Today is a post that is something of a different kind of vintage or TBT than is the norm on The Left Chapter!
As a big fan of baseball generally and the Toronto Blue Jays specifically I was thrilled recently to stumble across an old, pocket-sized 1988 schedule for the team.
1988 was an interesting year for the Jays. In 1985 they had won their first American League East Championship and in 1987 they had looked sure to win a second. They were 3 1/2 games up on the Detroit Tigers with only a week to go in the season...but they blew it. They lost seven in a row including two final games to the Tigers themselves and were knocked out of the playoffs.
In 1988 they ended up in third in the AL East with a record of 87-75. It ended up being the last season for Jimmy Williams as manager. He was replaced by Cito Gaston the following year. Gaston, of course, would lead them to greatness with two back-to-back World Series wins in the early 1990s.
1988 was also the last full season the Jays played in the terrible Exhibition Stadium, with its awful sightlines and ludicrous outfield seats. It was a stadium that had not been built for baseball and it showed! The Skydome opened mid-way through the 1989 season.
George Bell -- who had something of a love-hate relationship with the Toronto media and fans -- is on the cover of the schedule having won the American League Most Valuable Player award in 1987.
For the record, on this day in 1988 exactly 30 years ago, the Blue Jays played the Texas Rangers. It was a Tuesday night game at home. The Jays lost 7-6.
(Click on images to enlarge)
The giveaways are a real throwback with brand sponsors like
Bowlerama, Hostess, Dominion and events like a "bring your radio" day.
The seating layout of the truly awful Exhibition Stadium. I have many, many fond memories of going to games there as a kid and teen...but no nostalgia for the venue itself!
This week's list of articles, news items and opinion pieces that I see as must reads if you are looking for a roundup that should be of interest to The Left Chapter readers.
This list covers the week of July 30 - August 6. It is generally in order of the date of the article's release.
I am outraged by the position the Trudeau government has taken with regard to the escalating conflict in Venezuela. Once again the government has condemned Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, expressing serious concerns over the government’s plan for a Constituent Assembly, saying it’s “contrary to Venezuela’s Constitution”. This is not only a flagrant interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation but is also factually incorrect. Article 347 and 348 of the Bolivarian Constitution clearly outlines its legitimacy and establishes the president’s right to convoke a National Constituent Assembly. Read and sign the petition
Venezuelans voted Sunday for representatives of the National Constituent Assembly, amid what the government has called a targeted media campaign to destabilize the country and destroy its sovereignty.
International media outlets rushed to discredit the vote, sharing grossly misrepresentative accounts of the historic electoral process. Read the full article. 6) Why the lack of Indian and African faces in Dunkirk matters Sunny Singh, The Guardian
What a surprise that Nigel Farage has endorsed the new fantasy-disguised-as-historical war film, Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan’s movie is an inadvertently timely, thinly veiled Brexiteer fantasy in which plucky Britons heroically retreat from the dangerous shores of Europe. Most importantly, it pushes the narrative that it was Britain as it exists today – and not the one with a global empire – that stood alone against the “European peril”. Read the full article.
7) Dunkirk, the War and the Amnesia of the Empire Yasmin Khan, The New York Times
Two and a half million soldiers drawn from Britain’s empire in South Asia fought in World War II. But they are missing from many British commemorations and accounts of the war — an absence reinforced by Christopher Nolan’s new film “Dunkirk,” which does not feature any of the Indian soldiers who were present at the battle. Read the full article.
State attorneys are dismissing dozens of cases in Baltimore after reviewing a video that appears to show a police officer planting evidence at a crime scene while two other officers look on. Read the full article.
People with disabilities and their caregivers are at risk for being made to say yes to medical assistance in dying when they don't want to. Read the full article.
Both Lives Matter has got away with a misleading ad. But using the language of human rights can’t hide its true agenda: subjugating Northern Ireland’s women. Read the full article.
The statistics are as shocking as the "horrific" crisis they measure, British Columbia's new mental health minister, Judy Darcy, warned Thursday. Read the full article.
In anticipation of a fall book tour for his new novel, Seven Matches, Joseph Boyden is back in the pages of Maclean’s magazine with an article restating his claim of First Nations ancestry, and anchoring that in the results of a DNA test. Read the full article.
HBO’s prospective series Confederate will offer an alternative history of post-Civil War America. It will ask the question, according to co-creator David Benioff, “What would the world have looked like … if the South had won?” A swirl of virtual protests and op-eds have greeted this proposed premise. In response, HBO has expressed “great respect” for its critics but also said it hopes that they will “reserve judgment until there is something to see.” Read the full article.
Galen Weston Jr., the mild-mannered, bespectacled grocery-store magnate you may recognize from President’s Choice commercials, is a thoroughly Canadian one-percenter. He is thoroughly Canadian in the sense that he isn’t flashy or grandiose like Richard Branson, and he doesn’t tout the benefits of vampirism or plot to destroy the free press, à la real-life super villain Peter Thiel. He is thoroughly of the one percent in the sense that his family is worth somewhere in the ballpark of $9 billion, he himself earned at least $5 million last year, and, despite that generous—one might even say obscene—level of wealth, he remains staunchly opposed to paying his employees enough money to live on. Read the full article.
This summer growing numbers of my clients in Toronto have stayed in jail because there were not shelter beds. Even Seaton House has put in cots. In one of the richest cities in the world we are keeping people in jail before trial because we cannot provide them a bed in a warehouse as their address. Read the full article.
October and November saw 44 posts published on The Left Chapter. In terms of hits this period saw the highest number, again, for any two month period in our history!
Our top post for the month was also one of the most widely read and shared in our history.
Thanks again to all our readers and contributors.
Without any further ado the top six posts from the two months, in terms of hits, are:
After a generation of retreat that saw its abandoning of the welfare state and of any meaningful advocacy for working people and much of the middle class in the United States, it can now truly be said that the wages of liberalism is Trump.
The victory of Donald Trump in the American election signifies a number of things many of which are profoundly dangerous.
In what is one of several "let them eat cake" moments made by members of the governing Liberal caucus lately, this past Saturday Finance Minister Bill Morneau threw young Canadian workers under the proverbial bus when he said that they should get used to the 'reality' of precarious employment.
By now I doubt there is a person in North America who has not heard about the great Beer Can Toss Toronto Blue Jays scandal of 2016 after some (likely inebriated) twit launched an overpriced beverage at Baltimore outfielder Hyun Soo Kim during the Wild Card playoff game Tuesday night.
It was an ugly incident that could have resulted in Kim's serious injury.
In what has to be one of the single most demented and offensive examples of some bizarre version of pseudo-liberal 'impartiality' in recent memory, the good folks at McMaster University have seen to fit to remove anti-Nazi posters from the campus on the grounds that "McMaster's goal is to ensure a welcoming and inclusive community."
Yes, you read that correctly. McMaster University, it would seem, wants "to ensure a welcoming and inclusive community" including, apparently, for neo-Nazis!
You would think that the 'brain trust' running the show in the Ontario New Democratic Party (ONDP) would have learned something from its disastrous attempt to try to court the right wing populist vote in the 2014 provincial election.
But apparently if it has learned any lessons they were the wrong ones!
By now I doubt there is a person in North America who has not heard about the great Beer Can Toss Toronto Blue Jays scandal of 2016 after some (likely inebriated) twit launched an overpriced beverage at Baltimore outfielder Hyun Soo Kim during the Wild Card playoff game Tuesday night.
It was an ugly incident that could have resulted in Kim's serious injury.
The beer can toss caused much outrage and rightly so. It also caused the city collectively a great deal of embarrassment, especially given that Toronto baseball fans have a fairly bad reputation to begin with.
One group of baseball fans pitched in to buy an ad on Facebook apologizing to the people of Baltimore. Mayor John Tory managed to find a moment to divert from his quest for fictional "efficiencies" in driving down city department budgets to, with his usual clarity and eloquence, denounce the evildoer as a "loon ball". He further noted that it was "just the behavior that was exhibited by one person".
Major League Baseball itself called for the beer can hooligan to be "prosecuted to the extent available" while Toronto police released a photo of the alleged offender and called for him to come forward. He subsequently did, while denying all wrongdoing, and now a section of the internet is consumed by watching blurry video over-and-over again claiming they have identified the "real shooter" as if this is some sad version of JFK or the X-Files.
There is no denying that, while hardly unprecedented in any ballpark, throwing anything onto the field of play or in the area of players during a sports game is serious, stupid, dangerous and boorish and that any louts caught doing it should face some consequence. In almost all cases, given it will usually prove the alcohol fueled momentary bad impulse of someone, this will and should end up being dealt with by a stadium ban and possibly anger management classes or community service, especially as it is unlikely that the person who did it will turn out to have been a hardened criminal.
But seemingly overshadowed by all of this is the fact that several sources reported that multiple fans hurled racist slurs at both Kim and his teammate Adam Jones who rushed to Kim's side and defense after the incident with the beer can.
CBC Radio's sports commentator reported hearing racist calls at the game and you can see fans yelling at Jones in videos of the night.
It is not so easy to try to claim this as simply a stupid or ignorant act by a single fan as, by all accounts, this involved many fans.
Canadians have long liked to believe that we do not have the kind of problems with racism that exist in the United States, and yet racist incidents like the one that happened Tuesday are all too common and institutionalized racism on the part of Canadian police and the Canadian state have a long and ongoing violent and oppressive history.
Press Progress detailed many recent and disturbing racist incidents in July in an article ""Meanwhile in Canada," Canadians are forgetting Canada has its own problems with racism".
A poll released on the day of the playoff game showed that Canadians were, in fact, significantly less embracing of cultural diversity as opposed to assimilation than Americans. 68% of Canadians said immigrants needed to do more to "fit in" while only 53% of Americans felt the same way. While 47% of Americans said that our society "should encourage cultural diversity", only 32% of Canadians think that.
This should be a truly worrying statistic for those who think a racist demagogue like Trump is impossible north of the border.
So while the focus has been on the search for one hooligan, it really should be on the reality that a number of Toronto baseball fans were quick to use racist taunts against the players on an opposing baseball team, something I think most Canadians want to pretend only happens at European soccer matches.
A person tossing a projectile at a player is very bad, but easy to explain away and relatively socially inconsequential. Many people tossing hateful racist terms at players, however, is ultimately more dangerous, much less easy for those so inclined to try to write off, and a symptom of something far, far worse.
