Veritas et Venustas

A-Rodmania at the Stadium!

On defense, A-Rod is an excellent third baseman, who will get even better. He's had some great offensive moments as a Yankee, but he's often looked uncomfortable, he hasn't lived up to his past stats, and he's clearly had problems with the fact that he's not the center of his new team.

Will that change after last night? Will this be like the walk-off home run that made Giambi a Yankee?

From the New York Times:

They have played baseball on 161st Street in the Bronx since 1923. In all that time, with so many legends having roamed the grounds, no player has ever been responsible for 10 of his team's runs in a game. Not Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig. Not Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle. Not Derek Jeter. All of those players are known as true Yankees, a title that has eluded Alex Rodriguez. While he waits for another chance at October, Rodriguez added to his legacy by doing something never seen on baseball's grandest stage. He blasted three home runs in the Yankees' 12-4 victory over the Los Angeles Angels and became the first player to drive in 10 runs in a game at Yankee Stadium, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

Another Quote of the Day

But guess who said it –

Is the whole of life visible to us, or isn’t it rather that this side of death we see only one hemisphere? Painters--to take them alone--dead and buried, speak to the next generation or to several succeeding generations through their work. Is that all, or is there more to come? Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter’s life. For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of Xxxx? Just as we take the train to get to Yyyyyyy or Zzzzz, we take death to reach a star.

Quote of the Day - D'Oh! Frank Gehry on The Simpsons

Culture of celebrity embraces pop-star architects
John King
San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, April 7, 2005

Big news: Architects have finally made inroads where it counts  --  American pop culture.

I know. I saw one on "The Simpsons."

And not just any Frank Lloyd Wright wannabe, no sir. This was Frank Gehry in all his animated glory, designing a right-angles-be-damned concert hall for Springfield, hometown of Bart et al.

Which shows two things. The notion of architects as celebrities has taken hold in American society; at the same time, the impact of the trend beyond name recognition goes only so far  --  and it is ripe for ridicule along the way.

For those of you who were too busy counting the minutes until "Desperate Housewives" to catch "The Simpsons" on Sunday, here's what you missed:

Marge, Homer, Bart and Lisa journey to Shelbyville and hear people making fun of Springfield, the Simpsons' lifelong home.

Marge tells fellow members of the Springfield Cultural Advisory Board that a surefire way to win respect is to hire Gehry to design a concert hall along the lines of his Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

"So good it's Gehry," proclaims a magazine cover she happens to have handy.

Cut to Santa Monica. Gehry strolls to his mailbox, a Gehryesque tumble of odd angles, and pulls out Marge's letter making Springfield's case. Gehry rolls his eyes, wads up the letter and tosses it on the ground, only to stare transfixed at the crumpled paper that looks uncannily like ... yes ... a Frank Gehry building!

From here, the plot wanders off toward its denouement at a prison riot (more on that later), but not before one bit that made me laugh out loud. After workers erect a steel structure that looks like a straightforward cluster of upright boxes, cranes with wrecking balls pummel it until the structure buckles in a dozen directions  --  with Gehry on hand to give a smiling thumbs-up at seeing his design brought to life.

So that's how those gravity-defying icons get built.

Seeing as how "The Simpsons" has also featured real-voice cameos by the likes of Mickey Rooney and Britney Spears, Gehry's turn at the microphone doesn't mean that architects en masse will now be viewed by the public with solemn respect. But it's still a gauge of how the profession has evolved in the past decade or so, for better or worse.

More and more, especially with cultural facilities, star wattage counts. Institutions look to familiar names and flamboyant designs because the extra buzz helps attract attention  --  and, theoretically, the donors who pay for the construction, followed by  customers looking for what is new and hot and wow.

These buildings aren't merely part of the landscape, or structures crafted with an eye to posterity. They're gambles: bets by clients that a payoff is more likely if the architect is part of the appeal.

Nothing demonstrates this better than Gehry's popularity; his cascading exuberance has become a brand every bit as recognizable as a Volkswagen bug. If a building is a Gehry, you know it at a glance.

That's fine in his case, because his most visible creations have delivered the goods.

The 1997 opening of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, not only turned a fading industrial city into a mecca for the traveling intelligentsia, it put "starchitecture" on the map. All that undulating titanium wasn't just baffling, it was lyrical. And 2003's Disney Hall delivered the same oomph closer to home, disarming skeptics who were poised to take the celebrity big shot down a peg.

The danger comes when having a BIG NAME is more important than whether the BIG NAME is appropriate for the project at hand. These days, the Gehry stardust is being sprinkled far and wide; among the projects on the drawing board,  are a winery in Canada, a museum in Hong Kong, a sports arena in Kansas City, Mo., and condominium towers in Brighton, England.

And what's the payoff beyond the property lines? Hard to say.

San Francisco's not in line for a Gehry  --  though there's talk of a Gehry winery in Napa  --  but we've got the Daniel Libeskind-designed Contemporary Jewish Museum set to start construction next spring near Yerba Buena Gardens, with a blue cube lurching against a century-old wall of red brick. And the sinuous, vaguely biomorphic de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park opening this fall that's the copper-covered vision of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, winners, like Gehry, of the vaunted Pritzker Architecture Prize.

These brash designs are controversial, but whether or not they loosen the city's distrust of contemporary architecture is an open question. The bold moves by big names might captivate the public at large, or make people even more resistant to any design that doesn't look as if it were plucked from a time capsule.

Back to "The Simpsons."

Remember the prison riot I mentioned? It took place inside Gehry's Springfield concert hall  --  after it was converted into a prison because the good folks of Springfield realized on the hall's opening night that they didn't like classical music.

Let that be a lesson to any city lured by the glamour of celebrity architecture. When you're building for the ages, star wattage goes only so far.

Place appears on Thursdays. E-mail John King, a big fan of Disney Hall, at jking@sfchronicle.com

Winning Players

BILL JAMES and his statistical methods have been central to Moneyball, the Red Sox winning their first World Series in 86 years, and the Yankees winning 4 World Series in 5 years. But for years, his specialized focus kept his intellect from seeing what the intuition knows: that there are clutch hitters and winning players who are worth more to their team than their stats – unless James turns clutch hitting into a stat, as he may:

In an essay published this winter - in something called The Baseball Research Journal, a Jamesian outlet if ever there was one - he argued that clutch hitters might indeed walk the earth. Not only that, but he also proceeded to challenge a handful of other numbers-based doctrines, including the belief that hot and cold streaks do not exist.

James, who made his name writing the Baseball Abstract books and currently advises the Red Sox, said he no longer had faith in the numbers he and others long used to make their arguments about clutch hitting and the like.

asl April 24, 2005   KEEPING SCORE   Baseball's Leading Man of Math Has Some Second Thoughts About the Numbers   By DAVID LEONHARDT     ith the score tied, the bases loaded and a division title at stake, Steve Finley walked to the Dodger Stadium batter's box in the ninth inning last October with a grin. "I knew the game was over," he said afterward. On the second pitch, he sent the ball flying through the late-afternoon California sunshine toward the bleachers, and the Dodgers had beaten the Giants. The grand slam seemed a proper season's capstone for Finley, a veteran outfielder whom the Dodgers had acquired from Arizona before the trade deadline. When games were on the line in 2004, he did his best hitting. What you think this says about Finley, and about what he is likely to do for the Angels this season, offers a good litmus test of your place in baseball's ideological universe. If you believe his 2004 heroics prove him to be a clutch hitter, you belong to the majority party. Call yourself a traditionalist, and know that most managers and players stand with you. If you think Finley is no more likely to be a big-game performer this year than Alex Rodriguez - who tended to melt in the clutch last year - consider yourself a Jamesian. You share the view of many statistics lovers who have been inspired by the writings of Bill James. You consider clutch hitters to be the Loch Ness monsters of baseball, because you know that players who outdo themselves in the clutch one season rarely repeat the performances during the next. The debate had not changed much for years. Then Bill James himself announced that he was thinking of switching parties. In an essay published this winter - in something called The Baseball Research Journal, a Jamesian outlet if ever there was one - he argued that clutch hitters might indeed walk the earth. Not only that, but he also proceeded to challenge a handful of other numbers-based doctrines, including the belief that hot and cold streaks do not exist. James, who made his name writing the "Baseball Abstract" books and currently advises the Red Sox, said he no longer had faith in the numbers he and others long used to make their arguments about clutch hitting and the like. The statistics now seem far too noisy to him - based on too little data - to trump ideas with an inherent ring of truth to them. "I was wrong about something, wrong about something important, for a long time," James said by e-mail last week. "And since I had contributed heavily to creating the problem, I realized that I had to do what I could to address it." The central idea behind much baseball analysis is persistence. Hitting for average, hitting for power, drawing walks, striking out batters and stealing bases are all obvious skills because the players who do them well one year tend to do them well again the next. But if there is no pattern from one season to another, Jamesians argue, there is probably no underlying skill. Steve Finley, as it happened, hit worse with runners in scoring position during 2003 than he did when nobody was on base. Did that make him a choker? Or did 2004 make him clutch? Neither, statistics mavens say. He is just a good hitter who sometimes succeeds in big situations and sometimes fails. You do not get one head and one tail every time you flip a coin twice, and Finley will not replicate his career statistics in every given situation. There seems to be no persistence, in other words, to clutch hitting. "Here today, gone tomorrow," James wrote in the essay. The same can be said of a handful of other traditionalist chestnuts, like streakiness. The problem, James now says, is that his old argument rested on a shaky stack of statistics. Imagine if a doctor checked for breathing problems once a week by placing a stethoscope over a patient's winter coat and listening for changes. Every exam would be flawed - filled with noise, as statisticians say - because of the coat. But the comparison of one exam with another would be even worse, with any small differences between them overwhelmed by uncertainty. In baseball, luck and randomness - weather, ballpark dimensions, the pitcher - play the role of the winter coat. And the search for clutch hitters involves not just one comparison that compounds the statistical noise. It has two: the differential between a player's normal and clutch batting averages and the difference between this differential across seasons. This messiness could disguise any clutch hitting. "We ran astray because we have been assuming that random data is proof of nothingness," James wrote, "when in reality random data proves nothing." (The essay, "Underestimating the Fog," is available at sabr.org.) But the richest thing about James's mea culpa may be the conclusion worth drawing from it. Just as common sense says that some people handle pressure better than others, it seems likely that these differences are not large among major leaguers. True chokers will flame out well before reaching the big leagues. Players who discover an edge in clutch situations, meanwhile, will almost certainly try to use it at other times, too. If it exists, clutchness probably creates only a few extra hits for a batter over the course of a season, despite announcers who claim to see it in every game. So James's old view might have had the rare distinction of being wrong and still being closer to the truth than the other side's argument. E-mail: keepingscore@nytimes.com   Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Quote of the Day

Yankees 11 - Rangers 1, Randy Johnson improves to 2 and 1, with a 4.19 era.

"He was a lot different than what I've seen in the past and what I've experienced with him," said Rangers catcher Rod Barajas, who caught Johnson with the Arizona Diamondbacks and went 0 for 3 yesterday.

"It's not what we expected. We expected Randy Johnson to be throwing inside - hard four-seamers and sliders. He kept us off-balance. He hit both sides of the plate, and that's not how you really know Randy Johnson. He was sinking the ball away and getting some weak ground balls. He did a great job of making adjustments."

From the New York Times.

Torre: “Everything we do is based on pitching.”

RANDY JOHNSON is not in mid-season form yet, but he's getting there. If Pavano and Moose follow suit, they could all have .750 records, and the Yanks could have enough wins, regardless of who pitches 4 and 5. They now have the same record as last year, when they went on to win 101 games. Can they do it again?

OR will they be trading Andy Philips (who had a double and 3-run home run today) for pitching? Sure would be nice to have Lieber, or even Admiral Halsey. So far this year, many of the Yankee runs have come when the Yankee pitching was also doing well. And as Torre has said ever since winning his first World Series with the Yankees, “Everything we do is based on pitching.”

Movies: Birth & Girl With A Pearl Earring

Here are two more movies with directors who think it's artistic and profound in the 20th century to make move movies that say little more than "life sucks." Maybe they forget we're in the 21st century now.

Girl With A Pearl Earring is showing on HBO this month. I've tried watching it a couple of times, because I love Vermeer's paintings, and many of the Dutch paintings of the 17th century. But watch Girl With A Pearl Earring and you'll find the point of view that the artists and society who created the great Classical beauty we see in the work of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other 17th century Dutch masters were profoundly depressed, emotional zombies, evil or all of the above. This says much more about those who made the film than its supposed subjects. (And they actually had a few things to be depressed about, like plague, no social net, no central heating and no indoor plumbing, to name a few at random. But who today can paint like Rembrandt?)

Birth is the depressed materialist's take on reincarnation. It takes an hour and a half to say life sucks, and reincarnation is a hoax. It's about as insightful as an episode of SpongeBob Square Pants, without a moment of joy or insight.

Here are a few quotes from RottenTomatoes.com:

• "Interminally slow film of torpid self-indulegence based on a ludicrous premise."

• "All I could think was, What in God's name do the filmmakers think they're doing?"

• "Possibly, this idea would have worked as comedy. Say, if the kid had said something like, 'I am dead people.'"