It’s another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest night spot for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in out of the heat. The music is cool in here. There’s no cover charge. The dress code is casual. There’s no waiting list. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you to grade the job manager Craig Counsell is doing. There was a real consensus in that 60 percent of you gave Counsell a “B.” Another 23 percent gave him an “A.” I’d probably have given him that A.
So here’s the part with the music and the movies. You’re free to skip that if you want. Or you can enjoy the music and movies and just skip the baseball. Your call.
So I’ve got a little nostalgia going on tonight for us older folks. This is the great jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery covering The Association’s pop single “Windy” on The Hollywood Palace in 1967. You even get Herb Albert introducing Montgomery.
I’m a sucker for “true crime” stuff, even though I know it’s (mostly) bad for me. Movies that are based on true crime stories suck me in more often than they should. Director Richard Fleischer was also a fan of “true crime” stories as he directed four films based on famous murders. I’d seen two of them before. Compulsion (1959) is based on the Leopold and Loeb murder trial and it’s decent, mostly because of a great performance by Dean Stockwell. The Boston Strangler (1968), on the other hand, is a hot mess. So I should have walked into Fleischer’s The Girl With the Red Velvet Swing (1955) with more trepidation. Because while The Girl With the Red Velvet Swing is not a dumpster fire, it does manage to be something that no true crime dramatization should be: dull.
The Girl With the Red Velvet Swing is based on the murder of famous architect Stanford White (Ray Milland) by railroad heir Harry Kendall Thaw (Farley Granger) in 1906. The title character is Evelyn Nesbit (Joan Collins), who was Thaw’s wife and White’s mistress.
If none of these names mean anything to you, I can promise you that you would have known them in 1906. Nesbit was a well-known “Gibson Girl,” by face if not by name. These were the women drawn by illustrator Charles Gibson for magazine covers. They were the turn-of-the-last-century version of supermodels, even if their faces were better known than their names. White was a rich architect, who, among many other things, designed the Washington Square Arch that still stands in New York. Thaw was the heir to an enormous railroad and coal fortune in Pittsburgh. His net worth was estimated to be around $40 million in 1900 dollars. He was also deeply mentally unwell, a fact that his money covered up throughout his life.
Thaw had become deeply obsessed with White. Not only had he “deflowered” Nesbit before she married Thaw, but Thaw was convinced that White had blackballed him from New York high society. (Maybe he did, but if he hadn’t, someone else would have.) One night in 1906, Thaw approached White during a stage performance on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden and shot killed him in front of hundreds of witnesses. He confessed on the spot, shouting that either that White had “ruined his life” or his “wife.” No one was really sure which one he said and probably both were true in Thaw’s mind. Thaw’s resulting murder trial became the first of many “Trial of the Century.”
One thing you need to know about The Girl With the Red Velvet Swing is that Nesbit was still alive in 1955 and served as a paid consultant on the film. As such, the film is far less lurid than the actual details of the case. For one, the film portrays White fairly sympathetically and Nesbit as in love with him. White’s only real crime, per the film, was not wanting the scandal of divorcing his wife any marrying Nesbit would bring. In reality, Nesbit was 16 when she met the 47-year-old White. She also wasn’t the only 16-year-old having an affair with White. The man was the Jeffrey Epstein of his time. Also, while Nesbit admitted that their later sexual encounters were consensual, their first meeting was a clear case of what we’d call date rape today. Thaw is portrayed in the movie as merely controlling and abusive towards Nesbit, but the long trail of payoffs to victims in his life shows him to be a violent psychopath, serial rapist, and a sadist.
Certainly the Production Code probably prevented some of the more lurid details of the story from coming to the screen, I also wonder whether Charles Brackett, who produced the film and also co-wrote the screenplay with Walter Reisch, also toned down the story. I know Brackett mostly from his terrific partnership with Billy Wilder, but I forgot that Brackett refused to work on Double Indemnity, considering it too immoral. Well, the White killing should have made Double Indemnity look like Sesame Street. Instead, we get a love story between a young woman (portrayed as older than she was in real life) and an older man. Then when the older man refuses to leave his wife, she marries her psychopathic stalker because she needs a husband and because he’s one of the richest men in America.
Farley Granger’s Harry Thaw is not nearly crazy enough. Yes, he’s portrayed as having a hair-trigger temper and an obsession with both Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit, but his true craziness doesn’t come out until the very end of the film. I suppose Nesbit would rather people think she was duped by an abusive man than she knowingly married an abusive man for money and security. I also don’t think she wanted everyone to know that she was carrying on an affair with White at 16, and her age is never mentioned in the film.
The other problem is that while a young Joan Collins looked a lot like a young Evelyn Nesbit, her American accent is all over the place. Milland just rides with his mid-Atlantic accent that works well for upper-class people on both sides of the pond, but Collins needed a more standard lower-class American accent. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it just slips and sounds off. Her portrayal of Nesbit is also quite passive. Maybe that’s how the real Evelyn Nesbit was (I don’t know), but it certainly makes her a less-than-intriguing protagonist.
I did like the CinemaScope photography and the colorful look of early 20th-Century New York a lot. The sets and the costuming are first-rate.
The Girl With the Red Velvet Swing takes a really incredible true crime murder story and tries to reduce it to a lame love triangle story. It’s not a terrible film, but a crime like this one deserves much better.
The trailer for The Girl With the Red Velvet Swing.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
As part of our Draft Week coverage, tonight we’re asking you who was the greatest first-round pick in Cubs history.
The MLB Draft only dates back to 1965 and honestly, the Cubs were mostly terrible at it for the first two decades. It can’t explain the first twenty-five years of the pennant drought after 1945, but it certainly does go a long ways towards explaining much of the next twenty-five. Things have gotten much better since around 2007 and certainly Cubs draft picks after that played a huge role in the 2016 title, either as players or as trade bait for other players.
If you go to Baseball Reference and look at the top Cubs players of all-time as ranked by bWAR, only one of the top ten were Cubs draft picks. To be fair, seven of them were from the era before the draft. Two were acquired in trades and only number ten, Rick Reuschel, was a Cubs draft pick. However, Big Daddy was taken in the third round, so he can’t be the Cubs’ best first-round pick.
The drafted player who is second on the Cubs’ career bWAR behind Reuschel is Mark Grace, who is 15th. However, Grace was taken in the 24th round in 1985. Again, not a first-round pick.
The Cubs best draft pick was Greg Maddux, who was taken in the second round in 1984. But he only had about a third of his total value as a Cub before leaving as a free agent. Still, just Maddux’s Cubs career would put him ahead of pretty much everyone except Reuschel and Grace among Cubs draft picks.
So when you look at the list of first-round draft picks in Cubs history, there is one player whose career bWAR is head and shoulders above everyone else. Unfortunately, that player is Rafael Palmeiro, who just 258 games for the Cubs before he was dealt. Second on the bWAR list is Josh Donaldson, who never even played for the Cubs.
I’m ruling that the greatest Cubs picks of all time can’t be people who played for other teams. I suppose if Palmeiro had been traded for Ken Griffey Jr., he could be the greatest Cubs draft pick of all time, but he wasn’t. So I’m calling Palmeiro and Donaldson as ineligible. Same goes for Jon Garland. To be the greatest Cubs first round pick, you have to have contributed to the Cubs.
So who was the greatest Cubs first-round draft pick who delivered the most value to the Cubs? You don’t have to go by bWAR in their time with the Cubs. In fact, I suggest you don’t. There’s more to baseball than just scoring on a metric. But the following players are first-round picks who starred with the Cubs and made a major impact.
I don’t think I need to tell you much about any of these players. But I will put two number to help you pick, The first is the player’s career Wins Above Replacement as calculated by Baseball Reference as a Cub. The second number is the player’s career bWAR.
Obviously all of these players, other than Wood, are still active. So you can include numbers that you think the player will do throughout their career if you want.
1995; Kerry Wood. Cubs—25.5. Career—26.8
2011: Javier Báez. Cubs—21.8. Career—26.9
2013: Kris Bryant. Cubs—28.0. Career—27.3
2015: Ian Happ. Career—24.2
2018: Nico Hoerner. Career—23.1
I could have included Kyle Schwarber, but other than his World Series heroics, Schwarber only returned 5.4 bWAR before he was non-tendered. And because of his poor defense, his career bWAR is below all five of these players, even with all those home runs.
So who was the greatest Cubs’ first-round pick of all-time?
Thank you for stopping by. We’re always glad to see a friendly face. Please get home safely. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again next week for more BCB After Dark.
