The Iran talks? Meetings about Syria? Discussions about Palestinian peace?
Nope.
Related: Balls and Strikes in My Boston Globe
More front-page pitches by the Boston Globe:
"Kids make their pitch for late World Series bedtimes" by Beth Teitell | Globe Staff, October 26, 2013
Let’s join Newton’s David Schumacher and his sons....
Do I even need to type it, readers?
Like an activist engaged in nonviolent resistance, Jamie went limp....
I don't like those kind of analogies coming from a lying war-promoting piece of crap.
Maybe I'll just shut off the game and go to bed.
Call it the Curse of the Sandman.
Parents who have proudly encouraged Sox fanaticism all these years now find themselves negotiating with relentless opponents. Kids are promising to eat broccoli and do chores if they are allowed to stay up. They are vowing to sleep extra hours in November. In Jamaica Plain, Jodi Sugerman-Brozan’s fourth-grader played the once-in-a-lifetime card....
Eleven-year-old Isabel Costa-Smith is using guilt....
Harry Smith, a Little League coach and a community organizer from Jamaica Plain, is trying to exploit his daughter’s interest, using late-night viewing rights as a bargaining chip. “For about a week I’ll have influence over her,” he said.
You'll have hand, huh?
I think you kids are watching waaaaaay to much television.
Well, maybe.
As negotiation expert Gregory Barron points out, giving in early — even for concessions — erodes a parent’s position for future games.
“The outcome of each negotiation sets up the next negotiation,” said Barron, a director with Lax Sebenius, a Concord negotiation firm. “I would be hesitant to reach any agreement that doesn’t cover the entire series.”
Translation: negotiate like an Israeli.
Nor should parents allow themselves to get sucked in by their children’s innocent faces.
“Children are very sensitive to what your triggers are,” warned Barron, a former assistant professor of negotiation at Harvard Business School. “They learn very quickly what you really care about, not what you say you care about, which is what we train people to do as negotiators later in life.”
I'm so glad experts the Globe finds know more about your children and how to raise them than you do, parents. Nice to know that negotiator means bullshitter, too.
Despite what kids may think, mom and dad are really just the middlemen, forced to deal with a situation — game start times of around 8 p.m. — over which they have no control. That decision is made by Major League Baseball, with input from Fox Sports, which is broadcasting the Series.
Parents may rage against the league — if they want to keep young fans, the argument goes, they would make it earlier so kids could see the series — but MLB has bigger concerns.
“You have to try and hit that window of opportunity where it’s going to be the best-case scenario for the entire country,” MLB spokesman Matt Bourne said. “Time and time again, the data has shown that starting in prime time [on the East Coast] is optimal in terms of reaching the most people.”
When the league did start a game earlier — Game 3 of the 2010 World Series began at 6:54 p.m. Eastern Time — the ratings were the lowest of the series between the Texas Rangers and the San Francisco Giants, Bourne said. It was also the lowest-rated among teenagers of any World Series game as far back as data go.
If it is any consolation to parents who could be facing five more games, in 2007 and 2008, the first pitch was thrown out around 8:30 p.m., compared with closer to 8 p.m. for this series. It turns out games starting that late turn off the non-diehards, said Fox Sports spokesman Lou D’Ermilio.
“The feeling was that at 11, when the more casual viewer flips on the game, if it was only in the seventh inning [as opposed to the eighth] it was too much of an investment to watch to the end,” he said. “So FOX and MLB decided it would be best to start earlier.”
Is there anything else on?
Even when the Sox aren’t in the World Series, many kids don’t get enough sleep. Teens need about nine hours, and tweens and pre-tweens closer to 10, said Dennis Rosen, associate medical director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital and author of “Successful Sleep Strategies for Kids.”
But how bad is it, really, for kids to stay up late? In the short term, Rosen said, sleep loss can lead to crankiness and a diminished ability to absorb information or perform at school or in sports. As for problems in the long run? “If it’s just a few nights,” he said, “there are probably none.”
That is good news for parents, many of whom are conflicted about enforcing the very laws they have set down.
They sort of have to act like the AmeriKan government when it comes to Israel, huh?
As Schumacher, the Newton dad, put it: “The best moments we have are through baseball.”
Then I feel sorry for you and your family. That is such a sad statement.
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Almost makes one want to root for the Cardinals:
"In St. Louis, the nice guys finish first" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff, October 26, 2013
ST. LOUIS —In an era when baseball has lost ground in many cities to the sensory, amped-up overload of pro football and basketball, the sport remains king here.
Baseball, newspapers, Jews. Only two of the three are losing ground.
Related: Distractions
It's all in the protocols, folks.
Like New Englanders, Cardinals fans are bound by a treasure trove of memories collected over generations.
That is the way myths are created and sustained.
“The Cardinals are a central pillar to everyone’s life.”
****************************
Their allegiance is unique, Cardinals fans said, because the city stood for decades as the remote, westernmost outpost of Major League Baseball until the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958.
Much of the rural Midwest was Cardinals country, as was vast swathes of the South and the West. The legendary play-by-play voices of Harry Caray and Jack Buck on KMOX Radio became the soundtrack of summer for countless families.
“It’s kind of a religion. It can be a little frightening, but it’s true,” said Leslie Gibson McCarthy, a former longtime editor at The Sporting News who lives in suburban Crestwood. “It was just part of the fabric of how you grew up.”
I'm beginning to not like religion of any kind.
At the team store at Busch Stadium, plenty of Cardinals fabric was being pulled from the shelves this week....
The articles always get $teered back to certain intere$ts.
Toto, we’re not in Boston anymore.
You are not in Kansas either, idiot. It's St. Louis, MISSOURI!
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Sorta hoping St. Louis spoils the party now and bursts Boston's arrogant sports bubble.
