A follow-up on OffermanGate. The Atlantic League, perhaps having reviewed the incident more closely than the national media has, decided to maintain the suspension of Jose Offerman until after the criminal charges against him are resolved. No life ban, not even a season-long suspension. A good article placing the incident in context can be found here.

Now here's a good way for hitters to reclaim the inside part of the plate. My all-time favorite ballplayer, Jose Offerman, went after a battery with a baseball bat after being hit by a pitch in a minor league baseball game last night. For this act of self-defense, he spent the night in jail. Both pitcher and catcher were recuperating.

I know there's a "code" that tolerates "throwing inside" to a batter, but I'm surprised this hasn't happened more often. Having a 100-mph pitch deliberately thrown at your skull may seem to the outsider as a pitcher's prerogative, but to someone in the heat of battle, that's assault and battery. At least one player, Ray Chapman in 1920, has died because he didn't get out of the way fast enough from a pitch aimed at his head, and two other famous players, Mickey Cochrane and Tony Conigliaro, sustained injuries that led inexorably to their deaths years later. Charging the mound with nothing but your fists seems a disproportionately weak response.

But a baseball bat expands the arms race exponentially. Hall-of-Famer Juan Marichal once pounded in the skull of LA Dodger John Roseboro because he thought the catcher had thrown a return pitch to the mound a little too close to his ear. He got off rather easy, with a short suspension and a fine, but the public outcry was so great that a player who was arguably the best pitcher of the 1960's was kept out of Cooperstown for a few years because of the incident. Offerman can expect no such mercy from the predominantly white media or from organized baseball. Expect the home run he hit in his previous at bat to be his last.

UPDATE (8/17): Here's a real time slide show video of the attack. It's not even close to the Marichal attack; Offerman appears to take one aborted swing, connecting with both catcher (who's rushing him from behind) and pitcher, but it looks from the video that he went out hoping to scare the pitcher, and the fact that he only used one hand testifies to his lack of deadly intention. Still, if you point a loaded pistol at someone, you pay the consequences if it goes off.

It wouldn't be a baseball season at Smythe's World without at least one reference to the whereabouts of my all-time favorite player, Jose Offerman. This year, it's Long Island, where he has returned to the league which gave him succor during the 2003 and 2006 seasons, the Atlantic League, His teammates on the Ducks include Carl "Jurassic" Everett, Pete Rose Jr., Donovan Osbourne, Edgardo Alphonso, and other former alums of the Show. He's hitting a healthy .317 and four home runs for his division-leading team (to put that number in context, Rose is hitting .360 with six homers, Everett .284 with 10 knocks, and Alphonso an anemic .264 with three home runs). Hey, it's baseball, so don't knock it.

Quickie Trivia: With his release by the Phillies yesterday, the major league career of Jose Offerman is apparently at an end. Assuming that another major league team is not gullible enough to sign him, Offy will go into the record books as the second player in major league history to have homered in both his first, and his final, plate appearances. Who was the first?

Offerman Signs: You know the baseball season draws near when this story hits the wires...btw, the page for Phoebe Nicholls at IMDB.com has not updated in the past twelve months. Should I be concerned?

Smythe Jumps the Shark: Since I started my blog, I've tried to steer my own course, for the most part staying away from issues that I had little interest in, and/or had little in the way of expertise. Since I'm not a reporter by profession, I tend not to be obsessed with the political bias, whether it be right or left, of the media. I don't "fisk" other writers, since that is so 9/12, and I have another blog where I can discuss sports, if I wanted to. My opinion on Iraq is simple: the Administration (particularly the Veep) exaggerated the threat from Saddam, didn't have the slightest idea what we were getting into, and hundreds of American soldiers (and, no doubt, thousands of Iraqi civilians) are now dead. Also, Saddam was a bad man, it was a good idea to keep a close watch on him, regardless of whether we went to war, and it is going to benefit the Iraqi people in the long run to be rid of him.

There are only so many ways you can write those opinions before you glaze over the eyes of your readers, and it's so much easier to troll your views elsewhere, where they will be read by a larger audience. Some things, though, I am compelled by reputation to expound on, regardless of the general interest my readers may have. For example, I will always post about any halfway interesting night at Joxer Daly's; Smythe's World, in fact, is the de facto website for the bar, even though I'm not a regular there anymore. Political polling fascinates me, so any shift in the horse race numbers will receive my attention. Jose Offerman has been my favorite athlete since he was making several dozen errors a year at Albuquerque (I've always had a soft spot for despised athletes, like Sonny Liston and Ryan Leaf, but Offy is special, since he has always handled the malice from sportwriters and fans alike with class and dignity), so any news stories involving him will surely get noticed. And naturally, if something happens in the area of law I practice, bankruptcy, I will avail myself of the opportunity to rant.

And of course, there's Phoebe Nicholls. Ms. Nicholls, for those of you who do not have intimate knowledge of the British theatrical scene, is a mid-fiftyish English character actress. She was quite beautiful during her ingenue period back in the day, and even today she's not hard on the eyes, but her uniqueness derives from the spellbinding effect her voice has on an audience. Quite simply, it is the most captivating voice possessed by an actor since the late George Sanders; today, only John Malkovich is comparable. And like those actors, she invariably portrays rather elegant characters who deserve to be taken down a peg or two (that is, when she's not portraying another specialty of hers, that of "bereaving mother". It's safe to say that the former are a heck of a lot more fun to watch).

Almost all of her work is done on British television or on stage, and she's only acted in a handful of films (none released since 1997), so Americans rarely have the chance to see her perform. I've followed her career since her disembodied voice concluded The Elephant Man in 1980, and her most famous role was that of the youngest sister of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited the following year. The sheer fact that she has worked regularly (and, for the most part, reviewed favorably) since then, without becoming a household name even in her home country, is a testament to a quality I generally admire in a person, a commitment to craft beyond any pecuniary benefits that may arise out of it.

Which brings me to Prime Suspect 6 [part two], which ran on your local PBS station last night. She had only two brief scenes, playing the frumpishly malevolent spook who attempts to shut down Inspector Tennison's investigation into the Serbian war criminal she's protecting. She played the part perfectly, creating one of the most sinister TV characters since The Cigarette Man, conveying more with a resigned shrug than Gwyneth Paltrow does with one of her patented line-readings. In particular, her final scene conveyed a sense of power and contempt even after she had been out-smarted by the heroine, all without uttering a word. It gets replayed again on PBS next weekend, so watch out for it if you missed it the first time. And by all means, remember the name; it wouldn't surprise me in the least if she turns out to be another Judi Dench, an actress whose fame and notoriety in this country are achieved after middle age.

UPDATE: Jose Offerman has now been cut by three teams in the last two years, and spent the entire 2006 season with the New York Mets AAA team in Tidewater. In August, 2007, he was charged with assault after he charged the mound in a minor league game with a baseball bat (he subsequently plead guilty, and agreed to probation), and was suspended indefinitely. Showing up two years later managing in the Dominican Winter League, Offerman proved the early incident was no fluke by meriting a lifetime suspension for attempting to punch an umpire.

Phoebe Nicholls has rebooted her career in recent years by excelling on the West End, starring in a number of well-received plays and winning some long-overdue awards.

*However, her American fans were recently victimized by a cruel hoax when the IMDB website listed her as performing in the TV series CSI: Miami. In fact, the producers of the show merely created a character named "Phoebe Nichols" (with only one "l", so the audience wouldn't be confused with the real-life actress), a Britney Spearsian singer who is thought to have exploded in flames at the beginning of the show, only for the deceased to have been a doppleganger. I hope my blogmuse was well-paid for the indignity.

For those of you who wondered whatever happened to Jose Offerman, this story gives the skinny. Like many small-market teams, the Twins are pursuing a variation of the Billy Beane philosophy, and larding up on players who get on base, take pitches, and basically act like a schnorrer to the opposing pitching staff, and that's what Offerman does. He had his best years with the Royals, where they downplayed his defensive shortcomings and tried to find a niche for the talents he actually possesses, which is to take pitches like a mother/father and hit triples. He did those things with LA and Boston (at least he did his first two years with the Sox) too, but the teams, and by extension the local media, were more obsessed with what he couldn't do, such as catching anything that was hit at him or stealing bases, and the result was unfortunate for all concerned.

It's about time--Jose Offerman is finally back in baseball, with the Bridgeport Bluefish of the independent Atlantic League. His first game: vs. Rickey Henderson and the Newark Bears. Perform your magic, Jose !!

Well, spring training can really begin, now that Jose Offerman has signed with the Expos.

Last week, I mentioned, almost in passing, stories published about two public figures, Jose Offerman and Gwyneth Paltrow, that I thought were so poorly sourced that it offended me that any reputable journalistic venture could have published them (by the way, I believe this blog is the first to ever put those two individuals together in the same sentence; I can't wait to see if someone reaches me through a Google search for " 'Jose Offerman' AND 'Gwyneth Paltrow' "). Its not a big deal, unless you're the subject of such a hitpiece; the journalistic standards regarding "anonymous sources" for sports and entertainment/gossip are so low anyway that the public has already developed an ingrained skepticism about such stories. Then again, I came upon this story and this story today, which only show what a strong shelf-life the most odious of lies can take on.

Anyway, I'm sure a lot of you have already heard about the Fox.com smear of Al Gore last week: that he and his wife attempted to use influence to get some freebies to the opening Springsteen concert, and had a fit when he didn't get the tickets. Coming as it did on the heels of a campaign season when false stories were printed about the former Veep taking credit for inventing the Internet, or for having been brought up in a luxury hotel, I was amazed that anyone with a sense of fair play could have believed that allegation even for a second. To that end, I would propose a hard and fast rule concerning any published story that uses anonymous sources: unless it involves a whistleblower, or a Mafia informant, anything that you read that contains a reference to an unnamed "friend", "teammate", "source" or "insider" must bear the presumption that it is a lie, unless the journalist can show elsewhere in the story that the anonymity was granted to protect the source, not the reputation of the journalist.
(Ed. I would be happy to discuss with anyone who e-mails or comments, below, why I believe the stories involving Gore, Offerman and Paltrow were untrue in whole or in part)

I may have been too kind to the media concerning my post the other day about the release of Jose Offerman. It seems the front office of that team put out the story that Offerman had refused to enter last Monday's game in the 9th inning to pinch run as a rationale for cutting the bastard four days later, and as a justification for making him travel with the team to Texas, rather than releasing him in L.A., where he lives in the off-season. The media, which tend to dislike uppitty dark-skinned players, fell for it hook, line and sinker, reporting the allegation without sourcing it. As I wrote earlier, if Offerman was white, or spoke English as a first language, I am certain that this story would have been covered differently; that is to say, it would have been reported that he was cut by the Red Sox because his batting average sucked, but that the team's decision to force him to make the trip to Texas, and inventing a smear afterward about his willingness to play, was classless.