BCB After Dark: The help has arrived?

Welcome to BCB After Dark: the nightclub for night owls, early-risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Have yourself a drink on the house. You will have to provide it, however, because it’s bring your own bottle. The show will start any minute now. We’ve saved you a good table in the second row.

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.

The Cubs beat the Reds 7-1 today for a two-game winning streak. Because it was a day game, Al already has the recap done long ago and I don’t need to say anything about it. But I will say that I’m crediting Judy Garland from last night for the turnaround.

Last time I asked you who you thought would win the National League Most Valuable Player Award this season. The winner, with 34% of the vote, was the Padres young superstar Fernando Tatis Jr. If he can stay healthy the rest of the way, he has to be the favorite. But he’s had trouble staying healthy.

The Giants’ Brandon Crawford was second with 29% of the vote and Phillies outfielder Bryce Harper was third with 19%.

I think Shohei Ohtani pretty much has the American League MVP Award sewn up. I mean, 40 home runs and a 2.79 ERA? Unbelievable.

Here’s the part where I talk about jazz and movies. You can skip ahead to the baseball question if you’d like. You won’t hurt my feelings.

Today’s jazz is the 1953 classic Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz at Oberlin. I got recruited to go to Oberlin, but all those music students intimidated me. I thought I’d be out of place as I didn’t have any musical talent. I don’t know whether that would have been true or not, but that’s what I thought when I was 17. Also, I discovered it was in Ohio. (That’s a joke, Buckeye readers. It being in Ohio played no role one way or the other in me not going there.)

This week I watched the 1960 documentary Primary, which is a film about the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary between John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. The film should be of interest to any political junkies and it’s interesting to see the way the Kennedy versus Humphrey campaign has parallels to today’s politics, even though both Kennedy and Humphrey were quite liberal.

But I’m going to leave the politics out of my discussion and talk about its filmmaking. Primary is considered to be one of the vanguards of the cinéma verité style of documentary filmmaking. It may seem second nature to us now, but Primary was one of the first documentaries to have almost no narration. The film follows the two candidates around the state of Wisconsin and showed what went on, both behind the scenes and in public settings with no commentary from the filmmakers. They do get some voters to share their opinions of the candidates to provide some opinions. None of this seems revolutionary to us today, but it was in 1960.

So today’s discussion question is “What are some of your favorite documentaries?” The documentary has taken off in recent years, to the point where they are actually getting bloated as streaming services stretch out what should be a two- or three-hour documentary into a long miniseries. (And yes, I’m expecting many of you to say The Last Dance is your favorite documentary, but I’m including that in documentaries that would have been much better had it been shorter. Maybe not one 2 ¹⁄₂ hour movie, but it really could have been half as long as it was.)

Staying with sports, Hoop Dreams is clearly one of the greatest documentaries of all-time in my mind. D.A. Pennebaker, who was one of the cameramen on Primary, directed a great documentary on Bob Dylan called Don’t Look Back. I haven’t seen The Thin Blue Line in decades. I remember the controversy around it when it came out and I remember being impressed with it when I saw it. But director Errol Morris is still controversial and I’d really like to go back and watch that again.

And as far as documentaries go, do concert films count in your mind? Because I can name three or four great concert films. My personal opinion is that if it just shows the performance, then no, it’s a different genre. But if it shows a tour or what’s going on backstage and the performances are just a part of it, then it is a documentary.

But please share some of your favorite documentaries in the comments below.

Welcome back to those who skip the music and movies. Tonight I’m going to ask you which fringe-y current Cubs position player is the most likely to be a valuable contributor to the team in 2022.

By “fringe-y,” I mean the guys who have been bouncing between the majors and the minors for the past few years. They aren’t all technically rookies, but they are all players who have not yet really established themselves in the majors.

The candidates are:

• Sergio Alcántara
• Michael Hermosillo
• Rafael Ortega
• Frank Schwindel
• Patrick Wisdom

I could include Greg Deichmann in the poll, but I consider him to still be more of a “prospect” than a fringe major leaguer. I admit the definitions are imprecise. But in any case, Deichmann is in Iowa at the moment.

So pick which of the following five current Cubs will be the most valuable one on the 2022 Cubs. If you only think one will be back with the Cubs next year, pick that one, even if you only think he’ll get 20 at-bats. If you think they’ll all be on the team next year, pick the one that you think will be the most valuable.

I think you’re all familiar with these five players so I shouldn’t have to explain the choices. But if you’d explain your choice in the comments, that would be terrific.

Thanks for stopping by. We’ll see you again next week at BCB After Dark. Be sure to tip your waitstaff before you leave.