Reverse Cruds Alert!*

 (*Because the Rockheads, the Mange-els and the rest of the Cruds are old news now that the baseball season has reached August, its black hole of months)

Checked out the MLB standings this a.m. just to see if it was really August and if my Pittsburgh Not-As-Cruddy-As-They-Used-To-Be's were still playing .500 baseball (They are! 56-56, baby!).Aand guess what?

The Los Angeles Dodgers are not the best team in baseball right now. 

They've actually lost two in a row and are 69-42, half-a-game back of the numbingly efficient Milwaukee Brewers. And, OK, so they're still 10 games up in the NL West, but, listen, it's not like they couldn't use some help. So all you people griping about the rich getting richer and what a joke baseball is now need to dummy up.

Because they needed Tarik Skubal. Yes, they did.

For those of you who don't know who Tarik Skubal is, well, he was the prize of prizes during this trade deadline period, a two-time Cy Young winner who's arguably been the best pitcher in the American League the last two years. And now he's a Trolley Dodger!

News broke last night that the Dodgers and Skubal's former team, the Detroit Tigers, were finalizing a deal that would send Tarik west in exchange for a handful of magic beans, er, prospects. That's what's so annoying about the Dodgers, see: Not only do they have all the money these days, they also have lots of trade bait to dangle from their first-rate farm system. 

"All the money AND a farm system?" you're saying now. "How's THAT fair?"

To which the Dodgers would no doubt reply, quoting a former teammate in our company basketball league: Fair? (Bleep) fair!

Fair's not what's made Dem Bums back-to-back World Series champs, with a likely three-peat waiting in the wings come October. And if you think that's a joke, well, the joke's on you, sorehead. 

Dynasties are good for baseball, see. Grotesquely over-doggy overdogs are the life's blood of the game. I mean, you didn't hear people complaining about Casey Stengel's Yankees when they were winning the Series every crummy year in the 1950s, did you?

(Brief interlude while every other team from the '50s shouts, "Hell, yes, we were complaining! Screw Mantle and Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra and Elston Howard and the rest of those high-hatted bastards! We like World Series rings, too, ya know!")

Anyway ...

Now the Dodgers have Skubal, and just in time, too. After all, it wasn't like they were going to get by with Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamato, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki and those guys. And where was the run support gonna come from when the only sticks you had were Ohtani and Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts and Kyle Tucker and Will Smith, and also Max Muncy?

So, yeah, good for them. They've got the best pitcher in the AL now, or one of the best. Which means they'll probably win a pile more games and beat the Brewers or Braves in the NL and then beat, I don't know, maybe the Rays in the World Series.

Or how about this: Maybe the Series comes down to the Dodgers vs. the White Sox.

The Pale Hose, after all, are leading the AL Central by three games right now, two seasons after fielding the worst team in the modern era. How great a narrative would that be, the former schlubbiest of schlubs against baseball's reigning Reverse Cruds?

The White Sox, stealing a Virgil Tibbs' line from "In The Heat Of The Night": "I can pull that fat cat down off his mountain!"

The Trolley Dodgers, stealing King Arthur's line from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail": "Bloody peasant!"

Ah, yes. I can see it now. 

Birthdate of fear

(In which the Blob again says "Later for you, sporty-sports," and sets off into the wider world for awhile. The usual protocols apply to those who don't wish to join me on the journey.)

First of August now, and another summer in the books, or at least it seems so these accelerated days.  The local baseball diamonds are empty. The band kids are in the high school parking lots, sweating under the hammering sun. In 12 days, they'll back in school again, the yellow buses will be running again, and wasn't it just yesterday that they spilled everyone out into what seemed an endless stretch of freedom?

Perhaps. But summer's end is not the end I think about when I think about August 1, and this August 1 in particular.

The end I think about is the end of a certain kind of American innocence, and the assumptions that formed its foundation.

This August 1, you see, is 60 years to the day since a sick man in a high place went hunting human beings.

His name was Charles Whitman, and on Aug. 1, 1966 he hauled an M1 carbine, two Remington rifles, a semi-automatic shotgun and three handguns up to the observation deck of the University of Texas tower -- which still stands, and which they still light up Texas burnt orange after every Longhorns football triumph -- and turned downtown Austin into a kill zone.

He was up there for 90 minutes until a couple of police officers took him down, and in that time, from his high place, he killed 15 people and wounded 31 more. This was after he'd stabbed his wife and mother to death, and after he'd left two victims inside who had the misfortune to encounter him on his way to the observation deck.

For most of his 25 years, he'd been a normal American male, a loving husband and dutiful son who'd whisked his mother away from his abusive father. Then a tumor bloomed inside his brain, and, in 90 terrifying minutes, Charles Whitman became something else entirely: The godfather of the American mass shooter, and the bringer of nightmares we could scarcely imagine in 1966.

Because who could conceive, back then, of an America where you could be shot dead just walking down the street? Where some random human (Even a neighbor, maybe!) could take it in his head to find someplace where other random humans congregate, and just start killing people he didn't even know?

We feared the Russkies and nuclear missiles aimed our way and the damn Commies taking over the world, in those days. We didn't fear one of our own using his Second Amendment rights to stockpile an arsenal of weapons (Two Remmies, an M-1, a shotgun and three handguns? Who needs all that?) and make war on his fellow Americans.

So now we had something else to fear, in a fearful time. And on it went from there -- from Charles Whitman to James Oliver Huberty in a McDonald's down by Mexico; to Patrick Sherrill in a post office in Edmonds, Okla.; to George Hennard in a cafeteria in Texas; to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School; to Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech; to Stephen Paddock on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel in Las Vegas, another hunter of humans in a high place.

Paddock killed 60 people and shot almost 500 when he did his deal nine years ago. Five years before that, Adam Lanza murdered 27 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. Another elementary school in Uvalde, Tex.; a synagogue in Pittsburgh; a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.; a supermarket in El Paso, Tex., and another in Buffalo, N.Y. ...

The blood trail of Charles Whitman, the madness and the butchery, continues apace. As does the fear that, after so many butcheries, we're either numb to or have trained ourselves not to think about anymore.

But Aug. 1, 1966 was the birthdate of that fear. And then it was very real.

I was 11 at the time, see, and we were on vacation, and that night we went to dinner somewhere. I remember, hazily, seeing a newspaper there, and the Texas tower shooting was splashed all over the front page. And when we finished dinner and walked out to the car, I remember walking very fast, because somewhere in the dark I just knew there was a man with a rifle, and that he was going to start shooting.

Like I said, I was 11 years old at the time, with an 11-year-old's overheated imagination. But I suspect I wasn't the only one who, after that day, felt a chill the next time they walked out into their quiet American lives in their quiet American town. 

And I suspect they weren't all 11, either.