The “We’re Not Gonna Get It” Crowd
As you might expect from a largely dim group, there seems to be a backlash from the players with many wanting to see an easing of the restrictions at the facilities they play should they resume the game again. Here’s the espn link (in tiny url form because I respect you just like when I wear a mask in the grocery store):
Their argument is that if they all test negative every day why do they have to change out the balls so often or why can’t they use the facilities. Or spit. That one is not going to fly, let me tell you. Those dudes spit as they breath.
This line was interesting: “The toughest thing will be relying on the younger players to really contain their social circles to just teammates and immediate family,” one agent said. “Containing that circle of people is probably the most important part of the plan to make it work.”
That’s just like the spitting problem. You aren’t going to stop the parade of whores going in and out of those hotel rooms. You just aren’t.
A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball 
It still blows my mind the number of people who do not want to take this serious. My county was one of the first to go into a phased opening, with restaurants, etc. I personally have decided to wait several weeks or a month to see how this all plays-out.
Some restaurants are taking the same tact. Marco’s, a place we love to frequent in Lotus, on the American River, typically serves-up great food and live music. I reached-out to them right after the announcement on the phased opening, and they had the same take…going to wait at least several weeks to see how things pan out. On the flip-side, I have seen some restaurants like Poor Reds, that were packed, and obviously were not following the opening guidelines, that include social distancing. I would suspect that many of the folks at Poor Reds were from out of county.
I would love to see some live sports if they can pull this off, but it will be no great loss to me if they hold-off until 2021.
Forgot to mention. This is the latest I have on Stix. No idea what to make of this. I assume he has been released, or (hopefully not) is no longer with us of this world:
Inmate 20796041- CLAUSEN, CARSTIE LEE no longer has access to the Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System; therefore, he/she may not send or receive messages.
As mentioned a while back, I sent him a letter several weeks ago, and no response. He was always very good about turning-around letters, quickly. Hope our man is free and doing well.
thanks, Chuck. He’ll have some tales to tell.
I hope so. I am friends with Carstie on FB, although he never spent much time there. I am going to reach-out to some of his FB friends (family) and see if I can get an update on him.
I’ll see if I can find anything on Rakebook…
excellent idea. FB’s good for a few things!
maybe try the key words “antique 30-30”
Thx Flav I knew I had seen something like this. Interesting, is it not, that players want LESS restrictions, not more as pertains to facilities isolation and health? From DeJong comments it seems he is hopeful agreements can be made amenable for all. As for the $$, again hopefully the millionaires/billionaires can sort that out too.
Just for fun. My dad , brother, and i are singing too. Life is funny. I was watching something totally unrelated a week ago on yutube, and this was the ‘next video’ that starts automatically. Good times for us all!
so good.
Very cool…thanks for the share, sportsdude.
Damn. Chuck, my hope is that he’s in a halfway house/relative and the mail isn’t getting through to him. Because yeah, he’s always very quick to reply to mail.
My sentiments exactly, Charlie.
In that e-mail exchange with Twin that Flavor posted recently, I think Stix mentioned a nearby nephew who could help him set up the computer…
.
I reached-out with a private message to one of Stix’s relatives (she is one of his Facebook friends). No word back, yet.
I also went to the Bureau of Prison’s locator. Stix’s last location was Elkton (the prison to which I sent my last letter). Today I did a new search, and he shows as being at “RRM Minneapolis.” This is listed as a “Residential Reentry Management field office.” So, looks like our guy is on his way to freedom.
I called the number listed, and chose an option for someone I felt would have info. Got a voicemail, but left a message. Hopefully she calls back and I can shed some light on Stix’s current situation.
Way to go, Chi.
very cool thx Chi.
Great work Chi! You might have a new calling call for work PI Chi..
BF, keeping hookers away from young sequestered athletes is just a small part of the problem. What about the PG wife who is delivering in the middle of ANY pro player’s season? What about the player whose kid gets sick mid-season? The athlete whose parents both get killed in a car crash, etc., etc.?
You just will not be able to lock in place ~100 players and support staff for 6 months. Eventually, someone will get it and pass it to others. Imagine my star-crossed Bucs are poised for a playoff game for the first time in 15 years (it seems like a century) and their center and left tackle get the virus. Do they play on- -potentially infecting their opponents? Result = fiasco!
However, I suspect eventually some league will step up and try it out. Just like we shit-canned the reopening guidelines a week after they were announced when Trump said, “Regardless, we are open!”
And, yes, Loo. Trump is driving this reopening. For better or worse.
oh man. where to start. It’s NOT 6 months; mid June start for ST at earliest, 3 more months of baseball tops. Bottom line, everyone is going to have to adjust to what has to be done in order to go shopping in stores, getting a haircut or out to eat or whatev. Ballplayers will have to do the same and deal with it. You can suggest any number of what if doomifiers…hopefully most of them can be addressed successfully to keep those involved safe and sound. Perfect? No. But it just might work. And as noted above players want fewer restrictions, not more.
Trump has less to do with than lot of other things. Le Bron james and rest of NBA players like Chris Paul and Steph Curry are also trying to get NBA back up and running—and they are his worst enemies and despise him.
Playoffs add a month and a half to that.
You used to crack jokes about the virus having only killed 20 people in the U.S. How does that look now?
About as good as this…
https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idOVC3S6T3Z
Well, I agree that Fauci’s reputation took a dive by linking up with Trump’s snake-oil show.
The Rick Wilson book’s title says it well: “Everything Trump touches dies.”
I’m sure Fauci would say he had expected a competent effort from the Federal government, based on past presidents he worked with.
I guess he wasn’t paying a lot of attention to Trump’s presidency.
Did he work with Obama on swine flu?
How competent was that effort?
13 years since the Bucs’ last playoff game. :;
I think you’re absolutely right, Flavor, about the hooker trade. mlb needs to register, vet and regularly CV19 test a huge brigade of them, imo.
Those of you who attend ST in AZ are probably familiar with the, uh, drill. I’ve seen it once. In October 92 I had a business meeting one evening at the airport Hilton in Oakland. The Blue Jays were in town to play postseason games vs. the a’s. The place was wild. The bar was impossibly crowded and loud. Many drunk guys gathered around a baby blue Lamborghini in a no-parking zone and took turns getting close enough to the car to trigger an amplified alarm voice ordering the person to move away. Someone said it belonged to Ruben Sierra. In the lobby, half a dozen of the most beautiful women you’ll ever see were cooling their high heels, waiting. I remember one of them petulantly pacing and glancing at her watch in anger. Maybe she was a wife.
OSF, I was thinking about doom scenario myself the other night. I had gotten a stimulus check I needed to cash. My bank is about 10 minute drive away. I typically get up early and thought about all the things that could happen.
As i’m at the ATM, I feel a weapon pressed into my back. Seconds later, a whack across the head and there goes–my $$, my ID and Drivers license, my house/work keys phone from my pocket and my car. What do I do next? no way to get anywhere near apt., no $$ or ID, no credit or ATM cards…A Target is across the street but would they help me? And do what exactly… I have no medical coverage either or way to get into my apt. if anything of value is still in it?
So what happened is, I went anyway though later in the day, cashed the check inside the bank, got some cash back and went shopping across the street at Target after a brief wait. then drove home with money in the bank to pay rent and bills, and some food and drink to survive weekend without going out. End of story.
.
Where to start? I don’t know. The virus that is still little understood has killed 100,000 people in two months.
The “reopening of the economy” is flying absolutely blind because Trump has so botched the Federal response that it truly is the wild west. The athlete quoted in BF’s article still doesn’t understand basic things about the spread of the virus, because the message from the Federal government has been so hopelessly muddied and muddled, with a president who is putting his reelection strategy way ahead of the public safety. Plus a lot of athletes aren’t readers or watchers of the news, I’m guessing.
I still see half the customers without masks in local grocery stores.
Stay safe everyone.
Holy shit. You OK, Willie? Is there any surveillance video from the bank?
You are too funny, Chuckie!
He was saying that life is always full of risk, not just with the virus.
And that’s true. People have to make their own choices, using their (hopefully) best judgment.
I think the pro athletes will have vigorous debate over all of this.
And I have said before, if they play, I’ll watch it. I just don’t respect it as a real season, and I think the chance is high that it will all have to be shut down again before the shortened season is even over.
But the athletes might be up for rolling the dice on it.
Did this happen or not, Willie?
he was telling a *what if* story.
as Flav said, it was a doomer scenario I thought about night before while trying to sleep; I should have prefaced it better by saying this is a nightmare I envisioned. I’m just tired of reading all the bad things that could maybe happen if baseball starts; stuff could happen to any of us at any time and I try not go to out unless I have to. Players seem OK to try and get a half season in, so more power to them.
I received a $1200 stimulus check. I immediately suggested that my son make a liquor run for me and buy whatever he wanted for himself. I also know some college students in Ireland who worked briefly in the USA last summer. They all received $1200 deposits in their bank accounts. True stories. (I put the money in my bank account by taking pictures of the check with my phone and I transferred money to my son on-line. The new normality. I hate the word normalcy.)
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We watched the 1957 movie “Sayonara” on the TCM network last night. I had seen it a long time ago, and had forgotten just about all of it. Brando gives a good performance, playing a U.S. Air Force ace from the South, who ends up stationed in Japan after serving in the Korean War. He falls in love with a Japanese woman who is an elite Japanese dancer and singer. A movie that just kind of transports you to a different time and place.
We’ve been watching a lot of movies. Over the years I’ve gone up and down on the whole concept of movies. Some years I think they’re important, and some years I don’t think that they have much importance at all.
I’ve certainly lost any belief that they change society much. A few have over the years, but not as many as the filmmakers would like to think. Ultimately, they’re entertainment. They can be emotionally moving and thought-provoking, which is cool.
But I’m guessing the movie “Sayonara” probably did help some of the U.S. public to become more accepting of Japan as a friend to the U.S. now, and not a foe anymore. I remember talking to an older guy in the 1980s who was still angry with Japan. I remember being kind of stunned. I was in my mid-20s, and I had grown up with Japan as a U.S. ally. I may have mentioned before on the Flap I was born in Japan because my biological father was stationed there as a member of the U.S. Air Force, and our whole family was allowed to live on the base.
I was too young at the time to have any memory of being in Japan, other than the flight back to the U.S. There was some slight engine trouble for a moment when an engine sucked in some birds. I do have that memory. My earliest memory.
The author Ray Bradbury claimed strongly he could remember his own birth. Seems hard to believe.
Have you seen The Sand Pebbles, Zumie? Madin 1966 iirc. A veiled knock on the US’s gunboat diplomacy of the early century, and a comment on our early involvement in Vietnam.
I missed a chance to record that on the TCM Network. I’ll keep a lookout for it.
Sand Pebble was a great movie with an all star cast.McQueen one of his finest performances.Crenna,Bergen,Anttobourgh(sp) Oakland,and the little Japanese guy Mako? who McQueen helped train in the engine room and later trained as a laughable boxer against 3 times bigger Oakland with cash on the line.Plenty of tension throughout this movie with the gunship involvement against riotous mobs..
Rain Man makes having an autistic brother look like fun.
Take him to Vegas and he’ll make you rich…
” And as noted above players want fewer restrictions, not more.” Willie, they quoted three players, that’s a pretty small sample size. The article also included an expert in infectious disease dynamics who explained why all the precautions were being suggested.
And then there is Mike Trout who sounds to me like he’s hoping they are putting in enough precautions. https://tinyurl.com/ycr58gdf
Sure, you’re right. I just think 25-30 yr olds are gonna have different view of what’s safe for them than that of older maybe wiser heads and experts in infectious diseases would. And these are the players and not the scientists that will do the voting on whatever ultimately gets decided upon as “safe.”
From Super 70 Sports. I do not remember this brawl. Or a pitch thrown with the manager in the box. Or 2 batters . . . Cubs Cards explains it I guess.
Simmons gets freight-trained.
Shag Crawford lets this one get out of hand a tad!
https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLN/SLN197409220.shtml
Jose Cardenal …another solid OF that came up with the Giants.
I’m not even gonna bother looking up what they got for him…
Couldn’t help myself.
It was Jack Hiatt.
High hopes in ’65 when he hit his first ML HR off Koufax…
Just passed by CNBC and some stock called Palo Alto Networks is surging in after hours trading.
I automatically assume anything involving Palo Alto is run by Big Flavor…
Subsidiary of BFE (Big Flavor Enterprises).
The SEC is still investigating the sale of Room B…
Update: So I reached-out to one of Stix’s FB friends (relative). She referred me to her father-in-law (also a Clausen). I explained to him that I was trying to reach Carstie, and wondered if he had any info. He said that Stix now resides with his sister in Lakeville (looks to be about 20 miles south of Minneapolis). I gave him my phone number and address and told him I would really like to hear from Carstie. He said he would be glad to pass along my info.
Will let you know when I have a Stix connection.
Good news. Thanks.
Awesome. Thanks Chi.
Good to hear, Chuck!
Willie, that’s a “nice” paranoia-trip. Mine involves a small injury that makes me go to the hospital emergency room. We are so lucky in Oregon and my county specifically (< 10 cases so far) sandwiched between two power house states.
If I knew how to get a camera on this site I'd show you guys my super mask. Comments almost every time out.
OSF
SF for SF and/or Seals Fan?
Don’t tempt me…
OSF = OldSealsFan. I started listening to the SF Seals about 1948.
mm just make sure that nutjob candidate from Oregon I saw boasting some weirdo conspiracy theory doesn’t get any closer to holding office.
Perkins, candidate for Senate who is all in on that QAnon nonsense.
I just saw a traffic jam on Highway 24 that looked like an average Thursday getaway afternoon before Memorial Day. Several huge pickups towing huge outboard boats, etc. I think people are confused about best practices. I wonder why.
And people vote for this clown.
a good 40% of the pop does; and so does the top 1%
Sounds like a Stix post is possible very soon.
Should be an amazing time here.
Do blogs have a “sweeps week”?
I don’t want to get ahead of myself but I’m excited about it too. In some ways this would be like if Twin all ofa sudden reappeared and started posting again. I know, not the same, just in *some ways*
Think it’ll be like a press conference with a Q & A?
something tells me a press conference style welcome back might be a little much for our friend
For Zumiee mostly…
paul-mccartney-pays-emotional-tribute-to-dear-friend-beatles-photographer-astrid-kirchherr
Thanks, but the link isn’t working for me. Could you repost that link?
Fixed it, Zum – sorry…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/celebrity/paul-mccartney-pays-emotional-tribute-to-dear-friend-beatles-photographer-astrid-kirchherr/ar-BB14r5SM?li=BBnb2gh
Obviously the whole key to opening anything up, not just sporting events, is confidence that the virus “out there” is disappearing, new cases declining, etc. Opening up where new cases are still on the increase will likely result in renewed lockdown; where cases are on the decline, not so much. Where new cases have stopped altogether, theoretically there should be no issues with opening up. If they really could control the micro-environments of the games (including hotels, restaurants, etc.), it could all be fine. Here in Vietnam, confidence is very high that the virus is *gone* in the community, country-wide, so, we’re free to go about our business, although some establishments are still holding off from opening. The only active cases are from overseas VNmese who are still being repatriated from other countries, and obviously they are immediately and completely quarantined upon arrival. Get the new cases down to nothing in certain areas, should be safe to play ball. *Should*. I’m still waiting for a sudden new case here and BAM, it all goes into lockdown again. Here’s hoping not.
those commies whipped the French and the USA and now the CV19? I’m interested. And best to you.
Thanks Xoot, and of course to you. The French found out, US found out, China got swatted away at the northern border, and now Covid has retreated as well. Yeah, the VNmese are fairly proud people. But not blindly nationalistic, like the Chinese. Very aware of the world and their place in it. US is about a month to 6 weeks behind “over here”, so maybe everything will be open and fine for you all by mid- to late June…..
Jessie Freitas SR the inaugural 49ers QB in 1946 has passed away at the ripe old age of 99.He was the second oldest living football player till his death( no I don’t know who’s #1) after his football career he coached at Serra and had a record of 102-49..
His son Jessie Freitas jr also played a short time in the NFL..
I remember this guy.
Not related?
I still don’t know where I stand on Stix. I go back and forth from *he died* to *he’ll be posting here 20 times a day next week*. Doesn’t appear to be an in between.
Stix is alive and well and thanks to Chuck and UncaChuck he’ll be posting here soon. Let him rip.
Hey Johnny Winter had a cool song “Still Alive and Well” which will remind of Stix (Cartsie) whenever he makes his epic return to Flap Nation!!
DJ, not sure if they are related but I don’t think so. Freitas was my Chemistry teacher in HS way back in 1978. His son Jessie Jr was a big star at Serra as well. Made the pros a couple years with the Chargers. He died 4-5 years ago but flamed out. Had a lot of problems dealing with not being good enough to stick in the pros.
Stix iirc was very into studying prospects. Giants do seem to be headed in right direction these days according to those who place value on their minors guys, but wiping out minor league season isn’t going to help them grow. Chron had column on Luciano yesterday, slated to be in A ball at Augusta. too bad
I truly look forward to the first post from Stix, here, but I also want to be cognizant of his state. Who knows how the guy is doing physically or mentally at this point. I do hope to get a chance to talk with him. I know multiple times in letters he said the food in the pokey was shit, and it was really affecting his health. He had some issues, so hopefully he is on the mend and heading towards good health. Dude is 75, I believe.
For Stix…good call, Kat.
I was fortunate to see Johnny Winter back in the day. One of the best blues guitarists of all-time.