The Brewers signed Frank Catalanotto to a minor league deal on Tuesday, causing Tom H. to think that one of the Brewer bench outfielders like Brad Nelson or Chris Duffy will be replaced due to their ineptitude hitting so far. GM Doug Melvin and manager Ken Macha don’t seem to agree, basically saying the equivalent of, “well, he’s not guaranteed to make the major league club at all — he has to prove to us he can hit before he replaces somebody.”
Catalanotto, by the way, is a 35-year-old defensively washed up corner OF with continually declining statistics (probably due to age) who hasn’t played in the majors so far in 2009. His last time facing live pitching was back in 2008 where he put up a .741 OPS in 248 at-bats with 2 home runs, 20 walks, and 29 strikeouts. He’s an intense defensive liability (why he would be limited to pinch-hitting duties if he made the major leagues) and got his average OPS playing in a hitters’ ballpark. He passes the three checkmarks of a player who I don’t want: old, getting worse, and no defense. It’s like signing Sidney Ponson to pitch in the starting rotation. With all that in mind, he did have a bad-ass mustache.
I don’t think the Brewers are in actual need of this guy. Catalanotto can’t replace Chris Duffy because Duffy is more or less a defensive replacement and acceptable player to give Mike Cameron a day off. Brad Nelson in his career in the minors OPsed .801, which seems about on par for what Catalonotto is set to do when you take into account the major league dropoff. Nelson is also signed for much cheaper since this is his first year making the big league roster; he’s 27 years old and has plenty more time to improve on his hitting skills.
The best justification I can think of for this would be to get Nelson more at-bats in AAA to let him work through his current season-long funk so far. The problem is, Nelson’s amassed only 20 at-bats so far this season and I still think the problem with him is that he’s mired in a funk where he is stressing out too much about getting that first big-league hit. The only way to solve this is getting him some more at-bats. He’s due to get hot and I don’t agree with signing Catalonotto only to put more pressue on Big Brad. 20 at-bats is nothing.
To put this differently, Nelson has nowhere to go but up. Catalanotto would be an offensive downgrade, especially considering he hasn’t seen live pitching since last year. Doug Melvin is right when he says that Mustache Frank should be held down in case there’s an injury to an upcoming fielder — the outfield is pretty thin even when everyone is healthy. I’ll be sad to see Brad go down if Catalonotto does replace him.
No posts coming from me until next week. Until then, enjoy donking your own remixes.
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Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is one of the best counterpoints to the limitations of film. Few novels have taken as great an advantage from their medium. Woolf is working against notions of the concrete in novels. In other books, we may be presented with dialogue, with descriptions of emotions and the reasonings behind them. The problem is that the world is not so neat. A person often does not think in complete thoughts. To even characterize real experience as thinking overstates the control actors have. Woolf is able to exploit this facet of existence primarily through her expert use of stream-of-consciousness. In penetrating the apparently concrete surface of thought and human interaction present in other works, her novel is able to plunge the reader into a world of half-formed impressions, glancing and unpredictable trains of thought. In this way she captures a truth about the essence of subjectivity often negleced, that it is untidy.
Of course, Woolf’s writing is not untidy. It’s often breathtakingly intricate. Her method of writing conveys affective states through its syntax and style. A winding maze of subordinate clauses and parenthetical notes serve to mirror the tangental way in which human actors experience the outside world from within. One could write, “he woke up in the morning, got dressed and drove to work” and convey a coherent idea that is immediately intelligible and visible. But these events are really just artificial anchors in an otherwise chaotic experience. While he was waking up perhaps the first thing he noticed was an acrid taste in his mouth as he wondered wordlessly about a figment of a dream. While he was getting dressed perhaps he thought of his slightly sagging stomach, began to feel a cool breeze but was distracted by a spider crawling across the floor. Woolf’s writing makes clear that, although these moments are transitory and forgetable, they provide the bulk of subjectivity.
Woolf couples this with persistent qualification and modification of presented ideas. This has the effect of further undermining the concrete. In one of the best scenes, when James finally reaches the lighthouse, he is struck by the dual notions of the physical structure before him. It is both a highly powerful and strong symbol of his childhood, and an overwhelmingly ordinary piece of dreary architecture, cold to the touch. This is an important moment because it reflects on subjectivity generally, the insoluble problem that the lighthouse is not one thing or the other, it is both.
tell that bitch to give me kiss // then I smack her on ass // throw a stack at her and laugh. // this shit to me ain’t nothing. // how much money do you have?
that’s not up for discussion.
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