Month: October 2004

FROM MY SEAT

Post author By Frank Murtaugh
Post date October 28, 2004

COULD A CURSE BE WORSE?

It’s one of the strangest emotions I’ve ever experienced. Sitting seven rows behind the St. Louis Cardinals’ dugout in Busch Stadium for Game 3 of the World Series Tuesday night, I was at the one place on the face of the earth where I most wanted to be . . . and with my father no less. And I was absolutely suffering.

Time heals, they say. And with baseball history — as it unfolds, particularly each October — the invigorating wins and throat-squeezing losses blend together in a tapestry unlike any other sport can claim. So the 2004 Cardinal season — with 112 wins, counting the postseason — will be near the top of the “bittersweet” category as fans do their mid-winter recollecting.

The Boston Red Sox ended the most fabled and talked-about “curse” in American sport (was the “curse” not merely a convenient excuse for 86 years of losing?). And they did so in a fashion that earns them a permanent spot (wild-card status, be damned) among the game’s truly great teams. To come back from three games down against the mighty Yankees of New York, and to beat the Bombers in Babe’s House, and once behind a pitcher whose red sock was the precise shade of the hurler’s hemoglobin . . . the stuff of legend. Put Curt Schilling’s name not beside, but ahead of the Splendid Splinter’s, Yastrzemski’s, Fisk’s. After all, it was he and not they who brought New England to heights their own gridiron Patriots can only approximate.

And what of those Cardinals, the first National League champion to call St. Louis home in 17 years? Imagine having a date to your senior prom with the prettiest girl in the county . . . and showing up with the largest zit your nose could accommodate. Heroes became clowns for St. Louis in this Fall Classic (dare we call it that?). Jim Edmonds, it could be argued, won both Games 6 and 7 of the NLCS, the first with an extra-inning home run, the second with a circus catch in centerfield to save two early runs. Against Boston? He had all of one hit, a bunt single in Fenway.

Scott Rolen drilled the home run that beat the indomitable Roger Clemens in that NLCS Game 7. Against Boston? Nary a hit. Albert Pujols hit .500 in the NLCS, with four home runs. He wasn’t able to so much as dent the Green Monster in a ballpark made for him.

And then there’s Jeff Suppan. As Cardinal Nation roars for his head over the pitcher’s base-running blunder (the enmity is better directed at third-base coach Jose Oquendo), remember how he clinched each of the previous playoff series for the Cardinals, and how he out-pitched a first-ballot Hall of Famer to win the pennant. A clown, yes. But with a hero’s cape still in his wardrobe.

Just as baseball history is written in the language of heroics, its texture is thickened with heartache . . . and collapse. Poor Tony LaRussa has been witness to the execution three times, now, first at the hands of Kirk Gibson in 1988, two years later when swept by an outmanned Cincinnati club, and now under a lunar eclipse at Busch Stadium. Here’s hoping he’s back for 2005. Facial blemish aside, he danced with the partner he brought.

I’m a third-generation Cardinal fan. My grandfather never took my dad to Sportsman’s Park to see the great Musial, much less to see a World Series contest. With the help of more friends than I can count, Dad and I pulled it off Tuesday night for the 18th World Series game to be played at Busch Stadium since it opened in 1966. We could see Stan the Man’s pearly whites as he threw out the first pitch, caught by none other than Bob Gibson. (Oh, but if we could have had Gibby on the hill that night!) But legends, alas, aren’t replicated by the will of a father and son. Legends are made by retiring 14 consecutive batters to take your team within nine innings of a world championship. This night belonged to Pedro Martinez and the Bosox.

After the game, Dad and I shuffled over to Mike Shannon’s restaurant, across Market Street from the stadium in downtown St. Louis. Budweiser, of course, was the salve. Packed within this eatery — decorated wall to wall with, what else, baseball history — were fellow members of Cardinal Nation. Damp from the rain, and some tears. Still dressed almost entirely in red, many of their caps with the fancy World Series logo newly attached. Knowing what was surely imminent, my spirits (so to speak) were near rock bottom.

But like the Grinch after stealing every last item from Whoville, I noticed something truly odd about my extended family of Cardinal loyalists. They were smiling, laughing even. Shaking hands and allowing the scattered Red Sox fans to soak up Cardinal Country for a night. You see, they knew — as do my dad and I — there will be another Cardinal game. Another win, even. Perhaps, I’d like to believe, another championship.

News News Feature

CITY BEAT

Post author By John Branston
Post date October 27, 2004

A SHABBY PERFORMANCE

The tax man’s fingerprints are all over FedExForum. They’re on the seats, the concessions, the rental cars and limos that bring fans downtown, the restaurants where they eat, and the hotel rooms where they stay. One thing that isn’t taxed locally, however, is the players.

In the world of major-league sports, Memphis and Nashville are tax havens. Tennessee has no state income tax and no local payroll tax, although Memphis voters get a chance to change that by voting on a referendum next week.

In the unlikely event that an income tax ever passes in Tennessee or Memphis, the Memphis Grizzlies will write the biggest checks, because their players make millions every year in salary and endorsements. One $4 million player salary equals roughly 100 teacher salaries. The Grizzlies pay no income taxes to their home state and home town even though they play in a publicly funded arena and, like other professional athletes and entertainers, are taxed in most other places where they play.

But while the mainstream Memphis media have been quick to praise the Grizzlies for their civic activities and charitable donations and to trash the tax referendum for its vagueness, they have not put the two elements together in the same story. This is but one omission in what has been, overall, a shabby job by the media, politicians, and business leaders of explaining the issues underlying the payroll tax referendum.

If the vaguely worded referendum is defeated next week, as expected, no one will point out that enabling legislation is often vague, that Mayor Herenton took a pass, Mayor Wharton took a pass, and the business community raised more than $100,000 to fight the “well-intentioned” proposal. Proponents of the referendum had only city councilwoman Janet Hooks and free media. Payroll tax opponents will crow that “the people have spoken,” and the headlines across Tennessee will read “Memphis Overwhelmingly Rejects Payroll Tax.”

Better gloat now, because the chickens are coming home to roost in 2005. While the Good Ship Memphis steams along, there’s rough water ahead.

á On Monday, a story in The Wall Street Journal appeared under the headline “Rising Property Taxes Across U.S. Lead to a Slew of Ballot Initiatives.”

According to the article, “The efforts share a common theme: that reliance on property taxes, which have jumped 10 percent on average in the past few years, is an outdated and sometimes unfair way to fund local services.”

Every conscientious politician and business leader in Memphis and Shelby County knows as much, but none of them have stuck their necks out for the payroll tax. According to the Shelby County Assessor’s office, property taxes accounted for 50 percent of county revenue in 1996 and 63 percent today.

Memphis is 75 percent of Shelby County. For the first time in memory, the value of assessed property was down in Memphis last year by $90 million mainly due to reductions in the Hickory Hill area. As a result, Memphis lost $10 million in tax revenue.

á Next year is a reappraisal year for the first time since 2001. If you’re a Memphis homeowner and your $150,000 house is now worth $200,000, you’re looking at an increase in your property taxes of $908 in 2005 before the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission, properly chastened by defeat of the payroll tax, probably raise the property tax rate even more.

á Memphis and Shelby County are buying growth by constructing the most expensive public building project in local history, FedExForum, and by subsidizing growth through the Center City Commission, Industrial Development Board, and Health and Education Board, which grant tax freezes. Every project taken off the tax rolls or not put back on the tax rolls when its freeze expires puts a greater burden on the property tax. At least some of the revenue streams diverted to FedExForum would have gone elsewhere. Suffice it to say that a $250 million arena cannot pay for itself, and it is not free.

á If these numbers have not put you to sleep yet, visit the Web site of the Federation of Tax Administrators (taxadmin.org) for a look at how Tennessee taxation, based largely on sales and property taxes, stacks up against other states. Or Google the phrase “jock tax” for an interesting look at how other cities in Canada and the United States capture tax revenue from professional athletes. But don’t expect to find much from the mainstream Memphis media, which is still starstruck when it comes to pro sports.

I don’t know anyone on the Memphis Grizzlies team or staff. I assume that on an individual basis they are as generous and civic-minded as the rest of us. Generosity and major-league sports are nice, but so is tax equity. On that score, Memphis is bush league.

Editorial Opinion

EDITORIAL: FOR A STRONGER, SAFER, SANER AMERICA

Post author By Kenneth Neill
Post date October 27, 2004

Since its foundation in 1989, The Memphis Flyer has strictly adhered to a policy of not endorsing candidates for public office. Regular readers are aware of our unabashed support of progressive ideas and, by inference, the individuals who espouse them. But we have always felt we best serve the public interest by keeping an arm’s-length distance from political candidates in the run-up to elections.

This year’s extraordinary presidential campaign, however, requires our making an exception to our traditional non-endorsement policy. Four more years of George W. Bush is a potential disaster of such magnitude that we feel obliged to add our editorial voice to those of so many other newspapers around this country, and declare our support for John F. Kerry’s candidacy for the presidency.

The reason is simple: President Bush’s policies have failed this country on nearly every front, domestic and international. There is not room on this page to chronicle those failures in detail. Our relations with our allies are in shambles; our budgetary and trade deficits are out of control; corporate lobbies are setting environmental policy; our tax system is obscenely biased towards the rich; our civil liberties are at risk. The list goes on and on

And then there’s the matter of our misnamed “war on terror.” Bush supporters relentlessly cite their confidence in the president’s handling of this issue. It’s hard to imagine why. After failing to take action despite repeated warnings from our intelligence agencies of the impending al-Qaeda attack that became 9/11, the president’s definitive response to that attack was to invade, under false pretences, a country that had no proven links with the “terrorists” and posed no real threat to our national security. President Bush attacked Iraq in defiance of world opinion, ignoring virtually all the lessons learned from the first Gulf War, a victory choreographed by his own father. And since foolishly declaring his “mission accomplished” in May 2003, Mr. Bush’s continued display of incompetence in his conduct of that war would be unacceptable in a Memphis city councilman, let alone in a President of the United States.

Today, this president’s war of choice is an unmitigated disaster. Eleven hundred American soldiers are dead; more than 10,000 are wounded and maimed, their lives forever altered. Countless innocent Iraqi men, women, and children are dead or wounded simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. All for what?

John Kerry is not a perfect candidate. We took severe issue with his initial waffling on the war, and his vote to give the President war-making powers in the fall of 2002. But Kerry has been in real combat and knows what that means; he will not view war as an abstract geopolitical tool. He has served in the Senate for 20 years and knows how to get legislation passed. And in the debates, the Senator articulated a vision for the future that seems both reasoned and reasonable, in sharp contrast to the platitudinous pablum offered by the president.

Senator Kerry has grown in stature during this presidential campaign. George W. Bush, meanwhile, has shrunk, especially in these final days, when his “message” to the American people is little more than an appeal to our rawest and most primitive emotions. As Marie Cocco noted recently in Newsday, “Fear is the president’s running mate.”

At the risk of irritating the always-irritable vice president, we concur. Senator Kerry, by contrast, appeals to our minds as well as our hearts, drawing upon our nation’s best instincts, not its worst. Most importantly, he offers the promise of redeeming George W. Bush’s famously unkept promise from the 2000 presidential campaign.

John Kerry has shown that he can be “a uniter not a divider.” George W. Bush has clearly proven that he can’t. Your vote for Senator Kerry next Tuesday will be a vote for a stronger, safer, and saner America.

Film Features Film/TV

Bad Company

Post author By
Post date October 26, 2004

B>The most intellectually compelling of the rash of politically oriented documentaries that have graced local screens this year, The Corporation isn’t as emotionally devastating as Fahrenheit 9/11, but it illuminates an issue that predates George W. Bush and will plague us long after he’s gone. This Canadian film is also unlike Fahrenheit in that its concerns are more likely to connect across ideological divides. One can imagine economic populists in the conservative movement being as persuaded by the film’s central argument as the progressives most likely to see the film.

The Corporation begins with the premise that the titular institution is the dominant one of our time, all-pervasive in a manner that the monarchy, the church, or the Communist Party have been at other times and in other places. In examining the nature, evolution, and impact of the modern corporation, The Corporation rejects the “few bad apples” argument that has been used to explain away recent corporate scandals. Instead, it seeks out a better metaphor to explain the crimes of these institutions.

This metaphor is based on the corporation’s status as a “legal person,” which the film traces back to arguments growing out of the 14th Amendment, which was meant to guarantee the rights of former slaves but which, the film illustrates, has been used by opportunistic attorneys to acquire individual rights for corporate entities.

What is most ingenious about The Corporation is that, instead of merely railing against this reality, it takes the “legal person” status and uses it against its subject. The film asks: If the corporation is a person, what kind of person is it?

This defamiliarizing strategy is novel and effective. Utilizing case histories of bad corporate behavior (such as labor and environmental abuses) and the testimony of a wide swath of commentators both inside and outside the corporate world, The Corporation employs the World Health Organization Manual of Mental Disorders to diagnose the corporation. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others? Check. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships? Check. Reckless disregard for the safety of others? Check. Deceitfulness and repeated lying and conning of others for profit? Check. Incapacity to experience guilt? Check.

The diagnosis? If the corporation is a “legal person,” then that person is a psychopath.

That might sound outlandish, but the argument marshaled by this nearly two-and-a-half hour film is hard to refute. After all, the corporation is an institution designed by law to be concerned only with its stockholders, to put profit ahead of everything else, even the public good.

The Corporation makes its case with grimly amusing use of industrial and educational films and a kaleidoscopic, globe-spanning series of evidence. Among the catalog of outrages are the privatization of rainwater in the Third World and sweatshop-labor costs that make up only three-tenths of 1 percent of the cost of a pair of sneakers. A commodities trader confesses that when the World Trade Center towers went down, his first thought was, “How much is gold going up?” Talking about oil prices as a response to the war, he says, “We couldn’t wait for the bombs to fall.” His matter-of-fact moral: “In devastation, there is opportunity.”

The one hitch might be that the audience that most needs to see The Corporation isn’t consumers but business leaders. Indeed, the smartest move that the filmmakers Joel Bakan, Mark Achbar, and Jennifer Abbott make is to include interviews not only with celebrated lefty critics such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore but with a string of CEOs, economists (including Milton Friedman), and corporate insiders. Indeed, the hero of the movie isn’t Moore or Chomsky but Ray Anderson, the Southern, gentlemanly CEO of Interface Carpeting, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer.

Anderson was a typical CEO whose epiphany came from reading a book. Asked to give a speech about business and the environment, Anderson realized he had nothing to say on the subject, so he did some research. In his reading, he came across the phrase “the death of birth,” a phrase referring to species extinction. Anderson remembers the phrase as a “point of a spear into my heart.” Anderson, who is now taking pains to convert his business into something environmentally sustainable, refers to himself as a “plunderer” and wonders out loud whether someday CEOs like himself might find themselves jailed for their crimes against the planet. He calls the “terrible legacy of poisoning and diminishing the environment” that he and his corporate colleagues have perpetuated a form of “generational tyranny,” taxation without representation for the kids and grandkids who’ll have to face the consequences.

This might sound radical, but it comes from the mouth of a straight-laced man in a dark suit, a wealthy business leader whom some might call a “captain of industry.” Michael Moore might not win many converts, but what about Ray Anderson?

The Corporation will be shown at 6 p.m. Sunday, October 24th, in the screening room at First Congregational Church in Midtown’s Cooper-Young district. The screening is co-sponsored by the Memphis Digital Arts Cooperative and local activist Brian Baird, who brought the Howard Zinn documentary You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train to the space earlier this year. Admission is $3.

Chris Herrington

I made the mistake of allowing myself to hope that Team America: World Police would be the funniest movie ever in the history of the universe. Such expectations can do little but disappoint, be it the hope for that ever-elusive birthday pony or that Iraq really has weapons of mass destruction. It has been a good five years since the hilarious South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and one could only expect that auteurs Trey Parker and Matt Stone would have spent that time honing their filmmaking skills and saving up their delicious offensiveness for something big. Alas, Team America, you are no South Park.

Team America is a small squadron of jingoistic militants who, headquartered behind the faces of Mount Rushmore, police the world for terrorist threats. Opening in Paris, France, Team America zeroes in on a group of terrorists wreaking havoc on innocent Parisians that is, until the team shows up! Within a matter of minutes, the terrorists are destroyed but not without taking down some of the world’s most valued landmarks: the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe.

When a lone casualty creates a hole in the team’s lineup, mastermind Spottswoode scouts out a promising possibility currently starring in the Broadway musical Lease. He’s Gary Johnston, Broadway star and graduate of the University of Iowa with a double major in theater and world languages the perfect candidate for a paramilitary spy! (Brace yourself when the cast of Lease sing the jaw-droppingly irreverent “Everybody’s Got AIDS.”) Handsome, dedicated, and a great actor, Gary is a perfect fit for the team, but he has several lessons to learn about teamwork and courage. When the rest of the team is imprisoned by Jong Il and the world is on the verge of takeover, it’s up to Gary to get it together and save the day. Complicating matters: the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G. Get it?) led by Alec Baldwin and peopled by the likes of Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Martin Sheen, are up to no good, what with their fight for peace and all. Oh, and Michael Moore’s along for the ride.

What I like most about the South Park television show and triumphant film version is that it is nonpartisan in its offensiveness. But behind the potty jokes and sometimes tasteless anti-everyone jokiness, there is a keen perceptiveness to the satire coupled with an accomplished and well-researched aesthetic. Parker is an excellent musician, for example, and the musical sensibilities of the series, the South Park film, and now Team America are spot-on homages (maybe “homage” isn’t the right word) to Hollywood archetypes.

In the case of Team America, one can hardly distinguish the plot, score, and excessive Hollywood-ness from, say, any Jerry Bruckheimer film. And, in fact, much is borrowed or derived from Bruckheimer films, ranging from the love ballad “Pearl Harbor Sucks and I Miss You” to the quote from Armageddon on the subject of the terrorist plot: “Basically, it’s like all the worst parts of the Bible.” The rest is recycled Top Gun, Lethal Weapon, Knight Rider, Star Wars, and a hoary host of just about anything in which guns are fired.

Did I mention that there are no actors, only marionettes? Yes, Team America is a puppet show but an impressive one (cinematography by The Matrix and Spider Man 2‘s Bill Pope and sets by uber-architect David Rockwell). But this highlights the film’s biggest flaw: The technical accomplishment of the puppetry and sets is somehow funnier than anything written. No line in the film (by the oft-quotable Parker and Stone) is funnier than, oh, the sight of two marionettes having Monster’s Ball-style marathon sex or the four-minute projectile vomiting of Gary after an alcohol binge. And for all of the awkwardness of the puppets’ movements, such pains are taken to make their world lifelike that it’s sometimes easy to forget that they’re not people. Their concerns, likewise, are those of real-life conservatives and liberals. (Both sides will see the film and think that it’s a critique of the other.) I couldn’t help wanting more. More gross. More mean. More something. But like two sophomoric pranksters, Parker and Stone have followed up the successful flaming bag of poop of South Park with merely another flaming bag of poop. Team America is funny, yes, but not nearly as funny as the political vaudeville you can watch nightly on Fox News. n Bo List

News The Fly-By

KILLER ON THE ROAD II

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date October 25, 2004

A Knoxville news station reporting on the ongoing cleanup of Memphis’ old defense depot reports that Jim Morrison, a state environmental project manager, wants to institute a plan involving microorganisms that help Mother Earth to mend herself. Morrison says the new technology is less costly and more efficient than old methods. Morrison has also been quoted as saying, “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding, ghosts crowd the young boy’s fragile eggshell mind.”

Plante: How It Looks

News News Feature

COMMENTARY: IF THERE’S A ROCK AND ROLL HEAVEN

Post author By Sherman Willmott
Post date October 25, 2004

Memphis lost one its brightest, most eclectic female stars last weekÑCordell Jackson, a lady who out-punkrocked them all with her octogenarian Hagstrom attack. She even kicked Brian SetzerÕs ass, admittedly not a difficult thing to do. With the loss of Ms. Jackson as well as MemphisÕ first lady of soul Estelle Axton in February, it has not been a good year for the ladies who helped create the mystery and magic of Memphis music (Where are the made-for-tv movies or Biography specials on Estelle Axton and Cordell Jackson? Certainly Ms. Axton was one of the most influential females in popular music of the 20th centuryÉbut I digress). This is not an obituary; Cordell Jackson had a great life and a great run, especially as inspiration to a current generation of roots rockers in the 1990s. This is a wake-up call! Memphis has lost too many stars in the last ten yearsÉRufus Thomas, Fred Ford, Sam Phillips, Junior Kimbrough, Othar Turner, Son Thomas, Charlie Feathers, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash and many others (Only the enigmatic Jerry Lee Lewis, who has definitely made a deal at the crossroads, is still sitting by the pool playing the piano) to not take notice.

Do something today for Memphis musicians–those famous and those not yet so. Your gesture can be small or big. Book a Memphis band for your next bbq, party, or wedding. Take a Memphis musician to lunch, as Jim Dickinson likes to say. If you work at a radio station, play their music (on the air!). If you work at Memphis Convention and VisitorÕs Bureau, start promoting current acts like South Filthy, Lucero, and Half-Acre Gunroom in your brochures before they get Dolly Parton-sized. If you work at the Memphis Arts Council, open up your vast budgets to current Memphis Music, which is an art and should be treated like other branches of the arts. If you work at or own a hotel, have a Memphis band play your cocktail hourÑa good portion of your guests have come to hear the Memphis Sound. If you drive a cab, play Memphis music for your fares. If you work at the City Council, continue to honor heroes like Willie Mitchell by naming a street after them; people come from the ends of the earth to have their picture taken on Willie Mitchell Blvd. If you are a mayor, next time you give a billionaire from out of town a monopoly concert business and a free $250 million corporate headquarters, make sure you put in the contract that he has to hire Memphis musicians to be the opening act at all of his events.

Make Memphis musicians feel important and used (in the commercial sense) while they are alive. Do not wait until they are gone. Do not wait on the Memphis Music Commission to come to the rescue. And do not look at these actions like charity. Look at them as an investment in Memphis. People come from all over the world to this city for its music and music heritage. They buy meals from your restaurants, shop in your t-shirt shops or antique stores, ride on your trollies, rent your cars, sleep in your hotels, and buy airline tickets from your travel agents. Musicians have taken a pay cut to live in Memphis and spread the goodwill of Memphis all over the world. If you want to have Memphis music icons in the next generation and if you want this music heritage (i.e. this commerce) to continue, you have to create a musical atmosphere that is more conducive than a subsistence gig once a month.

News News Feature

FROM MY SEAT

Post author By Frank Murtaugh
Post date October 25, 2004

PITCHING A HOLIDAY…AGAIN

If I were King of the World — or at least Donald Trump — we’d all be home with our families and friends this Wednesday. Yep . . . no school, no work, stock market closed, no mail. You see, in my world, this Wednesday would be National Baseball Day.

I’ve been campaigning for a national holiday tied in to the national pastime for a few years now, and I suppose I’ll continue until the right person or people — people much smarter than baseball commissioner Bud Selig — start listening. Whether or not you enjoy the game of baseball, hear me on this: America needs National Baseball Day.

Why this Wednesday, you ask? Each year, the holiday would coincide with Game 4 of the World Series, the oldest and greatest event in American team sports. Best of all — and pay attention, Mr. Selig — Game 4 would start no later than three o’clock, eastern time (and only that late if a west-coast team is hosting). The idea, friends, is to play this wonderful child’s game when children can actually watch, under the sunshine.

Do you realize the last World Series game to be watched with sunglasses was 1984? From Don Denkinger’s infamous call in 1985 to Kirk Gibson’s homer in ‘88, from the epic Game 7 between Minnesota and Atlanta in ‘91 to Joe Carter’s Mazeroski imitation in ‘93, from Edgar Renteria’s Series-winning hit in ‘97 to Luis Gonzalez’s Series-winning hit in 2001 . . . all came after your favorite 10-year-old’s bedtime. Imagine the legion of 10-year-old Red Sox worshipers sound asleep Sunday night when Game 2 ended at 11:30 pm in Boston? That is, quite simply, criminal.

Oh, the TV fat cats will hear none of this. There’s ad revenue to build, and prime time slots in which to build it. As quoted in the October 18th Wall Street Journal, here’s the fat cats’ lackey, er, commissioner Selig: “The ratings get bigger and bigger as the night goes on, and so our daytime ratings are never what the nighttime ratings are. . . . And so it’s very hard to tell [TV executives] they are doing the wrong thing. They are not doing the wrong thing.”

If you’ve got a droplet of purist’s blood in you — or if you’re a parent — comments like that make you want to force Selig to catch Randy Johnson without a mask. Baseball is suffering, if you haven’t noticed. (And if you haven’t noticed . . . all the worse.) From steroid rumors to chairs being thrown into the stands, there are enough black eyes on the game to seriously undermine yet another attendance record set in 2004. The fact is, baseball’s audience is aging, and becoming more exclusive. National Baseball Day would free everyone involved to take a breath, remember what’s important when we take a break from our workaday lives . . . and give a game — one game — back to the kids.

I’m old enough to remember World Series games in the afternoon and, let me tell you, my world stopped on those days. A daytime Series game was an event every bit as schedule-altering as the Super Bowl. A circus could have set up across the street and I wouldn’t have known (or cared). And when the ninth inning came? Rapture.

You say you couldn’t care less about the World Series, or baseball in general? Fine, no problem. Enjoy the holiday! Visit a park with your family. See a movie. Take a day trip to a place you’ve had on your to-do list. This is a holiday for everyone in America, and you’re not obligated to do anything (just as you’re not obligated to hang a flag on July 4th). All I’d ask during my stint as King would be that, as you enjoy this much needed break between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, you remember that it was America’s game — baseball — that got you there.