The Last '42'

The Times fawns over Mariano Rivera and I totally support their effort.

And fair's fair - let's balance that with a typical Mets headline:

In Defeat, the Mets Show Some Encouraging Signs

The Mets are off on another typically encouraging season.

Comments

[Jack is Back!]

Off for the school run then my annual member-member at the club. But before I do that, I want to remind Clarice and OL that tonight the Caps will rule and Alex the Great will once again be the Hab's Daddy.

Go Caps!

[peter]

Winning isn't everything, it is the only thing. I wish the Repubs would remember that.

[RJ]

Somewhere in Flushing ten thousand middle fingers rise to greet you TM.

[anduril]

More information on the Polish crash. Turns out that there were rules in place about too many top people on one flight, but Kaczynski skirted them: Polish Flight Skirted Military Protocol: Invitation From President Put Fatal Trip Outside Procedures to Keep Officers From Traveling Together On the Same Plane. This sort of thing was par for the course for Kaczynski:

Two weeks before last weekend's tragic plane crash, Poland's top military commanders got individual invitations from President Lech Kaczynski to fly with him to Western Russia to commemorate Stalin's 1940 massacre of Polish intellectuals and officers.

It was an invitation from their commander-in-chief that the generals and admiral couldn't refuse and there is no indication they wanted to refuse it, say people familiar with the matter. Because the invitations came from the president, rather than within the Defense Ministry, and the flight was civilian, not military, the flight was outside military procedures—developed in the wake of an air disaster two years ago—that restrict which and how many senior military officers can fly on the same plane.

The result was tragic. All six of the Polish military's senior force commanders, plus three other top defense and security officials, died when the president's Tupolev-154 aircraft crashed Saturday, killing 96.

No official interviewed for this article blamed the late president for the soldiers' deaths, and officials said they knew of no discussion among commanders about whether they were following the rules about taking the same flight.

Yet the picture that emerges is of the president taking measures to stage a high-profile public event that Russia had denied him weeks before, when Moscow declined his request to attend a joint Russian-Polish commemoration.

...

Military officials and analysts say the ability of Poland's military to operate, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, is unlikely to be seriously affected by the loss at the top. "These guys are the strategy guys, they take the big final decisions, but they don't run the military day-to-day. Their chiefs of staff do that," said Charles Heyman, a military consultant and former British army officer.

But the commanders lost in the air tragedy, according to Polish military officials and U.S. diplomats who worked with them, may be irreplaceable for years. That is a blow not just for Poland, but also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the U.S. The men were the first complete generation of top Polish commanders to have been educated in Western—mainly U.S.—military colleges, and to have learned from operations alongside U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Sue]

I have it on good authority that the Texas Rangers are the team to beat this year. Stay tuned. This could get ugly.