8-23-90 Two pitchers made news last night. Nolan Ryan won his 301st game (I watched it on television) and Oakland pitcher Bob Welch became the major leagues’ first twenty-one game winner. Welch is 21-4 and on his way to the American League’s Cy Young Award. Nobody else has won eighteen. [Welch finished 27-6. He did indeed win the Cy Young Award.] As for the American League batting race, George Brett, the longtime star of the Kansas City Royals, is making a move to win another title. As of this morning, he is third in the American League with a .3155 batting percentage. Rickey Henderson of the Oakland Athletics leads all hitters with .3243 and Rafael Palmeiro of the Texas Rangers is second with .3172. Although I would be happy to see Palmeiro or Detroit’s Alan Trammell (who is fourth) win the title, I’m pulling for Brett. What a career he has had! A few years ago he hit .390. In 1985 he led the Royals to a World Series championship after several frustrating years in which the Royals lost in the playoffs. Given the forces of time, this may be Brett’s last chance for glory. I love watching him hit. He leans back, bat low over his left shoulder, wad of tobacco in his cheek, and rares at the ball with one of the smoothest swings in the history of the game. He can pull the ball to right, slice it to left, and rip it up the middle. He can still hit for power. When it comes to baseball, I’m a sentimentalist. I know full well that I’m seeing George Brett in the twilight of his glorious career. He’s a sure-fire Hall of Famer. [Brett won his third and final batting title in 1990, with an average of .329.]
Neither the United States nor Iraq has attacked each other in the past couple of weeks, so the American media have turned to human-interest and other stories. They can’t seem to let the subject go. The most recent “event” concerns a videotape produced by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein [1937-2006] which shows him, clad in Western apparel, conversing with what he calls his “guests” and everyone else calls “hostages”. In one scene, which I saw on television, he tries to strike up a conversation with a five-year old boy named Paul through an interpreter. Paul is scared stiff by the man, but that doesn’t prevent Hussein from patting his head and smiling at him. What a revolting ploy. Hussein is obviously trying to win the respect, if not the affection, of American viewers. He wants them to think, if not say, “Look at Hussein; he’s not as vicious as the Western press and politicians have made him out to be. He loves kids, dresses like us, and smiles a lot. He’s a regular kind of guy”. The viewer is never told that Hussein killed thousands of his Kurdish countrymen with poison gas in recent years or fought an eight-year war of attrition with Iran. The man is a beast. Sadly, this is what war and diplomacy have come to in the modern era: a public-relations battle. George [Herbert Walker] Bush tries to put the best face on American involvement in the Middle East; Hussein tries to come across as an innocent humanitarian. Both are playing to Western television viewers—Bush in the hope that they’ll see the “justice” of “our cause” and Hussein in the hope that they’ll pressure their leaders into pulling out of Saudi Arabia.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 