Monday Morning Musings

The Silicon Valley Bank failure runs in sharp contrast to lyin' Biden's analysis of the economy. Silicon Valley Bank was one of the leaders in wokeness. Unfortunately, diversity was not the object of their operation. They were in finance, not feelings. They were a bank, not a psychologist. If they had worried as much about their holdings as they worried about global warming, they would be opening again this morning still as Silicon Valley Bank. 

Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot had this to say about Silicon Valley Bank. "And these banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is, shareholder returns.” Bernie is 95, he was born before the Depression. He has seen some bank failures. 

The UNC-CH Tarheels failed to make the NCAA basketball tournament this year. They were the pre-season Number One ranked team. Unfortunately, in real life, we still go ahead and play the games, no matter who the favorite is. They failed to live up to their press releases. Yesterday, they announced that they would not accept a bid to the NIT. They are taking their ball and going home to pout. They might want to squeeze in a few more practices.

When I was growing up in Tampa, I loved to go to spring training baseball games. This was before baseball changed for the worse. My wife is a Houston Astros fan, so we have watched a couple of pre-season games on television. It is nowhere nearly as interesting as the games that I used to attend. This year, they have a pitch clock and limits on how many times a pitcher can try to throw out a runner on first base and other changes. The bases are bigger, but I don't understand why. How do you complicate a game so much?

Major League Baseball says that they are trying to cut down the length of games that now take between 3 and 4 hours to play. When I was a kid, the average game lasted a little over 2 hours. What takes so long? Hitters have to step out and adjust their batting gloves after every swing. If the batter gets on base, it takes a couple of minutes for him to shed all of his batting equipment and give it to some kid to lug back to the dugout. Then they put on the special "base running gloves". They have electronic communication on pitching signs, are they picking up the wrong stations? Players show off a lot more. Strutting scores no points and only runs up the clock. Players are making millions playing a game that kids in my neighborhood played for free. 

The big cause for baseball games being so long is television advertising, which no one ever mentions. They need the hundreds of millions of dollars that advertising generates to pay grown men obscene amounts of money to play a child's game. This adds 45 to 60 minutes per game for commercials. When I was a kid, they televised the "Game of the Week" on Saturday afternoon with Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean calling the game. Now every game is televised.  Sports are the national soap opera.

Nothing will be accomplished in American offices today as millions of soon-to-be disappointed fans set up their "brackets". Am I picking a bracket? I would sooner have a good case of jock itch than waste my time on a "bracket". Besides that, I miss the basketball that we played as kids. The object was to throw the ball into the basket. How much athletic skill is required for a guy seven feet tall to cram a ball through the hoop? And yet they sometimes miss.