Rick Telander in S-T notes that this is the first post-steroids series, hence full of speed (of legs), smarts, strategy.   “Baseball with brains, not just brawn,” sez USA Today.  And hence much more interesting, sez I.

As for smarts, Mike Downey in Chi Trib offers a seven-game scenario with AJ Perzynski running home with the ball hidden in his shirt.  It could happen!

AND as for the doughty defectors from the Island Prison, Sox pitchers Contreras and Hernandez, Chi Trib runs a p-1 story from its man in Havana, Gary Marx, about whom usually (and why not now?) the less said the better.  Kudos to Trib for featuring the defectors, however, though not as punchily as National Review Online with such details as this:

Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez and Jose Contreras . . . risked their lives to escape. . . .  Hernandez, the winningest pitcher in “revolutionary” Cuba’s history, was a national hero in the early 1990s, but nine years after his 1986 debut he was banned from baseball. His crime was helping his half-brother Livan defect. Livan went on to become the MVP of the 1997 World Series, during which he embarrassed Fidel by shouting, “I love Miami” — in English.  . . . . . . . .  It would be as if President Clinton had banned Michael Jordan from basketball during his prime.

After Livan got out, in a show trial of an American who had helped him do so, Orlando crossed Castro up and called the guy his “companero.”  A year later, Orlando, his wife, and six others were found on a cay in the Bahamas eating conch to survive.  The Coast Guard picked them up after four days, and that fall, Orlando was winning Game 2 for the Yankees.  If he hadn’t defected, “he would have died another obscure Cuban pitcher, virtually unknown outside Castro’s fortress.”

That’s language you don’t expect in a daily newspaper, where (a) politics and baseball steer clear of each other and (b) political commentary steers clear of outright condemnation of Fidel.

Contreras didn’t eat conch on a cay, but his wife was arrested after he defected from Mexico.  Missing her and their two daughters, he slumped with the Yankees.  Told by Castro she’d have to wait five years to get out, she and their daughters last year joined a boatload of Cubans who made it to Florida.  Contreras, no longer slumping, is one of the Sox Four, reading to start tonight vs. his former teammate at the Yankees, Roger Clemens.

Play ball.

Maybe a story tomorrow or the next day in Chi Trib or S-T about Ward Churchill at DePaul?  Could be, what with Freepers (Free Republic members) gearing up for a protest.  Churchill is the dude who called 9/11 victims “little Eichmans” and wants more of the same, with a view to erasing us, beginning with the effing capitalists.  He’s a pseudo-Indian from U. of Colorado, where he’s being investigated for plagiarism and other offenses.  His topic in part is “human dignity for men of color,” always a favorite.  You couldn’t make this stuff up. 

                                                                        — more more more —

Update: Nothing today, 10/21 . . .

The Kyoto Treaty has received a major, perhaps fatal, setback, though it was barely reported in the media. It occurred when British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the gathering at the Clinton Global Initiative in September, the same week that the United Nations had its annual gathering of world leaders, that the treaty was basically dead. Blair has been a major supporter of the treaty, and has unsuccessfully implored President Bush to sign on.

[A]s more and more people begin to ask, “What’s happening to our weather?” it seems that all of official Washington is holding its breath, lest the dirty little secret gets out: that Katrina and Rita are the entropy bill for increasing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.

Responsible scientists in the 1,500-member Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cross their fingers in hopes that we cut back our use of fossil fuels before carbon dioxide levels double from their 1937 level, which could produce cataclysms that we don’t want to ponder, that would make Hurricane Katrina seem like a petulant schoolgirl.

As reported by columnist James Pinkerton of TechCentralStation, Blair announced that he was going to speak with “brutal honesty” about Kyoto, and then proceeded to do so. “My thinking has changed in the past three or four years,” he said. “No country is going to cut its growth.” He added that countries such as the two largest in the world, China and India, who are both excluded from the terms of the treaty, “are not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto.”

Meanwhile, back at Chi Trib on the day S-T ran the gripping war story in Controversy, it was business as usual, and why not, with the same-old liberals running things.  “Desperate for work, lured into danger: The journey of a dozen impoverished men from Nepal to Iraq reveals the exploitation underpinning the American war effort” dominates p-1, complete with (surprise!) color shot of bereaved people.  For these Cam Simpson and his fotog went high into the Himalayas.  But they got their shot.

The only thing missing (it’s a series, so there will be more opportunities) is the head they are really looking for, here only part of it: “Exploitation underpins American war effort!”  Then only will their hearts be glad and spirits light.  It’s coming, yes!

Exaggeration aside, isn’t it funny how Trib juices never really flow unless they find something that makes us look bad?

Run out now and buy your Sun-Times for “Night Raid in Mosul,” by Colby Buzzell, who was there, with his combat buddies skulking through alleys at night past houses where people watched TV, he carrying a battering ram which they used to break into a house where slept a family.  The man of that house was their target.  They used a smell detector and found dynamite smell on his hands and took him away, the wife and presumed mother of their kids wailing, “Don’t take him away.  I don’t want to be alone.”

But taking this guy away, maybe eventually to Guantanamo, made Mosul safer for many mothers who do not want to be left alone either, many others having wailed at night like this one because of his dynamite.

It’s a gripping tale of getting ready for the raid and completing it, from a book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq (G.P. Putnam’s Sons).  The piece is not on the Sun-Times site, which is why you have to buy hard copy.  It’s the lead story in this week’s Controversy section, edited by Tom McNamee, the sort of Ernie Pyle-style reporting you won’t find in Chi Trib, where instead the focus is on wailing mothers without context: a pacifist tilt.

This one ends with a quote from George Orwell, of Animal Farm and 1984 fame:

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Yes.

=============

Correction to the above:

“Nabbing” has:

. . . . The piece is . . . the lead story in this week’s Controversy section, edited by Tom McNamee, the sort of Ernie Pyle-style reporting you won’t find in Chi Trib, where instead the focus is on wailing mothers without context: a pacifist tilt.

It should have said, in view of James Janega’s reporting to which I have called attention, “reporting you almost never find in Chi Trib,” or come to think of it, in Sun-Times either. 

Also, in addition to “pacifist tilt,” I might have said “Viet Nam syndrome tilt,” which is practically speaking the same thing these days, but it’s such a hackneyed phrase.