Thanks for the memories. You are a class act, perhaps the classiest ever to manage a World Champion. But why you didn’t fucking play Rob Ducey in that opener of that series against the Red Sox in late September of 1990 is beyond me. That bastard came into that game hitting .317 as a call-up, yet you went back to that season’s old standby, benching Ducey, starting George Bell in left and putting a 21-year-old Olerud back at DH. Is it any wonder we lost that game, and ultimately 2 out of 3 in that series? Then we watched the Sox win the division by two games. Never fucking mind we traded McGriff and Fernandez for Alomar and Carter in the offseason and won back-to-back titles in ’92 and ’93, this has been sticking in my balls since I was 14. See, here’s what that lineup would have looked like that night if you weren’t such a motherfucking stickler:
MOOKIE WILSON CF
JUNIOR FELIX RF
KELLY GRUBER 3B
GEORGE BELL DH
FRED MCGRIFF 1B
ROB DUCEY LF
TONY FERNANDEZ SS
PAT BORDERS C
MANNY “MANUEL” LEE 2B
In all seriousness though, thanks for the memories Clarence. I believe you are the all-time face of the Toronto Blue Jays, and they should rename Blue Jays Way to Cito Gaston Way.
I love Buffalo like my own non-existent son, but there’s a big negative, something distinctly Queen City about Paladino. And it’s not just his accent. His poorly-veiled racism for instance (But I got black friends, he says, like Thurman Thomas). And sending bestiality-themed emails.
I always felt sort of bad for Andrew Cuomo because he was cuckolded by a Kennedy girl and a polo player, but dude’s going to mop the floor with this jackass. The downstate Manhattan liberal elite are going to look like they’re attached to reality by the time that election rolls around in November. In the meantime, I’ll think positive memories about Buffalo-area businesspeople …
Rocco Rossi’s attempt to make a major statement Monday by announcing his intention, if elected mayor of Toronto, to finish the Allen/Spadina Expressway by tunneling from Eglinton to the Gardiner will almost assuredly not provide the shot in arm his campaign desired. The idea is certainly bold — but among other things, too bold for Toronto. While there’s no doubt that the city has needed a north-south freeway connection on the west side of downtown for decades, it’s just never going to happen. In Toronto, only activists unite and vote over major municipal issues. While this will certainly get attention from people, it won’t galvanize anybody to actually go out and vote for him. In fact, it will only increase the resolve of the anti-car activists and residents of Forest Hill and the Annex — the same people who killed the original Spadina Expressway in the early ’70s.
At worst the platform was hideously ill-informed, because for the cost of something like this you could build a real subway network. At best it highlights a very real problem — gridlocked streets that make walking and cycling dangerous. But big ideas are not something Toronto does. As I’ve said before, this isn’t China or the United States of the last century. Toronto’s biggest problem was that it boomed in the 1960s and early ’70s, a time when reformist ideas were taking hold. That’s why the Spadina and Crosstown freeways were never built. Other North American cities, like New York and Chicago, boomed in the 1880s and early 1900s respectively, or when the industrial age was firing up. That’s why New York has 468 subway stations and Chicago has a complex network of elevated trains and double-deckered streets. Montreal? They just have better infrastructure because they’re in Quebec and that’s where the Feds need to constantly grease wheels.
Because of that and many other reasons, Toronto is left with outdated everything, from the low VIA platforms at Union Station to exposed hydro wires to a transit system the current mayor admits only properly serves a city half its size. And it will never change because imagination doesn’t work here in terms of government. That’s what makes Rossi’s plan so crazy. If he at least focused on an issue that held some immediate relevance — like Downtown Relief Line over Transit City, or burying that other expressway, the Gardiner, rather than tearing it down — he might have been taken seriously by somebody. But come on, a mind-boggling massive project? In Toronto?
