George Vecsey

Id like to wax moralistic about the baseball scandal that got a manager and a general manager of a championship team fired on Monday. I feel cheated because I fell in love with that Houston team three-four years ago, so much talent, so much charisma with Altuve and Springer and seemingly admirable guys like Hinch and Cora and Beltrn. Now, as a Mets... fan, I want to know how this scandal affects their new manager, Carlos Beltrn, but according to the commissioner, you cant really bust a dugout full of players. (Plus, players have a union.) So it seems Beltrn will be the manager. Just hide the garbage-pail cans. I'll admit, I used to think it was funny when ball players I knew were caught with sandpaper or thumb tacks in their pockets to doctor the ball, or a catcher had a sharp edge on his belt buckle so that the two-out, two-strike pitch would swerve downward, game over. Then, a generation ago, everybody had new muscles all over them, and players were whacking 50 or 60 or 70 home runs a year. Looks to me like burly, wired pitchers were cheating, too. Then again, out in the Real World, public figures are lying every time they move their lips, and have reputations for not paying their bills and cheating on their wives, while preachers tell their flocks to vote for them. After I absorbed the breaking news of suspensions and subsequent firing of Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch, I flipped to the news section of the Times and read a piece by the great Michael Kimmelman. He is one of the jewels of the paper, who has morphed from art critic to covering the social implications of architecture over the world. As described by Kimmelman, that new playground for the 1 per cent, known as Hudson Yards Heaven forbid New York should try to house its working class is trying to slip a two-out, two-strike pitch past the city by building a huge garage on the west side of the playpen for the rich. (Never mind that the city is already choking on cars, and trucks and limos, plus amateurs swerving around on ...Read More