I knew the Cards would win

Susan and I got back from two weeks on Cape Cod on Saturday, just beating the nasty snowstorm that clobbered the northeast, and I called my son Matt (in Tucson) not long after we slogged all our crap inside.

Matt and I hadn’t talked about much sports related stuff for a while, or anything for that matter, as where we stay on Cape Cod is very unfriendly to cell phones. There is no Internet or TV either, but the very limited access (from anyone to us) is one big reason why Susan and I like going where we go. I do draw the line in regard to being able to access the World Series but at least this year, finally, we were able to listen to baseball playoff and World Series games on the radio. There are a few places within a few miles that serve food and adult beverages that also have ballgames on TV, but I’ve never been a "nurse a couple of beers" kind of guy. Alternately, getting popped for DWI is not something I wanted to experience a second time, 27 years after my "celebration" of Matt’s birth got me my first one. These days I tend to let someone else drive, or take in the game at home.

But anyway, the time Matt and I did talk (we had a landline in our cottage) was after game 2 of the Series, but the subject wasn’t about baseball. Rather it was which one of two job offers Matt should take, and he wanted my input. Being the half-drunk gambler kind of guy that I am, I was adamant that he should take the job in Las Vegas, and I’d be out there to visit him as soon as I brushed up on my Blackjack strategy.

Wouldn't you take a free drink?

Actually, both job offers were Vegas-based, so I am being disingenuous, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that my boy will be living and working (for the record, as an attorney) in one of his old dad’s favorite towns soon enough! 

The way I see it, as I inch towards retirement, I will need some way to pass the time in my doddering old fartitude. I figure that free drinks at the tables will save thousands of dollars, but it’s really about just having a place to go and spend productive time. When the deck is running hot, the dealer is showing 6, and I am splitting Aces, could there be a better place for me to have a free drink served by a sexy young lady? Talk about making a "hard eight," huh?

Our lusting President

Someone might be thinking about all the great shows the casinos put on, but to me that’s like some porn junkie (back in the day) telling me he bought a certain issue of Playboy for the interview with Jimmy Carter. Plus, there are swimming pools on casino property these days that allow ladies to go topless, which does not suck, and for anyone inclined to recline, there is an abundance of love for sale. 

Of course prostitution isn’t legal in Vegas (Clark County), but no one is seriously fooled into believing that the law is strictly enforced when there are 50+ Yellow Pages of listings for escort services in the local phone book. The top-end casinos don’t let working girls troll their premises for the most part, but unescorted "escorts" do slip through the lines quite often. This generally happens late at night, not that 50% of the clientele at any given time has any idea what time it is. Anyway, nothing perked me up more than a 3:14 A.M. conversation with a voluptuous and scantily clad lady on a casino floor, unless it was a hot run of cards at a $25 Blackjack table.

Come to think of it, during the times when my stack of chips was growing larger by the minute, I’d often see a young lovely in my field of vision, sucking a coke through one of those narrow cocktail straws. One time I gave my cocktail waitress an extra large tip if she’d buy the young lovely at the bar a drink and ask her (as a joke) when she got "off duty?" I have no idea what my waitress said to the lady at the bar, but I do know that she came back to me and whispered "Not sure about her, but I get off in a couple of hours."

You have to admire self-promotion and a strong work ethic.

I had an opportunity many years ago (mid-1970’s) to move to and (potentially) work in a Vegas casino, but I chickened out, and stayed in Tucson. In retrospect, if I’d taken a job in Vegas, it’s 90% certain I’d be long dead – too much sex, drugs and gambling. It’s only a matter of luck that I didn’t die in Tucson, where I worked with an endless stream of cocktail waitresses, and the drugs were just as plentiful. Picking my way through that minefield was tough enough, without gaming tables.

Elisabeth Shue

But that aside and soon enough, Susan and I will have a place to stay in Las Vegas, and I will have a direct connection to a very successful law firm in case I get into any trouble! No hookers need apply -- that ship sailed long ago, and I love Susan too much. Even the beautiful young lady on the right wouldn't have been able to woo me.  I dare say that I'd have left...

Thinking about Vegas and gambling while the World Series was taking place got me to recall that the most money I ever won on a sporting event was the 1976 World Series. I had the Reds over the Yanks, but also had a Reds sweep, and bet all 4 games as well. 6 for 6 ain’t easy, and I even received a "very well done" from my bookie, along with the cash. He also told me about a casino in Vegas that got hammered by a flood of Cincinnati bets, as gambler’s invariably bet favorites. It was around that time that I began to study gambling and the history of Las Vegas as well.

My lovely grandma, Florence, and grandpa Frank

So, with Matt and my daughter-in-law (Shannon) living and working in Las Vegas soon enough, it kind of connects my son to me to my dad and to my dad’s mom, Florence, and completes a circle in my life, so to speak. 

Back in 1952, a few months before I was born, my parents (Mary and Charlie Sr., hereafter, sometimes referred to as Senior) bought a house in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. 60 years later, my son will be working at a job that will pay him more money in one week, than his grandfather made in all of 1952. Matt will make a lot more money in one month than that house cost, when my parents bought it. About 10 days ago, I left a tip for a food waitress at a favorite restaurant in Wellfleet, Massachusetts that was equal to the mortgage payment Senior told me he had to scramble to pay each month in the year I was born.

I am telling all of that because of what happened in 1954.

Senior was a huge New York Giant fan, and an even bigger fan of Willie Mays, who to Senior’s dying day called his "cousin." (It was part of the times to patronize black sports heroes in that way, and many other ways. My dad was a racist, just as a huge part of the American population was. One of the best things I can tell you about my dad was that he truly changed, when he realized how wrong he’d been.)

Senior, top left, Hank top right, w/ Wilb and Dolores

Senior had gotten his love of the Giants at an early age, from his mother, Florence (his father died when he was 5 years old). Dad told me that his mom was known to wager one or two dollars on the Giants once or twice a year. He told me a wonderful story about he and his mom, along with his older brother Hank going to a New York Giants versus Cincinnati Reds game at the Polo Grounds, sometime in the early 1920’s. Senior said that Hank was a big Reds fan, particularly a huge Eddie Roush fanatic – the Red’s (Hall of Fame) centerfielder. On that day, Cincinnati was beating the snot out of Florence’s Giants, and 10-year old Hank was cheering and shouting like the crank he was when my grandmother had finally had enough. She slapped Hank across the back of his head and lectured that "When I buy your ticket you root for the Giants or bite your tongue!" I have to believe granny had a wager that day.

By 1954, Senior had been a Giant fan for more than 30 years, and he "just knew" that the New York Giants were going to beat the Cleveland Indians in the World Series that October. The Indians had (still) one of the greatest seasons in baseball history that year. The Yankees had won 5 straight World Series, and won 103 games in ‘54, and finished a distant (8 games back) second – that’s how good Cleveland was. They were a prohibitive favorite to brush the Giants aside, which was how Senior got such great odds on New York. For the time, and based on how much money he made in a week, he put a large bundle down on the Giants to win. He told my mom he’d placed a wager, because he was such a forthright guy he couldn’t imagine how he’d be able to explain the devastation if he’d lost. It was also a fact that he didn’t tell my mom exactly how much he’d bet, giving her a substantially lower sum. She was rocked anyway, so when he asked her about putting some additional funds down on a bet that the Giants would sweep, she cried, and he said he wouldn’t do it. But he did put some money on the sweep, just not that much.

Of course the Giants swept Cleveland and my dad won a bundle, but never again tempted any amount of money he couldn’t afford to lose, like a $2.00 bet on the Kentucky Derby, stuff like that. It remains one of the greatest pieces of advice on gambling I have ever received when my dad told me to "Never bet more money on a game than you can afford to throw down a sewer – unless you are really sure who will win."

Hence, my Cincinnati bets. Even with the odds seriously on the Reds to win, I never hesitated for a minute to back them as a big favorite – I just knew, you know?

Over the years Senior would come up with his fair share of touts, which I took in with varying degrees of attention. Later, after the event, he’d ask me if I followed his advice, because invariably, his picks would win. It got a little eerie after a while, and I started (slowly) to put some actual keesh on his picks, and won every single time. There weren’t many over the years, and you couldn’t force a pick out of him, rather, these forecasts would just come to him, and he’d give them to me. This went on for about 12 years or so, beginning in the early-1970’s. They weren’t all underdogs, and the sports varied. One of the last ones he gave me was Oakland’s dismantling of Philadelphia in the 1981 Super Bowl. The Raiders were about a 3-point dog, and became the first wild card team to win the championship. It was the second most money I ever won on a sporting event.

Senior almost always introduced one his rare (maybe 15 total, all time) touts in the same way:

"Charlie, would you like to make some money?"

"Shit yeah!"

Lefty...on the left

It was kinda like having my own Lefty Rosenthal, without having a vicious Joe Pesci-type maniac killer on the side. (As a side note, Rosenthal – Robert De Niro’s character -- really was the target of a car bomb. I worked for a guy in Tucson whose son, Gary Triano, was the victim of a car bomb in the parking lot of a Tucson (La Paloma) country club. For a while, one of the leading theories about the murder was it was casino related, as Triano was allegedly working with Chinese investors in an attempt to start a casino in any number of locations aside from Vegas.

I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not, but after my mom died in 1982, the touts just stopped. A number of years later Senior married Donna, and they both loved to take those group bus-trip junkets (from Tucson) to Loughlin (Nevada) for some casino gambling. Senior would spend a few hours at the $2 and $3 poker tables, while Donna pounded the slots, but my dad was never really a gambler. The man had often worked 3 jobs while I was growing up so he and his family would have nice things in their lives, and he was too smart to think that gambling was an easy avocation.

I pretty much gave up betting on sporting events in the late-1980’s, when Matt was still a little boy, but I "rediscovered" Vegas again in the late 1990’s, and had excellent success playing 21 on any number of visits.

Matt is not a gambler, though he does love games, and he especially loves card games. He is not averse to making a wager on a game here and there, but generally speaking these are "friendly bets," the kind you have a difficult time collecting, like the $100 I still owe him for losing a chess match to him about 10 years ago.

Soon, I will have a chance to go to a casino with him, and maybe I’ll get him to sit down with me at a $5 Blackjack table, and sip some free highballs. Then we can spend a little time at a sports book, and wager a few dollars on a game. I have an image of a cocktail waitress coming by, and we’ll order a round, I’ll over tip her upon her return, but then shue her away too.

After the Rangers failed to score in the top of the 11th inning of game 6, I turned the radio off, and went to bed.  I was absolutely certain that Texas would lose the game. Similarly, I knew the Cardinals would win game 7. I thought of my dad asking me if I wanted to make some money, and actually considered calling Matt, and telling him to find a way to bet on St. Louis that night.

From my dad, to me, to my son…right.

It 1985 I placed an enormous amount of money on the St. Louis Cardinals to beat the Kansas City Royals in the World Series, and also bet each game. When the day of game 7 beckoned, I was in a considerable hole, and still had my huge series bet riding. I was looking at a financial disaster as I spoke with one of my closest friends, and fellow gambler, Al.

"This is from the guy so sure St. Louis would win, right dickwod?" Al asked. "Why don’t you wipe your ass with your St. Looey bet and just get even, if you can’t afford to let it ride?"

"Huh?" I muttered.

Al asked me how much did I stand to lose if Kansas City won, and I squeaked out the figure. He then called a bookie and placed that amount of money on KC to win the seventh game that evening.

"That’s your bet, dipshit," Al said, "you’ll be a big zero on the books."

"Al, you’re genius."

"Shut up St. Louis breath and tell me who you like in the Cowboy/Redskins game on Sunday… cause I’m gonna bet 10-grand on the other side."

I often think about gambling as a metaphor for the ocean’s tides, the way the dollars come in, then get washed away. I have often told folks the story about Florence swatting my Uncle Hank upside the head when he rooted for the wrong team on her dime. But most importantly, I will never forget the simple lesson my late friend Al taught me back in 1985

So I didn’t call Matt, and St. Louis won, of course.

Did I mention that I knew the Cards would win?

Pickling Willie Mays

In Bill James 2003 "Historical Baseball Abstract," under his comment on Tony Taylor he describes the Phillies and Giants playing a game in 1963. A series of pitches, plays, and other events finds Willie Mays caught in a rundown, between second and third base.

Anyone with a reasonable sense of humor has a time (or 1000) when something just cracks them up so much, they can’t repeat why they are seemingly hysterical. So it was about 10 days ago when I attempted to tell Susan why I was laughing so hard that snot was running down my cheeks, and my eyes were stinging from the tears.

The reason for me is below, and it's for anyone who may ever be called upon to describe what a great base runner Willie Mays was, Bill James has given all of us the perfect line:

"Catching Willie Mays in a rundown is like trying to assassinate a squirrel with a lawn mower…"

Boston Chicken

After reading and hearing all the stories that have come out about the Red Sox, I am left one big question?

What video game were Josh Beckett, and his minions Lackey and Lester playing in the clubhouse? I mean, admit it, you’d like to know right?

I also wonder if anyone screwed up at a critical moment because one of the controller buttons was greasy from all the fried chicken greasy fingers?

If there is anything I take away from this it’s that age-old truism that when a team is winning, all these stupid and selfish behaviors by players are never news, but losing spawns countless pieces of evidence why a team was doomed to fail.

Jack McKeon was interviewed about Beckett, having managed him in Florida during the Marlins championship 2003 season. Apparently McKeon had to chase Beckett out of the clubhouse with a bat that year, and later keep the clubhouse locked to prevent guys from flaking off during games. Does anyone think that Beckett wasn’t pounding Bud’s in the clubhouse every year while he was with Boston?

The thing about Terry Francona abusing painkillers really bothers me. The guy’s playing career ended very early due to operations on both knees, and (so you know) he was the NCAA College Player of the Year in 1980, so the man could hit. To think he suddenly started to abuse prescribed medications after close to 30 years of taking things to alleviate pain is the worst kind of journalism, in my opinion.

Sometimes, things just play out, you know…they just end. That’s what happened to the Francona era in Boston. A bad mix of personalities combined with a few too many injuries to a team that didn’t have a player or two capable of kicking some teammate’s asses when things started going bad.

The Boston media has many villains to blame in all of this, and the team will spin it the best way they can. The bottom line is that the players couldn’t figure out how to police themselves, and not one guy in the starting rotation was able to be a stopper down the stretch.

So, with Boston a no-show, the Phillies not nearly as good (no hitting) as most folks thought, and the Yankees exposed (no starting pitching) as a post-season fraud, we are left with perhaps Texas being the best team in baseball? We are also being treated to being able to watch the best hitters in each league (Cabrera – AL and Pujols and Braun – NL) play deep into October, and a very realistic chance that one franchise will win it’s first ever championship. If either Texas (spawned as the expansion Washington Senators in 1961) or Milwaukee (Seattle Pilots – 1969) win it, it will be the first time.

I continued to root for Tampa Bay, and whichever team is your favorite, wasn’t it hard to not root for those guys and their manager, Joe Maddon? How many managers would have had the guts to start a rookie (Matt Moore) with a total of 9 and 1/3 innings of MLB experience in a critical game #3, on the road versus Texas? Girardi may have done it, but then he’d bring in a reliever in the 3^rd, one in the 4^th, another 2 guys in the 5^th, etc., etc. Does anyone over-manager more than Girardi?

Answer: Yes!

And you wanna be my latex salesman?

Tony LaRussa does, but he does it in ways that are beyond our normal human intelligence, and Tony doesn’t have the time to explain anything to us dorks. I can’t stand the guy, I really can’t. He is so smarmy he makes wish I didn’t love baseball, with all his imperious crap.

It’s hard for me to believe that he and Jim Leyland are such good friends, the way Leyland is so down to earth, and so much of a throw back to the way managers used to be when I was a kid. My lips say Texas, but my heart says Detroit.

I really don’t have a take on Ron Roenicke, except that he was a fair-to-suck MLB player, and he seems like he’s on auto-pilot as a manager, which may not be the worse thing for that team?

Ron Washington looks like he’s still doing lines, all fidgety and jumpy. You’d think that incredible bullpen and all those great hitters would calm him down a bit, wouldn’t you?

In parting, I thought Francona was great fill-in for Tim McCarver, but then a lot of guys would be a huge improvement over Tim. I am liking A.J. Pierszynski a lot, though it’s easy to see why he’s pissed off so many teammates over the years – baseball players don’t like guys that are smart, critical, and talkative.

As Tony Plush would say, "Gotta go," but before I do, has anyone (aside from me) given any thought to the idea that Theo Epstein will hire Terry Francona as the new Cub manager? My only question is will the Cubs part with Ernie Broglio as compensation for hiring Theo?

Wouldn’t that be something? Only thing better would be those two guys celebrating a World Championship in Chicago in a year or three, with their star players, Prince Fielder and Jonathan Papelbon.

Remember where you first read that last part.

Free Beer and Naked Women

I’ve thought about writing something for this blog for about half of the 45 days since I last posted, but too many things got in the way. The biggest one was just losing my muse for doing it, and it’s given me a whole new and deeper respect for the folks that actually write multiple columns a week that thousands or millions of people actually read.

Another major thing was trying to figure out what I really want to say, and how to go about putting it out there? Do I want photos each time, or are the photos I add (without permission) just something to entice people to read what I’ve written?

I really like looking for photographs and other things about people I am referencing, because I think it makes what I am "talking" about more amusing or interesting, and hey, if it ain’t amusing or interesting, even I don’t want to read it.

But who does read it, and why?

Most interesting to me is that the biggest ‘keywords’ for finding this blog on the Net are the names Lindsay Fredette and Brandi Chastain. Google tells me this is true, and they would know. Far and away, the most searched is Jimmer Fredette’s older sister Lindsay, who I mentioned in a wacky piece way back on January 31. Brandi gets searched quite a bit too, with one keyword being "Brandi Chastain’s boobs." That is great! To think that there are probably enough guys or gay ladies out there, wanting a look at Brandi’s boggles? It boobies the mind!

Years ago, when I lived in Tucson and worked as a bartender, I had a Monday night to work. The regular band was off on Monday’s, so we’d have a band fill in for the evening. It was often a very dull night, with hopefully enough friends of the band filling some seats, buying some drinks, and not starting any fights.

(The place I was working at the time was called the "Longhorn Saloon," so you have to just trust me when I tell you we had fights in that place. The bar sat right outside the main gate of Davis-Monthan AFB, so imagine all those young and drunk airman stumbling into a cowboy bar for last call? It got nasty some nights…days too.)

This Monday we had a band with 5 guys, a couple of whom I knew from other bands and other clubs. The lead guy in the band and I were lamenting the crappy turnout when he told me the secret to getting new business was to open a bar and call it:

Free Beer and Naked Women (Now I have hit the title to this piece, and if you’ve gotten this far in reading it, well, you’ve read about 450 words.)

I don’t know what a lot of people’s reactions would be if they saw that sign lit up in big letters on the top of some bar, but it would get my attention. I’d also bet that it would get the attention of a lot of the same guys that are Googling Brandi’s ta-ta’s, or Lindsay in a swimsuit?

Of course I can also imagine having a bar with that name, and putting up with all the crap from boozed up dudes looking for what’s on the sign, if someone could actually get the sign up to begin with? It’s a more PC world every day, and while I can see being able to do it in Tucson, up here in Burlington (VT), things like that are just not done.

I wonder what ever happened to a bar outside of Miami called Sofa King? Susan and I heard their ad on the radio one morning in 2005 while driving (and getting lost) on the south Florida highway system.

"Sofa King! You gotta be where the sounds are sofa king cool, the beer is sofa king cold, and the ladies are sofa king hot!"

It’s an old joke, but to actually hear it on the radio was nuts, so think about advertising a bar called "Free Beer and Naked Women?" If liquor laws preclude you from that I bet "Cold Beer and Naked Women" would work pretty well. Hey, chill the beer lad, how you supply the sofa king naked women is your problem -- I am just selling the franchise fees here.

By the way, the word "free" took on a different meaning for me about 6 or 7 years ago while I was driving through one of the housing developments I manage. As I circled through I noticed that one apartment had placed a number of things on the green space that everyone is praying to find! Great stuff like broken and cheap furniture, bags of stained and dirty children’s clothing, old tires, and stacks of car repair manuals, kid’s VHS tapes, and James Patterson novels.

It’s a city code violation to put stuff on a green space (the area between the sidewalk and street), so I took special note of the fact that the tenant had not put the usual "FREE!" sign up. When I told the story to Susan she reminded me that when we had moved from Shelburne to Essex, we had done similarly. What was funny was that along with taking most of our discards, someone took our "FREE" sign as well.

Vermonters make up their own rules about these types of things, because we don’t want anything to go to waste. Somewhere, some day, the person that took that sign will find a use for it, or know someone who’ll need it.

"Harry, hold on! I have a sign that already says "FREE. You don’t have to do a damn thing!"

"You’re kidding right? You’re not? Dude, that’s awesome dude, frikkin’ awesome! Thanks for borrowing it to me man"

As a further digression, a few years ago there were a couple of signs Susan and I used to see every time we went to her dad’s house. One was for a guy named Tardie, and he was an accountant that did the IRS thing for folks. What better way to let potential clients know that then by putting a sign out that read "Tardie Tax Returns?" Really, that was his sign. Maybe he attracted clients anyway…you know, those that like a joke about the IRS auditing them?

Maybe none of my tenant’s property left the green space because it was not quite free?

The big sign on top of the pile had one word, perhaps a warning, or more likely an omen?

It read "Feer!" Seriously, and yes, I was.

Along the same route as "Tardie Tax Returns" there was a landlord with a vacancy that needed filling. So, he (or she, but I gotta bet it was a guy) bought a 2-foot by 3-foot piece of thin white cardboard, and nailed it to a phone pole with the following written on it:

House for Rnet

999-9999

Yup, rnet, but someone caught it after the fact and added a ^ between the R and the n, and placed an e above the ^. The way I read it was "House for Renet." I tried calling the number, but got no answer. I figure the owner must have been at an Algonquian Round Table meeting, so I let it go, but would it have killed the guy to buy another piece of cardboard, and spell the damn word correctly?

Okay, I’ve been writing this thing over a couple of days now, and just enjoying the process of writing, which was the entire point of this blog anyway. I used to write so many long emails that I’d get folks telling me to just blog, which I took as a polite way of saying, "Write your ass off, just don’t send it to me because I’ll feel guilty if I don’t read it. You should start a blog. That way, if I don’t read it I will just be one of billions and billions of people who don’t read it, instead of just me."

Last words about "free beer" is that beer should always be free, or we should only be charged for renting it. I think this is a law Vermont could enact?

I also doubt I could have "naked women" as part of the name either, but I could have a sign at the door telling folks that there is never a cover for naked women.

I have one more day of work left before I am on vacation until November, which is nice. Susan and I are going to spend a couple of weeks in a cottage on Cape Cod that looks out over the Atlantic, just relaxing. I am old, and need to relax.

Time for baseball.