"Our enemies in Iraq are good at filling hospitals, but they don't build any. They can incite men to murder and suicide, but they cannot inspire men to live in hope and add to the progress of their country. The terrorists only influence is violence and their only agenda is death."

"In the city of Fallujah there has been considerable violence by Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters, including the murder of four American contractors. American soldiers and Marines could have used overwhelming force.

Our commanders, however, consulted with Iraq's governing council and local officials and determined that massive strikes against the enemy would alienate the local population and increase support for the insurgency.

So we have pursued a different approach."

"Like every nation that has made the journey to democracy, Iraqis will raise up a government that reflects their own culture and values.

I sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American."

"Our terrorist enemies have a vision that guides and explains all their varied acts of murder. They seek to impose Taliban-like rule country by country across the greater Middle East...

They seek weapons of mass destruction to impose their will through blackmail and catastrophic attacks.

None of this is the expression of a religion. It is a totalitarian, political ideology pursued with consuming zeal and without conscious."

The Case for Pudge

Rob,
Your ranking of baseball's greatest catchers is based on an appallingly simplistic, one-dimensional analysis. It surprises me that baseball writers like you could be so unconscious of the new developments that have taken place even very recently that mandate new levels of analysis when taking on questions such as this one.

Your analysis is outdated. There was a time, perhaps fifteen years ago, when it would have been perfectly adequate.

But that time has past. Something has happened in baseball during that time that has revolutionized the position of catcher, forcing baseball analysts to consider it in different terms and to take new variables into account.

I give you Ivan Pudge Rodriguez, the man who, even with your grossly outdated analysis, would easily have ranked in the top five had he spent the prime of his career in pinstripes instead of Ranger red/blue. Pudge is quite arguably the best catcher there ever was, and it seems the only experts who recognize that are the ones who live in Dallas.

There has never been anyone like Pudge. You can adequately weigh the relative merits of Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk and Yogi Berra using the same monotonous criteria. You might compare their offensive stats such as adjusted OPS and games played, as you have done. It is the same way for nearly every position. Defense is determined by factors such as fielding percentage; and this variable is usually left out of the analysis entirely since all major league players tend to have relatively high ones. And so when comparing Willie Mays to Ted Williams or Lou Gehrig to Mark McGwire, for example, no one ever mentions defense. It is a variable rarely brought into the analysis because the relative difference is always negligible against the backdrop of more significant offensive categories. And for years, it was much the same way with catchers.

Until Pudge. The day when catchers were, just as first basemen and right fielders, evaluated primarily by offensive prowess is over. That era is long gone. And Pudge Rodriguez is the one who ended it.

Of course, you did not take into account any such defensive-oriented stats such as caught-stealing percentage (CS%) in your analysis. You couldn't. It’s impossible to do so because no one kept track of such things in the era of Berra or even Fisk. As good as Johnny Bench was and for all the gold gloves he won, no one ever watched him pick off base runners so routinely and thought, "My God! No one ever steals on this guy!" No indeed, and so such statistics as caught-stealing percentage were tracked only with the coming of Pudge.

The way Pudge so habitually fired laser beams behind excessively confident runners, sending them back to the dugout was something new to baseball. And Pudge gradually came to be feared and respected by runners on the basepaths much the same way Bonds is feared by pitchers. Just as pitchers so frequently surrender to Bonds and issue the intentional pass, so did the Kenny Loftons of the league begin to take only the most modest leads off first base when Pudge was behind the plate. The opposing running game was completely shut down. And the modest leads that runners took off first base frequently precluded them from scoring on balls hit to the gaps. Indeed, in the past, a runner was never considered to have stolen a base off of a particular catcher. It was as though the arm strength of the man behind the plate were another irrelevant defensive statistic that showed only a negligible difference between two given catchers. Not until Pudge was the catcher considered such a significant factor on defense for doing things like shutting down the opposition running game.

Pudge Rodriguez did not play in Boston or New York or even your beloved Kansas City. And so it appears the most revolutionary baseball player of the last fifty years has still not found his way onto your radar screen. This is because you cannot sit there in your New York condo and measure all of the achievements of Pudge Rodriguez with numbers on paper. There is no way to measure how many runs were saved in an inning because a base-runner so carelessly led a bit far off first base. There is no way to measure how many runs were saved because runners could not take a large lead off first or second, much less steal, and were therefore prevented from scoring. There is no way to measure how many runners chose not to steal solely because Pudge was behind the plate. And so in this way, attempts to measure the scale of the Pudge revolution quickly degenerate into fruitless exercises in the realm of counterfactuals.

You see Rob, there is no way to measure Pudge's achievements on paper. The only way to obtain some feel for them is to watch him play. And it seems you haven't done much of that. While Pudge was in his prime, you were too busy watching the Yankees (or the lousy Royals.. whatever). Remember J.T. Snow barreling into Pudge last year to end the Marlins-Giants Division Series? Ever wonder if Snow might have taken a slightly larger lead at second without Pudge behind the plate? He might have scored...

There's really no way to know. You can't measure Pudge's impact. But still take note: no one has ever said this about Gary Carter or Carlton Fisk or Yogi Berra or even Johnny Bench. They were all similar players that differed slightly only in the magnitude of their skills, but not at all in the breadth of them. Only Pudge Rodriguez has transcended the traditional role of catcher.

If, in addition to being one of the five best pitchers of the last half-century, Greg Maddux had also annually batted .330, comparing him to other pitchers of his day would be somewhat problematic. Comparing Babe Ruth to any player in history also presents something of an obstacle given that, for a time, Babe was one of the American League's best pitchers.

And in the same way, you cannot so flippantly compare Pudge to Mike Piazza or Gary Carter. Pudge is in a class entirely his own.

And so now, no analyst or writer will ever be able to tackle this question again and still be taken seriously if he does not take into account the new variables that Pudge Rodriguez has added to the equation.

You did not do this. And so except that your article was posted online, I would say it's not worth the paper on which it was printed.

Nicholas Berg (about 1978 - about May 2004), an American businessman seeking telecommunications work in Iraq during the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, was captured and beheaded by Islamist militants possibly linked to Al-Qaida in May 2004. His capture and killing was said to have been carried out to avenge abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.

Berg, age 26 at the time of his death, was a native of West Chester, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and owned his own company, Prometheus Methods Tower Service. He worked inspecting and rebuilding communication antennas, and had previously visited Kenya and Ghana on similar projects.

Berg was graduated from West Chester Henderson High School in 1996, and attended four universities, Cornell, Drexel, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oklahoma. He once traveled to Africa to help a village; in Ghana, he taught villagers how to make bricks, and returned emaciated because he gave away most of his food: he returned with only the clothes on his back.

It's time to put up or shut up. Last week I wrote a column saying that CBS should have thought twice before showing the photos from Abu Ghraib prison. The response from readers and even some journalists was like I'd proposed banning the printing press. Numerous e-mailers said I'm no different than a Holocaust-denier who'd ban photos from Auschwitz.

Well, now we have the horrible news that Nick Berg, an American contractor, was beheaded by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group explicitly in response to the release of the Abu Ghraib photos.

I say in response to the release of the photos — and not the abuse — because that's exactly what I mean.

The Iraqi insurgents had to have known that there were abuses taking place in Abu Ghraib before those images were released. Enough prisoners had been released for the New York Times and CNN to report on the allegations, long before the photos came out. The revelation of those humiliating pictures and the political opportunities they created lead to Berg's beheading.

So now we have an opportunity to see firsthand whether the media is willing to hold to its new standard on gratuitous and sensational images, showing them no matter how offensive and no matter what the consequences.

The Russians are not quite folk like the Israelis or Americans. They really don't care much if you hate them; they are likely to do some pretty scary things if you press them; they don't have too much money to shake down; they don't put you on cable news to yell at their citizenry; and you wouldn't really wish to emigrate there for a teaching fellowship anyway.

Yet when we take the trouble to sort out the messy moral calculus and go in on the ground shooting and getting shot, then suddenly the Left cries war crimes and worse — so strong is this Western disease of wishing to be perfect rather than merely good. Such is the self-induced burden for all those who would be gods rather than mere mortals.

But 20 years ago this week, the Carter administration had to go into a deep huddle to figure out how to respond to reports that the leader of the free world had to fight off a belligerent bunny. "It was a non-story, but they had to respond," says presidential biographer Douglas Brinkley.
"It just played up the Carter flake factor and contributed to his public persona as something less than a commanding presence. I mean, he had to deal with Russia and the Ayatollah and here he was supposedly fighting off a rabbit."

"After writing my Carter biography I can tell you," Brinkley says, "more people ask about the bunny than about the Camp David Accord or the Panama Canal Treaty."

See if you can match the variables listed in the table with the following names: Ted Williams, Griffey, Lou Gehrig, A-Rod.

Player RBI/162 G X Lou Gehrig 149.3 Joe DiMaggio 143.4 Babe Ruth 143.2 Juan Gonzalez 135.8 Y Ted Williams 130.0 Hack Wilson 127.7 Z Alex Rodriguez 125.8 Mark McGwire 122.2 W Ken Griffey Jr. 117.1 Sammy Sosa 116.8 Hank Aaron 112.8 Barry Bonds 109.9 Willie Mays 103.0	Player HR/162 G Mark McGwire 50.4 Babe Ruth 46.2 Z Alex Rodriguez 43.8 Sammy Sosa 43.4 Juan Gonzalez 42.0 Barry Bonds 41.5 W Ken Griffey Jr. 40.7 Hank Aaron 37.1 X Lou Gehrig 36.9 Y Ted Williams 36.8 Mickey Mantle 36.2 Willie Mays 35.7 Joe DiMaggio 33.7
Player TB/162 G X Lou Gehrig 378.8 Babe Ruth 374.9 Joe DiMaggio 368.4 Z Alex Rodriguez 368.3 Juan Gonzalez 354.3 Y Ted Williams 345.2 Hank Aaron 336.8 W Ken Griffey Jr. 336.6 Sammy Sosa 331.8 Barry Bonds 331.3 Willie Mays 328.4 Mark McGwire 314.6 Mickey Mantle 304.4	Player OPS Babe Ruth 1.164 Y Ted Williams 1.116 X Lou Gehrig 1.080 Barry Bonds 1.035 Mark McGwire 0.982 Joe DiMaggio 0.977 Mickey Mantle 0.977 Z Alex Rodriguez 0.963 Willie Mays 0.941 W Ken Griffey Jr. 0.940 Hank Aaron 0.928 Juan Gonzalez 0.907 Sammy Sosa 0.895

He played every game for more than 13 seasons, despite a broken thumb, painful back spasms, and a broken toe. X-rays taken late in his career, showed Gehrig's hands had 17 different fractures that had healed while he continued to play.
Link

If you want to know what it means to be a teammate, you need to look at how guys interact when the game is over. When R.A. Dickey came to Texas last year, he brought his pregnant wife with him. What does Blalock do to make him feel welcome? He tells Dickey to move into his place so he can take care of his family. Blalock says he and his wife will find another place to live for a while. He's 23 years old, and he has that kind of leadership? That's a team I root for.
--John Kruk, ESPN.com

How do we know Kerry was in Kansas City? Because the FBI was there. Why were they checking on VVAW and Kerry? Perhaps because VVAW harbored hotheads like Camil. Perhaps because Kerry had met with the Viet Cong in Paris in 1970.

But the FBI has disclosed no record of assassination talk at Kansas City and absolves Kerry of any suggestion of violence.

Still, Kerry's conduct raises questions. Why did he and his campaign so hotly deny he was at Kansas City to the point that fellow vets and Gerald Nicosia, the pro-Kerry author of "Home to War," now believe Kerry and his campaign have been lying and covering up?

Why deny he was at Kansas City, unless he knows something rotten went on in Kansas City? And if Kerry took the assassination talk seriously enough to resign there, why did he not take it seriously enough to tell police?

Finally in desperation the spineless Army chief informed the Fuehrer that the morale of the troops in the west was similar to that in 1917-1918, when there was defeatism, insubordination and even mutiny in the German army.

At hearing this, Hitler, according to Halder (whose diary is the principal source for this highly secret meeting), flew into a rage. "In what units," he demanded to know, "have there been any cases of lack of discipline? What happened? Where?" He would fly there himself tomorrow. Poor Brauchitsch, as Halder notes, had deliberately exaggerated "in order to deter Hitler," [from moving forward with plans to attack] and now he felt the full force of the Leader's uncontrolled wrath. "What action has been taken by the Army Command?" the Fuehrer shouted. "How many death sentences have been carried out?" The truth was, Hitler stormed, "the Army did not want to fight!"

"Any further conversation was impossible," Brauchitsch told the tribunal at Nuremberg in recalling his unhappy experience. "So I left." Others remembered that he staggered into headquarters at Zossen, eighteen miles away, in such a state of shock that he was unable at first to give a coherent account of what had happened.

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: MJF Books, 1959) pp. 650-651.