One of the great young stars of Baseball is Elly De La Cruz. Not only has he already hit for the cycle in his rookie year he has helped raise a team that lost 100 games last season to first place.
Yesterday he did something that screamed Jackie Robinson, stealing 2nd, 3rd and home but most amazingly he did it on only two pitches.
I’ve watched that video a few times and while I noticed that he seems to have long legs and an athletic gait, what really struck me was the baseball sense. Let’s look at the video:
now the steal of 2nd wasn’t anything special other than the good jump but take a look at the 47 second mark of the video and check out where the 3rd baseman is when the catcher is getting up to throw.
There is nobody covering third. de La Cruz noticed this and immediately took off. Yeah the 3rd baseman right have broken for the bag if he had been ready and saw de la Cruz break. With a shorter distance he might have gotten there first and perhaps could have set himself to get a throw, but he wasn’t ready and de la Cruz saw this and took the base.
Remember this is a one run game at the time, you would think a team would be careful about these things but the Milwaukee infield was not and de la Cruz was ready to strike.
Now look at what he does once he’s there. The 3rd baseman is still nowhere near the bag and he starts down the line. at the 2:14 mark the catcher throws the ball back to the pitcher who turns his back and heads back to the mound casually. The moment de la Cruz notices the pitcher isn’t watching he breaks for the plate. The pitcher turns at the 2:19 mark and rushes a throw that doesn’t have a chance.
That’s some of the most intelligent baseball I’ve seen in years. Elly de la Cruz is only 21 years old but he’s clearly one of the smartest players on that field and more importantly he’s paying attention to the game and making wise decisions.
This is exactly how this game should be played and the fans of Cincy are lucky to have that kind of player on the field. Will he develop into a Larkin or a Rose, it’s way too early to tell but for now let’s just take joy in it all.
A few years ago, a young lady knocked on my door in Hawaii. She happened to be a volunteer from the Census Bureau, and I spent about 30 minutes answering Census Bureau questions. Unlike most of the other door to door surveys that I promptly ignore, I actually wanted my voice heard by the Census Bureau. About halfway through the survey, I was asked by the surveyor “Do you approve of smoking in the home?”
Me: “Uhm, in my home or other people’s homes?” Surveyor: “The question doesn’t specify.” Me: “Well, that’s kind of important. I don’t smoke, and I don’t let people smoke in my home, but I really don’t care if they smoke in their homes.” Surveyor: “The question only has a Yes or No answers.” Me: “Then my answer is Yes, I’m OK with smoking in the home.”
Not surprisingly, the overall results showed something like 85% of people disapproved of smoking in the home, which was then used as proof that we should conduct more smoking cessation programs.
I’m willing to bet that more than a few people felt the same way I did but chose “No.” When you design a survey question without allowing for nuance or more than a binary answer, you skew the results. That’s not good from a simple truth perspective, but its really not good if you intend to base financial and policy decisions on the results. With that in mind, flash forward a few years and I receive an email asking me to take the Health of the Force survey for the Navy. I wrote about this survey before and how it showed that the Navy is VERY unhealthy in so many ways, so I was hopeful the survey would dig further to identify the areas where the Navy can improve.
Yeah….not so much. I took screen shots as I completed the survey so you can see just how bad it was.
Let’s start with the question “What factors are or would most likely influence you to get out of the Navy?” That’s a legitimately good question, and you get to select your top five options. Maybe the Navy should put something in the survey about readiness and shipyard issues, given the massive amount of news coverage on ship schedules slipping and Sailors committing suicide in Newport News. Or what about wokeness? Or the COVID “vaccine”? Maybe people are particularly incensed about it, or maybe they aren’t, so listing it as a choice would help shed some light on it.
Nope. All the answers are super generic responses that don’t ask any hard questions. They have responses for “Leadership at current command,” but nothing about shipyards, logistics, medical, or other support services that Sailors constantly complain about.
The best option I had was “Senior Navy leaders.” I selected that, and I expounded in the comments, but again, super generic, and not going to result in anything actionable.
Another set of questions asked about Command leadership, still focused on the local command. They did bring in enlisted leaders, which is good, because in the past they often only focused on the Command Triad (the Commanding Officer, Executive Officer and Command Master Chief). But there are no support questions. Plenty of Sailors are frustrated with Navy’s Mandatory Crappy Internet (NMCI), or the lack of investment in our shore facilities, but neither of those issues are the command’s fault. Those decisions are made by top brass, who are never held accountable for how miserable they make Sailors.
What about “How I feel in the Navy” questions? Again, touchy-feely stuff, but nothing that gets at the hard issues we have going on.
And then the DIE questions. That’s like a full 30% of the survey, but I’ll spare you the agony of reading the questions. All of these ask about sexual harrasment and racism and such, which are important…but aren’t the reasons Sailors commit suicide in their baracks room.
This survey was frustrating. I wrote paragraphs in the free-form section, which I am sure will be promptly ignored by the non-warfighter HR officer bent on using the survey to justify more white supremacy training in the fleet. This survey will provide no useful results and will continue to ignore the actual problems in the fleet. It will be used by the Department of the Navy to justify more money in DIE and other stupid programs when we need more efforts towards fixing ships and training our Sailors to be ready for combat. As a taxpayer, you should be angry over this survey and demand better from your elected representatives.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
…the only reason you know about it is because it was first thought that this “white powder” was some sort of anthrax like attack threatening the White House that might be blamed on conservatives. This is why you had the whole hasmat treatment.
It was the result of that scare that this white power was determined to be coke and the troubles for the White House and the impossibility of actually answering a simple question became the issue.
Let’s be blunt the cocaine in the Whitehouse isn’t a crisis to this administration, I suspect this administration has had plenty of drugs in this place over the last two plus years and that those folks have known about this just like they knew about Weinstein and Epstein and like Weinstein and Epstein only became a crisis when it was publicly known and could not be credibly denied.
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