Tragedy strikes Angels

Nick Adenhart, a promising rookie pitcher for the Los Angels of Anaheim, was killed in an automobile accident, just hours after his impressive 2009 debut.

From this morning's LA Times;

Adenhart and two friends were killed early Thursday morning when their car was broadsided by a driver who police said had a suspended license and a previous drunk driving conviction. The news of the young pitcher's death stunned friends, teammates and fans, some driving to the Fullerton intersection to place flowers and candles in the roadway and others going to Anaheim Stadium, seemingly just to be there.

Adenhart's father, Jim, had flown in to watch his son pitch. The younger Adenhart, plagued by arm injuries the past two years, blanked Oakland over six innings, Wednesday night.

Spencer Weiner photo/LA Times

After leaving the Angels' stadium with friends, the Mitsubishi Eclipse Adenhart was riding in was struck broadside by a Toyota Sienna minivan driven by 22-year-old Andrew Thomas Gallo of Riverside. Gallo allegedly blew through a red light at 50 to 60 mph and struck the Eclipse, killing Adenhart.

Police said Gallo, convicted in San Bernardino County of drunk driving in 2006 and marijuana possession the following year, ran from the scene but was quickly apprehended. Fullerton Police Lt. Kevin Hamilton said his department planned to seek felony hit-and-run driving, DUI, vehicular manslaughter and, possibly, murder charges. A decision could be made today.

As fate would have it, the Red Sox travel to the west coast and will be the Angels opponent, Friday evening.

Bill Shaikin has a column today, on Adenhart's father, grieving and going through what no parent ever hopes to experience--the death of their child.

Where's Ben Sheets

On May 16, 2004, Ben Sheets struck out 18 Atlanta Braves. I was watching the game on TBS, the Atlanta Braves network at the time. Sheets made major league hitters look like overmatched Little Leaguers, with an unhittable 12-6 breaking pitch, and a fastball routinely touching 95 on the gun. I'm thinking, "this guy's sick."

Since then, I've been a lurker, following Ben Sheets, and his up and down, injury-plagued career, always wondering just how good he could have been without his propensity to get hurt, and also, if he played for a real major league team, not a AAA squad masquerading as one. Sorry Milwaukee.

When I want to MLB.com this morning, I noticed he was no longer listed on the Brewers roster. I'm like, "WTF?"

I guess I'll have to do some digging when I get a chance.

Opening day redux

The Boston Red Sox, New England's team, disappointingly saw their home opener foiled by yesterday's deluge. They'll try it again today, at 4:00 pm.

I attended opening day once, back in 2000. It was a miserably cold day, and while it was fun to say I'd been to opening day, I prefer to wait until June, to view my baseball in the flesh. In fact, my uncle, left-handed ace of the old Roberts 88'ers town team, always insisted that "we don't get baseball weather in Maine until June." That adage has always served me well.

In saluting the hope that accompanies opening day for fans of every team, even perennial cellar dwellers like the Kansas City Royals, I leave you with this piece from Russ Smith, and my own take on opening day, back in 2006, and the optimism that accompanies this uniquely American experience.

History Maker Malfunction

I may have miscalculated just how much words matter, at least words that have time, research, and thought behind them.

Back in January, I launched what I had hoped would be a weekly exercise in presenting history, most notably people and events that currently receive short shrift, or have been the subject of some recent revisionism.

This was not an insignificant undertaking, as trying to post something that I considered substantive, and not a mere rehash of someone else's work, required considerable effort.

Each one of the 10 posts that became History Maker Mondays involved reading, research, and then the requisite time necessary to put the information into a readable format. What I thought might become a boost to my site's traffic, for whatever reason, has instead resulted in a decrease in readership.

Despite the drag my takes on history have become to Words Matter, I don't consider these exercises in research and information retrieval to have been total waste of time. Each one of my weekly forays back into the past have helped me to have a better understanding, and further cemented my belief that history is important. It also reinforces my belief that much of what remains important to me puts me in the place of swimming upstream, against the superficial, and overly simplistic and banal.

My decision to suspend my weekly history posts isn't just about a lack of positive feedback, however. When I set out to try to tackle something substantive, in January, I was looking for a way to prime my creative pump, and possibly push my writing forward, hoping it would allow me to fall into book project mode. I think it may have had its desired effect.

While I'm not abandoning the Words Matter ship entirely, I've experienced a noticeable shift in my interests of late. Typically, this blog has been about my views on politics, culture, media, with other subjects tossed into the mix (including history). While I still maintain an interest in these matters, I've become aware of the day-to-day drain on my psyche that these subjects engender. Instead, I'm choosing to focus more on books, reading, the craft of writing, and because of this, a literary focus has emerged.

For the short-term at least, I'll probably post infrequently here, preferring to concentrate on books, other authors, and the progress I'm making towards developing book #3. You can find these musings over at my writing blog.

Moral nihlism

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
--Chris Hedges, Truthdig, 3/23/2009

Hedges never pulls any punches. If you can pull yourself away from Twitter, and your other social networking endeavors long enough, think about making Hedges' Truthdig column a weekly habit. Better yet, stop thinking about it, and just do it!