This is not a baseball blog, part I

Mainers can play baseball. While we don't have the sheer numbers of college-level players and even professional athletes that warmer states boast, for a state with a small population and our baseball fields deemed uninhabitable (or at least, unplayable) for large portions of the annum, Mainers do just fine.

Beginning Wednesday, I'll be on the Cape, watching my son and his Wheaton Lyons teammates, take on six other opponents, in the NCAA Division III Regional tournament, in Harwich, Massachusetts. Mark is a senior, so this will be a sentimental three or four days, for me. We've developed much of our father-son relationship on lonely baseball diamonds, with me throwing batting practice and as he got older, lining baseballs back at his father, watching time erode my former cat-like reflexes. While the Lyons have had a remarkable run this spring, including a team record 24 game winning streak, #6 ranking in the country and the #1 seed in the regional, this will all be for naught, if they can't advance to the Little College World Series, in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Division III baseball doesn't receive the fanfare (or the scholarships) of the Division I brand of college baseball, but for the young men who play, actual student-athletes, they bring much of the same intensity, passion, and often level of skill to the game, of their bigger, sometimes faster, large-college counterparts. For me, small-college ball seems somewhat purer.

Against my own personal storyline, is the Maine backdrop of three Maine small colleges being represented, with their large contingents of Maine born and bred ballplayers. I'm hoping some of Maine's sports reporting community will pick up on this. I've send the following release to many of my contacts, in hopes that this story gets picked up.

Maine well-represented in NCAA baseball tourney

In college baseball circles, Division I programs often receive much of the attention and the lion’s share of press coverage. In New England and more specifically, Maine, Division III baseball, while sometimes overlooked, has often overshadowed and often outperformed Maine’s lone Division I program, headquartered in Orono.

It’s been over two decades since the Black Bears, then coached by the legendary John Winkin, appeared in the College World Series. On the other hand, Ed Flaherty’s USM Huskies have won two national, small college championships, in Division III, first in 1991, then again in 1997.

This year’s Division III, Northeast Regional, in Harwich, Massachusetts, features an abundance of Maine-grown baseball talent, with three Maine-based schools participating. Never before has the Pine Tree State been this well represented in a regional college tournament, before.

With Bowdoin College, USM and St. Joseph’s College all participating among the seven seeded teams in Harwich, there are 51 Maine-born players on the various rosters of the combatants. Bowdoin and St. Joseph’s are making their first appearances ever, in a NCAA regional baseball tourney.

Even Massachusetts-based Wheaton College, the #1 seed, as well as 6th ranked team in the country, has six Maine players on their roster, with four position players that start and another considered one of the Lyon’s top starting pitchers.

In addition, many of these players have all played one or more summer’s in Portland’s Twilight League, Maine’s premiere summer college baseball league.

Here is the breakdown of teams and number of players from Maine:

USM (seeded #5)-19 players
St. Joe’s (seeded #2) 18 players
Bowdoin (seeded #7)- 8 players
Wheaton College (seeded #1)- 6 players

That’s 51 players with roots firmly planted in Maine! Who says Mainers can’t play baseball, particularly of tournament-caliber quality?

It would seem quite obvious to me that there is something newsworthy about this, certainly from a sports perspective.

Comedy's "truthiness"

In a nation that seems to have mutually lost its spine and its soul, Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents dinner is still being talked about all over the blogosphere, some two weeks after Colbert showed President Bush and his administration no mercy in skewering its policies, practices and indicting the mainstream media for being co-conspirators in the removal of our democratic underpinnings. There are those who might argue the merits of even using the “d-word” in relation to the United States, at any time in our recent past. That’s a discussion for another post. What I’d like to highlight, is at a time of timidity and caution, Colbert threw expediency and diplomacy to the wind and let it rip, when given an opportunity to make his case about the president.

Oddly, the one consistent place to find some “truthiness” has become Comedy Central, with its nightly duo of Colbert and former comedy partner in crime, John Stewart, tag-teaming Bush and the political debacle we find ourselves in, during the first quarter of 2006.

While it’s not the first time that comedians have provided some context for politics during wartime (anyone with a cursory knowledge of Lenny Bruce and his comedic salvos understands comedy’s ability to provide a working framework for current events), it’s been awhile since the nation’s turned its weary eyes to the comedic profession for truth and understanding.

While the late Bill Hicks provided a fringe take and hot poker to the ass of much of what passed for right-wing lunacy, Stewart, and now, Colbert, bring a needed perspective, albeit one less caustic (but just as deadly), to a much wider audience, particularly the living rooms of middle-America. Better yet, they have found a way to reach an apathetic group of 20 and 30-somethings, who have tuned out politics and rarely focus on traditional news outlets for their political or cultural understanding.

Arianna Huffington offers up her perspective on Colbert’s gutsy performance, one in which he dared to speak truth to power, when power was a stone’s throw away, literally at his right elbow. In fact, Colbert walked into the lion’s den with nothing more than his comedy routine and schtick from The Colbert Report and systematically put poor little rich boy, George, squarely in his place with a comedic, “up yours” to the commander-in-chief.

Huffington’s take is a good recap for anyone who’s been living under a rock for the past two weeks, as well as summarizing the perspective of other bloggers and pundits on Colbert’s comedic tour-de-force.

For the health of it

File this one in the category of "facts to confound your patriotic, flag-waving friends and family," especially when they trot out the tired canard that goes, "well, America is still the best place on earth to live," which inevitably follows any mention by you about quality of life in other places on the globe.

To the "true believers," there is very little room inside their brains, riddled by talk radio, for information bathed in reality and pregnant with facts. Most likely, they'll have to resort to the usual ad hominem attack, or Euro-bashing that is a favorite activity of the Faux set.

And the rich get....richer!

One of the editors at Mother Jones came up with a series of "snapshots" that detail the ever-widening gulf between the very rich in America, and everyone else.

Clara Jeffery's piece, titled "The Perks of Privilege," clearly illustrates the growing disparity in wealth that is now, 21st century America.

Here are just a few "highlights":

• In 1985, The Forbes 400 were worth $221 billion combined. Today, they’re worth $1.13 trillion—more than the GDP of Canada. (Income disparity)
• ONLY 3% OF STUDENTS at the top 146 colleges come from families in the bottom income quartile; only 10% come from the bottom half. (Educational disparity)
• BUSH’S TAX CUTS GIVE a 2-child family earning $1 million an extra $86,722—or Harvard tuition, room, board, and an iMac G5 for both kids.
• A 2-CHILD family earning $50,000 gets $2,050—or 1/5 the cost of public college for one kid. (These last two, taken together, show a tax disparity that leads to the above-mentioned education disparity)
• ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION, the federal minimum wage has fallen 42% since its peak in 1968. (How can lower-income workers compete when an already inadequate wage continues to shrink? It makes trying to make a living an absurd joke.)
• IF THE $5.15 HOURLY minimum wage had risen at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, it would now stand at $23.03. (which would make it a living wage)

These are just a few items from Jeffery's article, which is definitely worth going through, if for no other reason than to have some talking points to throwback at the conservative trolls you work with, or other Limbaugh-loving family members that make you bite your tongue until it's nothing more than bloody pulp.

Defined by class

Lewis Lapham was the editor of Harper’s Magazine, for over 30 years. Harper’s has the distinction of being the second-oldest continuously published magazine in America (do you know the honor of being the oldest?). In an age of five-second sound bites and a populace given more to American Idol than American literature, Harper’s longevity and relevance is quite an accomplishment. Actually, staying true to its intellectual underpinnings in a dumbed down nation might be Lapham's true legacy at Harper's.

As a writer and social critic, Lapham has continually written about class in America. The 600 pound elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, class arguably informs American life more than any other factor.

In the late 80s, as the Reagan years were mercifully winding down, Lapham gave us Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion (Grove Press, 1988). In this book, a series of Lapham’s essays, his underlying theme is the degradation and caustic effects that chasing money for money’s sake has on culture, politics and society as a whole. Showing that his thoughts and ideas are still relevant, Lapham notes in an interview granted for The Progressive,

“We [also] need an awakening on the part of large numbers of people, both Democrat and Republican, of a political consciousness that has been dormant for the better part of the last thirty years. We have to change the notion that politics isn’t important, that what’s important is the economy and money, and that politicians serve at the pleasure of their corporate sponsors. They might as well be hired accordion players at a hospitality tent at a golf tournament.”
Lapham also has some interesting insights about young college graduates and how they no longer are interested in ideas and things bigger than themselves—only how to land a cushy corporate gig and make money.

If you’d like to read more from the interview with one of America’s great essayists, you can access it here.