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DDT's Pop Flies (67)

DDT (AKA Darryl Tahirali) is a freelance writer living in Orange County, California. Originally from Canada, DDT enjoys writing about music, baseball, and other areas of Western pop culture from the tasteful to the trashy. DDT can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

After ten years of inducting musical artists, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had shown itself to have cast a broad net. In addition to inducting the expected founders and superstars from the Rock Era's first two decades, it also inducted a number of artists whose credentials were marginal. Unfortunately, that trend accelerated through this third five-year period, with only 10 of the 33 total inductees truly without question Hall of Fame acts. In this period from 1996 to 2000, that broad net scooped up many more acts that clearly justify a close audit of the Hall's inductions. How far off-base had the Hall of Fame become?
Continuing from Part 1 my folly to audit the selections made thus far by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, this bite of the elephant covers the inductees from 1991 to 1995. With 37 inductees during this five-year period, as opposed to 43 during the previous five-year period, and the window of eligibility extending to acts that released their first recording through the 1960s, the Hall made some fairly sage inductions during this period.

Continuing the idea from a previous column about the ten music albums you would want with you on a desert island, here is that idea updated for 21st-century digital boys and girls. (Apologies to Bad Religion.) Thanks to iPods and other digital devices, music storage and playback has grown tremendously—you can now literally hold the musical world in the palm of your hand. Should you find yourself on that titular island today, no doubt you would have access to much more music than before. So, before the batteries run out or the Dharma Initiative kidnaps you, which ten playlists would you have with you on the island?

Beware the dangers of channel surfing: Recently I stumbled across a rebroadcast of VH-1's most recent 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, originally broadcast in 2010. VH-1 has of course appointed itself both curator and arbiter of the history of the Rock Era, and it has proved to be impressively incompetent in this regard, as should be evident from just the first hour of this five-hour televised train wreck. But just how bad could this particular countdown be?

 

While it might be premature to consider Ichiro Suzuki's career to be at a close—he is still the starting right fielder for the Seattle Mariners—he enters the 2012 season as a 38-year-old major-league ballplayer. In baseball terms, that's pushing retirement age—and his performance in 2012 will determine whether it becomes a forced retirement. What is not premature is determining the answer to this question: Is Ichiro Suzuki a Hall of Famer?

After a quarter-century of selecting inductees, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has been under steady criticism for its choices, as readers of this site are well-aware. So, in an exercise in extreme foolishness, I think it's high time the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was audited to determine whether its selections really are justified. It is a comprehensive task, and just as you eat an elephant one bite at a time, I am starting with the first five years' worth of inductees.

The week of January 16, which began with the observation of the birthday of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., brought news of the deaths of R&B singer Etta James and R&B bandleader Johnny Otis, both inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is sadly appropriate first that the deaths of James and Otis should occur in the same week—it was Otis who discovered James—and that both should die during the week that marks the commemoration of the slain African-American civil rights leader.

 

Having proved to be a hit with moviegoers, Moneyball, the baseball story that might feature an underdog but otherwise avoids most sports-film cliché, is picking up steam as we move into the heart of awards season: This fast-paced, engrossing movie has garnered four Golden Globe nominations, typically a bellwether for the World Series of filmdom recognition, the Academy Awards. Indeed, Moneyball is a Hall of Fame-worthy baseball flick.

The Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) has voted on which player or players will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2012, and the results of that vote will be announced on January 9. Boy, I wish I'd had a ballot!

Each BBWAA voting member can cast a vote for up to ten players, a ballot provision that might prove to be very useful given the logjam of worthy candidates already on the ballot and those who will be added to the ballot in the next few years. Although I don't think there are ten worthy candidates on this year's slate, I would have voted for eight of them given the chance.

First, I'll dispense with the players who are on the ballot for the first time this year. Of the 13 new candidates, only former Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams merits any serious consideration. Of the remaining 12, the Angels' right fielder Tim Salmon emerges as the strongest choice, although he remains a solid player, beset by injuries, one of the many good enough to play major league baseball as a career but not an elite player.

All right, so the Baseball Hall of Fame has not inducted any movies yet, but that doesn't mean that baseball fans who love movies—feel free to reverse that if you are so inclined—don't have their favorite baseball movies. I know I do. And here they are—my Starting Nine, baseball's Hall of Fame-quality movies.

 

More so than any other sport, baseball lends itself to the dramatic devices that make a feature film effective. For one thing, the fundamental conflict in baseball—the pitcher-hitter confrontation—makes for an ideal one-on-one confrontation. Moreover, the individual focus on a player translates to dramatic character study like a double-play transfer toss at second base. For another, the very pace of the game (and, yes, non-baseball fans might liken that pace of the game to Oscar Wilde's description of a Wagner opera: "Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror") allows for the kind of climactic moments ripe for slow-motion shots and stings of thrilling music swelling on the soundtrack, with sufficient time for reaction shots from the bench and the bleachers (think: The Natural). Finally, the claim that baseball was the "national pastime" persisted throughout the 20th century, allowing Hollywood to begin mythologizing the game early on.

As of this writing, Minnesota Twins designated hitter Jim Thome is two home runs away from reaching a milestone mark in baseball: 600 home runs. Only seven men in the history of baseball have reached the 600-homer plateau, and if 500 round-trippers are no longer an automatic ticket to the Hall of Fame, then surely 600 are. Right? Earlier this year, we saw a good deal of hoopla surrounding the Yankees' Derek Jeter's reaching 3000 hits, another historic milestone, and Jeter certainly reached that hallowed circle in grand fashion, not only going five-for-five during the game that he reached 3000, including hitting a home run for his 3000th hit, but he drove in the winning run with one of those hits. By contrast, Thome's march toward history seems to be a non-event despite the fact that if and when Thome reaches 600, it will be several years before Albert Pujols reaches the same plateau. Where is the love for Thome?

 

Part One of this series was easy—picking the five recently-retired players who will waltz into the Baseball Hall of Fame once they are eligible, probably during their first year of eligibility. Part Two is not going to be as easy: Yes, these players would, during any other time, be on the express train to Cooperstown. But the Hall of Fame ballot for the next several years is going to be overstuffed with worthy candidates; there are already several qualified candidates waiting for their call to lasting baseball greatness. Will we see surefire Hall of Famers overlooked and even discarded?