC victory this year – including this past fantastic weekend, which saw Toledo and Marshall upset Top-10 opponents, and Northern Illinois move into the Top 25 in both the Associated Press and ESPN polls after beating Alabama – is even less meaningful than it might have been had it occurred while I was in college.

In 1998, six major conferences – The Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten, Pacific-10 and Southeastern Conferences – combined (or colluded, depending on how you look at it) to form the Bowl Championship Series with the University of Notre Dame, which is its own entity. The BCS was offered as a solution for college football, where the top two teams could play for a national championship.

However, teams in other conferences, such as the MAC, are shut out in theory and in practice from the hint of a national championship. Apparently, the powers that be in college football decided that they liked the competitive imbalance of baseball, and wanted to be a part of it. BCS-conference schools get $85 million. The rest get $5 million annually, according to The Associated Press.

Once upon a time, major colleges (i.e. the ones that regularly appear in Top 25 polls) used the beginning of the season to tune up for the conference season, and smaller conferences enjoyed the brief glare of a national spotlight and a hefty payoff (for Bowling Green’s 1997 game against Ohio State, the Falcon athletic department took home $250,000).

But scholarships to big schools have decreased, and top talent can go to places like Bowling Green or Toledo. And the Falcons, in the ebb and flow of most college programs, have put some good teams on the field lately. They beat Missouri and Northwestern in 2001, Kansas and Misouri (again) last year, and Purdue - which was ranked No. 16 at the time, this year. They kept it close against Ohio State on Saturday, but really, who hasn’t lately?

And now, representatives of smaller conferences – most notably Scott Cowen of Tulane University – are calling for a change. Congress recently convened hearings on the disparity in college athletics. College basketball has a playoff among 64 Division I schools, with some weight toward conferences, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Bowling Green can win a basketball championship. Unless they’re ranked within the top six in college football, they can’t even play in one of the big bowls (Sugar, Rose and Orange).

Maurice Clarett is suing the National Football League because they won’t let him play. One of the points he raises is that the NFL essentially allows college football to serve as a farm system for their players. But like a farm system, there’s division within the programs. Some coaches cut their teeth in small conferences, and then move up (Urban Meyer’s a good example, he took over at Bowling Green in 2001 and left for Utah and a $500,000 raise this season).

But if nothing else, the recent spate of upsets should make people sit up and take notice of the MAC. We can run with the big dogs, screw with their rankings, and maybe crush the Bowl Championship Series.

Not bad for a bunch of small colleges in strategically-located cornfields and cities.

Hurricane alley

Natalie Miller-Moore's first hurricane was a roller coaster ride. Here is a recap of the week that was "Isabel."

By Natalie Miller
210 west Content Editor [send email]

Isabel, she was my first.

I was excited, then nervous, then exhilarated then bored then relieved. That’s been my week, folks.

Last weekend when Isabel was declared at Category 5 Hurricane, people here in Tidewater Virginia, that’s all the areas on the Chesapeake Bay, started to flip out – mainly because we were due for a Big One. Since moving to Virginia, living near the ocean rather than on Lake Erie is something I’ve had to adjust to. There’s more seafood to try, people go fishing every weekend, and no matter what their trade, they know a lot about the tides and boating and crabpots.

And in the case of the hurricane, some people were pragmatic and some were panicked. Many people locally recalled the Ice Storm of ’98 and Hurricane Floyd, even Hurricane Camille of ’69. So most people knew what to expect and started pruning tree limbs and getting gas for their generators. Monday there were lines for bread and ice at all of the grocery stores, and toilet paper was flying off the shelves. Tuesday my boss told me I could leave to get gas or buy batteries or get things in order. All I did was get some snacks for me and Dan and the dogs, plus some batteries for our clock radio. Wednesday at work was a bit of a wash-out – we logged off our computers and put them on our desks covered with plastic, and went home for the afternoon to brace for the storm.

I taped up all four sets of windows in my apartment with duct tape, long before anyone in the complex did. And we filled our bathtub with water, not for drinking, but for flushing the toilet if the water went out. That was something new to me completely as a concept – that you could still flush with no running water.

We watched the news and waited, Wednesday night was uneventful. When I got up the next morning, it was gray and rainy outside, but didn’t look too bad. Dan and I set about rearranging our spare room, a project we’d been meaning to do for a while. Just after we finished putting the furniture in place, we lost our power – it was about 1 in the afternoon, so we still had some daylight. But I was surprised we had lost it so soon, since Isabel wasn’t supposed to arrive for a few hours yet.

But when she did, there were thrashing trees outside and loud wind and torrential rain. It was good to be watching from inside. My dogs looked alarmed at the noise, and probably wondered why the heck we didn’t turn the lights on. So we played checkers by candlelight after a supper of garlic bread and tea – being stuck inside wasn’t working up much of an appetite. The solitude of our apartment was really getting to me, so we went to see what our neighbors were up to.

They had crammed about 8 people into their living room for a lively get-together of college-era drinking games. (The obvious impetus? Got to drink the beer before it gets warm!) Their apartment and their style of dealing with the storm differed from ours, in that we had “battened down the hatches” and they had opened all the windows and doors for ventilation. (Numerous fan jokes were told, such as “Why don’t we turn on a fan?”)

And, although I hung out with these neighbors occasionally, this was a very interesting camaraderie that night – as Gabe wisely said to someone who was complaining about the game of cards taking a long time “We ain’t going anywhere, everything’s closed, so chill out!” One of the lessons of the hurricane is that you can’t go anywhere, so deal with where you are and what your situation is.

Another thing that became apparent after the storm was that even when it was over, we still weren’t going anywhere. Our workplaces were closed, and nowhere had any power – not 7-11, not the streetlights, not the library, the bank or any stores. And everyone was trying to conserve gas. So, it was a chance to hang out with the neighbors outside in the parking lot courtyard, to get some things done around the house and read. Now, people are diehard when it comes to habits – I did it and lots of other people did too – turned on light switches, got ready to do the laundry, got out the vacuum or turned on the garbage disposal. Instead, I remembered that a broom works nearly as well on my all-hardwood floors, and that the laundry would have to wait.

One nice thing about the aftermath was that it makes you get a little creative – Dan and I got a picnic set in a backpack for our wedding, which is very fun, but we’d only used it once, so we cooked our food on our gas stove and took it outside. It was a fun thing that I doubt we’d think of doing most any other time… and that night the stars were amazingly clear to see because there were no lights.

So Day 3 with no power began to be a little much – Dan got to go into work at Colonial Williamsburg, because of course that’s one place that knows how to do things the old-fashioned way. I stayed home and worked on my book, a 1,000 pager about the history of Salisbury, England from ancient times until modern. So that was the right speed for the way things were going – it reminded me that electricity is a fairly recent invention. And I began to see that I was motivated to get up a little earlier to get stuff done rather than try to do it in the dark. Cooking by candlelight or flossing by flashlight can be tough. And that night everyone was back out in the parking lot, listening to their car stereos, drinking and carrying on. But we were ready for the lights to come back, the novelty was about to lose its luster.

And Sunday, I got to go drive through town. It was a bit of a shock because Virginia has beautiful wooded areas, shade and huge hundred year old trees. Unfortunately, that which is a blessing most times is a curse in a storm as bad as Isabel. I was on my way to church, and I was blocked by fallen trees and power lines at more than one route. And every tree that had fallen was huge, and brought many surrounding trees down with it. Some houses couldn’t be seen from the road anymore.

And when I got to church, it seemed like a country church with everyone bringing tales from their ends of town, reporting on how they had fared during the storm. The service was changed to let people speak about their experience and what they had learned and what they were grateful for. Some people said that they had learned something about their own resourcefulness, or realized how much water or electricity they had been wasting or how lucky we are that it wasn’t a worse storm.

There were some great stories of people pulling together, too, having a neighborhood grill party before the meat spoiled, and lending a hand with raking leaves and branches. Some people met their neighbors for the first time – I guess it’s something when people don’t have time to meet or talk until a disaster. I spent more time with my next door neighbors than I ever had, but found they’ll be moving out next month.

I had a great chat with a woman at the weekly farmer’s market about what had happened in her neighborhood and how to tell the freshest corn, but that was tempered by the poor people at Baskin-Robbins carting out their giant melted containers of 31 flavors to the dumpster. I also attended an art show at the community center. The weather after the hurricane was gorgeous and sunny, so the place was naturally well-lit. It was a great chance to appreciate beauty after the storm.

The loss of electricity is a reflection on how modern life has changed so much that we really feel a loss of our daily lives. Loss of power really is that – you’ve got to go back to the simpler ways of doing things – of communicating in person rather than by phone or email and entertaining yourself rather than sitting in front of your electronic medium of choice. The storm will change things around town, no doubt, because many of the great trees that keep this town beautiful will be absent. And many homes in the outlying areas have been flooded or crashed into by trees, so life has really changed for hundreds of people in just a few days.

When our power went back on Sunday, and it really made me more appreciative of simple things like traffic lights. Because although non-working lights are supposed to indicate a four-way stop, not many people seemed to follow that. The roads and intersections in the old town of Williamsburg are confusing enough with their one ways and yields, it was a little scary when people were left to their own driving devices.

So now I’m sitting at my computer at home, in the lamplight, writing about the past few days. I learned that you should follow advice from people who’ve been through this before, and get a full tank of gas and plenty of bottled water. Meet your neighbors whenever you can. Have fun when you can, despite the situation. There’s a silver lining to that dark cloud named Isabel.

Spectacle, indeed

Todd Merriman looks back at John Carpenter's "They Live," featuring special sunglasses, super yuppies from outer space, and unabashedly-drawn-out fight scenes.

They Live
Rated R
Starring: Roddy Piper, Keith David and Meg Foster
Directed by: John Carpenter
95 minutes

The year was 1988. Ronnie was in the White House. Downsizing was all the rage. The gap between rich and poor was widening. And “They Live” hit the nation’s theaters.

“They Live” is the story of homeless man John Nada, played by wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Though he’s down on his luck, Nada doesn’t give in to bitterness or blame anyone else for his troubles. He doesn’t share his fellow bum Frank’s view that everyone is only out for him or herself. Unlike Frank, he has no desire to “take a sledgehammer to one of those fancy fucking foreign cars.” He has hope that a hard day’s work will make him successful in life.

“I believe in America,” he explains to Frank, played by Keith David. “I follow the rules. Everybody’s got their own hard times these days.”

At least, that’s his attitude until he finds a box of special sunglasses.

Then he sees that the earth is run by a race of skull-faced super yuppies from outer space. The aliens narcotize earthlings through, natch, television, broadcasting a signal that camouflages them, making them appear as ordinary humans. When revolutionaries disrupt the alien broadcasts to tell the truth, interrupting the endless stream of ads and mindless programming, viewers get headaches. Kind of like when you try to watch Free Speech TV on your satellite dish.

The revolutionaries also made the sunglasses, and coincidentally, run the mission where Nada and Frank are staying.

Anyone who puts the glasses on no longer sees what the aliens want them to see, but what’s really there. The subliminal messages come straight to the surface. To the naked eye, a billboard appears to advertise a computer. Viewed with the glasses, it really says, “Obey.” Magazines actually say things like, “No independent thought,” “Consume,” “Submit,” “Watch TV.” A billboard ad for a Caribbean getaway featuring a bikini-clad woman really says, “Marry and reproduce.” Dollar bills say, “This is your god.”

“They Live” is a populist, satirical sci-fi allegory on mass media manipulation, rampant consumerism, and the consequences of blind greed over compassion for one’s fellow man.

But that’s not why I like it.

I like it because once Nada puts on the sunglasses he gets pissed off and starts shooting.

I like it because he walks into a bank, shotgun in hand, and says, “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubble gum.”

I like it because Nada and Frank have a fistfight that lasts 5 minutes and 21 seconds, just because Frank doesn’t want to try on the sunglasses. It’s refreshing to watch because it’s almost nothing like any fight scene in any recent action film. No musical accompaniment. No flashy effects. No one flying around with the assistance of hidden cables.

It’s just 5 minutes and 21 seconds of two guys beating the shit out of each other in an alley. ‘Rassler Roddy even slams his opponent to the pavement in a suplex. Not that he comes away unharmed. Frank gives him six seconds worth of repeated knee-to-the-nasties.

The scene is so endearing that South Park mimicked it in an episode where handicapped Timmy and Jimmy get in a fight.

Frank throws a punch, and 5 minutes, 21 seconds, later Nada forces the sunglasses onto his face. Then the two men join up with the revolutionaries, only to find that after all that fuss over sunglasses, the underground has manufactured some contact lenses that do the same thing. But they obviously can’t make enough contact lenses for all humanity, so Frank and Nada find themselves, armed with machine guns and grenades, on a mission to destroy the source of the alien’s signal.

And if I keep talking, I’ll give away the ending. Suffice it to say, this is a cool movie. I give it 5 beers out of a six-pack.

You gotta have goals

Dan Nied is doing his damnedest to maintain some sort of Detroit Pride, even in the face of unbelievable Tigers losses. But, he says, there's hope. Kinda.

By Dan Nied [send email]

Around the middle of May it became a foregone conclusion the Detroit Tigers would lose every one of their remaining games this season.

By that point it was clear that the Tigers were the Muhamed Ali’s of losing.

To this point they’ve done it 113 times, often in a unique and amazing fashion.

My personal favorite came last week when pitcher Nate Cornejo blanked the Toronto Blue Jays for nine innings in what should have been a complete game shutout. The only problem is the Tigers didn’t score a run and lost 1-0 in the 10th when Cornejo finally broke.

Then there was that Cleveland night in the spring when Carlos Pena hit four home runs and the Tigers still lost 10-9.

We haven’t seen breakdowns like this since Anne Heche got dumped by Ellen.

As the resident Tigers fan at 210 West, I feel it is my duty to let you know that while the Tigers really are this bad, all hope is not lost in Detroit.

Look, we’ve had bad baseball for the last decade. It had been so bad that I have actually started to lose some love for the Tigers. Where there was no other game (besides the Pistons maybe) in town in the early 1990s, now I find I have to be fascinated by the WNBA championship winning Detroit Shock in order to feel any September pride. (By the way, GO SHOCK!)

But is that a sliver of light I see at the end of this dark delusional tunnel? Well, maybe just a tiny bit.

Hey, third baseman Eric Munson played like a major leaguer this year, which is more than I can say about middle infielders Omar Infante and Ramon Santiago, who were supposed to be the second coming of Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker.

Pena had a few good games, which didn’t really outweigh his bad ones. He had a little trouble handling the numerous defensive burdens of first base, such as catching the ball and fielding soft grounders. But he’ll end up with a fair average around .260 and challenging the 20 home-run mark.

Outfielder Craig Monroe looked dangerous in the on deck circle, if not in the actual batters box.

And lets not forget all-star Dmitri Young, who, if he isn’t traded for a new bat rack and a jug of Gatorade, will soon become “perennial all-star Dmitri Young." Young was streakier than a drunk hippie at the Oscars. When he was hot he hit .450; when he was cold he hit .150. It will all even out to a tolerable .290 average and close to 30 dingers.

And lets not forget that powerhouse pitching staff.

While Mike Maroth is already 20 losses deep and Jeremy Bonderman is unquestionably going to get there, neither has pitched particularly bad this season. Think about the fact that if you can stay in the rotation long enough to get 20 losses you must be doing something right. Bonderman is a 20-year old wunderkind who honestly could be dominant one day. Maroth could turn into a solid third or fourth starter.

Cornejo, who, in my favorite Tiger fun fact, can’t grow hair anywhere on his body, has been downright tolerable at times. He could wind up being a solid two starter.

So, you could say things are looking up in Tiger world. Once these players hit their prime, Detroit will be no worse than a third-place team in the American League Central. That’s right, at the end of the Tigers' current five-year plan they should overtake the Cleveland Indians.

While those kinds of results are far off right now. You know, you gotta have goals.

Dazed and confused

Vince Guerrieri was convinced the California Recall couldn't get any stranger. He notes how wrong he was.

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

Just when you thought the California recall couldn’t get any weirder…

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the same people who brought you the ruling that “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance) halted the recall of Gov. Gray Davis, originally set for Oct. 7. The court ruled that punch-card ballots could lead to disenfranchisement, citing the 2000 presidential election ruling that stopped the recount.

So, to recap, a Supreme Court ruling that was used to halt a recount and give a presidential election to a Republican, has stopped another power grab by the Republicans. Ain’t karma great?

The court suggested that the election be held during the state’s March primary next year, which is also a presidential primary year. So theoretically, a registered Democrat could walk into a voting booth next March and see 10 candidates for president and 135 candidates for governor.

That type of choice is exactly what American politics needs, but the machinations that led to the gubernatorial recall is just the type of dirty dealing that makes young people today (and more than a few old people) sick of politics.

It takes 12 percent of the people who voted in the last governor’s election to put a recall on the ballot. In this case, 897,158 registered voters (not necessarily people who voted in the last election) could put the recall on the ballot. California has nearly 34 million residents. Less than 3 percent of California residents signed a petition supporting the expenditure of more than $50 million for a recall called for by people who are pissed off about a $35 billion deficit! So let’s spend more money to vote out the governor!

The recall was the pet project of U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, who started it within weeks of Gray Davis being sworn in for his second term as governor. Issa spent $1.7 million to gather enough signatures to put the recall on the ballot, and then announced – surprise! – that he was going to run for governor in the recall election!

But Issa dropped out of the race, as did Bill Simon, who lost last year to Davis, and former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth, all Republicans. They’re clearing the way for Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is emerging as the front-runner among Republicans.

Basically, anyone with 65 signatures and $3,500 could get their name on the ballot for the recall election, whenever the hell that’ll be. And more than 250 candidates tried. A total of 135 candidates will appear on the ballot.

Some people suggest that there are too many choices for governor. I think there are enough. There are current more varieties of Coca-Cola on the market than I can count on my hands. But every spring and every November, we’re expected to choose between a Democrat or a Republican. Occasionally, there’s an independent, but they’re not taken seriously enough by enough people to pose a real threat. So with 135 candidates, the American Dream that anyone can grow up and be elected to office is a little closer to reality.

But this is all academic now, since the election might not be held until next year. It’s also weird enough to sell tickets.

Hey, now there’s a way to clear up the state debt! Embrace it as the spectator sport that it is, and sell tickets! Peter Ueberroth could do it. He’s got some time on his hands now!

An upset? Not really.

Dan Nied was celebrating last Saturday, but not becasue his Alma Mater beat a ranked team. He expected that.

By Dan Nied [send email]

I heard it all over the place Last Monday morning.

“You guys must have been celebrating all night Saturday after that big win,”

Well, yeah. But not really.

I did celebrate Saturday after the Bowling Green football team’s 27-26 “upset” of No. 16 Purdue Sept. 6, but not because of the game.

No, I was celebrating because my friend Cameron was married that day in Findlay, Ohio, not because my alma mater had just beaten a ranked team for the first time in about 50 years.

It’s not that I wasn’t pumped about BG’s win (Oh believe me I was, after the wedding my friends and I stood in our hotel’s parking lot listening to the game on a car stereo, singing the unofficial BG fight song, Ay Ziggy Zoomba with every first down. Not a bad way to spend a post-wedding Saturday afternoon.) It was just that I did not think this ranked as the amazing upset everyone else did.

I wasn’t shocked that the Falcons burned Purdue, badly outgaining the Boilermakers in a game that shouldn’t have been decided by less than a touchdown.

Before graduating in the summer of 2002, I had covered this Bowling Green football team for four years at BG’s student paper. Last season I made it to nearly every home game, including a few that I was able to cover for various publications. I knew this team’s resolve and I knew how good it was.

I knew that Bowling Green might be the most underrated team in the country and that quarterback Josh Harris was a Heisman Trophy candidate weather anyone had heard of him or not (Harris, who sliced up Perdue’s secondary for 357 yards, is absolutely the most electrifying athlete I have ever covered. He is a poor man’s Mike Vick who can single handedly take over a game with a cannon arm and flubber-like legs.)

I watched Bowling Green play last season as the 16th ranked team in the country. So why would Purdue - a team ranked 16th in the preseason polls, who had not yet played, going through the motions in a game they most likely added on to the schedule circa 1999 when BG was 2-9 - scare me? The Falcons were 5-0 against BCS conference schools in the past two seasons.

This was an upset, but it wasn’t the second coming. People seemed to forget that BG was ranked for a while last year and still have their lethal weapon, “J5”, Josh Harris.

So while we were singing Ay Ziggy Zoomba at the wedding in front of 100 people who did not understand, I was thinking about the real upset to come.

BG’s got Ohio State this week.

I’ll celebrate then.

'This is our Pearl Harbor'

At the second anniversary of 9/11, America's young people are still reeling.

We have not forgotten; we will not forget. Today we close our eyes and step back two years, to that morning we cannot put to rest.

STORIES

Two years after that horrible day, Vince Guerrieri figures we're all going to be OK, after all.

Mary Beth Eastman can't remember where she was when the planes struck the World Trade Center; she was unconscious. Sometimes strange things happen, and sometimes strange things happen for a reason.

The full impact of Sept. 11th's events didn't hit Dan Nied until two weeks after they occurred -- and then it knocked him flat.

Natalie Miller-Moore wonders: After seeing how strong we became together, where is this unifying force going to take us?

Chuck Soder remembers the moment the weight of Sept. 11, 2001, hit him: His buddy Brent, king of the tasteless joke, could find nothing funny in what had happened that day.

Zach Baker recalls the blur and surrealism of that morning.

The Desperado Under the Eave: A Tribute to Warren Zevon: 1947-2003

With the recent news of Warren Zevon’s death, Erik Pepple offers a remembrance of one America’s finest songwriters.

By Erik Pepple
210 west Pop Culture Editor [send email]

A few years ago in the midst of one of the innumerable alcohol-fueled discussions of mid-college life, a friend of mine posed the question: When was the moment you realized you had good taste in music?

It’s a good question, especially among a group of people who either worked in college radio or could claim to have dropped entire paychecks on imports from the likes of Pavement. More than that, it’s the kind of query designed to trigger a debate of aesthetic superiority, which are some of the best debates you can have when you are drunk and stink of a college radio booth.

Most of the answers were obvious, seeing as we were the generation that came of age when Nirvana broke and 120 Minutes was still in heavy rotation, there were answers like: Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Frank Black, Michael Stipe, Fugazi, and so on. Good answers all, but mine was always Warren Zevon. And while I never got the chance to offer him up -- we became distracted by an infomercial -- Zevon was/is my Lennon and McCartney, my first Fugazi show; he’s the guy who showed me pop and rock and roll could be smart, witty, morbid, literary and cynical while done with grace. He was ample proof that music could mean something, even if it just wanted you to tap your feet.

Despite a record collection dotted with Elvis Costello, Lyle Lovett, Peter Gabriel, Nirvana and minor childhood fascinations with the Beach Boys and the Beatles, it took a performance of “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” by Zevon on Late Night with David Letterman to tie together all the loose ends.

After hearing the scabrous epic about mercenaries, I immediately picked up Learning to Flinch, Zevon’s astonishing live record from 1993. From this point on it became a resolute need to get all of his records. And whether or not it was the fact that his writing brought to mind Hunter Thompson or was consumed with death (two fascinations of mine in junior high), it pointed me to the direction of a foremost satirist. Zevon was a chronicler of the ugly, the brokenhearted, the disillusioned and the miserable and he did it without an air of self-pity or angst; he was a reporter and this is what he saw. To me, it was my stepping-stone to punk rock (sounds weird, I know). It was music about a general unease with society and not knowing where to go or what to do; and the fact it was dressed up in anger and slashing cynicism made it all the more intriguing.

It is clear that Zevon, much of the time, was writing about what he knew -- the drugs, loveless sex, dying -- and that personal touch made it all the more wrenching. But the fundamental beauty of his best songs (“The Indifference of Heaven,” “Mr. Bad Example,” “Splendid Isolation,” “Desperadoes Under the Eaves,” “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” “Don’t Let us Get Sick”) is the heart that beats beneath the carapace of sarcasm and sardonic wit, it’s the sneer that really wants to smile, but won’t until it can do it on its own terms. It’s Zevon’s greatest gift; his way with words was such that for any amount of anger or measure of regret, he could package it in a way where the soul shone through.

While Zevon’s name will be known to most for his mid-70’s novelty smash, “Werewolves of London,” his work will always retain the patina of neglected genius to those who loved his music.

Zevon once told a reporter: “if you’re lucky people like something you do early on and something you do just before you drop dead. That’s as many pats on the back you should expect.” Like much of his work, this utterance is oddly prophetic; the man who attained stardom for a song about werewolves, recently saw the general public warm to his final record, The Wind (it debuted in Billboard’s top 20, heretofore unheard of for a Zevon disc). As one of the finest, most articulate songwriters of his generation, Zevon has gotten his pats on the back from the press, and on a personal level he served as my doorway to everything from Elvis Costello to Guided by Voices, and for that he will always be remembered.

ESSENTIAL ZEVON

Warren Zevon: His sophomore record, is one of his best. A slickly produced document of mid- to late-1970’s Los Angeles. Songs about outlaws, pimps, drunks, desperadoes and whores form the backbone of much of Zevon’s work and Jackson Browne’s production is so clean you could snort coke off of it (which probably occurred during these sessions). It’s the cynicism-coated bitter pill of a musician who worked as a session man for the Everly Brothers and songwriter for the Turtles and now had a chance to show the world what he could do. It’s a sardonic work of heartfelt genius .
Choice cuts: “Hasten Down the Wind,” “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” “Mohammed’s Radio,” “Desperadoes Under the Eaves”

Excitable Boy: The first record to thrust Zevon into the spotlight thanks to the hit single “Werewolves of London.” There’s some pop radio filler here, but on the whole this is a delightfully morbid piece of pop songwriting.
Choice cuts: “Excitable Boy,” “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” “Accidentally like a Martyr,” “Lawyers, Guns and Money”

Sentimental Hygiene: With members of R.E.M. backing him up, Hygiene is Zevon’s first album of material after a stint in rehab. His years of rock star excess result in one of the strongest records of his career. Continuing his stories of boxers, con men, duplicitous dames and alcohol, this is a ragged masterwork. Featuring guest appearances by Bob Dylan, Neil Young and George Clinton.
Choice Cuts: “Detox Mansion,” “Boom Boom Mancini,” “Leave my Monkey Alone.”

Learning to Flinch: Along with Rhino Records’ best-of compilation, this is the best bet for anyone who wants an intro to Zevon’s work. This is one of the best live albums in the history of rock and roll. Jagged and angry and ultimately hopeful, this showcases his songs in the best possible light-stripped down and delivered with furious virtuosity.
Choice cuts: “Splendid Isolation,” “Mr. Bad Example,” “Worrier King,” “The Vast Indifference of Heaven,” “Searching for a Heart”

Life’ll Kill Ya: Zevon’s prophetically titled 2000 release. This is a raw, bluesy workout that boasts surreal tunes about Elvis Presley, a worldly, heartbreaking version of Steve Winwood’s late 80’s hit, “Back in the High Life Again” and the dark humored dirge of depression, “My Shit’s Fucked Up.” A late career masterpiece.
Choice cuts: “I Was in the House When the House Burned Down,” “Life’ll Kill Ya,” “Back in the High Life Again,” “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” “Don’t Let Us Get Sick.”