Posts Tagged ‘nashville’

If the White Sox move to Nashville, I might already be there to welcome them–with updates

Posted: August 27, 2023 by John Ruberry in baseball, crime, News/opinion
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

For the second straight post at Da Tech Guy, I’m writing about crime in Chicago.

Outside of the Oakland Athletics, who are on pace to lose over 110 games and may be headed to Las Vegas next season, no MLB team has had a worse season than the Chicago White Sox. 

Predicted to finish around the .500 mark–which is where they finished up, exactly, in 2022–the South Siders never recovered from an April 10-game losing streak. 

The Sox on are pace to lose 100 game this year, which is how many they lost in 2018. That season, the White Sox unloaded several veteran players, kicking off a rebuild project with the goal of bringing the World Series championship back to the South Side for the first time since 2005. That rebuild brought the Sox to the playoffs in 2020 and 2021, but they won only two playoff games–losing five.

Another teardown occurred this July, the White Sox are in rebuild mode again.

August has been even worse for the Sox. Longtime team owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, known to be loyal to a fault with the front office staff of the White Sox and the Chicago Bulls–Reinsdorf owns that team too–uncharacteristically fired the top two men in the White Sox front office, Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams. A couple of days later, news broke that the White Sox, a charter member of the American League, might move out of its current stadium, the state-owned Guaranteed Rate Field, its home since 1991, to elsewhere in Chicago, or perhaps to the suburbs or even Nashville. The Sox have six years left on their lease at Guaranteed Rate Field. 

On Friday night, in a game where the Sox were punished 12-4 against those otherwise awful Athletics, a female fan in the left field bleachers was shot in the abdomen, another woman was grazed by a bullet. 

A move to the suburbs–perhaps joining the Chicago Bears in Arlington Heights–or to Tennessee, probably is more attractive now more than ever for Reinsdorf.

The woman who was shot Friday night is in fair condition, the fan who was grazed by the bullet declined medical care.

According to the quite reliable CWB Chicago, police officials are exploring the possibility that the bullet that wounded the woman may have been fired from a mile away. A gunshot detection system detected gunfire a mile southeast of Guaranteed Rate Field–in the Bronzeville neighborhood. The White Sox and the CPD, in several statements, have said that the shooting was not part of any altercation inside the ballpark.

If CWB Chicago is correct, the Sox and the city of Chicago still have a big problem. And there is an historic precedent that bodes poorly for professional baseball on Chicago’s South Side.

The rise in criminality since 2020 has been the dominant news story in Chicago, despite subtle attempts by the mainstream media to minimize it. Headlines routinely speak of people “injured” in shootings, rather than using the correct verb, which is “wounded.” The first Chicago Police Department statement on the Guaranteed Rate gunshots spoke of a “shooting incident,” rather than a “shooting.”

Another MLB “shooting incident,” actually a homicide, took place during batting practice before a July 4 doubleheader between the host New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds–in the Coogan’s Bluff area of upper Manhattan in 1950. The post World War II decline of New York was underway, although the city was years away from bottoming out. The way NYC’s fictional doppelganger, Gotham City, was portrayed in the Joker movie is a pretty accurate portrayal of what New York was destined to become.

A teenager, in a twisted way to celebrate the Fourth of July, fired a gun from the roof of an apartment building a half-mile away from the Polo Grounds. A fan sitting in the upper deck, Bernard “Barney” Doyle, was instantly killed by the stray bullet. A horrifying photograph of Doyle slumped over, dead of course, was on the front page of the New York Daily News the next day. That pic probably gave New Yorkers nightmares for years.

The Giants struggled at the gate in the 1950s. Despite winning the World Series in 1954, only 1.1 million fans crossed the Polo Grounds turnstiles that season. In their last two seasons at the Polo Grounds, only the pathetic Washington Senator’s had worse attendance. City Journal’s Clark Whelton, writing about the Doyle killing in 2018, claims the crime was “quickly forgotten.” I’m not so sure. But Whelton did add of the team’s owner, Horace Stoneham, that he was “said to have brooded for years about Doyle’s strange demise and the run-down buildings on Coogan’s Bluff.”

In 1958, the Giants and Dodgers abandoned New York for California. When they arrived, there were plenty of Giants and Dodgers fans who had moved out to the Golden State before them.

As our day jobs wind down, Mrs. Marathon Pundit and I are eyeing our exit from crime-ridden, crumbling, corrupt, and tax-greedy Illinois. Tennesse is at the top of our list for our next, and likely last, home. Both of us watched Joker for the first time this month. We compared Gotham City to today’s Chicago.

Why should we stay here?

Wouldn’t it be great if we, as Tennessee residents, were there to welcome the White Sox to Nashville?

UPDATE August 28, 2023, 7:15pm EDT:

Thank you to Dan Proft of WIND-AM Chicago. He, along with Amy Jacobson, co-host Chicago’s Morning Answer–a show I Iisten to, either over the air, or by way of the podcast, nearly every weekday–for mentioning this post on the air today. Look for Proft’s take around the 9 minute mark.

Also, here’s an update, and I have a strong feeling there will be more than one for this blog entry. Chicago’s interim police superintendant, Fred Waller, in a press conference this afternoon, discussed what his public affairs callously called a “a shooting incident” on Friday night. It was a shooting. “We’re dispelling a lot of things,” Waller said. As for where the bullets originated, he added that “coming from outside [Guaranteed Rate Field] is something we’ve almost completely dispelled.”

Still, fans who have bought tickets to a Sox game, or are considering doing so, probably have a lot on their minds now, to say the least.

UPDATE August 29, 2023 4:20pm EDT:

This story keeps getting stranger. There was online chatter that one of the women who was shot had sneaked the gun inside Guaranteed Rate Field beneath her belly rolls. I mean, what kind of people make up stuff like that?

Well, they may not have to do so.

Here’s what longtime Chicago sports reporter, Peggy Kusinski just tweeted:

“As I reported on @ESPN1000 just now… the shooting at Guaranteed Rate Field during a #WhiteSox game was indeed an accidental discharge by one of the women “grazed” by the bullet. She reportedly snuck the gun in past metal detectors hiding it in the folds of her belly fat.”

ESPN 1000 AM is the White Sox flagship radio station. It’s a credible source and Kusinski is a solid journalist.

If true, this news is a black mark for the White Sox fan base. What type of person brings a handgun to a baseball game? On the other hand, after the game, in a heavily hyped promotion, Vanilla Ice was to be the headliner of a “90s Night” concert. Were the women there for the Sox-Athletics game or for the postgame show? The White Sox cancelled the gig due to what they called “technical difficulties.” They lied. Shame on the White Sox. Police officers wanted to keep stadium lights on to look for evidence.

And how does a gun detection system miss a firearm hidden in belly rolls?

And what about the Chicago Police Department? Interim superintendent Waller said in a Monday press conference, “At one point in time it was requested as a precaution” to cancel the game. But the game played on. Who made that call to continue? The White Sox? The police? Mayor Brandon Johnson? The women who were shot are said to be teachers. Johnson is a product of the Chicago Teachers Union, for whom he was a longtime organizer, and Johnson is a former CPS teacher. Johnson’s political career is a creation of the CTU.

Without a doubt, I’ll have at least one more update.

Update August 29, 2023, 9:15pm EDT:

Second City Cop is hinting about the “graze wound” woman, that the injury may have been a power burn, is a Chicago Public Schools teacher.

UPDATE: A CPS teacher had the gun?

UPDATE: A CPS teacher with a suburban home address?

John Ruberry, a lifetime Chicago White Sox fan, blogs five miles north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Solid Advice, Where’s Ali and Stacy for that Matter? Reaping what they sow, Let’s Make a Deal and the Joys of a Good Book Under the Fedora

Posted: January 29, 2023 by datechguy in abortion, crime, culture, nfl, opinion/news, Sports, tech, Uncomfortable Truths, under the fedora
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Robert Stacy McCain in noting the race hustle that is going on in Memphis give a piece of solid advice to those who are elevated to sainthood after death only without an examination of their lives to discover “heroic virtue” as the church does:

Don’t resist arrest in Memphis

Just once I’d like to the see the parents in one of these cases say: “I loved my son but he was a thug who got what he deserved.” That kind of declaration would save lives, but doesn’t generate generational wealth.

Speaking of Stacy it’s been many weeks since Elon Musk stated that conservatives who had been banned by the previous regime would be restored but there is still no sign of the @RSMCCAIN account on twitter that used to have 80K+ followers, me among them, however I notice that Ali Alexander has been suspended again. I have no idea what his underlying “offense” was but from what’s being reported the twitter code is practically designed to suspend people on its own.

It’s a great reminder of the wisdom of the start of Psalm 146:3-4

Put no trust in princes,

in children of Adam powerless to save.


Who breathing his last, returns to the earth;

that day all his planning comes to nothing

These type of problems have to be solved by ourselves

I used to feel bad for people in Minnesota for the type of government they managed to get saddled with. I had always presumed that they were sensible midwest folk who had just let the left get too strong a foothold in cities.

And then I see thigs like this:

The Minnesota Senate today passed a bill to enshrine in Minnesota law a right to abortion without limits at any time during pregnancy. Senators approved the bill, H.F. 1, by just a one-vote margin, 34-33. Gov. Tim Walz is expected to sign the sweeping measure into law.

Abortion to the day before delivery? No problem in Minnesota!

It’s news like this that makes me think that Minneapolis voters are reaping what they have sown from their worship of St. George of the fentanyl, after all why should the parent who vote to allow the murder of their kids even to the day before their birth be safe on the streets?

The Cry is “racism” as the Carolina Panthers hired Frank Reich, an experienced coach with a long record for the open job rather than elevate the interim coach of color who had played .500 ball with a .500 team as the man in charge.

Wigdor LLP, the New York City-based law firm that represents Wilks in his discrimination suit against the NFL, was “disturbed” by the Panthers’ hiring process.

“We are shocked and disturbed that after the incredible job Coach Wilks did as the interim coach, including bringing the team back into playoff contention and garnering the support of players and fans, that he was passed over for the head coach position by David Tepper,” the firm said in a statement.

I’ll make a deal with Wigdor LLP. I’ll start worrying about the supposed underrepresentation of blacks among NFL head coaches (10% of the league when blacks represent 11% of the population of the nation) when the NFL address the overrepresentation of blacks among those who play the game making six to eight figure paychecks annually (70% of the players when blacks represent 11% of the country).

Sooner or later an undrafted or released player will sue on those ground claiming “racism” and the fun will begin.

Finally as my wife has been picking up extra days at work to supplement her gardening budget for 2023 I have rediscovered the joys of going to a restaurant with a good book and slowly enjoying a meal while I read.

This week it was Commodore Hornblower by CS Forester I had a first edition sitting on my shelf but a book is not meant to sit on a shelf it’s meant to be read.

It’s amazing how relaxing such a thing can be and it’s a rather large contrast to all the cell phones around me.

Who ever thought reading a good book would be such a radical act?

When a bomb is about to explode in your neighborhood do you call the ACLU, Antifa, or Black Lives Matter?

Posted: December 27, 2020 by John Ruberry in News/opinion, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Broadway in Nashville in 2018. AT&T Building in background.

By John Ruberry

The defund the police looks pretty irrelevant now. As you know on Christmas morning an explosives-laded recreational vehicle devestated a business district in downtown Nashville.

“This vehicle has a bomb, if you can hear this message, you need to evacuate” was the loop recording that played before the bomb detonated at sunrise in Music City.

Someone, or more likely more than one person, called not Black Lives Matter, Antifa (true, I don’t believe they have a listed phone number), or the ACLU–all of them who are proponents of the defund the police movement–about the warning. Instead the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department was called.

And six MNPD police officers cleared the area, most likely minimizing injuries and possibly fatalities. These hero cops appear to be pretty young, they may have had children at home. They were on the streets on the one day when most people don’t want to work.

There are a couple of theories on what motivated the bomber–or bombers. I’ve been to Nashville and 2nd Avenue, where the explosion happened, is just a block from the popular and generally crowded entertainment and bar district on Broadway. If human carnage was the goal then Christmas Eve around sunset would have been a much better time for that. Or last night, the day after Christmas. One theory is that the recording was meant to frighten away pedestrians and residents so there would only be cops on 2nd Avenue when the bomb went off. Another hypothesis is that because the rigged RV was parked adjacent to the AT&T Building, the explosion was the work of anti-5G paranoids. AT&T mobile and internet service in Nasvhille has been severely disrupted by the bombing, as has 911 service as far away as Kentucky.

As for the first theory, when that RV exploded that would mean only cops would be killed. Back to the Nashville hero police officers: These six appear to be ordinary beat cops, not specialists that you’ll find on the bomb squad. All but one, the sergeant, have been on the job for less than five years. It’s beat cops that the defund the police activists have their eyes on; “moderates” within that movement admit cops with advanced skills, such as bomb experts, are still needed. But you’re not going to find the specialists, with all due respect to them, patrolling the streets at dawn on Christmas morning.

“Call a friend, call a cop,” was the slogan of PSAs back in the 1970s. Alright, perhaps you don’t need to have cops as your pals. But police officers sure come in handy when all hell is about to break loose.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.