To pay Paul

Blessed and cursed, editorial cartoonists are forever trying to harness one issue/event/person/color as metaphor for whatever issue/event/person/color they're skewering. Bonus if the two collide. So to speak.

Twenty-five years ago, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Prince William Sound in Alaska, spilling nearly 11 million gallons of oil, killing wildlife on a massive scale, ruining a sensitive environment, and the fishing and tourism and general economy of the southern state. Despite valiant efforts to top it — even this weekend! — the Exxon Valdez spill remains one of the country's worst environmental disasters.

Twenty-five years ago, Rep. Tony Coelho, a rising star in the Democratic Party and a favorite to become House majority leader, faced intense scrutiny over the purchase of $100,000 in so-called high-yield "junk bonds" (all the rage at the time), and speculation that the purchase also bought Coelho's help for the savings and loan industry (which enraged us all at the time).

Coelho resigned from Congress and his post as party whip, though he was not charged with a crime. His district overlapped with some of The Stockton Record's readership.

Democrats in Congress had become less moored than usual from ethics and civic duty in 1989, and Coelho's troubles were just one manifestation.

What could I say about the spill itself that hadn't already been documented by then? (Bad oil! Bad! Bad!!) But I might have been able to use the terrible spill to bring light to issues voters might want to wonder about.

'Cuz I'm the panderer, yeah, the panderer …

Baseball bits and pieces, Part I:

While the rest of the world snoozed, the Bay Area went simultaneously orgasmic and miasmic as the Oakland A's played the San Francisco Giants in the 1989 World Series. It took an major earthquake to bring the Fall Classic to the country's attention.

The 7.1-magnitude Loma Prieta quake shook the Giants more than folks and fans had figured, and once the ballparks were approved again for human habitation, the A's steamrolled their National League foes in four straight.

I played it both ways in this cartoon, pandering to The Stockton Record's readers who might be either Giants or A's fans. Fans used to be able to buy custom hats with the Giants logo and colors one one side of the crown, the A's symbol and colors on the other; I don't know if they can get 'em anymore, except from eBay hoarders. Fans bought them for the novelty and a lovely expression of conciliation, but the hats weren't big enough to hide their black hearts.

No one was truly a fan of both teams, nor can anyone be a real fan of two teams in the same sport. It's impossible. Sports fans grow up loving their team, and hating the other teams. It's a sport hate, not a true hate (though we all know how it can escalate), kind of like loving HBO over Showtime, Ford over Chevy. Kim over Khloe.

As ridiculous as my reasons for loving the Giants, so are my reasons for hating the A's: They were too good. They dominated professional baseball just as I was becoming a baseball fan about fifth grade, and I remember thinking that those neon yellow A's uniforms and all those walrus mustaches could not possibly be the meaning of baseball.

The A's dominated as I re-upped as a Giants fan, going to the World Series in 1989 and 1990. Somehow my brother-in-law had an extra ticket to game four of the A's-Cincinnati Reds World Series in Oakland. Somehow, he gave it to me. Such sustained surreality, sitting through that entire game, unable to utter a peep as the National League Reds carried out a sweep against the hometown team I hated so much.

(Trivial aside: Both those names, José Canseco and Will Clark, are still present in baseball. The charismatic former first baseman with the sweet swing, Will Clark works for the Giants as a community liaison. Canseco, he of the gigantic muscles whose Bash Brother was Mark McGwire, is still trying to play professional baseball, after all these years.) 

2013 nightmare

I run this cartoon now because the Giants just took two out of three games against the A's last weekend in their first meeting this season of interleague play. About this time of year, for wobbly marketing reasons, National and American league teams play each other throughout a month, and then resume sanity and finish the season against teams in their own leagues. The Giants will play the A's again, this time in Oakland, in June.

It works in the Bay Area, Chicago and New York, where fans in those areas and cities love their teams and hate the crosstown(Bay) rivals. Other interleague matchups are artificial, and I guess fans buy tickets just for the novelty of seeing opponents whom they would never see otherwise. But the Arizona Diamondbacks vs. the Seattle Mariners? Why?

Big changes await next season, when the Houston Astros will move to the American League, and each league will have 15 teams. Two equal but odd-numbered leagues will require National League teams to play American League teams throughout the season, wearing out the novelty and imperiling the National League's position as the Keeper of the Pristine Game: We may see the designated hitter rule apply to both leagues.

Next year, the cursed rule will have been in effect for 40 years. The American League uses it (in fact, I understand that every professional baseball league in the world, except for the National League, employs it) to replace the pitcher with a hitter during at-bats. Typically, teams put a power hitter in the pitcher's place, and put the designated hitter in the heart of the lineup; typically, the rule allows aging baseball players to extend their careers in the American League, where all they have to do in their final years is swing a bat.

The National League still requires the pitcher to bat, and pitchers usually bat last in the lineup. Typically, pitchers aren't good hitters, but sometimes pitchers can surprise fans with a liner that can deflate opponents, or will lay down a bunt to advance runners on base. Team managers have to work hard to make a pitcher's at-bat effective.

When American League teams play in National League ballparks during interleague, they can't use the designated hitter rule, which can put their hardly-ever-hitting pitchers at a disadvantage. Conversely, National League teams in American League ballparks can boost their lineups with an extra hitter.

I'm afraid next season the American League will complain about having to do without the designated hitter rule so often, and will try to have it applied to the National League as well. Fans who should know better, who want to see home runs over game strategy, will bark for it too.

Should it happen, the game won't be as much fun.

One excuse after another

A C-minus on the Effective Editorial Cartoon Scale …

The earth shook San Francisco 106 years ago this week, giving me another flimsy excuse to blab about tangentially related cartoons. These follow the day the earth did another number on The City 23 years ago.

The San Francisco Giants were about to play the Oakland A's Oct. 17 in Game 3 of the 1989 World Series, when the TV signal hiccupped and disappeared. Then the ground beneath me in suburban Sacramento gently rippled. My wife, pregnant with our firstborn, and the women with her, planning an event in the next room, simultaneously felt queasy and glanced around to see if anyone else noticed.

In the constant din of news about the devastating earthquake, I drew a buncha cartoons. The Stockton Record ran the one above, which as cartoons go, doesn't go very far. It became merely visual relief on a gray page. "Cartoonist feels earthquake, fumbles the commentary, whelms readers" — that about sums it up.

My more pointed cartoons, about the literal and political fallout of the quake, including the one below, were harder to sell:

Though the Embarcadero is a broad and beautiful avenue again, the elevated double-decker that used to darken the piers along San Francisco's inner bay became a horrendous deathtrap in the Loma Prieta quake.

Gov. George Deukmejian wasn't alone in passing blame for what might have been lax oversight in the seismic stability of all that the Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down. But he wasn't at the forefront saying, "We need to fix this!" either. I dunno; maybe my pointed 'toons lacked taste and decorum.

Which is sorta what I was going for.

Mr. Garamendi, also, is upside down

Just the usual chicanery for which politics is so well known.

Rep. John Garamendi last week pulled what the San Francisco Chronicle's Joe Garafoli called a "rookie mistake" by jumping headfirst into the public meatgrinder that is Stephen Colbert's "Better Know a District" segment of the Colbert Report. It's the semi-regular feature in which, with purposely insipid questions and crafty edits, even the sharpest tool in the Congressional shed comes out looking like an idiot. Garamendi, no rookie, did not miraculously change the outcome of this feature, instead emerging as said idiot.

Colbert repeatedly harped on the incongruous and unsettling fact that Garamendi does not live in the congressional district he represents; his front yard is in District 10, which Garamendi represents; his home is on the other side of the line in District 3. Presumably he has a card table and mobile phone out on the District 10 north (or south?) 40.

Not only did Garamendi, who never met a political office he didn't run for (he was state insurance commissioner twice, lieutenant governor, state assembly in two districts and senate member, plus deputy U.S. interior secretary and candidate for governor) come out the buffoon, he gave me an excuse to showcase some of my editorial cartoons about him. I mean, there's public service, but there's also wondering if Mr. Garamendi might have any other job skills.

At one point, Garamendi's wife Patti got into the act, running for the state Senate office her husband was vacating to become insurance commissioner. It put party opponent and Assembly member (and former Garamendi aide) Pat Johnston in the strange position of competing for the seat against the dubious Garamendi dynasty (below).

The Garamendis "liked" the cartoon so much, they wanted to buy it. Star struck, I may have actually sold it; it's the last time I was asked, thank goodness, because I'd never do it again. My goal was to get the Garamendis to cancel their subscription to The Stockton Record.