The Public Shaming of the Astros

This is shaping up to be one of the most miserable baseball seasons on record. The Yankees are the odds on favorite to win the pennant. And worse, every conversation about baseball seems to begin and end with the Houston Astros' cheating scandal. This is not a fun topic, and it's not even really about baseball as much it's about injustice and the desire to exact revenge.

This has been a huge story, and I can't deny that it has good reason to be. The Astros have affected almost everyone in baseball: the Dodgers and the Yankees, of course, whom they eliminated from the play-offs, but also every other team and almost every individual player. A little-known pitcher named Mike Bolsinger is suing the Astros on the grounds that his bad outing against them in 2017 did irreparable damage to his career. People are pissed off - even the kinds of people who don't tend to get pissed off. Normally taciturn players like Aaron Judge, Nick Markakis, and even the great Mike Trout have publicly castigated the Astros.

The fans are irate to an extent I've never seen before. In 1994, they were disgusted with the greed from both owners and players, which resulted in a lengthy strike and a canceled World Series. In the mid-2000s, they were outraged to find out about the rampant use of steroids, but it was hard to cast too many stones, because every team had fielded its share of users.

The difference this time is that all of the rage is directed towards one team. Almost everyone - fans and players alike - seems to think the Astros got off too easy. True, their manager and general manager were fired. So were the managers of the Red Sox and Mets, who were, respectively, a coach and a player for the 2017 Astros team, both rumored to be heavily involved in cheating tactics. No current players have received punishment, though, and the commissioner has not stripped the Astros of their 2017 title.

Let me say here that the act of vacating titles is categorically dumb. It's an empty gesture that has always seemed to me more like pandering than like actual justice. The way to move on from any event we don't like is not to pretend that the event didn't happen. Will vacating a title really bring much satisfaction to the Dodgers or their fans? Will it really change the way the Astros and their fans think about the 2017 World Series? If popular perception is that a title is tainted, then the title will be remembered that way, whether or not the championship banners are still allowed to fly.
I am not trying to sugarcoat the Astros' cheating. It was bad for the game, bad for the fans, bad for other teams and for many individual players. But some fans' hysterical response to the scandal is, to me, just as bad and often worse. It reminds me of Jon Ronson's great book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which examines the contemporary phenomenon of massive social media shaming.

"[W]ith social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama," write Ronson, "[E]very day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.”

In the age of social media, when someone transgresses into "sickening villain" territory, we unleash a torrent of what he calls "ecstatic public condemnation" that build and builds until it is completely out of proportion with the crime that has actually been committed. Again, I am not trying to go easy on the Astros. I just think trial by social media is stupid, boring and unproductive. It has a way of bringing out our basest instincts too. In recent weeks, fans have cheerfully expressed their desire to see players intentionally hit by pitches, and anyone who offers the slightest dissent faces scorn and derision. Calls for both baseball-related and general violence against Astros players have become normalized. For God's sake, Josh Reddick, who may or may not have even participated in the Astros' cheating scheme, has revealed that he has received threats of violence against his family.

A truly appalling paragraph from the ESPN story: "I put a post of my kid rolling over for the first time and I gotta look down there and see 'I hope your kid gets cancer,'" Reddick said. "It makes you really want to see that person in person. Really makes you want to go up to him and see what they would do if you put your face to their face and really get a little bit of retribution for yourself. Pisses you off."

Does anyone really think that sociopathic behavior gets a free pass if it's directed at a cheater? And are you truly a baseball fan if your greatest desire going into this year is to watch living, breathing people being used as target practice dummies? Is this really something you want to see? And yes, they did something wrong. And yes, they deserve punishment. This whole thing has caused real heartbreak, and I don't want to be blase about that.

But there has to be something better than mob justice.

It's baseball season! Spring training games are underway! This year, we get to see what Garrett Cole looks like in pinstripes, and what Mookie Betts looks like in Dodger blue! We get to see whether or not the Nationals can defend their title, and whether or not the Orioles can break the 50-win threshold! We get to see a new stadium in Dallas! We get to watch Albert Pujols cap off a Hall of Fame career!

Look. If you're pissed, then you have every right to be. But if you are looking forward only to watching Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve endure bodily harm, then you're in the wrong place.

If you want to be sad, then be sad. If you want to take a break from baseball then fine, I get it. But if you're just using this scandal to as a receptacle for your own negativity and bloodlust, you can feel free to find a new hobby.

Now can we please talk about something else?

Oscars 2020

My goal in any given year is to view every nominee for Best Picture before the night of the ceremony. With roughly eight hours remaining, it's looking bleak. Of the nine nominated movies, I saw six and a half. (Jojo Rabbit was the half. I watched the first hour illegally and then dozed off. When I returned to the site the next day, it was no longer functional. Truthfully, I enjoyed the first half so little, I felt no burning desire to finish it anyway, beyond the anticipated satisfaction of checking it off my list. More on that in a minute.)

Frankly, I'm pleased with myself for even making it to six movies, which is no easy feat when you're planning your life around your twin toddlers. The rise of Netflix has obviously helped: I watched both The Irishman and Marriage Story in my pajamas. Once again, it also helps to have a wife who lets me shirk my fatherly duties on occasion.

In ranking these movies, I'm using the same ground rules I used last year. I'm listing these movies purely in order of how much I enjoyed them, not by objective quality (which isn't a thing anyway), not by cultural impact, and not even necessarily in order of how much they deserve to win the Oscar.

2020 was, in my opinion, a stronger movie year than 2019, and one of my favorite years in recent memory. I legitimately loved at least three of these movies (not a claim I would have made last year) and I feel much more confident about my number one choice (unlike last year, when I was constantly made to feel that my affection for Green Book made me "un-woke"). Btw, SPOILER ALERTS for all movies.

2019 was the best year for movies in quite a while.

The List

1 - Parasite
2 - 1917
3 - The Irishman
4 - Marriage Story
5 - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
6 - Joker
7 - Jojo Rabbit
Not ranked - Ford vs. Ferrari
Not ranked - Little Women

My Pick for Best Picture: 1917
Movie I think will Win: 1917

And now, some thoughts on each movie.

The synopses for Parasite all seemed sort of vague, but the reviews were uniformly excellent. I went to see it not really knowing if it was a comedy, a thriller, or, as the title seems to suggest, a horror movie. Once I saw it, I realized the reason for the vagueness. The movie is impossible to faithfully describe without massively spoiling it. The first half is engaging enough: it's darkly funny to watch the members of the Kim family infiltrate the Park family, all while pretending to be total strangers to each other. And then, about an hour in, the doorbell rings and we see that frightening, haggard face of the former housekeeper. And then, holy shit, the underground bunker (!). And things just get crazier from there. I watched with my mouth agape, wondering where this crazy movie was taking me. And, having a peach allergy myself, I feel I enjoyed it on an even deeper level.

1917 was one of the most thrilling movies I've ever seen in a theater, and a reminder of the big screen's advantage over the phone screen. In general, war movies tend not to be my favorites. This one worked for me, I think, because of the simplicity of the story and the focus on the visceral experience of combat. I hadn't felt so enthralled by a movie since Gravity - and 1917 was a vastly better movie. The plane crash sequence was particularly harrowing. So was the main character's iconic final run, parallel to the trench, amidst an onslaught of explosions. The definitive WWII movie is Saving Private Ryan. The definitive Vietnam movie is probably Apocalypse Now. Finally, we have our definitive WWI movie, too.

On paper, The Irishman was a dream come true for every fan of crime movies. Scorcese, De Niro, Pesci, Pacino, the true story of Jimmy Hoffa. This seemed like it couldn't miss. The crazy thing is: it pretty much lived up to the sky-high expectations. Look, I can understand the criticisms: it's three and a half hours long. Could it have been trimmed? Sure. Did it get a little bogged down in historical detail at the expense of story? Yes, probably. Was the age-reducing CGI a little silly? Yes, although that didn't detract from my experience. At the end of the day, this was great story-telling on an epic scale. It's tragic, and darkly funny, and historically fascinating. It goes without saying that the acting was brilliant. (Obviously the leads kill it, but the smaller parts are equally well played. Stephen Graham, for example, more than holds his own with the heavyweights.) What surprised me was the restraint and complexity of the acting. None of those big Joe Pesci Do-I-Look-like-a-Clown scenes here, and that's just fine. For my money, de Niro's phone call to Jo is some of the best acting he's ever done, and that's saying quite a lot. "What kind of man makes a phone call like that?"

I love movies like Marriage Story. No bells and whistles, just a sharp script full of keenly observed details about domestic life. And of course an acting masterclass by Driver and Johansson (and Laura Dern and Ray Liotta, too, as the smarmy lawyers). The saddest part of this movie is that there's no bad guy. Both characters are basically sympathetic. The antagonist here is divorce itself.

I liked Inglorious Basterds and disliked Django Unchained, so I had no idea what to expect from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Turns out it was right in the middle. There were some great moments: Leo's character killing it in the western b-movie to earn the admiration of that little girl, and of course, the whole sequence with Brad Pitt on Spahn Ranch. But the pacing was slow and parts of the movie dragged. I'm torn on the ending. On the one hand, these were the warped hippies who would murder Sharon Tate in the worst way possible. And yet... it's one thing to gleefully kill Nazis and slaveholders, but kind of another to kill teenage girls who, murderous intentions aside, haven't actually done anything terrible yet. Call me a snowflake, but the big violent showdown at the end sort of rubbed me the wrong way - especially the visual of a middle-aged Brad Pitt slamming a teenage girl's face onto the mantle in the most graphic possible way. The audience cheered at that part, but I don't know. Seems like a weird thing to cheer for.

Was Joker really a good movie? Or was it just surprisingly poignant for a comic book movie? The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. It was a dark, but engaging character study with some truly iconic moments (everyone talks about him dancing on the stairs, but what about that subway scene?). Everyone has raved about Joaquin Phoenix's performance, which will probably win him an Oscar. And yes, it was great acting, but it was also tough to watch and ultimately, like the movie as a whole, felt a little one-note. As a character, the Joker obviously needs to be psychotic, but he also needs to exude a sort of reptilian charisma. Jack Nicholson's and Heath Ledger's Jokers were nothing if not charismatic. Phoenix's Joker is the opposite: who would want to do anything other than keep a great distance from this guy? Sure, his capacity for charisma is hinted at in the final moments (in the riot scene), but it's hard for me to buy this guy leading an army of clown-faced followers.

Which brings me to Jojo Rabbit, which I'll attempt to weigh in on despite having only watched half of it. It's hard for me to talk about the movie without bringing up Wes Anderson, whose work I've never liked. Like almost all of Wes Anderson's movies, Jojo lost me with its cartoon-ish script and its stylized acting. Like all of his movies, it seemed to think itself awfully cute. Like all of his movies, it must be said, its cinematography was gorgeous. But, like all of his movies, it left me feeling like I was on the outside of a big inside joke. People have talked about the potential offensiveness of Hitler as imaginary friend, but I wasn't offended so much as just confused. Unlike most Anderson movies, its reviews were decidedly mixed: it earned a 58 out of 100 on Metacritic, which is quite low for an Oscar-nominated film. So at least I know I wasn't alone.

Other films of note:

Richard Jewel was a solid movie. Paul Walter Hauser can really act (I love him in I, Tonya, too), and I hope he continues to find work. Also, Clint Eastwood's anti-media, anti-government politics rubbed me the wrong way, but whatever.

I wasn't sure I liked Uncut Gems as I was actually watching it, but the more I reflect on it, the more I appreciate it. One of the most hectic, nerve-wracking movies I've ever seen. Damn, that last hour was great. The auction scene, the Celtics game, the jammed door. I want to see it again.

Two Popes and Dolemite is My Name are about as dissimilar as two films can get, but I lump them together because they are both on Netflix. Both were solid, if uneven. In Two Popes, the scenes between Hopkins and Pryce were riveting, but the film lost momentum during the lengthy flashbacks. The movie-filming sequence in Dolemite was a hoot, but on the whole, the movie felt sort of slight and insignificant.

I saw three of the five films nominated for best documentary, and of those, I'm putting my money on American Factory. This story of an auto-glass factory in Dayton, Ohio reminded me of the many, many Americans whose experience is vastly different from mine, and reminders like that are why I love the movies.

One Last Thought:

I enjoyed Parasite more than any other movie I saw this year. That said, I hope 1917 wins Best Picture. There is a growing perception that Hollywood is a bubble for the snobby elite (which is kind of true), and that the nominated movies have limited appeal for the general public. The divide between popular and critically acclaimed films is greater than ever before. I'd like to see that divide start to shrink, and for that reason, I'm rooting for 1917, an epic, captivating war movie in the grand Hollywood tradition. If it acts as a gateway drug to introduce more people to quality movies, so much the better.