Okay, so Len Kasper is my Non-Sexual Man Crush

There's so much more complaining I could do about BAR/BRI and this whole process. But there's really no point, and it's boring. I'll say this, though: there's something kind of shady about purchasing education from (and having your practice work "graded" by) an organization that has an incentive to induce you to purchase more education. Think about that. And then go through BAR/BRI when your time comes anyway, because they've made sure you really don't have a choice.

Okay, so I did a little more complaining.

The parents come into town tomorrow, and then my lovely wife (to stay, finally, thank goodness) and my mother-in-law on Thursday. These are good things. Nay, necessary things. I'm spending so much time by myself in this tiny little apartment that I'm pretty sure that given a few more days of this, I'd be drawing a face on and befriending a volleyball. If I even had a volleyball.

The Cubs, while they're the only one of the two baseball teams in this city that I can watch without wanting to vomit a little (and then to think that this man has children!), also are a really, really bad baseball team. I keep thinking, and everybody else does too, that they've got to get better sometime soon, and they do play in the worst division in baseball (where, as of this writing, they're a scant five games out of first). But they've been so terrible, it's getting harder and harder to imagine.

But, I've discovered, there's at least one member of the Cubs organization that's doing his job really, really well, and that's broadcaster Len Kasper. See, if you don't watch much baseball (why are you still reading?), you should know that most baseball announcers and color commentators currently are, well, terrible. They tend to be former players at some level, by and large, and yet tend to know very, very little about the game itself. There's a lot of senseless blather, a lot of "in my day" nonsense. A bizarre fear of most statistics. A little bit of latent racism (there's an unnerving tendency for funny little white guys who can't actually play to be labeled "scrappy" and athletic African American or Latino guys who can to be "lazy"). You know, fun stuff like that.

Kasper's different. First, he's young (36, give or take), and a real live professional broadcaster (most play-by-play guys are, to be fair, but the very worst offenders, like The Hawk, are emphatically not). Second, he actually focuses on the game (whenever he's allowed to, with mandated diversions such as last night, when Larry the Cable Guy wasted 15 minutes of my life in the booth). Third, and most importantly, he understands the game the way people who are paid to present and analyze the game should. He knows the importance of on base percentage, and drawing a walk every now and then.

The best thing about Kasper, and I'm basing this on precisely one moment in time, is that he does his homework. Broadcasters, and baseball media folk in general, have this tendency to go with their gut and make stuff up. Watching Twins games on MLB.TV, I've heard the opposing teams' broadcasters say things about Twins players that are plainly false, and could have been verified with an internet connection and approximately three free seconds. In contrast, earlier tonight, Kasper wanted to know a certain statistic. He said what all broadcasters say, which is something like "I don't know what the Cubs' batting average is this year in extra innings, but it sure seems like they struggle," only then, Kasper got on his laptop, pulled up the best site in the world, and found out what he wanted to know. You just don't know how unusual this is. Baseball-reference.com should be the single most important resource for anyone who works in the game, and most of them seem never even to have heard of it. Unfortunately, he's teamed with Bob Brenly, a horrible manager and a worse-than-average commentator. But that's how it goes.

As Mike was just mentioning to me a moment ago, there's one great baseball announcer left. And Vin Scully can't last forever. What Kasper doesn't have is that classic, soothing sort of baseball voice; but did Vin always have that? I'm hoping that Kasper keeps it up for another 40 or 50 years and finds his unique voice, and then he can be like a stathead version of Vin Scully.

Also, Scully can't rock like this. Or this. Heh. (Actually, if you ever wondered what "Folsom Prison Blues" would sound like performed live karaoke style with every last ounce of soul sucked out of it, click on the second link. It's still mildly entertaining, and I'm not sure whether that's because it's so bad or something else.)

I wish I hadn't lost my passport, and I wish someone would buy our house already.

So, as I've said, I've been sitting around with some time on my hands, and I've looked more than I should at this site. The comments (particularly the long strings of comments after any associate-salary-related post) are terribly depressing. These people are apparently among the top young lawyers in the country, or at least have weaseled their way into the top law firms in the country, but almost to a person they're petty, greedy, offensive, and in many ways just plain foolish. It's become to me kind of like what Jerry Springer is to some people--I know I should look away, and that I'd be happier and healthier for it, but I can't.

To bed!

What a day.

So that whole law school thing? Yeah. That's over. Had my last final today--knocked it out of the park. And by "knocked it out of the park," I mean "wrote words, more or less in response to each question, which may or may not have formed sentences." Significantly, I turned it in, and I'm fairly certain I'll pass.

We're going to Europe in August, and have racked up huge credit card bills in the planning process. Using my impressive grasp of economics, I ascertained that the credit card company would be charging us significantly more in interest over the next few months than the bank would be paying us in interest on my savings account, so I paid the bill in full. Only, using my less-than-impressive grasp of computers and my own motor skills, I inadvertently paid the bill out of our checking account rather than our savings account.

Several days ago. And in the meantime, our bank has happily gone along accepting our checks and debit card charges, charging us overdraft fees, and not saying a thing. When my debit card was finally rejected during my pre-exam water, energy drink and donettes trip to 7-11 this morning, I logged in to find our balance at something like -$4209. A transfer from the savings account stopped the bleeding, and I then spent a good chunk of my afternoon on the phone with the bank's "customer" "service" staff. And let me tell you, nothing takes the edge off after a 3 1/2 hour exam like a solid hour on the phone with a pleasant but woefully incompetent phone-answerer. Anyway, I've got most of the charges refunded, still working on the rest.

I was lucky enough to win a kind of pointless little contest on Seth's popular Minnesota Twins-themed blog, and my prize was a boxed DVD set containing all seven full games from the 1987 World Series put together by A&E. So after I was done with all the bank silliness for the day, I got up on the treadmill in front of Game One. I was at Game One, as an awestruck eight-and-a-half year-old, and I remember Frankie V pitching well and a grand slam and a win, and a subsequent celebration where some loud lady spilled beer all over me (though that might actually have been Game Two), but not much else.

It's really an incredible experience to go back and see through adult eyes how it actually went, and to see players like The Wizard of Oz and the late, great Kirby in the context of a full-length ballgame again. I actually found myself yelling at the TV at times, usually at the umpire for a questionable call (which, as silly as it is in any situation, is at least doubly so when you're trying to yell not only across hundreds of miles of space but across twenty years of time). It was great fun, except for all the running in place and sweating. (Boy, if you've been skimming, that's gonna be a really hard one to decipher!)

Got a call cutting the nostalgia short--had to stop, actually, just after the grand slam--saying someone was coming to look at the house between 5:30 and 6:30. So I go downstairs, and I'm climbing out of the shower at about ten to 5 when I hear our cute little dog barking her cute little head off; there's a car parked in our driveway that isn't mine. I was sure I'd heard them wrong, that really they were coming at 5 instead of 5:30 (in which case they're still early), and I'm standing there in my towel. So I throw my clothes on, having to put on the jeans twice because the zipper stuck in the first pair, and pulling my t-shirt on over my not-nearly-dry upper half, and run outside to discover a very nice realtor and client who were not the people I was expecting, and who couldn't be bothered to make an appointment.

After that I met my wife for dinner and had generally a very pleasant evening. But I was out of breath for like an hour. Really far too stressful for a day when I'd planned to do nothing but enjoy all the done-with-law-school-ness.

***SUDDEN SUBJECT CHANGE!***

I tend to talk about baseball a lot, and yet to totally ignore the issues in baseball that most people talk about when they talk about baseball. For instance, I'm utterly bored by the steroid issue. If it were coherent to say that I was militantly, almost violently apathetic, that's what I would be about steroids (and HGH and what-have-you) in baseball. Similarly (though less violently), I have almost no interest in what Curt Schilling has to say or the job security of various non-player Yankee personnel.

But lately, the tragic yet (or rather, because) utterly avoidable death of Josh Hancock has a lot of people both inside baseball and out talking about the alcohol policy in most clubhouses (namely, that they provide it, and a lot of it). Now, I've read Ball Four, as everyone should. I know that baseball players, for the most part, are thoughtless, sociopathic losers. But I had no idea that teams encouraged this behavior on a nightly basis. This is ridiculous. Now, the firm I'll be going to has a Friday afternoon happy hour, and some people (present company included, once or twice, last summer) get a little silly. But then they (we) walk home or to the train station. Baseball players own big expensive cars, many of which are made to travel very, very fast. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even a smarmy used car salesman, to realize that this is a problematic policy. I mean, come on. As Seth Myers and Amy Poehler might say, "Really, Bud Selig? Really?"

Adventures in Miscellany

• One thing that every person should do before he or she dies is ride in a hot-air balloon:

See? This was my birthday present from my wife, and we finally got to enjoy it this past weekend. And, man. It was great. Everyone should get to do this.

• Colin Cowherd is a jackass. He directed his listeners to overload and essentially destroy a website, apparently in response to some perceived slight no one else actually understands, and stole a joke from another website and later refused to give its originators credit for no discernible reason. Moreover, he's terrible at his job, as long as one understands the requirements of his job to include knowing things about sports, communicating them over the radio airwaves in an intelligible manner, and/or being entertaining while doing so.
  
  Here's the thing, though: I can't stop listening. I mean, I can; I would never listen outside of my car, and I can't say I've ever stayed in the car longer than I have to to hear what he has to say. But if I'm in the car and driving and he's on, I listen. It's fascinating. He really is, by any measure, a stupid man, with a severely limited understanding of his native English language. He has a grating and unpleasant speaking voice. He is, I truly believe, a bigot, and is often quite offensive, like earlier today when he improbably turned a light-hearted (but entirely unfunny) dig at Pittsburgh being named the U.S.'s "most romantic city" into a very thinly-veiled attack on San Francisco for being accepting of homosexuality. His sense of humor is disastrous; the other day, he read a "top ten signs your recruit might be on drugs" list, and none of them was any more than a humorless restatement of one or more stereotypes associated with abusing drugs. A representative sample of his humor is this "joke".
  
  In short, I hate every single thing that comes out of his mouth. Which, I think, is why I listen: for the reminder that we live in a country where some large number of people can listen to Colin Cowherd (or Carlos Mencia...but I digress) and actually find themselves entertained. This is what he wants; a guy like Cowherd couldn't care less what I think of him as long as I listen. He's winning. And yet I can't stop. It's kind of depressing.
  
  
• The Onion's AV Club has a nice sampling of wit and wisdom from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. I'm not sure I'd have made all the same selections they did, but it's nice nonetheless.
  
  
• I just don't know what to think of Alex Rodriguez anymore. I've been rooting for him to succeed while the rest of the Yankees fail, because the disparity between his value and fans' perception of him is almost as great as Derek Jeter's (but in the opposite direction), and A-Rod really hasn't deserved anything he's gotten the past couple years (except the MVP award and the $25 million a year). But this start is ridiculous. Nevermind that he's actually winning games for the Evil Empire, with two game-ending homers in the first three weeks. I still kind of love the guy, but he must be stopped.
  
  
• Speaking of baseball (what? me?), I'm taking a trip up to D.C. this weekend to watch some bad baseball in a bad stadium, but from a great seat. Back in October, I bought two front-row-over-the-dugout Nationals tickets at UVA law's PILA auction, so I'll be there to watch David Wright, Jose Reyes and the Mets dismantle the local(-est) nine on Saturday night. Wish me a game worth watching. I really can't justify taking the time out of studying, but that clearly isn't stopping me, either then or now.
  
  
• Kudos to us. By "us" here, I mean we gun-toting, Idol-watching, Colin Cowherd-listening, largely idiotic Americans. We pleasantly surprised me this week by revolting against NBC's (and other networks', after the inevitable trickle down) decision to show the video and other materials sent to them by Cho Seung Hui. We're hopelessly voyeuristic, and we look at things we know we shouldn't (or listen to them, like me with that blowhard Cowherd) for any number of stupid and sometimes vaguely troubling reasons. But there has to be a line somewhere, and that line has to be well in front of the point where we're giving horrifically evil mass murderers exactly the kind and amount of attention they're seeking. I didn't expect us to really recognize that line, but I guess we did. This time.
  
  
• Colin Cowherd is a jackass.
  
  
• Incidentally, Jim Rome is no better at his job; his voice is just as bewilderingly inappropriate for radio, and he's just as unfunny, and really does seem dumb. But he doesn't actually seem like an evil person, so I'll lay off him.
  

Jackie Robinson Day

I'm currently watching Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN. (I should be studying or something, but it's fascinating.) Today is Jackie Robinson Day: sixty years ago today, Robinson, a genuinely great ballplayer who would have been a bona fide Hall of Famer even if his only contributions to history had been with his bat, legs and glove, became the first African American to play Major League ball (or any major American professional sport). In celebration, they're interviewing prominent people who knew and were affected by Jackie (the most interesting of which has been Jackie's widow, Rachel Robinson, an engaging and fascinating woman) while the Dodgers-Padres game is carried on in the background.

Earlier, meathead ESPN "analyst" John Kruk said something I think I agree with, which would be an all-time first; the gist was that we're celebrating Jackie because it's the 60th anniversary, and that's great, but it should really be celebrated every year, because it was a momentous occasion not only in baseball, but for all of America. He suggested that it should be a national holiday, and I don't know if I'd go quite that far. But it should be remembered. And at the very least, it probably shouldn't also be tax day. Get on that, feds.

I was going to pick on ESPN's coverage just a little bit, but I'm enjoying it so much that I don't have the energy to do justice to my argument. Here it is in a nutshell: tied in with this celebration, because there always has to be a controversy, is this lurking idea that African American representation in pro baseball is dwindling, going from a high of some 27% in 1975 to just 8.5% today. This seems to me like a bit of a red herring; those percentage points are being taken by Latino and Asian players, and the percentage of white players is decreasing as well (apparently about the same number of percentage points, which admittedly is a much slower relative decline since the starting percentage was much higher). An alternative way to look at it, it seems to me, is that rather than African Americans losing interest in the sport (which may be happening to some extent), a sport that was once heavily dominated by white and black players has become vastly more diverse, with better international relations, more advanced international scouting systems, and just generally better competition for a larger-but-still-very-limited number of roster spots. So I'm not really seeing a problem here (certainly not one foreboding enough that it needs to be juxtaposed with this happy event). Let me know if I'm wrong, and check out some of the recent numbers (and a very favorable diversity report for MLB) here.

Talkin' baseball...

Kluszewski, Campanella!

First, a breakdown of my readers thus far, as I understand them:

Me.
My wife, when I remind her.
Mike and Melissa.
Stephanie.
My mother-in-law.
My Advanced Legal Research professor.
My other Advanced Legal Research professor.

Good group. A small group, but a sociologically and geographically diverse one stretching (well, more like jumping) from one coast of this great nation to the other. And growing at a rate of approximately one U.Va. Advanced Legal Research professor per week (warning: due to sample size issues, data may not be a reliable predictor of future performance). If you're reading this for some (or more likely no) reason and don't appear on the above list, I hope you'll let me know somehow (like by using the "comments" link below). It's fun to hear.

Right. So, as one who is hopelessly addicted to the complex, often frustrating, and ultimately pointless world of Major League Baseball, and in particular to the very out-of-market Minnesota Twins, I'm now entering my third year of subscribing to MLB.TV, which allows me (subject to certain restrictions, which are the subject of this portion of the entry) to watch essentially every game through my dying laptop and the miracle of the internet. This year, I even shelled out the extra thirty bucks for their premium package: you get a much higher resolution picture, and access to a software program that allows you to watch and shift seamlessly among the audio streams for up to six games at once (and may even function someday soon).

All in all, I'm happy with it. The picture quality is very good, and streams much more smoothly than a few years ago. I don't have digital cable, so I can't get the Extra Innings TV package, but I don't think the difference is such that I'd be willing to pay the extra $50 per season.

But here's the problem: local and national blackouts. First, each team has a set of zip codes, viewers within which are banned from watching any of that team's games over the internet. The idea, I suppose, is that there's about a 50/50 chance that you'll end up watching the other team's broadcast, and thus miss out on all those critical local commercials. And I'm fine with that. The real problem is that the zip code 22901, wherein I reside, is on the banned list for both the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals, whereas both teams have contracts with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Networks (MASN) to carry their games locally, and Comcast Cable doesn't currently provide access to MASN in said zip code. So I can't get the games on TV or over the internet. What's worse, ESPN has contracts to black out its nationally televised, non-premium (i.e. any night but Sunday night) games when those games are also available locally, presumably covering the same overly expansive lists of zip codes. So while the Twins' opening-night game against the Orioles last Monday was theoretically available on local TV, national TV, and the internet, I had none of these sources available to me. The bottom line is that lawyers ruin everything.

In a similar vein, ESPN and Fox both have exclusivity contracts with MLB that provide that no other games will be made nationally available in competition with their national broadcasts (Saturday afternoon for Fox, Sunday night for ESPN). This makes sense and is completely above the board, etc., etc. The problem is that their definitions of both what qualifies as a national broadcast and the time range of what qualifies as being in competition are ridiculously broad. To take them in order: an internet "broadcast" of what is intended to be a local telecast, made available only to paying subscribers to a website, should not be subject to these blackouts. I'm sure that the language of the contracts explicitly states that they do qualify, but that is true only because, as mentioned, lawyers ruin everything.

Second, Fox has gone and moved the first pitch of its Saturday broadcasts from about 1:00 p.m. EST to about 4:00. This is great in that it allows Left Coast viewers a few more hours to sleep it off and gives pitchers the decided advantage of pitching through really awkward late afternoon shadows, but it's terrible for MLB.TV and Extra Innings subscribers. Games that start at the ordinary start time of 1:00 p.m. Eastern, of which there are several (especially in the colder-weather months), continue to be blacked out, despite very little (if any) overlap with the Fox broadcast. Of course, West Coast afternoon games will also be blacked out, as will games that start in the early evening (say 6:00 EST), which occasionally happen on Saturdays. When one considers that at least half of all local broadcasts are carried on a regional Fox Sports channel, and that Fox is effectively then keeping viewers from choosing not to watch its broadcasts in favor of watching...its broadcasts, these contracts start to seem senselessly restrictive. I'm pretty sure the whole point is to annoy me.

Speaking of annoying things and baseball, the Twins seem to have latched onto the idea that one sticks with what works. Which, in ordinary circumstances, is a fine idea. The problem is that what "worked" for them last year was starting the year with among the least talented lineups that could possibly have been formed of all the talent available to them: Tony Batista and Juan Castro manned third and short, while Jason Bartlett toiled in the minors; Francisco Liriano started in the bullpen. They recovered from this to win 96 games and the division. So, this year, why not give spots in the starting rotation to Ramon (or is it Russ?) Ortiz, Carlos Silva and Sidney Ponson instead of Matt Garza, Glen Perkins, Kevin Slowey and/or Scott Baker? The problem, of course, is what saved the Twins last year is that they recognized these mistakes, come about May, and rectified them. That might need to happen even earlier this year if they're going to have similar success.

The Twins play the Yankees at home tonight, on a nationally televised game that I will get to watch. For some reason, the completely useless Ponson will be starting despite the availability of the completely average Boof Bonser on six days' rest. These are the kinds of decisions that end up costing a team a very tight division, and the kind that lead a team to end up giving up 25 runs to the Yankees on national television. But then I guess Ponson giving up 25 runs, which is honestly well within the realm of possibility, might lead to Garza's recall coming faster, so maybe that's a good thing?