With the commissioner of baseball’s decision not to reinstate Pete Rose comes a rather embarrassing conundrum: on one hand, the so called integrity of the game is upheld with the exclusion of admitted and habitual gamblers but, on the other hand, the very close association with DraftKings and Fan Duel and the like apparently continues. What Peckerhead did was dead wrong and he is rightfully paying the price with no evident remorse. Major League Baseball, however, is hypocritical to the extreme to join with organized gangs that are openly looting fans who are either naive or just too stupid to abstain. The hypocrisy here is comparable to the way everyone involved strained hard to look the other way during the steroid era when team earned run averages were in the fives.
I don’t mean to imply that betting by fans on individual player performances has the potential to affect wins and losses in the manner of the Black Sox scandal, but what it definitely has the potential for is the harm to fans financially while they dream of the big jackpot. It’s no different than playing the numbers. The trouble is, ever since the Mob got states involved in various lottery games and casinos sprouted all over the country, throwing your hard earned money away not only became legal (for the most part)but also acceptable, worthy behavior.
The biggest change in sports in the last 25 years or so is the amount of money involved. Television has had everything to do with that, with the result being that television now dictates most of the rules as far as scheduling and sponsorships. Therefore I would not expect that any TV executive who wants to remain employed will ever say no to any entity that wants to fork over a bunch of cash in exchange for air time. That’s why the DraftKings ads and logo were plastered all over our screens all last season. So what I suggest is that the commissioner maintain some consistency by dropping the ban on Pete Rose unless he orders the banishment from MLB of the gambling sites. Could that happen? In this age where not only is poker considered a sport but also people actually watch other people play it, I have serious doubts; it’s about as likely as a Republican presidential candidate telling the Koch brothers to ram their money up their asses.

Around the time that the new commissioner of Major League Baseball replaced the Chevy salesman, speculation arose as to whether or not he would consider rescinding the banishment of Pete Rose from baseball.  There has yet to be a decision announced on that matter, although the Fox network has already welcomed the slime into its large family of questionable characters and nearly qualified journalists. The inquiry prompted a review of Rose’s case on ESPN and, in somber terms, that network’s report concluded that what made it so difficult to forgive the former Cincinnati and Philadelphia horse’s ass was the fact that he had bet on games played by his team when he was its manager.

Remember when gambling wasn’t cool? The odd thing about the ESPN report was that, when it ended and they broke to commercials, an ad for DraftKings appeared. DraftKings came from out of nowhere this season to suddenly be everywhere your eyes could see, the official separator of fools from their money for MLB. Every screen you looked at, every fence behind every backstop bore their logo and seemingly every break between innings of every game featured that advertisement that bragged about how 300 million dollars were going to be “awarded” that summer—just pick your players and win, fool. Now I see that there are other players in this great scam and I also see that the attorney general of the state of New York calls it illegal gambling and wants to boot them out of that state. Of course, they have no doubt raked in enough money to fight whatever legal battles that may be on the horizon but folks, let’s tell it like it is—it’s gambling. If I pick my player, say Wilmer Flores, and he gets five doubles in six plate appearances, maybe I will win. So where do my winnings come from? Probably from all of those idiots who chose Mike Trout, who struck out all four at bats. However, I’ll “bet” that you need to pick more than one player What everyone knows who follows baseball is this:you have good days and bad days and, for just about everyone, bad days rule. The house always wins, or someone gets a broken back.

Picking a group of players to do well all on the same day is equivalent to what was called a “parlay” when I was a lad and my father and his friend John would often pick a two or three team group to win on a certain day. They made their choices, carefully considering the starting pitchers (always important, but even more so in the 50s before the bullpen got crowded with guys the manager could barely remember), the home ballpark, who was “hot”, etc. Still, nothing was automatic; there were days when Washington’s Chuck Stobbs was going to beat Whitey Ford, even at Yankee Stadium. If they “hit” a 3-teamer it was cold draft beer and a shot for everybody, but how often do you think that happened? Yeah.

Gambling was illegal just about everywhere in those days. That did not, of course, mean that it was not prevalent. The reasoning was that only the poorest fools would squander their earnings so recklessly and that their families, and society would suffer as a result, although I often thought that, as with so many other forbidden practices, the earning power for the racketeers ballooned as a result of the law. The other part though is that gamblers could seek to influence competition to insure the desired results for their shareholders. They tried and, as we know, sometimes succeeded. That’s why Rose was banned, along with the fact that even though a player or manager might be betting on his team to win, when he inevitably falls into debt to the bookies, things could change. Gambling is so very mainstream these days. We used to have Las Vegas and the rest of the state of Nevada; now it’s everywhere. Indian casinos, a bass ackward attempt at paying 2 or 3 per cent of the surviving members of the people who lived in the Americas before Europeans came to slaughter a large amount of money to exploit the rest of us, are ubiquitous. State lotteries, church bingo, whatever. Much of it is relatively harmless and helps raise funds for worthy causes. This Fan Duel and DraftKings stuff is not like that. It’s more like big business and easy money, just like online poker etc.

Major league baseball should not be endorsing it and you, brothers and sisters, should not participate. Unless, of course, you like being a loser.

Did it really matter that Matt Harvey won the argument about pitching the ninth inning? Well, his determination was admirable and the bullpen options were not very enticing by the time the fifth game of the 2015 World Series rolled around, so all it really proved was that his manager would vacillate in a crucial situation. Mets manager Terry Collins showed poor judgement more obviously earlier when Yoenes Cespedes was allowed to complete his at bat after fouling a pitch off his knee and proving that standing upright took as much energy as he had to use. To answer the question, though, no.
The Mets, it is true, had that game won with a Harvey masterpiece taking them to a 2-0 lead with three outs to go. If he comes out after the lead off walk, maybe. If Daniel Murphy isn’t the mediocre to bad infielder he has always been, maybe. However, were they then going to go to Kansas City and win two more games? It’s baseball, and anything can happen, but no, hell no.
We have seen many times how a strong pitching staff, which the New York Mets certainly have, can carry an otherwise ordinary team to great success. When the pitchers strike out a lot of the opposition batters, a relatively weak infield defense can be compensated for if not totally made irrelevant. The 1969 version of the Mets is a case in point. Also, in a short series at least, even the worst team can win or even sweep the series against the very best team. I don’t know whether or not the 1954 Philadelphia A’s swept or even won any series against the Yankees or Indians, teams that combined for 214 wins, that season but it could have happened. In baseball, however, it is over the long haul of an entire regular season that cream rises to the top. So it was for the Royals this season despite the parity that now seems to exist throughout the major leagues. Every team has holes, but Kansas City had the fewest.
The Royals team of 1985 was somewhat similar, with outstanding defense and strong pitching led by Bret Saberhagen and Dan Quisenberry. In October, although I guess I should now say November, that is what usually gets it done.
One of the nasty things about the culture that we live in now is that winning means so much while contending but finishing second or third is considered failure by so many otherwise friendly people. I want to give credit to all eight playoff teams (admittedly enough for an entire league not so long ago) for providing us with a mostly entertaining (despite Fox television) postseason in 2015.
Now it time to count the days until everyone reports to spring training. The pundits are already going on and on about free agent signings, money for contracts, and all that other business page bullshit. Others turn to football or basketball for sports fixes, or even hockey, but, finding no solace or stimulation there, I will continue posting about the game I love throughout the winter. No money stuff though.

What did you think, the Mets were chopped liver? Come on! This is New York, buddy. Those starting pitchers are all Tom Seaver. At least for a few innings. And David Wright, you thought he was done,dinja? We’ll show those cowtown fakers who’s real.

We have seen many games delayed by inclement weather and a few by fights or near riots, but now, for the first time, we have seen a game delayed because Fox lost power, which probably means electricity. It’s a good thing that they start the games so early in the day. I figure it was either the Islamic state or LGBT people pissed off at Daniel Murphy. We were spared Joe Buck for a while.
You have to love the way that the Kansas City fellows play the game. The only thing missing from their arsenal is East coast hype. The Mets, however, have many good weapons available, now including Juan Uribe. It’s difficult to understand why Juan Lagares isn’t in center field every game but Terry Collins usually appears to know what he’s doing. Curtis Granderson is playing the best ball of his life, Wright is an inspiration, and Yoenis Cespedes truly has transformed the lineup almost single handedly, but the final verdict may come down to the fact that the Royals’ bullpen is stronger and deeper.
Meanwhile, isn’t it gratifying to know that no game henceforth shall proceed without the sterling pronouncements of Buck, A-Rod,Peckerhead, and the ever pertinent Erin Andrews? I know, the official reason given was that they would be without the replay analysis so vital to today’s game. But isn’t that why God made carrier pigeons?

What will be finished first—the World Series or that bag of Halloween treats? Here’s hoping for decent weather as we brace ourselves for the gusty chill of New York versus Kansas City in the  21st consecutive championship of major league baseball since the last cancellation.

These are two very interesting and good teams. I could feel like a cagey prognosticator for calling the Royals the best team in the American League back in April except for the fact that I was ready to abandon that assessment midway through September. Toronto was red hot and the Royals, while in comfortable possession of the lead in the Central Division, seemed to be leaking oil. What had made the Royals look so formidable in the Spring was their solid defense, great team speed and base running ability, adequate starting pitchers and those almost flawless relief pitchers. They had lost Nori Aoki but gained Alex Rios. They had lost Billy Butler but gained Kendrys Morales. Then, to make them appear complete, in mid season they accepted the gift of  Ben Zobrist from Billy Beane and the Athletics and the probable clincher, Johnny Cueto from Cincinnati. Omar Infante had seemed to lose a step both at bat and in the field at second base, so Zobrist solved that problem more than adequately while also providing backup relief for the outfielders, particularly the ailing Alex Gordon. Cueto would join Edinson Volquez to replace the departed James Shields as a reliable big game pitcher. It was all just about perfect, except that Cueto and Volquez were not being so reliable down the stretch and one of the feared relievers, Greg Holland, was lost for the season with injury. So how sharp were the Royals going to be come playoff time? Well, quite sharp enough as we have now seen.

The Blue Jays did not suddenly become losers, but the loss of lefty reliever Brett Cecil showed a relative lack of depth on their staff, David Price was human and, after Marcus Stroman, the hurlers were mediocre at best. Many good things were shown to the viewers of the ALCS, including the outstanding play of Ryan Goins at second base and the awesome power of Jose Bautista. This is a very good team that unfortunately plays in a bad yard that seems to make players prone to injury (ban artificial turf before it’s too late, along with maple bats!) and  is too easy to hit home runs in at the same time.

What about those damned Cubs ruining everything? First, they eliminate the Pirates, who had won 98 games, just because they had a pitcher who had apparently sold his soul to the devil just to win 22 games. Then they knock off the Cardinals, who had won 100 games, just because St. Louis, who had been shelled with machine gun fire and mortars all season long, finally succumbed after one of the most valiant efforts of all time. So the National League pennant has to go to the Central Division, right, even if it’s the team that finished THIRD in that division? Wrong! Why? Well, the Cubs were severely diminished by the loss to injury of brilliant shortstop Addison Russell, but the fact of the matter is that they ran into a team that got very hot at just the right time. That would be the Mets, a team that I definitely wrote off early in the season that really took off after acquiring Yoenis Cespedes from the suddenly inept Detroit Tigers. It was another player who must have sold his soul to the devil, Daniel Murphy, who was largely responsible for the NLCS success, however, but it certainly helps to bat in front of the powerful Cubano. I mean here is a career journeyman infielder who doesn’t field very well, hits pretty well but with only occasional power, and runs well and can steal a base. Suddenly, he was better than Carlos Beltran and Reggie Jackson in their youth. Baseball:that’s why we love it

MEDIA REPORT: The bad thing about the NLCS being over is that now we’re stuck with Fox. This is the empire that demonstrates equal opportunity in hiring to criminals, a perhaps admirable quality that now brings us Pete Rose and Alex Rodriguez at the same sad table. The coverage by TBS was far better, although everyone producing live sports now seems to feel like we’d rather hear players, coaches, and managers talk in trite bland terms (Joe Maddon the welcome exception) about the action than see the actual game. The post game who’s your daddy, cigar, and wine thing was embarrassing, though. Perhaps the lowlight of the ALCS was the interview of the young man who caught the reviewed homer by Moustakas. I will offer a free tofu sandwich to whoever can forward me a tape of Joe “ADD” Buck completing a coherent sentence.

With the first game of the National league Championship Series, winter ball began.Murdoch forbid that we should have a  day game with hope for some sun, that annoying thing that dominated so much of the Royals-Blue Jays game earlier that same day. Murdoch forbid that we should compete with the three or four dozen college football games being televised that Saturday.

When the base runners are blowing on their fingers, it ain’t really baseball weather. Also, when the game is scheduled so that the ninth inning is probably going to be played at near midnight Eastern time, it becomes an adults only affair even on a Saturday night.

Yes, it can still be a good, well played game, especially if it isn’t snowing or raining. But by limiting the number of people able to enjoy the so called national pastime on TV, and by arranging the schedule to please television executives and advertising reptiles who prefer football, baseball is hurting itself in the long run.  The people watching are more limited to those who have been following the teams involved all season and will put up with crappy playing conditions while curious, new potential viewers of all ages may end up wondering what all the fuss is about. As for those wealthy enough to attend the game in person, it can’t be entirely pleasant even if their team wins.

Ski masks on baseball players are much more acceptable in April than in post season when the games are so important.

There were 12 college football games being televised at noon eastern time alone. Why not play those games at night in bad weather the way football was meant to be played anyway? I know the answer. I just don’t like it.

How could a usually very good Texas Rangers infield make three errors in one inning? I don’t know, but they did. How could the New York Mets win three games versus Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke? I don’t know, but they did. How could an esteemed catcher like Russell Martin clang a throw back to his pitcher off the hitter’s bat? You kind of had to see these things to believe them, but the 2015 MLB postseason is off to a roaring start except for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who likely would have beaten anyone but Jake Arrietta, and the New York Yankees, who finally had to face reality in the form of the Houston Astros.
In a season chock full of devastating injuries that continue to this day, we are experiencing an exciting and already memorable set of playoff games. All four teams in the league championship series have to be full of confidence right now. The best strategy for those of us who are not followers of any of them is to just sit back, enjoy, and see what happens next. Make no predictions but I’ll make one:it’s going to be fun.

One of the most clear signs that the United States is an empire in decline is the ceaseless, unquenchable demand for more and more violence, not so much as participants but rather as spectators. That’s probably the reason that the hottest topic to arise from the major league baseball playoffs so far is Ruben Tejada‘s broken leg.Prior to that, it was probably the brouhaha surrounding the soft plunk on Jake Arrietta’s ass by Tony Watson, which led to bench clearing jaw jacking. We love “hits” and it is not limited to football, where killing the quarterback is the aim of the game.
Therefore, at the same time, anyone who advocates for safety over crushing blows is considered a wimp, whether or not people actually come right out and say it.The so called “Buster Posey Rule” that was enacted after his leg was broken by a career minor leaguer doing his best Peckerhead Rose imitation, is often ridiculed by current and former players as wimpy and against the way the game was played for decades and yadda yadda. Despite the fact that such manly men as Duane Kuiper and Pedro Martinez have spoken out in favor of a similar rule to protect middle infielders, cowardly varmints who are going to be called out still feel it is their duty to go after the person and not the bag.
The simple rule should be, but probably never will be, this: You slide. You do not barrel roll. You slide to the base, not to the fielder. It’s apt to be dangerous anyway. The fielder does not block the base or home plate without the ball being at or very near his possession. If the Utley type play occurs, the runner is out and, because of injury, the ball is dead. That’s it.Cut to Viagra ad.
While we are discussing loathsome individuals,how repulsive it is to tune to Fox for a baseball game and see Pete Rose doing the analyst thing along with respectable former players like Raul Ibanez and Frank Thomas. The same people that consider Charles Krauthammer and Oliver North as political commentators are at least consistent. On the other hand, National League games are more enjoyable because of the pertinent remarks of Cal Ripken and Ron Darling. Fox should stick to Nascar and kick boxing and leave real sports to ESPN and TBS.

In October of 1955, the first of several mysterious illnesses that began to plague me annually at about that time of the year found me at home rather than at school. The Brooklyn Dodgers were in the process of finally beating the hated New York Yankees in the World Series, and I was thrilled and mesmerized by the exploits of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Sandy Amoros and, especially, Johnny Podres. The Yankees had famous stars as well but I couldn’t like them or root for them because, after all, as someone said, rooting for the Yanks was like rooting for General Motors, which was sort of the Google or Apple of the time. That’s how relentlessly successful New York had been in those Eisenhower years of American complacency.

At nine years of age I was living in a mostly working class neighborhood and our Irish and Slovak family liked the underdogs, except for Notre Dame. I was on the living room floor expressing my thoughts on this prejudice when my mother, who was paying just as much attention to the game as I was while doing some ironing, startled me by saying “yes, but I like Yogi.  I’ve always liked Yogi.”

Holy mackerel! That was equivalent to her saying that she was going to go to a Protestant church next Sunday.

The next season at World Series time, for some reason I was in school. However,our classrooms at St. Joseph’s all contained something new that year–televisions. Consequently, the principal, Sister Angelus, who was hotly rumored to have a brother who pitched for the Pirates and who regularly joined in with our lunch hour ball games, allowed the televisions to be turned on this day so that we could watch the fifth game of the 1956 World Series during lunch. Wow! Some prayers did get answered! St. Joe’s had a combined fifth and sixth grade room that year so my brother Jimmy, a sixth grader, and I were in the room together. The TV got turned off after three innings and he and I noted that at that point both the Dodgers and Yankees had no runs, no hits, and no errors.  It was Sal Maglie for the Dodgers against Don Larsen of the Yanks. The Dodgers, having won the Series in ’55, looked like repeaters after winning the first two games in Brooklyn, 6-3 behind Maglie and 13-8 as Larsen didn’t make it out of the second inning. Then, at Yankee Stadium, the Yanks tied the series by having Whitey Ford and Tom Sturdivant outpitch  Roger Craig and Carl Erskine. So the final game at Yankee Stadium was going to give the winner a 3-2 edge in games before they headed back to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.  So it was back to geography and all that other bullshit with no knowledge of what was happening in New York for the fifth and sixth graders at St. Joe’s.

Then, without the intervention of the pope or even the parish priest, another miracle occurred.  Not only did we now have televisions, we also had a PA system so that the sound of God, via his agent Sister Angelus, could boom into every classroom at once.  About an hour after lunch, this voice announced that we should turn the televisions back on.  Sure enough, we were to witness the end of that fifth game! Angie, as she was called only far behind her back, was a real fan! Trust me, I wanted Dale Mitchell to reach base. He struck out, and Don Larsen had pitched a perfect game in the World Series. Yankees catcher Yogi Berra rushed out to the mound and leaped on Larsen like he was his daddy coming home from the war.  It was then that I, too, began to like Yogi.  It was then, also, that I was confirmed as a lifelong baseball addict.  And Angie, much to my surprise, was cool.

Yogi died at 90 years of age last week. He was an all star in 15 of his 19 seasons and won World Series money often (13 times) during an era when that money was meaningful. He was also a coach and a manager. People know him well for his crazy, wise sayings but I’ll not be redundant here; you’ve heard them all again this past week.  I’ll remember him for other things as well.  He was in left field when Bill Mazeroski hit my all time favorite home run. He managed the Yankees to a very difficult pennant in 1964 and got the sack when they lost the World Series to a better St. Louis Cardinals team, and the Yankees went twelve years without returning upon his exit. He managed the Mets in 1973, when they finished barely above .500 and then almost stole the World Championship from the vaunted Oakland A’s. He managed the Yanks again in between a couple of Billy Martin reigns and was gracelessly sacked by reptilian George Steinbrenner.  That was one of my favorite things about Yogi, the way he refused to have anything to do with Steinbrenner’s circus for many years until relenting. Hardly anyone was treating George like the asshole he was in those days. Between 1950 and 1956 he caught between 133 and 149 games every season and the Yankees were World Champs all but two of those seasons and in the Series all but one. His lifetime slugging percentage was .482, he had 358 career home runs, and he stuck out 414 times in his career despite his penchant for swinging at “bad” pitches. I am still a Yankees hater after all these years, but this guy is Mr. Berra to me.

As we progress along the road of life and the milestones begin to pass more and more rapidly, certain occurrences seem to tell us that we have perhaps gone as far as we are going to go and that, perhaps, we have now seen enough. One of these hit me in the face last week when I looked at the box score of a game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Colorado Rockies and observed that the two teams combined to use 24 pitchers in a single major league baseball game. I counted twice. Now, of course, it was a 16 inning game (the Rockies won, 5-4) and, of course, it is September with its expanded rosters and, of course, I ought to be better about adapting to change but still…have I lived too long? I know that my pitch for limits on pitchers on the roster in a previous piece was mostly wishful thinking and that the old days are never going to come back but the need for players on the bench who don’t require Tommy John surgery every year and a half but rather do things like pinch hit, pinch run, and sub for defense is obvious and severe. We have now a veritable plethora of five inning starting pitchers and, more appallingly, one inning relief pitchers. That’s a big waste of money, and there are more effective ways to keep managers’ waistlines from expanding to LaSorda dimensions than having them constantly hiking out to the mound and back.

On July 2, 1963, there was another 16 inning game. The Giants and Braves played a scoreless tie for fifteen and a half innings before Willie Mays ended it with a home run and Juan Marichal had a complete game victory while Warren Spahn, at 40 years of age, took a complete game loss. No bullpen. I don’t think that the physiology of athletes is so much different today that complete games and three inning relief jobs are beyond the imagination. I think that a certain psychology has developed that enables the athletes and their coaches to set endurance limits that lead to self fulfilling prophesies. The first time I heard about pitch count limits was when Billy Swift was returning from injury in 1993 and the medics decided he should be limited to 100 pitches. That has now become the threshold for all starting pitchers. If you tell me I’m tired after 100 pitches, eventually I will tend to agree with you, especially if I still get paid. No doubt, some guys are finished even before that. However, I have to believe that guys like Clayton Kershaw, Madison Bumgarner, and Gerrit Cole are strong enough and mean enough to go nine. If the bar got set a bit higher, more young guys would get that way too. Do you think Marichal or Spahn were throwing as hard as they could for sixteen innings? No, since they didn’t have to impress scouts or radar guns, they concentrated on getting batters out efficiently. And relievers like Elroy Face and Rollie Fingers, who could come in with the game on the line no matter what the inning (not the pansy Papelbon “closing situation”), could also still be developed if the will to do so was there.

The playoffs are just about set and it should be interesting. I have favored Kansas City from the beginning, but they might fall victim to the same sort of circumstances that I think hurt Washington last season. They more or less cakewalked to the division title with not a lot of stress and strain over the last few weeks, and we have seen that take away the edge sometimes. Plus, with the uncertainty about Johnny Cueto‘s effectiveness and the bullpen not being anything like it was a year ago, they don’t look like favorites now. Toronto seems to have the right magic at the right time. No team in the A.L. West looks that strong, but let’s give Texas and Houston big applause for fooling most of us most of the time.

In the Good League, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Chicago should just have a three way playoff among themselves and screw the rest. However, since we are sticklers for the rules, New York has an outside chance because of their five inning pitchers and the Dodgers have a chance if there are rainouts between all of the Greinke/Kershaw starts. Stay tuned, though, because I’m always wrong.