Alomar enters Hall (won’t wear Mets hat)

He failed miserably when he arrived at Shea, but there should never have been any doubts that Robbie Alomar was going to the Hall of Fame. Alomar was one of the best to ever play his position, better than anyone who played in her era and today’s announcement was a year overdue.

As for the others: I won’t begrudge Bert Blyleven’s entrance, though I am not sure he belongs in the hall. Two others Jack Morris, a top-notch pitcher, and shortstop Barry Larkin are close. I would vote for Larkin, who was the best all-around shortstop of his era — the years between Ripken/Ozzie Smith and the current Jeter/A-Rod group. Morris is a closer call, like Blyleven, because his numbers do not jump out and say Hall. But there were few pitchers on his level during his prime and he was a gutty winner.

So congrats to Alomar and Blyleven.

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A ’70s pop masterpiece was his legacy

It always was the sax line that got me, like the sax in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” a rare sax solo that captures the memory.

And while Gerry Rafferty didn’t play the solo, he wrote the basic melody and the song the sax made famous. “Baker Street,” though, was more than the solo; it was a shimmering bit of mid-’70s pop that stands among the best music of its decade. That Rafferty managed only a couple of minor hits from the same album — the underrated City to City — ultimately doesn’t matter. What matters is that he gave us “Baker Street” and “Stuck in the Middle” (recorded with Stealer’s Wheel), a feat few can claim.

Rest in peace, Mr. Rafferty.

  • Read poetry at The Subterranean. 
  • Send me an e-mail.  
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.  
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
    Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

    The correct response is ‘Hell no!’

    John Nichols, in a useful rejoinder to so much of the economic and political nonsense flying around as the GOP readies to take control of the House, that it is the people who created the mess we are in who should pay to fix it.

    Our sputtering economy and exhausted federal budget was not caused by entitlement spending, but by a regulatory climate that turned the financial markets into Atlantic City casinos and two endless wars that are daily sucking the cash from our bank accounts and leaving the blood of soldiers and civilians on both sides to stain the countrysides.

    And yet, we still hear from the “Washington elites … that the U.S. had spent itself into a financial mess” and that “it was going to be necessary to put Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs at risk to balance the books.”

    That is both foolish and immoral.

    As Nichols says,

    there is a place for fiscal responsibility. But there is also a place for moral responsibility. Those who created the mess should shoulder the burden of cleaning it up.  Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid did not create this crisis, war profiteering and Wall Street speculation did. So before any working family sacrifices, the first demand should be that the profiteers and the speculators pay for their crisis.

    • Send me an e-mail.
    • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
    • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
    • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
    Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

    East Brunswick: Every town New Jersey

    The East Brunswick Township Council is preparing for what it expects will be a nightmare budget season — which is exactly what every town in the state should be expecting to face. The reason? About 15-18 years of games and gimmicks at the state level that has made it impossible for the state to help local government and a current governor with an ideological predisposition to slash and burn.

    • Send me an e-mail.
    • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
    • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
    • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
    Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

    Let the games begin

    The Republicans who have taken over the House of Representatives have scheduled a vote to repeal the Obama healthcare law, a maneuver guaranteed to fail while also winning them political points among their paranoid base.

    The Democrats are — finally — attacking the anti-democratic filibuster, a maneuver that will raise the ire of every single Republican in the Senate.

    And this is just the beginning. Things are not going to get any less ugly anytime soon.

    • Send me an e-mail.
    • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
    • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
    • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
    Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.