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Eight Royals could start in the All Star game July 14. NPR’s Robert Siegel talks to Chris Eckes, curator of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum, about the last time this happened.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Every year, Major League Baseball fans vote-in starters for the All-Star game. This year, Kansas City Royal fans have been voting early and often. Just a couple of weeks ago in the voting for the eight non-pitching positions, eight Royals were leading. Now it’s five Royals who are leading. Casting many votes is permitted. In fact, it’s encouraged.
But this year’s results have sparked an uproar. It isn’t the first time that fans of one team have stuffed the ballot box. In fact, the most egregious case before this was in 1957. It involved the Cincinnati Reds, who incidentally called themselves the Redlegs for a few years for fear of being associated with Communism. Chris Eckes, curator of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum, joins us now.
Welcome to the program.
CHRIS ECKES: Nice to be here.
SIEGEL: And how many Reds were voted to the National League All-Star team in 1957?
ECKES: Well, if the actual vote totals had been allowed to stand, it would’ve been seven of eight.
SIEGEL: The ’57 Redlegs were a team that finished fourth out of eight teams in their league. The team had a few good players and one truly great player, Frank Robinson. How did they get so many All-Star votes?
ECKES: Well, a lot of it had to do with the success of the team the year before. The 1956 Reds were the first Reds team to be competitive in quite some time, so a lot of what happened in 1957 was carry-over from 1956. People in this town really fell in love with that team.
SIEGEL: And there were people who were really urging-on the fans to vote a lot.
ECKES: Absolutely. At that time, there weren’t real strict rules governing All-Star voting. So here in Cincinnati, one paper in particular really got behind the endeavor, printing a ballot every day. And actually on the ballot was printed, vote early, vote often. And it became really this grassroots civic effort. People talked about doing your civic duty by voting. Waite Hoyt, the longtime Reds broadcaster, reminded people every day on the radio, do your civic duty – go out and vote. Ruth Lyons, who was a broadcasting legend here in a town, she did the same thing on her television show. And there’s a brewer here in Cincinnati called the Burger Brewing Co., used to be a longtime sponsor of the Reds back then. They printed-up hundreds of thousands of ballots and sent them bars all over the city. And some of the bars would require that you complete a ballot before you could be served your beer.
SIEGEL: (Laughter).
ECKES: So it was a lot of fun, people had a great deal of fun with it, and it was one of those things that just kind of snowballed.
SIEGEL: If in fact the National League All-Star team had fielded all of the vote winners, it would’ve been Stan Musial of the Cardinals and seven Cincinnati Redlegs and then the pitcher. As it turned out though, the commissioner of baseball overruled the fans in this case.
ECKES: Yeah, that’s correct. You know, as ballots started coming in, it became apparent that something unusual was happening. And he used his executive power to intercede and dropped two of the Reds and replaced them with some pretty familiar names – Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. The bigger after-effect of it all was that fans were no longer permitted to vote after 1957, and that ban lasted all the way up until 1970.
SIEGEL: Well, a National League team heavy with Cincinnati Reds did play in the All-Star game, and what was the outcome of the game?
ECKES: Well, the American league actually emerged victorious in that game. They won the game 6-5.
SIEGEL: Chris Eckes, curator of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum.
Thanks for talking with us.
ECKES: Thank you.
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Expect heavy traffic and busy airports if traveling this Independence Day weekend. Travel industry groups say with unemployment down and wages ticking up, more Americans will be on the move.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Highways across the country are already busy and the lines are starting at airports. Welcome to the Independence Day weekend. AAA predicts nearly 42 million Americans will be traveling at least 50 miles from home – the most since 2008. And NPR’s David Schaper reports from Chicago a growing number of travelers, and the businesses that rely on them, worry about the condition of the nation’s transportation infrastructure.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Traffic is already getting heavy, but it is moving here on the Tri-State Tollway just outside of Chicago as a lot of families are looking to get an early start on their getaway for this long holiday weekend.
ROISIN DOHL: We’ve always done road trips. I love road trips.
SCHAPER: Roisin Dohl of Chicago is heading up to Lake Geneva, Wisc., with her two kids – a 5-year-old and an 11-year-old, plus one more.
DOHL: This one is a friend, so he’s the one keeping it sane. These two, if they were together just by themselves, they’d be fighting the whole time, so bringing an extra one to calm the backseat (laughter).
SCHAPER: That doesn’t seem to be a problem for this father-daughter duo from a suburban Geneva, Ill.
LANE BURNS: Lane Burns.
MORGAN BURNS: Morgan Burns.
L. BURNS: And we’re going up to Summerfest.
SCHAPER: That’s the city of Milwaukee’s big annual lakefront music festival. Lane Burns says he loves taking road trips as a way to reconnect with his now young adult children. The only drawback – road construction.
L. BURNS: Summer – all the orange things pop out of the ground and traffic slows down. It’s just the way it is.
SCHAPER: Orange things meaning cones.
L. BURNS: Yes, exactly, exactly. These just seem to…
M. BURNS: Signs.
L. BURNS: …Kind of pop out of the ground and there you go.
SCHAPER: It’s like the snowfall actually encourages their growth.
L. BURNS: Seems like it, yes. There is a correlation.
SCHAPER: But Burns says congestion is getting worse, and he’s concerned about the crumbling state of the nation’s transportation infrastructure.
L. BURNS: It’s a shame what our government’s done to us. It’s just a shame.
SCHAPER: And the U.S. Travel Association is concerned, too. The lobbying group that represents the tourism industry says this Fourth of July weekend means big business.
DAVE HUETHER: We estimate that travelers are going to spend about $15.8 billion during this weekend.
SCHAPER: The U.S. Travel Association’s Dave Huether says all that spending is a big boost to the nation’s economy, but he says increasingly travelers are finding bottlenecks, congestions and delays on the roads, rails and in the skies.
HUETHER: If we don’t work on the infrastructure problems going forward, travelers who, unfortunately, sometimes may face bottlenecks may face it more – even more often in the years going forward.
SCHAPER: The federal Highway Trust Fund is due to run out of money at the end of this month. The travel industry is one of many groups urging Congress to enact a long-term sustainable funding solution instead of another short-term extension, as it has done repeatedly over the last several years. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
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NPR’s Robert Siegel talks with Charles Ornstein of ProPublica about its research into payments doctors receive from drug and device companies.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
First, do no harm. That’s what we think most of our doctors have agreed to in one way or another, so what’s the harm in taking money from drug companies? ProPublica has been looking closely at doctors who take money in a study called Dollars for Docs. Charles Ornstein is here to tell us about what they’ve found.
Welcome back to the program.
CHARLES ORNSTEIN: Thanks Robert.
SIEGEL: We’ve even spoken about this before, so what did you discover in this investigation that’s different?
ORNSTEIN: Well, something major has happened since the last time we talked, and in essence, the government has now released records of every payment from every pharmaceutical and medical device company in the country from August 2013 until the end of 2014. And so in the past, we were looking at different groups of companies and a sample of the payments. Now we actually can see all the payments to all the doctors in the country, and just how often companies interact with doctors, and it’s a lot.
SIEGEL: And in fact, one can go to the website Dollars for Docs and put in a doctor’s name and the state and see how much money they received. What type of doctors take the most money from drug companies?
ORNSTEIN: Well, hardly any specialty is left out and untouched by interactions with the pharmaceutical industry. What we’ve tended to find is that the people who receive the largest amount of money are orthopedic surgeons. They tend to get large payments from medical device companies, in part because many of them are getting royalty payments because they helped invent the devices that they’re using.
SIEGEL: Well, roughly how common is it for a doctor to receive, say, $100,000 from pharmaceutical companies or medical appliance companies?
ORNSTEIN: Well, it’s relatively uncommon for doctors to receive large money in the order of $100,000 or more, but there are, you know, hundreds of doctors that are receiving that, and there are, you know, dozens of doctors that are receiving millions of dollars. So all told, we’re looking at about 600,000 doctors and dentists, but most of those payments are meals and many doctors only receive one or two of them.
SIEGEL: And what have you heard from doctors about this? What kind of reaction has ProPublica received?
ORNSTEIN: It’s really interesting because doctors are very divided about relationships with the pharmaceutical and medical device industry. There’s obviously a huge cadre of doctors that believe it’s very helpful and that collaboration between the industry and physicians is essential to developing new medications and to learning about new medications. But there’s also a growing number of doctors who are concerned that these interactions are having a corrosive effect on medicine.
SIEGEL: Although what about this question – if I look up a doctor or a dentist whom I know or whom I use and I see that that person received a few hundred dollars from a pharmaceutical company, if I imagine that that person actually makes a few hundred-thousand dollars, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that the whole practice is turning on a couple of meals?
ORNSTEIN: It’s really interesting, the responses that we’ve heard from patients in this regard. Most patients trust their doctors and this is not going to shake their trust in their doctors. They may look it up out of curiosity, but it’s not going to cause them to change doctors. But what we’ve heard is, there are also a small group of patients that have doubts about what their doctor has recommended, they’re – sort of have a nagging doubt in their mind about a particular drug that they’ve been given, or it costs a whole lot of money and they don’t understand why. And those are the patients that are emailing us to say they’re going to look for new doctors and they’re taking to social media to discuss that as well because they’ve already had a doubt, and this sort of adds another element of doubt, and they may choose to go to a different physician as a result of it.
SIEGEL: Charles Ornstein of ProPublica.
Thanks for coming in.
ORNSTEIN: Thanks Robert.
SIEGEL: ProPublica has been tracking payments to doctors from drug and medical device companies since 2010.
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Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras attends an emergency Parliament session for the government’s proposed referendum in Athens on June 27. Petros Karadjias/AP hide caption
itoggle caption Petros Karadjias/AP
This is what has unfolded in Greece in the past week:
June 26: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announces a July 5 referendum on terms put forward by the strapped country’s creditors and urges his people to vote “no.”
June 27: Europeans rule out further talks with Greece over new bailout terms after Tsipras’ surprise announcement.
June 28: The European Central Bank, one of Greece’s creditors, halts an emergency credit line to Greek banks. In response, the government introduces capital controls to prevent a run on banks.
June 30: Greece defaults on a $1.8 billion loan payment to the International Monetary Fund, putting at risk his country’s presence in the eurozone.
July 1: Tsipras appears to soften his stand, saying Greece would accept most of the conditions, raising hopes that talks will resume. Eurozone finance minister say talks will have to wait until the results of Sunday’s referendum are known. Tsipras reiterates his calls for a “no” vote.
Greece has gotten commitments of $244 billion from various countries and organizations as part of two bailouts, in 2010 and 2012, The Telegraph estimates. (The Wall Street Journal has an excellent interactive that explains what Greece owes its creditors and when payments are due.)
Tsipras’ calls for a rejection of the creditors’ demands come despite repeated warnings from European leaders that a “no” vote is tantamount to leaving the eurozone. However, the prime minister insists that will not happen.
It’s a lot for any one country or leader to digest. But with Tsipras, the Greeks and the Europeans knew what they were getting.
Even before he was elected prime minister in January, stunning the country’s long dominant center-left and center-right parties, Tsipras compared the creditors’ demands to “fiscal waterboarding.”
“Our common future in Europe is not austerity, it is the future of democracy, solidarity and cooperation,” he said just after voting in the election that brought his far left-win Syriza party to power. “Today we are deciding whether the troika will return to Greece … or whether, through tough negotiation, the country will claim its return to dignity.”
Here’s how The Guardian explained those comments: “In short: Athens’ creditors at the European Union, European Central Bank and IMF — the bodies propping up its bankrupt economy — should expect handshakes but, if necessary, punches too.”
Tsipras, 40, is a former Communist Party youth leader and his country’s youngest prime minister in modern times. He was elected in January on the promise of renegotiating the regimen of austerity imposed on Greece by its creditors. As Joanna Kakissis reported on NPR at the time, his win was “a direct challenge to eurozone policies.”
Tsipras said he wanted to renegotiate the terms of Greece’s EU bailouts that resulted in billions being loaned to the country, which was on the brink of a default, in exchange for severe — and deeply unpopular — austerity measures. EU leaders noted at the time that they expected the Syriza government to repay Greece’s debts.
Here’s more from The Guardian‘s profile:
“For Tsipras’s fans — who increasingly include members of Greece’s decimated middle class, even if his bedrock of support comes from a vast underclass of unemployed youth — he is a visionary who has dared to tackle the dark heart of power.
“For his critics, who are legion, he is a dangerous narcissist and economic lightweight whose ascent is based on feelgood pledges he will not be able to keep.”
A BBC profile notes that many EU officials “accuse Mr Tsipras and his colleagues of reckless and irresponsible conduct — from unprofessionalism in meetings to disinformation in the media.”
“The challenge of Tsipras is to turn an insurgency into a governing party,” Denis MacShane, Britain’s former Europe minister, told The Guardian earlier this year. “Can he make Syriza into something like the German Green party or Brazil’s Workers’ party under Lula or does he want an all-out fight?”
The answer, given the latest developments, appears to be clear.
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U.S. prosecutors have sent Switzerland a formal request to extradite seven FIFA officials who had been arrested in May in Zurich in a corruption investigation of soccer’s governing body.
The FIFA officials were arrested May 27, and the extradition request, submitted by the U.S. Embassy in Bern, came within the deadline laid down by the bilateral extradition treaty between the U.S. and Switzerland.
As we reported in May, the U.S. Justice Department indicted 14 people from the U.S. and South America, including nine senior FIFA officials, seven of whom were arrested in Switzerland at the time. Here’s more from our story at the time:
“Of the nine officials who were indicted, two of them are FIFA vice presidents. Charges in the 47-count indictment include bribery, racketeering, money laundering and wire fraud. Five corporate executives were also indicted.”
U.S. officials alleged the suspects were part of money-laundering schemes and complex bribery payments within FIFA.
“These crimes are thought to have been agreed and prepared in the USA, and payments were allegedly routed through U.S. banks,” Switzerland’s Federal Office of Justice said today.
The office said the seven FIFA officials will be given an extradition hearing, after which they, or their lawyers, will have 14 days to respond. The office will take “a few weeks” to rule on the extradition request, but the ruling can be challenged in courts.
The men, who face 20 years in prison, all oppose being extradited to the U.S.
The corruption scandal at soccer’s governing body forced the resignation in June of its chief, Sepp Blatter, who had been re-elected to another term as president just days earlier. He said he will stay on as president until a successor is elected.
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LAS VEGAS, July 1, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Caesars Entertainment Corporation (NASDAQ: CZR) (Caesars Entertainment, or the Company) today announced that Mark Frissora has assumed the role of President and Chief Executive Officer, effective today. This…
