Author Topic: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court  (Read 1411 times)

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Offline EasyAce

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A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« on: February 11, 2020, 08:29:21 pm »
The Astros murdered Mike Bolsinger on August 4, 2017. Now he wants them to pay for their subterfuge in court. Does he have a case?
By Yours Truly
https://calltothepen.com/2020/02/11/houston-astros-former-pitcher-bolsinger-takes-cheaters-court/

Mike Bolsinger was last seen on a major league mound in Toronto Blue Jays fatigues, facing the Houston Astros on August 4, 2017. At age 29 at the time, Bolsinger clung to the hope that he could remake himself into a useful relief pitcher following four years’ worth of bouncing between the Show and Triple A. The Astro Intelligence Agency banged his final hope to bits.

Now Bolsinger wants payback. Specifically, in the form of a lawsuit charging unfair business practices and negligence, among other things. A lawsuit he filed quite cleverly in Los Angeles, for whose Dodgers Bolsinger once pitched, for the two seasons before they lost the 2017 World Series to the Astros.

And the former righthander—whom the Dodgers traded to the Jays for Jesse Chavez—wants not just for damages for himself but for $31 million worth of Astro bonus monies from their World Series win to be forfeited and distributed 1) to assorted Los Angeles children’s’ charities; and, 2) to a new fund to be established specifically toward aiding retired baseball players in severe financial straits.

It may or may not have been a matter of time before somebody might think about sending Astrogate to the courts. But if a former player who took an AIA gumshoe in the backside was going to do it, you might be hard-pressed to find a more pronounced victim.

Bolsinger entered that game in the bottom of the fourth in Minute Maid Park. The Houston Astros led 3-2 when the inning opened. They were up 6-2 when Bolsinger relieved Toronto Blue Jays starter Cesar Valdez‘s relief Matt Dermody, with Yuli Gurriel checking in at the plate, two out, and Josh Reddick aboard first. Gurriel walked on five pitches and Marwin Gonzalez stepped up to bat. On 2-0 Gonzalez hit a three-run homer. Make that 9-2, Astros, who batted around the order and a half in the inning.

Carlos Beltran followed by hitting a first-pitch, line double, Brian McCann followed with a full-count walk, Tyler White rapped a ground single on 0-1 to right to send Beltran home, and Jake Marisnick hit a 2-1 service for an RBI single. Bolsinger followed by walking Derek Fisher on 3-1 before he ended his inning and, it turned out, his major league career by retiring Alex Bregman for the side on a first-pitch fly out to center.

“I remember saying, ‘It was like they knew what I was throwing. They’re laying off pitches they weren’t laying off before. It’s like they knew what was coming’,” the former pitcher tells USA Today columnist Nancy Armour. “That was the thought in my head. I felt like I didn’t have a chance.”

He didn’t, really. Thanks to Tony Adams, the fan who went to work analyzing the 2017 Houston Astros, including every game in which they banged the can slowly to transmit stolen electronically from off the field, we know exactly how little chance Bolsinger really had that day:

Gurriel—He took the first pitch for ball one with no bang. Bolsinger then threw him three curveballs, each one of which got banged to Gurriel and the second of which landed for a called strike between balls two and three. Gurriel then took a cutter for the walk with no percussion accompaniment.

Gonzalez—He saw two curveballs for balls one and two, then caught hold of a cutter and drove it over the right-field fence. The AIA operative in the clubhouse didn’t swing on the can once, interestingly enough.

Beltran—He saw a four-seam fastball to hit to the back of right-center field and heard no bang. (Remember: the AIA banged the can slowly on breaking stuff and changeups. No bang equaled fastball.)

McCann—Bolsinger started him with a curveball for which he was banged before delivery. Ball one. The next three pitchers were slider (swinging strike), cutter (called strike), and slider (ball two in the dirt). No bangs. Then, it was: bang, slider (ball three); bang, slider (foul); no bang, cutter (foul); and, bang, curveball (ball four).

White—In order: two bangs, cutter (called strike); one bang, curveball, ground RBI single.

Marisnick—Bolsinger started him with two cutters, no bangs, and a foul strike followed by ball one. Then, it was bang, cutter (ball two); and, bang, curveball, line drive, base hit, RBI

Fisher—Called strike followed by four straight balls. The strike was a four-seamer; the balls, back-to-back cutters, a slider, and another cutter. And no bangs.

Bregman—Bang, curveball, fly out, side retired. Considering Bregman knew what was coming, Bolsinger was probably lucky Bregman didn’t hit it into the seats.

Bolsinger threw 29 pitches in the inning and twelve of them got banged. It was the most bangs for Astro hitters against any of the Jays’ six pitchers on the day.

Bolsinger was sent back to Triple-A after the game and didn’t get a hoped-for September call-up despite going the rest of the way with a 1.93 ERA. Neither the Jays nor anyone else in the majors offered him a new deal at season’s end.

“I was an older guy,” he tells Armour. “They had younger guys to call up. Let’s say that (game) doesn’t happen . . . I probably don’t get sent down. But at that point, they probably lost faith in me and were over it.”

Bolsinger went to Japan instead, pitching for the Chiba Lotte Marines, posting a serviceable 3.87 ERA in two seasons with Chiba Lotte, and doing it largely on edge. His wife was pregnant with their son in the first season. His translator lived an hour away from the couple. And the pitcher feared trouble getting her medical attention during her pregnancy or during their son’s first year of life.

When Mike Fiers first blew the whistle on Astrogate to The Athletic, his reasons included him saying, “I just want the game to be cleaned up a little bit because there are guys who are losing their jobs because they’re going (against the Houston Astros) not knowing.” Indeed.

Back in December, The Athletic‘s Molly Knight identified Bolsinger as one of at least nine pitchers whose careers got torpedoed by the AIA—including Matt Dermody, the pitcher he relieved in that fateful fourth inning.

Want to know how Dermody took it up the tailpipe?

Fisher, with second and third—He saw a pair of unbanged fastballs and pushed McCann home on a ground out to second.

Bregman—no bang, two-seam fastball, ball one; bang, curveball, taken in the dirt; bang, slider, called strike; no bang, four-seam fastball, two-run homer.

Reddick—bang, curveball, base hit, end of Dermody’s assignment.

And, as it turned out, his major league career, too. The Jays optioned him to the minors the following day, then designated him for assignment the following spring training. He didn’t do very well down there, either. At this writing, he was a free agent as of last November.

Whenever any pitcher went against the 2017 Astros on the margins already, a send-down following an AIA-instigated roughing up cost them considerable money. The difference between a major league minimum salary or a $1-$2 million salary and the average minor league salary is the difference between a supermarket chain raking millions and a family grocery making high ten figures at best.

Astro players got immunity to spill to commissioner Rob Manfred and his bloodhounds. Manfred suspended general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch and Houston Astros owner Jim Crane saw and raised, canning both post haste. Bolsinger wants the Astros held far more accountable and far more heavily penalized for Astrogate than baseball held and penalized them. By that light alone he may well garner a large crowd of sympathisers.

It’s pointless for now to guess how far his lawsuit goes before it’s either dismissed or ruled in his favor. Some might call it frivolous. Some might call it a bottom-of-the-ninth desperation stand from a pitcher who was marginal at best. Some might ask whether Bolsinger was a little too clever by half, considering the sentiment in Los Angeles for restitution and legitimate questions as to whether the case can have a truly fair hearing there.

Bolsinger doesn’t pretend that he was a great pitcher, even if he believes in his heart of hearts that he could have lived to pitch another major league day otherwise if things were played fair. But even marginal players have a right to know that, if they’re going to get driven right out of the majors, they got it because the other guys played straight, no chaser and really were better than him on the day of reckoning.

He’ll never really know whether the bang pitches the Astros did lay off would have been swung on and missed or put into play for outs if they had to guess what was coming. Which raises yet again the great unanswered question, whichever way Bolsinger’s suit goes. The question that most needs to be asked, and answered, about a baseball team you’d have thought was the last team on the planet to need espionage to triumph the way they did—why?
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"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.

Offline AllThatJazzZ

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #1 on: February 12, 2020, 09:13:22 am »
How many times have I tortured myself with that question ... WHY? They didn't just leave a trail of brokenhearted fans. They hurt careers. They sullied their title(s). They ruined their reputation. I have no enthusiasm for the 2020 season. 
8888crybaby


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Online Lando Lincoln

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #2 on: February 12, 2020, 12:30:33 pm »
What an ugly, indelible affair.  I suspect and expect others will join the suit. 
There are some among us who live in rooms of experience we can never enter.
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Offline AllThatJazzZ

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #3 on: February 12, 2020, 04:26:35 pm »
Since this entire cheating saga began, I haven't been able to get this movie (one of my favorites) off my mind.



(Trailer)


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(Documentary synopsis)


Error 404 (Not Found)!!1



So many parallels of broken trust and shame that extends beyond the cheaters themselves.


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Online Polly Ticks

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #4 on: February 12, 2020, 04:51:43 pm »
What an ugly, indelible affair.  I suspect and expect others will join the suit.

If it gains any traction I'm sure you're right. 
Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too. -Yogi Berra

Offline DCPatriot

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #5 on: February 12, 2020, 05:12:47 pm »
I recall posting this scenario right after the scandal broke... that there had to be relievers today who are riding the bus in the minor leagues because they weren't effective against the Astros in relief.

Yes, it's that serious.

Careers and/or lives turned upside down because the ASTROS could see all your cards.
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Online Lando Lincoln

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #6 on: February 12, 2020, 05:47:29 pm »
I just read that two weeks prior on July 18,  Bolsinger threw four strikeouts in one inning at Fenway.  The third strikeout ended with a wild pitch run to first. 
« Last Edit: February 12, 2020, 05:56:22 pm by Lando Lincoln »
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Online Lando Lincoln

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #7 on: February 12, 2020, 05:51:11 pm »
I just read that two weeks prior on July 18,  Bolsinger threw four strikeouts in one inning at Fenway.  The third strikeout ended with a wild pitch run to first.

Bolsinger v. Astros: Does a journeyman's sign-stealing lawsuit have any hope?
« Last Edit: February 12, 2020, 05:56:43 pm by Lando Lincoln »
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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #8 on: February 12, 2020, 07:26:41 pm »
The exact same thing that the Astros were doing is happening in every major league park in this country and Canada but HOUSTON is in flyover country!
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
- J. R. R. Tolkien

Offline EasyAce

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #9 on: February 12, 2020, 07:51:37 pm »
Since this entire cheating saga began, I haven't been able to get this movie (one of my favorites) off my mind.
@AllThatJazzZ

Beware that the film Quiz Show badly bowdlerised the actual doings and undoings of the actual scandal. Which may be typical Hollywood, never letting, you know, the truth get in the way of a good piece of filmmaking and story telling, but . . .

* Richard Goodwin had nothing to do with the scandal until it was practically going to the Congressional hearings.

* Goodwin also never actually met Charles Van Doren until long after Van Doren's run on Twenty-One was finished and he'd been part of The Today Show for a little over a year.

* Herb Stempel did tank the movie question by answering with On the Waterfront---and his favourite film was actually Marty, the correct answer to the question he tanked---but it's not the question he lost the critical game with.

* Charles Van Doren was anything but a bachelor during his Twenty-One run: he was engaged to his wife-to-be at the time. (They married during the height of Van Doren's television popularity in 1957 and remained married until Van Doren's death last year.)

* Van Doren revealed many years after the scandal that, contrary to the film's depiction of his interest in quiz shows, he didn't even own a television set at the time. He met Twenty-One fixer Albert Freedman through a mutual friend and let Freedman persuade him to try out for another show Freedman's boss Dan Enright produced: Tic-Tac-Dough.

* Herb Stempel first blew the whistle on Twenty-One's rigging in 1957, after Van Doren defeated him. The film compressed the time of the scandal into a single year; the Congressional hearings actually began in 1959.

* Van Doren's life was far from ruined by the scandal. He became an editor at Praeger Books and, especially, the Encyclopedia Britannica, authored a few books, and in time put the lie to the film's closing credits note that "he never taught again"---he and his wife became literary professors at the University of Connecticut Torrington from 2005 until the campus closed in 2016.

* Stempel didn't lose his Twenty-One winnings either by gambling with bookies or by investing in a sham Florida land scheme---he was actually never really paid his winnings at all. Freedman and Enright actually forced him to sign documents agreeing to be paid a fraction of what he might actually win, in addition to dangling the hope of a television career of his own in front of him.

* The woman who defeated Van Doren, Vivienne Nearing, wasn't exactly a stranger to Van Doren: he'd beaten her husband earlier in his Twenty-One run. Mrs. Nearing was an attorney who was later disbarred after she pleaded guilty to perjury before a New York grand jury investigating the quiz show riggings before Congress got into the act. She eventually restored her legal career and died of cancer in 2007 at 81.

* Irony of ironies: Herb Stempel fell to a teacher on Twenty-One . . . but in due course he became a teacher himself, teaching high school social studies. The film's closing credits note said only that he returned to his job with the New York City Transit Authority.

* In 2008, Charles Van Doren surprised the country when he finally wrote publicly about his quiz show experience, an essay in The New Yorker called "All the Answers." Interestingly, when he admitted he burst out laughing over Stempel's insults against him in Quiz Show, he conflated Stempel calling him "Charles Van F@cking Doren!" and "Charles Van Moron" on separate occasions into the single "Charles Van F@cking Moron."

* Van Doren also didn't go on The Today Show right off the bat when he first lost Twenty-One. And Today host Dave Garroway didn't make the show of NBC hiring him that the film showed. NBC did offer Van Doren a three-year contract as a consultant on education and public service . . . but the network also tried to press him into service as a newsbreak writer and White House reporter. By his own admission Van Doren wasn't a whip at either, but finally NBC assigned him to segments on Garroway's Sunday afternoon show Wide, Wide World, a cultural program more up Van Doren's alley, and that led to Garroway making Van Doren Today's cultural and literary correspondent, a job he held until after he confessed to Congress his role in the quiz show scandal.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2020, 06:05:35 pm by EasyAce »


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.

Offline EasyAce

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #10 on: February 12, 2020, 08:07:09 pm »
The exact same thing that the Astros were doing is happening in every major league park in this country and Canada but HOUSTON is in flyover country!
They were the first team to get the whistle blown on them. I won't be shocked if they're not the last aside from the Red Sox, either. And I'd still like to know what the hell a team as talented as those Astros was really thinking when they decided they needed to resort to illicit from off-the-field electronic sign-stealing.

But I don't know that every major league team in every major league park was doing it . . . and you don't know, either. Not without that crazy little thing called evidence. (Or, another whistleblower.) And it also turns out that the Astros' espionage was well suspected around baseball from 2017 forward, to the point where as many as ten teams complained to baseball's government about it to no avail, apparently.


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.

Online Bigun

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #11 on: February 12, 2020, 08:11:42 pm »
They were the first team to get the whistle blown on them. I won't be shocked if they're not the last aside from the Red Sox, either. And I'd still like to know what the hell a team as talented as those Astros was really thinking when they decided they needed to resort to illicit from off-the-field electronic sign-stealing.

But I don't know that every major league team in every major league park was doing it . . . and you don't know, either. Not without that crazy little thing called evidence. (Or, another whistleblower.) And it also turns out that the Astros' espionage was well suspected around baseball from 2017 forward, to the point where as many as ten teams complained to baseball's government about it to no avail, apparently.

Yep! Mucho complaining and Flyover Houston was selected to take the fall!

I'm done!
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
- J. R. R. Tolkien

Offline truth_seeker

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #12 on: February 12, 2020, 08:24:36 pm »
I recall posting this scenario right after the scandal broke... that there had to be relievers today who are

Careers and/or lives turned upside down because the ASTROS could see all your cards.

And deservedly, unless the players themselves seek a meaningful penalty.

Yes, I mean ML players themselves need to insist on punishments.

Otherwise I will rack it up as just one more institution, gone to hell in a basket.

"God must love the common man, he made so many of them.�  Abe Lincoln

Offline GrouchoTex

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #13 on: February 12, 2020, 08:49:33 pm »
The latest thing that has come out, is Beltran telling the Astros they were "behind the times" when he got there.
Meaning where he had come from, they we "up to speed"?

Going backwards as a player from the Astros in 2017, the teams he played for were:

The Rangers 2016
The Yankees 2014-2016
The Cardinals 2012-2013
The Giants 2011
The Mets 2005-2011
The Astros 2004
The Royals 1998-2004

Where did Beltran learn to get with the times?

Online Lando Lincoln

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #14 on: February 13, 2020, 12:38:33 pm »
The exact same thing that the Astros were doing is happening in every major league park in this country and Canada but HOUSTON is in flyover country!

@Bigun

You and I agree on most things.  This?  Maybe not.  This is something more than the Boys of Summer being the Boys of Summer.  To me it is, anyway.

Now, I will go back to agreeing with you on most things...  :cool:
There are some among us who live in rooms of experience we can never enter.
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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #15 on: February 13, 2020, 02:21:31 pm »
@Bigun

You and I agree on most things.  This?  Maybe not.  This is something more than the Boys of Summer being the Boys of Summer.  To me it is, anyway.

Now, I will go back to agreeing with you on most things...  :cool:

Hell @Lando Lincoln I sometimes argue with myself!   888high58888

I stand by what I said on this.
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
- J. R. R. Tolkien

Offline AllThatJazzZ

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #16 on: February 14, 2020, 04:04:34 am »
@AllThatJazzZ

Beware that the film Quiz Show badly bowdlerised the actual doings and undoings of the actual scandal. Which may be typical Hollywood, never letting, you know, the truth get in the way of a good piece of filmmaking and story telling, but . . .

* Richard Goodwin had nothing to do with the scandal until it was practically going to the Congressional hearings.

* Goodwin also never actually met Charles Van Doren until long after Van Doren's run on Twenty-One was finished and he'd been part of The Today Show for a little over a year.

* Herb Stempel did tank the movie question by answering with On the Waterfront---and his favourite film was actually Marty, the correct answer to the question he tanked---but it's not the question he lost the critical game with.

* Charles Van Doren was anything but a bachelor during his Twenty-One run: he was engaged to his wife-to-be at the time. (They married during the height of Van Doren's television popularity in 1957 and remained married until Van Doren's death last year.)

* Van Doren revealed many years after the scandal that, contrary to the film's depiction of his interest in quiz shows, he didn't even own a television set at the time. He met Twenty-One fixer Albert Freedman through a mutual friend and let Freedman persuade him to try out for another show Freedman's boss Dan Enright produced: Tic-Tac-Dough.

* Herb Stempel first blew the whistle on Twenty-One's rigging in 1957, after Van Doren defeated him. The film compressed the time of the scandal into a single year; the Congressional hearings actually began in 1959.

* Van Doren's life was far from ruined by the scandal. He became an editor at Praeger Books and, especially, the Encyclopedia Britannica, authored a few books, and in time put the lie to the film's closing credits note that "he never taught again"---he and his wife became literary professors at the University of Connecticut Torrington from 2005 until the campus closed in 2016.

* Stempel didn't lose his Twenty-One winnings either by gambling with bookies or by investing in a sham Florida land scheme---he was actually never really paid his winnings at all. Freedman and Enright actually forced him to sign documents agreeing to be paid a fraction of what he might actually win, in addition to dangling the hope of a television career of his own in front of him.

* The woman who defeated Van Doren, Vivienne Nearing, wasn't exactly a stranger to Van Doren: he'd beaten her husband earlier in his Twenty-One run. Mrs. Nearing was an attorney who was later disbarred after she pleaded guilty to perjury before a New York grand jury investigating the quiz show riggings before Congress got into the act. She eventually restored her legal career and died of cancer in 2007 at 81.

* Irony of ironies: Herb Stempel fell to a teacher on Twenty-One . . . but in due course he became a teacher himself, teaching high school social studies. The film's closing credits note said only that he returned to his job with the New York City Transit Authority.

* In 2008, Charles Van Doren surprised the country when he finally wrote publicly about his quiz show experience, an essay in The New Yorker called "All the Answers." Interestingly, when he admitted he burst out laughing over Stempel's insults against him in Quiz Show, he conflated Stempel calling him "Charles Van F@cking Doren!" and "Charles Van Moron" on separate occasions into the single "Charles Van F@cking Moron."

* Van Doren also didn't go on The Today Show right off the bat when he first lost Twenty-One. And Today host Dave Garroway didn't make the show of NBC hiring him that the film showed. NBC did offer Van Doren a three-year contract as a consultant on education and public service . . . but the network also tried to press him into service as a newsbreak writer and White House reporter. By his own admission Van Doren wasn't a whip at either, but finally NBC assigned him to segments on Garroway's Sunday afternoon show Wide, Wide World, a cultural program more up Van Doren's alley, and that led to Garroway making Van Doren Today's cultural and literary correspondent, a job he held until after he confessed to Congress his role in the quiz show scandal.

@EasyAce

Thank you for your detailed breakdown of the quiz show matter. A little TMI for this gal whose only point was that deception was going on and it was hurtful to others. A broken trust is hard to recover from.

Jim Crane botched the attempt to mend things with that anemic press conference this morning. Whoever orchestrated that pitiful showing should be fired. The players' one-on-one interviews were far better -- especially the clips I saw on local TV that, curiously, weren't aired on MLBTV.



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Offline EasyAce

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Re: A former pitcher takes the cheaters to court
« Reply #17 on: February 14, 2020, 05:35:19 am »
@EasyAce

Thank you for your detailed breakdown of the quiz show matter. A little TMI for this gal whose only point was that deception was going on and it was hurtful to others. A broken trust is hard to recover from.
Yes it is, but the film Quiz Show either omits or bowdlerises the actuality of that scandal, hence my details. Getting the real story of the quiz show scandal from the film Quiz Show is like getting Lou Gehrig's full true story from Pride of the Yankees, another example of great filmmaking while playing very fast and loose with the facts. In the case of Gehrig, if Hell's Angels president Sonny Barger could say of their press coverage, "All that bullsh@t, hell, ain't the truth bad enough for 'em," Gehrig could plausibly have said of Pride of the Yankees, "All that bullsh@t, hell, ain't the truth good enough for 'em?"

Jim Crane botched the attempt to mend things with that anemic press conference this morning. Whoever orchestrated that pitiful showing should be fired.
Either that or the poor sap who orchestrated it should demand his money back for his advanced degree.  wink777


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.