Author Archives: bpriddy

Sports Page—-Racing: A Dirty Easter Gift

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(NASCAR)—Two of NASCAR’s young guns tried to race each other cleanly for the win on the Bristol dirt track Sunday night but wound up giving a gift to another driver, an old guy who was running third when Tyler Reddick and Chase Briscoe ran out of room headed for the finish line.

Briscoe went inside on the last turn, couldn’t hold the line, and spun himself and Reddick out yards from the finish line.  The spin let Kyle Busch pick up the win, his first of the year, 60th of his career.

Reddick got his car straightened out but Busch came off the last turn at full speed and beat him to the finish by a third of a second.  Briscoe finished 22nd.

The win means Busch has tied Richard Petty’s record of recording at least one win in 18 consecutive years.  His 60 wins rank him ninth all-time. He leads all active drivers.

The race started late because of rain and then was red-flagged when another shower turned the track too slimy to run. The rain moved out quickly and track officials got the dirt back into racing shape in about 20 minutes so the race could go to the end.

Joey Logano, Kyle Larson, and Ryan Blaney rounded out the top five.

The race was the ninth of the year. Busch is the eighth driver to win this year meaning the playoff field is now half full with about two-thirds of the season left to determine the 16 drivers who will take part in the 10-race championship runoff.

Fourteen yellow flags that slowed things down for about one-third of the 250-lap (125-mile) race lowered the average speed to only 34.973 mph, smashing Ned Jarrett’s 1965 slowest-winning speed record of 61.826 mph.  It’s even slower than the winning average of the exhibition race on the special track around the football field at the Los Angeles Coliseum at the start of this year. That one went to Joey Logano at 39.029 mph.

NASCAR puts all the slow stuff behind it next week when it moves to Talladega, where Bill Elliott set a still-standing NASCAR record for the fastest lap ever, at 212.809 in 1987.  In the race that year, Bobby Allison’s serious crash tore out several yards of safety fencing, narrowly missing going into the crowd.  NASCAR immediately moved to slow down the cars by instituting restrictor plates for Talladega and Daytona.

(INDYCAR)—INDYCAR has an open test at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway tomorrow and Thursday. Jimmie Johnson plans to take part in the tests on the oval although his right hand will be in a carbon fiber splint because of a broken bone incurred during one of his three crashes at Long Beach.  He also plans to race at Barber Motorsports Park on May 1 as he gets ready to race on the IMS road course on May 14th and run his first Indianapolis 500 fifteen days later.

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INDYCAR still has a lot of schedule left to run but already there’s a lot of speculation about drivers moving to other teams in 2023.  The top buzz is about Alexander Rossi, whose contract with Andretti runs out this year. He’s been told he is free to make a deal with another team if he gets a good deal. Rossi won the Centennial Indianapolis 500 in 2016.

Rossi, however, isn’t able to talk to other tams yet because team owner Michael Andretti has exclusive rights to negotiating a new contract.  The year has started poorly for Rossi. Bad team strategy is being blamed for his 20th place finish at St. Petersburg to start the season. He had a battery failure and finished 27th on the Texas oval but had his best start and best finish of the year at Long Beach—starting fifth and finishing 8th.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 heads to Ferrari Country next weekend with the Italian Grand Prix at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari in Imola, Italy.

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc is having a dominating season, scoring 71 of a possible 78 points through the first three races.  He has two first and a second, two poles, and has turned the fastest lap in all three races so far. He is so far ahead that he would still lead the points if he goes scoreless in the race.

(photo credits: Bob Priddy)

Abdicating Authority

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The Senate Appropriations Committee has sent a House-passed bill on sports wagering to the floor for debate.  The bill taxes proceeds from sports wagering at eight percent rather than the 21 percent rate for all other forms of gambling.  Committee Chairman Dan Hegeman says there will be a substitute bill offered on the Senate floor that changes some of the provisions of the House bill.

I could have opposed this bill when it was before the committee a couple of weeks ago but decided not to do it because I’ve told this committee and House committees for about three years why the legislation written by the casino industry should be rejected—-because it does nothing or almost nothing for the state’s interests and, in fact undermines them.

The worst thing the bill proposes—so far—is a series of deductions from the taxes the casinos will pay the state.  The goal, plainly stated in the bill, is to let casino accountants turn profitable days into unprofitable days and then to carry over any paper losses to the next day’s calculations. And if the accountants can show enough days were losers, then an entire month will have no revenues that can be taxed.

This is what I told the committee—with some editorial modifications because this is a column not testimony.

First: The fiscal note on this bill talks about how much the state will gain, which isn’t much, but it does not talk about how much the state will lose because of the ultra-low tax rate proposed and other factors in the bill.  Eight percent of nothing is the same as 21% of nothing, and “nothing” is the goal.

The other two points unfortunately are combined.

This not only is the thirtieth anniversary year of the vote to legalize casino gambling, it also is the thirtieth anniversary of approval of term limits.  This legislation represents an unfortunate combination of these two issues.

We have seen the realization of two important things that critics warned would happen if term limits were adopted.

One was that imposition of term limits would eliminate the institutional memory of the General Assembly.

Institutional memory is passed along by the Elders in any society to newcomers.  It consists not only of previous experiences in what works and what does not. In the legislature’s case, it was a matter of teaching new members about traditions, practices, rules (written and unwritten), and behaviors that are essential to good governing.

It is a matter of understanding why people are “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” in the House and why the phrase, “Everyone is a Senator” is vital to the operations of the Senate.  Both standards are matters of respect and based on the idea that policy is shaped by debate among equals.  A debate between two gentlemen, two ladies, or a lady and a gentleman is a debate between equals. It is a matter of parliamentary discipline and political respect regardless of party, geography, color, gender, faith or any other factor.

“Everyone is a senator” is the same.  Senators debate Senators.  It is not us-versus-them.  Senator-to-Senator does not infer that one is superior to the other.

Institutional memory used to teach respect for the understanding that today’s opponent likely will need to be tomorrow’s friend. It was a system that worked for about 175 of Missouri’s 200 years. The sad result of the loss of that memory has been played out in the Senate this year.

The third warning we heard is that after institutional memory is gone, the General Assembly would lose the structure that protects its role as the people’s policy-maker.  Without that structure, without that discipline—critics warned—the power to make policy shifts to two elements that are permanent parts of government outside the chambers—the bureaucracy and the lobbyists.

The warning was that while legislators will come and go, both the bureaucracy and the lobbyists are permanent and their power grows.  And so it is with this bill.

In the last five years, the gaming industry has given legislators 29 bills on sports wagering with the expectation those bills will be passed.  In these five years, not one member of the House and the Senate—I haven’t counted but probably 230 or more people have served in either chamber during that time—not one member of the House or the Senate has independently introduced a bill that puts the General Assembly in charge of this issue.

Not one bill has been written by any member of the Missouri Legislature that legalizes sports wagering on the state’s terms, that asserts the General Assembly’s authority to act on behalf of the people who elected its members. 

And so the warnings from 1992 have come sadly true.  For five years the Missouri General Assembly has abdicated its authority—on this issue—to those who are not physically Ladies, Gentlemen, or Senators, none of whom have any responsibility for, or obligation to the people who sent you here.

And that is why you are being asked by backers of this bill to tell the people who sent you here that it is okay with you if your veterans continue to see declines in financing for their nursing homes, why it is okay with you if the state’s promise of education funding from casino gambling is broken, why it is okay with you if the cities some of you represent that play host to casinos will continue to lose thousands and millions of dollars every year because the gambling industry tells you not to update outdated laws.

It’s not too late to regain control of the process. Committee or floor substitutes, or committee or floor amendments can do it.

But the industry doesn’t want you to do it.  So you have a choice.

When you go home on the evening of May 13th and you have coffee the next morning with some constituents and one asks if you did anything good here this year—what will you say?

—that you stood up for your teachers and your veterans and your home dock cities…..

Or will you say, “I voted to let you bet on a baseball game tonight.”

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Time is running short and pressure to pass what the industry wants in this election year is likely to increase. Now we will learn if the legislature has the spine to act on behalf of the people they meet at home or whether they’ll go with the people they meet in the Capitol halls.

We hope the teachers and the veterans and the college kids looking for state scholarship help, or the city leaders of towns with casinos—and even families of those who become addicted to this industry’s product—ask in these weeks before the election whether their legislator abdicated policy-making power to the people in the halls.

Theatre of the Inane

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Elon Musk, insanely wealthy and looking to fend off boredom, has decided he wants to buy Twitter. He says he’ll pay $43 Billion.  Twitter doesn’t want to be bought and thinks it has a poison pill that will keep it Muskless.  He has suggested these are just the opening rounds of what can become an increasingly nasty fight.

We don’t twitt. We don’t Facebook. Both refusals probably are to our disadvantage when it comes to sharing this twice-a-week wisdom. But, frankly, we have a life and it’s not spent focusing on what’s between our thumbs.

When Twitter first came along, the Missourinet news staff was told it was going to have to start using it because it was the coming thing in communication.  The example given of its usefulness was a narrative series (forgive me, friends, I abhor the word “tweets”) of a friend of ours who was going somewhere and reported at various times that he had arrived at the airport, had been checked in, was waiting to board, was boarding, and was sitting on the airplane that was spending too much time packing in the passengers..

The Missourinet staff was unimpressed beyond description.

A few days later, your observer, the now-retired Missourinet news director saw a message from a friend who told the world that she was going to have to stop on her way home from work to get a new sump pump.

The news director quickly dubbed Twitter “the theatre of the inane.”

While Twitter has proven to be useful in distributing news in real time (as well as lies, conspiracies, accusations, and general trash), it still is awash in inanities.

Representative Harry Yates of St. Joseph would not have liked Twitter if it had existed in his day. He introduced a bill in the 1925 legislative session making gossip and scandal-mongering a criminal offense.   He proposed fines of ten to one-hundred dollars or a ten-to-fifty day jail sentence for anyone “maliciously repeating or communicating any false rumor or slander detrimental or harmful to another person.”

Yates would, of course, be apoplectic about Facebook.

His bill never made it into the statute books. It had some obviously serious First Amendment problems. And worse yet, if people couldn’t gossip or be mongers of scandals, there would be little to talk about, especially at the Missouri Capitol.  The place is a hothouse for gossip of varying degress of veracity.

But then again, imagine how nice would be the Silence of the Thumbs, at least in some places, if Representative Yates had succeeded.

 

Reductio ad absurdum

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The life of retirement on this quiet street provides an opportunity for time to reflect on some of the great political thinking of our times as well as some of the not-so-great ideas. State legislators can be counted on as great thought-fodder producers. They’ll be back in the big-time fodder-manufacturing business in about, hmmmm, ten weeks.  Personal experience has led to the observation that selective self-righteousness always produces fodder. The quality of the fodder sometimes can be measured by a Latin phrase.

Latin does not often spring to the mind of the journalist, but we recall that the introduction of a couple of proposals during the 2015 legislature sent us scurrying to our source for Latin expressions.  It was the first session in which we were not present to subtly suggest some ideas were bereft of intelligence.

One proposal could have eliminated the sales tax that provides the bulk of funds for the Missouri Department of Conservation.  The department wanted to know where the state would find the $110 million dollars to pay many department’s bills if voters kill the tax. The representative didn’t have an answer to that question.

On the other side of the rotunda, a senator wanted to eliminate hunting and fishing permits because, he said, Missourians already pay the conservation sales tax and charging a fee to hunt the critters the conservation sales tax provides habitat for is double taxation.  That’s another $40 million dollars the department would not have so it can pay for all of the stuff it does.

Neither of these fellows suggested how the department could continue to function if it lost $150 million dollars a year, about 85% of its funding.  And if you think the legislature would look very hard for a new funding source, you don’t have a clue about the ideology of the legislative majority.

For example, the legislature started fiscal year 2014-2015 more than $400 million short of the amount it promised public schools they’d be getting by then under the school funding formula.  Do you really think a legislature that lacks interest in meeting its responsibility to pay for the education of Missouri’s children would show any great interest in finding new money to take care of deer, turkeys, otters, elk, prairie chickens, trout, bats, hellbenders, glades, and what little prairie there is left in Missouri?

The legislature solved the problem of funding shortages for education.  It rewrote the formula to reduce its responsibility.

We think the Latin phrase that tops our discussion today means “reduction to absurdity,” a concept that goes back to the great Greek seekers of logical thought who tested the truth of an  argument by seeing if it remained valid when extended to the point of absurdity.

The representative who wanted an end to the conservation sales tax said it’s not “good politics” to have a funding source “that never has an end to it.”  He wanted a statewide vote on whether to continue it.

Hmmmm.   Let’s extend his argument. Had he thought of a proposal for a statewide vote on the income tax?   The state sales tax?  The cigarette tax?   The alcoholic beverage tax?  Since the Farm Bureau jumped to support his bill back then, we wondered if the same standard should apply to the soil conservation and state parks sales tax. Those taxes don’t seem to have any ends either.

There were all kinds of opportunities for “good politics” then.  And if we listen to our legislators who continue to argue that lower taxes will mean more businesses will come to Missouri and create all kinds of new jobs, the expansion of the “good politics” plan could create a business development expansion that would make the Oklahoma Land Rush look like a small-town homecoming parade.

Now, let’s look at the senator’s double taxation argument.  There are all kinds of double taxation that also should be eliminated under his reasoning. We pay a sales tax for the opportunity to own our cars and our trucks and our snowmobiles and our wave runners.  But then we pay a second tax so we can stick a license plate on the front and the rear of the things, or put decals on the side.  And then we have to pay a third tax if we want to put fuel in them. And property taxes, don’t forget them. Forget double taxation.  We’re talking about QUADRUPLE taxation!!!

We pay property taxes that help finance our public schools and universities.  But then we have to pay laboratory fees, sports fees, band fees—and we have to pay to buy or rent textbooks so our children can learn something in the schools we’ve already paid taxes to support, sometimes higher taxes because the legislature continues to refuse to meet its self-imposed obligations. Clearly, those who use our schools are being taxed every bit as unfairly as the people with guns and bows and arrows are being taxed (don’t forget the sales taxes they paid to buy those things) to use the woods where the deer and the turkey play.

We pay taxes to finance our court systems at the county level.  And then we pay additional tax after tax after tax hidden behind the phrase “court fees” for various and sundry parts of the judicial system.  People who make mistakes that put them in court are being double-taxed. In fact, they’re being taxed in multiples, not just as a double tax.

There are astonishing possibilities for even more “good government” in other categories we haven’t touched on here.

The Representative withdrew his proposal fairly soon after introducing it after publicity about it raised big questions about the devastation it would cause. The Senator’s bill underwent major modification and was reduced to something that applied only to people living outside Missouri but who owned at least 75 acres here, which doesn’t exactly peg the logic meter.

We realize it’s never fair to criticize the efforts of others if the critic has no alternatives to offer.  In that spirit is a suggestion that lawmakers should avoid such pennyy-ante tax and fee proposals and focus on a broader “good government” system that lets taxpayers decide how to spend their money—because as we have often heard some legislators say, the taxpayers know how to spend their money better than government does. For example:

—-A law that designates each month as “pledge month” for certain government programs and services.  Let Missourians phone in amounts they would pledge for those services.   January could be Department of Natural Resources and Department of Public Safety Pledge Month.  February could be Department of Transportation and Department of Agriculture Pledge Month.  And so it would go.  We could eliminate an entire large state agency under this plan and that would make advocates of smaller government ecstatic.   We wouldn’t need a Department of Revenue any more. We could set up a smaller Office of Pledge Compliance and save a bundle.

We wonder how things would go for Legislature and Elected Statewide Officials Pledge Month.

Or perhaps we could have a statewide car wash for the Highway Patrol weekend.  A Statewide Social Services Bake Sale weekend.  A statewide garage sale for Mental Health.

Take a Conservation Agent to Lunch Day at the venison chili parish picnic.

See, folks, all the great thinking is not exclusive to legislative chambers when it comes to tax policy.  Any of us can think of things those people think about.

 

 

 

 

Sports Page:  Strong Starts And—-

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(BASEBALL)—Red State Missouri (Cardinals) and Blue State Missouri (Royals) are providing early-season optimism to their fans by with winning first weekends.

The Cardinals started with two straight wins over the Pirates, 9-0 behind six scoreless innings from Adam Wainwright in the first game and home runs from Tyler O’Neill, Tommy Edman, and Nolan Arenado.  Miles Mikolas struggled through a 41-pitch first inning and wasn’t around for the decision in a 6-2 win that featured Paul Dejong’s first homer of the year in the second game.  But new acquisition Steven Matz was bombed early in the third game of the series, won by Pittsburgh 9-3. Arenado had another home run. The Cardinals scored in the first innings of their first three games of the season for the first time since 1977.

The scheduled fourth game of the series was rained out Monday and will be made up as a doubleheader later.

Albert Pujols started the season opener, his 22nd consecutive season opening start (second best in MLB history) but did not play the next two games.  He was 0-5 in his first role as a DH for the Cardinals.

The Royals went 2-2 to open the season, spoiling the debut of the Guardians uniforms of the former Cleveland Indians in the first two games of the series then getting hammered in the last two games.  The Royals won the first game 3-1 then edged the Guardians 1-0 in ten innings before being clobbered 17-3 on Sunday and outslugged 10-7 in game four.

The Royals and Cardinals have a two-game interleague series today and tomorrow in St. Louis.  Dakota Hudson will start tonight against Daniel Lynch, with Zack Greinke and Adam Wainwright getting their second starts of the season tomorrow night.

(INDYCAR)—Team Penske has gone three for three to open the 2022 INDYCAR season and Josef Newgarden is on a two-race winning streak.

Newgarden had to hold off Romain Grosjean for the final 15 laps on the streets of Long Beach, particularly during the last five laps after the final caution.  Grosjean made several runs at Newgarden but could not get even with him.  Newgarden’s two straight wins have put him top the points standings. He was the series champion in 2017 and 2019.

Team Penske is off to its biggest start since 2012 when it won the first four races. Chip Ganassi Racing was the last team to start the year with three straight wins, two years ago.

Colton Herta had a stranglehold on the field for the first 29 laps before crashing because of a “stupid mistake.”

Defending series champion Alex Palou picked up the last podium position.

Long Beach was a trying weekend for seven-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson who crashed twice in practice, the first time breaking a bone in his hand, and then crashed out of the race with a dozen laps left.

(NASCAR)—NASCAR’s first night race at The Paperclip was dominated by two teammates who led 397 of the 403 laps (two in overtime).  Pole sitter Chase Elliott led the first 185 laps at Martinsville but it was William Byron who controlled things the rest of the way to become the first two-time winner this year in the Cup series.

The race usually is 500 laps but it was cut to 400 this year.

Byron had to survive a two-lap overtime shootout with Joey Logano who couldn’t get the jump from outside on the overtime start and couldn’t get close enough to Byron to bump him out of the way.  Byron finished three-tenths of a second in front.  Elliott faded to tenth.

Martinsville, a .526-mile track likened to a paper clip because of its tight turns and long straights, often is the scene of numerous bumps and spins. But Saturday’s nights race drew only four caution periods, only two of which were because of on-track incident (the other two were pauses at the end of the first two stages of the race).  The four cautions were the fewest since 1997.

Elliott and Byron combined to give team owner Rick Hendrick a special distinction. Hendrick Motorsports is now the first operation to field cars combining to lead 10,000 laps at a single race track.

(FORMULA 1)—Ferrari and Charles Leclerc are the hot setup in Formula 1 through the first three races of 2022 while defending F1 Champion Max Verstappen and Red Bull are struggling.

Leclerc won the Grand Prix of Australia during the weekend by twenty seconds over Red Bull’s number two driver, Sergio Perez while Verstappen fumed about his second mechanical failure that has left him 46 points behind in the championship chase.

Mercedes seems far from the dominant team it has been for several years although George Russell did finish third, one slot above teammate Lewis Hamilton.

Leclerc with two wins and a second-place is 34 points up on Russell in the early standings. He’s the only driver with three podiums this year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enhancing (?) Sports

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Baseball season finally has arrived.  By this time next year you might be able to place legal bets on its games.

That will make baseball even better, according to one big name in the biz.

The President of the St. Louis Cardinals, Bill DeWitt III, has told two legislative committees (he’s read the same script twice for one of them) that the Cardinals, Blues, Royals, Chiefs, and soccer teams in St. Louis and Kansas City, “first and foremost…support sports wagering as a way to increase engagement with our fans and provide a fun, exciting new way to enjoy sports.”

Your correspondent does not oppose casinos; voters approved them thirty years ago and it is unlikely they will have a major change of heart.  Sports wagering is inevitable although the proposed legislation guts gambling tax laws that serve the public.

What caught the ear in those hearings was DeWitt’s assertion that sports wagering “will increase engagement with our fans.”

I love baseball.  Some of my earliest memories are of playing the game in the yard of our home in a little Illinois town and hitting a ball that wound up in our living room, the picture window notwithstanding.  I played center field with a catcher’s mitt in my first organized game. I was about seven, and I was scared to death at the plate where I had to face a fourth grader (the town was so small that fourth graders and second graders were on the same teams) throwing smoke, or the fourth grade equivalent.  I remember that in the last game I decided I was going to swing the bat and I did, with my eyes closed, and I felt the ball hit the bat and I opened my eyes in time to see the ball scoot between the legs of the startled pitcher. It was my first official hit.

My first regular fielder’s glove was an Eddie Joost model. Joost was a long-time shortstop for the (then) Philadelphia Athletics, one of the first players to wear glasses in the field.

I played baseball or whatever permutation of it was available to me for as long as there was a game I could play.  I was 65 when I played my most recent game, a slow-pitch co-ed softball game. I took a two-hopper down the third base line and threw a strike over the shoulder of the runner trying to score, right to the catcher for an easy tag.   I say “most recent” because if Jefferson City had a league for fat old men over 75, I’d get my glove and buy some new spikes and I’d be out there smelling the dust mixed with lime, feeling and hearing the ball hit my glove, hearing more than feeling a solid contact with the bat, and going home sweaty with dust-gray socks except for the areas covered by my shoes which was still white.

I love the game.  And thank you, Mr. DeWitt, I will not be more “engaged” in the game because I can bet on it.

I tell you what would “engage” me more, sir—–

You need to call the casino company whose brand carries the television broadcasts of the Cardinals and Royals and tell that company to get the games back on Dish TV.  This will be the third season Nancy and I have had to fill our evenings binge-watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy instead of watching men play the boy’s game I’ve never outgrown.

What also would “engage” me more would be if The Game was made better.  Columnist George F. Will, whose writings I enjoy although he is a dyed-in-the-wool Cubs fan, wrote a column on March 16th, skewering what the game has become—-and frankly, what it has become can’t be fixed by letting somebody bet on whether one of our teams gets more than six hits tonight.

Will complained that games have gotten longer “but with fewer balls in play.”  He noted that more than one-third of all at-bats “result in strikeouts, walks or home runs, which are four seconds of flying ball followed by the batter’s jog.”

“Longer games with less action,” he says, are an atrocious recipe for an entertainment business.

He is correct.  Too much of the game involves only three players. The pitcher and catcher and the hitter.

Sometimes as I listen to my protégé John Rooney’s radio broadcasts of Cardinals games, I think there are only three players involved—the pitcher, catcher, and the batter who often doesn’t try to beat the shift by going the other way or laying down a bunt.

Will points out there were 1,070 fewer stolen bases last year than a decade earlier and suggests,  “If the MLB’s attendance is going to get back to its peak of 80 million fans in 2007, it must restore the energy of the game as it was….”

I once watched the Cardinals and the Phillies play a doubleheader. The two games lasted a TOTAL of four hours, two minutes.  Bob Gibson and Ray Culp plus two relievers in first game won by the Cardinals 5-1 in 2:08.  Ray Washburn and Jim Bunning plus a reliever in game two, won by the Cardinals 1-0 in 1:54.

Will cites what arguably was the greatest World Series game ever played, Pittsburgh’s 10-9 win over the Yankees in World Series game 7, in 1960.  That’s the Bill Mazerowski walk-off homer game played in 2:36. Nobody struck out.  By contrast, he says, the SHORTEST game in last year’s World Series, won by the Astros over the Braves 7-2, lasted three hours-11 minutes. The game had 23 strikeouts, “45 percent of all outs,” he noted.

Betting might increase involvement but if engagement is a goal, give the audience something more than seven guys standing around holding their gloves while two multi-millionaires play catch and a third one takes mighty swings or looks at pitches go by while waiting to see if he can hit the ball over the fence.

It’s The Game—not the bet—that will increase the engagement with fans. And those who love The Game as I do might be excused for worrying that DeWitt’s condescending attitude ignores the apparent hypocrisy of Hall of Fame bans for Pete Rose and Joe Jackson as baseball crawls deeper under the covers with gamblers.

Legal sports wagering is coming to Missouri. But pretentions of it making The Game in some way better are nothing more than misplaced, self-serving platitudes.

A Reason to Still Like Ike

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Here’s a piece of trivia for you that we learned years ago while touring the boyhood home of Dwight D. Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas:

He was born David Dwight Eisenhower.  His father’s name was David, too, so his mother reversed the first two names to avoid having two Davids in the family.

At the end of World War II, President Truman told him, “General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.”  Eisenhower called the idea “an astounding proposition”   that he treated as a “splendid joke, which I hoped it was.”  He laughed it off and told Truman that he would not run for president in ’48.

The incident is recounted in Eisenhower’s 1948 book, Crusade in Europe, his view of the European War.  You might find his last few paragraphs something to reflect on in our current times:

Volumes have been, and more volumes will be, written on the collapse of world co-operation and the true significance of the events that accompanied the tragedy.  For us, all their words will amplify one simple truth.  Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession—to defend it against every thrust from within or without.

Eisenhower warned against any signs of military weakness (as Churchill did in Fulton in 1946) but he felt “Military preparedness alone is an inadequate answer to the problem.” And nationalism isn’t either.  In a time long before Russian hacking, Eisenhower wrote:

Communism inspires and enables its militant preachers to exploit injustices and inequity among men. This ideology appeals, not to the Italian or Frenchman or South Americans as such, but to men as human beings who become desperate in the attempt to satisfy common human needs. Therein it possesses a profound power for expansion. Wherever popular discontent is founded on group oppression or mass poverty or the hunger of children, there Communism may stage an offensive that arms cannot counter.  Discontent can be fanned into revolution, and revolution into social chaos. The sequel is dictatorial rule. Against such tactics exclusive reliance on military might is vain.

The areas in which freedom flourishes will continue to shrink unless the supporters of democracy match Communist fanaticism with clear and common understanding that the freedom of men is at stake; meet Communist-regimented unity with the voluntary unity of common purpose, even though this may mean a sacrifice of some measure of nationalistic pretensions; and above all, annul Communist appeals to the hungry, the poor, the oppressed, with practical measures untiringly prosecuted for the elimination of social and economic evils that set men against men.

As a world force, democracy is supported by nations that too much and too often act alone, each for itself alone. Nowhere perfect, in many regions democracy is pitifully weak because the separation of national sovereignty uselessly prevents the logical pooling of resources, which would produce greater material prosperity within and multiplied strength for defense..

The democracies must learn that the world is too small for the rigid concepts of national sovereignty that developed in a time when the nations were self-sufficient and self-dependent for their own well-being and safety. None of them today can stand alone. No radical surrender of national sovereignty is required—only a firm agreement that in disputes between nations a central and joint agency, after examination of the facts, shall decide the justice of the case by majority decision. This is a slight restriction indeed on nationalism and a small price to pay if thereby the people who stand for human liberty are better fitted to settle dissension with their own ranks or to meeting attack from within.

We believe individual liberty, rooted in human dignity, is man’s greatest treasure. We believe that men, given free expression of their will, prefer freedom and self-dependence to dictatorship and collectivism.  From the evidence, it would appear that the Communistic leaders also believe this; else why do they attack and attempt to destroy the practice of these concepts…

If the men and women of America face this issue as squarely and bravely as their soldiers faced the terrors of battle in World War II, we would have no fear of the outcome. If they will unite themselves as firmly as they did when they provided, with their Allies in Europe, the mightiest fighting force of all time, there is no temporal power that can dare challenge them.  If they can retain the moral integrity, the clarity of comprehension, and the readiness to sacrifice that finally crushed the Axis, then the free world will live and prosper, and all peoples, eventually, will reach a level of culture, contentment, and security that has never before been achieved.

It might seem to some that Eisenhower’s seventy-year old message today would be “Make the WORLD great again.”

Sports Page:  NC Can’t KO KU

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NCAA)—It’s either the greatest comeback in NCAA men’s basketball championship history or the greatest collapse in the tournament’s history, depending on your perspective.

The Kansas Jayhawks, down by 16 late in the first half and trailing by 15 at halftime went on a 31-10 tear in the first ten minutes of the second half to turn a 40-25 halftime deficit into a 56-50 lead, then fought off repeated North Carolina comebacks to win the fourth national basketball championship in KU history, 72-69.  The Jayhawks held North Carolina scoreless for the last 1:41 of the game.

The comeback is the biggest in NCAA title game history. Kentucky rallied from ten points down to beat Utah in 1998.

Kansas finishes the season at 34-6 including a 102-65 win over Missouri in December. North Carolina’s season ends at 29-10.

So ends a season for the young guys.  Old Guys are part of the rest of our stories.

(BASEBALL)—The unofficial real end of winter will be Thursday—baseball’s opening day.

The Cardinals open at home against the Pirates. The Royals open at home against the newly-named Cleveland Guardians, a team named for some statues on a city bridge.

’22 will be 22 for Number 5 on Thursday—Albert Pujols’ 22nd straight opening day start. He’ll be the DH.  Only Pete Rose had more season opener starts—23. Pujols will join Hank Aaron and Carl Yastrzemski for second-most.  Pujols is one of three old guys who might be making their last opening day starts. He’s joined by battery mates Adam Wainwright and Yadier, Molina. Molina has said this is his last year. Wainwright has come back for one more after a 15-win year in 2021.

The Royals old guy is Zack Greinke, who makes his sixth opening day start, fourth most among active pitchers. His last opening day start for the Royals was in 2010. Clayton Kershaw, Madison Bumgarner and Justin Verlander are the only pitchers with more.  He will start against an old franchise with a new name—the Cleveland Guardians.

(NASCAR)—Richmond was for the old guys of NASCAR. Denny Hamlin and Kevin Harvick ran down the young guns in the closing laps at the ¾ mile track at Richmond, passed leader William Byron with five laps to go and finished 1-2.  A third veteran, Martin Truex Jr., finished fourth.  It’s Hamlin’s 47th career victory.  Hamlin, who is 41 is the seventh winner in seven Cup races this year, the first older than 30 to pick up a victory.

Kevin Harvick, 46, threatened to end his long winless streak but couldn’t get through lapped traffic at the end of challenge and came up just over a half-second short.  But he said the race was the “first clean day” he’s run all year.

Both Hamlin and Harvick used a late-race two pit stop strategy to give them newer tires than Byron had. The strategy enabled Hamlin to come from 14 seconds back with 25 laps left to get past Byron, who admitted after the race that his older tires didn’t have enough traction to hold off Hamlin and Harvick.

Hamlin becomes the seventh different winner in the first seven races of the year.  The record for most different winners at the start of a NASCAR season is nine, set in 2003 by Michael Waltrip, Dale Jarrett, Matt Kenseth, Bobby Labonte, Ricky Craven, Kurt Busch, Ryan Newman, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Jeff Gordon.  Only Kurt Busch is still racing.

Hamlin’s 47 wins ranks him 17th on the all-time list. Harvick, still looking for his first win since September, 2020, is tenth with 58 checkered flags.

Hamlin is still hoping to win a Cup Championship. Only one other driver with more wins that he has never won a driver’s title—Junior Johnson.

(INDYCAR)—Whether the Indianapolis 500 will see a full field of 33 cars this year remains a big question mark.  Only 32 car/driver/financial combinations have come together for the May 29 race.  RACER magazine says negotiations are continuing to put together a package that will provide the final entrant.  The major teams have indicated their satisfied with their plans.

(FORMULA 1)—Mercedes, winner of eight straight F1 Constructor’s Championships, is still looking for solutions to a handling problem in its cars that has left them uncompetitive with Ferrari and Red Bull teams in the early going.

The problem is called “porpoising” and is the result of Formula 1 allowing curved, not flat, bottom surfaces of the car that allow for once-banned ground effects.  The new chassis architecture allows air flow above the car to force it down closer to the track, thus creating greater traction. But when the bottom of the car gets too close to the ground, the underbody no longer funnels the air appropriately, causing the car to rise.  The up and down motion is called porpoising.

Mercedes’ first chance to show it has solved the problem comes up next week when the series runs the first Grand Prix of Australia since 2019.

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F1 has announced it will run a street race in Las Vegas in 2023.  The race will be held in November, hear the end of the Formula 1 season.  The race will be the third Formula 1 race in the United States in 2023.

The new track will be 3.8 miles long with 14 corners and three long straights. The famed Strip will be part of the course.

(Photo credit:  Bob Priddy)

 

Morbid Bracketology

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A lot of office employees have filled out basketball tournament brackets this year but I’ll bet you’ve never seen one such as the staff at the Missouri State Archives has each year.

Instead of “March Madness,” these folks have a “tournament” called Morbid Madness. It started six years ago when staffers were talking about some of the “weird, interesting or amusing causes of death while researching, processing or indexing records,” as archivist Christina Miller explained it to me a few days ago. “We come across death certificates, mortality schedules (1850-1880), probate records, coroners inquests and court records during the course of our work,” although the brackets are not limited to those years. Since it was about March when this came up, the staff decided to create a bracket to determine a “winning” unusual cause of death. Before long, people from other divisions of the archives joined in and before long the bracket became a “team building” activity.

One example from a previous bracket was a death certificate that listed “drowned while washing car.” That set the staff off on a search of newspaper accounts which showd the car apparently was partiallyi driven into a lake for washing (strange enough right there!) and the driver got his foot stuck under water and drowned.

These are folks that are keying thousands of old records into databases that the public can access. Among those records are death certificates and the supporting documents, usually coroner’s inquest reports.  These folks discover all kinds of funny (in a grisly sort of way) causes of death.

Here is this year’s Morbid Madness Bracket;

Some of these are pretty prosaic—smoking in bed, for example.  Others are just—–Well, we don’t know that to say they are.

We don’t have room to include coroner’s reports but the case of the death of William Nabe who died of a knife wound in an argument about pies at the Coker School House in Cape Girardeau County, 1916—which reached the final round—happened this way:

A deposition from witness Louis Schatte recalled there was an “entertainment” at the school that featured a pie sale. One Jim Thompson bid to buy all of the pies, prompting Nabe to ask in a friendly way, “What are you going to do with all those pies?”  To which Thompson replied, “It’s none of your damn business.”   A short time later, Nabe told Thompson he’d be better off saving his money because the next day he wish he hadn’t spent all of it and had let the other guys a chance and “if he was going to invite the boys to eat pie with him.”  Schatte said, “All Nabe’s remarks were seemingly in fun and Thompson replied in a very short plain manner that it was none of his God Damn business.” (The involvement of the Deity indicates things are much more serious now.)

In a follow-up conversation, Nabe said he wasn’t looking for a fight inside the school but if Thompson was looking for trouble “to come outside and he would get it.”  Outside, Thompson was ready to go but Nabe didn’t want to fight on school property. There were some other words exchanged and the two wound up wrestling in the road in the process of which Thompson stabbed Nabe while Nabe was on top of him.  We don’t know what happened to Thompson or to all the pies he bought.

“Died during a fight over pies” prevailed over such causes as dragging dead hogs, burned by a kettle of ketchup or by really hot hotcakes, being shot “slyly,” and just plain old smoking in bed, or in a drunken brawl.

Reaching the championship round on the other side was the death of William Diez (as nearly as we can decipher the old handwriting) from “Drinking Almond Oil”  in February, 1848.  It seems a man named Magnus Gross (perhaps) was making a liquer called Maraschino, the recipe for which called for the oil of bitter almonds. Diez argued with Gross about the properties of the oil. Although Gross said it was among the most dangerous of poisons, Diez disagreed and said that while he was a student in Europe he drank the stuff after a night’s spree. The dispute continued until Diez suddenly grabbed the glass containing the oil and chugged it down.  Not long afterward he complained of feeling ill, vomited material strongly smelling of almonds, and lost consciousness. He died within a half-hour.

A doctor later testified that eight drops of the oil would often kill a man.

Drinking almond oil defeated whiskey of questionable quality, thought bug killer was wine, a watermelon seed in the lungs, drowned in a keg, and used a railroad tie as a pillow.

Drinking the oil of bitter almonds was this year’s Morbid Madness champion.

Last year these jolly archivists had an all-star bracket that featured winners of past brackets. The winner in 2018 was suicide with booze and women as the contributing cause. In 2019 it was about a man hit by a cow on a public highway. In 2020 it was a guy whowas attached to a chain on his wife’s car—which was ruled a justifiable homicide.

The winner of last year’s All Star contest was the winner from the 2017 bracket—a guy more than fifty years ago who tried to throw a beer can to a neighboring house. There was a little more to the incident than that, though:

Moral of the stories for 2022: If you’re going to have a pie fight, throw them and in the other case sometimes (I can hear Shirley Bassey singing this) “Almonds are forever.”

The Hypocrisy of Term Limits

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Sometimes we write stuff here that won’t move the public needle but we do it to get something off our chest and into whatever public discussion flows from these pieces.  Truth be told, these columns have limited readership and since I don’t mess with Facebook or other social media platforms (I have a life and it is not lived between my thumbs), this wisdom reaches only a few feet from the mountaintop from which it is dispensed.

But today, we need to expose term limits for the hypocritical entity that they are. And the hypocrisy that voters showed in approving them thirty years ago this year.

We related some of the problems a few days ago.  There are two major points today, one that can be made in just a few words and the second one that will take a little more. The point, however, is the same—term limits are voter apathy and voter hypocrisy at their worst:

The first point is one we’ve made before—that voters gave up their right to vote for the people who represent them in the legislative chambers when they adopted a law saying they did not want the right to vote their state representative a fifth term or their state senator a third term.

They just threw away their votes.

Voters said we must have term limits to get new, fresh blood into our governments—-and then immediately contradicted themselves.

The same voters who approved limiting Missouri House members to only four two-year terms voted in the same election to return 53 members to the House of Representatives for a fifth term.

Of that 53, four were returned for their ninth term, one for a tenth term, two for their eleventh term and one for his SEVENTEENTH term.

Two years later, Missourians voted for 36 of these same people for still another term and gave fourteen others a fifth term or more.

And in 1996 voters sent 22 of them back again! And they gave 13 representatives fifth terms.

The last person affected by term limits to serve in the House of Representatives, as far as we have been able to determine, was Chris Kelly of Columbia, who was elected to his ninth and last term in 2012 after having been away from the House for several years.  He could have run for a tenth term but did not.

In all, Missouri voters who think term limits are good public policy have voted 263 times to elect state representatives to a fifth term (one was elected to a 19th during this time).

The Missouri Senate, a much smaller body, has seen voters send its members back for more than two terms 32 times.

That’s almost 300 times for both chambers of our legislature. .

And what does that say?

It says that if voters have a chance to vote for someone they like, they’ll do it.  But those voters of 1992 decided you and I won’t have that opportunity.

The second point is that term limits miss the target.  The real issue is POWER.  Instead, term limits cripples SERVICE.  The most dangerous people in our political system are the people in power.  They set the agendas.  They decide what legislation will be heard in committees or debated on the floors of the House and the Senate. They are in positions that attract financial support that hey might wish to share with a favored few.

Terms limits can be, should be, applied to those who can manipulate the system.  Speakers and Presidents Pro Tem have the power. The Governor and the Treasurer have policy and financial power in state government and limiting that power is a safeguard as would be limiting the years a person can lead a legislative body.

There is no doubt that incumbency has its advantages at campaign times.  But the answer to that advantage is not in taking away the right to vote for that person again instead of for an opponent. It is in making challengers more equal in presenting their cases.  Reforming the way campaigns are financed is an answer. The challenge is in finding a constitutional way to do it.

One way to start is to change term limits laws to apply to those in power and to restore the citizens’ right to pick their public servants.

Will voters reclaim their right?  In today’s political climate, it’s extremely doubtful regardless of how much we owe it to ourselves as voters and our system to do it.

There are people who are dying today to keep their version of democracy alive.  We smug Americans who too readily wrap ourselves in our flag and use it to justify all kinds of dubious remarks and actions cannot fully appreciate  how desperately millions of others want to hang on to something we regard so casually and irresponsibly and are willing to give away with so little thought.

But term limits are what we have and that’s what we are thirty years after Missourians gave away their right to vote for those speaking for them in the chambers where our laws are made.