Going to Eleven

I’ve spent this very sad morning thinking about how many times I’ve seen each of Rob Reiner’s first five movies … and how many quotes from each one I use every day. You can talk all you want about the great ones, the Scorseses and Coppolas and Spielbergs and Hitchcocks and all the rest. Sure, they were great.

In a practical sense, Rob Reiner has meant more to me than all of them combined.

Rob Reiner made other excellent movies after those five — Misery, A Few Good Men, The American President, I think Flipped is very underrated — and some pretty famously bad ones. But none of that matters much to me. That five-movie run, for me, is the best there ever was and the best there ever will be.

A long time ago, I interviewed Rob Reiner at the All-Star Game in Pittsburgh (yikes, that was more than thirty years ago), and I should have told him what he and his movies meant to me, but I didn’t, and it wouldn’t have registered even if I had. We did talk a little baseball — Reiner was a great baseball fan — and that’s probably as it should be.

The world feels a little bit colder this morning. Thank goodness the movies live forever.

Not a lot left to say about the Browns — hasn’t really been a lot to say for weeks now — but I do have two thoughts.

One is that Cleveland.com has clearly run out of ideas.

Shedeur Sanders made a couple of nice deep throws to a wide-open receiver on Sunday. One of his three interceptions should have been caught by the receiver.

He also had a 30.3 passer rating — as a reminder, if you go 0-for-40 but don’t throw an interception, your passer rating is 39.58 — and he threw a Pick 6 that was dropped by the defensive back, and also the refs missed an obvious fumble because they blew a quick whistle while he was getting tackled. He was abysmal. That wasn’t all his fault or perhaps even mostly his fault. The offensive line was worse than abysmal. He has no weapons other than promising tight end Harold Fannin, whom Sanders locks onto the way Tony locks onto Maria at the high school dance in West Side Story.

I’m not saying that Shedeur Sanders is a hopeless case. No way to know.

But I am saying he gave the Browns exactly zero reasons to “believe he can be their guy.”

Having covered many, many bad teams over my three centuries as a sportswriter, I recognize that headline and story. You have to write SOMETHING. I can go back into my archives and find countless “Emil Brown is the future,” and “Jeff Blake proves he belongs,” and “Carlos Febles is the key building block to a better future” stories. No matter how bad or hopeless the team you’re covering happens to be, you have find something good or hopeful to say, or else you’ll lose your mind (and also your readers).

In other words, this headline is laughably Pravda but also understandable. The season ain’t over yet. We’ve got three more games of this trash.

The second thought might be my imagination running wild, but as the world’s leading expert on Kevin Stefanski press conferences, I definitely noticed a different vibe for this week’s version. He seemed … I don’t quite know how to describe it … more relaxed? More settled? More resigned to the inevitable?

I mean, he said all the same things he always says (“made too many mistakes,” “can’t beat a good football team that way,” “we have to coach better and play better,” “we’ll get it fixed”), but he didn’t put any of the force behind the clichés that he usually does. He didn’t sound like a guy who believes he’s going to get it fixed.

He sounded like a guy who knows that he won’t be the head coach much longer but is trying to go out the right way. Which, you know, I wouldn’t expect anything less.

Again, this could be overreading the situation — but there was just a sort of wry and rueful ease in his voice as he dodged a bunch of unanswerable questions about why the Cleveland Browns are a terrible football team. Probably my favorite was when he was asked why the Browns sent Shedeur Sanders out there without a play card on his wristband, leaving him helplessly running to the sideline to the plays.

Here’s the sheepish exchange:

Reporter: “Was there something wrong with Sanders’ wristband?”

Stefanski: “Yeah, there was a miscommunication early.”

Reporter: “We heard you guys had the wrong plays on the wristband on the first two drives. Is that accurate?”

Stefanski. “No. Yeah. Yeah. There was something, I don’t know, they uh, the wristband got something on it, or whatever it was, but there was a, uh, we got that fixed. Pretty quickly.”

Again, it might be my imagination. But I sensed Stefanski thinking to himself, at least a little bit, “Three more weeks, and I won’t have to deal with this garbage anymore.”

I’ve dreamed that one day Stefanski would go off and bark the truth about stuff. Someone would ask about the Browns historically terrible special teams, and he’d shout, “Yeah, well, when you’re in salary cap jail because you just had to give away your whole future to bring in a 24-time accused sexual misconduct quarterback who hadn’t played in a year, you’re basically scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last players on your 53-man roster, so, um, no, we’re not going to have great special teams.”

But he won’t. He’s a team player, through and through, and he will go down saying that he needed to coach better, and the team will learn from it. That’s admirable. I think he’s admirable. But if he ever decided to write a book about what really went down in Cleveland these last few years, well, I’m here for you, Stef.

It’s so fun, as a writer, to watch your daughter’s writing voice hone in. I think Part II of Elizabeth’s “Oscar Best Original Song” series is a blast.

Part I was fun too.

Catherine M. Young writes about Bruce Springsteen’s Exes in McSweeney’s, and it’s so good that I … well, if you’re a Bruce fan, just read it. If you’re a Bruce hater, also, just read it. And if you’re ambivalent about Bruce, you might not get all the references, but you’ll get enough, and you’ll love it too.

Some of you know about the longstanding argument I’ve had with my friends at the Baseball Hall of Fame. I think it’s right to call the announcers and writers who have won the Frick Award and Career BBWAA Excellence Award “Hall of Famers.” The Hall’s official position is that they are not — they are Hall of Famer AWARD WINNERS, which they make clear is not the same thing. In their world, Bowie Kuhn is a Hall of Famer and Vin Scully is not, Candy Cummings is a Hall of Famer and Roger Angell is not, Bud Selig is a Hall of Famer and Bob Uecker is not.

I don’t really want to live in that world.

Our argument is immaterial and inconsequential because we live in the real world — the winners of the Frick and Excellence Awards give speeches in Cooperstown, and they are always introduced as Hall of Famers. Ergo: They are Hall of Famers. The fact that their name lives in a different part of the museum and that they don’t get an official plaque doesn’t matter to 99.99% of people.

But I have thought: If it is the official position that announcers and writers who win the big awards are not Hall of Famers, why don’t they have an ACTUAL HALL OF FAME ballot for announcers and writers? I mean, that would actually honor the history of the Hall. Do you know who was in the third Hall of Fame class?

After the voters put in Ruth and Cobb, Honus and the Big Train, Mack and McGraw, Ban Johnson and Cy Young, after the biggies, they inducted Henry Chadwick, a writer. You might know some stuff about Chadwick — he invented the box score, shaped the game as we still know it, and was called “The Father of Baseball” — but the main point is that he was a writer who enhanced baseball with his words and ideas.

According to the Hall’s official position, he’s the last writer inducted into the Hall.

According to the Hall’s official position, there are no broadcasters in the Hall (unless you count people like Dizzy Dean and Ralph Kiner, who were not elected for their broadcasting).

I thought about this over the weekend after it was announced that Joe Buck won the Frick Award this year and longtime Cleveland beat writer Paul Hoynes won the Career Excellence Award. I’m genuinely happy for both men, who are both very nice people in my experience, and have both done fine work over many years. Buck is obviously the more famous of the two, and people had VERY strong opinions about him as an announcer, with the most common complaint being that he seemed to like football a heck of a lot more than baseball*. I found that complaint to be both fair (he really did seem to light up more watching football) and unfair (Buck was a technically excellent baseball announcer with a ringing voice that was, for a long time, the music of October baseball). Would I have given the award to Duane Kuiper instead? Absolutely. But no one can deny the impact Joe Buck had on baseball for multiple decades**

*And the second most common complaint being that he hated OUR TEAM, whatever OUR TEAM happened to be — this is still a common refrain in Kansas City after Buck gushed over the incredibly gushable performance of Madison Bumgarner in 2014.

**In the interest of full disclosure, I vote for the Career BBWAA award, and I did not vote for Hoynes. He’s done yeoman’s work as a Cleveland baseball writer for more than 40 years, and he’s always a joy to see in the press box. I voted for Tom Verducci. I think Verducci is one of the greatest baseball writers ever.

Anyway, both choices are fine. Both men are deserving. All that jazz.

But I do find myself thinking: Maybe there should be a way to petition the Hall of Fame to start adding broadcasters and writers to the veteran’s Hall of Fame ballot? I mean these awards are nice, and it’s great that to honor local greats like Cleveland’s Paul Hoynes and Cleveland’s Tom Hamilton and Cleveland’s Sheldon Ocker and Cleveland’s Jack Graney and Cleveland’s Hal Lebovitz (it’s been a banner run for Cleveland!), and it’s good to remember the national voices of baseball like Joe Buck and Al Michaels and Bob Costas.

But there are writers and broadcasters who are a bigger part of the game, whose impact on baseball is titanic, who mattered as much as the greatest players, people like Vin Scully and Red Smith and Red Barber and Roger Angell and Bob Uecker and Ring Lardner and Harry Caray and Jim Murray and Jack Buck and Peter Gammons.

There should be a place in the Hall of Fame — the real Hall of Fame — for those giants.