The Zong

Does anyone remember the last time it was fun being a fan of the San Francisco Baseball Giants? Neither do I! One of the happiest memories from my childhood was the BART ride to the Oakland Coliseum to attend the 2nd game of the 1989 World Series. It was all mad excitement and people screaming and I thought I was the coolest kid in the world in my Giants hat and eye black.

Then Rick Reuschel gave up 5 runs in the first 4 innings, topped off by a 3-run jack by long-since forgotten catcher Terry Steinbach. The rest of the game was kind of blurry, as I tried to fight back tears while a full-grown man in a Raiders jersey (at a baseball game) heckled me for wearing eye-black in the bleachers and told me to take my glove off every time the Giants were up because I wouldn’t need it. He was right. I was twelve.

But everything was about to get better for Giants fan against the Angels in 2002, Up 3-2 in the series and up 5-0 in the 7th inning of game 6. I was in a sports bar in Los Angeles, joyfully screaming like an idiot at some guy wearing an Angels hat and ready for more beer when the Giants pitching staff once again heroically pissed away the hopes and dreams of a generation of loyal fans. It also prompted one of my more insensitive yet baseball-savvy friends to exclaim “That’s Giants pitching!”

So, as Jason Schmidt ponders the silence of the Giants front office, I sit and ponder what the hell the Giants are talking about when they talk about trading for Manny Ramirez. Now, I love Man-Ram’s numbers and think he’d be a great younger public relations nightmare who doesn’t run out ground balls to replace the older public relations nightmare, dead-weight, slow-footed, defensive liability that San Francisco likes to put in left field nowadays, and part of me hopes it’s all a bunch of bullshit to try and get Barry to sign with the Giants for a couple of bucks and Santa Clara 49ers season tickets. Nevertheless, unless Manny has a really ill slider that I don’t know about, I’m curious how this team is planning on improving itself without some serious arm strength.

Last season, anyone who watched the Giants play on a regular basis might have noticed a repeated, familiar series of events in each game. I believe young kids learn to refer to this kind of series as a “pattern.” The pattern had something to do with scoring one or two runs in the first three innings and then giving up four or five runs a game, many of them in the 8th and 9th inning. In fact, the Cardiac Kids of San Franistan had a team ERA of 4.58 in the final three innings last season (that’s 24th overall). In innings 1-6, the team was right in the middle of the pack, ranked 14th overall. Now, I’m not a baseball doctor, I just play one on the internet, but my diagnosis in this case is a horrible bullpen and a rotation that’s short by an arm or two.

The prescription? MORE FUCKING PITCHING!

Sorry for yelling, but it gets mighty cold during the winter meetings out here in Yerba Buena, and while I agree that I’ll probably start coughing up blood if Rich Aurilia is batting 3rd next year, the Giants and their post-break team ERA of 5.00 need to put those pitcher-finding goggles on and bring me someone better than Jamey Wright or Sidney Ponson, or at least someone who started a few games in a league that didn’t have Osama Bin Laden Bobblehead Night planned. Ever

I like some of the Giants’ young arms, and I realize that the free agent pitching market is kinda limp. Maybe Matt Cain can be the ace of the staff before he becomes a free agent and signs with the Dodgers, but unless you’ve really already given up on even fielding a team next year, Mr. Sabean, for the love of Christ please go get Barry Zito. He loves the girls out here.

Here’s a quote from your president. Try and figure out when he said it:

“We’ll continue to be flexible, and we’ll make the changes necessary to succeed,” Bush said in a speech [time and place completely inconsequential]. “But there’s one thing I’m not going to do. I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.”

Yup, he said it yesterday. (In Latvia) It’s the same old song, but with a different meaning now that we’re considering giving up on the Anbar province altogether:

Faced with that situation in al-Anbar, and the desperate need to control Iraq’s capital, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace is considering turning al-Anbar over to Iraqi security forces and moving U.S. troops from there into Baghdad.

“If we are not going to do a better job doing what we are doing out [in al-Anbar], what’s the point of having them out there?” said a senior military official.

Riddle me this: What will constitute the “completion” of our mission? Handing over entire provinces to the Iraqi security forces? That would be a great idea, if only they were ready for it. A few people in our government think that they probably aren’t, though. Neither does Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and who just returned from Iraq:

Criticizing statements about how many Iraqi army units are “in the lead,” Cordesman notes that the Iraqi army “lacks armor, heavy firepower, tactical mobility and an Iraqi Air Force capable of providing combat support” — the same points McCaffrey made yesterday.

“No administration official has presented any plan to properly equip the Iraqi forces to stand on their own or give them the necessary funding to phase out U.S. combat and air support in 12 to 18 months,” Cordesman says. He writes that the Iraqi army could need U.S. support through 2010.

So once again, how’s that mission going?

I awoke from one of several tiny comas that evidently had nothing to do with tryptophan on Friday and read a quietly somber report by the Christian Science Monitor about our marines’ withdrawal from Fallujah. Under different circumstances, this might sound like progress; as America draws down its military presence, the Iraqi forces will step in to help secure their countries future. As they stand up, we’ll stand down!

As a nation at war, it’s easy to go through the motions on Thanksgiving, to give a thought to our troops serving abroad and to salute them for serving our country, maybe mention them in a polite way over some pie. Vice President Cheney was even rumored to be in Iraq for the holiday to celebrate with the troops, and although it didn’t ever really happen, it was a nice thought by whoever leaked it. The reality, of course, is that this tiny scene from Fallujah is a truly saddening microcosm of what we’ve done to Iraq as a whole.

Here echo the conclusions of a report written by the chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in August, and first described by The Washington Post, which determined that there is little the military now can do to improve prospects in insurgent-riddled Anbar Province, which includes Fallujah.

“They say we are here to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, but I just don’t see that happening,” says Corporal Mattice, of Gladwin, Mich. OP Blazer is perched on the northern edge of the city, looking due south down a main street known to the marines as Ethan, site of numerous roadside bombs.

Giving thanks for our troops, for their unquestioning sacrifice in support of freedom and democracy, is a pretty minor gesture on the part of any politician at this point. Perhaps the proper way to give thanks for them would be to find some way to get them out of harm’s way, or at the very least to not abandon them as soon as political successes (or failures) are secured. Nevertheless, we’ve watched four Thanksgivings come and go since the invasion, and it would seem that Fallujah – an outpost that we’ve virtually destroyed through numerous attempts to control it – is once more slipping away from us. We are standing down, but for some reason, those who are about to stand up seem to be the same assholes who have been killing our troops and Iraqi civilians with bombs and sniper fire.

The 300 marines here are attacked five to eight times each day. That presence is a significant drop from the 3,000 marines posted here in March 2005, and the 10,000 that took part in the late 2004 invasion.

Another metric: Officers say the number of direct fire incidents against US forces has shot up 650 percent in the past year. Three marines had been hit by snipers in one 48-hour span earlier this week.

I wish I had a solution, but I don’t. We pay the salaries of military and intelligence experts to figure that stuff out, and if they can’t come up with any better ideas, I’m not sure that there really is one at this point. Instead, I think we should give thanks for our troops and the freedom they defend by establishing some sort of accountability and oversight in regards to how the hell we got into all this shit in the first place.

The new Democratic congress is making some noise about bucking the status quo in regards to defense contracts, energy and domestic spying. This is promising in a way, but you’ll forgive me for remaining skeptical about any real resulting change. Nobody wants to play the blame game for keeps, at least not right now. Why the hell not? Why has anyone swallowed the rationale that we need to keep fighting to honor those who were killed in a war that never should have been started in the first place? The GOP-controlled congress paid a hefty price for their unwillingness to hold anyone accountable for the deaths of our servicemen and thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians. Now the Democrats, rank and file, get to show America just how well-placed their votes were.

Since 2004, the Intelligence Committee has been promising to complete a thorough investigation, called Phase II, into how the Bush administration used intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. With Republicans dominating the committee, some of the most politically charged areas of inquiry have been delayed by Chairman Pat Roberts. The committee has released some of its work, but the broad question of whether the White House accurately and responsibly represented the information it had at the time remains unanswered. Now, the outgoing chairman no doubt wishes the committee had finished the work under better terms.

What it breaks down to, finally, is just a ballgame. Republicans vs. Democrats is the thickest rivalry in the country, and every couple of years we all have to pick a side. I’m certainly glad that the team I root for won this year, but I know most of us desperately want it to be more than just a process of hand-clapping and gloating. As it is, when I read things like the CSM article cited above, I feel like the war itself is nothing more than a political keystone for both the right and the left, and that our soldiers’ lives are being sacrificed for the sake of something to argue about. We’re certainly not winning any wars on this day. We’re only fighting them.

Like most of you, I’ve loved and lost many things in my life. Years ago, I left the most comfortable hooded sweatshirt in the Western Hemisphere on a plane after taking a redeye flight to Massachusetts in the dead of winter, and I would have wept like a baby in front of God and everybody except I was about 24 and was standing next to a cute girl at the baggage claim when I realized what I had done. I bit my lip and tried to think of the happy times, but it probably didn’t matter because I had gotten a bunch of that blue airplane toilet water on my right pant leg during the flight somehow and so I looked like a degenerate anyway. The worst part about the whole thing is that I had nobody to blame but myself, and so my misery was compounded by a sense of spectacular shame and failure.

I imagine that, standing there at the baggage claim smelling of half-assed sleep and chlorinated urine and trying desperately not to cry, I felt a lot like Eddie DeBartolo did on the day he signed away his ownership of the greatest professional football franchise in the world to his sister and her husband because he couldn’t keep his dick out of the dirt. Granted, my sweatshirt was probably worth a little less money than a football team with five Lombardi Trophies, but I think the feeling was about the same; Both of us realized the enormity of our loss, and had only to look as far as our bathroom mirrors to find the perpetrators responsible for the tragedy.

Now, almost a decade later, Niner Fan is witnessing the real reckoning wrought by Eddie D’s Scorcese-esque fall from grace. I can’t really count how many times I heard the term “Salary Cap Hell” being used to excuse the ineptitude of ownership and the discount miscreants that they hired to run the team, or how many times I’ve heard that the Niners drafted Gio Fucking Carmazzi before Tom Brady, but it’s all in the past and I realize we’ve had it pretty good here and I’ve said more than once that I really wouldn’t care if evangelical fascists owned the team as long as they beat the goddamned Arizona Cardinals once in awhile and maybe go to the playoffs again before I have to sign up to watch their games on the big T.V. in the rec room during puzzle time.

Now I realize something that’s worse than losing something I love because of something I did: Losing something I love because of something some other asshole did. Since I can’t blame myself for it, I have to direct my rage outward, because it’s just not healthy to keep things all bottled up inside when you’re angry. At this point, I’m not going to single anyone out, because I hold each one of you parsimonious aristocrat fucks responsible for all of this, but there are a couple of things in the media that recently caught my attention:

A typically slapdash report in the Chronicle cited an unnamed source who believes one reason the talks broke down was because John York felt like Mayor Gavin Newsom wasn’t as involved with the negotiations as he should have been:

The relationships — or lack thereof — may have further damaged an already troubled deal.

“He should have made sure it was rolling along properly, schmoozing with John some,” said another source who knows both men.

Newsom, however, said he did have “plenty of dinners and dozens of phone calls” over the years with York. But there were no dinners as the deal progressed this year, others countered.

I really hope that isn’t true. I hope that the Yorks aren’t leaving for Santa Clara because John York – a fully grown man, with a family and a car and everything – didn’t get to do the rich-man dance with the Mayor enough. If it is true, then I’ll start saving up to buy a platinum highchair for Dr. Johnny McPoutsberry to sit in when he wants to eat at the big kid’s table in his luxury box. Also, I’ll call the Mayor of Santa Clara to make sure he knows to schedule any dinners he plans to have around little Johnny’s nap time, because we wouldn’t want him to get all grouchy and threaten to move the team to Reseda.

I have trouble taking the report all that seriously, though, because of little qualifying nuggets like this:

Instead of being engaged in the larger issues in the deal, York busied himself with fabric samples for seats and carpet swatches for luxury boxes, the source said.

“He was a pathologist. He studied how people died,” the source said. “The trouble is, this was a live stadium development, and John’s too deathly afraid to make a mistake.”

It’s right here that I get the sneaking feeling that “the source” for this information is about as close to the Yorks as Ahmad Chalabi or my mother. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that John York paid a tailor to fashion him some pajamas and a smoking jacket from the seat and carpet samples, but trying to qualify it with the statement that he was “deathly afraid to make a mistake” is like telling me Michael Richards dropped the N-bomb on some hecklers because he was “deathly afraid that they might not enjoy the rest of his jokes.” If John York – a fully grown man – ignored the big picture while rolling around naked on alpaca carpet samples for his luxury box, it was only because he’s rich, and rich people like expensive fabrics and carpeting better than they like thinking about where the money they just spent on seats stuffed with dodo bird feathers came from.

I was there when Jerry Rice retired and the entire stadium booed. That’s right, Nise; the greatest football player of all time stood up in front of a stadium full of fans wearing his jersey, at a retirement ceremony that you paid for, and we all booed like Hitler had just walked onto the field because Jerry simply said you and your husband’s name. (I could see Eddie smiling all the way from my seat, by the way.)

I’m pretty sure you believe that John and Jed and you all know what you’re doing, but here’s a tip: Threaten to withhold whatever sexual activity the two of you still partake in next time he gets up in front of the press and tells the fans that plans to keep the team in their area code just changed because “It doesn’t pencil out.” When he says things like that, it makes me want to take a pencil and that crappy Christmas card you sent me and figure out exactly how much money my family has spent in the last thirty years on season tickets and eight-dollar stadium dogs and busted struts from driving through your parking “lots,” not to mention the arrhythmia I developed after you hired Dennis Erickson. In short, I know you hate your brother and that rough crowd he rolls with, but Niner Fan doesn’t deserve this.