Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Virginia Postrel on the problems of government healthcare.
If I lived in New Zealand, I’d be dead.
That’s the lead my editor wanted me to write, and I have to admit it’s great. Alas (for this column, at least), it’s not exactly true. But neither is it false. And the ways in which it’s partly true matter greatly, not just to me or to New Zealanders but to anyone who might get cancer or care about someone who does.
The American health-care system may be a crazy mess, but it is the prime mover in the global ecology of medical treatment, creating the world’s biggest market for new drugs and devices. Even as we argue about whether or how our health-care system should change, most Americans take for granted our access to the best available cancer treatments—including the one that arguably saved my life. …
Melanie Phillips says we are showing weakness to North Korea. And she posts on the coming destruction of Israel.
As was entirely predictable, Obama has gone to his good friends the Saudis to help him throw Israel under the bus. Having bowed deeply to the Saudi King Abdullah when they were in London last week (an image which tells you everything you need to know — and so has been conspicuous by its absence from the msm; the Queen, by contrast, merited only a protocol-busting hand on the back) Obama, according to his Middle East envoy George Mitchell, is adopting the Saudi Israel destruction ‘peace’ plan as his solution to the Middle East impasse. Ha’aretz reports:
“The Arab peace initiative will be part of the Obama administration’s policy toward the Middle East, the United States special envoy to the region said. The 2002 initiative offers to normalize relations between the entire Arab region and Israel, in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories including East Jerusalem, the establishment of a Palestinian State and a ‘just settlement’ for Palestinian refugees.”
That ‘just settlement’ in the Saudi destruction plan means the unlimited immigration into Israel of the Arabs of the territories, which would mean the end of Israel. …
Cook County politico accidentally explains how it’s done.
Seems some of the Brit press has discovered what Pickings readers already knew. BO is tiresome.
For Cubs fans last year the name CC Sabathia was an ominous sound. Picked up mid-year by the Milwaukee Brewers, there were times when it looked like Sabathia would single-handedly pitch them into first place in the Central Division. The Cubs did win the division, but Sabathia’s willingness to pitch with only three days rest inspired the Milwaukee club. His agent, with visions of the $161 million contract he would sign with the Yankees, pleaded with him to spare his arm. Sabathia took the ball anyway, and the Brewers won the wild-card with CC’s 11 – 2 Milwaukee record. Sports Illustrated tells us about CC in this week’s cover story.
… The pitcher doesn’t stop. A man stares down at him, opens his mouth, waits, squirms, as if unsure how to address the mystery below.
Sabathia, born in California, famously allowed that he’d love to pitch there. Everyone knew he would have taken less money to get closer to home. But then came his dominating stint with the Brewers down the stretch last year: Traded to Milwaukee in midseason, Sabathia ignored the pleas of his agent and risked his looming financial bonanza as a free agent by starting three games on three days’ rest, throwing seven complete games, going 11–2 with a 1.65 ERA and carrying Milwaukee into the playoffs for the first time in 26 years.
“The most unselfish performance by any player,” says Brewers G.M. Doug Melvin. “To pitch like he did for the betterment of the ball club? To put that ahead of free agency? You just don’t see that much anymore.”
It was, indeed, such a display of baseball cojones that the Yankees felt they had no choice. Sabathia was 28 and had won 117 games, the most for any current pitcher his age: Cashman had to have him. He offered seven years at $161 million—two years and about $60 million more than the Brewers and the Angels. It was the sport’s new standard for an offer you can’t refuse.
Still, the Yankees faithful are a romantic bunch. They like to think it takes unique toughness to win in New York, and that being a true Yankee has nothing to do with money. This is odd for the richest team in sports, but the paradox abides: Yankees fans live by the wallet yet despise mercenaries. Free-agent pitching busts such as Ed Whitson, Kenny Rogers, Hideki Irabu and Carl Pavano serve as foils in Yankees lore—derided examples of how not to be. With that puffy body and an opt-out clause after three years, Sabathia is more suspect than most new arrivals. Did he come only for the contract? Will Santa be too laid-back for the Bronx?
The man in the stands has it at last. He leans over the railing and yells, “Who wants to be on the WEST Coast?” …
… THINGS IN the Crest have steadily gotten worse since Mare Island went dark in 1996. There’s hardly money for rent—never mind sports fees—and baseball is king no more. In March thieves broke into the North Vallejo Little League office, stole 150 uniforms and the concession food and candy, trashed the computers and trophies and tore down photos of alums like Sabathia. “It’s not the same city,” says Sabathia. “A lot of closed businesses, a lot of my friends out of work. I feel like there’s something I should do … but I don’t know what.”
He is, of course, in a unique position. Last May, in the face of a $16 million deficit, Vallejo became the largest municipality in California to declare bankruptcy. If Sabathia isn’t worth more than the city he grew up in, he’s at least running a surplus. Still, there seems to be little resentment of his good fortune in Vallejo, because Sabathia hasn’t committed the cardinal sin of the pro athlete: He doesn’t big-time his hometown. Each winter he’s seen ducking into Vallejo High basketball games or working out with the school’s baseball team. He walks in the annual Martin Luther King Day parade with his entourage: Amber, their three kids (CC, now 5; Jaeden, 3; and Cyia, six months) and Margie. Sabathia bought a batting cage for Vallejo High one year, paid to resurface the North Vallejo Little League fields another.
Once he signed his Yankees contract in December, Sabathia stepped it up. In February he asked to meet with Vallejo High athletic director Tami Madson and football coach Mike Wilson and his wife, school board member Hazel Wilson, and told them he wanted to supply the football, basketball and baseball teams with new uniforms—a gift Madson estimates at $100,000, more if footwear is included. Then Sabathia turned to Hazel and asked her to set up two college scholarships, Charlie Hustle awards in memory of his cousin Nathan.
With Margie serving as his local point person, Sabathia also pledged more than 400 backpacks, each filled with supplies, to the kids at his elementary school, Loma Vista, and is putting the finishing touches on a plan to overhaul his old Little League complex for next spring, complete with new scoreboards, dugouts and concession stands. Long-term? “I want to do a baseball academy, a Boys & Girls Club–type thing in north Vallejo, indoor fields: Have a bus pick up kids from each elementary school, have them come do homework for 90 minutes, then the rest is baseball,” he says.
Last September, during a Brewers series with the Cubs, Sabathia flew Hobbs, his high school coach, into Chicago. He still considers Hobbs a second father, the man who, he says, “saved all of us” by teaching boys in the Crest not just to play baseball, which is the easy part, but also to love the work the game demands. Weekends, Hobbs would have CC and his buddies hustling from early morning until well past dark, and it didn’t end there. He’d turn his car lights on the batting cage, burning out one or two batteries a season so the boys could keep hitting.
Hobbs’s oldest son, Luke, grew up around CC and is severely autistic. In Chicago, Abe and CC talked baseball and reminisced about a trip they’d made to Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park when CC was 14. Sabathia casually asked him about a treatment machine called a “hug box” that has proved to be effective in calming autistic patients—and, at $5,000, costs more than Hobbs could afford.
“I got back from Chicago, and the machine was at my house,” Hobbs says. “CC didn’t mention it.” …
The Onion says the Cubs will continue the grand tradition of playing baseball.
Click on WORD or PDF for full content