Billy Paultz Reconsidered

I’m at the Barnstormers’ game, and there’s a local physician’s group that threw out ceremonial first pitches (yes, plural) and was also allowed to take a hand mike and, over the stadium PA, essentially do an advertisement for their practice that lasted like 3-4 minutes. What the… People are actually applauding at all the appropriate moments and more than just politely. Not a bad thing, I guess, unless it starts happening every night with like appliance salesmen, but am I the only one who finds this strange?….

More fun stuff at the ballyard…. York has Shea Hillenbrand, a two-time major league all-star who had 267 ABs in the bigs a year ago. He’s hitting .340, but with exactly one home run and eight errors (even though he DHs at times, including tonight) in 24 games….

York also has Jose Cruz, son of the longtime major-leaguer, Jose Cruz, and brother of another big-leaguer, Jose Cruz, Jr. That’s correct: all three of them are named Jose. I understand Dad is now test-marketing an indoor grill…

One of the doctors who threw out a first pitch is now doing color commentary on the radio. I’m fully expecting him to pinch-hit later, and Boots Day to assist on some surgery next week….

Just had an informal chat with Jon Danos, president of Keystone Baseball, which owns both these teams. He acknowledged that he’s talked with Marc Schoenfelt, who’s opening a state-of-the-art indoor baseball facility in Manheim, about basing Atlantic League spring training at the facility. They’re just talking, nothing close to finalized. Local outdoor fields, certainly including the Clip Joint, would also have to be utilized. Might be much cheaper than going to Florida for a week. Danos said he’s informally polled the players and was surprised to find they seem to like the idea…

Danos said he’s also talked to officials at F&M about using the school’s dormitories to house Barnstormers during the season. This would be in addition to, not in place of, placing players with local families. F&M seemed amenable, Danos said, but, again, nothing’s close to finalized… 

More from the It’s-A-Small-World Dept.: Tim Foli’s son Dave, a pitcher, just came on in relief for York…

is a wonderful thing, one of those Internet creations no one could have forseen and it’s now hard to imagine being without. But its bios of athletes often include some subtle weirdness.

Dan Kreider’s is only eight sentences long, but one of those is: “Kreider attended the University of New Hampshire and was an A student and letterman in football.”

You’d think it would go without saying that an NFL player lettered in college, but, hey, congrats, Dan.

Here’s another one: “[Billy] Paultz played organized basketball at River Dell Regional High School in Bergen County, New Jersey.”

The lack of detail on Billy’s teenage pickup games is really glaring here.

Here’s the line that may become this blog’s credo: “Although Paultz moved with a bulky stiffness, he was a very heady player.”

That’s what she said.

Don’t expect to see much about fantasy sports on this blog, but Sports Illustrated’s NFL fantasy preview last week caught my attention.

The most valuable position in real football is of course, QB, but in fantasy it’s running back. SI has Brian Westbrook ranked fourth at RB behind LaDanian Tomlinson, Adrian Peterson and Joseph Addai.

Of that group - and the RBs ranked below it, for that matter - Westbrook is right there with everybody in rushing yards last year, and has by far the most total yards per game, receptions and receiving yards. (The only exception is the Dolphins’ Ronnie Brown in total YPG, but he wasn’t a full time player). And if they allowed Westbrook to do it, he’s surely be one of the best punt/kick returners in the sport.

This might be a reach, but an argument could be made that the former DeMatha High point guard is the best player in the NFL. Not most valuable, but best. And for the most part he doesn’t even practice.

A tiny annual treat of covering college football is picking up one’s copy of Phil Steele’s annual preview magazine. In addition to being fun to peruse, for sportswriters it’s an essential tool, really 119 team media guides plus much more, an exhaustive effort that annually blows away its competition by prediction accuracy or any other measure.

The tiny type and esoteric abbreviations (FHG= final home game, PBU= passes broken up, etc) can be annoyances, but Steele uses them so he can cram ever more info into the thing. It costs nine bucks, but if you’re into this sport that’s a bargain.

Anyway, I got my copy the other day. Some interesting notes: Steele has Penn State ranked 10th in the country, in marked contrast to the ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll, which has the Lions 22nd.

Steele has Florida No. 1 thanks largely to its schedule, about as manageable as an SEC slate can be, with most of the toughies at home. The rest of the top 10: Ohio State, Oklahoma, USC, Clemson, West Virginia, Missouri, South Florida, Georgia, Penn State.

Georgia is No. 1 according to the coaches, but Steele disagrees because of its schedule, which includes Florida, LSU, Auburn and South Carolina (one of Steele’s most improved), all on the road.

In Steele’s position-group rankings, Penn State’s defensive line comes in second in the country and first in the Big Ten, but that was of course before Baker and Taylor got kicked off the team.

Steele’s most improved team in the country: Notre Dame.

Jim Hersh reports that Billy Paultz, official inspiration of BPR, celebrated his 60th yesterday, June 30. Sudden thought: You’ve got to sympathize with Billy’s mom, giving birth to a Whopper.

As of 11 a.m. today, there is exactly one Billy Paultz-related item on E-bay. Of course, that’s probably one more than you or I have.

Happy birthday, you big cultural icon.

I’m going to dispense with the pithy commentary and trenchant analsyis here and just point out a good story:

Rwenzururu in a mountainous region of Uganda with a population of about 300,000. Charles Wesley Mumbere is its king. This is noteworthy because Mumbere is a 58 year-old nurse’s aide living in a public housing project in Harrisburg.

The Ugandan government recently recognized Rwenzururu’s sovereignty after years of, uh, not recognizing it. Which means Mumbere isn’t going to be a nurse’s aide much longer. Dude gets to be King again.

One interesting thing about the Penn State investigation on “Outside the Lines,” was the contrast between what Joe said and what University president Graham Spanier said.

Confronted with the raw numbers - 46 players arrested since 2002, 27 of them found guilty of something - Paterno went into knee-jerk defensive mode, using the word “witchhunt,” several times.

Spanier, confronted with the same numbers, said, “They’re staggering numbers. They’re very high and they shouldn’t be that way. It might often be the case that there is an initial overreaction as evidenced by the dismissal of so many charges. But never mind that; it’s still the case that many of these charges have stuck.”

More surprising, ESPN came up with some evidence the football program had attempted to influence Penn State’s Judicial Affairs Dept. regarding penalties for players. JoePa of course vehemently denied that. Spanier said something to the effect that the football program “was involved in a discussion about what was fair.”

So Chase Utley is hurt. Maybe. That explains some, but not all, of the presumptive MVP’s awful offense of late. For the first five weeks of this season Utley was Rogers Hornsby with better defense. Since then he’s been Duane Kuiper.

He’s constantly behind in the count (how many many of his ABs the last 10 weeks have started with him taking a breaking ball for strike one?), almost never walks, and when he does put it in play uses like one-eighth of the field, usually the second baseman’s neighborhood. Why teams don’t use a full Ted Williams shift on Utley - at least this year much more of a pull hitter than Ryan Howard - is a mystery. You can’t put all of that on a sore hip.

I’m making it sound worse than it is, of course. Utley’s a great player going through a bad stretch.

In a related story, last week Sports Illustrated published a poll of National league players on who’d be the league’s MVP this year. Utley not only won, he got as many votes, 50 percent, as everyone else combined. OK, maybe the poll was done months ago - in which case SI should have said so - but what’s interesting is how bulletproof Utley’s reputation has become. He’s approaching Derek Jeterville.

Yo Packers: A month ago you seemed happy to let Brett Favre retire. Now you won’t take less than first-round pick in trade for him? Dump him for whatever you can get, and for the love of God put this nightmare behind us.

The best book I’ve read about show business (not that there’s a lot of competition) is “Cavett,” by the former late-night talk-show host Dick Cavett (duh) with his college pal, journalist Christopher Porterfield, published in 1974. I recently found the book in my attic, beyond dog-eared, after assuming it had been long, long gone.

There are very, very few books in any canon I’d describe as “compulsively readable”. This is one. Anyway, your correspondent is a huge fan of the language and words. When they’re appropriated, diminished or even ruined by political and/or cultural purposes much smaller than the Mother Tongue, as almost all political and/or cultural purposes are, well, that pisses me off. Here are Cavett and Porterfield with an example I bet you havent thought of in a long time, if ever:

“I must say the word “gay,” is about the silliest choice of a word for homesexual. How was it picked? It means joyous or exuberant, and what that has to do with homosexuality is anybody’s guess. Should straight people be called “glums”? It follows that the proper word for bisexual would be something akin to manic-depressive. Gay was such a good word before it was appropriated; when read aloud today from literature of the 18th and 19th century, it invariably gets a laugh.”

“Appropriated,” is exactly the right word for what’s happened to gay, a word that has literally been redefined. At least it wasn’t done, as far as I can tell, for deliberate political reasons. Forget “liberal”, which was buried years if not decades ago. Consider “agenda,” as in the accusatory: “Everyone knows he has his own agenda.” Who doesn’t? Who shouldn’t?

That’s at least less partisan than the butcher job currently being done on “elite” or, better, “elitism”, or best, “the elite” which it is now bad to be a part of. Then there’s the “Ivy League elite,” reviled by millions, almost all of whom would jump at the chance to send their children to Harvard or Yale or Princeton and then bore you into a coma bragging about it.

The nadir of this dumbness, for me, came a couple years ago when ESPN’s boorish Chris Berman suggested the word dynasty must be redefined to reflect “the realities of the salary cap era.” Sorry, Boomer. Even the Worldwide Leader doesn’t get to redefine words. Depressing footnote: Berman went to Brown. He’s part of the Ivy League elite.

Interesting, and very different, takes on the “elite” nonsense can be found here and here.

I wrote this last night during the Barnstormers’ game and then got occupied writing alternate ledes to that 10-9, six-error, 217-minute mess of a game. Random observations while getting ready for the Barnstormers game with Newark at the Clip…

ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” is reportedly planning a look at some of the off-field issues with Penn State’s football program tomorrow (9:30 a.m., and noon on ESPN News). Based on the quotes here, JoePa thinks - here’s a stunner - we’re all making too much of this. See in particular the following quote: “They’re very aggressive kids or they wouldn’t be guys who can compete in front of 110,000 people.”

That’s right, you gotta be a savage to play football. It really is a Grand Experiment, isn’t it?

Ye Gods…

Actually, I hear the OTL piece is going to portray the program as if it used to be pristine, but got out of hand when Joe started losing, and thus allowed his assistants, in desperation, to recruit the “wrong kind,” of player.

That’s largely nonsense, I believe. The difference between then and now - and Joe has acknowledged this - is that then he essentially had the State College police in his pocket. So when a player got in trouble, the cops would grab him, call Joe and then bring the kid to Joe’s house, where Joe and Sue would take care of it. Doesn’t mean the kid wasn’t punished, but there was no formal arrest, no police report, and thus, of course, no public knowledge.

Now, Joe rails against the modern realities, knee-jerk defends his kids against the media and the suits and appears to be soft on crime. Maybe he is.

But name a recent Lion whom anyone could consider not “Penn State material”…. Chris Bell? Kicked out of school. For what it’s worth…

Remember when the Phillies had a lefty reliever named Aaron Fultz? Remember when they got rid of Fultz even though all he did (mostly) was get people out?

The weirdness continues. Despite a 2.92 ERA last year for the Cleveland Indians, and a 1.59 ERA this year in AAA, he’s now in the freakin’ Atlantic League, with Sparky Lyle’s Somerset Patriots. At least Lyle knows a reliever when he sees one. Not saying Fultz is a great pitcher, but considering some of the stiffs stealing money in big league bullpens, you’d think little things like below-average career ERAs would count for something.

I don’t get it….

Meanwhile, a guy who was a Somerset Patriot this year, Brandon Knight, started on the mound tonight for the New York Mets. He’s leading the Cardinals 5-4 in the fifth as this is written.

Not sure why people ever considered it so unthinkable that the Eagles would keep Lito Shephard, but, well, it’s pretty thinkable now, isn’t it?

Everybody’s talking about Heath Ledger’s Joker, and for good reason. He’s literally scary-good. I can’t remember a movie character to which you are so hopelessly riveted every second he’s on the screen.

But it isn’t just Ledger’s Joker, it’s Joker’s movie; the filmmakers give him more cool stuff to do and 10 times as many good lines as the rest of the cast combined. There’s a conscious and unique and mostly (I’m gonna say) successful attempt to make the other main characters dark and/or humorless and/or stoically gallant and/or very conventional. Batman himself is smart and deep and resourceful and tough and utterly witless, as if his smiling or lightening up in any way for one second would have thrown the audience off the trail or ruined the tone or something. [footnote: Just read Peter Travers’ rave in Rolling Stone, in which be compares Christian Bale’s brooding to Al Pacino in the Godfather Part II. Not totally buying it, but I can see traces of that.]

The plot is elaborate and even baroque, but, ironically, by being a psychotic loon, the Joker is somehow the solid center that holds it together. The script actually relies on him to provide, in addition to everything else, exposition and even perspective on what the hell’s going on here. I’m less interested in whether Ledger wins an Oscar than in which category he gets nominated. There has never been a less supporting (and more supported) role.

It’s too long - particularly the portion after the climactic Batman-Joker confrontation - but everything’s too long. The very end, the last two minutes or so, are silly and needless.

But it’s as authentically an experience as a movie can be - creatively sick bad guys, endlessly dogged good guys, draining suspense, drama so tense it practically squeals… this sucker really gets, and keeps, your attention. It’s hard to imagine a blockbuster getting closer to the limits of what good vs. evil, or hero vs. villian, or (certainly) what comic books are about. Without having seen nearly all of them, I can’t believe any superhero story has aimed so high, or so low or… here’s the right word… so deep.

It’s an imperfect movie but a real, real good one. Recommended.