Wild Pitch Of The Year

That's a title THC didn't think he would be using.  It happened last night when the Milwaukee Brewers had the bases loaded in a game with the Colorado Rockies and all three runners scored on a wild pitch.  You can see it at mlb.com.  The final run is particularly entertaining. (Found via Althouse)

Throw Of The Year

. . . at least so far.  June 10; The Athletics playing the Angels with the score tied 1-1 in the 8th inning.  Howie Kendrick is on first base with Mike Trout at the plate.  Trout laces a liner to left field.  The left fielder is Yoenis Cespedes who threw out two Angels on the basepaths the night before.  The ball initially looks like it will fall in for a single with the fast Kendrick getting to third but it glances off the glove of Cespedes and heads towards the left field corner.  Kendrick decides to go home.  Cespedes grabs the ball and makes a high arcing 310 foot throw which nails Howie at the plate.
(from veooz.com)
Go to the link and watch the entire play and the replays from different angles and also notice that the Athletics catcher Derek Norris barely has to move to catch the ball and make the tag.

The next night, Cespedes had another ball glance off his glove and threw out Albert Pujols at third base. 

Mokita

Mokita is THC's favorite new word.  According to Wikipedia, Mokita is from the Kivila language of Papua New Guinea and means:

"truth we all know but agree not to talk about"

Of course, since Wikipedia is the source this could all be urban legend but as always, when in doubt, we fall back on the Official Blog Policy.

The concept of "truth we all know but agree not to talk about" has both positive and negative aspects.  On a personal and larger societal basis it can help keep the peace.  It's hard enough holding relationships, communities and nations together - relentlessly picking at Truth can make it harder to coexist.  It can also, when deployed on a large scale, make needed communication impossible, prevent the resolution of important issues and destroy the trust upon which relationships and societies rely.  The trick is distinguishing between the two.

The Times Is At It Again

In I Thought Rose Mary Woods Had Retired and It's Special Prosecutor Time, I mentioned the role of the New York Times in suppressing stories potentially damaging to the progressive narrative.  As the house organ of the Democratic Party the Times also plays a pivotal role in creating and promoting stories that it believes will harm the enemies of progressives.

Yesterday's New York Times contains a front page article entitled Wisconsin Governor at Center of a Vast Fund Raising Case (at least they didn't call it A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy!) with this lead paragraph:

Prosecutors in Wisconsin assert that Gov. Scott Walker was part of an elaborate effort to illegally coordinate fund-raising and spending between his campaign and conservative groups during efforts to recall him and several state senators two years ago, according to court filings unsealed Thursday.

  (Target of Vast Left Wing Conspiracy)

You may recall that Governor Walker is #1 on the progressive hit list for his successful push to enact legislation allowing Wisconsin school districts to buy health insurance for their teachers and administrators from a source other than the insurer run by the state's teachers union.  The creation of competition to the union's insurer resulted in lower insurance premiums for school districts (and employees) and in some instances, the districts used those savings to hire additional teachers.  However, it meant that for union leaders a lucrative revenue source was diminished and, among other things, posing a potential threat to their ability to recycle premiums into campaign donations for Democratic politicians, triggering continued attempts to unseat the governor.

If you read the beginning of the Times story you will think that this is an active investigation since it reads that "Prosecutors . . . assert".  This is simply false and an alert reader, reading between the lines of the rest of the story will become aware something is wrong though the Times reporters seem to be desperately trying to make it difficult to discern this.

What actually happened is this.  After failed Democratic recalls and attempts to take over the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in 2012 a group of Democratic district attorneys in Wisconsin decided to undertake a "fishing expedition" and initiated a "John Doe" investigation to try to find evidence that conservative groups illegally coordinated activities during the recall election, figuring that even if they couldn't build a case they could at least intimidate these groups in the future. They issued 100 subpoenas to obtain records, including personal confidential information and conducted secret raids.  And, under state law, those targeted or witnesses to the action were forbidden to publicly speak of them.  [For a description of one of the raids and the gag order placed on targets and witnesses see the NOTE at the bottom of this post].

However, earlier this year a state court judge quashed the subpoenas finding:

“the subpoenas do not show probable cause that the moving parties committed any violations of the campaign finance laws.”

Then, in February some of the groups targeted for persecution by the prosecutors filed a civil rights lawsuit in Federal Court and the court quickly concluded that the plaintiffs:

"are likely to succeed on their claim that the defendants‘ investigation violates their rights under the First Amendment, such that the investigation was commenced and conducted ―without a reasonable expectation of obtaining a valid conviction"

The Court ordered the John Doe investigation to stop and all seized property to be returned.  It is as part of the prosecutor's appeal of this judgement that the documents cited in the Times were released.  For full order of Judge Randa of May 6, 2014 go here:

So what has really happened is that the documents that are the subject of the Times article have been found to NOT support any legal action against the conservative groups and a Federal District Court has concluded that these groups "are likely to succeed on their claim that the defendants' investigation violations their rights under the First Amendment".  If the situation were reversed and this involved Republican prosecutors we all know the Times would be running a story (fully justified, I should add) about how conservatives were politicizing the justice system.

This story is actually part of a larger story about how progressives are "weaponizing" campaign finance laws, whether via the IRS or federal and state prosecutors, to shut down and intimidate any opposition to their political agenda.   


NOTE:  From Judge Randa's May 6 Order:

Early in the morning of October 3, 2013, armed officers raided the homes of R.J. Johnson, WCFG advisor Deborah Jordahl, and several other targets across the state. ECF No. 5-15, O‘Keefe Declaration, ¶ 46. Sheriff deputy vehicles used bright floodlights to illuminate the targets‘ homes. Deputies executed the search warrants, seizing business papers, computer equipment, phones, and other devices, while their targets were restrained under police supervision and denied the ability to contact their attorneys. Among the materials seized were many of the Club‘s records that were in the possession of Ms. Jordahl and Mr. Johnson. The warrants indicate that they were executed at the request of GAB investigator Dean Nickel.

On the same day, the Club‘s accountants and directors, including O‘Keefe, received subpoenas demanding that they turn over more or less all of the Club‘s records from March 1, 2009 to the present. The subpoenas indicated that their recipients were subject to a Secrecy Order, and that their contents and existence could not be disclosed other than to counsel, under penalty of perjury. The subpoenas’ list of advocacy groups indicates that all or nearly all right-of-center groups and individuals in Wisconsin who engaged in issue advocacy from 2010 to the present are targets of the investigation.

Civilian Control

A brilliant insight from Bill James at Bill James Online which is not surprising since Bill is the brilliant godfather of SABRmetrics and advisor to the Boston Red Sox.  In response to a question from a reader he writes:

I think public skepticism is fundamentally a positive and is always a positive. It seems to me that you're assuming that experts have no agenda. In most cases, in most areas, experts DO have an agenda, and what the experts tell the public is almost always filtered through their agenda. Among the great successes of America has been the universal acceptance of the concept of civilian control of the military, because the generals--while they are indeed the experts on war--always have an agenda, whether that agenda is creating a war or avoiding one. Among our greatest failings is that we have not generalized the concept so that we realize that, for the same reasons, we need civilian control of the education system, civilian control of the police, and civilian control of the legal system. If you let educators run the education system, you wind up with a system that works well for teachers and college professors. If you let lawyers run the legal system, you wind up with a system that works very well for lawyers.

Tony Gwynn

He was the friend Ted Williams asked to help him make the last throw of his life.

He faced Greg Maddux 107 times, hitting .415 and never striking out.  Maddux once explained to Tom Boswell how he used changing speeds to get batters out which worked on everyone "Except that [expletive] Tony Gwynn".

He was an artist with the bat, winning eight batting titles, hitting .338 (second highest in the last 70 years) and elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

He will forever be one of the great "what-if's" of baseball.  On August 11, 1994 he was hitting .394 when the season ended with the players' strike.  Could he have been the first man to hit .400 since his friend Ted Williams in 1941?  Tony had no doubt; here he is reflecting on that season:

He was one of three players featured in George Will's classic work, Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball.

He sounded like a California surfer dude (he grew up in Long Beach) and was one of the most respected and well liked people in baseball.  You can read one appreciation from USA Today sportswriter Bob Nightengale.  Here's an excerpt:

I loved Tony Gwynn. Who didn't?
Once you met him, you couldn't help but fall in love with him.
That infectious laugh. That perpetual smile. That warm embrace.
He was the greatest pure hitter I ever had the privilege of covering as a baseball beat writer.
He was also the greatest person I ever had the privilege of covering.

And let's hope Joe Posnanski does a piece on Tony.  Well, just went and checked again before putting this post up and found that Mr Posnanski has published his thoughts which you can read here.  It starts:

When I was very young, we went to the Cleveland Museum of Art. There, I saw a woman standing in front of a painting, and she was actually crying. I don’t recall it being a sad painting. My mother leaned down to me and whispered, “See, the painting is so beautiful, it breaks her heart and makes her cry.”
This made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
But then, I had not yet seen Tony Gwynn hit a baseball.

He played his entire 20 year career with San Diego becoming Mr Padre and, in the process, wearing some of the ugliest uniforms in the history of baseball during the 1980s.

Gone way too early at 54 from salivary gland cancer which he blamed on chewing tobacco for so many of those years.