Ty Cobb Was Always One of the Blackest Marks ON bASEBALL. So Why Are People Trying to Rehabilitate Him?

 

More than any other professional sport, baseball has always cared more about the perception of the game then the reality. During the 20^th century Major League Baseball went out of its way to preserve the image of its players were no more imperfect then their plaques in Cooperstown.

They did everything to make sure no one knew what Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio were like when they were playing. When Ball Four was published Commissioner Bowie Kuhn knew the best way to make sure that the truth about the dirty secrets were hidden was to argue that it produced a slanted picture of  Mickey Mantle – the most idolized player for twenty years –  and that author Jim Bouton was burned in effigy as opposed to baseball’s practiced. And when Jose Canseco tried to blow the whistle on what was going on with steroids in the early 2000s, baseball essentially turned on the messenger even though it was an open secret what was going on to anyone with eyes.

The sole exception to that rule during this period was Ty Cobb, arguably the greatest single hitter to ever play the game and without question the most controversial for his behavior on and off the field. Baseball has always gone out of its way to have its players be good for the image of the game and Cobb always made that difficult. This was the common view while he was an active player though the press did what it usually did to cover it up. Once he was gone from the game they could just have him show up for certain occasions and it wasn’t much of a problem. But after he died in June of 1961, more than any other legend to that point the writers and his contemporaries did more to lay bare the idea of just how hard it had been to play around Cobb.

Well before Al Stump’s unvarnished biography came out in 1994, the majority of the games greatest historians had made it very clear that, despite being one of the greatest players in history, Cobb was very close to the devil. Daniel Okrent would write in his classic book Baseball Anecdotes that he was having trouble squaring the great player with the personality and when he was interviewed for Ken Burns’ documentary in 1993 he made it clear he thought Cobb was ‘the great black mark on baseball” and that “in his totality, I think Ty Cobb is an embarrassment to baseball.” This was the strongest comment by the scholars Burns and Ward gathered but it was an opinion shared by such historians as George Will and John Thorn. Bill James had done his own research on the subject and Charles Alexander had dealt with the majority of the issues well before Stump’s version came out.

Almost every story that Stump related in his biography was independently verified by one or more of these scholars during the filming of Burns’s documentary. Most of them do involve the more racist incidents of his career but there are countless other stories told in other books that don’t directly deal with Cobb. Donald Honig make it clear in many of his histories of the game (much of which were based on interviews with men who played with or against Cobb at the time) just how much trouble Cobb could be when he was playing exclusively against white men and Robert Creamer has verified some of his worst aspects in his own biography of Babe Ruth in 1975.

It’s hard for anyone to look at this evidence and try to say that Ty Cobb was just misunderstood. And yet that seems to be what Charles Leershen has done in his 2016 biography of Cobb titled A Terrible Beauty. I haven’t read this book (nor, I should add, have I read Stump’s) but based on glancing at its pages in a book store and some of his own articles written on it Leershen has apparently gone out of his way to try and argue that Cobb wasn’t as bad as everyone said he was.

To be more specific, his big villain is Al Stump who he goes out of his way is the author of the most prominent distortions of Cobb as we see him today in his 1994 biography. I can’t say for sure if he’s decided that every single person who did independent research decades earlier, and came to the same conclusion as Stump (much of it well before it was published) but I’m inclined to think that’s the revisionist in their natural habitat.

Much of those who try to argue that Stump is the villain for making Cobb’s perception in history base it on the fact that not long after it was published Ron Shelton made a film called Cobb and that officially made it canon. The fact that the film received mixed reviews and grossed less than a million dollars domestically would seem to argue against the idea that America’s perception changed with that film but Hollywood has always been an easy scapegoat for professional sports and I suspect that’s what Leershen and fellow Cobb apologists base this on. I’ve seen the film a few times and as either a work of art or a work of baseball history is a sorely lacking; if anything it paints a better perception of Cobb that what I’d previously read about him.

The kindest view of Cobb’s attitude towards African-Americans that even the best apologists can come up with is that it was the accepted view at the time. That is true as far as so many of his contemporaries and major league baseball’s attitude in particular towards blacks. However it should be added Cobb held to those views well past the time they were held and while he said certain things about players in public, he generally denounced both integration and all the major changes in the game from the day he left it and while he was still playing it.

It doesn’t excuse the horrible things he did on the field including nearly beating a disabled fan who called him a racial epitaph during a 1912 game. This is the kind of behavior, I should mention, that the world accused Allan Iverson of having gone too far when he did it during an NBA game. Cobb almost certainly should have been banned for that alone. And when Leershen tries to argue that his teammates supported him by going on a one-day player strike, it says far more about their own racial attitudes than the fact that they supported Cobb. Leershen seems to want to have it both ways on this, and he doesn’t seem willing to do that. This is the traditional mindset of the revisionist.

And its worth noting Leershen’s book has no formal bibliography and only two paragraphs on secondary sources. The first includes works on Cobb (with further bashing of Stump); the latter just shows other books he consulted. His endnotes are argued as a historian as a single paragraph of text with page numbers and brief commentary with a very brief comment where material came from. Considering that Leershen is writing his book a full half-century after Stump’s book and all previous witnesses are dead, he bears an added responsibility to have done his due diligence on his work. If you’re going to argue you have radical evidence deconstructing the history of Cobb you have an obligation to show your work and you can’t just argue your predecessors were wrong simply because you disagree with them. Otherwise you’re just doing the kind of cherry picking that Leershen is accusing Stump is doing but for a different end.

But perhaps the most telling argument that Cobb doesn’t deserve to be looked at in a kindly light comes from a book that was, in many ways, inspired by Cobb’s passing. In 1961 when Ty Cobb died Lawrence Ritter thought it was important that someone “should do something and do it quickly” to record for history the story of baseball:

“Ty Cobb symbolized America from the turn of the century until World War I,” he writes in the forward to The Glory of Their Times in 1966 “perhaps better than any other single figure, just like Babe Ruth symbolized America between the wars and, in so many ways, Mantle, Mays and Koufax do today. It was obvious the only way to do this was to take a tape recorder and go and talk to as many old-time players as one could find and ask them what it was like.”

So in what is still one of the most ambitious historical projects of all time Ritter traveled more than 75,000 miles across the United States and Canada to do just that. The project took nearly four years to complete and during that period Ritter talked to twenty-six former ballplayers who had played from the turn of the century until World War II. There were a few Hall-of-Famers in this group and a few ballplayers became Hall-of-Famers (some of whom were very marginal cases) but by and large he spent more time talking with the more obscure ones who even the oldest inhabitant would not have heard of and those today would do well to look up. And in 1966 The Glory of Their Times was published and very quickly became one of the landmark books about baseball as well as one of the best ever written. (Quite a bit of the material, I should add, is quoted in Baseball in some forms.)

And decades after they had left the field, these men were more than willing to talk about what they had done and seen. And a lot of them had things to say about the men they played with and against. And almost to a man, they are as best conflicted about Ty Cobb and in many ways the grudges they held against him never went away. This is best expressed by men who played with him.

Davy Jones actually played in the Tigers Outfield with Cobb for seven years, including the three consecutive seasons, 1907-1909, that the Tigers won American League Pennants. Here is what he said about Cobb:

“Trouble was he had such a rotten disposition that it was damn hard to be his friend. I was probably his best friend on the club. I used to stick up for him, sit and talk with him on long train trips, try to understand the man.”

Ty didn’t have a sense of humor, you see. Especially, he could never laugh at himself. Consequently he took a lot of things the wrong way…He was one of the greatest players who ever lived and yet he had so few friends. I always felt sorry of him.

Arguing about his disposition and why so few people liked him Jones is honest enough to admit “he brought a lot of it on himself. A lot of times it just seems he was asking for trouble.”

Indeed on one occasion when Cobb was in a slump and missed the hit and run sign, Cobb was so angry “I’m not going to play with him.” The next day he went to Frank Navin, the President of the club, and demanded Jones be traded. Navin set him straight and told Jones later. “Well that shows what kind of person Cobb could be. Picking on me of all people! Practically his only friend on the club.” He didn’t hold it against Cobb but you can just see an eighty-year old Jones shaking his head in wonder at this.

The next chapter deals with the third man in that outfield Sam Crawford. Crawford, it should be mentioned, was one of the greatest men to ever play the game. He had a lifetime batting average of .309, managed 2961 hits (it was harder to find records of how many hits a player got back then and drove in 1523 runs. But he also holds a record that will surely never be broken: the most triples by a major league player with 309. He played his entire career in the deadball era (he retired in 1917) so hitting home runs was never a necessary strength. That said he was one of the best of that era averaging 97 in his career and once leading the National League with 16. Cobb once said that if Crawford had played his career in the 1920s, he would have hit at least four hundred home runs.

Crawford’s entry alone is worth purchasing the book, as he talks about how he played against such greats as Wee Willie Keeler, with the eccentric pitcher Rube Waddell in the minors, facing off against Ed Walsh and Walter Johnson and namechecks such memorable figures as Robert Ingersoll and Santayana. He played twelve years in the same outfield as Cobb. But it says something that he thinks the greatest player of all time was Honus Wagner.

He goes out of his way not to run down Cobb, makes it clear he never tried to spike anybody and just how great a hitter he was. But he’s very clear on his issues with Cobb, particularly his argument about the hazing he claimed he took as a rookie:

Every rookie takes a little hazing, but most of them just take it and laugh. Cobb took it the wrong way. He came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little razzing into a life-or-death struggle. He came up from the South you know, and he was still fighting the Civil War. As far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees before he even met us.”

And this is the attitude of Cobb’s teammates years after the fact. During his rookie season Cobb was playing center field and the leftfield Matty McIntyre wasn’t playing deep enough. The next ball was in the gap and to prove a point Cobb didn’t budge and the ball went for a home run against Ed Siever, another tormentor and they nearly came to blows. Mcintyre made it clear that they were planning to run Cobb of the team.

During the 1908 Pennant race, he was bloody in a brawl with catcher Charley Schmidt the Tiger Catcher. At the end of the 1907 season, despite having won his first batting title and the Tigers their first pennant, the management considered trading him. During the 1908 season, in the midst of a pennant race, he left the team for a week in August to get married and his teammates were annoyed that he wasn’t penalized for it. They let it go after he won his second batting title and the second straight pennant, but it never stopped his being a one-man unit of disharmony.

Leershen acknowledges this in the book but seems willing to excuse this, saying that by having fought with Cobb that makes him wrong by default. He tries to argue that he was in favor of integration because he said good things about it, once, in 1952, a quarter of a century after he retired. As  I recall during that same period a lot of people in the South said that there were ‘plenty of good Negroes” but that didn’t mean they personally wanted them in their lunch counters and schools. Besides that just means he said it for the press. This is a man who had no problem called Ruth the N-word when the two of them were playing together.

I will acknowledge Ty Cobb is one of the greatest players of all time: the statistics just don’t seem to do him justice even in the record book. I don’t know how long it’s been since we’ve seen a player win a batting title with a .366 average, which is Cobb’s lifetime average, a mark that is safe to say will stand forever. He adds up to one of the four or five greatest hitters to ever play the game.

But I will never accept, no matter how many revisionists or apologists try to tell me otherwise, that he wasn’t also one of the most horrible men to ever play any professional sport or that if he’d played in any other era that he would have been allowed to get away with the horrible things he did on and off the field. Unlike Okrent and his colleagues I don’t think he’s a disgrace to the national pastime. But that still doesn’t excuse his horrific attitude towards his opposition, his teammates and often the game he played. He definitely deserves a better film made about him then the one he got, but it’s not the reason so many people think horrible things about him. We need to keep thinking about him the way his own teammates: an extraordinary ballplayer and an impossible man. The latter will never fully negate the former.

 

Did The 26th Amendment Fail, tRYING TO Answer The Question, Part 2

 

The Left’s Protests Over The Last Decade

Has Done Nothing To Stop The Forces of Conservatism.

Why Are They So Sure It Will Make A Difference Now?

 

In 1954 after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat it began a concentrated effort by the African-American community in the city of Montgomery to combine social justice and disruption with economic muscle. Over the course of more than a year Martin Luther King and the NAACP organized to apply social pressure with economic pressure to advance the cause of Civil rights.

It bears repeating this involved African-Americans with few economic options or recourses in a city in a state that in 1948 had voted for Strom Thurmond for President. And it only ended on December 20, 1956 when the federal ruling of Browder v Gayle took effect -  a decision by the Supreme Court that declared the laws that segregated buses in Alabama were unconstitutional. In effect Rosa Parks may have protested segregation in the Alabama buses but the Supreme Court had to affirm it was illegal.

For the next decade the Civil Rights movement achieved the incredible success it had in legislation, executive orders and judicial reform because the Movement was willing to use its activism to force Washington to act. It was a long and difficult struggle and no one doubts the sacrifice and lives lost because of it. But the reason the movement was successful was a combination of social activism, economic sacrifice and political muscle.

While the Voting Rights Acts was before Congress the anti-war movement was beginning to form. In both the makeup of its participants and its methods, it could not have been more of a polar opposite of the one that was taking place in the South. The majority of the protesters were college students, many of whom were economically affluent and had more privileges that their counterparts in the Civil Rights movement. Their protest was about not sacrificing – in this case, wanting to serve in Vietnam. They argued that the war was immoral (as if there has ever been such a thing as a moral war) and that the government was lying about it (true but it was something they only learned about years after the fact). And aside from their one movement to try and primary LBJ in 1968, they had no social or political muscle – many could not even vote for Eugene McCarthy.

And to call their demonstrations, occupations of college campuses and marching organized in the way the Civil Rights movement was is a bad joke. Their plans seemed fundamentally to march in the streets, scream and the authorities and try to shame the U.S. government – never mind South Vietnam – into ending the war solely so they didn’t have to fight in it. As a movement, it was ridiculous.

It did bring about change, of course – Richard Nixon became President in 1968, in large part due to the backlash of white working class voters which began their drift to the Republican Party to this day.

For the rest of the 20^th century the lion’s share of activism almost all seems to have followed the model of the anti-war movement. It’s rare that activists choose to adapt a method that has failed, then keep using it over and over and keeping expecting it to work but that by and large is what the left has done. Some movements did manage to combine political and economic muscle along with social change – Cesar Chavez’s victory in organized labor, the protests at Stonewall, Harvey Milk and the movement he managed for equality in San Francisco – but overall the model for protest took on the model of loud demonstrations and rage at the power structure, essentially insisting angrily for recognition at the top of their lungs.

 No one seems to have considered what happened after that, and to an extent that was understandable among so many of the marginalized groups wanted to be acknowledged by the white power structure. But none of them seem to have learned the lessons of the civil rights movement, that unless your outrage and marching for justice is matched by economic or political power, those who have economic and political power have no real reason to listen to you. You can speak truth to power all you want. Power is under no obligation to listen unless you make it worth their while.

There’s an argument that almost all the social progress that has been made in the last half century for so many marginalized groups has been made despite activism, not because of it. As the Republican party has increasingly become more made up of white, rural Americans there is little political gain to try and woo members of identity groups. Indeed considering how much of their base is in the deep south and the religious right it’s in their best interest not to listen unless theirs a political upside. Considering that the left has spent the last fifty years vilifying both them and their voters (not without justifiable cause) they have no reason to give these marginalized groups anything and they haven’t.

Yet the left by and large has still been unwilling to embrace the Democratic party as their only option. They will fully acknowledge that the Republicans are their mortal enemy and wants to destroy them but the logical next step – embrace the Democrats and build a margin – has never been part of their model of activism. Indeed they frequently choose to punish the Democrats – as they did in Nader’s run in 2000 – for not being sufficiently left enough for their taste. They spent much of the 2000s marching against the War in Iraq and the Bush-Cheney administration, but not only did they never seem to acknowledge they had a role in it, they still didn’t think the Democrats were the answer.

The 21^st century has seen a rise of leftist activist movements, from the protests against the War On Terror to the WTO protests to Occupy Wall Street to the Defund the Police movements in the mid-2010s. All of them have been high on moral outrage and loud dissent. None have led to any part of these movements having political benefits for those involved.

It has, however, endlessly benefit the right wing and the conservative movement. Indeed, over the last half-century they have been willing to do what the left hasn’t been willing to do: make alliances with corporations, spend money on far right wing candidates, work to remove boundaries to make sure their message is spread across every form of media, winning over the Presidency and building majorities in every level of the government. This took economic muscle, organization and political engagement at every level. The far right is infinitely better at political organization than the left has been.

If the various causes of the left were able to unite into one big movement, they at the very least be able to form a political force to face the right or at least, make the Democrats listen to them. But the various groups of identity politics remain fundamentally unwilling to unite. This is nothing new in our history: the right for women’s suffrage was delayed by at least a decade after the Civil War when the women’s movement broke with many of their African-American allies over whether they should get the right to vote first. For the next twenty years there were many separate fights within the larger movement that delayed progress for the rest of the 19^th century.

Yet even with a clear enemy who represents the worst of what they stand for, the various factions of the left have been by and large unwilling to work together, even during the first Trump administration. Yes there was a lot of organized protests almost on a daily basis but I defy anyone to tell me what any of those protests did beside express their frustration and get attention on TV and social media. The main reason so much of Trump’s agenda faltered had little to do with organized resistance and more to do with his own incompetence.

Even in the lead-up to the 2024 election, there seemed little willingness to acknowledge on the part of the left the consequences if he returned to power in their biggest protest movement. Ironically so much of the student protests against Gaza over 2024 mirrored in organization and execution the model of the anti-Vietnam protests in 1968, only it had even less political weight. Because America was not actively involved in events there, the students had even less political clout and less organization. Some organizations even acknowledged that the only thing that could bring a cease fire was the action of the Israeli government and that the government was hoping for a Trump victory in November. Yet none of them seemed to consider that this activism and disruption might be a factor in certain people voting for Trump in November.

And it’s hard for any logical person to understand how the Israeli government or Hamas was going to be influenced to make political decisions based on students protesting on college campuses in America or even why the Biden administration should do so or how they could. Only economic or political pressure could force them to the table and these students had none. Nor is in their any indication that they understand that, given an op-ed in The Nation on the eve of the election by its interns arguing the only way to bring about this change was not through voting but by demonstrating and raising awareness. This demonstrated a complete lack of awareness of foreign policy, diplomacy or even economic policy.

There seems to be an acknowledgment, at least according to a recent article in Time, that so much of the movements over that period failed for this very reason. What arguments do local or state governments have to defund the police if all the demonstrators are willing to do is march and create viral moments on line? Government can just wait until the marchers stop, give the bare minimum of offers and then go back to business as usual. Unless protestors can put political or economic pressure combined with social justice, they are marching and screaming for the cameras without any having to make any other sacrifices.

The one attempt at this kind of movement has been the attempts at Cancel Culture. Regardless of my concerns about the free speech aspects it doesn’t even pass the laugh test as a method of protest, much less a boycott.

It has always been hard to guess the goal of it. Even if one were to make a concentrated effort to stop buying the work of J.K. Rowling or Dave Chapelle, so what? They still exist and they will still be able to get work and have a platform regardless whether the youthful or those inclined choose to protest them. And the opposition, in particular, will use these actions to show the left’s only foolishness for their only political base. For them, it’s a gift the left is more than willing to keep on giving.

As a boycott, it’s a fait accompli as well: the people they target are already fabulously wealthy and famous and it won’t stop them getting from any richer. Even if Netflix were to take down every Dave Chapelle special, he still got paid for it, and the same is true for any project Rowling is associated with.  It’s a similar kind of navel gazing; if we don’t see it or pay for it, it doesn’t exist and it doesn’t count.

And strictly from the argument of their own agenda, it is meaningless in the short or long run. Regardless of what you might think of the power and privilege these individuals have at the end of the day, removing them from the conversation will not fix anything. The only thing that protect the people targeted by their bigotry is legislation and elected officials willing to enact these laws.

It's so foolish to believe that targeting a single celebrity or any one person does anything to change the views of an institution or even get rid of bigotry. Roger Ailes is dead and gone nearly a decade and it has done nothing to sound the death knell of conservative media. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are long dead but the kind of religious right they advocate for is still very active as a political force. And trying to boycott Amazon (an attempt last month that actually led to revenues going up one percent during that week) will not stop Jeff Bezos from getting any poorer. These protests are done solely to express outrage and make the individuals involved feel like they are doing something when they’re doing nothing constructive at all. And because they feel like they’ve accomplished something they don’t think they have to do anything that would count as actual work.

Part of the reason the right has succeeded with much of its agenda is because it understands what it takes to get their agendas done and they’re willing to do it. The left, by contrast, has been basically marching and screaming and refusing to engage in the political and economic movements that bring real lasting change. For all the fervor that David Hogg and Greta Thunberg and AOC have before a crowd, their generation remains convinced in a foolish plan for their future.

1.   March and scream and raise a crowd for the local media.

2.   Do nothing else.

3.   Act shocked when Republicans win elections.

One would almost find this laughable were it not for the fact that so many in their generation think this is what activism and movement looks like and that the rise of the conservative movement in their lifetime is because no one listened to them. That the only people who they talked to were those who already agreed with them has never occurred to them; that people hear what they have to say and were so alarmed by it they vote Republican is something that they dismiss as being more or less: “Who cares what they think?” That at this point 92 percent of rural America and 65 percent of white-working class voters now think this way – according to various polls in the aftermath of last November – still doesn’t seem to trouble them.

I believe at my core all of the massive protest movements that have taken place in the last month are significant – but unless they lead to an actual policy movement and more important unification around the Democratic Party and everything they stand for  - they will ultimately come to nothing. Yes people are angry with Trump and his administration. They were just as angry at this point in 2017 and that changed nothing he did. Go ahead. March all you want. Make all the viral videos. Get all the footage on TV you can. It did nothing to influence the GOP or MAGA last time around. You know what they say about the definition of insanity.

The only way this works is that you have to put either political or economic power behind this. We’ve already seen that for all the left’s outrage as tech billionaires they have no desire to give up either their cell phones or social media and their demands for corporate change are basically we’ll show up certain places and demonstrate for a while. No one is going to get rid of capitalism any time soon, so unless you can come up with some modified demand you don’t have much to work with.

The other approach – the one they can take – is to work with the DNC and try to win back rural America and much of the white working class voter. There are signs this might already be happening – certainly the elections in Florida and Wisconsin last month demonstrate it – but they have to grow from it. Instead of fifty protests in fifty states, they could spend their time organizing for building up the DNC in each of those states and start bringing together candidates who can win in Republican districts and Republican states. With all due respect to Hogg, the Republicans are the ones causing the problems right now and infighting among the Democrats will not help progressive causes.

I remain unconvinced that we are in the final days of America as a society. I believe days are dark and they will be dark for a while. I also believe that America may be a long time recovering from what the administration is doing. But I refuse to believe that it is irrevocable.

I also remain unconvinced that the change that we need can come through protests or demonstrations by the left, based on the simple fact is hasn’t in fifty years and they give no sign of changing their methods now. I understand the desire to do something, even if it only seems like its going to fix things. But there’s a difference between that and actually doing something that can fix things. It’s the difference between activism and politics. The right has always been better at the latter than the left. If the left is serious about wanting to bring about change, then they have to do the work the right has been willing to do all this time. It’s not fun and it won’t go viral, but it’ll actually bring about change.

 

Homicide Rewatch: Nothing Personal

 

Written by Bonnie Mark ; story by Tom Fontana & James Yoshimura

Directed by Tim Van Patten

 

To make an appropriate play on words NBC demonstrated that they had something personal against Homicide when they aired this episode. This episode was the eighteenth episode aired of Season 3 but it was the ninth episode filmed. I won’t risk spoiling the rest of Season 3 but by the time this episode was broadcast, there were a lot of continuity problems. To use the one that will be the least consequential by this time The Waterfront had already opened and the new owners were having issues with the bartender.

I should mention by that point NBC was officially number one in the ratings and would remain their until the end of the decade. It’s hard to imagine that they would be this callous in the order of broadcast for, say, ER or Friends during this period, but they never missed a chance to throw continuity out the window when it came to Homicide. Other series, it should be mentioned, would have similar issues over this period: The X-Files and Chicago Hope were by far the biggest ones to suffer during this era. You wouldn’t be able to get away with it today.

Ironically the first time this happened in Season 3, it was also related to the late Steve Crosetti. And while this episode isn’t nearly as dark or depressing, there is a similar mood of melancholy surrounding every detective.

After weeks of delay Giardello has finally decided that the time has come to take Crosetti’s name down off the board and reassign his open cases. In doing so the series takes on a pattern that it will follow almost every season afterwards as members of the cast either quit or are forced to leave, though because the changes that place over the summer hiatus there’s less ceremony and less mourning.

In a way much of this episode deals with the occupational fallout of Crosetti’s death. We’ve seen all of the detectives, especially Meldrick, wrestling with it emotionally over the past few episodes and it will never entirely go away. Lewis tries to take up the burden of his partner one last time asking Gee to give him all of Crosetti’s open cases. Instead he hands them out based on everybody’s workload. The toughest, the murder of Erica Chilton, is handed to Kay Howard. For the first time since we’ve met her Howard chafes at the idea of being handed an assignment. “I don’t want this case. It’s a dog,” she tells Giardello. And she resents the idea that she’s been giving this case because she’s the only one with a hundred percent clearance rate. But Gee brooks no dissent and hands it to her.

And with that Crosetti’s cases – and then his name itself – is erased from the board. There’s something truly unsettling about that; a man devotes his life to the job and one day all of his accomplishments are gone, along with any evidence he was even there. It’s a sad necessity that Homicide knows it has to go through. Furthermore by delaying a new detective being assigned to the squad as a matter of bureaucracy (Russert delightfully refers to Granger and Bonfather as ‘the Doublemint Twins’) the bosses show that they are completely indifferent to the squad even now. We already know Bonfather thought Crosetti’s death reflected badly on the department; he doesn’t think his absence and the decline in the clearance rate as a result is enough to replace him, arguing his work didn’t matter much either.

The main casework of the episode shows Howard becoming obsessed with closing the Erica Chilton case. During this episode Howard looks and acts unpleasant for the first time on the series. She’ll argue that part of this is about being the only female detective on the squad at one point but Pembleton – again the only person who he considers an equal – knows that this is about ego. He tries to get her to admit as much on more than one occasion but Kay is too bull-headed to see it.

There’s an argument much of Lewis’s attitude towards Howard in later seasons may be due to Kay’s behavior here. This case is obviously more personal to Lewis than it is to Howard and her brush-off towards him at the start is very cold. He tries his best to tell her it’s not an easy case and when she says: “Yeah, and its six months cold,” is incredibly tone-deaf, especially considering what Meldrick has been wrestling with. He actually welcomes going to the bank to expect the horrors of bureaucracy rather than deal with Howard. It shows an immense amount of maturity on his part that later that same episode he goes to see Howard following the same kind of random paths of desperation and tries his best to tell her how tough a case he and Crosetti found it and how hard they worked on it. That Howard is, if anything, harsher to him in this encounter – essentially telling him to get lost for the second straight time – clearly affects him. His next action is to go to Giardello and see if he’s ever going to get another partner. (He won’t, at least in Season 3.) Meldrick’s behavior towards Bayliss involving Emma Zoole was pigheaded and irrational; the grudge he holds against Howard going forward is as least explainable if you consider the context.

There are more immediate problems. At the start of the episode Felton looks like he’s on the upswing after spiraling the last few episodes, at least to Howard. But every other detective can tell just how heavily he’s been drinking the last few weeks. “His eyes are red, his gills are green,” Munch points out and all of Howard’s colleagues are just as clear as to how shaky he’s been. Howard tries to excuse him giving his personal life. “Myself, I’d rather have backup I could depend but that’s just me,” Munch tells Howard. It’s not the first time Munch makes an astute observation of one of his fellow detective drenched in sarcasm but like everything else he says, it’s ignored.

Felton’s apparent recovery is based on the possibility that Beth is coming back home and is bringing his kids back. He spends much of the first act almost ebullient, seeming like a good detective, talking about the future with Howard and even Bolander. Then that night he picks up the phone and his son’s on the line. Zach sounds afraid and then Beth picks up and tells him she’s not coming back.

This episode is a tour de force for Daniel Baldwin as Felton, as he plays the entire range of emotions in a way he almost never got to do on Homicide. That’s on display during that conversation when we see him in the space of less than a minute express the full range of emotions. Then when its done, his shoulders slump and he determined leaves the squad room.

When we see him the next day he’s clearly slept in his clothes after a night of drinking. We see him pleading with Gaffney in missing persons and (in a rare display of sympathy and empathy) after being chewed out, Roger provides him with the number of a private investigator. (In the classic case of the broken clock, this will end up helping Beau in the end.) Then Beau walks into the squad room and realizes he’s misplaced what appears to be critical evidence in the Chilton murders. Howard lays into her partner, calling him a liability and seems to dismiss: “Why do you go across the street and have another drink?” she says scornfully.

For the rest of the episode we see Felton desperately trying to atone for his mistake and we see him completely break down. At the end of the episode he ends up on Russert’s doorstep, not for sex but because he needs a sympathetic ear. In a heartbreaking scene, he confides in Megan in how lost he is without his family and how he doesn’t know who he is without them. He descends into alcoholism and self-pity but he’s never entirely unsympathetic even then.

During this same period Gee is going through his own in what is a subtle but unsettling subplot. Homicide was ahead of the curve on television when it came to dealing with racial issues but almost all of them dealt with the job. This is one of the few times we see what it means on a personal level to the detective. Al agrees to go out with Russert to have lunch with one of her friends, Amanda. Amanda is also African-American but as any observer can see she’s lighter skinned than Al. The three of them have a pleasant lunch and the two seem to hit it off. However Amanda talks to Megan and says she’s not interested in seeing Al sociably.

The next day Al wants to ask Amanda out. The reasons are never made explicit but what matters is what Al thinks. He believes a light-skinned woman didn’t want to be seen with a darker-skinned black man.

Yaphet Kotto actually proposed this subplot to the writers based on his own personal experience. As he told TV Guide, “I was not able to attract a lighter-skinned black woman. They perceived me to be too ethnic-looking and not Caucasian looking enough.”

Every so often Tom Fontana and his writers were willing to take suggestions from the cast as to where to take the characters. This would frequently lead to some brilliant emotional moments. We can see in Kotto’s performance as Giardello tells Russert how a woman once said she wouldn’t date him because “My nose was too big. My lips were too thick.” No matter how much Russert tries to assuage him, he is convinces of the truth.

When he returns to the squad he is in a rage. And it’s here we get another view of the value of Ned Beatty to the cast. Because of his age Bolander has always had the ability to get both suspects and other detectives to confide in him in a way no other character could and he is also the only one who has the nerve to approach Giardello for lunch, retreat when he says know and then come back later that night with dinner and not take no for an answer.

And Al does confide in him in a way he rarely does to anybody. He lays himself bare in a truly powerful way: “Right now, I want to tell you. I hate myself. I don’t have any friends to speak of. All I have is this job, and it disgusts me.” This is not the man who cheerfully hustled Bayliss at hearts the previous episode. He tells Bolander of how much comfort his wife gave him, what it was like when she was dying of cancer and his theory as to why Crosetti killed himself – he thought he had turned completely inward and he felt he had nothing left to live for. It’s something that Bolander understands very deeply as well.

The one ‘light’ moment in the entire episode is that during this period the loan to pay for the Waterfront has been approved and Bayliss, Munch and Lewis are finally owners. But not even this is without its gloom. The detectives have to pay another $9000 in incidentals, they can’t open the cash register and they have to turn over all the alcohol in accordance to city regulations. At the start of the episode they were worried about food they could serve, now they have to buy more liquor. This is far from the end of their problems.

By the end of the episode Howard is convinced by Bolander that maybe the mark of a great detective is to move on. And Howard appears to do so when she picks up the phone at the end of the episode and moves the case aside. But she will not let Chilton go and she makes it clear she’s not going to. The case will end up getting closed but, in typical fashion, it will not be because of any one thing she did.

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

“Detective Munch” The conversation between her and Laureen when she tells them that they the bank always gives good news in person.

Laureen: “Surely you do the same in your job.

Munch: “We’re detectives.”

Laureen: “Yes.”

Munch:  “Homicide Detectives. We never give good news.”

Laureen: Never?”

Munch: “Well, hardly ever. Unless a wife is glad to hear her husband took a shotgun blast to the head.

Laureen: “Well, that’s not never.”

 

Future Inmate: Dean Winters makes the first of what will be three appearances in three consecutive seasons as Tom Marans, Erica Chilton’s former boyfriend who seems so broken up by Erica’s death and hands over the letters from her old boyfriend that Felton loses. This was actually the very first acting appearance Winters ever did and it led to Fontana eventually casting him in what was his breakout role as Ryan O’Reilly on OZ. After that he  would play Detective Cassidy on the first season of Law & Order: SVU (Munch’s first partner there!) and has been a presence on TV ever since. He would play Charley Dixon on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Denis Leary’s brother Johnny on Rescue Me, Liz Lemon’s hysterically lousy boyfriend Dennis on 30 ROCK and Keith Pembroke on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Last year he appeared as Father Morgan on Tom Fontana’s most recent project Monsieur Spade and PI Dick Frank on So Help Me Todd. And of course he’s known to many as Mayhem in commercials for All-State. (His brother Scott is an actor as well…but we’ll get to that.)

This was only the second episode of TV directed by Tim Van Patten, who had previous been an actor. He would slowly build up a reputation as one of the greatest directors in television history, working on Sex and The City, The Wire, and Deadwood. But by far his biggest breakthrough was working on The Sopranos for which he would direct twenty episode, among them such classic Long Term Parking and the series finale. He later directed eighteen episodes of Boardwalk Empire and three episodes of The Pacific. He also co-wrote the legendary Pine Barrens episode of The Sopranos. He won two Emmys one for producing The Pacific, the other for directing Boardwalk Empire. He has also directed the pilot of Game of Thrones, which he won the Hugo for. He has been nominated for fifteen Emmys, won two Directors Guild Awards for television, two PGA awards and one WGA Award. He is on the short list for one of the greatest directors in television history. (And no, he never worked for Vince Gilligan.)

The Chilton case will end up being resolved in the fourth season. The scene where Howard tells off Felton will be reused in Season 5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Rebuttal of Adam Gopnik's Book Review in This Week's New Yorker

 

 

On November 7^th 1860, with news of the triumph of Lincoln’s victory just a few hours old, South Carolina District Judge Andrew McGrath closed the latest term with a starling announcement: because secession was inevitable, he was resigning his judgeship.

While South Carolina had been at the forefront of the secessionist movement few had thought that McGrath, who had always been on the side of the cooperationist part of the divide in his home state, would be the one to lead the secessionist movement. Yet he was the first member of the first state to secede from the Union.

In Massachusetts William Lloyd Garrison’s Observer the loyally abolitionist newspaper marked the occasion – with amusement. “Will they secede from the Union?” the paper asked jocularly. “Will they jump into the Atlantic? Will they conflagrate their own dwellings, cut their own throats and enable their slaves to rise in successful insurrection? Perhaps they will – probably they will not? By their bullying and raving they have many times frightened the North into a base submission to their demands – and they expect to do it again.

Garrison, it’s worth noting, never acknowledged his mistake. He would spend the remainder of the Civil War endorsing the effort and Lincoln, a man who he thought too much of a conventional politician on slavery to support as an election.

In a column in this week’s New Yorker too mindless to be considered a think piece Adam Gopnik discusses the leadup to the Civil War and all the bloodshed that followed as a lost cause by essentially arguing, for a Northern perspective, the causes the South spent a century arguing for in their textbooks. He acknowledges that slavery had no future, indirectly agreeing that the South was fighting for states rights rather than the horrible cause of chattel slavery. He argues that the cause of fighting to preserve the union – the reason that Lincoln gave to get the soldiers to fight – was not fundamentally part of the Constitution, essentially giving the cover to the argument that John C. Calhoun made for South Carolina since 1830. And he argues that because at the end of the war that while slaves were free they were still held in essentially a kind of servitude in the South that for all intents and purpose 800,000 men died for the status quo in the South for a century, so what was the point?

I have little doubt Gopnik’s attitude is very heavily influenced by the dark times we have today. Indeed, he almost seems to yearning for a kind of secessionist movement himself, arguing that if Washington, Oregon and California were to leave the Union and form their own country there is nothing in the Constitution saying they can’t. There are many reasons this is a horrible idea, but let’s deal with some of the more realistic problems that Gopnik seems more than willing to gloss over.

Lincoln has been accused by so many progressives as being a racist because he didn’t believe in the kind of full equality Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens did. It’s worth repeating that these views were held by a minority of politicians in Congress and were not held by the majority of Republicans, let alone the North. The mere fact that Lincoln believed in the immorality of slavery was enough to convince the South that his election was enough to lead the South to secede just by implication.

Lincoln’s famous statement: “If I could preserve the union by not freeing a single slave, I would do it”, has been reviled by progressives for more than a century as arguing that Lincoln was more interested in preserving the Union then ending slavery. That the alternative was a nation half slave, half free – and that very well nearly happened – is almost always ignored by those same scholars.

Even if we are to argue that slavery had no future in America, it would been a horrible present waiting for it to die out. How long would it have lasted? Ten more years? Twenty years? Until the end of the century? How many millions of African-Americans would have had to suffer a life in bondage before the South realized ‘the error of their ways?” The fact that they had essentially existed for nearly two hundred years with a plantation lifestyle and that it was only through violence that they were willing to end it at all should be a clear sign that slavery was never going to die a natural death.

And there was never a guarantee of Northern victory. Indeed as countless historians have written over the years were it just for the sake of a few key moments – McLellan’s defeat of Lee at Antietam, the repulsion of Lee at Gettysburg – the Confederacy might have been able to win the war and exist as the independent nation they so desired. Even when the chance of a military victory for the South seemed unlikely by 1864 many believed that if they could maintain a stalemate Lincoln would lose reelection and if a Democrat became President the South could achieve a negotiated peace. Indeed in the spring and summer of 1864, some believed that negotiated peace would end in the total fragmentation of the Union. There would be hostilities as to whether Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri would choose to unite with the North or the South. The abolitionists of New England might have considered a Union with British Canada. Similarly the Confederacy was engaged in a conspiracy to form an attack in the Northwest in Kentucky, Illinois and Ohio to form a third nation – the Northwest Confederacy – in the nation’s heartland and only through immense action and blind luck did this movement fail.

And here’s a nice bit of speculation: what if the Confederacy formed a separate nation but ended slavery? At one point James Seddon, the Confederacy Secretary of War in 1864 floated the idea of freeing slaves and arming them in order to preserve the Confederacy. This idea was carried out in the final months of the war when the South conscripted many slaves but by that point most of them had deserted.

Harry Turtledove, who works in the sci-fi field of alternate history, wrote multiple series arguing the Union and Confederacy existed as separate nations. In his scenario, the Confederacy ends up making alliances with Britain and France in the 1880s while the Union allies with Germany. When World War I breaks out, we see trench warfare, air bombings and mustard gas play out in cities across America. That scenario could have been a reality had we just let the South go.

Even allowing for the possibility that had the Union divided peacefully and that somehow we could have coexisted peacefully as neighboring nations on the same continent forever, what would ‘the Negro problem’ have been like for those in the South? Borders and checkpoints would have had to have been set up along the limits of the Confederate territory, simply as a matter of diplomatic relations. One would have required a passport to travel between Nashville and Chicago. Armed guards would no doubt be all along the various levels of the Mason-Dixon line. It had been difficult using the Underground Railroad before the war; now if an African-American was caught along the border, he could just as easily have been killed. One could see a future Southern President – an Alexander Stephens or Judah Benjamin – demanding a ‘border wall’ be built but to keep ‘Negroes’ in.

This condition would have been the same even when slavery ended. Jim Crow would have continued in the South but it would never have ended. Why would it? The North would have had no motivation to end. Plessy versus Ferguson would have been the law of the South and the Confederacy would essentially have exact as an apartheid state. It’s highly unlikely that other foreign nations would have done more than raise token objections. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to raise any objections to imperialism or the fascist rules of far right movements across the globe.

How could we? We’d be a divided country ourselves. I have little doubt that had we decided to separate we would have spent the rest of the 19^th century and well into the 20^th fighting among the various stages of the frontier, fighting over whether Colorado or the Dakotas became Confederate possession or Union ones. God knows how much bloodier the fight for Westward expansion would have become.

Gopnik seems to argue that the idea of union is just a shifting cause that we’ve basically only used to hang together to fight against common enemies. There’s a certain truth to that. The problem is without even this shifting, fragmentary cause, there really isn’t much of a reason that we aren’t 48 small countries on the same continent. People in Montana don’t have the same values as people in California and people in Nebraska don’t seem to have the same ones as those in New York. Without the idea of a shared belief in some idea of national unity, there’s nothing really to stop us from tearing each other the ribbons the moment we cross the border from Washington to Montana.

John Hancock once famously said at the founding of the Republic: “We must hang together or we shall surely all hang separately.” The idea of unity and loyalty to an institution has historically always been harder for those on the left to grasp then those on the right and they have a much harder reason to argue for disunion then the other side. At least when the Confederacy broke away from the Union, they had an economic reason along with a (horribly distorted) moral one. When Gopnik argues even hypothetically that Washington, Oregon and California should form their own country, he can’t even come up with a real reason for that, aside from the liberal arguments that Trump is destroying America. That secessionism is essentially doing the same thing is an equivalence that he and his colleagues don’t agree with – and they are forgetting that it didn’t end well for the ones chose to try it in 1861.

It is understandable for some to be concerned, even greatly worried by the trends of the current administration. But if anyone seriously thinks that the only logical step is to argue the United States has failed and to start dissolving it have forgotten the one reality of the last time it was tried: the Union was preserved at the cost of a great loss of life and more hostility in the region towards the federal government. If Gopnik and his colleagues truly think that there would be a better outcome this time, he clearly hasn’t learned anything from history.

 

Jeopardy 2025 Masters Recap: April 30th Knockout Round Night One

 

For the last two years the Jeopardy Masters has been the highpoint of Jeopardy fans seasons, myself included. Each time it does more to make even those of us who feel we are complete geniuses at Jeopardy feel incredibly stupid while many great Jeopardy champions remind us of why they are such great Jeopardy players in the first place.

And whether it is by necessity or simply a desire to adjust the game, the 2025 Masters lineup is as close to living up to the name as possible so far. To be sure James Holzhauer, Mattea Roach and Amy Schneider are absent for the first time since the Masters began two years ago but a wonderful combination of the old and the new is upon us. Here’s a review of the lineup:

Victoria Groce: winner of the 2024 Jeopardy Invitational and last year’s winner.

Yogesh Raut: winner of the 2024 Tournament of Champions and runner-up in last year’s Masters.

Matt Amodio: winner of the 2025 Jeopardy Invitational Tournament, third place in the 2023 Masters, last place in the 2024 Masters

 

And here are the newcomers:

Nilesh Vinjamuri: winner of the 2025 Tournament of Champions.

Isaac Hirsch: 9 Game winner with $215,390, runner up in the 2025 Tournament of Champions.

Adriana Harmeyer: 15 game winner with $349,600, runner up in the 2024 Tournament of Champions.

Roger Craig: winner of six games in 2010 and winner of the 2011 Tournament of Champions. Third place finish in the Battle of the Decades against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Part of Team Austin in the Jeopardy All-Star Games. Runner-up in the 2025 JIT.

Juveria Zaheer: Winner of the Jeopardy Second Chance Tournament and one of the 2024 Champions Wildcard Tournament winners. Participant in the 2024 Tournament of Champions. Has already defeated Seth Wilson and Ray Lalonde, both of whom won double digits in games in the 2025 JIT. Runner up in that tournament.

And Last but far from least:

Brad Rutter, Jeopardy’s All-Time money winner with just under $5 million in earnings.

 

So we have three of the greatest players in the history of Jeopardy, including the postseason. We have four Tournament of Champions winners participating. Four of the all-time money winners in Jeopardy play are in this tournament. Two very different players who made the most of their Second Chances on this show in JIT. And two players who have gone up against Ken Jennings on multiple occasions – one of whom actually had the measure of him more than once.

I will confess that while I’ve had certain favorites in each of the first two Masters the possible face-offs at every level fill me with the kind of anticipation that the first two could only hint at. The fact that some of these match-ups have, in fact, already happened (all three finalists from this year’s TOC and JIT are participating) has done nothing to diminish my anticipation and I seriously doubt it will anyone else’s. And it doesn’t hurt that with this new lineup there are far more possibilities for upsets than ever before.

This is a different set up then the last two years. There will be six ‘knockout’ games over the first three weeks, though I’m not sure how the lineup will play out. I have little doubt it will become clearer in the weeks to come. But for now, I’m going to deal with tonight’s two matches and the results. Both of which were thrilling in their own ways.

 

Match 1: Victoria Groce vs. Yogesh Raut vs Brad Rutter

Previous History: Facing against each other in the 2024 Masters Victoria managed to defeat Yogesh twice in the quarterfinals, one semi-final match, and both of the finals. Yogesh has only defeated Victoria once: the first semi-final match.

Yogesh got off to a lightning fast start in the Jeopardy round. He already had 5600 points when he found the first Daily Double in A LITTLE ALLITERATION (Victoria would point out how hard it was to say that category). As is usually the case in these Tournaments Yogesh went all in:

4 cantons surround this 44 square mile body of water in Central Switzerland

It took him a moment to come up with: “What is Lake Lucerne?” but he did and he doubled his score. At the end of the Jeopardy round Yogesh had 15,400 points the highest total amassed by any one player in the Masters in the Jeopardy round. Victoria trailed with 3800 and Brad, who was up and down, finished with a 1000 points.

In Double Jeopardy the show played an early gag by something all Jeopardy fans are used to: WAS THAT ON YOUR FLASH CARDS?, was one category. That category caused some struggles for all three players and by the time Victoria got to the first Daily Double in POETRY-POURRI she had 5000 points. She had little choice but to go all in:

In Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ the line ‘the centre cannot hold’ is preceded by these three words, later a novel title.”

Victoria knew it was: “What is things fall apart?” and was now at 10,000 points, closing the gap. However Yogesh then got two consecutive 1600 point clues correct and when Victoria missed a 1200 point clue in BONE OF CONTENTION Yogesh found the other Daily Double in the 2000 point clue in this category.

Wagering from the lead, he bet ‘only’ 5000 points:

A pair of the bones in the mouth have this name, like that of a hill in Rome.

It took him a moment to get there: “What is palatine?” and he went up to 27,600 points. Despite the best efforts of Victoria and Brad they couldn’t close the gap enough to stop Yogesh from running away with the game: he finished with 30,800 points to Victoria’s 14,000 and Brad’s 6200.

The Final Jeopardy category was EUROPE: “Words meaning, “water’s edge’ are one suggested etymology of this city, once capital of the province of Aquitania.”

Brad joked: “What is Go Birds?” a reference to his beloved Eagles. He lost 4022 points. Victoria wrote down the correct response: “What is Bordeaux?” That was correct: (the French words for edge and water).” She wagered nothing. Yogesh’s insurmountable lead was critical because he wrote down Glasgow. He wagered nothing and took his first victory and 3 match points. Victoria got 1, Brad zero.

Key Interview: As you’d expect Ken brought up Brad’s last appearance on the Alex Trebek stage at the GOAT. Brad was more traumatized by that and asked Ken not to mention it. He also said that he hoped to have many opportunities to make fun of Ken, during this tournament. But there was a genuine sense of respect between the two.

Yogesh said he had immense respect for Victoria already and Victoria said she thought she had a target on her back having won once already. She was wearing a green jacket – the Masters Jacket. It didn’t bring her luck this time. We’ll see if it does later/

 

Match 2: Matt Amodio vs. Roger Craig vs. Juveria Zaheer

Matt found the Daily Double in the Jeopardy round on the second clue and lost the 1000 points he’d already gotten. From that point on the match was a fight to the death between all three in the Jeopardy round. Matt finished it with a narrow lead: 5000 points to Roger’s 4400 while Juveria was not far behind with 2800.

In Double Jeopardy Roger got a 2000 point clue correct, got another one incorrect and was back at 4400 points when he found the first Daily Double in SCIENCE VOCAB. Roger is a scientist and he perfected the move everyone in the Masters has been using so it was no surprise he bet everything:

From Greek for ‘swift’, this word first appeared in a 1967 paper called ‘Possibility of faster-than-light particles’. Roger didn’t hesitate: “What is tachyon?” He went into the lead with 8800 points.

Juveria then got two clues correct in OLD & NEW GEOGRAPHY. But when she went away from it and Roger went back to it, he benefited and found the other Daily Double. Still in the lead with 9600 points, he bet 6000:

“Using prefixes now associated with gender, the Romans ID’d these two areas  of Gaul on either side of a mountain range.

Roger needed a little more time to come up with: “What is cis-Alpine and trans-Alpine?” Roger had a big lead with 15,600 points. That was pretty much his highwater part as he went up and down quite a bit in Double Jeopardy but neither Juveria nor Matt could make up sufficient ground and there were quite a few Triple Stumpers. Still the scores were incredibly close at the end: Roger finished with 15,200 points, Matt was next with 10,600 and Juveria was very much alive with 8800.

The Final Jeopardy category was WORLD LITERATURE: A follow-up to an earlier work, this 1671 efforts references eventually triumphs written in the Book of Job and the Gospels.

Juveria’s response was revealed first: “What is Paradise Regained?” She was correct. She wagered 7201 points, putting her at 16,001 points. Next came Matt. He also wrote down: “What is Paradise Regained?” He wagered 6000 points, putting him in the lead.

Roger had that poker face. He also put down:  Paradise Regained. He wagered 6801 points, giving him 22,001 and his first victory in Jeopardy Masters.

I won’t lie to you, my readers: every time Roger got a Daily Double correct I applauded heartily and when he ended up winning I all but cheered. Seeing Roger play in this field is a realization of a dram I’ve wanted almost since the Masters began. I can’t wait to see how he does against other Masters.

 

Interview Notes: Juveria’s daughter did a presentation on her for International Women’s Day focused on being her mother and being on Jeopardy – but not the rest of Juveria’s career.

Roger joked about being from the dark ages ‘Season 27’. Ken asked if playing against Brad and me cured him of stage fright and Roger agreed. Ken then admitted he still got nervous every time he played against Brad. Roger said “I don’t have any Brad PTSD. (We’ll have to see if that changes.) Matt, it’s worth noting, did not introduce him as a game show villain as he joked in the Invitational.

 

 

LEADERBOARD AT THE END OF APRIL 30^TH

Yogesh Rout – 3 Match Points

Roger Craig – 3 Match Points

Victoria Groce – 1 Match Point

Matt Amodio – 1 Match Point

Brad Rutter -  Zero Match Points

Juveria Zaheer – Zero Match Points

 

Still to play:

Adriana Harmeyer

Isaac Hirsch

Nilesh Vinjamuri

Already this Masters is living up to its name and next Wednesday can’t come soon enough. I’ll be back with the results then.