Cubs BCB After Dark: Who will be the second Wild Card?
· Yahoo Sports
Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the hippest gathering of night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and cool off with us. We’re so glad to see you. There’s no cover charge. We’ve saved a special table for you. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
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BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you what the best Cubs’ Deadline trade ever? I should have been more specific because I meant the Cubs adding players for a title race and not selling players. Obviously the Javy Báez for Pete Crow-Armstrong deal would be among the best if I meant the Cubs selling players for prospects. And as hard as it is to believe now, the Cubs acquiring Jake Arrieta and Pedro Strop in 2014 was about the Orioles adding Scott Feldman at the time.
Having said all that, 40 percent of you said the Aroldis Chapman deal was number one. That makes sense, since it was the only one that resulted in a World Series title. Another 30 percent of you went with the Rick Sutcliffe deal in 1984.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. You can skip that if you want. Or you can read that and skip the baseball stuff. Or you can read it all.
Tonight we’re featuring Welsh vocalist Judith Owen with a music video of hers from this past April “To Your Door.” John Maestas is the guitarist.
There’s been renewed interest in Cape Fear because of the new television series, which stars Javier Bardem and Amy Adams. I’m going to confess that I’ve seen none of it. But what I have seen is the 1962 original movie, directed by J. Lee Thompson, and the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake. So I thought I’d take this week to do one of my favorite exercises, which is comparing the original film to the remake.
Tonight, we take on the 1962 original, which stars Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Polly Bergen. Mitchum plays Max Cady, who has just been released from a Georgia prison after serving an eight-year sentence for rape. (more on that later.) He immediately tracks down Sam Bowden (Peck), a prosecuting attorney who witnessed the attack and testified against him. Cady blames Sam for his eight years in prison and the fact that his wife and daughter left him. Later in the film, he confesses he spent every day in prison dreaming about his revenge.
Cady immediately starts stalking Sam and his family, although he’s very careful to keep his interactions to within the letter of the law. See, Cady is very smart and very cunning and has had eight years in prison to read law books. When he does cross the line (as when he poisons the Bowden family dog), he makes sure that no one can pin it back on him. When Max Cady rapes a local girl (Barrie Chase), partially as a warning to Sam and partially because he’s a serial rapist, he brutalizes her so badly that she refuses to testify out of fear and flees town.
Mostly, Cady just shows up wherever Sam, his wife Peggy (Bergen) or his 15-year-old daughter Nancy (Lori Martin) go and look menacingly at them. As a prosecutor, Sam has a lot of connections with the police department and he goes to them for help. But every legal trick that Sam and the police come up with—charging him with vagrancy and not registering as a felon—Cady has already thought of and foiled. Sam tries to buy off Max, but Max can’t be bought.
Sam escalates to increasingly desperate and illegal activities to get Cady to stop harassing his family. These activities backfire on Sam and now he’s the one in legal jeopardy. That causes Sam to set up a trap for Cady on a houseboat on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.
The overarching themes of Cape Fear are not deep. The Bowden family are the epitome of American wholesomeness. Before Max Cady breaks him down, Sam Bowden is a fine, respected member of society. He’s basically auditioning for Atticus Finch, although that part was still about eight months in the future when Peck made Cape Fear. Peggy is the loving, supportive and fairly passive wife. Daughter Nancy is 15 and is played by the 15-year-old Lori Martin, but Martin was short and comes across as much younger and much more innocent than 15. They are the ideal Eisenhower family.
Cady, on the other hand, is pure evil, but it’s an evil combined with superior intelligence and calm and cool control. Peck is great as the upstanding man broken down to raw savagery to save his family, but there were a dozen actors in Hollywood that could have played that part. I can’t imagine anyone other then Mitchum being able to play Max Cady in 1962.
So you have the good America threatened by an evil force with a legal system that protects the criminals more than the victims. If you’ve seen American crime films from the sixties to the eighties, you’ve heard this story before. But certainly the way that Peck’s noble character breaks down over the course of the film (only to regain it before the end, naturally), gives Cape Fear a bit of a different direction.
There’s one other thing that makes the 1962 Cape Fear different from the “thin line between civilization and savagery” films that would come later is that Cape Fear was still made under the rules of the Production Code. And while the Code was cracking in 1962, it still held some weight. Max Cady is a serial rapist, yet the word “rape” can’t be mentioned at all during the film. They have to work with euphemisms and “you knows,” especially when discussing Max’s threats to the 15-year-old Nancy. The film is also very violent for something that came out in 1962, something the critics noticed at the time. Many found the whole thing distasteful, even though they praised the acting jobs and the way Thompson brought the story to the screen.
Of course, none of that can compare to violence in Scorsese’s 1991 version, but that’s for next time.
Overall, Cape Fear is a solid psychological thriller with enough action in it to keep the danger-factor high. It has a star-studded cast and a Bernard Hermann score. It’s not an all-time classic, but it’s a very good film and you can see why people keep wanting to remake it.
The trailer for the J. Lee Thompson original version of Cape Fear.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies
I’m not conceding the National League Central to the Brewers. Fangraphs puts the Cubs’ chances of winning the division at just 16 percent coming in to tonight’s Brewers/Padres game. I think the Cubs chances are better than that. I think they’re twice as good as that. Of course, that means I think the Cubs have a 32 percent chance of winning the division and the Brewers have a 68 percent chance. So yeah, a five-game or more lead in early August isn’t easy to overcome. Milwaukee is the clear favorite.
So assuming the Brewers win the NL Central for the purposes of argument, the Cubs are, in my mind, the overwhelming favorite to win the first Wild Card spot and host a best-of-three series against the second Wild Card team. But who that team will be is up in the air.
Currently, as I type this, the Cubs have a six-game lead of the Phillies and Diamondbacks, who are tied for the second and third spots at 63-56. Right behind them is the Padres at 62-57. Fangraphs gives the Marlins, who are 60-59, a little better than a ten percent chance. No one has a double-digit chance with the Cardinals and Pirates both in the seven percent range.
So which one of those teams do you think will play the Cubs in the Wild Card Series if the Cubs can’t catch the Brewers? Let’s leave the Cards and Pirates out of it for now. That means there’s the Phillies, Diamondbacks, Padres and Marlins to chose from.
The Phillies seem formidable on paper with all of those power hitters and strong starting pitching. But their hitting is slightly below average and their pitching is just average in the all-important runs per game category. They’re over-performing their Pythagorean number and their defense is fairly dreadful. Can they hang on and claim that second Wild Card?
The Diamondbacks are one of those teams that everyone forgets about but they are a lot better than you probably think. They don’t have many names that wow you, but honestly, that’s probably on you. But their runs per game, both on offense and defense, are very similar to the Phillies. They are also over-performing their Pythagorean number. Arizona’s defense is much better than Philadelphia’s, but their bullpen is much worse. They just released their closer, Paul Sewald, who had 24 saves abut a 6.23 ERA.
The Padres have been playing great baseball lately and have gotten back into the race. But they’ve been a weird team all season. They have a lot of big names on offense—Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts, Jackson Merrill—and so far this year their best hitter has been Ty France, whom they signed on a minor league deal this past winter. The Padres definitely have a below-average offense when it comes to this year’s stats, but there’s a lot of potential for more if those veterans get untracked.
The Padres do excel at run prevention, although their starting pitching isn’t that great either. Instead, they have one of the best bullpens in recent memory. While I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole to see if this is true, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had one of the best bullpens of all-time. But the Padres are outperforming their Pythagorean numbers by even more than Philadelphia and Arizona.
Finally there are the Marlins, who, as per usual for them, are flying under the radar. Their offense is below average, although shortstop Otto Lopez is having a season that should earn him significant MVP votes. But their pitching is outstanding, ranking fourth in the National League in ERA behind the three division leaders. Sandy Alcántara is most of the way back to his former Cy Young form. Eury Pérez is very good and while Max Meyer is on the injured list, he’s expected back before the end of the season and he’s an emerging star. Their bullpen isn’t as good, but they’re a sneaky good team. Miami is underperforming their Pythagorean record, but by only one game.
So which one of these four teams do you think will be the second Wild Card?
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