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For those of you expecting a post about silent movies here, forgive me. I'll have a review of D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (written but not typed) up on Tuesday and a review of Abel Gance's J'accuse! (already queued up) on Friday. They'll be worth reading, I promise.
In the meantime, I'm also a baseball fan—specifically a Washington Nationals fan, wearing as I type this, a ratty Nats cap with "Opening Day 2007" embroidered on the back—which means that only a little less annoying to me than all those Sight & Sound Top Ten posts (including three of my own, here, here and here) are all those bloviating articles, op-ed pieces, blog posts and ESPN segments explaining why the Nationals are insane to shut down Stephen Strasburg before the playoffs and offering up their own blueprint for how to ensure he pitches in the post-season without blowing his arm out.
Don't know who Stephen Strasburg is? He's the Nationals' twenty-four year old pitching phenom, the right-handed reincarnation of the still-living Sandy Koufax (and if you don't know who that is, stop reading now and come back on Tuesday).
He's also recovering from Tommy John surgery, a medical procedure designed to reconstruct a hopelessly damaged ulnar collateral ligament (i.e., the meat that holds the elbow together) by taking a ligament from some other part of the body, drilling a couple of holes in the bones of the arm and winding it around and around in a figure eight until the recipient can once again throw a baseball without his forearm flying off into space like the plastic limb of a broken mannequin.
Not only does the initial rehab take a full year, but the pitcher is then on a fairly short leash the season after that, a two-year recovery process. The success rate for Tommy John surgery is an astounding 89%, but in the 38 years since doctors invented this procedure using the elbow of Dodgers pitcher Tommy John (you thought I was going say Don Drysdale, didn't you) as a guinea pig, a protocol has developed for how to achieve that 89% success rate. Strasburg's doctors have told the Nats that he can't pitch much beyond around, oh, say, 160 innings this year without seriously amping up the chances he blows out his arm again.
The Nats had another starting pitcher go through the same process a year before Strasburg, a guy named Jordan Zimmermann. Zimmermann tossed 161-and-a-third innings last year, got shut down at the end of August, and is now off the leash and is second in the National League in earned run average. If he picks up five or six more wins, he'll be right in the discussion for the Cy Young Award.
And as sure as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning, the Nationals are going to follow the same path with Strasburg this year. Somewhere between 160 and 180 innings into his season—sometime between September 9 and September 29—the Nats will shut Strasburg down and let him watch the rest of the season (and post-season) from the dugout.
Here's the problem. Strasburg is arguably the best pitcher on the Nats staff (arguable, since Zimmermann and Gio Gonzalez have a better E.R.A. and more wins, respectively, and Edwin Jackson has World Series experience) and the Nationals have the best record in baseball. Which means absent a catastrophe, the Nats are going to make the playoffs where they'll succeed or fail without Strasburg.
And with the notable exception of my old Vanderbilt drinking buddy Buster Olney, the talking heads on television, particularly ex-ballplayers who don't feel constrained by facts or reality, insist that the Nats should find a way to play Strasburg in the playoffs despite the limits doctors have put on his elbow. You have no idea how many schemes have been floated—shut him down early then bring him back later, skip starts, go to a six-man rotation, use him in the bullpen, or even damn the torpedoes, pitch him until his arm falls off, ala Kerry Wood.
I won't evaluate these plans or explain why the Nats aren't going to follow any of them, no matter how reasonable or nonsensical they may be. I'll only tell you that it is carved in stone like Teddy Roosevelt is carved into the side of Mount Rushmore that the Nationals are going to shut Strasburg down in September. If it makes you feel better or sells advertising or increases page hits, you can yack about it until the cows come home. But the Nats are going to shut him down in September and take their chances then bring him back next year.
Until now. Because the Monkey (and only the Monkey) has a foolproof plan for allowing Strasburg to pitch in the playoffs without in any way violating the protocol for recovering from Tommy John surgery.
I'll just say two words: time machine.
Very simple. Put Strasburg in a time machine, set the date for the first week of October and let him pitch in game one of whatever series the Nats land in, either a division series or the one-game Wild Card playoff. The elegance of the plan is that it doesn't disrupt Strasburg's routine at all, and it doesn't require him to pitch beyond the limits set by medical science.
And don't tell me it isn't feasible. I've read that physicists believe a time machine is theoretically possible—it would just take the energy of an exploding sun to power it. Difficult, yes, but it's as feasible as any of the other hare-brained schemes they'll talk about on ESPN over the next month and for a Nats fan seeking the first World Series berth in D.C. since 1933, oh so worth it. I say go for it!
Just watch out for the Morlocks.
FlickChick, author of the blog A Person in the Dark and president of the Lina Lamont fan club, is on the offensive:
"Yes, loyal fans," she writes, "we are still here. No matter how hard her enemies try to destroy her legacy, Lina Lamont's fans will not rest until the truth is known and Lina is awarded her proper place in the history of film."
You know the story—one of the biggest stars of the silent era, Lina Lamont's career took an abrupt turn for the worst with the advent of sound. While her screen partner Don Lockwood went on to a big career in sound pictures with wife Kathy Selden, Lina quickly faded from public view—and from the public's memory.
"They have rediscovered Louise Brooks," says FlickChick. "Now it's time for a Lina Lamont revival!"
We here at the Monkey will do our part. Digging through my treasure trove of silent era memorabilia, I've come up with this vintage poster of the biggest hit of Lina's career, The Royal Rascal.
Stop on over at A Person in the Dark, read the whole story and show your support for this worthwhile cause!
Katie-Bar-The-Door happened to mention that Sally Ann Howes will be one of the featured guests on the Turner Classic Movies cruise in January. She was one of my faves back in the day and is a Katie-Bar-The-Door Award nominee for her performance as Truly Scrumptious in the 1968 musical comedy, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
We almost certainly won't be on the 2013 TCM Classic Cruise (not unless TCM plans to include the Mythical Monkey as one of their featured guests). Still, it would be nice to meet her, don't you think?
A show of hands: how many of you remember Sally Ann Howes in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?
I may have given the impression in my enthusiasm for Mary Pickford (e.g., here) that I think that every movie she ever made is a must-see classic. In fact, as with every great performer, her films tend to distill into four broad categories—the Great, the Good, the Bad and the Pleasantly Forgettable.
The Greats would include, for example, Stella Maris and Sparrows. Among the Bad are The Little American and most of her sound era work. And the Pleasantly Forgettable include, I suppose, such films as The Pride of the Clan and A Romance of the Redwoods.
Daddy-Long-Legs, the best known of her pictures from 1919 and one of the most highly-rated of her career, I would class as "Good"—and one that could have been Great, if the filmmakers had taken a bit more care in adapting Jean Webster's episodic novel.
For those who have seen Mary Pickford's work before, Daddy-Long-Legs will have a familiar feel to it. Pickford plays a foundling, Jerusha "Judy" Abbott, who grows up in a brutal orphanage, more labor camp than loving home, as oppressive as a prison. When we first meet Judy, she's a plucky twelve year old, just the sort of "tweener" Pickford made a career of, and just as you'd expect of a Pickford character, she's bonny and brave and full of well-meaning mischief, leading a revolt against a steady diet of prunes, getting drunk on apple jack and knocking the matron into a well.
Judy is also bright, kind-hearted and responsible, providing the younger children at the orphanage with the only maternal love they've ever known. In the main, her benefactors are cold and cruel, the sort who do their good deeds in public so that others might praise them, while in private meting out discipline—such as burning Judy's hand on a hot stove—that these days would earn them a felony charge.
But they're not all bad, and a wealthy trustee agrees to provide Judy with a college scholarship, providing that he remain anonymous. Judy sees only his tall, gangly shadow cast on a wall and dubs him "Dear Daddy-Long-Legs," writing to him as such in chatty letters from her new school.
That Daddy-Long-Legs might also be one of the eligible bachelors she meets while in school goes without saying.
Pickford was one of the true stars of the silent era, and when as here she was working within her range as an actress, nobody was better. She's utterly convincing as both a twelve year old and as a young woman, and it's her performance that carries the movie. "She was brilliantly expressive," wrote director-historian Peter Bogdanovich for Blogdanovich, "absolutely real, equally on the money at every second in comedy, drama and all points between. You want to see good modern movie acting, check out Mary Pickford in Daddy-Long-Legs."
The resulting film was one of the biggest hits of Pickford's career. As film historian Kevin Brownlow wrote, "Daddy-Long-Legs was the archetypal Mary Pickford film. It had all the elements an audience could hope for."
Is Daddy-Long-Legs the equal of Pickford's best films, The Poor Little Rich Girl, Stella Maris or Sparrows? No, I don't think so. The source novel by Jean Webster Daddy-Long-Legs may have been a hardy perennial—"beloved" according to one review I read (later versions of the story featured Janet Gaynor, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and even Japanese anime)—but the film plays bit like Dickens-Lite, Oliver Twist without Fagan, Great Expectations without Miss Haversham.
And while director Marshall Neilan and screenwriter Agnes Christine Johnson turned in some topnotch work in their careers (Stella Maris and Show People, respectively), neither gave their best effort here. Scenes drag a bit, characters are introduced and forgotten, and at times the action is described through intertitles rather than shown on screen—to me a cardinal sin for a silent movie and a sign that neither the director nor the writer completely solved the problem of reducing an epic, episodic tale into a digestible ninety-minute narrative.
Still, Pickford is at the top of her game, and despite its flaws, Daddy-Long-Legs is satisfying entertainment, and a must-see for any fan of this legendary actress.
Oh, I can't stand it. People make top ten lists, top twenty lists, top 25 top 50 and top 100 lists, but nobody makes top 23 lists, which is what you get if you add this list and this list together. So let's add two more and make it a nice, round twenty-five. Okay?
2001: A Space Odyssey—I saw this science fiction classic in a theater when I was seven years old and it absolutely blew my mind. That the most sympathetic character in it is a computer tells you everything you need to know about Stanley Kubrick's jaundiced view of the human race.
"My mind is going. I can feel it."
Holiday—Far and away my favorite Katharine Hepburn movie. If you want to know what Katie-Bar-The-Door and the Monkey are like when they're at home, this is it. Except we don't live in a Park Avenue mansion, I was never engaged to Katie's sister and the pillars of American finance don't tremble when we pick up a phone. Come to think of it, we're much more like Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon. Nevertheless, my favorite Katharine Hepburn-Cary Grant pairing.
"Someone stop me—oh, someone please, just try and stop me!"
That's it, I'm done. I've already queued up a review of Mary Pickford's Daddy-Long-Legs for Friday morning, and I'm well on the way to finishing a review of Broken Blossoms. Then I'll be working on non-blog pursuits for a while. But never you fear, I'll no doubt be posting some sort of cra—er, brilliant, witty thoughts from time to time.
I looked at yesterday's top ten list—which I completely stand behind, by the way—and thought "What, no Wilder? No Ford? No movies made after 1959?" So here's a baker's dozen randomly selected from the other half of my brain—which I also stand behind.
In chronological order this time.
The Gold Rush—The Chaplin movie that has it all: the dancing rolls, the edible boot, the hungry man who thinks his partner is a giant chicken. And rare for Chaplin, a truly happy ending.
"Chicken or no chicken, his friend looks appetizing."
The Adventures of Robin Hood—I like Star Wars as much as the next guy, provided that the next guy insists on watching the original theatrical cut with none of George Lucas's obsessive digital revisionism, but this adventure classic starring Errol Flynn as he-who-steals-from-the-rich-and-gives-to-the-poor is how it's done—great action, great acting, great dialogue.
"Why, you speak treason!"
"Fluently."
Out of the Past—The quintessential film noir starring Robert Mitchum as a guy just dumb enough to think he's smarter than Jane Greer. With Kirk Douglas in a great, early role.
"Baby, I don't care."
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—a rousing action-adventure movie and a dark look at greed and obsession. The best acting Humphrey Bogart ever did without putting on a trench coat.
"Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges."
Tokyo Story—Do you have parents? Are they getting older? Don't know what to do with them? Japanese master of understatement Yasujiro Ozu at his absolute best.
"Isn't life disappointing?"
(smiling) "Yes, it is."
Rear Window—Including North by Northwest yesterday, the second entry from Alfred Hitchcock. Jimmy Stewart is a wheelchair-bound voyeur who spends all his time looking out the window instead of at his gorgeous girlfriend, Grace Kelly. No wonder a murder breaks out.
"Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?"
"He likes the way his wife welcomes him home."
The Searchers—John Ford, John Wayne, which should be enough, but it also led directly to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, if that means anything to you. A deep, dark western with the most beautiful use of Monument Valley ever.
"I hope you die!"
"That'll be the day."
The Apartment—Billy Wilder made some of the best movies ever—Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot to name three—but this tender, cynical, romantic look at corporate America is my personal favorite.
"You hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you."
"Shut up and deal."
Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb—Nuclear armageddon has never been so funny.
"You can't fight in here—this is the war room!"
Chinatown—You'd probably put The Godfather here, but this story of a detective (Jack Nicholson) who only thinks he knows what's going on was the best crime film of the decade.
"Forget it, Jake—it's Chinatown."
Manhattan—Woody Allen has made Sleeper, Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Match Point and Midnight in Paris, but this is my favorite.
"You think you're God."
"I gotta model myself after someone."
Groundhog Day—Now here's a movie I'd be happy to watch over and over again. A laugh-out-loud comedy that also turns out to be one of the most insightful looks at the meaning of life ever made.
"What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?"
"That about sums it up for me."
Schindler's List—What makes a hero—good character or good choices? This moving and mesmerizing tale of the Holocaust makes you wonder why such a flawed man risked so much when so many "good" people did nothing.
"It's Hebrew, it's from the Talmud. It says, 'Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.'"
Is this list any better than yesterday's? Of course not. All lists are stupid. But we do love them so, me more than most.
... it would mean two things: (1) that the apocalypse is upon us in which case I've got more pressing things to do than make top ten lists, and (2) the Sight & Sound top ten movies list is even more random and meaningless that I had presupposed.
If you don't know what the Sight & Sound top ten list is, odds are you have a life, but if you're reading this blog post, obviously it's not much of one. Once a decade for the last seventy years or so, Sight & Sound magazine has polled directors and critics to put together a list of the ten best movies of all time. Citizen Kane topped that list for fifty years running. This year Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo edged it out for the top spot.
Now here's the thing about the top ten list: it's a knowing compromise and probably doesn't reflect the personal top ten lists of anybody voting in it. As Roger Ebert points out, if you want to see your favorite director on the list, you have to vote for the one movie that has emerged among the voters as that director's best. Thus, even though Ebert prefers La Dolce Vita among Fellini's films, he votes for 8½ because that's Fellini's go-to movie among critics. See what I mean?
So if I were actually voting, I'd probably come up with something totally different. But I'm not voting. I'm making a top ten list for the sort of people who read my blog—Who Am Us, Mister Muleboy, Katie-Bar-The-Door, my brothers. Also, I have to knock it out before lunch because this afternoon I'm finishing up a review of Mary Pickford's Daddy-Long-Legs then I'm going to spend the rest of the week working on something other than my blog.
You know, unless I win another Liebster Blog Award.
Okay, so you're all at my house, somebody put a gun to my head and said I have to show you ten movies. Are they the ten best of all time? I don't know. But you'll either leave having had a rousing good time or hating my guts. Or given my anti-social grumpiness, possibly both.
10. It's A Wonderful Life—You know, Buddha once pointed out that man's craving for the ephemeral—wealth, power, fame—is the root cause of his suffering; Jimmy Stewart gives the performance of his very great career as George Bailey, a small-town banker who takes a lifetime and one suicidal evening to learn this bitter lesson. Often dismissed as well-made Capra Corn, It's A Wonderful Life is actually a dark meditation on the emptiness of the American Dream. It's also warm, funny and wistfully sad, much like the holiday season with which it's most associated.
9. Gone With The Wind—For reasons not entirely related to the quality of the movie itself, I've seen this one eight times in a theater. Eight. A personal record. But it is one of the greatest romances ever made and is a cultural touchstone, in America at least. Is its depiction of racial politics in the South accurate? Lord, no. But as I wrote once before, "[Gone With The Wind] never purports to explain the war or its aftermath except in terms of their colossal inconvenience to Scarlett O'Hara. If she could have bedded Ashley Wilkes by freeing all the slaves she would have done it, and if she could have bedded him without freeing any slave she would have done that. Everything else is irrelevant."
8. Duck Soup—You might prefer A Night at the Opera (Katie-Bar-The-Door does), but personally, I think the Marx Brothers were never better than they were in Duck Soup. Simultaneously more streamlined, more disciplined and yet more anarchic than any other film they made, this is my (admittedly, highly personal) pick as the funniest sound picture ever made.
7. North by Northwest—Let's kill two birds with one stone: Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant. North by Northwest is one of Hitchcock's best suspense thrillers with some of the most exciting set pieces of his career. It's also the story of a shallow ad man (Grant at his best) who learns the hard way the consequences of the expedient lie, and in the process discovers he actually gives a damn. If you don't like Hitchcock and/or Cary Grant, you probably won't enjoy watching movies at my house. Go home. No hard feelings. Come back tomorrow.
6. Rio Bravo—I do believe Sight & Sound picked The Searchers as the best western of all time and they're probably right. But Quentin Tarantino and I prefer Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks' classic western starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and a girl with a flowerpot. Ostensibly the taut story of a small band of lawmen besieged by the rich and violently powerful, Rio Bravo is really a buddy comedy about a sheriff, a cripple and a drunk, and Katie-Bar-The-Door and I have seen it so many times, we could probably perform the whole thing as your after-dinner entertainment. Note: Katie looks much better in tights than I do.
5. Seven Samurai—One could argue that from Akira Kurosawa all action movies flow. His movies are so good even the remakes of his movies are good. You like the classic western The Magnificent Seven starring Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen? That's a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Prefer Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars? That's Yojimbo. And if you've ever plopped yourself down in front of a little ditty we like to call Star Wars—well, that's The Hidden Fortress. With Rashomon, Ikiru and Ran also to choose from, I think Seven Samurai is his best.
4. Singin' in the Rain—From beginning to end, the best musical of all time. I admit, as I get older, I prefer Astaire and Rogers as a dance team—when I watch them together, I reconsider the possibility that there might be a heaven after all—but Singin' in the Rain is a flawless blend of singing, dancing, comedy and romance, not to mention a pretty insightful look at the earliest age of movie history. As the song says, "What a glorious feeling!"
3. The General—My favorite Buster Keaton, my favorite silent movie, the one I'd show you, along with Chaplin in The Gold Rush, to convince you that you too can safely watch a silent movie. Heck, you've probably seen The Artist by now anyway. Treat yourself and see a truly great silent movie.
2. Citizen Kane—I won an award last year (with actual prizes) explaining why Citizen Kane is worthy of its status as the best movie of all time (read all about it here). Kane has slipped to two on Sight & Sound's all-time list. It slips on mine, too. But it's still great!
1. Casablanca—I don't know what you're hoping to see when you go to the movies, but when I go, I'm hoping to see Casablanca, or something like it: funny, romantic, adventurous, dramatic, quotable and so memorable you walk out of the theater saying, "Wow!" I said the other day I wanted to be Robert Mitchum in The Big Steal. Well, forget that. I want to be Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. And so does everybody else.
Anyway, it's a very mainstream list that skews rather old, now that I look at it. But let's face it, I'm a very mainstream guy who also skews rather old, especially if you look at me. What do you want for nothing—rubber biscuit?
Tomorrow: Take two on this same list.
P.S. Want to share your own top ten list? Leave it here as a comment or leave a link to your own blog post. We at the Monkey are interested in you!
Why the picture of Lady Gaga in a lobster hat? Aside from the obvious reason (that it's Lady Gaga in a lobster hat), because the Monkey has won another of the coveted Liebster Blog Awards. Liebster being German for "one who loves lobsters."
Natalie of In The Mood explains: "Well, too bad you already got [The Liebster Blog Award]. But I wanted to award you too."
And I'm glad she did. You think when Jack Nicholson won his third Oscar he said, "Oh, I already have two." Heck, no, he said, "Amen and Hallelujah!" Or something to that effect. I like awards.
I won't tell you eleven more things about myself—although if there's something you particularly want to know, feel free to ask (I'll feel free to answer or not as the mood strikes me)—but I will answer the eleven questions Natalie asks on her blog. You should feel free to answer as well:
1. In film do you prefer black&white or color? It depends, actually. I'd never want to see Citizen Kane in color, but I can't imagine Singin' in the Rain in black and white.
2. In photographs do you prefer black&white or color? with some notable exceptions, B&W
3. Your favorite era in music? Each decade is special in its own way and I love them all, I love the Beatles, I love Sinatra, I love the Who and Liz Phair, but I went to college in the '80s so that era is more likely to evoke particular moods and memories.
4. Do you have a tumblr? I confess, I don't even know how to have a tumblr, but I do have a pair of Baltimore & Ohio Railroad dining car tumblers.
5. Your second favorite actress? Can't say I've ranked them in my head. I have a copy of practically everything Jane Greer ever made, but I can't honestly say she's my favorite—she only made two good movies after all. Actresses I'm most likely to stop and watch if they're on: Myrna Loy, Irene Dunne, Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Mary Pickford, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, in roughly that order.
6. Your favorite movie starring your second favorite actress? If it's Irene Dunne, it must be Theodora Goes Wild, with The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife running second and third.
7. Your second favorite actor? If Cary Grant is my favorite, then either Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne or James Stewart is my second favorite. Lately, I'm much more likely to be watching John Wayne, so I'll say the Duke.
8. Your favorite movie starring your second favorite actor? Rio Bravo first, The Quiet Man second, The Searchers third.
9. Favorite foreign film? There are so many good ones, but Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru is probably my favorite. If you ask me tomorrow, I'll tell you something different.
10. Ice cream or French fries? Don't get much of either lately, but I'd have to say ice cream. As much as I like French fries, I can often eat them as mere filler, whereas ice cream is always a treat.
11. If you could see your favorite actress in any movie role [real or imagined] what would it be? Hollywood doesn't really make Irene Dunne movies anymore, i.e., musicals, sophisticated comedies and/or straight romances starring smart girls-next-door in their mid-to-late 30s.
Well, screw it, I'll just go with Irene Dunne and a gaggle of Golden Age actresses in Bridesmaids. I actually saw that one in a theater!
Oh, wait, I just re-read the question and saw that it says favorite actress not second favorite actress—why did I have that in my head? Oh, so that's a different question entirely. What would I like to see Myrna Loy in? How about a crime comedy where she solves the mystery for once?
For those of you expecting a post about silent movies here, forgive me. I'll have a review of D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (written but not typed) up on Tuesday and a review of Abel Gance's J'accuse! (already queued up) on Friday. They'll be worth reading, I promise.
In the meantime, I'm also a baseball fan—specifically a Washington Nationals fan, wearing as I type this, a ratty Nats cap with "Opening Day 2007" embroidered on the back—which means that only a little less annoying to me than all those Sight & Sound Top Ten posts (including three of my own, here, here and here) are all those bloviating articles, op-ed pieces, blog posts and ESPN segments explaining why the Nationals are insane to shut down Stephen Strasburg before the playoffs and offering up their own blueprint for how to ensure he pitches in the post-season without blowing his arm out.
He's also recovering from Tommy John surgery, a medical procedure designed to reconstruct a hopelessly damaged ulnar collateral ligament (i.e., the meat that holds the elbow together) by taking a ligament from some other part of the body, drilling a couple of holes in the bones of the arm and winding it around and around in a figure eight until the recipient can once again throw a baseball without his forearm flying off into space like the plastic limb of a broken mannequin.
Not only does the initial rehab take a full year, but the pitcher is then on a fairly short leash the season after that, a two-year recovery process. The success rate for Tommy John surgery is an astounding 89%, but in the 38 years since doctors invented this procedure using the elbow of Dodgers pitcher Tommy John (you thought I was going say Don Drysdale, didn't you) as a guinea pig, a protocol has developed for how to achieve that 89% success rate. Strasburg's doctors have told the Nats that he can't pitch much beyond around, oh, say, 160 innings this year without seriously amping up the chances he blows out his arm again.
The Nats had another starting pitcher go through the same process a year before Strasburg, a guy named Jordan Zimmermann. Zimmermann tossed 161-and-a-third innings last year, got shut down at the end of August, and is now off the leash and is second in the National League in earned run average. If he picks up five or six more wins, he'll be right in the discussion for the Cy Young Award.
Here's the problem. Strasburg is arguably the best pitcher on the Nats staff (arguable, since Zimmermann and Gio Gonzalez have a better E.R.A. and more wins, respectively, and Edwin Jackson has World Series experience) and the Nationals have the best record in baseball. Which means absent a catastrophe, the Nats are going to make the playoffs where they'll succeed or fail without Strasburg.
I won't evaluate these plans or explain why the Nats aren't going to follow any of them, no matter how reasonable or nonsensical they may be. I'll only tell you that it is carved in stone like Teddy Roosevelt is carved into the side of Mount Rushmore that the Nationals are going to shut Strasburg down in September. If it makes you feel better or sells advertising or increases page hits, you can yack about it until the cows come home. But the Nats are going to shut him down in September and take their chances then bring him back next year.
Until now. Because the Monkey (and only the Monkey) has a foolproof plan for allowing Strasburg to pitch in the playoffs without in any way violating the protocol for recovering from Tommy John surgery.
And don't tell me it isn't feasible. I've read that physicists believe a time machine is theoretically possible—it would just take the energy of an exploding sun to power it. Difficult, yes, but it's as feasible as any of the other hare-brained schemes they'll talk about on ESPN over the next month and for a Nats fan seeking the first World Series berth in D.C. since 1933, oh so worth it. I say go for it!
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