Kansas City Royals Morning Links: Bubba-geddon Dawns

I used to love Banecek….when I was college, Banecek and Have Gun Will Travel came on late after Letterman…..for the mid 80s, this was the zenith of TV culture as far as I was concerned….you couldn’t spend a better 2 hours in front of the set than the Letterman/Have Gun will Travel/Banecek trio….

Still, the pressure situation is still unique because none of those players were drafted by a local team.

yup

I think there will be some pressure from some quarters to sign no matter what the price is.

While the economic situation in baseball is obviously skewed, a lot of the criticisms from people in frustrated small markets have little to no basis in fact (for example, the one about how the Royals supposedly trade all their players to the Yankees). “They wouldn’t even sign Bubba” would become one of these.

Combination of elite program and elite academics.

no suggestions for beating a half court trap, let alone a full court press. He does point out the devils behind the housing bubble collapse. If you are looking for a good mix of politics and sports, I’d humbly suggest Charles Pierce (blogs for a boston paper), or if you are a flaming lefty, David Zirin at The Nation…..and FWIW, Daily Howler casts a broader net these days then NY Times or Wash Post, with MSNBC being a current bete noir….I like lefty writers who criticize “lefty” columists/talking heads/institutions…..you’ve got to police your own before you can even begin the arduous task of “debating” the non believers.

on how much wanting to send a message to the Soviets post-war was a factor in the US’s decision to drop the bomb. Of course, few people (if any) in the State Department anticipated how fast US-Soviet relations would deteriorate after the war.

We won the American Revolution the same way the Vietnamese won the Vietnam War: we hung around long enough for our more powerful enemy to say “this sucks; it costs too much money, and it’s just not worth it.” We didn’t defeat the British in any significant way. They were not weakened by our overwhelming forces…they just got tired and left. We won the Revolution because the British let us. We should give them the credit.

I can’t eat dairy.

I didn’t really use the textbook much – I wrote almost all of my own materials. I found it difficult to figure out how to best present the material so as not to give the students oversimplifications but also to provide an accurate appraisal of the facts.

I actually took an undergrad course just on the history of the Cold War and I knew that some of the things about the end of the war could be debated over an entire semester. As a public school teacher, going into that detail just isn’t appropriate. I came to the conclusion that I would have to leave a lot of things open ended after presenting both sides. But after all, it’s my job to teach, and to encourage them to come to their own conclusions.

Truth be told, with most of them, I was happy if they were even trying to listen instead of texting in the back rows.

As an actual historian, it bugs me when that term is used pejoratively (as it usually is).

Americans are generally too dismissive of the Soviet contribution to WWII (and the 20th century, for that matter). Victory in Europe was largely on the shoulders of dead Soviet soldiers. The bomb was dropped in large part to send a message to the USSR. If the Japanese were afraid of the Soviets more than the bomb, it might indicate that a) Japan’s government truly was crazy, b) the Soviets really,really wanted payback for the Russo-Japanese war, or c) that Japan didn’t really know what the bomb was. I think Hasegawa probably is right that the USSR entered the picture a bit, but surely the atomic bomb was a large part of the picture.

but usually it does.