OK, this is weird: I’ve been invited to appear this Sunday on CNN’s "Reliable Sources" to talk about the California wildfires.

I’m no expert (obviously) and have never pretended to be, so I’m not sure if this is even worth watching.  But there it is.  I’ve been paired up with a conservative blogger, so simply because of the format alone, I’m not expecting much in the way of actual conversation.  Most of these left-right talking-head things really nothing more than competitive evangelism, where two sides try to sell their talking points over each other in a very limited period of time.  I can’t stand that sort of rubbish, I don’t intend to participate in it, and I told the producer so.  Surprised she still invited me.  Either this will be surprisingly cool or the English language has its limits.

What rarely gets pointed out about the conventional talking head left-right format, although it should be self-evident: whoever may be correct in a given discussion, left or right, the severe time limitations also virtually ensure equal time for someone to spew complete crap — unless either the moderator is hip and brave enough to call shenanigans (rare), or both participants approach it with open minds and intellectual honesty (rarer still).  Most of what I’ve seen, nobody goes away learning a damn thing, and at least some absolute falsehoods get declared with sincerity and stand without rebuttal at the end.  Then we wonder why large chunks of the electorate are confused on the most basic facts of entire wars.

So I accept the invitation with severe reservations.  Frankly, I don’t care what I think about the wildfires, much less what any blogger or pundit or news commentator might think.  I have no desire to hit a bunch of talking points under fire like I’m back doing stand-up and I’ve got to get to the killer bit in the four minutes before the commercial.  It’s just not interesting.  I care about what actual scientists think, with time and perspective and research and peer review.

Unfortunately, CNN doesn’t have a Rolodex entry for the League of Attractive Scientists.  (I asked the producer.  Really.  She laughed, and I bet if someone organized such a group, she’d put them on in a second.)

So it’ll be me, balding white guy, and some right-leaning woman — who I assume is much younger and more attractive than I am, this being commercial TV — talking about things (a) other people really know about, some of which (b) we’ve read.  What great purpose this serves, I’m honestly not sure.  Also, we’ll chat about what we think about what we saw in the media this week.  Eight minutes later, HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead! for you guys, a trip back home to sleep for me.  Such a refreshing change from every other damn thing on the tube. 

I’m not even sure why I’m doing this, other than I tend not to say no to new experiences.  (This is why I’m about to spend time in England, Northern Ireland, Mexico, probably much of South America, and possibly Tanzania in the next six months.  And then probably moving to Australia.  Saying yes to unexpected things makes life fizzy.  Highly recommended.)

Ten years ago, I probably would have been excited, mistakenly seeing this as validating, even an opportunity, when it’s just the gaping empty maw of 24/7 media seeking perpetual nourishment.  Now I just hope to have one useful conversation with bright, friendly people and go home.  Is that asking too much?  I’m curious.

We’ll see how it goes.  I can only hold up my end.  I guess the point I’d like to make going in, on this show about media coverage of major issues: until we figure out how to have more actual, um, experts on TV regularly discussing the many underlying causes of the fires (or whatever the latest disaster to come may be) — dispassionately, and without a partisan agenda — we haven’t even begun to solve anything.  (Implementing any changes would be a whole other magilla.)  Not bloody damn likely, I know.

But until then, as a nation, we’re smoking in bed, and then wondering why we keep waking up on fire.

I may also sneak in a polite word about the limitations of shoehorning every damn issue into this manichean up/down left/right ongoing ceremonial argument machine.  I know they sort of have to, now that we’ve been so well polarized that they’ll get accusations of bias if they do almost anything else.  But still.  (This wouldn’t be ambushing the host; I told the producer exactly how I feel about this, and she said she was cool with it.)

If the thing turns into a partisan deal, well, I’m cramming almost as if it’s another Jeopardy! call, just in case.  Who does "better" in that exchange is probably up to Howie more than anything else.  But I really hope it’s civil and involves some actual thinking.

One positive idea, maybe: has anybody ever suggested a reward-the-good-guys, inverted version of a media boycott — buying extra crap when somebody actually does some great broadcasting?

I mean, if CNN went out and got the leading environmental scientists, urban planners, and fire experts — not partisan hacks, not talk radio hosts, not elected politicians, and not me and some other blogger, for gods’ sake — to sit not for eight minutes but for a three-night in-depth roundtable moderated by a non-partisan scientist who hasn’t registered with either major party because he’s too busy solving actual problems… I would buy every single goddam thing they advertised.

I would buy the HeadOn.  I would buy crates of the stuff.  I would apply it directly to my forehead.  Maybe a million other people would, too.

Ah, impossible dreams.  But for now, we go to media with the shows we have.

How low can things go?

No real reporters were allowed in, although they were allowed to listen.

Those responsible, however, may be "reprimanded."  Nice to know that people who have this much disrespect for the public and the democratic process in the middle of a crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of lives will at least get a good stern talking-to.

For those who came in late or don’t follow baseball (in which case you may just decide to scroll down to the next post), the Indians came within one game of reaching the World Series this year… and then lost three straight, setting a new record for striking out in an AL championship series.

This matches nicely with the Cleveland Browns getting to within one game of the Super Bowl… and then losing spectacularly in the very last seconds. Twice. Or Ohio State getting to the national championship game in both football and basketball last year… and then getting killed. Or the Cleveland Cavaliers getting to the NBA Finals for the first time, then losing four straight while setting a record for the fewest points scored in a modern NBA Finals series.

I say this with no small admiration for the diehards back home: if you can handle being an Ohio sports fan, you can handle damn near anything.

Or you’d think. Lately, I have to take serious issue with a lot of crap I’ve seen that is making want to stop cheering for Cleveland teams entirely. For one, this, first and foremost:

As noted here earlier, this idiot racist garbage shames the entire city. Has to stop.

There’s also lot of bleating about curses and dumb horrible luck being to blame for the Indians not winning a championship. Rubbish. Lots of teams in every sport you can name go decade after decade without winning titles: in American baseball alone, I can think of the Cubs, the White Sox, the Red Sox themselves going 88 years until ’04 (almost 50% longer than the Indians’ current drought), the Phillies (1883-1990, over 50% longer than the Indians’ drought), and even the SF Giants, who beat the Indians in ’54 and haven’t won since, either. There are dozens and dozens in other sports. There’s only one champ, kids. Everybody else goes home. Failure is always the most common result in all sports everywhere, just like in life itself. Make your peace with that and learn to be happy. All this poor, poor me crap is pathetic. Find a way to have fun while losing or just stop watching.

I’m still getting emails from people bringing up a bad umpire call when Kenny Lofton was wrongly called out at second in the deciding game. Umm… hello? The Red Sox won that game by nine runs, and outscored the Indians 51-32 for the series, a 60% advantage. That’s not one bad break, bad luck, or a screw-up by a third base coach. Good lord.

It seems not to have occurred to many fans that maybe the Indians lost because they’re just not all that damn good yet. Late in that same game, third base coach Joel Skinner made a conservative tactical choice, holding Lofton when he might have scored, giving the Indians men on first and third with one out. On the very next pitch, Casey Blake, who was often quite awful throughout the playoffs, leapt to the rescue of a struggling pitcher by swinging at the very first pitch and serving up a ground ball double play. Inning over.

That’s not Joel Skinner’s fault. It’s Casey Blake’s. The real problem: the Indians lost because they still have several everyday players who simply aren’t very good. Championship teams rarely feature that. And it’s the front office’s fault for not keeping a vastly superior third baseman in the system.  (More on that in two paragraphs.)

Blake finished the postseason with an OPS of .668 — a full 100 points below mere major league average. Lofton, despite a strong start in the playoffs, batted .174 (4-23) in the last six games, finishing the postseason with, yes, below-average total offensive stats, including an on-base percentage ten points below the league average. This from a guy whose strength is allegedly getting on base.

And then people wonder why the team can’t win a title. Jeebus.

Incidentally, the Indians recently had a terrific 3B prospect, a guy they could have dearly used instead of Blake: Kevin Kouzmanoff, the guy who hit a grand slam in his first major league at bat. Unfortunately, the front office traded him for Josh Barfield, who wouldn’t even be in the majors right now without his father’s last name. (You may have glimpsed Barfield briefly in the playoffs, appearing once as a late-inning pinch runner.) Kouzmanoff is now a 25-year-old starting 3B in San Diego, where he went .853 OPS for the second half. There’s a good chance he’ll be a .290 30 HR 100 RBI guy for years to come, even in the hitter’s nightmare known as Petco Park. Instead, the Indians stuck with Casey Blake, an aging veteran with no upside beyond what we saw this year, and they paid for it.

They’ll keep paying for it, too. There really isn’t a 3B prospect anywhere in the organization ready to step in. Wes Hodges, maybe, in a year or two. (Don’t talk to me about Andy Marte.) If they had a hot SS prospect, they could move Peralta to third, but the farm system doesn’t seem ready for that approach, either. So, it’s either a pricey free agent (not damn likely), or a crappy one (slightly more likely), or Blake it will be for the foreseeable future.

I’ve also heard a lot of wonder about why C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona, the Indians’ two young pitching aces, suddenly couldn’t find home plate. It’s no mystery: look at number of innings they pitched. Counting the playoffs, Sabathia threw 250 innings this year, a workload that has historically ended a lot of young guys’ careers. Carmona was only slightly less overworked, and at age 23, throwing 200+ innings creates a serious fatigue and injury hazard in the coming years.

If Carmona’s arm pops next year — and he’s at heightened risk now, thanks to Indians management — it almost seems like he ought to be able to file an OSHA claim. The Indians have badly mismanaged their best young pitching prospect, and if they get away with it again (as they have thus far with Sabathia, now 27) it’s through luck and little else.

If you want to see good player management, just look across the baselines at the Red Sox dugout. I’m no Red Sox fan, but I appreciate competence. How many teams would bat a slow, chubby guy like Youkilis second? Only the ones that understand that on-base is the most important stat and that steals are surprisingly meaningless. And that’s shockingly few teams, despite clear historical evidence. Youkilis, as everyone saw, was key — and the Red Sox management deserves a lot of credit.

Speaking of the Red Sox: not only are they clearly superior to Colorado in almost every facet of the game (save fielding, where the Rockies’ rookie SS Troy Tulowitzky is so excellent that by himself he provides a clear team-stat advantage), the Red Sox also have home field advantage and massively more playoff experience. Upsets do happen, but looking at the numbers a couple of weeks ago, I picked the Red Sox over the Rockies in the World Series before the playoffs began, and I’m sticking with it.

Bottom line: if you look it up, the Sox’s run margin was 103 better than the Indians’ run margin on the season. That’s 2/3 of a run per game better, comparable to the Indians’ margin of superiority over Oakland or Minnesota this year.  That’s how the Indians really stacked up.  In almost every measurable aspect of the game, the Red Sox were a better team, and will be until the Indians get a real 3B and LF, figure out what the hell is wrong with Hafner (I almost wonder if his eyes may be going, just slightly enough to affect his reaction to pitches — there’s nothing else that I can find to explain his steep season-long drop in production), and rustle up a closer with an ERA that resembles ERAs usually found in the major leagues.  Until then, the Indians are just pretenders, and so is anyone pretending otherwise.

I don’t know why this isn’t obvious to everyone alive in Cleveland. It should be. But no, let’s blame luck, third-base coaches in nine-run games, voodoo curses, and offensive mascots.

(Then again, blame the offensive mascot all you want.)

[Added Saturday, Oct. 27th: looking back in advance of a CNN gig tomorrow, the word "cause" in that headline was poorly chosen. I meant "a" probable cause, not "the" probable cause, as you can see from the concluding sentence, but the phrase "contributing factor" would have been much more accurate. My bad. Still, the point about climate change being an obvious factor in California’s future as a growing tinderbox, and the Bush administration’s resistance to climate change discussions, is plenty obvious.]

This was the view on the day I came back from the West Indies last spring:

Fire on the left, downtown on the right. Great to be home.

Now it’s fall, and there are fires in all directions, with things particularly bad down in San Diego County. I’m nowhere near the fire this time, but the air everywhere is smoky and brown and when the sun is near the horizon the whole sky looks bizarrely red. Kinda hard not to think about today.

Also, it’s 97 degrees outside in late October. According to the Weather Channel, this is 23 degrees above the seasonal average. Gee, global warming much? Actually, yes. Anecdotal evidence in isolation is meaningless, but add up everything that has been happening for years, and according to today’s Science Daily:

However, yesterday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control testified before Congress on the impact of climate change on human health. And today we learn that the White House deleted much of the prepared testimony in advance, removing large swaths of scientific information on major health risks posed by global warming.

More than two-thirds of the CDC’s testimony on global warming seems to have been deleted by the Bush administration.

I have friends in San Diego who are sheltering neighbors whose homes may not be there anymore. Unseasonable heat and changing weather patterns have turned southern California into a tinderbox, precisely the way forecast by people warning us about global warming for years:

And the White House is still actively trying to pretend that a main underlying cause [edit: contributing factor] to these disasters simply doesn’t exist.

My thanks to the Firedoglake Book Salon, which this online chat with yours truly this weekend concerning Who Hates Whom, a book you may have noticed mentioned discreetly somewhere on this site.

And my apologies for being too busy this week to blog about it properly.  Meant to.  Just swamped as usual.  Sorry if you missed it and would have enjoyed it.  My bad.