Andrus Center, Baseball

The Value of Team

Loyal readers know that I am a long-time fan of the San Francisco Giants. I’m hard pressed to identify why precisely I have been190px-San_Francisco_Giants_Logo.svg following the Giants since the days of Mays and McCovey, Marichal and Cepeda, but I have. They are my team and with the events of last night – if you missed it a 3-2 Game 7 win in the World Series – I may just make it through the winter.

There was much to like about the just completed World Series: two wild card teams playing for the big rings, a team in the Kansas City Royals who electrified their town and region and came darn close to a championship, two old school managers, some great pitching and some marvelous defense. While I’m glad my squad won, I love baseball and it was a good series to remind us again why we love the great game.

I’ve been following this Giants bunch even more closely than normal this year. The MLB app for your iPhone lets you listen to the radio broadcast of any game and I have been through all the ups and many downs of this Giants’ season, as broadcaster Jon Miller would say, “on the radio…”

My comments about the Giants are based on watching – or listening – to the evolution of a team that, let’s be honest, had little right to expect to win it all – again. Like all teams the Giants had injuries, tough breaks and a monumental losing stretch in mid-season that might have doomed many other teams. Some how this team kept scratching and winning.

World Series - Kansas City Royals v San Francisco Giants - Game FiveI have absolutely nothing original to say about Madison Bumgarner’s historic pitching performance in Game 7 and I’ll leave it to others to proclaim the franchise located South of Market as “a dynasty.” My thoughts on this first day until pitchers and catchers report turn to that one word: team.

In a game that seems fixated most of the time on individual performance: earned run averages, batting averages, on base percentages and some of the new metrics I can’t explain to my wife, I love that the new World Champions really seem like a team in a game that often celebrates the individual.

Taking nothing from the World Series MVP, who will be mentioned all his days for his 2014 Series performance, I revel in the small things that teams do that make for success. A young second baseman who few had heard of in August turns a spectacular double play at a pivotal moment. A defensive left fielder not hitting much above his weight makes a key catch. A wacky journeyman DH with enough hair and tattoos to star in a Harley commercial understands that his role as a teammate is to hit a fly ball to the outfield that scores a run and later take an outside pitch to right field to score another. An even wackier right fielder – what is with those Hunter Pencepants Hunter Pence – brings a head-long infectious enthusiasm, not to mention intensity, to everything he does and you can’t escape the fact that it rubs off on his locker room pals.

During one sweet moment in the game the camera caught Bumgarner in, what for him, was an unusual spot – siting in the bullpen between a couple of his relief pitching teammates. Starting pitchers don’t sit in the bullpen very often – maybe only in the World Series – and Bumgarner was there, of course, to do precisely what he ended up doing in the World Series. But before any of that, the star ace put his arm around the guy to his left, I think it was relief specialist Jean Machi, and just kind of casually patted him on the back. It didn’t appear that words were exchanged, just a knowing pat on the back of a teammate. It was non-verbal communication that said more than words, including that we’re in this together – the biggest big game pitcher and the guy they send in to get one out and then send to the shower.

I’m as cynical as the next guy about the big salaries and the even bigger egos in professional sports and I hesitate to make too much of isolated gestures and small, even routine events, but I think I detect in the San Francisco Giants what every corporate manager or Marine Corps platoon leader strives to create and sustain: teamwork. Teams need leaders, of course, and the Giants have their share – Manager Bruce Bochy, catcher Buster Posey and the wacky and wonderful Hunter Pence. But all leaders know you can’t lead well if your team doesn’t first want to be a team and doesn’t understand the power involved in being good teammates. Being part of a good team covers a multitude of individual shortcomings and that, I think, is why the Giants went all the way.

From the office conference room to the neighborhood Little League there is absolutely no substitute for team. A few good teammates can make the best player look and be even better. Unless your game is chess, we all need teammates. It makes the game more fun and enhances dramatically the chances that you will win all the marbles. Just ask the World Champion San Francisco Giants.

2014 Election, Tamarack

An Election About…

One of the tightest gubernatorial races in the country is unfolding in Wisconsin where I’ve spent the last several days. The yard signs are as thick as the autumn leaves and, while the outcome of the National League Championship Series was most appealing – my favorites won – the inane television commercials from incumbent Gov. Scott Walker and his challenger Mary Burke made me long to26446948.sf get back to Joe Buck’s inane play-by-play.

The race here has come down to whether Walker’s policies favor the “wealthy” or whether Burke is just another liberal Democrat. I’d say “yes” and “probably,” although neither label says much about what the candidates would do about Wisconsin’s crumbling highway infrastructure or rapidly rising college tuition. The race has also featured ethics complaints, an old email about Burke, and charges of plagiarism, which has become the new communism in American politics. But, hey, it’s a dead heat!

Meanwhile, in wacky Florida, a little fan – not that kind of fan – starred in the most recent gubernatorial debate. I’m old enough to remember Ronald Reagan grabbing a microphone in New Hampshire and saying something about how he bought the darn thing. I wanted XXX cbs4fanphotoCharlie Crist to tell Gov. Rick Scott the same. “Gov. Scott, I bought this fan…” At least we know how Crist stays so crisp in hot, muggy Florida. I’m left to wonder if carrying a little portable fan with you everywhere you go is a sign of intelligence or, well, something else. Right now put me down as leaning toward the fan.

Back in the great Northwest, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has a gender gap problem. In the reverse of most candidates, Kitzhaber needs a gap. He needs to put some space between himself and his fiance who has been serving as Oregon’s First Lady, while also being the Wife-in-Waiting and a private consultant on the side with, ahem, particular access to the top levels of state government. Here come the conflict of interest allegations that, even if Kitzhaber wins a fourth term, will play out for many months. It’s complicated, but so is Oregon. Kitzhaber’s opponent is a hard right state legislator who normally wouldn’t be caught dead in Portland’s chic and lefty Pearl District – and won’t get many votes there – and is therefore unlikely to beat the beat up governor, but stranger things have happened. For the most part other issues important to Oregon are now floating down the Columbia. Roll on…

In Idaho, a hard right governor is in trouble with his own party for a variety of reasons, including new revelations that his staff negotiated the fine points of a controversial settlement with the state’s former private prison operator who has been a major contributor to the governor’s campaigns. On at least two recent occasions the governor has said he knew nothing, nothing about the deal his top staffers helped create.

Governors, of course, arechrischristie_ap_img expected to know everything until they don’t know anything. Paging John Kitzhaber! Is Chris Christie in the house? Andrew Cuomo…paging Andrew Cuomo! Governor, any insight into neutering your own state ethics commission?

Let’s call it the silence of the lames.

A remarkable feature of the Idaho election this year is that several dominate party Republicans candidates – I’m not even counting Gov. Butch Otter – are remarkable for the simple fact that they are so clearly inappropriate for the jobs they seek. The GOP candidate for state school superintendent hasn’t voted in 15 of the last 17 elections and before she (surprisingly) won her party’s nomination no one outside of her school district had ever heard of her. She now says she wants to give back for missing all those chances to participate in the democratic process. You can’t make this stuff up.

The Republican candidate for Secretary of State was so disliked by many in his own party that he was voted out of office as Speaker of the state House of Representatives, in part for his inept handling of various ethics issues involving his friends. He’ll be a credible referee of fair elections, right? The incumbent GOP candidate for state treasurer is so unknown to voters that jokes have been made about putting his photo on milk cartons. The real question in his race, however, centers on handling of various state investment accounts. The answer apparently is that he hasn’t exactly been Warren Buffett when it comes to managing state money. You’d likely fire your broker for less, but hey its only a few million in public money. He’s only the state treasurer, after all. Whomever he is.

And where are the “responsible” voices in the state’s ruling political class about such obviously flawed candidates? Is that the wind I hear?

In early November, if history is a guide, somewhere south of 40 percent of American voters will troop to the polls and elect a new, probably more Republican House of Representatives and turn the U.S. Senate over to the Republicans, as well. The lame duck in the White House will be even lamer and the divided government that does nothing – and that American voters say they hate – will have a a two-year mandate to do more of the same.

As Tim Egan noted recently, we hate the Congress – or you might substitute the state legislature or your county commissioner – so let’s have a heaping helping of more of the same. “How else to explain,” Egan writes, “the confit of conventional wisdom showing that voters are poised to give Republicans control of the Senate, and increase their hold on the House, even though a majority of Americans oppose nearly everything the G.O.P. stands for?

“The message is: We hate you for your inaction, your partisanship, your nut-job conspiracy theories; now do more of the same. Democracy — nobody ever said it made sense. Of course, November’s election will be a protest vote against the man who isn’t on the ballot, a way to make a lame duck president even lamer in his final two years.”

Mid-term elections, even more than those elections when we select a president, have become about nothing. If anything, in the age of Super PAC’s, when a handful of the nation’s oligarchs essentially create their own version of political parties, the campaigns have become more vacuous, more irrelevant to the nation’s real problems, and more likely to turn off a sizable majority of American voters.

As the New York Times reports: “In 2010, the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court effectively blew apart the McCain-Feingold restrictions on outside groups and their use of corporate and labor money in elections. That same year, a related ruling from a lower court made it easier for wealthy individuals to finance those groups to the bottom of their bank accounts if they so chose. What followed has been the most unbridled spending in elections since before Watergate. In 2000, outside groups spent $52 million on campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. By 2012, that number had increased to $1 billion.”

Elections are more and more about less and less, unless you talk money and then it’s the sky is the limit. A few enormously wealthy – not just rich, but oh-my-gosh really, really loaded – people are defining the nation’s political agenda, mostly for their own purpose and benefit, and issues like a better educated work force, a shrinking middle class, and the age old bugaboo of race and class are left to, well, they are just left.

I’m not one who finds a way to blame Barack Obama for everything from Ebola to the missing whack job in North Korea, but on one important count the President is responsible for at least some of the political malaise that Americans in the 21st Century have Theodore_Roosevelt_laughing3-e1316002011942-390x300started to accept as our fate. The recent Ken Burns’ documentary on PBS on the remarkable Roosevelts reminds us that the presidency, in good times and bad, is a bully pulpit where a leader – paging Teddy Roosevelt! – can help establish a national tone, a sense of urgency and, yes, a collective sense of responsibility for our shared fate.

Our national tone is now largely defined by Koch brother’s money or the latest flavor of the day from the political left. The nation turns it’s lonely eyes to Fox News or Jon Stewart. Charlie Crist’s fan aimed at his, er, pant legs becomes a defining moment. We want a leader to speak honestly and candidly about real things. We get the will-she or won’t-she from Hillary.

What might politics in 2014 be like if Butch Otter in Idaho or John Kitzhaber in Oregon or a Boehner or a Barack just said: “You know, I screwed up here. I didn’t handle it well. We really need to get on with the people’s pressing concerns.” I suspect we’ll never know.

If politics just becomes about winning an election by pandering to the lowest common fear and loathing in the electorate we get elections like the mid-terms of 2014. It’s the Seinfeld Show reduced to politics – a show about nothing.

 

Civil Rights, Economy, Egan, Gay Marriage, Idaho Politics, Otter, Television, Uruguay

When to Quit

One of the most difficult things to do in politics – perhaps the most difficult – is to quit. When do you cut-and-walk-away from a Marriageposition that is no longer correct, or defensible? How do you back down when time moves on and you are stuck on the wrong side of history? The wrong side of morality? The wrong side of the Constitution?

There are political calculations involved in quitting. There always are. What will constituents think who passionately continue to believe in a position that can no longer be sustained? When do you call off the lawyers, save the money and the time, and try to reconcile the age old problem of holding two conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time? How to admit that by continuing to advocate what you believe to be right, you will really be wrong?

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has now presented Idaho with this most difficult moment. The most fierce advocates for denying Ninth Circuitsame sex marriage have now been told – repeatedly – that they are behaving in a manner not permitted under our Constitution. Those fierce advocates would be, in many cases, also the greatest defenders of the Constitution, at least the one they think they know. But now a bunch of faceless, nameless judges have said the Constitution’s guarantees of equal treatment under the law really do apply to all our people, even those who want to marry someone of the same sex. And what do you do?

Governor George Wallace stood in the school house door in Alabama to defy the Constitution. Governor Orval Faubus forced an American president to send paratroopers to Little Rock when he couldn’t bring himself to quit. Governor Ross Barnett permitted a riot to break out and people to die on a college campus in Mississippi rather than cut-and-walk away. Upholding the Constitution is difficult and dangerous business, just like quitting a position is difficult and, at least, politically dangerous.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about America – and also the most difficult – is the idea that all the provisions of the sacred Constitution apply even to those we most fervently disagree with. I don’t like your speech, or your flag burning, or your race or religion, I disagree with your life style, but it doesn’t mean – it can’t mean – that my Constitution isn’t also your Constitution.

One can appreciate how far Idaho officials charged with defending the unconstitutional have gone by reading the Ninth Circuit’s decision (or, for that matter, Idaho federal Magistrate Candy Dale’s earlier decision). The arguments used by Governor Butch Otter’s lawyers to defend Idaho’s official position are, there is no nice way to say it, utter nonsense and if the matters at hand were not so serious the arguments would be just this side of laughable.

One of those nameless, faceless judge is Judge Stephen Reinhardt. He certainly looks like a judge, doesn’t he? Writing for the Ninth Circuit, Reinhardt says at one point in his decision: “Same-sex marriage, Governor Otter asserts, is reinhardtpart of a shift towards a consent-based, personal relationship model of marriage, which is more adult-centric and less child-centric.”

The Judge, it would appear, was attempting to get to the essence of why Idaho has so strongly resisted same-sex marriage, but as he traveled the state’s road and attempted to reconcile Idaho’s claims with what the Constitution says, he found there was no there there. In a footnote, the Judge said this, really:

“[Otter, or more correctly his lawyer] also states, in conclusory fashion, that allowing same-sex marriage will lead opposite-sex couples to abuse alcohol and drugs, engage in extramarital affairs, take on demanding work schedules, and participate in time-consuming hobbies. We seriously doubt that allowing committed same-sex couples to settle down in legally recognized marriages will drive opposite-sex couples to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.”

The Constitution doesn’t say anything about being a good parent, or a good spouse. It says a lot about equality under the law and now the Ninth Circuit with its decision, and the Supreme Court with silence, has told Idaho you need to stop treating people differently, because the Constitution of the United States says so.

Moving on from a long-held position is not only difficult, it can also be constructive and help foster understanding and greater acceptance. It is a teaching moment if someone wants to teach. A leadership moment if someone wants to lead. The U.S. Constitution is the textbook.

When Governor Faubus in Arkansas couldn’t reconcile himself – and his constituents – to the fact that the fundamental law of his nation allowed black girls to go to school with white girls in Little Rock in 1957 he wrote the first sentence of how history has remembered him to this day. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says this about Orval Faubus, the longest serving Governor in the state’s history: “His record was in many ways progressive, but he is most widely remembered for his attempt to block the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. His stand against what he called “forced integration” resulted in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s sending federal troops to Little Rock (Pulaski County) to enforce the 1954 desegregation ruling of the Supreme Court.

Faubus“The Governor is “most widely remembered” for defying the Constitution and clinging to his old, illegal and morally indefensible position. Not the epitaph any politician imagines for himself.

Will the arguments about same-sex marriage continue in Idaho? Of course, just as they continued regarding race and equality in Little Rock in the 1950’s and beyond. Can political leaders, particularly those who have so adamantly defended what they have now been told is indefensible, help begin a more constructive conversation about fairness and equality? Of course they can. But, will they? Courage and leadership are required. Can they do it?

In the wake of the Ninth Circuit decision, Idaho has filed another appeal, but they will have to quit eventually. The Constitutional logic is too obvious. How they do it, the walking away and quitting, will be almost as telling as what they fought so strongly to prevent – equality and fairness.