Is it really possible, what Derek Jeter did last night? Are there, in fact, Fates that tilt the table on the plane we inhabit just for fun or misery, depending on their moods? It’s a fair question at times -- we’ve all asked it each in our own way. God, Zeus, yoga, whatever.
It’s perhaps not that surprising Jeter got the hit, a walk-off line single to right field that scored Antoan Richardson from second base to win the game 6-5. Evan Meek, on the mound for the Orioles, isn’t the biggest test, with a career .412 winning percentage and toting 5.48 earned-run average.
It’s that Jeter was in the position at all that makes us shiver a little, and then that he got the hit. In the bottom of the ninth. In his final game in Yankee Stadium. What’s he going to do in his last game ever in Boston on Sunday -- cure cancer?
We happened to arrive in New York City to work for Brand X in 1994, the year the Rangers won the Stanley Cup, the Knicks took the Houston Rockets to seven games before bowing in the NBA finals, a year before Jeter came up. Being pretty much an inveterate National League type, we watched Yankees baseball with indifference (until the players’ strike made it moot), but being a new arrival gaining some of the swing of our new city, it was easy to enjoy watching the kid play. We rarely had players like him in Philly.
There was no way of knowing then what he’d become today, and despite what Keith Olbermann said about the captain, or how stupid a notion it is to have a captain on a baseball team and make a big deal about calling him that; and despite that he was a Yankee, a team truly beloved by some, not entirely by the rest of us -- especially when your team’s been in six World Series -- less than a quarter of the World Series the Yankees have won -- and the Yankees beat them in two of them. There is something about the man.
It’s class. Look around us this week at the ruin of sports to get a full appreciation of what it still means, at this moment in time, to have a quiet, capable, excellent, modest, humble player who led by example. A man without a whiff of drugs, arrests, disharmony or selfishness trailing him and his idyllic, perfect 20-year career with the most storied franchise in sports.
We’ve long wondered what it must have been like to be alive in the time of Lou Gehrig. He was the paradigm of a gentleman athlete in our house when we were being tucked in at night with an oily baseball glove under the mattress.
Now we know.
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Today’s U.S. economic indicators are GDP and personal consumption at 8:30 a.m. EDT, followed by UMich consumer confidence at 9:55 a.m.
BlackBerry reports earnings before the bell, as does the Finish Line, a specialty-apparel retailer.
Overnight, Japan said inflation was 3.1 percent in August, below economists’ forecasts for 3.2 percent.
***
- The UN General Assembly is addressed by Iraqi President Mohammed Fuad Masum and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. - U.K. Parliament was scheduled to begin meeting this hour in a special session to vote on joining the coalition of armed forces fighting the Islamic State. - Hassan Rouhani is scheduled to hold a press conference at 3 p.m. in New York. - Spain presents the first draft of its 2015 budget at 1:30 p.m. in Madrid, 7:30 a.m. EDT. - Nigel Farage addresses his U.K. Independence Party in Doncaster, England, at 3 p.m. local, 10 a.m. EDT. - De Blasio meets Modi. No, really. - Valeant adds muscle in its fight for Allergan by naming ValueAct’s Jeffrey Ubben to its board. - FBI says it thinks it has identified the I.S. militant who beheaded Foley and Sotloff. - Three NYC firefighters who responded to Sept. 11 attacks die of cancer on the same day. - Fatah and Hamas come together on government in Gaza Strip. - Hundreds of Syrian refugees rescued from small boat by cruise ship. - Nigerian schoolgirl escapes. - Had it with Facebook? - Vinod Khosla can’t keep Californians off the beach he thought he bought. - South Carolina policeman shoots unarmed man during stop for seatbelt violation. - U.S. Forest Service plans $1,500 fee for permit to take photos on federal wild lands. But if you don’t get a permit, the fine is only $1,000. - Charlotte Hornets forward Jeff Taylor arrested on domestic-assault charges. Adam Silver, your turn. - Ray Rice tape sent to NFL’s chief of security in April, law enforcement officer says. Bill Simmons, any comment?
***
How was your workweek? Have a rough one? Really. How rough was it?
Were you half way up a mountain in blazing sun with a chainsaw, pitted in battle against a 17-ton, 130-foot tree that you have to cut down so that it falls uphill, risking injury or even death, either from the saw or the tree?
Thought so.
Outside of the gleaming canyons of New York City, way outside, there’s a world of people who make the world go around so that you can trade on it. One of them is Lewis Green, 24, from Council, Idaho, who still fells trees in the tradition of his father and uncle and grandfather, a proud tradition in the U.S. Northwest that nonetheless makes the young man among the last of a dying breed.
Tom Moroney, Bloomberg’s Boston bureau chief and a master storyteller, takes you to the mountainside with Green for an appreciation of a hard and honest day’s work that will not end at Soho House.
“Some never find meaning in earning their daily bread, some come to it late. Green was 9 following Uncle Craig around the woods with a gas can to keep a chainsaw fueled when he found what made him happy,” Moroney writes.
Is it too late for the rest of us?
***
The bear is starting to bite back, it appears.
With Jake Rudnitsky and Jason Corcoran reporting that Russia’s Duma is entertaining the idea of seizing foreign states’ assets comes word that its central bank is considering an attempt to bring the three U.S. ratings companies to heel under a system of Russian supervision.
Reporting for Bloomberg Businessweek, Carol Matlack writes that the Paris-based European Securities and Markets Authority’s oversight of the European branches of Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings puts them outside of Russian “supervisory authority.”
Our eyes were rolling before we even finished reading the story. Where are Russia and its companies going to go? Is there a ratings company out there we don’t know about? Maybe they could create their own state-owned rating company to rate their own state-owned banks and state-owned enterprises. What are the odds that, in that scenario, every rating would be AAA? Then we kept reading.
“There are some locally based ratings outfits, ‘but they do not have a good image,’ says Maxim Osadchy, head of analysis at Corporate Finance Bank in Moscow. ‘With some of them, we hear there is a kind of menu -- for example, you can buy a triple-A rating for $10,000.’”
Thought so. Then: “The Kremlin also plans to join China in creating a new, independent ratings agency that would compete with the Big Three.”
Anybody likely to buy this?
While we don’t entirely cotton to the idea that S&P has “no political agenda,” as spokeswoman Ekaterina Pavlova told the reporters, considering the U.S. still carries a AA rating from S&P when there’s no safer debt in the world, it is nonetheless an absurd proposition to suggest the ratings Russia now carries has little to with anything more than what Russia has done to itself.
Its economy is teetering, which is illustrated again today by Andre Tartar and Anna Andrianova, whose survey of analysts show projections for oil prices portend bad things to come for the bear, which gets about half its budget revenue from oil and natural gas.
Good luck, Vlad. See, this is how it works. This is what it means to be a part of the world, to be a contributing member of the global society instead of one of its antagonists.
***
“If we turn left, they’re going to start hating left, if we turn right, they’re going to start hating right. If we climb a mountain, they’re going to start hating mountains.”
This is the petulant quote given by a spokesman for the American Legislative Exchange Council to the Washington Post yesterday to explain why tech companies are leaving the organization almost in droves after having had enough of its increasingly one-way view of legislative policies.
As Bloomberg’s Jim Snyder reported along with Bloomberg BNA’s Ari Natter, Yahoo (we refuse to use the exclamation point) is the latest to quit the club, joining Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yelp, where we’re hoping against hope that a bad review of ALEC eventually arrives, because that would be so meta.
But back to the comment from ALEC’s Bill Meierling. If the organization were truly playing it down the center, he might have something. But here’s an incomplete list of its legislative aims, according to our story and the Post’s:
- Support for stand-your-ground laws that justified the killing of an unarmed (unless you count the Skittles) teenager but made no provision for a threatened wife’s warning shots, until Florida finally changed the law (presumably without ALEC’s help);
- targeting supposed regulatory overreaching by the EPA;
- targeting state mandates on renewable energy and carbon limits;
- trying to make electric-company customers pay a fee for selling unused energy back to the power grid;
- and a lot more.
It’s a closed-door group the sells private access to legislators for tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s not good no matter whether the policies are rightist or leftist.
And the tech companies are seeing through it, Meierling’s temper tantrum or not.
***
This probably doesn’t come as much news to the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton or the NSA, but the rising threat of hacking coming from within a company was cited by 73 percent of corporate IT managers in an April survey, an increase from 62 percent the year before.
Home Depot, Target and JPMorgan Chase are getting all the headlines for the hacks they suffered at the Doritos-stained hands of outsiders, mostly from nations hostile to the U.S., but just like domestic terrorism, there’s plenty to fear from within.
Chris Strohm and Jordan Robertson, following up on coverage earlier in the week, illustrate the threat with the example of Ibrahimshah Shahulhameed, who took a digital hacksaw to the company’s computer network after being fired from his job as a contractor at a Kentucky Toyota factory. And the example of Jonathan Wolberg, who shut down one of his (unidentified) cloud-computing company’s servers after quitting his job, leaving hospitals gasping for urgently needed information data. And the example of Robert Steele, who rifled through the computers of his previous employer after leaving for a competitor. You get the idea.
With the growing ubiquity of cloud storage services like Dropbox, critical information or assets can be whisked offsite by a disgruntled workers before anyone’s the wiser.
“The most costly data breaches are usually those that are created by a malicious insider,” one IT security expert told Strohm and Robertson.
***
It’s a light weekend for new movies, with only two coming out in wide release, and they couldn’t be more different: heartwarming animation versus brutal violence. We’ll start with the lighter side.
“The Boxtrolls” introduces an imaginary London-esque city with a post-First World War vibe that’s overrun at night by, well, little trolls that live in boxes. They creep about at night scavenging things to return with them to their subterranean world, and at some point one of their acquisitions is a baby boy, whom they name “Eggs,” because that’s what was printed on the box they put him in.
Eggs becomes the trolls’ bridge to the humans, and the movie appears to take on the allegory of the challenges kids face fitting into a world that seems alien to them. Ben Kingsley, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Elle Fanning and Tracy Morgan are some of the featured voices. It looks great, both for little kids and big ones.
Then there’s the violence. In “The Equalizer,” Denzel Washington is back to his menacing best, that freaky-mean side of him we met in “Training Day.” It stands to reason, because Antoine Fuqua directed both. Washington plays a man who had tried to put his past as a human weapon behind him, only to get drawn back when he encounters Russian mobsters.
It’s got a pretty fine cast also, with Melissa Leo, Chloe Grace Moretz and appearance by Dan Bilzerian. If you don’t know who he is, look him up.
But why do so many movies have to glorify violence? Why is it even money that the tension inherent in any good story is going to be resolved with guns? It’s not that we’re anti-guns (though we are), it’s that it just seems like laziness.
As a postscript, the New York Film Festival opens today and runs through Oct. 12. It will feature the debut of David Fincher’s “Gone Girl,” which opens in theaters next weekend. We’ll write our trailer review on that next week.
***
See, this is why we don’t understand finance.
You’re Larry Ellison, God bless you, you’re worth somewhere around $44 billion dollars, and yet you’re still borrowing against your stake in Orcale to add another roughly $10 billion?
Rob Gloster takes it from there, examining Ellison’s likely hunt for an NBA franchise in this week’s Sports Line column. After falling short in bids to acquire the Golden State Warriors, the Los Angeles Clippers, the New Orleans Hornet/Pelicans and the Memphis Grizzlies, it looks like Captain America’s Cup is now training his sights on the Atlanta Hawks.
The column also takes a look at the start of the Ryder Cup. Gloster takes note of how the British press recoiled in horror at Rickie Fowler’s buzzcut, which has the letters “USA” shaved in, sniffing as the Brits are wont to do at their perceptions of crass Yanks. At least for the weekend, the Europeans and the Americans will not be allies or the best of friends.
And Sports Line says goodbye Derek Jeter, who ends his 20-year run with the New York Yankees this weekend at Fenway Park in Boston, which, since it couldn’t be at home, seems fitting.
To contact the reporter on this story: C. Thompson in Wilmington at cthompson1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Marty Schenker at mschenker@bloomberg.net
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