State Of the (Jays) Nation

My friend, Cito...not really.

At the end of a less-than-illustrious baseball season (for Blue Jays fans), I’m going to review the year that was and comment on the year that is to come based on the events of the last 48 hours.

Citogate.  Fox Sports News (which I trust more than Fox News) reported yesterday that a ‘near-mutiny’ has existed in the Blue Jays clubhouse and unnamed players have insisted that due to a lack of communication, ‘old-school’ style managing and general negativity, two-time World Series winning manager Cito Gaston has to be let go by next season.  Cito has expressed incredulity at this and has been ‘blindsided’ (his own words) and while yesterday, rumblings were still being heard off the record, today the players have had an about-face and it appears now everyone is just peachy about having Cito back next year.  What happened?  A closed door meeting?  An edict from on high?  No, apparently a clubhouse meeting was scheduled but called off and head office had its own fish to fry (more on that later).  No, I think everyone is still unhappy but no one expected the story to leak so now those same ‘no ones’ don’t want to look like whiny babies complaining that Daddy is mean to them when they don’t do their chores.  Let’s be honest, with the exception of a couple on the roster, Adam Lind, Aaron Hill, Roy Halladay and perhaps Marco Scutaro, no one had performed to specs the last couple of months and I find it a bit disingenuous to blame a man who sits on a bench and watches YOU play and who through the last half of last season and the first two months of this one provided a glowing win-loss record, 78-51 (in a season this long, it’s easy to forget that the Jays were an American-League-leading 27-14 through May).  Yes, Cito has a different approach.  He lets guys work through their difficulties on the field, often to the groans of the fans.  He has a quiet, almost hands-off approach so it’s easy to disregard his wisdom (as Travis Snider found out early on this season to his regret) but he must know something because he….wins….games! (his managerial record is 809-758).  Well, it appears that Cito will be around for next year but one person who won’t be is J.P. Ricciardi.

J.P. Ricciardi, the general manager of the Jays for the last 8 years, was fired today, one year shy of the completion of his contract.  Ricciardi came over from the Oakland A’s where he served under Billy Beane who touted the idea of ‘smallball’, taking the focus from home runs and batting averages to on-base percentages and moving men around the bases.  This theory worked well enough to win the A’s a World Series and bring Ricciardi to the attention of the cost-cutting new owner of the Jays, Ted Rogers.  He was hired in 2001 to bring this new attitude to the Jays clubhouse and so Ricciardi presented his Five Year Plan (which, by the way, we are in the 8th year of).  I need to make it clear that I was not a fan of J.P. Ricciardi.  He seemed arrogant and rude and the list of his poor decisions and signings (Wells, Rios, Burnett, Ryan, Thomas) is long and undistinguished.  I’m not particularly sad to see him go but….I do feel sorry for him.  Why, you ask?  Because, so long as the Jays are in the American League East, so long as the Jays have almost forty games a season against the Yankees and Red Sox, teams with a seemingly endless pool of financial resources to draw from, so long as Rogers is content to keep our salary cap at under one hundred millions dollars, chances are no general manager will be able to lead this team to a World Series berth (I say ‘chances are’ because last year the Tampa Bay Rays, with a salary less than half of the Jays, did just that…against those same teams.  So there is a chance).  And when the team fails to reach that pinnacle of baseball, there will be anger and animosity against ANY general manager who, the fans feel, can’t get the team there.  It’s inherently unfair but a part of life in the A.L. East.  So, to Ricciardi’s replacement, former assistant general manager Alex Anthopoulos, good luck!  You’ll need it (and a thick skin…though not as thick as you would need in New York or Boston, so thank your lucky stars you’re not there.)  I can only hope that you are more level-headed than Ricciardi, with more media patience and tact.  You’re Canadian so already chances are you’re a nice guy (not too nice though, I hope).  Oh, and good luck with the whole Halladay thing.  Really.

Oh, and get rid of Wells.  It’ll help you in the long run.  Really.

The Death Of Classic DVDs Will Be the Death Of Me

I LOVE classic movies.  When a new one is released on DVD or shows up at the local rep theatre, my excitement is palpable.  People always ask me if I have Turner Classic Movies in my cable selection and I tell them that if I did, I would never leave the house (the other side of that coin is that due to my…’involvement’ with a local video store that has one of the largest rental collections in Canada, from whom I receive free rentals, we only have basic cable, which doesn’t include TCM).  Now, when I say ‘classic’, I don’t mean The Breakfast Club or Happy Gilmore.  I don’t even mean The Godfather or Rocky.  I mean black and white.  I mean movies that are older than your parents (in some cases, your grandparents).  I get all aflutter over movies with Errol Flynn, Jean Arthur and Cary Grant in them.  I become giddy as a schoolgirl when I think of movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Preston Sturges.  I actually know who Zasu Pitts, Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton are…and I like them!  When I say, “They don’t make them like they used to”, I mean it.  But my excitement came to a screeching halt a few weeks ago, thanks to an article in ‘Canada’s newsmagazine’, Maclean’s. 

On August 6, Maclean’s published an article entitled “Say goodbye to big screen classics”, (http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/08/06/say-goodbye-to-big-screen-classics/) which espoused the theory that classic movies on DVD would become as rare as the dodo, or a Toronto sports team winning a championship.  Through interviews with a smattering of highly placed studio execs, the story developed that studios, due to a downturn in sales, would be virtually discontinuing the release of classics, other than huge hits like The Wizard Of Oz and Gone With the Wind.  Even a ’boutique’ distribution company like Criterion would be paring back their schedule with more of a focus on modern film.  Well, I have a word or three to say on this…

I work in the trenches, retail trenches, that is.  As the sole person in charge of the ordering for one of the largest video stores in Canada (8,000 titles for rent, 10,000 titles for sale when the average Rogers and Blockbuster carries 1000-1500), I have a daily view into the soul of the DVD consumer and most of the time I don’t like what I see.  There has always and will always be crap.  The term ‘B movie’ came from the time when you went to the theatre for the evening, and saw two movies, the ‘big’ title, an ‘A’ title and a lower budget (and usually quality) ‘B’ title.  So yes, there will always be the Adam Sandler fan (don’t think he’s the first to make a fortune from lower-brow comedy…before him there was Chevy Chase, Jerry Lewis, Don Knotts, Lucille Ball, Arthur Lake (Blondie), Three Stooges and Fatty Arbuckle). 

It seems clear to me though that the quality of these classics are much higher than what today’s studios are putting out.  I don’t know if it’s the old studio ‘contract’ system which basically forced most actors and crew to appear in or work on whatever the studio heads told them to.  There wasn’t any of the script readings by actors and agents to decide if the potential movie fit his or her image (the studio head told YOU what fit your image).  You were on a weekly salary and you did what the bosses told you (which doesn’t sound all that different from my job, except for the pay scale).  A real difference is that while the Warners, David Selznick and Harry Cohn were businessmen first, they knew and loved movies while today’s execs are mostly MBA graduates who think that the French New Wave is Depeche Mode.  William Goldman famously said that in Hollywood, no one knows anything and that is more true today than ever. 

Yes, I admit that there is some good stuff coming out of Hollywood today (this year alone we’ve so far had Up, (500) Days of Summer, Away We Go, Inglourious Basterds and District 9) but most of this is coming from independent filmmakers or those who work outside the system with that system’s blessing.  I’ve already written a blog on the death of Hollywood (http://argento2665.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/the-blockbuster-and-the-death-of-hollywood/) so I don’t want to get back on that soapbox but I can’t help but think these issues are intrinsically tied together.  If we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it and if someone removes that history, we have nothing to learn from.  Classic DVD’s are that history and I would hate to see a day when I’m forced to resort to trading with other movie buffs on the information superhighway for a fourth generation VHS dub of Sullivan’s Travels (a movie about movies that will change the way you think about movies).  I fear though that day is closer than we all think.