I appended the title so that the many readers here who skip my baseball posts don’t skip this one entirely. It’s not mostly about baseball. But the introduction is.

You see, now it really gets hard for me. Grace, my wife of 43 years, dropped dead on Leap Year. March 1 is when baseball’s Spring Training becomes serious, and baseball is one of my most consuming passions. I taught Grace to love the game; during the seasons we watched the Red Sox almost every day (until they frustrated her too much, which happened frequently). Today, the 2024 season ends. It didn’t save me from being depressed, overwhelmed, guilty, angry and frustrated, but it sure helped a lot. The games also were virtually my only respite from work, as I try to resuscitate our, now my, struggling business after it was savaged by what I bitterly call “the Stupid Lockdown.” I’d watch a game with Spuds sprawled across my lap, then, when it ended, usually around 9:30 pm or so, I would head up to the office to go back to work, either in the throes of the joy of victory or the agony of defeat.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll have neither Grace nor the the Red Sox. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, yesterday was an ethics milestone in Red Sox, baseball and sports history.

On September 28, 1941, the last day of Major League Baseball’s regular season, the Ted Williams became the first player since 1930 to hit .400 as well as quite probably the last player to do so as well. “I guess I’ll be satisfied with that thrill out there today,” he told the Boston Globe of his quest for .400. “I never wanted anything harder in my life.” He never wanted anything harder, but he refused to get it on a technicality. Going into the final day, a double-header, “The Splendid Splinter” as he was called by some writers sported a .399 average that had enough numerals after it to be rounded up to .400. The Red Sox manager, Joe Cronin, told Ted to sit out the last two games. They were meaningless (the Yankees had already clinched the pennant, just like they’ve already clinched the American League East title this year, and the games were meaningless to the Red Sox. Cronin told Williams that nobody would blame him for protecting his historic batting average.

But Ted Williams didn’t care about other people (this was something of a problem for him); it was meeting his own standards that mattered. He felt that “backing in” to a .400 average would be cowardly and would tarnish the achievement in his own eyes. So he risked his .400 average by playing both games…and got six hits in eight at-bats to raise his average to .406.

The ethics password for this weekend is “integrity.“

Meanwhile, in non-baseball ethics news…

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There are so, so many reasons a Donald Trump victory over Kamala Harris is essential to restoring justice, ethics and a healthy democracy to this nation. It is a tragedy, or perhaps a cosmic joke, that none of those reasons have very much to do with the desirability of having Trump as President for four years. Never mind: what has been going on in the U.S. under the false justification of innate Leftist superiority is frightening, pernicious, and has to be stopped, which includes appropriate punishment.

One of those reasons the Axis must pay is its use of the legal system to harass, hobble, and if possible to jail Donald Trump. The conviction for—well, something—in the rigged Manhattan trial is certain to be overturned on so many grounds it’s like a 1L law school exam, but the case still has given Democrats the chance to describe Trump as “a convicted felon.” The dubious sexual assault case against him (which only proceeded because New York suspended the statute of limitations so Trump could be “got”) let them call the Republican Presidential nominee an “adjudicated rapist” after another politically motivated trial. Then we have the Fani Willis Follies in Georgia, where a prosecution against Trump was derailed because an incompetent and and corrupt D.A. used the case to get her lover on the Fulton County payroll. There are a couple more dominoes to fall in the disgusting “warfare” campaign against Trump, but as long as he loses in November Harry Reid will be high-fiving in Hell, because like Reid’s lie that Mitt Romney paid no taxes, the unethical strategy “worked.”

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Americans don’t appreciate the critical work on their behalf being done by groups like Turning Point USA, FIRE, and Prof. Jacobson’s Equal Protection Project, all of which would be termed “threats to democracy” under Joe Biden’s rhetoric.

This time it was Turning Point that stepped up. Riley Gaines, the gutsy and articulate former college swimmer who has become the de facto leader of opposition to allowing biological males compete as women against female athletes, was scheduled to speak at the University of New Mexico. The event was sponsored by Turning Point’s student organization on campus. The University told the students that they would have to employ extra security staff because Gaines would naturally be a catalyst for potential violence since the current mutation of student progressives like violence. (That wasn’t exactly what they said, but I’m acting like a journalist this morning.) TP-UNM told the University that it expected around 100 attendees and that the Gaines event would would last around three hours. It then received an email including an invoice that charged the students $10,202.50 to let a conservative speaker give her views on campus (well, again, that wasn’t exactly what the email said. It’s just what the email meant.) The charge covered the use of 33 security officers, or one for every three anticipated attendees, in the discretion of the university.

If your First Amendment alarm doesn’t sound after reading that, it might not have been installed correctly.

After the event, which went on without incident and minimal protesting, the final invoice that UNV delivered was about half the original amount. I’m guessing a UNV lawyer told UNV, “Mmmmm, I think $10,000 is too obviously a ‘Shut up, you bigoted conservatives!’ message. You might get away with $5,000.”

It didn’t. Turning Point sued, and yesterday, in Leadership Institute v. Stokes, a court struck down the UNV policy and its inflated, speech-constricting invoice. “Plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of their overbreadth claim because the security fee policy does not contain limiting language that includes “narrowly drawn, reasonable and definite standards[,]” and it does not include anything to prevent UNM administrators from exercising their discretion in a content-based manner….,” the court ruled.

Good.

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Pointer: The Volokh Conspiracy