Today we got our first taste of the brutal Chicago winter. It started with sleet yesterday evening, moved on to what Weather.com described as “ice pellets” after midnight, and finally became a thick, heavy snow early this morning. Forththe north side and the northern suburbs, they’re saying up to 15 inches will fall.

Snow is not really to hard to handle in Chicago. A few years ago, a mayor, I forget the name, failed to get the streets cleaned after a snow storm and lost the next election badly to Jane Byrne. Since then, Chicago mayors, if they do nothing else, get snow off the streets quickly and effectively. They know how to keep their job. This behavior has spread to the near suburbs, so I had an easy time getting to work even though the snow was coming down pretty hard.

I did have a minor problem with three street lights that went out, which meant about a mile of road took over a half-hour to traverse. And this morning the lights flickered in my high rise, so I took the stairs to the garage rather than risk getting trapped in the elevator. But all in all, the snow was only a modest inconvenience.

And I have to say that I am grateful that the snow didn’t really affect me negatively, because I absolutely love snowy weather. I think snow is about the most wonderful thing in the world. I grew up in Phoenix, and I’ve had it with sunshine. I can sit at the window and watch a snow like this all day. I’d hate to have that ruined because the snow kept me from getting to work.

The lifetime residents of snowy climes might now hurl “ice pellets” at me for saying that.

30,000 Turks took to the streets to protest the existence of the Papacy in advance of Pope Benedict’s arrival in Ankara. Given the tenor of the demonstration, how else can the protesters’ views be described?

Amid a sea of red-and-white Turkish flags and green Islamic bandannas, speakers at a rally denounced the Vatican as a centre of a western conspiracy against the country and the Islamic world.

How marvelously insane.

The Pope, who arrives in Ankara tomorrow, sought to mend fences ahead
of the four-day trip by offering his “esteem and sincere friendship” to
the country. The Vatican said he would visit Istanbul’s 17th century
Blue Mosque, his first visit to a mosque as Pope. But the gestures cut
little ice with a crowd of some 30,000.

“You are the representative of evil,” the main speaker, Recai Kutan,
leader of the radical wing of Islamic politics in Turkey, told the
Pope. “We don’t want to see you here unless you apologise.”

The problem is thus that the Pope dared to speak from a Christian perspective and failed to make the proper supplications before the “Arab street.”  For that alone he is denounced by these Muslims as evil, even though the number of imam’s shot dead by gunmen on Christians on motorcycles is precisely zero, while the number of priests shot dead by Muslims on motorcycles climbs steadily.

Filiz Turan, 23, said the Pope was leading a “crusade” against Islam.
“He wants to prove that Istanbul is a Christian city. He calls Muslims
bloody when Islam is a religion of love.”

As I said: marvelously insane.  His position is the perfect way to promote a religion as obsessed with politics as Islam is.  There can be no argument made against his words, as they are drawn wholly from thin air.  By the time you’ve proved him to be a lunatic he’s moved on to denouncing something else.

Via Babalu, some remarkable photos of the anti-Chavez rally in Caracas on Saturday. Despite the intensity of support for opposition candidate Manuel Rosales, the AP has managed to find that Chavez is leading in the opinion polls for the upcoming Presidential vote by a margin of 22%. There is only the merest hint in their story that releasing an opinion survey taken in a nascent police state constitutes journalistic fraud.

Meanwhile, the Mexican town from which Fidel Castro launched his revolution reminisces about the Cuban caudillo.

Now frail from illness and out of sight, Cuban President Fidel Castro was remembered on Saturday as a dashing young revolutionary who set sail 50 years ago from this sleepy Mexican port to a place in history.

Dashing?

In the stuff of leftist legend, Castro and a band of armed comrades left the Gulf coast town of Tuxpan in the leaky “Granma” yacht for Cuba in the early hours of November 26, 1956 to start the revolution that ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista.

The stuff of leftist legend is the stuff of freedom’s nightmares.

The story goes on in a similar vein. How did reporter Frank Jack Daniel type all that with only one hand?

I hope that a sufficient number of Venezuelans realize, when they vote on Dec. 3, that Cuba is their future should Mr. Rosales fail.

A cease fire has been called in Gaza. 400 Palestinians died in test of Israel’s will, and having found her will strong, the Palestinian leadership has retreated to regroup. The time for the next test will be soon enough. The only outstanding question is how much Israel will give up to the forces of darkness in the interim.

I’m back again, with things considerably more settled than they were three weeks ago. I’ve found a new job, one which pays the same but requires fewer hours and has much better benefits. My wife and I are now looking for a new home, but we’ve narrowed our options down to a new development in Morton Grove, so it’s mostly a matter of picking the right model. The baby has survived 7 weeks in our care and seems to be developing normally, and I’ve grown confident enough with him that I no longer check every five minutes to make sure he’s alright. I can go 30 minutes easy without descending into a white hot panic.

So with things somewhat normalized I’m coming back to blogging. Probably less than before, but daily posts at the very least.

I was tempted at times to break my hiatus, especially after the elections, but I keep to my word. As to my prediction, I was a little bit off. But in my defense, had I known that so many Democrats around the country were running as conservative alternatives to Republican incumbents I would have predicted a bigger loss for the GOP. And I was mistaken to assume that because the polls were biased towards Democrats that they were biased enough to be wrong on the final result.

But the election is over now, and the left-wing soul of a Democrat party that hid behind Blue Dog candidates has now revealed itself. Calls to abandon Iraq have stoked further violence in Baghdad, strong leaders are being forced out in favor of Nancy Pelosi’s cronies, and the hippie netroots enthuses over subpoenas and lawsuits against the Bush administration. Republicans won’t be out of power very long if that keeps up, and if they are then something is very wrong in America.

I’m officially putting this blog on hiatus for three weeks.

My wife had told me that after our son was born I’d find I had little time to update this blog. Soccer Dad, in a comment, suggested the same. I didn’t believe them, but I hadn’t understood the amount of psychic energy that BabyO would demand. I had thought I could blog at the times when he slept, or during breaks at work, but I find that even when he sleeps I simply want to look at him breathe, and during breaks at work I tend to call home and pester my wife for updates on our son’s most recent activity.

So I’ll officially put the blog aside for a few weeks so I don’t have to feel that I’m neglecting it, and will then see how I feel about picking it up again. It’s perhaps a foolish time to go dark, since election week is probably the most active time for blog readership, but that’s life. I will, however, add my prediction for the upcoming election: Dems pick up 3 in the Senate, 10 in the House, pick up 4 gubernatorial seats, and the election will be treated like some landslide referendum against Bush, even though losses like that for the President’s party are not severe by any recent historical standard.

For anyone who thinks I’m making a bad choice, understand that I’ll be neglecting this…

in favor of this:

Not a real hard decision.

See you in a few weeks.

Well, mostly Game 5, but I had baby duty last night and while I caught the game I didn’t have a chance to write anything about it.

Before yesterday’s game started it crossed my mind that the Cardinals and Tigers could trade wins until Game 7, and more or less that’s what would have happened were it not for yet another fielding error by a Detroit pitcher. Thanks to a ball sailing over the first baseman, the Tigers season could end at the hands of Jeff Weaver.

That said, I don’t see Weaver winning tonight. I see him and Jeff Suppan as pretty much similar: good, but far less than dominating. Weaver’s night will probably go about like Suppan’s did yesterday — he’ll get knocked around and the Tigers hitters will look good against him. That’s not to say the Cardinals won’t win, however; all they need to do is bunt a few balls toward the pitcher’s mound and they’ll be scoring runs just fine.

UPDATE: Justin Verlander took the mound for the bottom of the first and about 93 pitches later got out of the inning on a ground ball deep to short that Carlos Guillen barely managed to scoop up.

Verlander was the epitome of wild. He gave up 3 walks and threw two wild pitches, and Ivan Rodriguez had to go to the mound twice to calm him down (once along with the pitching coach and Guillen). He in reality only threw 35 pitches, but only 15 were strikes.

His only saving graces were that his pitches topped out at 100 mph, and those hitters who saw the ball cross the plate could only hit him weakly.

UPDATE 2: Brandon Inge, after making a great play on a bunt by So Taguchi, snared a ball sharply hit down the third base line by David Eckstein for what might have been the third out. He threw the ball well to the right of first, however, allowing Yadier Molina to score from third. It was scored as a hit. Cardinals up 1-0.

It’s a shame, because Verlander seems now to have control of himself, but Weaver is pitching so well so far that he could lose the game 1-0.

UPDATE 3: The Tigers threatened in the top of the 3rd. Inge doubled to left, then Verlander hit a grounder back to the mound. Weaver decided to go for the lead runner with only one out, a play that wasn’t even a force out, and got Inge at third. Joel Zumaya made a similar choice in Game 3, but made a throwing error that allowed the decisive runs to score. Tim McCarver wouldn’t shut up about it. I missed the inning checking on the baby, but now, in the bottom of the 3rd, he hasn’t brought it up once. It’s only a bad decision when it’s an error. Otherwise, I suppose it’s just veteran savvy.

Meanwhile, Albert Pujols got a leadoff single, but Verlander got Jim Edmonds to strike out on a failed hit-and-run, and Pujols got caught in a rundown halfway to 2nd. McCarver’s head hasn’t exploded, so I guess it wasn’t a mistake to a) send Pujols, who has a bad hamstring, or b) fail to put the bat on the ball for a hit-and-run.

UPDATE 4: I left the game to help my wife feed the baby. Or rather, to annoy my wife while she fed the baby, whom I also annoyed. It’s now the 7th inning and Weaver gets the first out covering 1st, launching McCarver and Joe Buck into an frenzy praise. But he threw to third instead of first in the 3rd inning, Tim?

It’s 3-2 Cardinals, and I don’t know quite how it got that way.

Hold on. According to the FOX profile, Jeff Weaver’s favorite show was Silver Spoons. Silver-freaking-Spoons? Does he like show tunes, too?

UPDATE 5: My wife believes I should make a full disclosure and point out that not only did I annoy her while she was feeding BabyO, after he was done and resting peacefully I made the mistake of tickling him. This commenced much wailing and puking up of food, and Mrs. O was not at all amused.

“The peace is very fragile,” she tells me.

UPDATE 6: It’s scored a hit, but Eckstein made first only because Carlos Guillen double-clutched on a hard ground ball. A slower runner would have been out, so I suppose Eckstein earned the hit, but Eckstein would have been out had Guillen got the ball out of his glove cleanly.

Anyway, it seemed to rattle Fernando Rodney, in now for Verlander, and appearing again even after last night’s game-losing error. He next walked Preston Wilson to bring up Pujols.

I suppose it’s only coincidence, but the Cardinals are the whitest team I’ve seen since the ‘88 Red Sox. They have one African-American in the lineup. They have only a few on the bench. It’s jarring to see a team like that nowadays.

UPDATE 7: Rolen is up with two outs and runners on 1st and 2nd. After listening to Joe Buck say how much a lift it would be for the Tigers to see Rodney get into trouble but then pitch his way out of it, I realized that Rolen was about to hit a two run double. Basically, a comment as stupid as Buck’s could not go unpunished. Additionally, Edmonds and Pujols both hit high pop-ups off Rodney, which means they just missed a solid hit, and Rolen had the chance to watch both of those at bats.

I was close to being right. After driving a ball to the left field corner that was barely foul, Rolen lined a single to right to score Eckstein from second.

UPDATE 8: People are holding up signs that say “Dream Weaver”. If Weaver goes ahead and wins this, and someone at FOX plays the song “Dream Weaver”, I swear I’ll hurl.

UPDATE 9: I just noticed Verlander had an error tonight. I missed it, but I assume it accounts for at least one of his two unearned runs.

In any event, Adam Wainright, the shakiest closer I’ve seen in a while, is in for the 9th. Detroit has three outs left, or perhaps better put, 3 outs to get 8 bases.

Magglio Ordonez is up first. He’s a pretty good hitter, and gets the count full before lining a ball towards the pitcher. But Wainright gets a glove on the ball, and Ronnie Belliard is able to get to the ball after it drops limply to the dirt and throw the runner out at first. Two outs left.

Next, Sean Casey goes down 0-2 right away, but hangs in and eventually he gets his second double of the night. That’s 2 of the bases they need. That brings up Rodriguez, as Ramon Santiago comes in to run for Casey.

Rodriguez is 3-18 in the series. I guess we should say he’s due, but I don’t think it works like that. And it doesn’t here. Rodriguez catches the ball on a check swing and it rolls slowly to the pitcher. Wainright stays calm, as Fernando Rodney did not last night, and throws out the runner at first.

It’s Placido Polanco’s turn. He’s 0-17 in the series.

The Cardinals fans are sensing it’s their turn to win the Series. I think they’re right.

Polanco gets it to 3-2 before Wainright throws a wild pitch that gets Santiago to third. That’s one more base for the Tigers, but they’re down to their last strike.

And Polanco walks!

Now Inge comes up and Duncan comes to the mound.

The first pitch is low and away but Inge swings for the fences. Strike two comes when Inge check swings at a ball down the middle. Strike three swinging and the Cardinals win! Inge goes down on three pitches.

Congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals.

I missed the first few innings, but caught the Cardinals two runs. Nate Robertson is pretty good to hold the Cardinals to just 2.

At the moment — one out in the top of the 7th — Chris Carpenter is suffering some ailment to his thumb. They’re speculating a cramp, but who knows. He’s thrown 63 pitches and has 19 of the 27 outs he needs.

Now Chris Meyers earnestly reports that the ailment was in fact a thumb cramp. Just a moment later Carpenter will get the next out on a fly ball to left.

Much ado about nothing.

UPDATE: Joel Zumaya just threw the game away.

It’s the bottom of the 7th, runners on 1st and 2nd, no outs. Preston Wilson hits a little chopper back to the mound, and Zumaya tries to get the force at third. He forgot to tell third baseman Brandon Inge. The ball reached the base before Inge had set, and Inge fell backward trying to catch the ball as it flew past behind him. Two runs scored, with a runner left on second, and the game is now 4-0. Zumaya got one out, but leaves a runner on second for Jason Grilli.

The Tigers have two innings to get 4 runs, assuming Grilli doesn’t give up any more. They may have a chance however, as Carpenter’s crampy thumb may be making it hard for him to throw a curveball. He got the last two outs of the 7th, but each batter hit the ball pretty hard.

UPDATE 2: They just pointed out that Curtis Granderson, Placido Polanco, and Ivan Rodriguez are a combined 0-33 in the World Series. That’s remarkably bad, and proof the Cardinals have a shot at winning this Series.

UPDATE 3: Carpenter is up to the plate in the bottom of the eighth. Why not? He’s thrown like 9 pitches so far.

Tim McCarver is harping on Zumaya for throwing to third for a force out instead of the traditional play to second. He references the last time a play to third was attempted by a pitcher: apparently it last happened in 1923.

At the risk of having my anti-McCarver bias show, lay off the kid Tim, you yutz! Seriously, he made a play for the lead runner with no one out. He’s seen 83 innings in the field this year. He throws about 180 mph, and sees very few ground balls hit his way. He’s not someone who’ll be a Gold Glover at the pitcher’s mound. When you put in a young, rocket-armed reliever, you expect that he may make mistakes in the field. Get over it, Tim.

UPDATE 4: The Cardinals got another run after Carpenter’s at-bat. I was busy changing a diaper, so I missed the particulars. Because the inning took so long La Russa decided to pull Carpenter for Braden Looper. So why was Carpenter hitting if an extra ten minutes on the bench would so derail his performance?

Cardinals lead the series 2-1, and the Tigers better hope their hitters start making something happen, or this World Series may not make it back to Detroit.

Was out with my wife to see King Lear — starring Stacy Keach, of all people — at the Goodman Theater, and I only just got a chance to put the game on. Apparently, Kenny Rogers had some substance on the base of his thumb in the first inning that magically disappeared in the second. Hmmm.

It didn’t seem to matter, as he struck out the first batter of the inning.

It’s inhumanly cold for baseball in Detroit. They really have no business making them play this game at night.

Currently 2-0 Detroit; updates to follow as events merit.

UPDATE: Holy crap!

Down 3-0, the Cardinals were down to their last out in the top of the ninth. Then Scott Spezio sent a liner to right for a single, taking second a pitch or two later on catcher indifference. Jose Encarnacion reached first on an error by Jones, getting Spezio to third. Then Scott Rolen doubled to the corner in left, scoring Spezio and putting runners on 2nd and 3rd. Then Jones hits Preston Wilson to load the bases, brining up Yadier Molina.

A dramatic hit to tie or take the lead?

Nope.

The game ends with a weak fielder’s choice out 6-4.

His membership in the Bucky Dent Society forbids Molina from hitting two dramatic home runs in the same post-season. If he breaks that rule, Aaron Boone will be sent to cut off one of his toes.

Series tied 1-1, thanks mainly to Kenny “Pine Tar” Rogers.

The FOX announcers asked each manager about the “thumb substance” issue during the regular, between innings interview. Cardinals’ manager Tony La Russa went first, and curtly told Joe Buck that he wouldn’t discuss the matter during the game. When the Tigers’ Jim Leyland spoke, he sputtered through a lengthy story about what the umpires said to him and what he thought La Russa was doing. It was like a little kid explaining how he wasn’t anywhere near the other kids when they started throwing water balloons at cars.

Busy with baby and job, I haven’t had much time to blog. Actually, its been the job more than the baby, but even when I’m home I’m more worried about taking care of the kid than writing something.

That said, I have just enough time to slip in some World Series talk before tonight’s game.

I had expected to see Minnesota and San Diego in the World Series, but I did pick the Tigers to beat the Yankees, a correct prediction that I will repeatedly remind people of. I had thought Minnesota because they seemed to have the best pitching, and San Diego because they had gone 20-9 in the last month of the season. Not that I believe in momentum, but rather I took their impressively play to be a sign that all of their talent had peaked at the same time, and usually teams where players all peak together do well in the playoffs.

I wasn’t terribly surprised that the Twins lost to Oakland, and Oakland to Detroit. I was, however, very surprised that the Cardinals did so well against San Diego and that pitchers Jeff Suppan and Jeff Weaver both pitched so impressively. Performance has ebbs and peaks, and the Cardinals had played so poorly in the last month that I thought the odds of any of their players performing so impressively, much less Jeff Weaver, was more than unlikely. But that was wrong, and now an 83-win team has made it to the World Series.

I haven’t really looked at what people are saying about the series. I think I would be surprised if the Tigers won the first game, since their players have had a week off and St. Louis is fresh. I would also be surprised if they did not win the World Series, since I’ve believed all season long that the American League was so superior to the National League that the World Series winner would come from the AL, and probably the Central Division. So I figure Detroit in 6 games.

Updates to follow.

UPDATE 1: Apparently, according to the FOX pre-game show, the Detroit Tigers have helped their home city rediscover its soul. Its soul. Wow. And they can hit a little, too.

20 seconds of that pap is about all I can take. I’m watching Clemson-Georgia Tech until first pitch.

UPDATE 2: Game 1 features, for the first time, two rookie starters, Justin Verlander and Anthony Reyes. Coming in from the bull pen for the first inning, Reyes looked nervous, and then pitched like it. He got himself in trouble, but only gave up one run after the chunkiest second baseman I’ve ever seen, Ronnie Belliard, chased down two little bloop fly balls.

Yadier Molina, the latest member of the Bucky Dent Society, gets the start at catcher.

Scott Rolen, tied the game with a solo home run in the top of the 2nd; so far that’s the Cardinals only baserunner.

UPDATE 3: Verlander strikes out the side in the top of the 4th — he has 7 strike outs overall — and the crowd goes wild. Too bad he’s not hitting. The Cardinals are now up 4-1 after a burst of professional hitting. Molina singles weakly to right, So Toguchi gets him over to second by throwing his bat at the ball to preserve something out of a failed hit-and-run, Chris Duncun, son of the Cardinal pitching coach, doubles Molina home, and finally Albert Pujols homers to left-center. Perfect hitting, really, against a guy as good as Verlander.

And by the way, according to the crack reporting of Fox Sports, Jim Leyland and Tony LaRussa enjoy a healthy dose of mutual man-love.

UPDATE 4: The Tigers managed to commit 3 errors in the top of the 6th, allowing three runs. Brandon Inge had two all by himself. It’s not even close at this point. The Cardinals are up 7-1 and the Tigers only have 9 outs left.

UPDATE 5: The Tigers basically conceded the game in the top of the 9th, bringing in Todd Jones for three batters despite being down 7-1. They need to get him some work.

It was truly a remarkable performance by Anthony Reyes. He finished the game, allowing only one base runner from the second inning through the eighth — he was pulled after Marcus Thames sent a ball so far out to left it landed in Canada. I didn’t count precisely, but it seemed he gave up a lot of high fly balls, which is usually an indication that batters are just missing (I was running around during the game, so maybe there weren’t as many fly balls as it seemed). I somehow don’t think we’ll see quite as an effective performance should he pitch game 5, once the Tigers have had a chance to get their timing down again. When Reyes left it was 7-2, and the Tigers needed 5 runs to tie the game and only had three outs to work with. They didn’t get them, though one runner did reach on an error by Scott Rolen.

Despite the high score and all of Detroit’s pitching changes, the game moved very quickly, finishing up at under 3 hours.

Now St. Louis leads the series 1-0, a result no one, according to Joe Buck, expected to see with Reyes pitching. He must not have read my blog today.

…to avoid faddish self-mutilation:

The teenager said the stabbing pains in her face felt like electrical shocks that lasted 10 to 30 seconds and struck 20 to 30 times a day. Her doctors diagnosed trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve disorder sometimes called “suicide disease” because of the excruciating and dispiriting pain it causes.

Doctors tried painkillers, then stronger medication, but in the end, a cure proved more simple: The young woman removed the metal stud from her pierced tongue.

Two days later her pain vanished.

There’s a reason why the peoples that evolved from tribes and mud huts stopped doing things like tongue-piercing, and those that did not stop did not so evolve.

Jeanne Fritch, owner of Personal Art, a piercing and tattooing studio in Lake Station, Ind., said she has not heard of a similar case in her 21 years in business.

Fair enough, but do you think this woman did follow up studies? A better, more serious question would be to try and find out how many people suffered this complication, or something similar, from a tongue piercing. Asking the chick from the first tattoo parlor that shows up on Google doesn’t quite qualify as reporting.

Apparently oblivious to the jihadi forces making YouTube safe for Islamofascism, Iran’s mullahs have decided to protect their people from themselves by denying them high speed internet connections.

In a blow to the country’s estimated 5 million internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran’s telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining Islamic culture among the younger generation. It will also impede efforts by political opposition groups to organise by uploading information on to the net.

The order follows a purge on illegal satellite dishes, which millions of Iranians use to clandestinely watch western television. Police have seized thousands of dishes in recent months.

This is the sign of a fundamentally brittle state, but the use of force can sustain such a state for many years. Just ask a Cuban.

A petition branding the high-speed ban as “backward and unprincipled” bearing more than 1,000 signatures is to be sent to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Scores of websites and blogs are censored using hi-tech US-made filtering equipment. Iran filters more websites than any other country apart from China. High-speed links can be used with anti-filtering devices to access filtered sites.

This makes the story interesting. Ahmadinejad is popular in Iran at least in part because he has a populist government which attempts to address the people’s needs. He now he must play the role of censor, reminding the public of the character of the Iranian mullahcracy he heads.

Parastoo Dokoohaki, a prominent Iranian blogger, said the move was designed to foil the government’s opponents. “If you want to announce a gathering in advance, you won’t see it mentioned on official websites and newspapers would announce it too late. Therefore, you upload it anonymously and put the information out. Banning high-speed links would limit that facility. Despite having the telecoms facilities, fibre-optic technology and internet infrastructure, the authorities want us to be undeveloped.”

The crackdown comes in an atmosphere of increasing restrictions on the media. Last week, Mr Ahmadinejad launched a fierce attack on the head of the state broadcasting organisation, IRIB, which he blamed for stoking public fears about inflation. Iran’s leading reformist newspaper, Shargh, was also closed last month.

It’s hard to hide things like inflation from the people, but the crackdown indicates that the Iranian government is planning to attempt to do so anyway.

Lou Piniella has taken a three-year position as manager of the Chicago Cubs. Somebody up there doesn’t like him.

Lou Piniella vows to make a winner of the Cubs, whose last World Series appearance came in 1945.

“Urgency is important,” said Piniella, who was introduced Tuesday as the team’s latest manager. “We’re going to win here, and that’s the end of the story.”

The Cubs haven’t won for a hundred years. It’s been urgent for a long time.

Or rather, it hasn’t been urgent. As long as the beer flows freely and the Midwest sun is high, Cubs fans as a group really don’t care.

Piniella said he was assured by general manager Jim Hendry that the Cubs would make moves necessary to improve the team. He brushed off a report that he wanted the Cubs to acquire embattled Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, saying there hadn’t been “any discussions about A-Rod.” Piniella was Rodriguez’s first manager, with the Seattle Mariners in the mid-1990s.

To Hendry’s credit, he’s been trying to acquire talent. The problem has been that the talent has been of the Nomar Garciaparra variety: mostly injured, or ineffective when healthy. It always seems that the Cubs make the right gestures to win, but never think beyond the gesture to actually examine how well a player may be likely to perform. Acquiring A-Rod would only confrim that suspicion: Rodriguez simply doesn’t win ball games for his teams. He didn’t in Seattle, he didn’t in Texas, he doesn’t in New York, and he wouldn’t in Chicago. It should be noted that Piniella’s best season in Seattle, 2001, came after Rodriguez went to the Rangers.

Piniella said he was hoping injured pitchers Mark Prior and Kerry Wood would be healthy and come to spring training. The team holds a $13.75 million option on Wood for next season and the right-hander is rehabbing a torn rotator cuff.

“They’re both talented individuals. Both have had physical problems,” Piniella said.

Dusty Baker had been hoping the same thing since 2003, but it never happened. Prior is spooked by all his injuries and seems to have lost his work ethic; Woods is too stubborn to change his delivery and protect his arm, a side effect of having such an excellent rookie season.

Piniella will coach the Cubs and will see, as he did in Tampa Bay, that promises to spend money don’t always translate into actual spending. If anything good comes of the seasons he spends here, it will the result of instilling discipline in his players, so that they play fundamentally sound baseball. That should help them avoid nearly 100 losses next season, but it won’t get them any further than a .500 season, at best. Unless Hendry gets some real talent into the rotation and the lineup, the Cubs will be hardly better than when managed by the lackadaisical, veteran-coddling Dusty Baker.

In a perfect world, children would not watch very much television. A world in which children become deathly ill is by definition far from perfect.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has decreed that television should be limited for young children, but Children’s Hospital Boston has found that television is a useful distraction for its young patients. A kerfuffle has ensued.

Cartoons, educational programs, and other shows are shown to children as young as 2 months old; the Globe observed two babies on their backs with screens playing cartoons a foot from their faces. A hospital spokeswoman said the TVs provide a necessary distraction from treatment, but the practice is drawing criticism.

“This is eyebrow-raising,” said Don Shifrin , a pediatrician in Seattle and chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Communication, when told that infants were watching TV. The academy issued a policy in 1999 setting guidelines for TV viewing for children of all ages — including no television for children 2 or younger — and reaffirmed it in 2001.

It’s fine to criticize the hospital, but a hospital is traumatizing for a child, and to carp about an attempt to mitigate that trauma seems disproportionate. These children aren’t going to be taking home fond memories of ll the television they got to watch in the hospital, in between needles and examinations.

Before installing the televisions in the new cardiac unit last year, she said, the hospital sought input from patients’ families and found overwhelming interest in having television. The parents wanted them not just as a distraction for the children but also as entertainment for parents who are there for long stretches, including times when a child is sleeping. Shaw said the hospital is “aware of and, to the extent possible, respectful” of the pediatrics academy guideline. There are no televisions in the neonatal intensive care unit, for instance.

But the televisions have stirred controversy even within Children’s Hospital .

Michael Rich, a pediatrician and head of the Center on Media and Children’s Health at Children’s Hospital, helped write the American Academy of Pediatrics policy on TV viewing. He said infants don’t know they are watching television. “From what we know about the way babies perceive an electronic screen, they will focus on anything that is bright, loud, or moving within their range, which is limited to what’s right in front of the face,” Rich said. “That’s part of a strong alert instinct. They would respond to anything unknown in the same way. They need to figure it out for survival.”

Of all the things a parent with an infant in the hospital have to worry about, this guy wants the parents to worry about how much TV the kid might see.

It would be nice if the televisions weren’t helpful, but castigating the hospital for having them makes the perfect the enemy of the good.

I’m quite happy with the teams that made it to each LCS, but I’m highly disappointed in the play of the Oakland A’s. They can’t score runs, so can’t win games, and the ALCS looks to be all but over. They have a lead after one inning today — their first lead of the series — but the odds of them winning two games in Detroit and sending the series back to Oakland are slim.

The NLCS looked for a while like it might go the same direction as the ALCS, but the Cardinals managed an incredible comeback last night to even the series at 1-1. They could go all 7 games, while the ALCS could finish as early as today. On Thursday I would have said that every game would end 9-6, but Tom Glavine and Jeff Weaver decided to have a pitcher’s duel. Last night was closer to what people expected. Hopefully the NLCS will stay exciting, because as happy as Detroit fans may be, there’s nothing more boring than seeing one team sweep through the playoffs.

UPDATE: May God have pity on Huston Street, and give him the strength to overcome giving up a monster of a home run to Magglio Ordonez.

Whatever North Korea did last week, it will result in sanctions affirmed by the UN Security Council.

The United States, Britain and France overcame last-minute differences with Russia and China on a U.N. resolution imposing punishing sanctions on North Korea, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said Saturday.

“We are very pleased at this outcome and look forward to the council’s imminent adoption of the resolution, co-sponsored by all 15 council members,” U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told reporters after a brief closed council meeting.

I was busy with BabyO last week, but saw enough of the news to note the ridiculous political posturing by Democrats on North Korea. The pretense that we can effectively reach the North Korean state the we can reach a normal country is preposterous. That Democrats don’t realize this, yet may win control of Congress this year, is frightening.

The North Korean regime will do whatever is necessary to survive; its own survival is in fact its only interest. To survive it must control its own populace and its own military. Its missile tests last summer and what is at least the appearance of a test of a nuclear device are for the sole intention of doing so. To think that we can reach them through normal diplomatic channels is absurd. We can Cubanize them with embargoes and strict control of their international activities, and very little else.

A fundraiser and adviser to Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was indicted by a federal grand jury this week, just in time to make the November election interesting. Now, Blago bud Antoin Rezko may be on the run.

Maybe he’s hoping a Clinton will get elected President in 2008 so he can get a pardon.

It has been a week since my last post, and what is most surprising is that I hardly noticed until this morning. BabyO has consumed most of my time and imagination, and writing a post suddenly didn’t seem so urgent.

But we’ve settled in now. The child has convinced me he’s not going anywhere, and my wife has mostly recovered from the ordeal of giving birth. Now I have a little more time and see how valuable it is to me to sit down and write something. Regular blogging will therefore resume.

I have to say, though, I did have one huge disappointment. I had wanted to save a bunch of articles and blog posts from the day Dylan was born, so we’d have a bit of a time capsule to show him when he got older. Unfortunately, the news was dominated by that asinine and disgusting Mark Foley scandal, so my plan was sort of a bust. I’m not interested in associating Foley’s peculiar romantic tastes with my son’s birthday. To hell with the Democrat hypocrites who sat on this story until October.

I’ve been slightly distracted the last few days so have missed most of the games. I did get a chance to note that within 24 hours of my son’s birth, the Yankees lost two games and were eliminated from the playoffs, despite the vaunted Yankees lineup™. This makes me remarkably happy. Probably too happy, but there it is.

In addition to being happy simply because the Yankees lost, I’m happy because I’m the only living soul outside of Michigan that actually picked the Tigers to win. It looks like I’ll be wrong about every other pick, but I don’t think that matters: I should get triple credit for figuring on Detroit to go to the ALCS.

The Yankees lost 6-0 on his birthday and 8-3 the following day, despite a lineup that is a run better per game than their nearest competition. But it should be noted that the Tigers gave up the fewest runs in the league this year, and those numbers came despite playing in a division with the Chicago White Sox offense, in a DH league, and in a league that has many more strong offensive teams. They had to be good. I bet on their staff being good enough against the vaunted Yankees lineup™ to allow their offense, which is very strong, to get past the rather weak Yankees pitching staff. It turns out that was the right way to look at the two teams.

Also, the Yankees made a lineup change late in the season that proved remarkably unwise, as Hideki Matsui and Gary Sheffield came back from injury. Teams that trade for a great hitter usually slump for a week after their new player gets inserted into the line up; the hitters simply need some time to adjust to the pitches they see with someone new nearby in the line up. The Yankees basically added two great hitters, and I don’t think the batters had time to adjust to the change.

Meanwhile, I picked the Twins to beat the A’s, which would have been smart had Marco Scutaro and Torii Hunter not somehow switched souls. Everybody in the Twins line up seemed to slump, but Hunter, unfortunately will appear the goat. He allowed an inside-the-park home run when he misplayed a dive in center, and got himself called out at home by running to aggressively. This is unfair: replay either play 100 times and Hunter gets it right. But when it counted, the plays didn’t come out right, and now the Twins are going home.

For the same reasons I picked the Twins, I think the Tigers should be favored. It’s unclear to me how the A’s will score against the Tigers staff, and how their staff will hold back the Tigers offense. It turned out to be the wrong analysis before, but I’m going to stick with it for now and say the Tigers in 6. It will be the correct choice so long as Scutaro doesn’t work his voodoo on Curtis Granderson and help the A’s send Detroit home in 4.

It’s a neologism — deal with it.

Patrify (verb) — to infuse with fear related to impending fatherhood: “I am patrified by the notion that my wife is about to have a baby.”

Blogging here has been and will remain light for the next few days, as my wife is about to have our first child. Or rather, our child is ready to have us. That at least is how it feels sometimes.

Aside from baseball, I haven’t been able to wrap my head around any recent news. I’ve tried, but the stark raving terror I’m experiencing recently has made concentrating on the world’s problems rather difficult. It’s so bad most of the time I can barely even work. Until he pops out, hopefully safe and sound, you’ll probably only see the occasional post.

By the way, his name will be Dylan Jacob, and if he doesn’t get himself born soon my wife will never forgive him.

UPDATE: He’s here, popping out about 6:30 pm CDT on Friday. He gave me a nasty look when he came out; I think he heard me telling my wife to push him out. He barely cried when he came out, which frightened me to the core, but he’s been pretty normal since.

A friend, a doctor, gave me some advice a few days ago that I have found very comforting. He said that a baby’s nervous system is designed entirely for survival in a jungle, that all the crying and the cooing serves the purpose of maximizing the chance of escaping the various predators that once threatened man. I remind myself of this a lot to explain his behavior, which has helped me greatly because it prevents my mind from spiraling off into wild explanations of every gurgle and hiccup. In fact, I think I’d go crazy without my doctor friend’s perspective, or at least drive the nurses crazy with all sorts of frantic questions.

Game 2 of the Yankees / Tigers divisional series was delayed by rain last night, and I took this as a sign of God’s mercy: my picks had thus far been so utterly wrong, I thought He was simply delaying my further humiliation a few hours. But today I see he was merely preparing the angels of His justice to bring his wrath down upon the vaunted Yankees lineup!™ I have been vindicated!

But first, some more on yesterday’s games. I had picked the Twins and Dodgers to win their divisional series, and yesterday, though the character of their games did not surprise me, the outcomes resulted from plays so bizarre and unforeseeable that it made me want to give up predicting anything about baseball entirely. The Dodgers managed to lose when two players (!) were thrown out at home on the same play. It wasn’t even a rundown thing, either. Paul De Luca got the ball from right and tagged out the first runner. Then, perhaps thinking he could catch De Luca off guard, the second runner tried to slip into home. De Luca just reached over and tagged him out too. He didn’t even have to take the ball out of his glove!

Meanwhile, Mark Kotsay gets an inside-the-park home run when Twins center fielder Torii Hunter dives for a fly ball, misses, and lets the ball roll all the way to the wall. Have Hunter try that play 100 times and the ball gets through like that maybe once, yet it happened yesterday to give the A’s a 2-0 lead in the series heading back to Oakland.

Seriously, it is sheer insanity to make predictions about baseball, and those games yesterday proved it. But predictions I have made so predictions I’ll stick to.

When I came up with how the various series would play out, I looked for two things. First, I looked for a team that had played remarkably well in the last month or two. I don’t mean just winning, but dominating and winning games that had to be won to make the playoffs, as the San Diego Padres did by going 20-9 to close out the season and win their division. Teams that show that profile have at least the quality of persistence, which is key to any successful endeavor, and probably also have a number of players reaching a performance peak at about the same time. The second quality I looked for was season-long pitching ability. I always tried to pick the team that had the best overall pitching, and/or the team that had the best, most effective starters, especially if those starters got a lot of strike outs. A winning profile always seems to be either two starters who combined pitch most of the innings for a team, or a very strong, versatile bullpen that always gets the last 9 outs. The former is the 2001 Diamondbacks; the latter is the 2002 Angels.

After looking at each team I thought the Twins and Padres best fit the profile, but I also figured on the Tigers to beat the Yankees, something no one else did. I knew this was an iffy pick because the Yankees lineup is insanely talented, but I went with it anyway. The Tigers staff had allowed the fewest runs in baseball this year, and I figured that while they may not shut the Yankees down, they would at least slow them down. Also, I am not impressed with the Yankees staff, and thought their relative weakness would allow the Tigers to win three of the five games.

Looking back, I frankly underestimated how well Mike Mussina has been pitching recently, and perhaps overvalued the Tigers pitching because of its early season strength. So after the Tigers lost game 1, I figured I had simply gotten the pick wrong. Now, after game 2, not so much.

I made the point after game 1 that even though the Yankees scored 8 runs, they got 7 off of a single pitcher, Nate Robertson. The eighth run, though it made headlines, was not surprising since it came from Derek Jeter at a point in the game when he could expect nothing but chances to put the ball in play: the Tigers at that point needed outs more than they needed to worry about Derek Jeter getting a home run.

Today, the Yankees had but one successful good offensive inning against Justin Verlander, pitching poorly on 10 days rest. Verlander managed to give up four walks and seven hits, yet the vaunted Yankees lineup™ only managed three runs. Meanwhile, the Tigers were persistent and, in terms of the number of innings in which they scored, more successful than the Yankees, getting 1 run in four different innings to win Game 2 by a score of 4-3. Despite being a little wild, Verlander managed to get outs when he needed to, mostly. Meanwhile, the 2 through 6 hitters for the Yankees went 2-18, with Alex Rodriguez striking out three times, including one in the first inning with the bases loaded.

The Yankees season is now left to the tender mercies of Jaret Wright and a rapidly aging Randy Johnson, and at least for one day my pick of the Tigers looks something close to prescient.

UPDATE: The Padres lost game 2, stranding 9 runners in scoring position. Ridiculous. They lost to Jeff Weaver, who had an ERA this year of around 5.00.

Meanwhile, the Dodgers lost again in Queens, and Nomar left the game with an injury.

Oh well. If the Tigers beat the Yankees I’ll be happy, because being that right when no one else was should count the same as getting every other series right. It’s a rule. Really. You can look it up.

Let me just say in my defense that there’s a reason I don’t gamble, and it ain’t because the Bible’s against it.

Every single team I picked to win their divisional series lost yesterday. Every single one. Yikes! However, I can at least comfort myself with the knowledge that though they lost, the games played out almost like I expected.

Given the score, 8-4, New York looks to have throttled the Tigers, but the damage the lineup did was not as bad as it may appear. The Yankees faced three Tigers pitchers but mainly scored only on starter Nate Robertson. Granted, they scored a lot on Robertson, but the relievers, Jason Grilli and Jamie Walker handled their lineup well. The exception is Jeter’s home run off Walker, but a solo shot in the 8th is what you’d expect from Jeter, a contact hitter who will see strikes when the other team needs outs, as the Tigers did trying to come from behind to tie the game. If you had predicted that Jamie Walker would hold the vaunted Yankee lineup to 1 run over two innings, a lot of people would have laughed.

Meanwhile, the Yankees staff, including sinkerballer Wang, gave up 12 hits, and Wang only went 6 and 2/3, forcing the Yankees to use 4 other pitchers. I had said at the outset that I felt the least confidence about the Tigers, but I think the teams are closer than they appeared yesterday, and much closer than they appear today. It’s more or less up to Justin Verlander to vindicate me.

The Oakland A’s beat the Twins 3-2, and what mainly surprised me were Frank Thomas’ home runs. It’s not that I didn’t think he could hit them, it’s that I thought he wouldn’t. I figured the Twins would win partly because Santana would keep the ball in the park and partly because the A’s offense would not get a home run. Thomas thought otherwise, and this is why they play the games. I still stand by the pick over a five-game series, and think three runs is probably the peak of what the A’s offense can do. Now it’s up to the Twins offense to score more than two.

The game that surprised me was the Cardinals and the Padres, if only because Pujols hit a home run in PETCO Park. That I really did not expect. I also thought Peavey would pitch better, but pitchers sometimes fail. The Padres have four games to get three wins off the Cardinals, which I think they’ll succeed in doing in that park with their staff. But if the Cardinals hit Wells today as well as they hit Peavey yesterday, they’ll probably be watching the NLCS from home.

UPDATE: Un-freakin-believable! The Oakland A’s win again, 5-2, aided by a run on a wild pitch from Joe Nathan and an inside-the-park home run by Mark Kotsay. Mark-freakin-Kotsay! I said they couldn’t create more than three runs and I was right: today they created two and had three more handed to them.

Twins need to win the next three to advance.

Another intellectual response to the Pope’s recent comments on Islam has been presented.

UPDATE: The story is not what it was first reported to be. One of the hijackers was a Christian somehow seeking help to avoid compulsory military service in the Turkish army. The hijackers surrendered and the passengers, who included some beauty pageant contestants, were released.

While Washington consumes itself with whether House Republicans should have seen through Mark Foley’s lies, North Korea has announced it will test a nuclear weapon:

The statement by North Korea’s foreign ministry, which was carried on the official KCNA News Agency, was immediately condemned by Japan as called “totally unforgivable”.

Its announcement capped weeks of rumours that the Stalinist state was planning a test and came amid increasingly bitter relations with the outside world after it test-fired missiles in July.

“The US extreme threat of a nuclear war and sanctions and pressure compel the DPRK (North Korea) to conduct a nuclear test, an essential process for bolstering nuclear deterrent, as a corresponding measure for defence,” the statement said.

But it added that North Korea would never use nuclear weapons first and would “do its utmost to realise the denuclearisation of the peninsula and give impetus to the worldwide nuclear disarmament and the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons”.

[…]

A nuclear test is certain to be seen as an attempt by North Korea to force the US into direct negotiations, something it has long pushed for but which Washington has rejected until Pyongyang returns to the six-party talks.

New Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who frightens some because of his nationalist rhetoric, now has further justification for an expansion of Japan’s military.