The bridge is yours.

-May 6 will be my favorite day of 2012.

-If I was a star Japanese pitcher, looking at the available evidence, I’d probably want to stay in Japan.

-HBO GO may finally be available to all HBO subscribers.

-Time to start playing with Google Music.

-Really excited for the Star Trek sequel.

I am a Red Sox fan, but when it comes to feats like Mariano Rivera’s setting a new major league record for saves, attention must be paid. I actually saw Trevor Hoffman, the previous possessor of that milestone, throw a perfect inning in Baltimore, nine pitches, nine strikes, three outs. It was glorious. And the Thursday before Labor Day, I saw Rivera absolutely destroy my Red Sox on the mound. That he’s done all this with essentially one pitch that no one’s ever managed to figure out is a testament to the great and profound mysteries of baseball.

As someone who both grew up on Cape Cod League baseball and would love to see more women in the executive ranks of professional sports, I was particularly interested to read Jane Leavy’s Grantland piece on the women who run and act as general managers for the Cape League. Unfortunately, the piece spends a lot of time on the idea that if these older women worked in big-league ball, their priorities would be about things like banning hip-hop, migratory circles around the pitchers’ mound, and smokeless tobacco (I’d be fine with that last item), reaching perhaps the most interesting thing about the Cape League only towards the end:

Over the years Mrs. E has hosted give or take 160 players. In her view, parents are a clear and present danger to their offspring. One year looking over the roster for the coming season, she told her manager, “You’ve talked to the fathers of three sons and all three have the second coming of Christ living at home. How is that possible?”

She snorts. “We oughta hire only orphans to play the game.” If that proves impossible, Mrs. E suggests an all-out ban on living vicariously through your children. “After five years in The Show, they can look up their parents,” she said.

Jim Collins gets at this a bit in The Last Best League, his 2004 book where he follows a group of players through a Cape League season. But as much as the Cape League is a showcase and developing ground for major league talent, they also preach what’s essentially an anachronistic set of values. The players work side jobs. They stay in Cape Cod families’ extra bedrooms. They sign autographs and sell 50-50 raffle tickets during games. That kind of humility and service to fans isn’t a skill set that they’ll need in the majors, or at least not at the same intensity. Professional athletes who don’t want to be seen as terrible human beings at least make the motions at fan service and charity work, but the alignment and priorities are just totally different, and I’d love to see someone explore at greater length how long the Cape League’s character-building structure can last, and what kinds of pressures it’s come under at an age when stars are anointed at younger and younger ages, and made increasingly aware of other people’s perceptions of their own worth by their parents and agents.

In any case, for as long as it’s seen as a necessary stop on the road to the majors for elite college athletes, the Cape Cod League will remain a delight. Leavy’s totally correct to single out Orleans, though the Brewster home field is a wonderful combination of high school field and major-league promise.

Harold Meyerson’s upset by the prospect of a Chinese government-owned bank buying a stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers:

In their defense, the Chinese certainly have plenty of money to put into the team if they see fit. But if it was harder to root for the Dodgers under Murdoch than under the O’Malleys, and harder still under McCourt than under Murdoch, imagine rooting for a team owned by an authoritarian government that jails its citizens for organizing unions or worshiping the wrong gods, and depresses its currency to decimate what remains of American manufacturing.

Over the last 30 years, the financial whizzes who dominate this country have sold off our industry to China in return for some quick and huge returns, never mind that they were wiping out the American middle class in the process.

It’s too late to stop the sale of our industrial might, but the proposed sale of a team in which millions of fans have invested their dreams for decades may be the moment when Americans say they’ve had enough — that the claims of the many, which matter so little in the normal conduct of American big business, should at least this time outweigh the interests of the few (particularly when that “few” is really just Frank and Jamie).

I’m not sure I can get quite as irritated by this as Harold is. It’s not like the Dodgers would be the first team to be under corporate ownership, or even under foreign corporate ownership. The Seattle Mariners are owned by Nintendo of America, the Atlanta Braves are owned by Liberty Media, and the Toronto Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Media. Individual owners are entirely capable of doing noxious things. When Ted Turner owned the team, he tried to nickname a player with the same jersey number as one of his stations Channel as an effort in cross-promotion. In the National Football League, Dan Snyder is a poster child for both poor management of a franchise and general terrible person-ness. It’s a bit of an odd hierarchy that we prefer ownership by fabulously wealthy individual Americans to ownership by corporations to ownership by foreign corporations.

To paraphrase Annie Savoy, baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a big, big business. There have been long-standing efforts to spark interest in baseball in China after Mao’s ban on the sport expired, and in 2003, the Chinese government asked Major League Baseball for help—the league actually pays the coaches for China’s national baseball team. And if we’re going to treat baseball as a major symbol of American democracy (which may be a sentimental overstating of the case but none the less an appealing myth), maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to stoke Chinese interest and emotional in a quintessentially American game. Either way, the ownership of the Dodgers may be an important symbol, but it isn’t necessarily a substantive intrusion of corrupting capitalism and foreign influence into a game that’s already plenty impure.

-People who are developing daytime talk shows: Anderson Cooper and Kevin Smith.

-The importance of geography, economics, and legal regulation to arts criticism.

-Debunking the myths of the 1961 baseball season.

-Wesley Snipes could have been Geordi La Forge, and boy would that have been strange.

-Because more brass in pop music is always a good thing, this is my track of the day:

-This would be better news if it was an announcement of a show about how Sam Malone turned Cheers into a detective agency. Norm and Cliff as partners, Carla as the tough interrogator who prefers to work alone, Diane as a brilliant but annoying lab tech…

-USA Network execs discuss their show-design jujitsu.

-A first-hand account of what it was like to work at News of the World.

-How to fix the All-Star game.

-Table-flipping and weave-pulling for Jesus:

Given Joe Arpaio’s general lack of decency and genius for performance art, I’m not remotely surprised that Arpaio is going to have one of his chain gangs picking up trash outside next week’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Arpaio strikes me as generally beyond shame, and as much as I wish the proposed boycott of the game by an Arizona human rights group that aims to protest Arizona’s draconian immigration policies more generally would materialize, I don’t have much faith that it will. But if not a single player traveling to Arizona for the weekend has the gumption to say something, I will be disappointed.

Ten of the players on the American League All Star roster and seven members of the National League side were born in countries other than the United States. The immigration system works for them, making it possible for them to come to the U.S. and make very large amounts of money. There’s no question that there are abuses in Latin American baseball academies, people who prey on the dreams of families who hope that years of training in a low-paying developmental league will translate into wild success in the States, just as folks prey on people who just want to get to the U.S. period. But if you make it to the United States and into a secure job in the Major Leagues, you’re one of the most visible and one of the most protected immigrants in America. And those 17 players will be in the ballpark long before Joe Arpaio sets up his ghastly spectacle outside of it. It would be tremendous value if one of those 17 spoke up to point out that what folks will see Arpaio doing — and what Arizona is doing as a whole — isn’t just embarrassing, or silly, it’s deeply wrong.

As much as I’m fond of the writing that comes out of elevating baseball into a great avatar of American democracy, be it by Roger Angell, Bart Giamatti, or Michael Chabon, I do recognize in my rational mind that it’s all essentially hokum. That doesn’t actually help me figure out how I feel about Moneyball, in which the cynics are actually the sentimentalists:

I think the real problem is that the movie just feels a bit late—Stephen Soderberg was replaced as the director, Aaron Sorkin ended up rewriting the script, and while those changes may have made for a better movie (though who knows), they also removed the movie’s release date from the moment of the A’s last triumph. Sabermetrics won in that the approach is an accepted part of the methodology almost every front office in baseball now, but being early adopters didn’t actually let Oakland overcome its financial disadvantages and win a league championship or the World Series. And the introduction of a new means of evaluation didn’t permanently (or even really temporarily) upset the corporate order of baseball. Oh, well. At least there will be Chris Pratt and Philip Seymour Hoffman to be entertained by.

Former Sen. Bob Graham has long been a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, whether he was using his chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee as a bully pulpit, taking to the pages of the Washington Post to decry the dangers of going to war on flimsy intelligence, and publishing Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America’s War on Terror in 2004. Now, he’s turned to a new medium. Graham’s first novel, Keys to the Kingdom, hits bookstores today. A political thriller informed by Graham’s extensive knowledge of intelligence bureaucracy, Keys to the Kingdom follows its Cuban-immigrant hero around the globe as he tries to figure out who killed his mentor—a former senator and governor of Florida—and what Osama bin Laden’s plotting from a surprisingly comfortable refuge. I spoke with Graham about what he could say in a novel that he couldn’t say in op-eds, what it’s like to kill off your fictional alter ego, and how America’s engagement with India and Pakistan will change after bin Laden’s death.

You’ve written serious policy books, an activist’s guide to the democratic process. Why write a novel?

Anger. I was very distressed at the way in which the 9/11 issue was handled by the [Bush] administration. In my opinion there were a number of important issues for which there was an answer, but where that answer was consciously and to date largely effectively been withheld and I wanted to tell that story.

Do you think fiction gives you a better shot of reaching more people than op-eds or policy books do?

That was part of it…While I was a senior fellow at the Kennedy School, Joe Nye, who had been a director of the Kennedy School and then was an assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, told me a story that when he came back to Harvard, he had wanted to write a nonfiction academic book about his experiences in the Defense Department and make a series of recommendations. As he got into the book, he realized that in order to do that he would have to use classified information which was not going to be available to him. So he shifted from writing the book that he thought [he wanted to write] to writing The Power Game, which is a novel about his experiences in the Pentagon. I’ve indicated in [Keys to the Kingdom] that the report of the Congressional inquiry into 9/11 was fairly heavily censored, particularly as it related to the role of the Saudis. So I decided I would see if I could write this. I am a member of the external advisory board to Director Leon Panetta at the CIA. We have a fairly high security clearance and anything we write that touches on the agency, we’re required to submit it for prior approval. So at three or four occasions while I was working on this book over a period of 5 years, I submitted manuscripts to the review board and it always got a clean bill. I think I was able to tell the story without being restricted by censorship.
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