Exit the hustler
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 170
SPORTS FINAL DEP'T.
Pete Rose, 1941–2024
PETE ROSE IS dead. He was, by most accounts, a creep—a showoff, a liar, a cheater, a compulsive gambler, a credibly accused sex offender—and his signature accomplishment was essentially a fraud, writing his own washed-up bat into the lineup day after day as a player-manager so that he could chase the record for the most hits, at the expense of his team's success. His most famous play was a cheap shot in the All-Star Game that ruined catcher Ray Fosse's career, lowering his head and smashing into Fosse on purpose as the catcher looked away to reach for an arriving throw from the outfield, then standing over the injured player to taunt him. At his peak, he was about 90 percent as good as the real best player on his own team.
He did grimly stalk down the hits record and wrest it away from Ty Cobb, using corked bats to get there. He finished 67 hits ahead of Cobb, in 2,787 more plate appearances, or about four extra years' worth. Thanks to that falsely extended career, he could and did say that no one has ever accumulated more hits than Pete Rose—cheap, crappy hits, like Smaug on a hoard of grimy pennies. Elsewhere, in a part of the record book closer to where games were won or lost, five players still scored more runs than Rose, despite coming to the plate 2,000 fewer times (or 5,000 fewer, in the case of Babe Ruth).
He set the prototype for an age to come when public figures would be immune to disgrace. Major League Baseball banned him forever because he'd placed bets on a Cincinnati Reds team he was managing. He said he never bet on his team while he was still playing, but he was lying about that. He said he only bet on his own team to win, never to lose. Pete Rose never threw a game, according to Pete Rose.
ANNALS OF RESEARCH DEP'T.
Space Gets Slightly More Crowded
THEY FOUND A new planet candidate around Barnard's Star. This one, researchers said, would be about one-third the mass of Earth and too close to the red dwarf to be within its theoretical habitable zone for life, with an estimated temperature of 260 degrees Fahrenheit. The measurements that detected it—using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, or ESPRESSO—also affirmed the rejection of the existence of a previously suspected "super-Earth" planet, but came up with three other possible small planets for further investigation, albeit none of them far enough from the star to support life.
In 2019, I wrote about Barnard's Star in a post about the mysterious interstellar object dubbed ‘Oumuamua:
Whatever else it may have been, ‘Oumuamua was an echo or reflection of the now long-abandoned Project Daedalus, an actual answer coming inbound where a hypothetical question had once been outbound. Project Daedalus was the nearest possible leap into interstellar existence when I was a child, a proposed spacecraft floating moodily in glossy magazine renderings.
We had only one exoplanet, then. One! In the entire universe. At most. The sum of our known realm of planets was nine here, around our Sun, and one over there, six light-years away, orbiting a dim little thing called Barnard’s Star and causing it to wobble. The name “Barnard’s Star” still carries a thrill when I say it in my mind; that was the name of the frontier of possibility. And the frontier of non-impossibility: scientists could imagine a spacecraft that could get there, without warp drives or cryo-suspension chambers or any other fantastic ways to get around the laws of physics or biology. Daedalus was (or was going to be, or could have been going to be) a cluster of globular tanks and a funnel, nuclear-powered, built in space near our own planet and sent off, at a reasonably small fraction of light speed, to go somewhere else. I gazed at the renderings and drew globular tank-clusters and nuclear-drive funnels on sketch paper, alongside assorted starfighters and ray guns and space-adventure stuff.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 30, 2024
★★★★ A pale yellow light was shining in the east as everyone began to wake from oversleeping their way out of the wet and dark weekend. Broad stripes of pink and purple stretched in the western part of a sky that seemed to have a chance at being blue. That blue was in patches at first, but it spread and soon sun was shining on the dogwood and low white clouds were speeding along. A boy outside the market looped a great swinging martial arts kick at nothing in particular. The segment of the sky with the afternoon sun in it was overwhelming white glare; the rest was fine, long-absent blue decorated with thin patches of cloud. The playground fountains were splashing.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
CLICK ON THIS box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS DEP'T.
Art Exhibit, continued again
More consciousness at Instagram.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from 250 Meatless Menus And Recipes To Meet The Requirements Of People Under The Varying Conditions Of Age, Climate And Work, by Eugene Christian and Mollie Griswold Christian, published in 1910, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
LETTUCE SANDWICHES
Crisp small leaves of lettuce and dip in Hygeia dressing. Spread crackers or bread with cream cheese (Philadelphia brand), a dash of grated nuts, and just before serving put the lettuce between crackers.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
A Word from FLAMING HYDRA: The SWAG Fundraiser and ARCHIVE PROJECT
A FIERY COOPERATIVE for press freedom, NOW with gorgeous SWAG. Plus, help preserve THE AWL and THE HAIRPIN archives!! Now it is time for our PHASE TWO Kickstarter, to raise more daily operating funds while we reach even more subscribers—and also to underwrite some exciting new projects.
Many of the Flaming Hydras once wrote and/or edited at The Awl and The Hairpin, and we want these sites to have the posterity they deserve. So we’re getting started on the work of online scholarship. With your help, and the advice and help of the editors of The Awl and The Hairpin, we’re designing an online literary refuge for a handpicked selection of the best work these sites produced, presented with care in a well-designed archival setting, with captioning, commentary, essays, and comment sections available for Hydra subscribers. If we reach our GOAL, we’ll design and develop a living sanctuary for these important landmarks in the history of web publishing (so they don’t wind up in some gross AI chum farm where they steal bylines and wreck everything!!!)
SPECIAL BONUS KICKSTARTER EXCLUSIVE: THE AWL BOOK
This collection of top-shelf pieces from The Awl, edited by Carrie Frye and published and produced by Flaming Hydra in consultation with The Awl’s original editors and contributors, will also include ALL NEW commentary and original essays from contributors and readers.
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