Please, no pushing, you will all get a turn. This dropped out of the electronic wind earlier this week; I can’t make out what conclusion this rigorous experiment returned, but I thought you’d like a chance to answer the lad’s question—click the comments balloon at the top right.
OK, I’ll start:
“Yes, and you will be one of them.”
My my my: how rare and brave are the new owners of the Houston Astros, standing right up to all-powerful Major League Baseball and everything!
After all, it’s so obviously clear that having Houston’s baseball players wear these shirts for two whole games this year would spark a wave of 
gun violence unprecedented in scope and depravity that there should be no question but that forbidding them from doing so was the only responsible option for the right-thinking people who direct what all other people should and shouldn’t do and think. Even if, as is likely, the team will only be seen by upwards of hundreds of fans on those days—including kids, I tell ya; think of the KIDS!—they-who-pass-judgment chose not to tempt fate and were super-duper-diligent in expressing their directions to the rest of us.
But the Houston Astros did not meekly accepted the dictats of our overcautious society; oh no. After exercising the temerity to consider the merits of a situation (but only after having received permission to do so, of course), team management expressed a considered and independent opinion:
“We made this decision for a number of reasons,” Astros owner Jim Crane said in a statement. “We listened to our fans, who were almost unanimously in favor of wearing the original jersey. We wanted to honor all of our past uniforms during this special 50th anniversary season, and we felt it was important to be true to the tradition of the franchise.”
Oh. My. God. They did what their fans wanted?! The team did what it felt was right?!! A bold move, unquestionably…but where will we all be if that sort of behavior were to catch on?
I’d find this funny in any case, but as a golfer I find it humorous in the extreme, and a great example of why it’s important to keep a close tab on your punctuation.
Today I found in the mail a flyer from an area golf establishment offering special rates on memberships that include play at a number of area courses, cheap lessons, family social events, etc., and all for a reduced entry fee. I’m not likely to join since the course closest to my house is about ten times as far away as where I play now (at a much lower monthly rate), but still I looked over the flyer. There, among the many enticing offers and colorful photos and alluring graphics, is a testimonial from “Canongate Member since 2011.” Well, if old C.M. really said this, in this way, I understand his reason for maintaining anonymity.
In the pull quote the man tells me that he and his wife and sons have spent their first day as members at their new club, that they enjoyed a lovely meal, and that then they spent “three hours outdoors together having more fun than we’ve had in a long time, and playing golf too.”
It’s a smile…
Listening to a baseball game on the radio is a special treat, but I haven’t been able to tune in to my Houston Astros since the mid-1980s because I cannot abide the play-by-play announcer. So I was quite pleased recently when Milo Hamilton announced he was retiring from the broadcast booth after the 2012 season. Appreciation of one broadcaster or another is to some degree a matter of taste, I grant you; in this case, I’m finally getting the bad taste out of my mouth after more than 30 years!
In the days of my first experience with cable television in Austin, Texas in the late 1970s, when all you got was a dozen or so channels in total including the local stations, the special offerings including the independent “super stations” WTBS (originally WTCG) in Atlanta and WGN in Chicago which carried a ton of syndicated programming plus all the games of the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Cubs baseball teams. To a fledgling broadcaster and long-time baseball fan it was pretty cool to see how stations in other cities put on their broadcasts, and since the Cubs played all their home games in the afternoon back then I saw them a lot. In a very short time I decided that I did not care for the style of either of the Cubs play-by-play men, Harry Caray and Milo Hamilton.
By 1985 I was back in Houston, and was disgusted at the news that the Astros hired Hamilton to be the second play-by-play guy behind long-time local favorite Gene Elston. By 1987 Elston was unceremoniously dumped and Hamilton had the top spot in the radio broadcast. He has some ardent fans—most notably Astros management, that hasn’t fired him in all these years—but Hamilton is the subject of high derision and ridicule, and it’s not just me: check out the comments forum at Houston’s Leading Information Source, or even the Astros’ own website, when the news broke that Hamilton was going to announce his retirement.
Among the things I’ve always loathed, right after his increasing inability over the years to stay focused on the game playing out right in front of his damn eyes, has been Hamilton’s pomposity, his exuberant affection for all things Milo and his assumption that you love all things Milo too. This includes the unbecoming habit of reminding the listener that he’s a Hall of Fame broadcaster, referring to the fact that he won the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1992. Well, during the big doings over the retirement announcement I saw a story in the Houston Press that gave me pause: John Royal asserted that Hamilton is not a member of the Hall of Fame, just the winner of an award the Hall gives. I had to find out for myself:
There you have it boys and girls, the bar-bet-settling evidence straight from Cooperstown! Milo Hamilton, no matter which halls of fame you claim, you are not a member of baseball’s hall. Happy trails! Oh, frabjous rapture!
But as joyous as the news is, as wonderful the feeling of smacking down a hated asshole can be, it’s raised an issue. My friend Mark Sterling, a product of Detroit who shares my distaste for Hamilton’s on-air style, and who is a lover of the late long-time Tigers broadcaster who also won the Frick, had this response to the notice heralding my achievement:
A fine piece of investigative work, indeed; certainly adding proper perspective to Milo’s body of work. However, in the case of fellow “award winner” Ernie Harwell, Red and I will stand like the house by the side of the road, and watch that one [Craig’s assessment] go by…
Oh crap, what I have I done? (Milo, what have you done? You’ve gone and screwed it up for everybody.)
And then it hit me: this is only a problem for creeps like Hamilton who’ve overreached and taken credit for something they’re not entitled to. We’ve all heard other Frick Award winners referred to as Hall of Famers by others, but the mikemen don’t bear the responsibility for that error. They’re all in the Hall, in the exhibit in the Museum, and we who appreciate their work aren’t wrong to think of them as being in the Hall. (Donna Stell, another friend who read the Hall’s response to my question, wondered if that makes Hamilton an exhibitionist; yes, I believe it does.)
So, I was relatively proud of myself for coming up with information that like-minded baseball lovers can appreciate. I shared it among a group of friends, and made the parenthetical aside that “this may be the most worthwhile thing I have done this week;” my friend Tom Adolph, no doubt voicing the sentiment shared by many others, replied “This may be the best thing you have ever done.” If so, I can live with that.
One of the things I learned from the whole affair was that I can get as lazy as anyone about paying attention, and I need to watch that. In this case, not only was I sucked in by the trick and missed the obvious transgression, I got schooled on the thing by the guy I was delighted to believe was going to suffer—not only for his own alleged unlawful behavior but from what I assumed is the bigotry of his fans.
The facts are 
these: late last month a Chevy Tahoe registered to local radio talk show host and former Houston City Council member Michael Berry was implicated in an traffic accident in which witnesses saw the vehicle strike an unoccupied parked car and then leave the scene. The vehicle was later witnessed driving around the block back to the scene a second and a third time without stopping, and on those subsequent passes the driver was ID’ed as Berry; Berry was also visible in surveillance footage shot inside a nearby business just before the accident happened. Police investigated, filed no charges; Berry subsequently acknowledged being inside the nearby business at the time in question, but has not admitted or denied being behind the wheel when the accident occurred. Well, that’s all very, well, (yawn)…
But that wasn’t the story when I heard it. The Big Story that was broken by a local television station last week (which I didn’t see) and was then followed up by Houston’s Leading Information Source (which I did) was that a local conservative talk show host was implicated in a hit-and-run outside a gay bar. The “conservative” (like there’s any other kind on a political show these days?) and the “gay bar” are also factually accurate, but entirely beside the point if you were to assume that any actual news here is “prominent Houstonian investigated for hit-and-run” and not “conservative loudmouth attends drag show at gay bar (and sideswipes a parked car without leaving his information).”
I admit: when I read the story in the paper my first thought was to assume that Berry was going to get roasted by his hard-core conservative radio audience for patronizing a gay bar, and I smiled a little smile of satisfaction…and, yes, my second thought was that it was wrong of him to back into a parked car and then leave, although to me the “illegal leaving” made sense if he was trying to keep from being caught up in the “gay bar” part of the situation. It was just funny that someone who was trying to keep from being caught would drive by the scene again—twice!—and if he was going to be that dumb then he deserved what he was going to get.
Berry said nothing publicly about the matter until he opened up his radio show yesterday, and then he spent an entire hour on it. It took him 34:42 into the hour before he got to the hit and run allegation at the center of the case and then he said he couldn’t talk about it because it’s a pending legal matter; he reminded listeners that he hasn’t been charged with anything, and stated that he has cooperated with the police fully. That all makes good sense legally but it’s jarring to the sensibilities: if you’re talking about the incident at all, how can you refuse to address the central issue?
What he did talk about, though, was the attack on him by the TV station, and he was right about that, to a point. KPRC-TV led its newscast—led the newscast, mind you; ostensibly the most important event of the day—with a story about a two-week-old, injury-less, hit-and-run accident in which a former city council member and prominent local media member was implicated, but had it all dressed up with screams of “gay bar” and “drag show.” That’s got to be in someone’s textbook as an example of how to unfairly and misleadingly characterize a simple set of facts. The station’s report included proof that a traffic accident occurred and that Berry’s vehicle was involved, but otherwise served only to raise the titillation quotient and crank up the rumor-mongering machinery. KPRC-TV should be ashamed of itself, but probably is not; it lost its soul when the local owners sold it to Post-Newsweek in 1994.
So for me, if Berry had left it there he’d be declared the hands-down winner in this little bit of business. But no. The man to whom I once wrote a nice letter about his expressed hope that any mosque built near Ground Zero would be bombed couldn’t let it rest.
I listened to Berry’s on-air response posted on the station’s website. He claimed he was being smeared with reports from “unnamed sources” that he intimated may not actually exist..and then he threatened to respond with reports from his own “unnamed sources” and their (wink, wink) “allegations” about KPRC people. Berry asserted that the “gay bar” story was “shopped around” to local reporters by political insiders (whom he did not name) and enemies he’s made over the years.
He said he went to the bar in question, where gay patrons were present, because he wanted a beer, thought he wouldn’t be recognized there, and didn’t want to be bothered. Fine. He also refuted the assumption that all conservatives hate gay people, and pointed out that he himself has taken on gay-bashers in the past, Pat Robertson in particular. But I thought he showed an inability to control his own temper: anger at being wrongly accused may be understandable, but Berry’s display of flashes of that anger, and his childish name-calling, showed a lack of self-control.
So anyways, thanks Michael Berry, for reminding me that if I am ever being tortured by being made to watch the news on KPRC-TV that I make damn sure to have the BS filter cleaned and installed ahead of time. And thanks to you, too, Patti Kilday Hart, for invoking the memory of the late, great Bob Bullock to teach a lesson to people like me:
The recovering alcoholic, chain-smoking, serial husband would remind us that life’s darkest moments offer opportunity for profound change. He’d tell Berry to listen to his lawyer and shut up.
Then he’d give the rest of us a dark scowl and suggest what we should give up for Lent: Schadenfreude, the personal enjoyment of another’s suffering. Bullock knew something about personal foibles. We all have them.
HEY, IT'S PAT RYAN'S BLOG! 