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This Issue from John Kuczaj, the Chicago Media Examiner:
• Stop Yellin' & Start Gellin', Larry Yellen!
• Busting Dusty
• Musings
Stop Yellin' & Start Gellin', Larry Yellen!
Monday night on Channel 32's news, Larry Yellen had an interesting I-Fox report about a security guard at Wrigley Field (Disclosure: I work for the Tribune Company in a non-baseball division) who was allegedly violent with many fans, as 5 lawsuits were filed against him & the Cubs (4 settled). Yellen focused on the final lawsuit and the idea that the Cubs didn't really discipline this security guy-even after 4 lawsuits.
I couldn't help but laugh as the story of the aggrieved person, who apparently did absolutely nothing, and the guard started beating him. Uh-huh, right. That's believable. His lawyer talks about how a 50-year-old man isn't going to pick a fight with a 300+ lb security guard in the bleachers. That's because no one who sits in the bleachers ever becomes belligerent after a day of drinking. I'm sure he was just minding his own business, polishing his halo.
Well, the lawyer is just one of many people who have no idea what really happened there-me included. Anyway, Yellen set the story up with the implication that the Cubs let this security guy beat the crap out of people and the Cubs still let him work there. The he revealed a 1991 internal evaluation of the security guard that said he gets mad easily & could be too rough at his job. At the end of the story, we find out the guy was fired in 1999, a month after the latest incident happened. 1999! He's been gone for 4 years! What's the point here? So, over the course of 8 years, the guy had a bad evaluation & 5 incidents, with the 5th incident probably the reason he was let go. They fired his ass.
Anyone who's ever seen unruly fans at a game or a concert understands how dangerous the situation can be. Can you blame security guards who pounce too hard in order to keep order? Yes, sometimes. Did we get the story behind the other 4 incidents with this guard? No, only one other incident. Apparently the guard went nuts and slammed a guy's wife into a concrete wall. We don't hear what the incident report said, but hey, the story makes for great shock TV. Who needs a fair & balanced report when we have a sensational story, right?
My point is, when even the idiots who jumped on the field at US Cellular claim after the fact that they didn't do anything deserving punishment, you can't possibly believe one side of the story in this instance. Should a security guard be fired after every time someone complains they were roughed up? The turnover rate in security would be 100%! This I-Fox investigation comes across as a non-story to me. A lawsuit being settled is not an admission of guilt, and an employer is going to believe the story of its employee over inebriated patrons. 1999? Come on.
Busting Dusty
Dusty Baker has gotten chewed on recently, huh?
First, the Dontrelle Willis thing…while the sportswriters zeroed in on Dusty's statement that he hadn't seen him pitch, I kept thinking about what Dusty said the night the All-Star teams were announced. On ESPN, Dusty explained that when it came to the 5th starter for the team, he chose Kerry Wood because he had the 5th most votes among the players. Dontrelle was 6th. Later he said he hadn't seen Dontrelle pitch. So, why rake Dusty over the coals for that statement but ignore the 5th-6th voting criteria?
Sportswriter bullshit.
Dusty got some heat over saying that players with darker skins could handle the heat better than lighter pigmented athletes. This seemed innocuous until a sportswriter in Dallas thought we should all be aghast. Some other sportswriters researched the info and found military tests that proved this to be false. You know, I remember hearing that the military develop PCP and tested it in New York Subways. Anyway. So Baker gets criticized for a sort-of racial thing that everyone says is wrong. Except that while his rationale was wrong, it was based on a fact. The fact that through evolution, the pigmentation of human skin is in direct correlation to the amount of UV light where they live.
I found this info at an Anthropology web site:
"Nature has selected for people with darker skin in tropical latitudes, especially in non-forested regions, where ultraviolet radiation from the sun is usually the most intense. Melanin acts as a protective biological shield against ultraviolet radiation… By doing this, it helps to prevent sunburn damage that could lead to melanoma -- a cancer of the skin....People who live in far northern latitudes, where solar radiation is relatively weak most of the year, have an advantage if their skin has little shielding pigmentation. Nature selects for less melanin when ultraviolet radiation is weak. In such an environment, very dark skin is a disadvantage because it can prevent people from producing enough vitamin D3, potentially resulting in rickets disease in children and osteoporosis in adults."
Dusty made the connection that since people whose ancestors came from warmer climates & had darker skin…well, they should be able to take the Wrigley day games better than those with lighter skin. However, the truth is that too many day games are giving the white players cancer!
Musings
"Chicago The Week in Review" turned 25 last week with a nice retrospective show that aired on Friday. Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't it seem odd that Channel 11 did only a half-hour rather than a full hour retrospective, then aired a repeat episode of "The Friday Show"? Wasn't the promise of the new hour-long "Chicago Tonight": that the hour gave more flexibility in format? Maybe I heard that from someone not affiliated with Channel 11. Probably, since the Phil Ponce interview segments run 17 minutes long no matter how compelling they are. Was it really necessary to show a rerun of Bob Sirott talking with Bernie Mac when we could have seen more clips from a successful local show? I thought it was low-class to only do a half-hour and I have to wonder if it was an ego thing--that Sirott wouldn't allow a show without him contributing something (even though I think it technically happens regularly). It's bad enough that Channel 11 has pissed all over "Chicago Stories" by running irregular segments within "Chicago Tonight," I just don't understand why they didn't give "Chicago Week in Review" a full hour with which to run some cool clips. Thankfully, in the whole "Chicago Tonight" revamp, the only thing that hasn't been screwed up has been "Week in Review". I enjoy watching the show, even though Joel Weisman doesn't bother to cover up his intense hatred of the Cubs and Rod Blagojevich. It's a good show. I hope to see the 50th anniversary in 2028. Weisman will be 87.
The Pittsburgh Pirates' Randall Simon swung a bat at one of the Milwaukee Brewers' sausage mascots last week. At first, it seemed like a serious thing because Simon didn't playfully swing the bat-he swung it with force, knocking the sausage to the ground. Then we hear there was a woman in the costume. By the end of the week, when it was discovered the woman didn't feel anything, sportswriters turned it into a joke, and made the Milwaukee officials out to be killjoys for even suggesting it was assault. Take a look at that video--Simon took a healthy swing at the mascot. If that costume wasn't so well-padded, he could have hurt the person in there. I guess almost doesn't count in this case--like in horseshoes & hand grenades. Moral of the story: It's okay to hit a woman with a bat, as long as she's wearing a sausage.
The Washington Post is launching a daily commuter newspaper next month, in part to keep a competitor from coming into the market. This would be the first instance of someone doing a RedEye-like paper albeit with its own twist. Interesting.
Debra Pickett's column in Friday's Sun-Times pissed me off royally. It was about a gathering of women who would possibly be included in a database for an alleged matchmaking service. The paragraph that pissed me off was: "Women don't pay a thing to be included. They are "passive searchers," says...(the company's founder)...But men pay big bucks, from $10,000 to $30,000, to get, um, access." So, men pay the company a huge amount of money while the women get matched for free. The assumption, of course, is that if a man would pay THAT much money to find a wife, then he's got some wealth going for him. Wonderful. Golddiggers. As a single guy having not a small amount of trouble dating right now, I'll just say that this kind of superficial behavior discourages me. Okay, so back to the article. I'm all pissed at this whole concept and everything when it hits me that Pickett wrote about a scam and didn't know it! Think about it. These women are being used in order for this company to make money from gullible men. With no guarantee that the women will find a husband, who's making all the money here? You got it--the "search company." It's just like the pimp-hooker relationship only without the fur coats and huge White Cadillac! That made me feel a little better, seeing the whole process for what it is.
Velvet Jones would be proud.
NEXT WEEK
Are sportswriters more powerful than editorial writers?
IN THE CURRENT CHICAGO RED FACE:
- Another Porch Collapses, some die, "lesser tragedy" according to Police
- Study: Gamers aren't all Geeks, but all are Losers
- Bye Bye Buddy
- CDC: Epidemic of people being X'd and Punk'd in LA
- Sox: Most Alomars in the League
- JAY MERRYMAN: LeBron ain't no Leftwich
- Cool Again: Larry Wilcox
Check it out at: www.chicagoredface.com.
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