Suddenly loquacious ballplayer

One of the more laughable things about the dustup involving the alleged maneuvering by Boston Red Sox management to land Texas Ranger shortstop Alex Rodriguez and his ridiculous gazillion-dollar contract in exchange for Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez and his ridiculous contract is the sudden turnaround of Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, the third party involved in the lashup.

The man is one hell of a ballplayer, and deservedly popular with the fans. But when things haven’t gone all that great for Garciaparra on the field, he — like certain other equally petulant, over-pampered and overpaid teammates — has refused to talk to the press about anything, going so far as to lay down a tape line on the clubhouse floor, demanding that the media not cross it.

Fine. It’s a free country. Except now that it’s become obvious that the Red Sox would jettison their all-star shortstop in a heartbeat if they could land Rodriguez, Garciaparra suddenly becomes all lovey-dovey with the media, even interrupting his honeymoon to call reporters from Hawaii to lobby for his job in the newspapers and over the airwaves. Now that there’s something in it for him, the pouty multi-millionaire superstar who has had nothing to say to working news media stiffs when it would have helped them do their jobs has been transformed overnight into a regular motor mouth, and you can’t shut the guy up.

Gee. What a surprise.

Garciaparra, of course, has no corner on the market when it comes to media manipulation by society’s movers and shakers in most any profession you’d care to name. Talking to the press when it furthers one’s agenda, and clamming up or becoming suddenly unavailable when it doesn’t is quite the fashion these days. It’s one of the things that makes the news-gathering business nearly as much fun as peeling pulpwood for a living. Or selling encyclopedias door to door in a neighborhood guarded by pit bulls.

Nomar’s swift conversion from Red Sox silent partner to the media’s loquacious newest best friend has not been the only laugh-inducing development in the news of late.

Hillary Clinton’s Thanksgiving Day campaign trip to Afghanistan being upstaged something fierce by President Bush’s Thanksgiving Day campaign trip to Iraq was pretty funny. As was the sight of some of the Democratic presidential candidates trying to pull off the delicate balancing act of publicly praising Bush’s visit with the troops while simultaneously condemning it. And the attempts of Republican spinmeisters to make it appear to be other than a photo opportunity of Olympian proportions in advance of Campaign 2004.

Closer to home, Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross got his picture on the prestigious cover of Newsweek magazine, an accomplishment that certainly trumps anything I’ve done this week. But after that big buildup, the cover story on lawsuit-happy America was a major letdown for locals expecting more than the one paragraph, including 11 words from Ross, that Penobscot County got. The more so, since the magazine had spent lavishly to fly Ross to New York and treat him like royalty, when a two-dollar phone call and a mailed-in mug shot would have produced the same result.

Readers with any appreciation whatsoever for the sweet joys of payback time enjoyed one of their better snorts of derision upon reading in Thursday’s paper about the whining by Russia, Canada, Germany, France and other countries over the U.S. order barring firms in countries that opposed the Iraq war from bidding on Iraqi reconstruction projects.

If you read that news story without concluding that this was a legitimate example of the wisdom in that old saw “what goes around comes around,” then you and I are reading from a different page of our manual on poetic justice. And chances are good that we march to the beat of a different drummer, as well. Serves ’em right, I say, even though the ploy was merely a warning shot across the bow, the first step in a round of hardball negotiations involving the reconstruction of Iraq and what the price of poker will be for those Johnny-come-lately nations hoping to get into the game.

And speaking of the jocular aspects of the well-chronicled French disconnection, back when France first refused to join the coalition waging war a standup Canadian comic I heard on the car radio while I was driving through the hinterlands delivered a routine on Bush’s frustration with the species. “The trouble with the French,” the comic had the occasionally linguistically challenged Bush saying, “is that they don’t have any word for entrepreneur.”

Great line. And one that pretty much sums up the sorry situation.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.