Padres 7, Brewers 0

A cool cloudy night in June, school out, CJ itching to get more parentally supervised driving time — he needs 50 hours with me in the car before he can get his license — meant it was time, after a two-year pandemic hiatus, to return to what on our last visit was Miller Park, and is now American Family Field — so many syllables, so awkwardly arranged. It was Brewers-Padres; here’s the box score. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a Padres game, but I was motivated to, because Manny Machado plays there now. Machado is the villain of the National League now, universally-except-in-San-Diego seen as a dirty player and a braggart. He was treated to resounding boos by the Brewers fans every time he came to the plate. But I still like him. One of my very first tweets was directed at him. He’s probably the best Oriole of our era, even though he’s not an Oriole anymore. I got us seats along the third base line, something I never ordinarily do, just so I could be closer to Machado when the Brewers were at bat.

Machado wasn’t the story of the game; that was Joe Musgrove, the Padres starter, who took a no-hitter into the eighth. I’ve never seen a no-hitter in person, and I can’t lie, after Musgove got through six I was starting to root for him. But it turns out watching a no-hitter isn’t that different from watching any other game! At least this one wasn’t. An inning where nobody gets a hit is pretty normal; this was just watching a lot of those in a row. Musgrove wasn’t dominant; he walked some guys, went deep in counts. Saved by his defense on a couple of line drives. It really just felt like a game where nobody on the Brewers happened to get a hit, until finally Kolten Wong did happen to.

On the Padre side, Machado hit a home run, just like he did the last time I saw him play. The boos crested to a new level. What I really wanted, though, was to see him play third. He was one of the greatest defenders at third I ever saw, going deep into the hole to stop a sharp grounder and making impossible turnaround throws. The stats say he’s no longer the third baseman he was in Baltimore, and no matter how much he mashes the ball — and this year he is mashing it to a very fine paste indeed — I think that’s a real loss. He wasn’t really tested in this game. The one play at third he made was completely routine, but, well, he made it pretty somehow.

The boos didn’t seem to faze him. He was a cheerful presence on the field, chatting with the third-base ump, throwing his arm chummily around a Brewer baserunner who made it to third. Real baseball.

Lots of Padre fans at AmFam. I didn’t know the Padres had out-of-town fans! Yelich by far the most popular Brewers jersey nowadays. A lot of Hader, too. Braun almost completely gone. Oldest non-Yount jerseys I saw: Corey Hart and Yovanni Gallardo. American Miller Family FieldPark is, as always, a great place to watch a game, unheraldedly one of the best parks in the league. It was good to be back.

The Milwaukee Bucks are the champions of the National Basketball Association

First of all, let’s be clear — I am a bandwagon fan. Despite having lived in Wisconsin since 2005, I only got into the Bucks three years ago. I feel a real envy for the long-time fans I know here, who, if they are old enough, have been waiting for a Bucks title since the year I was born. They feel this in a way I can’t.

That said: what a run! Bucks getting revenge on the Heat, who knocked us out early last year … then beating the Nets, the kind of super-team Giannis could have jumped to but didn’t… coming through and winning those key games against the Hawks without Giannis (including a superhero game from my favorite Buck, Brook Lopez) — and finally, Giannis coming back and being so huge in the finals, scoring 50 in the closeout game; and best of all, Giannis got there by hitting 17 out of 19 free throws — it was like, he said “I have one vulnerability and I think tonight is the night to turn it off.” You couldn’t write a better story.

Giannis, the philosopher:

“When you focus on the past, that’s your ego.” pic.twitter.com/XKiRMA8Ux2

— Milwaukee Bucks (@Bucks) July 17, 2021

And the text, if that link dies:

When I think about like, “Yeah I did this.” You know, “I’m so great. I had 30, I had 25-10-10,” or whatever the case might be. Because you’re going to think about that … Usually the next day you’re going to suck. Simple as that. Like, the next few days you’re going to be terrible. And I figured out a mindset to have that, when you focus on the past, that’s your ego: “I did this in the past. I won that in the past.”

And when I focus on the future, it’s my pride. “Yeah, the next game, Game 5, I’ll do this and this and this. I’m going to dominate.” That’s your pride talking. Like, it doesn’t happen. You’re right here. I try and focus in the moment. In the present. And that’s humility. That’s being humble. That’s not setting no expectations. That’s going out there and enjoying the game. Competing at a high level. I’ve had people throughout my life who have helped me with that. But that’s a skill that I’ve tried to, like, how do you say? Perfect it. Yeah, master it. It’s been working so far, so I’m not going to stop.

Parade tomorrow in Milwaukee.

Wisconsin municipal vexillology update

Madison is changing its flag!  The old one

has a Zuni sun symbol in the middle of it, which people correctly feel is a sort of random and annoying and unrelated-to-Madison vic of somebody else’s religious symbol.  On the other hand, on pure design grounds it’s kind of a great flag!  Simple, but you see the lakes, the isthmus, the Capitol.  The new flag elegantly keeps all that while skimming off the cultural appropriation:

 

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, pressure is mounting to adopt the People’s Flag. Milwaukee’s existing flag is an ungepotchkit mess, routinely ranked among the nation’s worst city banners.  I mean:

I think my favorite part of this mess is that there are two miniflags inside this flag, and the one that’s not the U.S. flag nobody even remembers what it is!

Anyway, this is the proposed new flag, currently the subject of hot civic dissent:

I think this is great.  Daring color choices, you get your lake, you get your big flat lake, you get your optimistic sense of sunrise.  Make the right choice, Cream City!

Brewers 6, Marlins 5 / Bucks 104, Celtics 102 / Orioles 6, Tigers 0

I’ve lived in Madison for 13 years and this is the first time I’ve noticed anybody caring about the Milwaukee Bucks.  It’s definitely the first time I’ve cared about the Milwaukee Bucks.  But now the Bucks have a legitimate superstar in Giannis Antetokoumnpo  and a likeable cast of supporting characters like 19-year-old former refugee and skinny blockmaster Thon Maker.  The kids had a rare unscheduled day on Sunday and the Bucks were in the playoffs against the Celtics and there were nosebleed tickets on Stubhub for $40 apiece so why not?

You may know that I kind of hate driving so if I’m gonna drive all the way to Milwaukee it’s got to be for more than a Bucks game.  When I thought about what the kids would really want to do it was pretty clear — see the Brewers, stay over, then see the Bucks.  So that’s what we did!

Notes on the Brewers:

• I got lost in the impossible off-ramp spaghetti surrounding Miller Park and we ended up not getting into the ballpark until the second inning.  The Brewers were already down 4-0.  4-0!  To the sad Miami Marlins, the team Derek Jeter is using as a tax dodge, the team so bad Marlins Man cancelled his season tickets!
• But as soon as we sat down, Travis Shaw muscled a huge home run to left center.  Didn’t even look like he got all of it, he kind of sliced it.  But Travis Shaw is a big strong man.
• Brewers just keep creeping back.  Crowd stays in the game, at no point do you really feel the Brewers are out of it.  Three straight Brewers hit what look like go-ahead home runs but each dies at the wall.  (Ryan Braun at least gets a sacrifice fly out of it.)   In the 8th, Derek Dietrich loses an Eric Sogard fly ball in the, I dunno, the lights?  The roof?  He plays for the Marlins and he just doesn’t care?  Anyway the ball plunked down right next to him, Shaw hustles in from second to tie it, Eric Thames, who starts the play on first, tries to get in behind with the go-ahead run but is tagged out at or rather substantially before the plate because Eric Thames made a bad decision.
• Josh Hader looks like he should be playing bass in Styx.
• Then comes the bottom of the 9th and the play you might have read about.  Still tied 5-5.  Jesus Aguilar, who’s already warmed up twice in the on-deck circle, finally gets his chance to pinch-hit against Junichi Tazawa.  Gets behind 0-2.  And then just starts fouling, fouling, fouling.  Takes a few pitches here and there.  Full count.  Foul, foul, foul.  And on the 13th pitch, Aguilar launches it to center field.  I thought it was gonna be one more death on the warning track.  But nope; ball gets out, game over, fireworks.  I felt like my kids got to see true baseball.

On to Milwaukee.  Bucks play the Celtics at noon, in what, if they lose, could be the last ever game played at Bradley Center.  (This is a bit of a sore point for UW folks, who absorbed as a budget cut the $250m state contribution to the arena’s cost.)  We have breakfast at the hotel and chat with a nice older couple in Packers/Celtics gear — what?  — who turn out to be Boston forward Al Horford’s aunt and uncle from Green Bay.

This is only the third NBA game I’ve been to, CJ’s second, AB’s first.  We wander around inside the arena for a bit.  Two separate groups of Bucks cheerleaders come up to AB and applaud her curly hair.  I think people are especially struck by it when they see us together, because I don’t have curly hair, except here’s a little-known fact:  I do have curly hair!  I just keep it short so it doesn’t curl.  In 1995 or so it looked like this:

Anyway.  The atmosphere, as I have promised AB, is more intense than baseball.  Bucks build up a 19-point lead and seem poised to coast but the Celtics come back, and back, and back, and finally go ahead with 52 seconds left.  Jaylen Brown plainly capable of taking over a game.  Aron Baynes has a very dumb-looking haircut.  Milwaukee’s Thon Maker is ridiculously skinny and has very long arms.  He’s just 21, a former refugee from South Sudan.  We saw his first game as a Buck, an exhibition against the Mavericks at Kohl Center.  Those long skinny arms can block a shot.

Game tied at 102, 5 seconds left, Malcom Brogdon (called “The President” — why?) misses a layup, and there, rising like a Greek column above the scene, is the Greek arm of Giannis Antetokounmpo — the tip-in is good, Celtics miss the desperation last shot, Bucks win 104-102, crowd goes berserk.

 

I was going to blog about this last week but got busy so let’s throw in more sports.  Bucks eventually lose this series in 7, home team winning every game a la Twins-Braves 1991.  The next Friday, I’m giving a talk at Maryland, and the Orioles are playing that night.  It’s been five years since I’ve seen OPACY.  I brought CJ along this time, too.  The Orioles are not in a good way; they’ve won 6 and lost 19, though 3 of those 6 were against New York at least.  Attendance at the game, on a beautiful Friday night, was just over 14,000.  The last baseball game I went to that felt this empty and mellow was the AAA Tucson Toros, several months before they moved to El Paso and became the Chihuahuas.  Chris Tillman, tonight’s starter, was the Orioles’ ace five years ago.  Now he’s coming off a 1-7 season and has an ERA over 9.

So who would have thought he’d toss seven shutout innings and take a no-hitter into the fifth?  Never looked overpowering but kept missing bats.  His first win in almost a year.  Manny Machado, surely now in his last year as an Oriole, strokes a home run to dead center to get things started.  It’s a beautiful thing.  It doesn’t even look like he’s working hard.  It’s like he’s just saying “Out there. Out there is where this ball should be.”  Pedro Alvarez homers twice, in exactly the opposite manner, smashing the ball with eye-popping force.  Jace Peterson, who the Orioles picked up off the Yankees’ scrap heap, steals third on the shift when the Tigers third baseman forgets to pay attention to him.  He did the same thing against the Rays the night before.  I am already starting to love him the way I love Carlos Gomez.  Maybe now the Orioles are going to go back to being a bad team that makes good use of players nobody else wants, like Melvin Mora and Rodrigo López.

Besides me and CJ, this guy was at the game:

Never get tired of that flag.

 

Why did Terrill Thomas die of thirst?

Nobody decided to kill Terrill Thomas.  He kept flooding his cell at the Milwaukee County Jail and making a mess so they just turned off the water to his cell.  Then they left it off until he was dead.  It took six days.  Fellow inmates say he was calling out for water.  Corrections officers say they checked in on Thomas every half hour, and “he had made some type of noise or movement” every time.  Until the last time, when he didn’t make any type of noise or movement because he’d died of thirst.

How did this happen?  It didn’t happen because David Clarke — the sheriff of Milwaukee County, and a top candidate to lead the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration — wanted to kill a prisoner in the most agonizing way imaginable.  What kind of psycho would want that?  I don’t think Sheriff Clarke wanted to kill a newborn baby either.  The baby was the fourth person to die in the jail since April.

These people died because nobody really seems to care what happens in the Milwaukee County Jail.  The medical services there are run by Armor Correctional Health Services, a company which oversees healthcare for 40,000 inmates in 8 states.  What are you saying about your priorities if you call your health care company “Armor”?

Armor’s glassdoor page doesn’t make it sound like a great place to work.  One employee writes:   “Stop being bean counters and start listening to your employees. We are asked to do too much: too many patients, too many intakes, not nearly enough staff to be in compliance with your own rules!”  Armor was sued by the state of New York this year over 12 inmates who died in the Nassau County Jail, including Daniel Pantera, who died of hypothermia in solitary confinement; they settled the suit last month for $350,000 and are barred for three years from bidding for contracts in the state.  Armor does get a very nice endorsement, though, from Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who says right on the front of their website, “Armor stands out as an exemplary model of what partnership in correctional health should look like.”  Bradshaw’s department was held liable this year for $22.4m in damages to Dontrell Stephens, and this summer settled for $550,000 against a former U.S. Marshall who said he was roughed up by deputies after stopping to help the victims of a traffic accident.

Here in Wisconsin, Armor’s performance is overseen by Ronald Shansky, a court-appointed monitor and the first president of the Society of Correctional Physicians.  Some of what Shansky has to say, based on his visit to Milwaukee County correctional facilities last month:

As for the deaths:

Shansky also, I should say, has a lot of praise for some staff members at the jail, characterizing them as devoted to their jobs and patients and doing the best they can under strained circumstances.  And I believe that’s true.  Again:  the doctors of Armor didn’t want Terrill Thomas to spend six days dying of thirst.  Neither did the CEO of Armor.  Neither did David Clarke.  But it happened.  And everyone participated in creating the circumstances under which it happened, and under which it’s likely to happen again:  public services outsourced to companies without the staff or resources to do the job right.

It starts with jails.  But it goes on to schools, to parking, to Medicare, to policing, to the maintenance of our bridges and roads.  You’ll hear people say those services should be run like businesses.  We can see in Milwaukee County what that looks like.  Does it look good?

Such shall not become the degradation of Wisconsin

I’ve lived in Wisconsin for more than a decade and had never heard of Joshua Glover.  That’s not as it should be!

Glover was a slave who escaped Missouri in 1852 and settled in Racine, a free man.  He found a job and settled down into a new life.  Two years later, his old master found out where he was, and, licensed by the Fugitive Slave Act, came north to claim his property.  The U.S. marshals seized Glover and locked him in the Milwaukee courthouse. (Cathedral Square Park is where that courthouse stood.)   A Wisconsin court issued a writ holding the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional, and demanding that Glover be given a trial, but the federal officers refused to comply.  So Sherman Booth, an abolitionist newspaperman from Waukesha, gathered a mob and broke Glover out.  Eventually he made it to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

Booth spent years tangled in court, thanks to his role in the prison break.  Wisconsin, thrilled by its defiance of the hated law, bloomed with abolitionist fervency.  Judge Abram Daniel Smith declared that Wisconsin, a sovereign state, would never accept federal interference within its borders:

“They will never consent that a slave-owner, his agent, or an officer of the United States, armed with process to arrest a fugitive from service, is clothed with entire immunity from state authority; to commit whatever crime or outrage against the laws of the state; that their own high prerogative writ of habeas corpus shall be annulled, their authority defied, their officers resisted, the process of their own courts contemned, their territory invaded by federal force, the houses of their citizens searched, the sanctuary or their homes invaded, their streets and public places made the scenes of tumultuous and armed violence, and state sovereignty succumb–paralyzed and aghast–before the process of an officer unknown to the constitution and irresponsible to its sanctions. At least, such shall not become the degradation of Wisconsin, without meeting as stern remonstrance and resistance as I may be able to interpose, so long as her people impose upon me the duty of guarding their rights and liberties, and maintaining the dignity and sovereignty of their state.”

The sentiment, of course, was not so different from that the Southern states would use a few years later to justify their right to buy and sell human beings.  By the end of the 1850s, Wisconsin’s governor Alexander Randall would threaten to secede from the Union should slavery not be abolished.

When Booth was arrested by federal marshals in 1860, state assemblyman Benjamin Hunkins of New Berlin went even further, introducing a bill declaring war on the United States in protest.  The speaker of the assembly declared the bill unconstitutional and no vote was taken.  (This was actually the second time Hunkins tried to declare war on the federal government; as a member of the Wisconsin territorial assembly in 1844, he became so outraged over the awarding of the Upper Peninsula to Michigan that he introduced an amendment declaring war on Great Britain, Illinois, Michigan, and the United States!)

Milwaukee has both a Booth Street and a Glover Avenue; and they cross.

Madison has a Randall Street (and a Randall School, and Camp Randall Stadium) but no Glover Street and no Booth Street.  Should it?

 

 

 

 

 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court gets home rule wrong and right

The Supreme Court made a decision in the Milwaukee police officer residency requirement case I wrote about, peevishly and at length, earlier this year.  Chief Justice Michael Gableman is still claiming the home rule amendment says something it doesn’t say; whether he’s confused or cynical I can’t say.

the home rule amendment gives cities and villages the ability “to determine their local affairs and government, subject only to this constitution and to such enactments of the legislature of statewide concern as with uniformity shall affect every city or every village.”  In other words, a city or village may, under its home rule authority, create a law that deals with its local affairs, but the Legislature has the power to statutorily override the city’s or village’s law if the state statute touches upon a matter of statewide concern or if the state statute uniformly affects every city or village. See Madison
Teachers, 358 Wis. 2d 1, ¶101.

“In other words,” phooey.  The amendment says a state enactment has to be of statewide concern and uniform in its effect.  Gableman turns the “and” into an “or,” giving the state much greater leeway to bend cities to its will.  The citation, by the way, is to his own opinion in the Act 10 case, where he’s wrong for the same reason.

But here’s the good news.  Rebecca Bradley, the newest justice, wrote a blistering concurrence (scroll to paragraph 52 of the opinion) which gets the amendment right.  She agrees with the majority that the state has constitutional authority to block Milwaukee’s residency requirement.  But the majority’s means of reaching that conclusion is wrong.  Bradley explains: by the home rule amendment’s plain text and by what its drafters said at the time of its composition, it is and, not or; for a state law to override a city law, it has to involve a matter of statewide concern and apply uniformly to all muncipalities.  Here’s Daniel Hoan, mayor of Milwaukee, and one of the main authors of the home rule amendment:

We submit that this wording is not ambiguous as other constitutional Home Rule amendments may be. It does not say——subject to state laws, subject to state laws of state-wide concern, or subject to laws uniformly affecting cities, but it does say——subject only to such state laws as are therein defined, and these laws must meet two tests: First——do they involve a subject of statewide concern, and second——do they with uniformity affect every city or village?

Bradley concedes that decades of Supreme Court precedent interpret the amendment wrongly.  So screw the precedent, she writes!  OK, she doesn’t actually write that.  But words to that effect.

I know I crap on Scalia-style originalism a lot, partly because I think it’s often a put-on.  But this is the real thing.

 

 

 

Brewers report

CJ and I took in a couple of Brewers games last weekend, both victories over the Pirates.  Perhaps the greatest pleasure was seeing Carlos Gomez do something that’s only been done a few dozen times in baseball history; after walking to lead off the bottom of the third, he stole second, then, with the pitcher up, stole third.  And then he broke for home.  A.J. Burnett uncorked a panic pitch that got away from Pittsburgh’s catcher and Gomez scored without a play.  He had stolen his way around the entire basepath!

Except he hadn’t.  Ordinarily, you’re credited with a steal of home if you’re off before the pitch; but official scorer Tim O’Driscoll ruled that the Brewers had been attempting a suicide squeeze, which means the play is scored as a wild pitch, not a stolen base.

Still, I know what I saw; an exhibition of brazenly aggressive baserunning, the likes of which I have not seen since college, when Tom Scocca used to run on me that way in Atari baseball, because it was really hard to make accurate throws in that game, and because all mercy and human feeling drained out of Scocca when he played Atari baseball.

More Brewers impressions:

• About 60% of jerseys at a Brewers game are Ryan Braun jerseys.  Judging from the cheers he got, I’m pretty sure nobody in Milwaukee cares whether Braun used or is using PEDs.
• The scoreboard at Miller Park displays OPS!  Very forward-looking.  On the other hand, there’s no out-of-town scoreboard on the outfield wall, which to me seems an unforgivable omission.
• Once a year or so I think “hey, burger and brat on the same bun, that sounds like a pretty great sandwich,” and I order one.  Burger and brat on the same bun is not actually a great sandwich, but merely a meaty confusion.
• American Science and Surplus is only about 10 minutes from Miller Park and is one of the most amazing stores I’ve ever seen.  You can buy typewriters there, or teflon hexagons in bulk, or sunglasses with hidden mirrors in the lenses so you can see behind you, or full-color posters depicting all the kinds of ulcers.  You can buy a 5-foot-long whisk for only 18 bucks.  Why didn’t I?

Sat. Nite Duets on CNN

Some criticized me a few months back for posting about obscuro Milwaukee slack-pop heroes Sat. Nite Duets, but now here they are, interviewed on CNN — and you heard them here first!

Here’s “Peel Away”:

The Orioles’ first visit to Miller Park, and ours

The Orioles came to Milwaukee this weekend to play the Brewers, their first visit here since the Brewers switched leagues, and — if I understand the interleague schedule correctly — their last until 2014. So it was time for CJ to attend his first ballgame. I didn’t expect him to make it through the whole game, but he did — partly because both pitchers worked fast and the game only lasted two and a half hours, partly because I bought a tub of popcorn at the 7th inning stretch which held most of CJ’s attention during the late going.

Not that there was much to watch; the Orioles lost, 3-2, but it never seemed that close. Apart from the two-run pinch-hit homer from Oscar Salazar, the Orioles never seemed to catch up with Milwaukee pitching. When you see a lineup that ends with a Murderee’s Row like Ramon Hernandez, Adam Jones, Freddie Bynum, and Daniel Cabrera, you rest your head in your hands and wonder how we ever score at all.

Cabrera was lousy on the mound, too — in trouble and behind in the count all game long, and lucky to get out of it allowing just three runs. He managed only one 1-2-3 inning out of the six he pitched. I had the impression that Cabrera was the kind of pitcher who was either dominatingly brilliant or wild with flashes of dominating brilliance — but in fact, Cabrera on a bad day looks like any other mediocre pitcher.

CJ didn’t really follow the game, though he clapped when he saw other people clapping (in other words, at the wrong times). His favorite part of the trip was when the retractable roof opened. His second favorite part was the Sausage Race. His third favorite part was a tie between the aforementioned tub of popcorn and a corn dog.

A little more Daniel Cabrera:

• In person you get a sense of how weirdly tall and big he’s built — not really a superathlete tall and big, more of a hyperpituitary tall and big.
• This is especially evident when you watch his ungainly attempts to hit. Cabrera has 11 at-bats in his career, and has struck out every time. Is this a record?

Addendum: Almost forgot to record the strange dream I had after coming back from the game.  Because of the construction on I-94, Brewers officials stopped my car on the way out of the park and asked if I could drive Melvin Mora and Cabrera back to their hotel.  Cabrera got in the back next to CJ and was clearly pretty cramped, but I didn’t feel comfortable asking Mora to get out so they could switch.  Amateur psychoanalysts, get to work!