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Cleveland’s Pro Baseball Team, Mildly Renascent

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As readers of this blog will know, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and under the tutelage of my sports-loving dad, I became a fan, too. I remain a fan and a follower of all the Cleveland professional sports team, the NBA Cavaliers (By lottery this week they won the first pick in the upcoming collegiate draft, a pleasant prospect.); the NFL Browns (I attended the last Cleveland pro sports championship, when the Browns won the NFL title in 1964, two years before the minting of the Super Bowl.); and the baseball Indians (In case you wonder, I am tired of the nickname, embarrassed by it, and wish the franchise would dump it; I tend to just call them the Tribe or CLEVE. At least this year the front office, though still resisting calls to change names, they do seem to have sidelined the brazenly racial “Chief Wahoo” mascot logo.). The history of failure–or least, shortfalls of the ultimate goal–by my teams, hasn’t deterred my fanship, illustrated by a piece I wrote last year, How to Enjoy Sports Even When Your Teams Have a History of Failure.

The Tribe haven’t won a World Series since ’48. This season, so far, the team has been playing surprisingly well, and at the moment they lead their division by a half-game. In their past 25 games they must be playing at about a 17-win and an 8-loss clip. They could still collapse after July 4th, but things look bright right now.

The above is prelude to the fact that last night the Tribe opened a 4-game series in Boston vs. the Red Sox at Fenway Park. It was the first game back in Boston for Terry Francona, now the CLEVE manager, after he held the job in Boston for 8 years, until 2011. As this Cleveland Plain Dealer story reminds, he won two World Series championships during that tenure, and then was quite unceremoniously dumped by the BOSOX brain trust. I’m really glad Cleveland has him in the dugout now. I’m sure his calm leadership is one of the reasons the Tribe is playing so well this season. Who knows, maybe the team can keep it up.

Last night’s game ended up as a route, for my side. The Tribe scored early and often. Their march through the innings went like this: 1-0; 4-0; 4-3; 5-3; 6-3; 12-3, the final score. The Tribe currently leads the American League in homers, with 60, yet oddly last night, though hitting double digits in run production–though they had a total of 16 base hits, with 4 doubles and a triple–they did not hit a homer. Still, it’s alright, for as Mark Reynolds the Tribe’s leading basher with 12 HRs puts it in beat writer Paul Hoynes’ game story, “‘Sometimes, homers are rally killers,’ said [the DH/3rd baseman] with a laugh.”

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Latest Coverage of “Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology”

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Delighted to see that Rust Belt Chic, the book to which I contributed an essay, “Remembering Mr. Stress, Live at the Euclid Tavern,” is getting lots of coverage. One of the best parts of writing the essay has been that it’s put me back in touch with the venerable Cleveland bluesman, Mr. Stress, whom I followed avidly for many years.

This week, Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Daily Beast website, The Dish, wrote about Rust Belt Chic in a piece called “Between Ruin and Rebirth,” citing the book and Roger Ebert’s review of a new documentary, “Detropia.” Fitting, with the Tigers beating the Yankees on Thursday and advancing to the World Series. Relatedly, Friday’s NY Times brought a smart essay by Bill Morris, on the recent rejuvenation of Detroit’s downtown. It seems that the topic of urban decline and rebirth is never far from the collective mind.

Rust Belt Chic has also been covered by Karen D. Long, Book Editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer in a weekend piece, “‘Rust Belt Chic’ warms to scruffy, problematic Cleveland”. Long writes that the community enterprise that fueled the book “resembled a pop-up civic action.” Typifying this approach, co-editors Anne Trubek and Richey Piiparinen asked all the contributors–in the event that the book sells well enough to make back its expenses and reaches profitability–if we would want an honorarium payment, or prefer to plow our earnings into another indie project to be chosen from among book ideas presented by the contributors, with one (or if we’re really fortunate, more than one) project being chosen for funding. I have a ready book idea–a new volume to be culled from the Guinness Book of World Records-recognized diary of Edward Robb Ellis, whose A Diary of the Century: Tales from America’s Greatest Diarist, I edited and published in 1995. I am happy to have chosen the latter option.

In case you missed an item I put up last month, one of my fellow Rust Belt Chic contributors is Connie Schultz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author. In the past year, she left the Plain Dealer while for her husband Sherrod Brown’s run for re-election to the US Senate from Ohio. A few weeks ago, on the Rust Belt Chic Facebook page, I saw this note from Ms. Schultz:

“Sherrod didn’t get home until after midnight last night, but as soon as he saw my newly arrived stack of ‘Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology,’ he had to pick up a book and take a look. ‘Wow,’ he said, over and over, as he recognized one writer’s name after another, read aloud some of the titles and marveled at the photos.” Here’s my whole piece, “Senator Sherrod Brown ♥s “Rust Belt Chic”.

I hope you buy the book as a print or a digital edition, or get one of each, not simply because you want to support this communal effort, but because it offers thirty-five fine examples of narrative journalism, chronicling a distinctive part of the country that is too often overlooked on the literary and cultural map. I also urge you to follow the book’s Twitter feed, @rust-belt-chic. On my own Twitter feed, @philipsturner, I’ve started a hashtag, #MrStress. You may also ‘like’ the Rust Belt Chic Facebook page. Thank you for supporting this exciting experiment in cultural urban renewal.

Finally, I got word today that there will be a public event with Rust Belt Chic contributors in Brooklyn, NY, on January 3. I hope to be there, reading from my essay on Mr. Stress. More details when I have them.

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Mitt & his Minions, Sticking it to Coal Miners/w Romenesko update

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Second Update, two days later:  At Jim Romenesko’s media site, it’s reported that Murray Energy is suing a reporter in Charleston, WV, Ken Ward, Jr. for supposedly defaming CEO Bob Murray.  Murray is the boss in the two posts below, responsible for docking the pay of workers and who were pushed to attend a pro-Romney rally on Aug. 14. Ken Ward, Jr. had written:
“renegade coal operator Bob Murray played a major role recently in a campaign fundraiser in Wheeling, W.Va., for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney” and that “the question for Governor Romney, of course, is whether he thinks criminal behavior by coal companies, especially when it kills workers and damages the environment, is acceptable. If not, why is he buddies with Bob Murray?”
H/t Jim Romenesko 
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I posted the story below at about 2PM this afternoon, and see this evening that ThinkProgress has already pushed the story beyond what I knew earlier. Bob Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, the coal company that in some fashion compelled their employees to attend an Aug. 14 rally for Mitt Romney, and then docked workers’ pay for the day, is a prolific denialist of climate change, someone who claims that scientists are trying to make money off climate change.  That’s rich–a guy who’s made his own fortune digging and shipping coal is accusing other folks of trying to cash in on cleaning up his mess. 
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You may have recently seen this photo, taken near a coal mine in Beallsville, Ohio, with a story on Mitt Romney bashing President Obama’s energy policy.  Turns out, according to a segment broadcast by West Virginia radio show host David  Blomquist and a report by Sabrina Eaton in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, those miners were docked a day’s pay when the mine closed for the day so their employer, Murray Energy, could hand over their facility to the Republican candidate for the day. What’s more, the miners may have been compelled by their employer to attend the pro-Romney event–Blomquist heard from miners who told him this, while  the company denied it with a perfectly Orwellian statement: “Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore . . .told Blomquist that managers ‘communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.’ He said the company did not penalize no-shows.”

Got that? “Attendance. . . was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.” Aren’t people embarrassed to say stuff like this? According to Blomquist’s interview with Moore, which you can hear via this link to the show on radio station WWVA, the executive seems to want people to believe that after the event the company decided they wouldn’t enforce the rule, and would let any no-shows off the hook. Mitt and his minions commit crimes against language as handily as they exploit workers.

Eaton’s Plain Dealer article ends with this telling piece of information:

“Records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that Murray Energy has contributed more than $900,000 to Republican candidates in the last two years.”

Please share this story widely as possible among your social networks–it’s emblematic of the whole campaign and why the fate of the middle class is at stake in this year’s election.

 

 

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