Word: smacks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...suicide squeeze is cool, and the double steal is all right, but a guy who can smack the bejeezus out of a ball--that's the guy for us. Like most great things American, the home run deconstructs strategy with a beautiful act of aggression. So Mark McGwire, 250 lbs. of muscle in a game full of the fat and unfit, doesn't really shock when he sends the ball more than 500 ft. And Ken Griffey Jr., hat backwards, grin cocksure, seems almost bored as he gently taps homers over the fence. The crowd expects it, the crowd gets...
...similarly unshowy on the mound. Maddux doesn't get tons of strikeouts (not even 200 in a year; the record is 383). He doesn't pitch a lot of shutouts. In other words, he doesn't starve batters--he just serves them table scraps, stuff they can't really smack. Lots of his pitches dribble into the infield. Almost none fly out of the park (only five this year and none in his five face-offs against McGwire). Jim Palmer, a Hall of Fame pitcher, calls Maddux "a master at late movement," a baseballese way of saying his pitches dance...
...through the managed-care red tape for a pair of eyeglasses or a simple ear infection. What would happen, they wonder, if they or one of their loved ones became desperately ill and needed serious--and expensive--medical attention? Who would prevail if their medical needs ran smack into gate-keepers of an HMO focused primarily on reducing costs? The horror stories coming back from the front lines are not encouraging. A sampling...
...sanitation worker named Simon Grim (the glumly funny James Urbaniak) is literally lying in the street waiting for...something. Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan, pinwheeling raffish charisma) has everything, and too much of it. He swaggers, smokes, guzzles beer, grabs life by the butt and gives it a fat smack. He makes abrupt love to Simon's morbid mother (Maria Porter) and bored sister (Parker Posey). He is, he tells Simon, an artist, the author of a huge, unpublished tome called My Confession; and he encourages Simon to lift himself from lethargy and create his own masterpiece...
...have the rest of our lives to go to LL Cool J concerts. But when else do students have the opportunity to throw themselves onto a giant wall of Velcro, or smack each other over the head with giant foam boxing gloves? The corraling of legal-aged students into a special cage for beer drinkers may not have been the most aesthetically pleasing solution to the problem of providing alcohol, but turning the event into a "BYOB affair," as the staff suggest, is a recipe for disaster. And the MAC Quad was the perfect location for the festivities. Had they...