Much of today will be occupied by my driving my little sister to West Virginia where she will finally adopt a new dog more than a year after her beloved canine companion, a sweet Havanese, perished of old age. From experience, I know bring a new dog home is a two-person job. I won’t be able to post on developing ethics catastrophes until this afternoon, but I am hoping to leave enough metaphorical bread crumbs behind to prompt some lively discussion.

For instance…

1. I know I alluded to AOC’s head-exploding statement on ABC’s “This Week” a week ago that “Woke 1 was crazy” but attention should be paid. Then she said, “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.” How can anyone trust a politician who would say something that cynical and damning? “Oh yeah, my party and I advocated all sorts of crazy stuff way back then (a few years ago!), but come on, don’t hold us to that nuttiness.” This is a back-room consultant’s solution to problem of the Axis embracing so many so-called 80-20 positions—let minors get their genitals mutilated with “gender affirming care,” defund the police, abolish prisons, forgive student loan debt, “et cetera, et cetera,” as the King of Siam would say. Funny… in my world, people who say they believe ridiculous things are regarded as, in fact, ridiculous: untrustworthy and irresponsible even if they bleat “I didn’t mean it!” later.

2. Oh good: I haven’t had a “Yankees suck!” topic for a while! An upsetting essay (gift link) in the New York Times begins…

“On one side of East 161st Street looms Yankee Stadium, the baseball fortress in the South Bronx that is the home of baseball’s $10 billion franchise, the richest in the sport. On the other lies a park in one of the Bronx’s poorest communities, built on the site of the former Yankee Stadium after the old home of the Yankees was torn down in 2009 and 2010. Macombs Dam Park was originally intended to serve as a shrine to the team’s history. Plaques commemorate great Yankee moments, as does the iconic facade that was stationed above the original entrance. Quotes from Yankee greats make up the park’s signage, and Elston Howard Field was created as a replica of a stadium that stood for 85 years. The park is about 44 acres, and also includes a track, playground and basketball courts. Yet over the past decade, the park has fallen into a state of decrepitude, trash littering the venue. The playing surface, with uncut grass and sprouting weeds, is uneven and unsafe. The field, when untended, is largely unplayable.”

The story continues to tell us that kids have broken ankles and legs trying to play on the field because of all the holes, and that parents in the area, one of the state’s poorest, feel betrayed and ignored. Nonetheless, however, none of the parties with interests in the project have stepped forward to fix it—not the state, not the city, and not the New York Yankees, as they all point to each other and generally refuse to respond to the news media’s inquiries.

Ethically, the #1 villain is obvious, to me, anyway. The Yankees should clean up and maintain the park. It’s that team’s history that resides there, and there is no question that the Yankees can afford it without having to plow through the red tape the community would have to navigate to get results. The team pays 8 figure annual salaries to utility infielders. The state of its legacy field is a disgrace to the memory of the Babe, Joltin’ Joe, the Mick and Lou Gehrig. (Okay, I have to say it: naming the field after Elston Howard, the first black Yankee star, is DEI crap, and I loved Elston. But Yankee Stadium was long called “The House that Ruth Built,” and Babe was the greatest Yankee.

More “Woke 1”?

3. Speaking of baseball ethics and the hugely profitable sport being cheap, last week the Baltimore Orioles lost a game they thought they had won in dramatic fashion when an apparent home run by slugger Pete Alonso was ruled foul by the umpires. The potential home run ball was so high that it soared far over the left field foul pole, and the videos of the blast were inconclusive. The technology is available to make such calls with certitude, but stadiums haven’t installed it, presumable because it is expensive and the situation doesn’t arise that frequently. However, the outcome of single games can affect careers, seasons. championship and franchises. The story in The Athletic ends,

“Everyone acknowledges more needs to be done…No one was able to offer clear answers or timelines.This week, MLB players fumed at a fair/foul call like generations of ballplayers before them.In 1963, an umpire’s foul call on Willie McCovey’s towering ninth-inning fly ball elongated the game into a 16-inning marathon. “He didn’t make the call right away. I hit it so high and far, he waited until it landed … which was in Oakland,” McCovey said in 2013, still grumbling as the 50th anniversary of that epic game approached. “He was the only person in the ballpark who thought it was foul.”

…“It seems odd to me that we don’t have cameras on foul poles,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “That’s the one thing that is not different in every ballpark.” New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone acknowledged that while it’s natural to want to use every available tool to get calls right, it’s likely more complicated than a quick install that fixes everything.

“That’s a little above my pay grade,” Boone said.

I really hate it when people say that.