If you guys thought last year was special, wait till this year.As Alex Speier of the Globe writes:
And with that, the ballroom at the InterContinental Hotel erupted. ... Cora waved off the notion of complacency or satisfaction for a team that soon will be confronted by a million questions about World Series hangovers and motivations. ...Cora also said he is reconsidering his decision to visit the White House next month. "Right now I can say yes. It might change tomorrow. ... You read what's going on back home. It's not easy."
[Cora] will not be wedded to what worked so well in 2018 if he believes there is a way of improving on it in 2019.
On Thursday night, Cora outlined the ways that he believed the Red Sox were capable of being better: Full seasons from Nathan Eovaldi, Steve Pearce, and Ryan Brasier. The "eye-opening" performance of Jackie Bradley Jr. during the second half of last year sustained over the entirety of a season. Continued progress from Rafael Devers, Benintendi, even Xander Bogaerts. ...
By the winter meetings in December, he had charted the rotation through the entire first half. Cora is not merely inching forward from 2018; he's sprinting into what lies ahead.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that the Trump regime has attempted to block disaster-recovery funds for Puerto Rico - and discussed diverting that federal money to fund the proposed wall* along the Mexican border.
* Note: It turns out that the entire idea of a border wall was a joke/gimmick cooked up by two political advisers looking for a way to get Trump to talk about immigration. Trump got cheers, so he kept mentioning it - not realizing it was only "a mnemonic device of sorts".
6 comments:
Cora ... the cheerleader or Cora the strategic operator ??
his coaching staff is his achilies heal... vacation oriented .. incompetent or just lazy ? too many players took took long to fix mechanical issues when it should have easily recognized by coaches and fixed much earlier ..
Lol. They won the WS and people still want to complain about the team.
Puerto Rico May Be Trump's Ultimate Stain
Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone, January 18, 2019
Trump reportedly told John Kelly and Mick Mulvaney that he did not want "a single dollar" going to Puerto Rico "because he thought the island was misusing the money and taking advantage of the government," the Post report claims. He reportedly wanted the Congressional appropriations redirected at his whim to fund recoveries in Texas and Florida, which would be just as illegal as diverting them to build a border wall. Apparently, Trump "was not consolable about this."
This is a week in which we have learned that the insidious practice of family separation was more widespread than we were led to believe. We also saw this president toy around with the safety of Speaker Nancy Pelosi by revealing her plans to visit a Middle Eastern war zone, blowing up her itinerary in a retributive act. Then we learned that Trump may have committed an unequivocally impeachable act, as BuzzFeed reported that he allegedly told his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a proposed business deal with Russia.
This isn't a competition, but the Puerto Rico travesty belongs at the forefront of our attention and at the very top of Trump's political epitaph.
An estimated 2,975 people died in the aftermath of the storm, and Trump would have the island rot. It is clear, from the negligence that the government has shown Puerto Rico since Maria hit, that this president is not interested in helping an island full of brown people. To Trump, Puerto Rico is a low-income housing tenant that he was forced to take on and that he now wishes that he could evict.
***
For much of 2018, the US government acknowledged only 64 deaths.
Trump, in August 2018, on his response in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria: "I think we did a fantastic job."
Naomi Klein, June 2018:
"I'm really struck by this phrase that these are deaths 'due to' Hurricane Maria, you know? It's not due to Hurricane Maria. Maria was the catalyst. But if you look at the study, the cause of death in so many of the cases, the largest cause, was the collapse of the healthcare system, which is intimately tied to the collapse of the electricity system, which is intimately tied to the collapse of the water system. So, this is really about a total infrastructure failure, right? And it didn't just fail. A total society doesn't have its infrastructure fail, unless you systematically knock out every support structure and you do so knowingly.
[The late investigative journalist Rodolfo Walsh described the economic policies of Argentina's military junta "planned misery".]
I keep searching for a phrase to describe this. It's not a natural disaster. It's not just a tragedy. It's state-sponsored mass killing. That's what we're talking about here, because maybe there wasn't the intent to kill, but there was the knowledge that the infrastructure was being destroyed. And even after we see the results, the deadly results of it, they're doing it still. ... Even after seeing the effects of such brutal austerity and the thousands of lives it has taken, what is the response? More of the same—huge doses of austerity that they're pushing right now, trying to kill–trying to close hundreds of schools, more layoffs, more neglect. And the cost of this is counted in thousands and thousands of lives."
I know in the Pure and Innocent World of Sport, it's "not about politics," (except for those kneeling troublemakers in the NFL objecting to police summary-executions of black men.) But, oh, if only Alex Cora would no-show at the WH, perhaps instead bringing a planeload of MLB player-donated stuff to PR.
Alex Cora: "No, this wasn't about politics, it was just a humanitarian gesture, and something I needed to get done before the pitchers and catchers report."
Unless he initiates a nuclear war or stands quietly by while Russian military rediscovers the old western boundary of the USSR in Ukraine, Moldava, Belorussia, and the Baltic states, there will never be an "ultimate stain." Every day there's a new outrage, a new stain that cannot be topped--until the next day arrives.
John, that "ultimate outrage" phrase pinged for me too. I've felt that way pretty consistently since the 2000 election. Today's outrage is ________, the most outrageous until tomorrow.
But, oh, if only Alex Cora would no-show at the WH, perhaps instead bringing a planeload of MLB player-donated stuff to PR.
We need this.
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