Tom Finneran: On Santa, and Sandy Koufax
Friday, October 10, 2014
Christmas is more than two and a half months away.
Have you been in any stores lately? I was in one of the “big stores” recently, having just come off a golf course on a beautiful late-summer’s day. My shorts and my short-sleeve golf shirt were quite comfortable in the 70 degree weather I was enjoying.
You can therefore imagine my surprise when I saw the Christmas decorations already up and heard the schmaltzy commercial Christmas music blaring away. What a perfect way to ruin one season and tarnish another. We are barely into the fall season, still savoring summer, and enjoying a harvest of homework, homecomings, football, and foliage. Yes the nights and mornings are cooler but both snow and Santa are still far far away. I guess in the world of retail it’s never too early to say that there are only 364 shopping days left ‘til Christmas.
Here’s where I go into my rebellion. I utterly refuse to consider any form of Christmas shopping until well into December. December 15th strikes me as a good time to start thinking about it and somewhere around the 22nd is a good time to execute one’s game plan.
Don’t let yourself be bullied. Celebrate Columbus Day weekend. Enjoy trick or treating on Halloween. Cherish Thanksgiving with its own special season. Rake leaves, play with the kids, get to a postponed project---do anything---but don’t go Christmas shopping in October. Do not reward this nonsense.
Of course we’ve seen these absurdities before. Every year it seems the envelope gets pushed a little bit more with back-to-school sales now in early July and beachwear sales in February. What a great idea for the Northeast---promoting swimming while we shiver in the polar vortex and shovel out from the latest blizzard. Are these people nuts?
The lunacy has taken hold in other realms as well. Take the world of sports where it seems as if we anoint a new phenom for the Hall of Fame every year. I’m as much a “hope springs eternal” guy as anyone but can we get real here? The latest version of “the next Babe Ruth” is Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The poor kid is a pretty good pitcher but the lunatic hucksters in the media are already anointing him as the next Sandy Koufax. That’s an insult to Koufax. As Joan Rivers liked to ask, “can we talk? I mean really………”.
There are many ways to evaluate a pitcher and Kershaw measures up fairly well on most of them. So far that is. He’s just a kid, finishing up his seventh season. Successful longevity, so difficult to achieve as a major league pitcher, is a crucial measure in evaluating a career. Here’s where Bill Belichick’s cautionary remark rings so true whenever reporters try to anoint some hot-shot rookie who has a few catches in a few football games as the next Jerry Rice. Coach Bill always says that it’s a little early to bronze the rookie’s cleats for Canton, Ohio. Amen to that.
And that’s the point about Kershaw. He’s just a kid and he’s as likely to flame out as he is to dominate hitters for another ten or twelve seasons. Consider Koufax who ate up innings and pitched splendidly for twelve seasons. Or Bob Gibson, seventeen seasons. Or Juan Marichal, sixteen seasons. Or Warren Spahn, twenty one seasons. Or our own Tom Glavine, twenty two seasons. These were magnificent pitchers, very competitive and very successful over a long span of time. Maybe Kershaw will join their ranks. But he has many more seasons to go before he can be compared to Koufax.
So let’s keep Santa on the shelf for a while longer. His season, with all its joy, its beautiful music, and its spirituality, will arrive in its due time, needing no push from the hustlers. And let’s leave Mr. Koufax where he belongs, alone and unchallenged at the top of the heap. It’s much too early to and much too soon to swallow the hype.
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