Justice under siege | The Spectator

Is Shohei Ohtani the GOAT?

How good is Shohei Ohtani? “If he were a Yankee, he’d be Taylor Swift-famous,” a friend says. That might be a rare case of overselling the Los Angeles Angels’s pitcher and designated hitter, the lone supernova in a sputtering old pastime that needs all the hype it can get. It has been more than a century since baseball had such a double threat. Babe Ruth was once one of the game’s best pitchers, but not even Ruth, who focused on hitting after the Yankees bought him from Boston in 1919, ever dominated on the mound and at the plate like the twenty-nine-year-old Ohtani has done since he left Japan to join the Angels in 2018.

Christopher Sandford

Danny Bonaduce’s guide to survival

It’s just after nine on a gray Pacific Northwest morning, and Danny Bonaduce, the once winsome redheaded child star of TV’s The Partridge Family, is dispensing life advice on Seattle’s 102.5 KZOK classic-rock radio station. “My ex-husband has a gambling problem and won’t ever show up for our two kids,” one distressed young woman announces. “Keep a journal. Write down what he does wrong, it’ll be useful one day in court,” says Danny, speaking in his familiar rapid-fire, gravelly voice. “He has to perform if he’s ever going to see the kids. You’re not a bad person, he is. The kids know that. Be strong. Hang tough.” “My twelve-year-old son is cool,” the next caller says, “but he’s rude to his mom. Should I intervene?” “Intervene?

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The liberal idea of sin

The Western world, once so firmly grounded in Christianity and its Gospels, dogma and teachings, retains in the twenty-first century virtually nothing of them, the almost sole exception being the notion of sin and thus of guilt — not the Christian concept of them, but rather the modern liberal one. To begin with, the liberal idea of sin is collective; it is also highly selective, being limited to the West in general and the Caucasian race in particular. And it is obsessive, as much so as was the Christian version among the Calvinists of Geneva, or the neurotic anticommunism prevalent among the more single-minded and hysterical outliers on the American right during the 1940s and 1950s.

Bill Kauffman

Summering in Scranton

Our big adventure this summer was supposed to be a trip to the Capri for a young friend’s wedding, but there was a hitch in the plan. You see, in my six decades on this orb I never have gotten the hang of this whole money thing. (Whose idea was it, anyway?) But I am blessed in countless ways, not least by having married a woman who, when she moved east from Los Angeles, expressed a wish to see two places: Cleveland and Utica. So Lucine and I hitchlessly shifted to Plan B. Capri was out, replaced by an overnight in Scranton, Pennsylvania, followed by a visit to Centralia, the Keystone State’s ghost town, under which a coal-mine fire has burned since 1962. Don’t think that I was acting out of tightfistedness.

Life