hey, we won a series

It's amazing what happens when you get decent pitching and score runs at the same time.

Now only 12 games under 500...

nebraska mortgages its future

Before going further, I of course admit that this isn't that big a deal In the Scheme of Things. We're not talking about nuclear proliferation or financial fraud or oil spills. Or Brittany, Brangelina, or Beyonce.

But still...

Two major universities decided to leave what is (was) arguably the best collegiate conference in the country for the uncertain future of two separate conferences on opposite sides of the country. Nebraska and Colorado first played a football game against each other in 1898. Kansans, Missourians, Nebraskans, and other vacationers enjoy making the trek to the Rockies, while all good pro football fans of course root against the Broncos while supporting the Chiefs. Colorado I'm really not sure what they're expecting to get out of this move.

What I want to focus on is Nebraska. I use the language of mortgage because I think it captures the uncertainty: there are a range of potential outcomes, and it could be a good move or a bad move. It depends. And like the financial industry of our day, we've destroyed the history and tradition of what came before. Whatever else happens in the future, we have officially severed ties to the past. That's sad. And frustrating. And disappointing. Nebraska football has a history unparalleled in the heartland. You have to travel over 500 miles from Lincoln to get to South Bend or Norman. It's over 600 miles to Ann Arbor. Over 700 to Tuscaloosa, Columbus, or Austin. Even farther to State College. The plains states can't support a high concentration of professional sports teams, but it is large enough for a vibrant collection of universities.

Nebraska, just up I-29 from Kansas City, was the key voice pushing for Arrowhead stadium to remain one of the premier venues boasting both college and professional sports. As I type this, Oklahoma is playing in the College World Series in Omaha. And the Royals' AAA club is in Omaha. That's what makes a lot of this so bitter particularly from a KC-perspective. Instead of sticking around and fighting for a major conference centered around the center of the country, Nebraska jumped ship.

To the Big Ten.

Save it Tom, Nebraska ain't like Minnesota or Illinois or Ohio or Michigan. Lincoln ain't Columbus or Madison. Omaha ain't Chicago or Detroit. And Nebraska didn't leave a broken conference. It broke the conference.

Sort of.

And see, that's the thing. The Big 12 wasn't broken. Yes, Texas is a pain. As a good American, I hate Texas as much as anybody. Yes, there were some political gaffes, like Missouri Governor Nixon acting like he knows something about running an athletic conference or a university system. But Nebraska belongs with Missouri and Kansas and Kansas State and Iowa State and Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. Dallas is a valuable counterweight to the regional pull of other places, like Chicago, Atlanta, and LA.

Nebraska has now mortgaged its top-tier tradition to get into a new place. There's a part of me that hopes Nebraska cleans the floor of the Big Ten. But there's also a part of me that's sad enough and upset enough to hope Nebraska gets exactly what it deserves: access to the 'stability' of the Big Ten in exchange for permanent loss of its unique prestige.

Dear Nebraska fans/players/Big Red nation:

When you're done playing not just second fiddle but third or fourth in a league whose population center isn't even in a state bordering Nebraska, come back to the Big 12. Stick around and fight to make this part of the MidWest top rate, rather than abandoning us.

In the meantime, expect us to express our, uh, feelings about this in your direction. Let's be clear. You dumped us. Not the other way around. And in the process, you have contributed greatly to the transfer of college from meaning to money.

woah, the royals put up 10 runs

Spread the love around guys. We need some runs the rest of the week, too.

it's official

Greinke wins the Cy Young Award. How about that. Could you imagine if he was pitching in front of an outfield of, say, Carlos Beltran, Jermaine Dye, and Raul Ibanez? Baseball is an odd sport. It has good draft and trading systems that allow all franchises to develop star athletes. It just doesn't have the revenue structure to allow any but the largest TV markets to keep a nucleus of players for very long.

is this really happening

A month into the season, can the stats really look like this?

All five AL Central teams in the top half of baseball? Two in the top five? And what's that? Is that the Royals leading the division, garnering spot #3?

This must be a misprint, a mistake, a misunderstanding. At least, it's May.

And that's kind of exciting. Maybe, just maybe, they can keep this up.

call the season

It's official. Let's just end it now. The Royals are in first place. In fact, they're the only undefeated team in baseball.

That can't last long. Can it?

can the espn curse affect even the royals

Imagine my shock when I saw the following on ESPN's preview of the Cardinals/Royals game this evening.

annoyed baseball fan

(R) When ranting about sports coverage, it's hard to not address the wider problems we have with corporate control of the media and lack of competition and whatnot, not to mention disparities in how baseball distributes TV revenue. But, honestly, this is a very targeted complaint. There are lots of other opportunities to complain.

You've got a freakin' $100 million dollar pitcher starting his first major league game, and you can't watch the game in the state it's being played on a cable package that costs hundreds of dollars a year, not to mention funding from commercial breaks. It's absolutely ridiculous. What's on ESPN, ESPN2, and FSN? Reruns. Lovely. Don't even ask about the 40 other channels showing crap at 2 in the afternoon on a Thursday.

Oh, but of course, you can watch the White Sox on WGN. Whoopdeedoo.

And who would have thought the Royals and Cards would have started the season 1-5? Bleh.

opening day part 2

The good news is that the Royals were on ESPN today. The bad news is that they decided to have the game while I was working. Not very thoughtful.

So, I took a late lunch and hung out at Laclede Street Bar and Grill down by SLU for an hour. Of course, my waitress had to be a Red Sox fan. What are they doing in St. Louis, anyway? Got there just in time to see Schilling walk in the tying run. That's always smart to do. Something must have been wrong with the TV, though. That Royals pitcher actually looked like somebody who should be paid a fair amount of money to play baseball. I'm sure Bud Selig and David Glass are looking into it.

Lookie, it's day 2, and the Royals are still tied for first. I think I'm not getting a hair cut until they lose.

Note to Royals, I'm planning on getting a hair cut Thursday. Don't let me down.

they're back

(P) I got a little caught up in the Missouri vote last year regarding stem cell research, which you may have noticed if you've perused my archives or visit regularly. Among other things, I became acquainted with the Vitae Foundation, and wrote this post in particular about an ad that I found most distasteful.

Well, Vitae is back! They are running an anti abortion ad with the tagline think about it. This time, unlike the tasteless anti stem cell ad, you can see the ad on their website. Like the stem cell ad, they're running it during a major sporting event (opening day for the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals).

It is quite interesting. It is in a classroom, with a black teacher asking a class of all black students what they want to be when they grow up. You see a child want to play professional basketball and fade away (a boy of course) and another child want to be an actress (a girl this time) and similarly fade away. The teacher/narrator explains that abortion has killed more of us than anything else.

Wow.

Not only is it offensive for what the backers of the Vitae Foundation support regarding public policy, opposing things that would actually help black children in this country like Headstart, universal daycare, more spending on public schools, universal healthcare (in particular better prenatal and neonatal care), improved mass transit, better access to family planning and contraceptives, ending the drug war, and so forth, but more topically to the focus of the ad, it raises a number of interesting areas of discussion which conservatives usually assail liberals for raising.

Basically, the ad suggests we should look to the effects of aborting fetuses. That is perhaps the strongest argument in support of keeping abortion legal, something that pro-choice people supposedly unfairly include in the argument. It's important to note that the ad doesn't say anything about the beginning of life or a soul being created or anything like that; only the future potential of what these fetuses could become is what's suggested. This is very important for the moral position they are staking out, as I'll get to later. Now that the cat is out of the bag from such an interestingly supported organization (among other people, the Iran-contra traitor Oliver North is offered on the website as one of many VIPs supporting the organization), let's delve into the consequences. The first place to start, perhaps, is the rather interesting correlation between the Roe v Wade decision in the 1970s and the dramatic drop in crime a generation later in the 1990s.

But that's just the beginning. We know from all over the world that as countries get richer, family size decreases. Across cultures, families recognize the value of planning for and limiting the number of their offspring. If you want to reduce the number of abortions among blacks, you should support a variety of policy options that make black communities better off, healthier, and improve access to sex education, condoms, birth control, and so forth. Vitae seems to want blacks to take responsibility for abortions while being in league with the very political thought that makes policies which impoverish and imprison and disenfranchise blacks all over the country, not to mention people who push for ridiculous programs like abstinence only education.

Perhaps most intriguingly for me, this touches on one of the major big picture moral problems we face, the massive explosion of the sheer number of people on the planet. To vastly summarize, basically there are enormous environmental, poverty, and destabilization issues related to the unprecedented increase in the global population. This is one of those moral positions where there is absolutely no middle ground with the way Vitae has staked out their position. Either it is ok to limit potential humans, or it is not. As they suggest, think about it. Every time a woman of child bearing age passes an unfertilized egg (or a fertilized one, called a miscarriage), a future potential human is destroyed, wasted, squandered, murdered, whatever word you want to use for the death of that egg, a living cell with the potential to create a new human being. Now, I don't think that China's approach to solving the very serious problem of overpopulation is the way to go. But not because it acknowledges a role for abortion, but rather because it forces the choice upon families. Rather, families should make those choices. But, it is important that China at least recognizes the issue and is doing something. I am curious what Vitae's solution for China would be. Is their ideal to have billions more people crowd into the massive cities on China's east coast? Or would they suggest to the Chinese to just stop having sex?

This was a fabulous way to cap a wonderful birthday week. Yay for excitement.

Now we just need the Cards to score a few more runs. Oh, and have you checked the standings? The Royals are tied for first right now. And they're on ESPN tomorrow!

While I'm at work.