Category Archives: Immortality

KANSAS CITY, Mo. Miguel Cabrera had just achieved baseball immortality, and everyone around him knew it.

Tigers manager Jim Leyland had tears welling in his eyes. General manager Dave Dombrowski kept trying to remind people to stop and enjoy the moment. Prince Fielder simply shook his head in disbelief at the history that had unfolded.

Less than an hour earlier, in the midst of Detroit's otherwise meaningless 1-0 victory over Kansas City, it had finally become official: Cabrera had won the Triple Crown.

"Everybody said to me it was unbelievable. They were all excited to see this, enjoy this, be a part of something big," he said, taking the rare feat in stride better than anyone.

Cabrera finished the regular-season hitting .330 with 44 homers and 139 RBIs, leading the American League in all three statistical categories, making him just the 15th player to achieve the Triple Crown and the first since Boston's Carl Yastrzemski in 1967.

"I've managed a lot of players, managed some great ones, but I've never seen anything like this," Leyland said. "When you're sitting back and it's over with, people are talking about Miguel Cabrera, the rest of the world will have no idea who his manager was, but I will."

Among those in one of baseball's most exclusive clubs are Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Frank Robinson, who called it "an incredible accomplishment for a gifted young man, and Miguel should be proud of his all-around excellence and consistency throughout the season."

Cabrera's achievement wasn't assured until the Yankees pinch-hit for Curtis Granderson in their 14-2 rout of the Boston Red Sox. Granderson had homered twice to reach 43 for the year, tied with the Rangers' Josh Hamilton and one shy of the Tigers' third baseman.

The closest competition in the race for the batting title was Angels rookie Mike Trout, who remains Cabrera's toughest competition for the AL MVP. Cabrera was the runaway leader in RBIs.

"When he's over the plate, he can do anything. He's the best hitter in the game," Trout said. "I think his approach, the way he battles with two strikes you leave one pitch over the plate that at-bat and he's going to hit it. He had an unbelievable year."

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Baseball Immortality

By DAVE SKRETTA AP Sports Writer

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - Miguel Cabrera had just achieved baseball immortality, and everyone around him knew it.

Tigers manager Jim Leyland had tears welling in his eyes. General manager Dave Dombrowski kept trying to remind people to stop and enjoy the moment. Prince Fielder simply shook his head in disbelief at the history that had unfolded.

Less than an hour earlier, in the midst of Detroit's otherwise meaningless 1-0 victory over Kansas City, it had finally become official: Cabrera had won the Triple Crown.

"Everybody said to me it was unbelievable. They were all excited to see this, enjoy this, be a part of something big," he said, taking the rare feat in stride better than anyone.

Cabrera finished the regular-season hitting .330 with 44 homers and 139 RBIs, leading the American League in all three statistical categories, making him just the 15th player to achieve the Triple Crown and the first since Boston's Carl Yastrzemski in 1967.

"I've managed a lot of players, managed some great ones, but I've never seen anything like this," Leyland said. "When you're sitting back and it's over with, people are talking about Miguel Cabrera, the rest of the world will have no idea who his manager was, but I will."

Among those in one of baseball's most exclusive clubs are Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Frank Robinson, who called it "an incredible accomplishment for a gifted young man, and Miguel should be proud of his all-around excellence and consistency throughout the season."

Cabrera's achievement wasn't assured until the Yankees pinch-hit for Curtis Granderson in their 14-2 rout of the Boston Red Sox. Granderson had homered twice to reach 43 for the year, tied with the Rangers' Josh Hamilton and one shy of the Tigers' third baseman.

The closest competition in the race for the batting title was Angels rookie Mike Trout, who remains Cabrera's toughest competition for the AL MVP. Cabrera was the runaway leader in RBIs.

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Tigers' Cabrera wins 1st Triple Crown in 45 years

Sunday, Sep. 30, 2012

"In 20 years human beings will neither die nor age."

That's Shukan Gendai magazine's headline. Is it possible? Is the age-old dream about to come true? Are homo sapiens, who have been dying for 190,000-odd years, on the cusp at last of immortality?

Myriad champions down the millennia have waged their battles against Death. The first known one is Gilgamesh, of the 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian epic that bears his name. Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, journeys to a distant land where dwells the world's only immortal man who is willing to help, on one condition: Gilgamesh must stay awake for a week. He fails, and earns a stinging rebuke: "Behold this fellow who seeks eternal life! Sleep swirls over him like a mist."

So much for that. Gilgamesh died but his quest lives on. His successors are legion. Among them is the Chinese Taoist sage Xu Fu, who in the 3rd century BC led an armada of 60 ships crewed, it was said, by 3,000 virgins across the eastern seas in search of the elixir of eternal life. What he found instead, says legend, is Japan, where, legendarily, he settled and introduced the Japanese to rice farming.

There's no end of marvelous tales. Some, to the modern sensibility, are plain crazy, like that of the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman who pursued deathless eternal youth by bathing in her young daughter's blood. They all have the same ending, which the Biblical Book of Genesis sums up very well: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

So what is Shukan Gendai telling us that our death sentence has been revoked?

If it has, the hero of this story is not a warrior-king or a mystic or a quack but a scientist. His thesis arouses more skepticism among his peers than support, but over the years the support has been growing, if slowly. He's a 49-year-old British biogerontologist named Aubrey de Grey. He has a doctorate from Cambridge, is editor in chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, has authored numerous books on aging, and is chief science officer of the SENS Foundation. SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. The last two words are, to all practical purposes, synonymous with immortality.

De Grey works at the cellular level. His famous "seven causes" of aging and death all have to do with cell damage and cell deterioration, and amounts to this: We age because our cells do. Cell deterioration, he believes, can be retarded; cell damage can be repaired. The SENS Foundation has been pursuing this modern elixir of youth for 20 years. De Grey figures another 20 years should do it. We're almost there. Think of the implications: many people now living will never die.

When he started, the consensus was that de Grey was a crank. Support even now is cautious and qualified. Shukan Gendai quotes several Japanese experts who agree that cellular rejuvenation is theoretically possible, though they question whether that will necessarily lead to immortality or even to a much extended youthfulness. De Grey, undaunted, invites us to imagine a world transformed. We'll get old without it mattering. The young will look up to us for our experience and wisdom, instead of down on us for our infirmity and dementia and the drain we are on the economy. We'll need neither nursing homes nor final resting places, since there'll be no final rest. Death, shadow on our lives since our species emerged into consciousness, will shadow it no longer.

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What nightmares may come, when we shuffle onto an immortal coil

Today is a day for John Silbers detractors to put their pens down. John Silber is dead, and he was a great man in the sense of how human beings long were measuredby their accomplishments.

In many ways he was the exact opposite of the famously self-referential Milan Kundera, whose own thinking was summed up nicely in his novel Immortality:

While hypnotic, that obsession with self-reference is a recipe for hyper-sensitivity, resentments, and all-too-much navel-gazing, the kind that we require of our students all too often as they learn to write. We have them write about their feelings, their observations, their observations about their feelings, and maybe even their observations about others observations about their feelings.

For John Silber that was a disasterin some ways the disaster of American education.

Some may think that Silbers brusqueness was all about shunning peoples feelings. Back in 2008, when the Massachusetts Board of Education spent successive meetings seeking nicer ways to speak about school failure, hoping to soften even the already fluffy underperforming by calling them a Commonwealth priority, Silber thundered:

The newspapers delighted in such quotes. But the fact is that Silber was interested in attaching the right word to the right object or the right idea. He is called the architect of the MCAS in todays Globe, but the fact is that he thought that any useful test was good even the Stanford 9. (He was wrong on that, BTW.) What he really is the architect of is the broader set of education reforms that set this state on a path focused on academics rather than simple skills or self-esteem. He believed in knowledge acquisition and thereafter the formulation of an individuals judgment.

Tests were a vehicle to inject this into a system that was failing spectacularly. Like so many in the state, when Silber started as Chairman of the Board of Education in Massachusetts, he was not a fan of charter schools. He thought he would by dint of personality and force of will turn around the state's entire network of district schools. And he aimed to do it by focusing on academics, higher-quality teaching (ensured through subject/contentbased tests rather than the usual PRAXIS tests employed in other states) and an accountability/audit office for the public schools that was to mirror the British system.

Those were difficult times for such an argument. After all, the Board of Education was, prior to his arrival, a place where debates about whether to include Ebonics in the states content standards took considerable air time. He was appointed in 1996 by his former rival for Governor, William Weld, to chair the states Board of Education. That appointment had the support of both the Senate President and the Speaker of the House, because they were disappointed with the pace of reform after the Commonwealths 1993 landmark Education Reform law.

All three of these elected leaders got what they were looking for: An energetic, focused educational leader who was willing to do what it took to shake up the education establishment and bureaucracy.

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John Silber and Immortality

Ever a season away from his potential, or a game away, even a pitch away, Homer Bailey on Friday night in Pittsburgh became something like the pitcher the Cincinnati Reds always believed would come with that talented right arm.

On a cool night at PNC Park, near the end of a season in which he became a consistent contributor to and 13-game winner for the NL Central-leading Reds, Bailey threw the modern day record-tying seventh no-hitter of 2012.

After the Pirates' Alex Presley popped out on Bailey's 115th pitch, securing a 1-0 win and the Reds' first no-hitter since Tom Browning's in 1988, Bailey thrust his arms straight over his head and welcomed his onrushing teammates. The Reds' Homer Bailey celebrates after notching the final out in his no-hitter against the Pirates. (AP)

"It's really surreal," Bailey told reporters afterward. "I can't believe it's happening."

In spite of a generation of futility, the Pirates had not been no-hit since 1971 against Bob Gibson. The last Reds right-hander to throw a no-hitter was Tom Seaver, 34 years ago.

[Related: From prospect to priest, ex-A's farm star Grant Desme searches for peace]

Bailey rode his fastball, particularly in Friday night's late innings. His strikeout of pinch-hitter Brock Holt to open the ninth (on a 93-mph fastball) was his 10th, tying his career best. Bailey walked one batter Andrew McCutchen in the seventh inning and had another batter reach on Scott Rolen's fielding error in the third inning. The rest saw Bailey hammer the strike zone with fastballs and bury his slider.

Noting the cooler temperatures and the guidance of catcher Ryan Hanigan, Bailey said, "We didn't have our best stuff, but somehow we were able to go out and make some good pitches."

The seventh overall pick in the 2004 draft, Bailey reached the major leagues three years later, as a 21-year-old. He did not pitch a full season, however, until this one. His career ERA was nearly five when, in April, he began to approach the promise of his early years. Friday's was his 32nd start, during which he surpassed 200 innings for the first time.

As a result, pitching behind Johnny Cueto, Mat Latos and Bronson Arroyo, Bailey is among the reasons the Reds for all intents and purposes finished the NL Central race weeks ago and remain in a fight with the Washington Nationals for the league's best record.

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Patience with late-blooming Homer Bailey pays off in form of Reds' first no-hitter since 1988

NBC

"Parenthood's" Monica Potter and Peter Krause

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from the second episode of Parenthood's fourth season.]

NBC's Parenthood delivered an emotional blow unlike any other in the series' three seasons Tuesday.

While still adjusting to Haddie (Sarah Ramos) going off to college, Adam (Peter Krause) and Kristina (Monica Potter) were confronted with their own mortality during "Left Field," the second episode ofits brand-new fourth season Tuesday.

Breast cancer.

"My wife went through it a couple years ago and it's a story that I've been, in the back of my mind, wanting to tell," showrunner Jason Katims tells The Hollywood Reporter, noting he felt the same trepidation when mulling whether or not to include another personal story, Max's Asperger's, into the NBC family drama. "We ultimately decided this was a story we could tell in a unique way and that it would be something that would be a very emotional and poignant story with many positive moments, too."

STORY: 'Parenthood' EP Previews First-Year Marriage Woes, Beauty of Adoption and Matt Lauria in Season 4

While the EP was discussing the then-potential story line with his producing partners, he received a call from Potter, who had just gone in for her first-ever mammogram and wound up contacting Katims to suggest the show explore a breast cancer story line for Kristina.

"I had to go for a mammogram -- my first mammogram ever -- and It was really scary and I didnt know what to expect," Potter tells THR. "I reached out to Jason and said, 'I got a little scare. I think I'm fine but what if we talked about Kristina having breast cancer?' I e-mailed him and within the hour, he e-mailed me back and said, 'I have the chills as we just broke that story for Kristina for this season.'"

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'Parenthood's' Jason Katims, Monica Potter on Kristina's Life-Altering News and the Journey Ahead