Eric Show and the wrong side of history

Dave Farquhar Baseball, Christianity, Human Interest, Music , , ,

ESPN has a moving article about Eric Show today. Eric Show was one of several tragic figures from the mid-1980s San Diego Padres who stood in the shadow of Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, one of the greatest hitters ever.

Show’s family would prefer that people remember him as the millionaire pitcher who was fond of inviting the homeless people he passed on the street to dinner.

But generally speaking, people remember him for a hit he allowed in 1985. A hit to a much lesser man. And nine short years later, Eric Show was dead at age 37.

Show’s tragedy, sadly, wasn’t unique among his teammates. Left-handed pitcher Dave Dravecky lost his arm to cancer. Second baseman Alan Wiggins became the first baseball player to die of AIDS. Tony Gwynn, of course, died much too young as well.

Supposedly the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs are cursed, but their 1980s teams have nothing on that.

But I’m way ahead of myself.

In some ways, Eric Show was a Greg Maddux-like pitcher. He didn’t have overpowering stuff, but he threw a lot of pitches well, and was much smarter than most of his opponents. Show never matched Maddux’s best numbers, but spent most of his career just short of the brink of Maddux-like superstardom. Scarred by a poor relationship with an abusive father, Show’s difficulties bouncing back when little things went wrong turned him into an all-or-nothing pitcher, and those occasional games where he had nothing were the difference between him and guys like Maddux.

Show put together a perfectly respectable career, even if he never lived up to his full potential. During his career, the Padres went from last place to the World Series, and he played a key role in that transformation. Even ignoring what he did off the field, people should remember him as a very good pitcher for a very good team.

Instead, he’s the guy who gave up a record-setting hit. He’s also the guy who hit Andre Dawson with a beanball in 1987. That is, when someone remembers him at all.

But there was a lot going on with him behind the scenes. Show was a gifted musician. Routinely he asked homeless people to join him for dinner. He handed out $50 bills like candy to people less fortunate than him. He was a committed Christian. Finally, he was a deep thinker and only two of his teammates understood him.

Show started falling apart in 1987, when the Padres traded those two friends–Mark Thurmond and fellow tragic figure Dave Dravecky. That was the same year he hit Andre Dawson. I’m familiar with the other side of that story. I was a Cubs fan in 1987, and I’m related to ex-Cubs pitcher Rick Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe had lobbied hard for the Cubs to sign Dawson. When he saw his man go down, Sutcliffe went after Show. The commissioner fined and suspended him 8 games for his role in the brawl.

What I didn’t know was that Eric Show hand-wrote an apology and tried to give it to Dawson.

Abandoned and injured, Show did something completely out of character. The man who talked junkies on the street into going into rehab turned to drugs himself. First it was greenies, which propelled him to his last great season in 1988. But that soon led to crystal meth, cocaine, and heroin. After two barely mediocre seasons, the Padres let him go, and at age 35, he signed with Tony LaRussa’s Oakland Athletics. The ESPN article calls the move naive, but I disagree. Show was exactly the kind of reclamation product that LaRussa’s longtime pitching coach, Dave Duncan, specialized in.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, it didn’t work out. Show didn’t turn into one of Duncan’s success stories.

In 1992, Show was out of baseball and in rehab when he went to see his former teammate, Dave Dravecky, give a lecture. Dravecky wrote two books about his battle with cancer and embarked on a long career as a speaker and author. Dravecky recognized him and asked him to call, but Show lost his number.

ESPN has the rest of the story.

But I agree with his family that Eric Show’s legacy ought to be as a man who took homeless people out to dinner and who forgave and repeatedly tried to reconcile with his abusive father.

I’ve been following baseball for as long as I could read. I’m sure Eric Show isn’t the only baseball player who ever took a homeless person to dinner. But I never heard of any other.

I wanna blow bubbles!

Dave Farquhar Parenting, Personal, Saving money ,

My oldest son’s obsession is blowing bubbles. If he’s awake, it’s what he wants to do. If he doesn’t want to do something, offering to let him blow bubbles if he does that something often works.

The trouble is that an 8 ounce bottle lasts him about an hour and costs between 75 cents and a dollar. That can make for an expensive 3-day weekend, unless you make it yourself.I’ve seen a number of recipes. The recipe I tried may not be the best, but it’s better than any of the commercial formulations we’ve tried.

I took 1/4 cup of Costco dish detergent (it was what I had), 1/2 cup of water, and a tablespoon of sugar, which I stirred and poured into his used bubble bottle.

Most recipes suggest Dawn or Joy. For these purposes, I’m sure concentration matters a lot more than brand. Some recipes call for glycerin or corn syrup instead of sugar. Corn syrup and glycerin aren’t things I have any other reason to keep around, so I used sugar.

The concoction left enough room in his 8-ounce bottle to make it easier to use.

Google says a gallon of Dawn costs $15 at warehouse stores. That would make 64 refills, cutting the cost to about 25 cents a pop. I don’t remember what the Costco brand costs, but it’s probably less than that.

Where I am

Dave Farquhar Music, Personal ,

I’ve been trying to keep a lower profile online the last couple of weeks. But telling everyone where you are seems to be the rage these days.

I’m in my living room. I’m here a lot.Earlier tonight, I was making toy cars with my oldest son ("Daddy, make more school buses!"). We have a routine. I make them, he plays with them until he gets bored. Sometimes he lets me play too. Once he gets bored with that, he takes them apart. Sometimes he brings me the pieces, which I reassemble into something a little different. As the night goes on, the cars get weirder and weirder.

The game will probably change when he gets a little older and discovers, like my cousin and I did, that you can crash the cars into each other.

After both sons went to bed, I wound down by watching old Guadalcanal Diary videos on Youtube. Guadalcanal Diary was an indie rock band that came up around the same time and place as R.E.M. They were a little weirder, immensely talented, and a lot less successful. The DJ who used to play alternative music on Sunday nights on one of the Top 40 stations in St. Louis in the late 1980s and early 1990s would mix them in very occasionally. I’m pretty sure by the time I’d heard of them, they’d already broken up.

I think their singer, Murray Attaway, could croon with almost anybody. The single off their final album, "Always Saturday," shows off those abilities. But their songs tended to be a little too cerebral, and maybe a little too dark, for mass audiences.

I won’t be posting another update like this one. The routine will be about the same tomorrow. And probably in a couple of weeks, though by then, I might be listening to some other forgotten band.

Editing. Or not editing.

Dave Farquhar General

If you were one of the 25 people who read my ramblings earlier today, I apologize. I accidentally posted what amounted to a bunch of disorganized notes. I’ve since edited them into better shape. I still think they wander too much, but that’s a reflection of me, I guess. My writings are all over the place because I’m all over the place right now.

Of politeness and consideration in the connected age

Dave Farquhar net.culture, Retro Computing, Society , , , , , ,

I’ve quit several online forums in recent months, and lately I’ve been noticing a lot of Facebook wars–discussions that just got out of hand too fast. All of this makes me extremely nostalgic for the days of Commodore 64s and 128s, dialup modems, and hobbyist-run BBSs. It was hopelessly primitive compared to what we have today, but for the most part it was polite, and it certainly felt more like community.

What happened?

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DVD players as cheap home media centers

Dave Farquhar Video , , ,

I thought the steady stream of Thomas the Tank Engine, Dora, Bob the Builder, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Elmo, Thomas, and Thomas had finally done in our DVD player after almost 8 years.

It turned out the VCR I was running the video through was actually the problem, but what I learned in shopping for a potential replacement suggests I may want to think about replacing it anyway.Modern DVD players will upscale your old DVDs to make them almost hi-def, and have HDMI ports for digital connection to HDTVs. But they do more than that.

Mid-range ($50 and up) players include a USB port, so you can plug a flash drive or hard drive into them, and they’ll play MP3 audio or DIVX video off them.

Due to the United States’ anti-fair-use laws, I won’t tell you how to do it, but what you’ll want to do is rip your DVDs to a USB hard drive, convert them to DIVX, then plug them into your DVD player. Ask Google how. Then you have a library of movies in a 5-inch box and don’t have to mess with discs. That’s a big plus when you have small kids like I do. Plug in the box, turn it on, and pick your movie or show from the on-screen menu.

For ages, I’ve been planning to build a media center PC for just this purpose.

But I think I’d really rather just buy a $50 DVD player and plug a USB hard drive into it. Even though our 32″ CRT TV can’t really take advantage of a modern player’s video capability, the convenience of not fiddling with discs (and no risk of scratching them) makes it worth the 50 bucks. And once LED-lit LCD TVs get affordable, the DVD player will be ready for it when I upgrade.

Update: Rather than buy a pricier DVD player, you might want to consider a $35 DVR, which can double as a media player.

The stunning fall of Mark Hurd

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , ,

I didn’t believe it when the news broke late Friday that Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, had suddenly resigned under fire.

Hurd wasn’t flamboyant or a quote machine like many technology CEOs. He just steadily turned HP around, increasing profits, passing Dell in sales of PCs and IBM in sales of servers, and buying companies like EDS and 3Com. He was exactly what investors liked.

In the following days, it turned out there was more to the story.Some people believe the infraction that HP cited for Hurd’s downfall was a cover, that HP wanted him out. The reasons make some sense. The one that resonates with me the most is the logic that Hurd increased profits by squeezing expenses to the bone, slashing the workforce to the minimum, then slashing salaries. Doing more with less, in other words–the mantra of IT during the entire previous decade.

The result? Record numbers of applications from HP employees at competitors. So far, no Steven Slater-style meltdowns, but when demanding more and more while paying less isn’t a good long-term strategy. The Slater story brought attention to this problem and got people talking about it, and it looks like HP may have been a few days ahead of the curve on that.

Other accounts have said employees don’t like working for Hurd and he’s unpleasant toward him. Which lead to some defenders questioning when "being nice" was a job qualification for a CEO.

Well, five years ago I was consulting for a Fortune 500 company. I stepped onto an elevator, and the company CEO stepped on right after me. He extended his hand, introduced himself, and asked me my name, what department I worked in, and what I did there. It was a 30-second exchange.

He stepped off the elevator and literally never saw me again. I don’t know whether he forgot about me the moment I stepped off the elevator, or if he jotted down a note that if he needed a printer fixed he could call Dave Farquhar and filed it away. But unlike a certain very famous CEO, he gave me no reason to fear sharing an elevator ride with him.

And I do think an important qualification of being a CEO is knowing who to call when they need something done quickly and done right. Being friendly is conducive to that. Being ruthless at all times is not. Even Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun knew when to be kind.

Then there’s the question of the consultant. The consultant who had, among other duties, the questionable job duty of "keeping Mr. Hurd company on trips," but with whom Hurd didn’t have an affair (both deny any sexual element to the relationship), and whom Hurd didn’t sexually harass (HP said no harassment took place, and the two settled out of court and kept the terms private). The consultant with whom Hurd concealed $20,000 in expenses in order to hide the relationship.

To a CEO of a multibillion-dollar company, 20 grand isn’t much. Hurd could have paid that back, and he offered. The amount of money isn’t the question nearly so much as the motive. Why did he feel the need to conceal having dinner with one particular subordinate?

The sexual harassment claim gives weight to the claim of it not being a sexual affair. But the job duty of "keeping [any male in a position of power] company" is a common euphemism for something less innocent. I’ve also read speculation that some of this consultant’s past work–namely, acting roles in several R-rated films of the type that gave the cable TV channel Cinemax the nickname "Skinamax"–may have contributed to these expectations.

Some have said that’s blaming the victim. But no means no, and the definition is the same no matter what the person’s job description was for most of the 1990s.

If Mr. Hurd jumped to certain conclusions because his consultant once had a starring role in "Body of Evidence 2," that says more about him than it says about her.

If I remember one thing from my freshman orientation in college, it’s sitting in an auditorium and being told repeatedly that no means no. Regardless of how much she’s had to drink, or what she’s wearing, or what reputation she has for whatever reason.

Since the charge was harassment rather than something else, it sounds like perhaps someone thought a no on Monday might not be followed by a no on Tuesday. That’s better than thinking no means yes based on reputation, but it was still problematic enough to settle out of court rather than try to get it dismissed.

We’ll probably never know HP’s full motivation behind the dismissal. Mark Hurd left over what appears now to be a relatively minor matter of $20,000 worth of incorrect expense reports and a slightly inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, both things that would go completely unnoticed or be easily rectified if it was a different company, or, perhaps, a different person.

The key is to not leave that something relatively minor laying around.

The best boss I ever worked for

Dave Farquhar Personal

I had a brief conversation with my former boss’ widow today.

A few weeks before I was hired, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By the time I started, he was only working a few hours a week. In February I went on the road to work offsite for a week, and the week after I came back, he died.He had been a Marine Staff Sergeant and an Air Force Major. Out of respect, I will just refer to him as "The Major."

The Major’s accomplishments in the Air Force were the stuff of legend. He had a pattern of coming in and accomplishing superhuman things in mind-boggling periods of time. Doing more with less wasn’t a mantra with him. It was a gift.

I know his secret.

The Major wasn’t able to drive himself for any of the time I knew him, due to the pain medications he was taking. One day The Major needed to run an errand. It was a slow day, so he asked me if I would drive him. I agreed, of course.

I was parked about a half mile away (don’t ask), so I offered to pick him up at the door. He wouldn’t have any of that. He wanted to talk.

So we walked. I walk fast–the result of having too many classes in college back-to-back that were across campus–but he didn’t have to ask me to slow down very many times.

He told me a little about his career. About going into the Marines, working for a tape factory, going back to school, then becoming an officer in the Air Force. Then he stopped.

"What’s your background?"

He knew my resume, so I concentrated on the types of work I’d done, zeroing in on the parts I thought were relevant, based on the work we did.

I don’t remember what we talked about after that. Not much, I don’t think. His mind was turning.

I dropped him off where he needed to go, and waited for him. He wasn’t long. He didn’t get what he needed there.

But he did come back with a question. An exceptionally good question. In fact, I heard the question from our customers several times in the weeks that followed. But he was the first to ask it.

It was a simple question, but the answer wasn’t so simple. It begged for a repeatable process. I gave him the superficial answer that politeness demanded, then added, "but it really needs a documented process." He asked me to do that, and the result was that initial answer got a lot more refinement.

And eventually, the reason he was successful dawned on me.

He’d asked me to do things before. He’d handed me things to read and comment on before. But those were little things, mostly. This was a bigger-picture thing.

I’m sure he had an agenda. Managers always have agendas. But he didn’t let the last phone call he’d taken or the last meeting he’d attended drive his questions.

He set that aside for a minute in favor of another question. "What’s one question I have that this new guy would be able to answer?"

Unfortunately, he never got a chance to ask me a second one.

After he died, I heard some more stories, including stories about things he’d accomplished in the Air Force while stationed overseas. I imagined him having similar conversations with the people who worked for him, dividing up the work ahead into pieces of a puzzle, and determining who he had who could take each piece of it.

The American Dream vs. the American Greed

Dave Farquhar Christianity, Genealogy, Human Interest, Society , , ,

Last week at church, our newly-installed vicar preached about greed vs. generosity, and he ripped a little on the American Dream, which he defined as each generation having better stuff and living more comfortably than their parents did.

I think he’s right, letting that consume you definitely leads to problems. But I was taught that the American Dream was more about opportunity than it was about materialism. And maybe that’s where we’ve gone wrong.

I’m probably 10 years older than the vicar is, and I attended schools that didn’t exactly value new history books. So what I was taught probably dates back two generations, not just one.

And when I was in school, for the most part they taught us that the American Dream was about opportunity, and about parents giving their kids better opportunities than they had.

Today, I hear marketers on the radio saying, "That’s the American Dream, isn’t it? Owning a home?" Or tying the American Dream to any other materialistic thing.

Note the shift. It shifted from the kids to self.

I don’t know exactly why my direct ancestor, Adam Farquhar, came to the Americas in the 1700s (perhaps 1729). Presumably it was because he couldn’t get land in Scotland. But you see the American Dream working from generation to generation. Adam’s son Benajah owned land. Benajah’s son Edward became a doctor. At least five of Edward’s sons, including my ancestor Isaac, became doctors. Isaac’s son Ralph didn’t become a doctor, but he became a successful businessman who hobnobbed with some very powerful people. Ralph Jr. revived the family tradition of being doctors, and he was wealthy enough to give my dad every opportunity in the world.

My dad never did become as wealthy or as successful as his dad was. But by Dad’s own admission, he was a slacker. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity. Look at things strictly in material terms, and Dad set the Farquhar line back a couple of generations.

But Dad gave me opportunities. Wherever we lived, he got me into a good school. When circumstances found us living in a town that didn’t have a good high school, Dad moved us out before I turned 14, so that my sister and I could go to good high schools. And Dad saw to it that we would be able to go to college.

My sons aren’t old enough to go to school yet, but they live in a good school district. And I did what I had to do in order to ensure they would have a choice between several good preschools, to get them a good foundation. I don’t know if either of them will be reading at age 3 like I was, but I’m going to make sure they have that chance.

I may have to make some personal sacrifices in order for them to have what they need. But for what Dad spent getting me a good high school education, he could have been driving Lincolns instead of those Dodge pickup trucks he drove. (And this was before pickup trucks became status symbols. Dad didn’t want his patients thinking they were paying for him to have an extravagant lifestyle.)

So I don’t have any problem brown-bagging my lunch, driving an older car, or using an older computer so my sons can go to good preschools. And given the choice between a smaller house in a great school district and a bigger house in a bad district, I’ll keep what I already have, so they can go to good schools.

What they make of it is up to them. But never let it be said that I didn’t get them the opportunity.

Buy a used business printer and save a bundle

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,
Buy a used business printer and save a bundle

I’m through with cheap consumer printers.

Due to the nature of my wife’s work, we print a lot by home standards. We buy paper by the case, not the ream, and a case of paper probably lasts us a little more than six months.

Our workload just isn’t practical for the kind of printers you find next to the telephones at consumer electronics stores. So I bought an HP Laserjet 4100. And even if a case of paper lasts you a couple of years, you might want to buy an office-grade printer too.

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