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Alternate baseball: chapter three
by Shane TourtellotteJanuary 30, 2013
In my two previous installments looking at alternate historical tracks baseball could have taken, one common theme has connected the scenarios. The changes I've postulated have come about due to human agency. Someone remembers to pack a jersey, or forgets to mail a letter, or awards a basketball expansion franchise rather than allowing a team to move. These events don't just happen; they are done.
This is entirely normal for alternate history, but there are people who think it's like playing baseball without the foul lines. (I was going to say "playing tennis with the net down," then remembered where I am.) Acclaimed history writer Stephen Ambrose expressed this very opinion when writing for an alternate-history anthology. "For 'what if' history to work," he wrote, "there has to be a real chance that things could have turned out differently because of forces beyond human control."
I don't subscribe to this myself. I think it's more interesting and meaningful to show how a very small, or very distant, action by one person can affect a great deal more than is immediately apparent. Maybe it's natural for a writer to think that we're the authors of our own stories, even if we don't recognize the plot twists we're setting up for ourselves and others.
Just because I believe in branch points due to free will, though, doesn't mean that branch points due to random chance don't exist, or that they cannot produce interesting stories. It would feel a bit like cheating to make something wildly unlikely be the focal point of an alternate baseball story. Ted Williams isn't going to get hit with a falling piano, not while I'm writing these scenarios. (Not unless I learn that he actually was almost hit by a falling piano. Then we'll see.)
But to take some highly unlikely incident and erase it from existence is much more natural. To use an advanced sabermetric term, it feels like a regression to the mean. Baseball history may thrive on all those unlikely events, but surely it won't miss just one, right? Especially when I'm reversing one of the saddest events the game ever knew, restoring a man's life and vitality unfairly, inexplicably robbed from him.
To an athlete not dying young
Scenario No. 4
Change: Lou Gehrig lives.
Result: The Yankees dynasty lives. Then it dies. Then everything changes.
It is, thankfully, a rare few baseball players who are defined as much by how they died as by how they lived. Ed Delahanty; Ray Chapman; Willard Hershberger; Roberto Clemente; Thurman Munson; Lyman Bostock. A few others, surely, but the litany already feels too long. Atop that list, probably for all time, is Lou Gehrig, lost to a rare disease that not only took his life but claimed his name as a trophy.
The story is too familiar to need an extensive retelling. His ineffective play in the first eight games of the 1939 season led to the end of his consecutive-game streak (voluntarily, we are told, though there are hints manager Joe McCarthy gave him a "quit or be fired" ultimatum), and sent him to the doctors to discover what was wrong. The answer was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degeneration of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. There was, and is, no cure. The news was soft-pedaled, to the public and to Gehrig, but in truth it was a death sentence.
His benching became a retirement, even though there was wishful talk about a comeback once he was treated, and the Yankees held a day for him at the Stadium on the Fourth of July. The images and words of that day have stood in the top rank of baseball iconography ever since, elevating Gehrig from merely a great ballplayer to a great man, humble and brave in the shadow of his own mortality.
(The famed ceremony came between games of a double-header against Washington. One might expect a Yankees squad wrung out by emotion to have played the nightcap at half-strength. Instead, coming off a narrow 3-2 defeat in the first game, they demolished the visitors 11-1 in the second.)
Gehrig's story is so bound up with the ALS that took his life, it's hard even today to separate him from it. But let's try. Let's imagine a world in which the first games of 1939 were only the start of a new season, and not the beginning of the end.
This scenario fits Ambrose's criteria well. Despite a lifetime's worth of medical progress, we still do not know what causes most ALS cases. (A few are hereditary, but that doesn't seem to have been Gehrig's case.) We can't say why Gehrig contracted it, and can't say what little different thing would have spared him. It's not just "beyond human control," it's beyond our understanding.
Whatever hidden thing happened in Lou Gehrig's body, now it didn't. So what happens?
First off, the changes won't begin as late as 1939. A consensus has formed in recent years that Gehrig was already suffering the initial deterioration from ALS in 1938. His on-field performance did take a sharp dip that year, his OPS+ dropping from a league-best 176 to 132. For context, it was the first time Gehrig's OPS+ had finished below 152 since 1925, his first full-time season at age 22.
So Gehrig's alternate-1938 would have been better than his real-1938, and the following years obviously far better. As for offering specific numbers, here I hesitate. Specific projections are fraught with pitfalls, a thousand little things that could intervene and make a monkey of anybody offering exact numbers. Even approximations are dubious, but I have to try something.
Rather than put every statistical category through the wringer, I will begin with something comfortably fuzzy: Bill James' Win Shares. Win Shares measure the total contribution of a player to the wins his team gains, each Share equal to one-third of a win. For example, Lou Gehrig's 1937 season has a value of 36 Win Shares, meaning his presence gave the Yankees 12 victories over the presence of a sub-replacement non-entity (say, me) taking all his plate appearances and defensive innings. There's a kinship to Wins Above Replacement here, especially in gauging the margins between one player and another.
The first comparison is between real-life sick Gehrig in 1938 and his alternate healthy counterpart. The real Gehrig produced 25 Win Shares; we can project what alt-Gehrig would have done from his '37 performance and his age. One-time Baseball Prospectus writer Nate Silver once calculated the year-to-year change in offensive performance for players as they age*. I will use those numbers to project Gehrig's performance.
* Silver calculated the changes in Equivalent Runs, not Win Shares. Since both use a scale with zero meaning total ineptitude rather than replacement-level performance, the ratios should correspond from one system to the other. I am also assuming that defensive and base-running performances track with the decline numbers for a player in his latter 30s, which is a reasonable estimate.
Silver determined that a player in his age-35 season, as Gehrig was in 1938, will have his performance decline 11.1 percent on average from his previous year. For alt-Gehrig, that takes him from 36 Win Shares to 32. That's seven Win Shares, or a fraction over two wins, better than our Gehrig did. His Yankees, instead of finishing 99-53, would have gone 101-51. This wouldn't have affected the pennant race—they outpaced Boston by nine and a half games in reality—but the 1936-1939 dynasty would look a little neater with four 100-win seasons in a row.
Before I proceed, here's a table showing the differences between what real-Gehrig and the Yankees did at first base, and what alternate-Gehrig is projected to have done. Alt-Gehrig's decline feels a little steep, but I am following Silver's numbers. If they create a conservative projection, that's not such a bad thing in tamping down the magnitude of the changes I am creating.
Season Win Shares 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 ALS Gehrig 36 25 0 -- -- Yankees at 1B 36 25 8 11 8 No-ALS Gehrig 36 32 28 24 19
Then there's 1939. Between Gehrig and Babe Dahlgren, who took over from him and played every game for the rest of the season, the 1939 Yankees got eight Win Shares out of first base. Alt-Gehrig, following Silver's age-curve, would have produced 28. That's a difference of 20 Win Shares, six and two-thirds wins. I rounded down before; now I'll round up and call it seven.
The '39 Bombers as we know them are on the short list for the greatest baseball team of all time, starting with their 106-45 record. Add a healthy Gehrig, and they go 113-38. That outdoes the 1927 Yankees by four and a half games; it gets within hailing distance of the 1906 Cubs' astonishing 116-36 mark. Their 17-game cushion against second-place Boston grows—assuming the added wins are distributed evenly and one comes against the Red Sox—to a jaw-dropping 25 games.
The prime thing the '27 Yankees would have over the '39 Yankees would be the mystique of Babe Ruth. Aside from that, the '39s would have them matched, or bettered, all the way down the line. Getting performance from every position regular, and from a remarkably deep pitching staff, they would have no holes. In the minds of baseball fans, it would be an even fight at worst, but the more knowledgeable ones would probably anoint the 1939 Yankees as the greatest team that ever played.
The 1940 Yankees stumbled early and often. Several key players had big drop-offs in performance; Dahlgren, while playing every day like his predecessor and nudging his triple-slash numbers up a bit, was still nowhere near the player Gehrig had been. In the first close AL pennant race in some time, the Yankees finished third, a scant two games behind the Tigers and one game behind the second-place Indians.
In a race that close, it's easy to postulate how one thing done differently could have produced a different result. The presence of a healthy Lou Gehrig, even in natural decline, is more than enough. He's projected to produce four more wins, rounded down, than Dahlgren did at first base. From two wins down, the Yankees go two wins ahead, and take their fifth consecutive pennant. Forecasting the 1940 World Series is dicey, with the tiny sample size, but it's tough to see the Reds breaking the pattern of dominance. We can assume the Bombers took their fifth straight there, too.
The next season, 1941, was a bounce-back year for the real Yankees; they roared ahead of the pack to win the pennant by 17 games. By now, they had given up on Dahlgren, selling him to the Boston Braves, and installed rookie Johnny Sturm as their first baseman. He'd play 124 games that season ... and never play in the big leagues again. He was as big a disaster as that implies: He posted a mere four Win Shares on the year, four more at first base coming primarily from Joe Gordon doing some duty there.
Again, alt-Gehrig provides a four-win improvement at first base. This involves rounding up, but we probably redeem that fractional value by moving Gordon back to second for a couple dozen games. No big change: it turns a huge margin of victory into a really huge one. This table encapsulates the changes an ALS-less Gehrig makes to the Yankees' records:
1938 1939 1940 1941 Record (ALS) 99-53 106-45 88-66 101-53 Pennant margin (ALS) +9.5 +17 -2 +17 Record (no ALS) 101-51 113-38 92-62 105-49 Pennant margin (no ALS) +11.5 +25 +2 +21
That's 17 additional wins, plus one more pennant and probably world's championship, in four years. Even for a team at the top of the baseball world, that's a pretty good gain.
What is this doing for Gehrig's personal numbers as a player? Bill James chips in on this, as on most things baseball. He formulated a projection of an uninterrupted career for Gehrig, and the numbers are astonishing. The highlights: 3,928 hits; 689 home runs; 2,879 RBI. He wouldn't catch Babe's titanic 714, but he'd set an RBI mark that our real RBI champion, Henry Aaron, would miss by 582. "But these are not unreasonable numbers," James told author Jonathan Eig. "They just look unreasonable because they are so extraordinary."
I'm being much more cautious, and much more simplistic, with my projection than James' solid-gold effort. The Silver-plated forecast for a healthy Gehrig gives him 102 Win Shares from 1938 to 1941, almost exactly four times the 25 that an ailing Gehrig put up in 1938. Close enough for first-order approximation: I'll multiply his real 1938 by four to represent his alternate 1938-41.
The numbers that gives us are still very nice. He's the seventh player to collect 3,000 hits, finishing 1941 with 3,227. His 580 home runs put him 11th all-time. His RBI total of 2,336 still edges out Hammerin' Hank by 39, giving him the crown. These are all approximations, of course, so better to say he probably would hold the career RBI title and probably have close to 600 long balls.
Also, I am giving him credit for extending his consecutive-games streak. Here approximation is impossible: How could I guess the exact day some injury or illness finally kept him off the field? The most probable specific event is that he plays them all, and I'll go with that. Counting all the official games the Yankees played, he would have gotten to 2,585 at the close of the 1941 season.
By now some of you are all but screaming at the screen, demanding to know why I'm cutting off my projection at 1941. Some others have guessed the reason by now: That little dust-up called the Second World War.
Lou Gehrig had no love for Hitler, deploring what the dictator had done to Gehrig's parents' homeland. What's more, he would have remembered the last time America went to war with Germany, and the dire mindset it instilled. He would have remembered how his immigrant parents were treated, with suspicion and contempt, as enemy aliens guilty of sympathy with the Kaiser until proven innocent. He would have been ready to provide the proof right off the bat this time, for his sake and hopefully for theirs.
I'll skip all the hedging this time, and say it with confidence. Lou Gehrig wouldn't have waited for a possible draft notice; he would have volunteered. He was 38 years old? So what? Older and more famous celebrities would do the same: Ask buck private Clark Gable. He would have pressed for actual duty rather than being a baseball exhibitionist, though the service of his choice would have wrung some ball out of him for war-bond and morale purposes.
Four years of serving would have taken him past the point of any reasonable comeback: He'd be 42 on V-J Day. So 1941 would have been the end of his professional career. Gehrig liked his numbers as much as the next player, or more; he believed they were how he'd be remembered (at least until something more memorable came along in our timeline). They'd be frozen forever at where they were in October 1941. His RBI tally would be most gratifying—RBIs were his favorite stat—but he might regret not having a full chance to chase down Babe's 714.
Fans would remember this, and they would remember why. They'd know he could have stayed out of the fight, padded his stats against depleted wartime teams. But he didn't. In place of the sentimentalized honor we give him for fortitude in the face of death, he'd be honored for forgoing his shot at the home run record, sacrificing personal gain for a greater cause. Others did likewise, but with the goal seemingly within his reach, he'd be honored first and foremost among them, the standard-bearer for all ballplayers' service. He'd be lionized as a great man much as he is with us, just for a different reason.
He would still have his share of records. His RBI mark would be unlikely to fall to Aaron's assault, and he likely would have padded his record of 23 grand slams. As for The Streak, if 2,130 was considered unbreakable, 2,585 would be thought monumental, Olympian, utterly untouchable. And yet ... one can almost, through a murk of decades, see through to Baltimore on July 30, 1998, as a banner unfurls down the brick facade of the B&O Warehouse, changing a "2,585" to a "2,586".
Ignore it. It's a mirage. The reason for this begins with a little-remembered phase in baseball history, when the cry of "Break up the Yankees!" was put into official practice.
Restraint of trade
Even without Gehrig, the 1939 Yankees dominated the American League, then beat the NL pennant-winning Reds for their fourth straight world championship, and second Series sweep in a row. The Yankees were a juggernaut, one that some baseball executives meant to stop by any means necessary.
Philadelphia Phillies president Gerald Nugent offered a very modern idea: playoffs between the top four teams in each league (back when there were only eight apiece) to determine who would play in the World Series. Random chance in a short series might accomplish against the Yankees what 154 games could not. Owner Clark Griffith of the Washington Senators went for prior restraint rather than jumping through hoops. His idea was that a league champion should be barred from buying or trading for other major-league players, unless they cleared waivers, to keep them from restocking an already loaded lineup.
Proposals like this were cheap: All sorts of notions came bubbling up in the weeks before the December league meetings. Larry MacPhail of the Dodgers came up with his own strange one, proposing a full slate of inter-league series after the regular season. The champions would still play in the World Series, while the teams in second place, third place, and so on would face each other, down to the cellar. The NL actually voted to form a committee to study this proposal, but the AL would have nothing to do with it, and it died.
Nugent's idea similarly went nowhere. Griffith, however, found a receptive audience for his restriction, that being the entire American League. There was one obvious exception, but Yankees team president Ed Barrow couched it in defiance rather than persuasion.
"There is little that can be done to improve this Yankee club," he declared, all but saying such a ban would have no effect. He said everyone was finally realizing his was the greatest team put together, and continued, "No club can remain static. The price of victory is eternal vigilance. But the idea that any club can be broken up and the respect of the game maintained is plain bunk."
(The same issue of The Sporting News that carried this quote also ran a blurb stating that Vitamin B-1 had been found to be a cure for Lou Gehrig's disease. This panned out worse than most baseball rumors, and that is saying something.)
The other AL teams didn't share Barrow's opinion on the respect of the game. They voted unanimously to implement Griffith's rule, the Yankees abstaining in an act of passive resistance. The National League put a crimp in Griffith's plan by rejecting a similar measure, but as inter-league trades already needed to clear waivers, this gave the Yankees scant relief.
The rule as passed read thus: "The championship club in [the American League] shall not be permitted to acquire player contracts within its own league, except on waivers, so long as it retains the league championship." The bar held until the defending pennant winner was mathematically eliminated from contention.
St. Louis Cardinals president Branch Rickey was quite unhappy. The meeting had gone badly enough when Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis rejected proposals to limit the restrictions he was putting on farm systems, Rickey's invention and the underpinning of the Cardinals' organization. Now the American League pulled this trick, limiting another team's efforts to put and keep itself on top. Rickey may have been thinking of his own problems when he poured out his invective on the AL's trade bar,
"The American League sold everybody, including itself, short. ... Sure, the National League wants to beat the Yankees in World's Series competition. And the Cardinals will do it in time—perhaps next year. [He was off by two.—ST] But that type of legislation is not on the square. It destroys initiative and puts a penalty on enterprise. ... They've gone communistic in that league. Socialistic, I should say—trying to curtail enterprise. ... Ed Barrow is a great baseball man. A thinker and a worker. He has built up the Yankees. Now his own associates are trying to destroy that great club, or at least hold it back."
The rule did draw public disapproval, at least in print. John Drebinger of The New York Times praised the National League for declining to help tie down the Yankees, despite the World Series trouncings it had taken, in an article titled "Winning One on the Moral Side." The Sporting News editorialized against it, saying "It may be one thing to talk about breaking up a championship outfit, but it is plainly evident that neither the public nor the press will stand for inequitable methods." Not that they thought it mattered: Reporter Dan Daniel (whom we last saw torpedoing Hank Greenberg with the Tigers) predicted a fifth straight Yankees pennant.
This didn't happen, at least in our timeline—and the rule is probably directly responsible. When the axe fell, the Yankees had been pulling together a trade with Detroit to acquire pitcher Bobo Newsom. This now didn't happen, to the Tigers' great benefit. Newsom reeled off a 21-5, 2.83 season in 1940, finishing fourth in MVP voting. With Newsom a Yankee, it's tough to imagine what Detroit could have gotten back for him that would keep New York from overhauling the Tigers for the pennant. (The Yankees would finally acquire Newsom in 1947, but he never won a game for them.)
I did say it was easy to imagine one thing that could change this race. So easy, I've now done it twice, which is enough for one article.
With the Yankees thrown off their pedestal, the Griffith rule had accomplished its purpose. But now it threatened to accomplish a different purpose: wrecking the Tigers. Detroit had narrowly won with an old team, and needed to supplement its roster to make another run in 1941. The trade bar prevented this, so perhaps it was time for the trade bar to go.
This made for awkward appearances. Ditching the rule after one year made it look like the AL hadn't been guaranteeing competition, but just discriminating against the Yankees—which, quite arguably, it had been. Interest and image clashed when a repeal of the rule came up for a vote at the 1940 winter meetings.
This time the Yankees did speak up, voting to drop the rule even though it would help them for a year. Detroit voted its obvious interest. The Red Sox, perhaps seeing they had the cornerstone of a potential dynasty in Ted Williams, also voted to repeal. The other five teams stood fast, however, and the trade ban remained in place.
The result for the Tigers was even worse than expected. Charlie Gehringer's batting average dropped more than 90 points in 1941, "The Mechanical Man" finally breaking down. Bobo Newsom staggered to a 2-7 start, his ERA at that time ballooning past 6.00: he'd lead the A.L. in losses that year. Dick Bartell fell so far and fast, he was released outright in May. Worst of all, Hank Greenberg got drafted. The Tigers were 11.5 back by the All-Star Game, in fifth place and below .500, their chances shot.
Fortuitously, the All-Star Game was in Detroit that year, putting the Tigers' plight in the forefront of owners' minds when they arrived for the festivities. An impromptu meeting at Briggs Stadium the day before the game produced a new vote. The White Sox and Browns switched sides, and the 5-3 result produced a repeal, to take effect at the end of the season. It was already too late for the Tigers, and some owners were apparently afraid they'd conduct a fire sale and send all their best players to, yes, the New York Yankees.
That last twist only seemed to confirm that the rule was aimed at one team alone. Still, it was gone, and for good. Not even future Yankees dominance would spur the owners to put it back in place.
The ultimate dynasty
In the world where Lou Gehrig lived and thrived, however, continued Yankees dominance would have insured its permanence. I've shown that his healthy presence on the 1940 squad would have edged them into a fifth consecutive pennant. With that happening, there would have been no groundswell to repeal the Griffith rule. The Yankees' hands would have remained tied, however much that mattered.
For 1941, it wouldn't have mattered much. An offseason trade of bench players with the White Sox would have been erased, to no significant effect for either club. Other moves they made were waiver deals with National League teams, or permitted sales of their own players. A September 1941 waiver trade with Detroit would still have come off (the Tigers were the ones restricted in real life at that time), but again it meant next to nothing. The Yankees' dominance of the 1941 pennant race would be unimpeded, their string now extended to six.
One can imagine AL owners turning frantic by now. What could they do to stop the Yankees? Whatever notions would have circulated before the winter meetings, the trauma of Pearl Harbor would have smashed them aside, turned owners' thoughts to how baseball would cope with the war. The playing field would have stayed tilted, but no more so.
There still would have been trouble for New York. Gehrig's enlistment would have left a sudden hole at first base. In real life, the Yankees made a waiver trade with the Braves two days after Pearl Harbor, getting journeyman Buddy Hassett to replace Sturm. In our alternate timeline, with an unplanned absence occurring some time after, I don't think the Yankees would have been able to swing this trade to replace Gehrig.
The alt-Yankees, probably having sold off an unused Dahlgren at some point, would have had their Johnny Sturm ready to fill in. Presumably, this would have been as bad a train wreck in alt-1942 as in real-1941. The Yankees would have had a solution at hand, though: move Tommy Henrich from the outfield to first. Henrich played some first base in the minors, but he preferred the outfield. Necessity makes its own law, though, and the Yankees needed Henrich to make the move.
They could afford taking Henrich out of the outfield because they had a candidate to replace him, the player that in real life they sent to the Braves for Hassett: Tommy Holmes. Holmes was good from day one with Boston, posting three-plus bWAR his first seven seasons, including eight bWAR in 1945 and second place in the NL MVP race. He would have filled in satisfactorily for the shifted Henrich, and the Yankees, winners by nine in our 1942 A.L., would have weathered the Sturm for half a season to finish on top again. Seven straight.
The talent shortage bit baseball hard in 1943, many players entering the service. The effect of one serving player, Gehrig, would be drowned by all the others gone from the game. New York would lose Henrich at first, but in real life they got Nick Etten in a trade with the Phillies that the AL ban didn't cover. I'll have that happen in the Gehrig-verse, too. Etten will do okay, but even if he hadn't, the 13.5-game cushion the Yankees had in our reality would be in no danger in the other one. Eight straight pennants.
Any reticence to re-visit the rules caused by the onset of the war would be long gone by now. The AL owners would have done something, anything, to check the Yankees' utter dominance. Imagining what that would be is total speculation, but I suspect the hammer would have come down against their farm system. They'd have Commissioner Landis, who had never liked this system of control of minor-league teams, on their side in implementing it.
So the 1943 winter meetings bring a restriction on the AL pennant winner's—meaning the Yankees'—minor-league system. And apparently, it finally works. The real-life trades the Yankees made in the first years after the brief 1939 ban never did much to strengthen them, so the continued bar wouldn't have hurt them badly. The farm restriction, though, will coincide with a down year for the Bronx Bombers. Never mind the actual causation: The AL can claim victory over the now third-place Yankees.
So will all the anti-Yankees rules be thrown down so as not to impede the champion Browns? No. Less entrenched rules stayed in place for the Tigers, at least for a time. And the rules have only had half their desired effect—because a new dynasty is growing. In the National League, the St. Louis Cardinals have won their third straight pennant, this one by 14.5 games, and show few signs of stopping.
Back in 1939, inter-league rivalry had been intense: Whatever one league proposed or passed, the other almost reflexively rejected, but 1944 was a different time, the dominant ethos being pulling together for a common cause. More, the NL would have seen the example of the Yankees: eight straight pennants, seven of eight World Series. The fears of the American League owners had been borne out, and now the same thing might happen to the National League.
The Cardinals would have resisted, naturally. The Dodgers, Branch Rickey's new team and with a similarly strong farm system, would have joined them. They would be outnumbered. The other NL owners would adopt the slate of restrictions on trades and minor-league operations for their pennant winners. Pulling down the king of the mountain would be official policy across the majors.
A whole new ball game
Baseball thus would have stumbled into an effective anti-dynasty policy. The minor leagues were the true strength of the Yankees and Cardinals in that era, feeding fresh talent to already strong teams. Pinching that pipeline might not prevent back-to-back pennants, but it would forestall the spectacle of another eight-straight skein, or even five straight.
The older anti-trade policy, though, might have given the Yankees an extra pennant. In our 1945, they finished in fourth, 6.5 games back. In the alternate 1945, they still would have had Tommy Holmes when he had his near-MVP year. Compared to their most disposable starting outfielder, Bud Metheny, the Yankees would have gained six games by Win Shares, eight and a half by bWAR, or nine by fWAR. They might have grabbed the 1945 flag—and earned themselves another year of trade and farm restrictions in the bargain. Oh, and on a pennant winner rather than the sixth-place Braves, Tommy Holmes would have gotten that MVP award.
The weight of years of restrictions on the Yankees would take time to finally wear them down. Their pennant win in 1947 was too wide (12 games) to expect it to be overturned, but their one-game squeaker against the Red Sox in 1949 is different. Ted Williams would get his second bite at the World Series, and New York sportswriters would dismiss new Yankees skipper Casey Stengel as a clown after all, possibly running him right out of town. The new Yankees dynasty would be stillborn.
The real-life Cardinals might well not lose their 1946 pennant (won by two games) due to just one year of restrictions, and as they wouldn't finish first again for 18 years, they wouldn't suffer later, either. If they did get held back enough to lose in '46, though, the beneficiary would be the Brooklyn Dodgers. That would attach the drag chain to their franchise a year early in what would have been its superb 10-year run, to a reaction from Branch Rickey one can only imagine.
Actually, one can imagine what Rickey might have done in response, in '46 or '47: He could have accelerated his sweep of the Negro Leagues for new talent. Jackie Robinson was already on the way, but even more great black players could have been behind him, heading for Brooklyn, than in real life. Integration could have been Rickey's sally port against the siege of the "socialistic" rules working against him.
To an ownership culture now accustomed to hamstringing its great teams, this would have looked like a direct challenge to authority. There might have been a call from the more segregationist members to prohibit the signing of black players as an anti-competitive dodge. More likely there would have been a "compromise": a ceiling on the number of black players on one team's roster. In our reality, some teams were suspected for years of adhering to secret quotas on the numbers of blacks they played at one time. This would have made the system explicit, and much uglier.
Baseball would still be there, but it would be changed. Fair play would have been modified, systematically penalizing the successful as Rickey had stated years back. In the atmosphere of that era, the question would have simmered, and eventually bubbled up: Was baseball Communist?
There's no telling who would have flung the first accusation, but it would have been acutely uncomfortable for America even to think about. Even in our timeline, the Cincinnati Reds changed their nickname to "Redlegs" for several years to avoid association with the Soviet Union. (I wish I could remember the name of the Red who had the perfect rejoinder: "We had the name first: make them change!")
It wouldn't have stuck. Such accusations were made against every institution from the U.S. Army to Lucille Ball, and history shows how self-discrediting Sen. McCarthy turned out to be. But the episode would have reflected, even magnified, the unease with baseball that the new rules fostered, the sense that it wasn't quite fair any more. Distrust would have been revealed as much as it was created.
It is in this environment that politicians would have seen a chance to take matters in their own hands. In our reality, there was serious talk in the latter 1950s about removing baseball's anti-trust exemption. It ended up amounting to nothing, notably when Casey Stengel's famous testimony to a Senate subcommittee made it all seem ridiculous.
In this new timeline, however, there would have been more people ready to listen, and act. The awe of the institution of baseball would have been diminished. Anti-trust zealots would have been emboldened to do away with their exemption. Anti-trust skeptics would have seen the irony of baseball using monopolistic powers to break up a monopoly of pennants, and been less interested in defending this hypocritical privilege. And had the racial quotas gone through, dedicated integrationists would have joined the cause to strike a blow for equal rights.
Baseball wouldn't have seen what was hitting it. It made these incremental changes for what seemed all the right reasons, and found it had advanced into an exposed position, vulnerable to attack. Owners presumably would hunker down and stand on their Supreme Court-given rights. Baseball as an organization likes hunkering down, as long as it can.
It wouldn't be enough—and this time, Casey wouldn't be around to make a great comedy routine of the Senate hearings and divert everyone's attention. In the late 1950s, Congress would vote to strip baseball of its anti-trust exemption.
This is what science-fiction fans and other futurists call a "singularity": a change so massive, it is impossible to project what lies on the other side. That's why you can't rightly see that "2,586" outside Camden Yards, or whether Henry Aaron could make a run at Lou Gehrig's augmented career RBI total. There's no telling what general shape baseball takes after that event, and absolutely no projecting any individual career. In a real sense, God only knows what baseball would be like today.
And who would get the blame, or credit, for that immense change? The 1936-1943 New York Yankees, probably: Their pennant string set the machinery in motion. If any particular Yankee was tabbed, it'd likely be Joe DiMaggio rather than Lou Gehrig. Joltin' Joe was with the dynasty longer, and Gehrig was always overshadowed by his superstar teammates. A few might name Gehrig the cause, but no one would trace it to the completely natural act of not contracting a rare and fatal disease.
And that's fair. You can't blame a man for living, after all.
References and Resources
Baseball Fever
J. Gordon Hylton, "Regulating the Yankees: Baseball and Antitrust in 1939", Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog
What If?, Robert Cowley, ed.
Bill James, Win Shares
Baseball Between the Numbers, Jonah Keri, ed.
Jonathan Eig, Luckiest Man
The New York Times
The Sporting News
One of the joys of researching a piece is the fortuitous stuff you find along the way. Since it fits nowhere else here, I had to mention stumbling across a picture of an aged Connie Mack giving the "hang loose" sign in 1939. Or was he signaling "two outs"? Actually, he was conversing with old-time player William "Dummy" Hoy, and was signing the letter "Y."
So Connie Mack knew sign language. Didn't know that before, did you?
Shane Tourtellotte is a long-time, occasionally-nominated science fiction writer, currently living in Asheville, North Carolina. He will tell you all about the baseball novel he's shopping if you give him an inch.
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Posted: 7:32 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2010
By Jamie Dupree
While the White House keeps talking about plans to partially extend the Bush tax cuts, more Democrats in Congress broke with Democratic leaders on the issue Tuesday.
The latest schism was sparked by a group of 47 House Democrats, who signed a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, arguing against plans to allow tax rates to go up on investment income, through capital gains and dividends.
"Our fiscal policy should be one that maximizes economic growth and private sector job creation," wrote the group led by Rep. John Adler (D-NJ).
"That is why we strongly believe that Congress should extend the current tax rates for dividend and long-term capital gains taxes."
While most people have heard the debate about extending the Bush income tax cuts, I would bet many people had no idea there were other items involved as well, like capital gains and dividend taxes.
"Raising taxes on capital gains and dividends could discourage individuals and businesses from saving and investing," the Democrats wrote.
The names on this letter are very familiar to reporters, as it's basically the same group of Democrats who also noted their opposition to White House plans to extend just some of the Bush tax cuts earlier this month.
With almost four dozen Democrats now on the record about this part of the Bush tax cuts, it seems almost impossible to imagine a way that a partial extension of the cuts could get through the Congress before the elections.
And it again raises questions about what Congress can get done on the tax cuts after the elections.
My simple thought is this - if it wasn't easy to do now, why is it going to be any easier after a whole bunch of lawmakers get defeated?
Meanwhile, there was one other interesting development on the tax cut front yesterday, courtesy of Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf.
Elmendorf told a Senate committee that their full evaluation of extending the tax cuts - whether for all taxpayers, or all but the top income brackets - showed that while the move would boost in the economy in the short term, it would dampen economic activity in the long term.
Why? Because Elmendorf says tax cuts will mean higher budget deficits, which will require more borrowing by the feds in later years, crowding out private sector loans and investment.
Elmendorf said a two year extension might be the best, but then after that, the Congress needs to figure out how to solve the budget gap, using spending cuts and/or tax increases.
There are no easy solutions.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Jay Z WHERE · Prudential Center / Newark WHEN · Wednesday, January 22 @ 8:00 PM AGE · All Ages PRICE · US $32.50 - US $175.00 STATUS · On Sale Now MORE INFO PRUDENTIAL CENTER / NEWARK 165 Mulberry StreetNewark, NJ 07102 (973) 757-6600 http://www.prucenter.com/ Nearest cross street is: Market StreetParking information: For all parking questions please visit www.prucenter.com or to purchase advance parking visit clickandpark.com Directions: From New Jersey Turnpike: • Take exit 15E (Newark/Jersey City), follow signs to Raymond Blvd. At the stop light make a right and proceed about 2 miles to Mulberry Street (Downtown Newark). • Turn left onto Mulberry St. • Continue past Market Street and Edison Place, Prudential Center is on the right. From Garden State Parkway South • Take exit 145, follow signs to Route 280 East Harrison/Newark. • Take exit 15A (Route 21/Downtown Newark). • Make right and proceed for ½ mile on Route 21 until the Market Street intersection. • Make a right at the light onto Market Street. • Make a left at the next light at the intersection of Market Street and Mulberry, Prudential Center is on the right. From Garden State Parkway North/Route 78 • Take exit 142 (Route 78), follow Route 78 east to exit 58A and follow signs for Rt. 1 and 9 North and then proceed to Rt. 21 North (McCarter Highway). • Continue north on Rt. 21 for approximately 1.5 miles. At the Market Street intersection, make a left onto Market Street. • Make a left at the next light at the intersection of Market Street and Mulberry, Prudential Center is on the right. From Newark Liberty International Airport • Follow signs for Rt. 1 and 9 North and follow directions above for Garden State Parkway North. From New York City • From George Washington Bridge or Lincoln Tunnel follow signs to New Jersey Turnpike South. • Follow directions above for New Jersey Turnpike. Public Transportation Traveling to Prudential Center by Public Transit (Path, Train, Bus or Light Rail) please plan your trip in advance by consulting a timetable and make sure to check return departure times as some service does not operate after midnight. To ease your trip, purchase your return rail ticket when you begin your trip. You can use your rail ticket for free travel on connecting bus or light rail service in Newark. Tickets, Fares and Customer Information For more information on services and fares to Prudential Center on NJ TRANSIT, visit njtransit.com or call (800) 772-2222. For details on PATH visit panynj.gov. or call (800) 234-PATH (7284). More events at PRUDENTIAL CENTER / NEWARK Share This
Concerts 12/18 · Drake 12/29 · David Guetta 01/12 · Jay Z 01/22 · Jay Z 01/29 · Jay Z 01/31 · Janelle Monae 02/19 · Kings of Leon 02/20 · Justin Timberlake 02/25 · Justin Timberlake 03/01 · Demi Lovato 03/02 · Robin Thicke 03/06 · Robin Thicke 03/07 · Imagine Dragons 03/07 · Demi Lovato 03/08 · Imagine Dragons 03/14 · Ellie Goulding 04/04 · Miley Cyrus 05/12 · Lady Gaga 08/04 · One Direction 08/13 · One Direction More
What's Hot video premiere Britney Spears Perfume new music A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera Say Something video VS Fashion Show Taylor teams up with Fall Out Boy new xmas music Ariana Grande Last Christmas new music Lorde Team


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view of Salomon
view of the Salomon
Breakfast fruit and pastries
Coffee and Tea service
Souplantation salads and pasta for lunch
beverage and dessert for lunch
Baked potato bar from Souplantation for lunch
Fr. William Meninger
Fr. William Meninger approaches the podium
a view of UC room 107 for the CCS event on 2-4-12
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Fr. John Keller, OSA welcomes Fr. William Meninger to USD
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Effective October 21, 2013, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk will be implementing an enhanced automated internet application system for the filing of Fictitious Business Name Statements. The new process will allow walk-in, mail-in and third party customers (presenting Fictitious Business Name Statements on behalf of others) to utilize this web module to key, submit and print the FBN from the comfort of their own home or office. The new process will require following these instructions:
Please be sure to follow the above mentioned steps to avoid any delay in the processing of submitted FBN Statements. The new web address will be available starting on Monday, October 21, 2013.
Affidavit of Identity Form Requirement (AB 1325)
Effective January 1, 2014 pursuant to Assembly Bill 1325, the Los Angeles County Registrar/Recorder County Clerk's Office will require a completed Affidavit of Identity form to accompany any Fictitious Business Name Statement (Original, Refile and New).
Over the Counter: Business Owners are required to fill out the top portion of the form and show a government issued ID in order to verify they are the authorized signer. Any filings submitted by a Third Party/Agent/Courier will require a completed Affidavit of Identity form signed by the Registrant and acknowledged by a notary, as well as page 2 of Identify form completed and ID presented.
Mail-in: Business owners will be required to fill out the entire Affidavit of Identity form and have the bottom portion acknowledged by a notary and mailed in along with the complete FBN form and payment.
Please note that no additional fee will be charged.
This requirement has been made in accordance with the legislative amendment of Business and Professions code sections 17913, 17916, 17922, 17923, 17927 and 17929.
California Environmental Quality Act document fees will increase effective January 1, 2014, pursuant to Fish and Game Code §711.4(b) and 713 as follows:


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Where did it all go wrong for Crystal Palace and Ian Holloway? (From Sutton Guardian)
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Where did it all go wrong for Crystal Palace and Ian Holloway?
12:01pm Thursday 24th October 2013 in Football By Tim Ashton
Like hundreds of Palace fans, I was swept away with the excitement of Holloway's appointment 12 months ago.
It was bitterly disappointing when Dougie Freedman upped sticks for Bolton Wanderers, but when Holloway was announced as his successor I think we all thought: "Ha, in your face Freedman, look who we've got instead."
Holloway's public persona reeks of loyalty, passion, fun, pride and humble procrastination to the club and fans.
We loved his appointment for those reasons, but with hindsight, perhaps we should have taken a closer look at his football record.
Prior to becoming an Eagle, Holloway had 16 years in management which produced promotion to the old first division in 2004 with QPR, and promotion to the Premier League with Blackpool in 2010.
Is that good enough?
Palace's form under his early stewardship is misleading – OK, the stats of four wins out of four don't lie, but he was onto a winner from the off.
He inherited a side unbeaten in 10 Championship games, that could not stop scoring goals and which boasted the best player in the division in Wilfried Zaha.
Holloway's first dropped points came in game number five at Leeds United in a 2-1 defeat on November 24.
From then to the end of the season, Palace's record was distinctly average – L8, D13, W10.
Amid dissenting voices from the stands, Palace sneaked into the play-offs with a nail-biting 3-2 win over relegation fighting Peterborough - relief.
Now the passionate Holloway is in his element in the highly charged atmosphere of the play-offs.
And suddenly an excellent victory at hated rivals Brighton, and the narrowest of wins over Watford at Wembley, meant Holloway could do no wrong again.
That is until he went into the summer transfer market.
There is no denying losing Glenn Murray to long-term injury was unfortunate, and that losing Wilfried Zaha to Manchester United was a shame – but there is also no denying that bringing in 14 new players over the summer was a huge mistake. Huge.
Holloway also offered contracts to Kevin Phillips – the 40-year-old Kevin Phillips – and Stephen Dobbie – the Stephen Dobbie shipped out to Blackpool.
Amid the list of mercenaries to walk through the Selhurst Park gates and sign up to the Holloway philosophy, a few stand out.
The best signing was Jerome Thomas – experienced in the Premier League, a settling voice in the dressing room, and someone, after interviewing him, who spoke with intelligence about the task that lay ahead.
But most of the signings were borderline insanity – bringing in Marouane Chamakh was crazy.
If Holloway is all about passion, I cannot help thinking Chamakh is all about the pay cheque, not much else.
The signing of Dwight Gayle suggesting one thing, and one thing only – we're heading straight back to the Championship.
Gayle is undoubtedly a player who would thrive on Holloway's drive and determination, but he is not a Premier League striker.
Holloway changed too much, too soon – he admitted as much.
When your talent lies in getting players to walk through walls for you, it becomes a problem when they simply won't.
The man with the quick wise-crack and cheeky smile knew he had lost the dressing room at half-time during the defeat to Fulham, and when you have little else to offer, there is no way back.
Who do you think should be the Eagles' new boss? Have your say by taking part in our poll and leave your suggestions below.
Comments are closed on this article.


text: 2 Days / 1 NightsPackage includes: - Two weekday adult lift tickets to Butternut Ski Area. - applicable ski season of 2010-2011 -If availability is shown "NA", offer is either not available for requested date, or package allocation is booked to capacity. -Above rates do not include 11.7% mandatory Massachusetts Room Occupancy Tax. Please note: We are unable to accommodate children under 12 in our Firespa Jacuzzi suites


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The National Black Nurses Association is fortunate to have great nursing leaders among its leadership in a variety of areas. The summary below is just an example of the signature programs and activities that draw African American nurses to NBNA. These programs help NBNA members grow stronger as they seek to provide culturally competent health care services in our communities.
The National Black Nurses Association (NBNA) was organized in 1971 under the leadership of Dr. Lauranne Sams, former Dean and Professor of Nursing, School of Nursing, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, Alabama. NBNA is a non-profit organization incorporated on September 2, 1972 in the state of Ohio. NBNA represents 150,000 African American registered nurses, licensed vocational/practical nurses, nursing students and retired nurses from the USA, Eastern Caribbean and Africa, with 83 chartered chapters, in 34 states.
The NBNA mission "is to provide a forum for collective action by African American nurses to investigate, define and determine what the health care needs of African Americans are and to implement change to make available to African Americans and other minorities health care commensurate with that of the larger society."
In 2003, the National Black Nurses Association became one of the five founding organizations of the National Coalition of Ethnic Minority Nurse Associations, along with Asian American/Pacific Islander Nurses Association, Inc., National Alaska Native American Indian Nurses Association, Inc.; National Association of Hispanic Nurses, Inc.; and, the Philippine Nurses Association of America, Inc. This collaboration gives voice to 350,000 minority nurses. Dr. Betty Smith Williams is the NCEMNA president and a past NBNA president.
Its goals include support for the development of a cadre of ethnic nurses reflecting the nation's diversity; advocacy for culturally competent, accessible and affordable health care; promotion of the professional and educational advancement of ethnic nurses; education of consumers, health care professionals and policy makers on health issues of ethnic minority populations; development of ethnic minority nurse leaders in areas of health policy, practice, education and research; endorsement of best practice models of nursing practice, education, and research for minority populations.
Advisory Committees
NBNA holds membership on various national and federal advisory committees including the National Advisory Committee, Office on Women's Research, NIH; National Advisory Committee for the Office of Minority Health; National Advisory Council on Nursing Education and Practice; FDA Nominating Group; Joint Commission of Healthcare Organizations Nursing Advisory Committee; National African American Drug Policy Coalition, Inc.; National Council of Negro Women; Balm in Gilead Cervical Cancer Advisory Board, Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition, Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease, CMS Medicare Partners, Coalition to End Cervical Cancer and Nursing Spectrum Magazine, just to name a few.
NBNA Signature Programs
NBNA's signature programs and services make NBNA a superb organization to join.
NBNA Institute and Conference
NBNA annually hosts its Institute and Conference. Over 1200 nurses and nursing students obtain state of the art clinical instruction on such subjects as cardiovascular disease, cancer, children's health, diabetes, end of life, HIV/AID, kidney disease, research and women's health. One hundred sixty exhibitors showcase their services and products. Continuing education units are provided by Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California. Outstanding keynote speakers have included Dr. Beverly Malone, President and CEO, National League for Nursing; Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, President and CEO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Dr. Freda Lewis Hall, Senior Vice President, Medical Affairs, Bristol Myers Squibb Company; Congressman Charles Rangel; Marie Smith, President, AARP; U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher; Ron Williams, President and CEO, Aetna; and Kevin Lofton, President and CEO, Catholic Healthcare Initiatives and Chairman-elect, American Hospital Association. NBNA presents nursing awards in nine categories and Life Time Achievement Award and Trailblazer Awards. Scholarships are offered to nursing students at all levels and chapter awards are presented for community service; service to youth; and for chapter recruitment and retention.
National Black Nurses Day on Capitol Hill
Since 1988, NBNA has hosted, National Black Nurses Day on Capitol Hill, to educate the U.S. Congress on the nursing shortage, the nursing profession and health care disparities. Over 200 nurses and nursing students attend the event. Following the day on Capitol Hill, the National Black Nurses Foundation hosts CEU sessions and an awards ceremony honoring public health advocates. Former National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute director, Claude L'Enfant; Dr. Garth Graham, Director of the U.S. Office of Minority Health; and Dr. Clive Callender, Director, Minority Organ, Tissue Transplant Education Program and Chairman, Department of Surgery, Howard University Hospital.
Journal of the National Black Nurses Association
Published twice annually, the Journal of the National Black Nurses Association contains peer refereed health research based articles. Dr. Joyce Newman Giger, Professor and Lulu Wollf Hassenplug Endowed Chair, UCLA School of Nursing, has been the editor of the Journal since 1997. Dr. Hilda Richards, NBNA immediate past president, was the previous editor.
National Black Nurses Association Newsletter
The 40 pages NBNA Newsletter is published quarterly. It is filled with information on the membership and articles written by NBNA members, NBNA partners and sponsors on a variety of nursing and health issues. Themes have included public policy, aging and research. In 2005, NBNA published a special issue on "Surviving the Storms: Katrina, Wilma and Rita". The articles were written by NBNA members as survivors and caregivers.
Based on an article that she wrote for the Newsletter in 2006, Cynthia Hickman, Member, Fort Bend County Texas Black Nurses Association and St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, Houston, Texas, received a $50,000 leadership award from Johnson and Johnson. NBNA Executive Director, Millicent Gorham is Editor-in-Chief.
In September 2005, NBNA and five other organizations were awarded a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Office of Minority Health to provide services to Katrina survivors. In 2006, NBNA published a manual on surviving disasters which was distributed to 1000 entities in Houston and along the Gulf states.
In 2004 and 2005, NBNA received a grant from the John Hartford Geriatric Institute to publish two newsletters that focused on aging. In 2006, the existing articles and new articles were published on the NBNA website as the "Special Report on Aging". The NBNA website is www.nbna.org.
In 2003-2004, the National Black Nurses Association and the National Black Nurses Foundation collaborated on a series of workshops on recruitment and retention of African American nurses into the profession. Funding was provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Memorandum of Understanding
Moreover, for many years, NBNA has had a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Red Cross to help provide nursing services in times of natural and man made disasters. In 2006, NBNA representatives participated in several American Red Cross workshops on diversity. The purpose of the workshops was to craft curriculum that would help Red Cross volunteers to provide services in a culturally competent manner.
NBNA National Obesity Initiative
At the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the National Black Nurses Day on Capitol Hill, NBNA launched its National Obesity Initiative on February 14, 2008. The Obesity Initiative is NBNA's effort to help stem the tide of chronic diseases caused by obesity and lack of exercise. The 79 NBNA chapters have been challenged to collectively lose 360 pounds each. Each chapter is to hold continuing education sessions on obesity and co-morbidity factors such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. To get physically active, each chapter is to hold physical activity events and they can be linked to collaborating events like city wide walks. On May 3, each member is asked to walk one mile. This is the Saturday before National Nurses Week, May 6-12. A compendium of NBNA activities will be published.
NBNA Institute of Excellence
At the 2006 Annual Conference, NBNA launched the Institute of Excellence which is to honor African American nurses for their in the areas of clinical skills, research, academia and policy. Twenty-five nurses were inducted in the first class.
At the NBNA Conference, NBNA offers scholarships to student nurses at all levels. The NBNA chapters also provide scholarships. The scholarships are based on merit and financial need.
NBNA Nursing Awards
NBNA recognizes nurses who have made major contributions throughout their nursing career and are honored with the NBNA Life Time Achievement Award and the NBNA Trailblazer Award. Awards are also provided in nine other categories. The awards are made at the NBNA Conference.
In collaboration with other organizations, NBNA offers certification programs on HIV/AIDS and end-of-life-care.
NBNA Women's Health Research Program
The NBNA Women's Health Research Program was established in 1999 for nurse researchers to enhance existing research or develop new research around women's health issues.


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text:
Type: Bug
Status: Open
Priority: Major
Resolution: Unresolved
Affects Version/s: None
Fix Version/s: backlog
Component/s: None
Number of attachments :2
My pom has the following dependencies :
- log4j:log4j:1.2.13
- a war with log4j:log4j:1.2.11 included
Result the two jars are in WEB-INF/lib.
- MWAR-33-example.zip
- 04/Feb/09 3:55 AM
- 2 kB
- Alex Rau
- Proj1/pom.xml 0.7 kB
- Proj2/pom.xml 0.6 kB
- Proj2/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml 0.0 kB
- MWAR-33-workaround.zip
- 04/Feb/09 3:55 AM
- 2 kB
- Alex Rau
- Proj1/pom.xml 1 kB
- Proj2/pom.xml 0.7 kB
- Proj2/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml 0.0 kB
Issue Links
i guess this is a problem. =) maybe you can add an warExclude entry for the unneeded log4j
No agree with this.
IMO the content of WEB-INF/lib must populated with the dependencies section of the pom.
With this you are sure to have the same classpath content when you made : compile, test and package.
The WEB-LIB/lib of merged wars must be exclude by default.
Other tests made which causes some troubles.
My pom has a dependency to a SNAPSHOT dependecy (in example called foo).
An included war dependency has the same dependency.
The deployed war dependency contains a timestamped version of this (foo-64456-1.jar).
On my machine I have a SNAPSHOT of this (foo-SNAPSHOT.jar) due to an install which include fixes..
When I package my war, the WEB-LIB contains :
This cause real trouble and long time debugging to find the trouble because the timestamped one win in the appserver.
The ones declares in the pom (and transitive ones) doesn't win.
Junit passes but not the application deployed in the appserver.
This breaks the maven benefit's because you're really sure about your dependencies.
IMO this issue must be set to blocker
well, this shouldn't happen for two reasons:
a) it shouldn't duplicate
b) wars shouldn't pass on dependencies (you should get the war in web-inf/lib)
ok, it took me a bit to realise this was because the war is being unpacked.
You should use warExclude for now.
This is a much bigger change that will require excluding WEB-INF/lib and pulling in the dependencies from the dependant WAR using the maven artifact mechanism. I don't think it's a good idea to exclude the WEB-INF/lib by default without that, though.
Why not using Set artifacts = project.getArtifacts();
And get dependencies of the artifacts with type war.
But I think in case of war type transitive dependencies are not resolved.
I don't know exactly but I think there is an issue in MNG.
With all jars in WEB-INF will come from poms dependencies declaration.
IMHO, it's the best and cleaner solution ?
With this I'm sure to have the same classpath when I try a junit and when I build my war.
I believe this is a blocker too. In my (automatically generated) WEB-INF/lib dir I have duplicate jar files with different version which are causing me application errors. I would expect that jars on the WEB-INF/lib directory be the same as the ones generated with eclipse:eclipse plugin, but no.
Even those dependencies that I exclude in the pom.xml file are included in the war, so you must understand that it is breaking havoc for me. This makes maven unusable for war projects, at least for me.
We are currently doing our own repackaging that I developed prior to MWAR support of it. This issue here is a blocker for us to move over to using the MWAR repackaging. I'd much rather use the standard because my method also doesn't pick up the dependencies...I have to make sure they are duplicated in the repackaging war.
Using latest version in svn you can do
to avoid the jars from the war
I also discovered this problem today in a production environment.
Thanks to the various exclude mechanisms this is easy to fix. But since this a fairly common scenario, we should really try to implement an automated handling.
First of all, this problem exists only if one WAR is depending on another WAR, am i right? Is there any other scenario not involving two dependent WAR files?
Assuming this, i think the problem is that - since dependencies of WAR files currently are not transitive - we are stuck with the jars comming from the wars WEB-INF/lib.
On the other hand, if the dependent WAR file has any dependencies defined in the POM and those would be treated as usual transitive dependencies (keep in mind that this is only valid when a WAR is currently beeing built), we may simply forget about the libs from the dependent WAR and the conflict could be solved by the standard maven mechanism.
This also has no negative effect for manually imported WARs (not beeing built with maven). Those WARs simply have no dependencies specified in the POM, so all the libs would be used for overlaying without any exclusion.
This is a huge showstopper for us. We have a number of WAR projects that include 1-5 other war projects as dependencies. We are getting many many duplicate jars with conflicting version numbers and with unpredictable results. It would be great if the war overlay would allow us to exclude the lib directory and instead use the transitive dependencies that were originally defined in the war that is being overlayed. This would also require all dependencies from all overlayed wars to be reconciled between themselves as well as within the containing artifact. This would also tranfer down the chain of depedencies so that all transitive dependencies would be resolved correctly and at one time.
Scott, we would like to have this as well but this needs a heavy change in the maven core. I think it's been scheduled for 2.1 but I'm not sure.
What I would like to implement for this is a WEB-INF/lib postpackagingtask that will scan WEB-INF/lib and will report any duplicate dependencies that is found. A strict mode flag (set to false by default) can fail the build if a duplicate is found.
I hope this will be a first solution till we have the ability to resolve the war's transitive dependencies.
Brian, does that help? Any suggestion?
We fight with this problem also. Currently we use warExcludes and redeclare all the deps. The best solution though might be to introduce a war-client.jar similar to an ejb-client. The war-client.jar would contain all classes and - as attached artifact - it would provide the transitive deps. With such an artifact you could use a dependent war as overlay and exclude anything from WEB-INF/lib and WEB-INF/classes and declare the war-client as additional dep. Since the war-client is a jar, you'll inherit then all the transitive deps.
Having the ability to deploy the server-side code is actually a good idea and I used it in most projects with the build-helper plugin. I'd like to make this a feature of the war plugin.
Since we have many watchers over here, I'm open to suggestions with regard to the classifier's name + parameter name (war-client does not sound intuitive to me but I guess you used that for illustration purposes)
My project team gets hit by this at least twice a week. But shouldn't MWAR-60 have fixed this? It's caused by developer workspaces containing a different version in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/lib but Maven pulling down a different version in the build process. If we could just exclude WEB-INF/classes and WEB-INF/lib, this problem would be history.
Huge show stopper for us. We extend a 3rd party product and the current state of the WAR plugin forces us to redeclare > 100 3rd party dependencies which is practically impossible.
Brett - IMHO you described a proper solution (ignore/empty out WEB-INF/lib, resolve all deps only using project descriptors). Is this really that tricky to implement (sounds like loads of efforts) - especially considering that this issue is years old - what about current versions of maven ?
Regarding WEB-INF/lib: there's no point in using a tool like Maven for dependency management and then rely on plain old files (like ant) for web applications - this is definitely not following the "declaration" concept of Maven.
Good news.
I looks to me as I was able to work around the issue. After a long-day debug session in maven I figured out how to enable the inclusion of transitive dependencies on WAR dependencies.
I changed apache-maven-2.0.9/lib/maven-2.0.9-uber.jar/META-INF/plexus/components.xml which obviously configures the plexus container and its components.
Changing <includeDependendies/> from true to false for WAR artifacts causes Maven to not consider dependencies from WAR artifacts to be already included in the WAR artifact itself. Instead they are properly resolved including a proper dependency resolution. I'll attach an sample overlay project so that this is reproducible for others.
Using the following section in the overlay build itself leads to an empty WEB-INF/lib for the overlay.
This in combination with the above <includesDependencies/> change means: an overlay's WEB-INF/lib is populated with all transitive dependencies from scratch. Be aware that I only exclude JAR dependencies here for now.
Does that make sense ? Feedback appreciated. Personally I would consider this to be the expected default behaviour (compatibility-issues aside) and would love to see that behaviour in a newer release (either default behaviour or a configuration option somewhere). Right now everyone here has to apply these settings manually in their maven installation which is ok for now (but not in the long term).
Someone can give feedback on the consequences and side-effects of the above change ? Do we break something here in this respect in other places ?
Regards Alex
Alex, the workaround described above works. Simply exclude WEB-INF/lib and WEB-INF/classes from the war building. However, I concede this is a hack and expected the plugin to know better.
I agree with you that this could be more under control of the war plugin. However it looks (at least to me) like the handling (resolution) of artifacts of certain types (WAR in our case here) is fundamentally settled in the plexus configuration and artifact resolution. The war plugin (from what I've seen during my debug session) just gets the resolved artifacts presented without being able to control that process. Therefore is "just receives" the resolved dependencies based on the WAR artifact type which does (based on the plexus configuration) not include transitive dependencies.
If the WAR plugin should be configurable in this respect I guess it's more difficult as there needs to be some communication between WAR plugin and dependency resolution (which does not exist as far as I know).
I think the actual question first is: should the dependency resolution really be different for WARs compared to JARs ? Does a WAR dependency justify the dependency resolution mechanism to cut off transitive dependencies ? In the end both types of artifacts are quite similar - both are essentially java class artifacts (or libraries if you want) where the WAR artifact may include additional filesystem resources and libraries. The existence of libraries leads to a conflict here as the WAR bundle itself and maven "want" to take over control over dependencies in general. The current situation is: the WAR file wins and maven does not deal with transitive dependencies in favor of the WAR artifact. This leads to the conflict that "on-top" artifacts based on WAR files can't be handled by maven properly as there is some kind of processing gap in the dependency chain where maven is missing proper information about dependencies to properly deal with them.
This is why I personally do not really consider this to be a hack. I think the change would reflect a fundamental change in the behaviour of dealing with WAR artifacts. And it would not just be a local fix to the WAR plugin but a change which would straighten the dependency resolution in general for maven (and all affected plugins). I'm aware of that this is a quite severe change (e.g. what are the effects on other plugins dealing with WARs ?). But on the other hand I consider this issue being a bigger problem as well as Maven remains some kind of "incomplete" dependeny maangement solution for WAR projects.


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Current Time 9:16:18pm
70 mph limit takes effect on rural Ohio highways
Written by Associated PressODOT to post new signs on 570 miles of roadway on Monday
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Drivers can legally zip along some rural interstate highways more quickly as a new 70 mph speed limit takes effect along some sections of roadway around Ohio.
The change beginning Monday raises the speed limit in some areas from 65 mph to 70 mph. The Ohio Department of Transportation has said the speed limit is increasing on more than 570 miles of interstate highway. The increase applies to parts of Interstates 70, 71, 75, 76, 77 and 90. It doesn't cover sections of those roads in major metropolitan areas and a few smaller cities along the way.
New or updated signs will alert drivers about the higher speed limits.
A 70-mph limit already is in effect for the Ohio Turnpike stretching across the northern part of the state.
Associated Press
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Tue, Aug 03, 2010 | 23:14 BST
Virgin announced as online tournament provider for Ghost Recon
Virgin Gaming announced today it's partnered with Ubisoft to be the online tournament provider for some of the publisher's multiplayer console releases starting with Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
Tue, Jun 01, 2010 | 19:41 BST
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Looking for hotels near New York Antique Jewelry and Watch Show you'll be spoilt for choice thanks to Easytobook.com. Chelsea Savoy Hotel is a great 2-star hotel close to New York Antique Jewelry and Watch Show, offering you convenient access whenever you need. Also close by is Hotel 309, a great 1-star hotel whose quality exceeds its ranking. This hotel also has a great TripAdvisor rating.The Antique Jewelry and Watch show is a collection of the most rare and prestigious watches and antique jewelry. It takes place from 26th to 29th July 2013 in the Metropolitan Pavilion. Hotels near the Antique Jewelry & Watch Show are popular during these dates, as no one wants to be far from the action. Be sure to get the best prices for your hotel near the Jewelry & Watch Show New York on Easytobook.com.
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The Queen of Books
Herald Reporter
"I'm the only librarian with an animal and dairy science degree."
Cynthia Leigh Welch laughs when she talks about the different route her college education took for her. But as the new director of the Ricks Memorial Library, she couldn't be happier.
"In the library, it feels great at the end of the day to help people," Welch said.
Welch, who grew up in Vicksburg, spent a lot of her younger years traveling. Spending most of her adult years in South Carolina, she was happy to return closer to home.
"I was ready to be closer to my family," she said with a smile.


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Hotel Umbria Reviews
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Great hotel in the old center. Close the main sights and 2-3 min walk from busstop and minimeteo. Friendly and helpfull staff. Good value but hard beds though...
- Novice Nomad
- Anonymous
- Denmark
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The hotel was in an excellent location in the heart of Perugia Old Town, close to all restaurants, bars and the supermarket. Our room was clean with a good bathroom, balcony, and TV. Good value for a basic hotel room.
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absolute best place to see Perugia from....outstanding value n lovely place, right in the heart of old town
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Staff were very helpful, the rooms were clean, the location was excellent. If you stay here, eat at Al Mangiar Bene, very close next door- the best food we ate in all of Italy.
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Charming hotel and excellent location, although a bit difficult to find. Nice, helpful staff.
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This hotel has pleasant grounds and my room was fine. The pool was closed which was a shame as it was over 30 degrees each day. I was there for an exhibition at Feria so the free shuttle bus to the show and to the airport saved a lot of money. The restaurant is fine. The aircon a bit flaky.... More
- Also Known As:
- Osuna Hotel Madrid
- Official Description (provided by the hotel):
- Osuna Hotel is located in one of the busiest business areas of Madrid close to IFEMA (Exhibition Center) and Barajas International Airport and well communicated to the city center by public tranportation. The hotel offers a free shuttle bus service to IFEMA and AirportFor business meetings there are two rooms fully equipped with all kinds of technical and audiovisual services ROOMS , RESTAURANTS AND FACILITIESIt has 168 rooms with air conditioning, telephone, satellite and interactive TV with video channel and music.73 of them are bungalows with terrace and garden areas. Guests can also enjoy of our outdoor swimming pool (in summer season) and H20 restaurant specializes in traditional Mediterranean cuisine , where every dish is prepared according to ancient recipes. ... more less
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Heinz Fassmann, Thomas Glade (Ed.)
Geographie für eine Welt im Wandel
57. Deutscher Geographentag 2009 in Wien
1. Edition 2012
412 pages
Vienna University Press at V&R unipress
plus S&H
PDF eBook | 32,99 € |
What is modern scientific geography concerned with today? This volume discusses selected themes in physical and human geography, methodological approaches, societal significance and teaching methods. The 19 chapters include general themes such as contributions on
locations, mobility and planning, articles on mountain areas, climate change and ecological issues. Finally, didactic and methodological questions are addressed. The volume seeks to inform, discuss and further develop the latest relevant research findings. It addresses scientific geography, applied and practical geography (in regional planning and development, location development, town planning, cartography, geo computer science) as well as school teachers.
The book is the result of the 57th German Geographers' Congress held in
Vienna in 2009.


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By FORD O'CONNELL, Investor's Business Daily
First responders arrayed behind him at a press conference. Teachers furloughed from the classroom. Air-traffic controllers furloughed from the control towers. Everything but pay for the troops at risk in the armed forces.
President Obama wants us to taste austerity. He wants us to see what it would be like if our representatives in Congress — and this is all Congress' fault, in his version of events — fail to get back to Washington and avoid the sequester scheduled to take place on March 1.
Can we live with fewer firemen and teachers and more delays at the nation's airports? Can the military make do with less maintenance, delayed purchases and other belt-tightening?
It won't be easy, the president says. It might not even be bearable.
But it's all headed our way, like a big, noisy locomotive, unless Congress gives him what he wants — more tax revenue, more deficit spending, more of the policies that have made ours the brokest country in the history of countries.
Before the president goes too deeply into this strategy, he should take a lesson from his friend Tim Kaine — the former head of the Democratic National Committee and governor of Virginia and now a senator from Virginia.
In 2009, when Kaine was governor, he faced a transportation budget shortfall. He asked for more taxes. The Republican-controlled state House of Representatives refused. So he closed 19 of the state's highway rest areas.
Virginians felt the pain of austerity, but they didn't blame the legislature. They blamed Kaine for picking a fight he couldn't win, mismanaging state finances and invoking an unpopular measure out of spite. And when Republican Bob McDonnell took over in 2010, one of his first acts was to reopen those rest areas.
And yes, it did bring about great relief.
The president has settled on this strategy because he believes Americans won't like austerity when they get a chance to truly experience it.
He believes we have become so addicted to massive federal spending, we won't dare take even one step backward in the name of preserving the country's fiscal well-being for our grandchildren. He believes more taxing and spending will right the ship and that the discussion of how to rein in runaway spending ended with the fiscal cliff deal.
And Obama is betting even if Republicans refuse to give in and raise taxes or otherwise avoid the sequester — remember, the sequester was his idea and the Republican-controlled House twice has passed legislation to help him avoid it, only to be told to "get serious" about reform — he hopes to use this to damage the GOP brand in the 2014 midterms.