Milwaukee Brewers shortstop Cooper Pratt has a bright future ahead of him, but it is brighter now because his manager, Pat Murphy taught him a lesson about what it means to be a professional in general and a Major League Baseball player in particular.
As you can see in the video, Pratt hit what looked like an easily caught pop-up in the fifth-inning of last night’s game against the New York Mets, so he jogged down the baseline more slowly than Pete Rose used to run to first after a base on balls. The Mets, because they stink this year, managed to mess up the play and the ball dropped in for what would have been a double if the kid had been running hard. Standing on first, he looked surprised to see that Murphy was replacing him with a pinch-runner, pulling him off the field in an old-school public rebuke for unprofessional play.
As you must know by now unless you have been in a submerged submarine with a broken communications system like the one in “Crimson Tide,” Dolly Parton died yesterday at 80. Why her death is being described as a shock is a mystery: as my father said when he hit 80, “It’s the Red Zone, son. I can kick off any second from here on!” Nonetheless, the public and official outpouring of grief, love and admiration is unlike anything we’ve seen at least since Princess Diana’s demise in 1997.
The tectonic reaction is certainly not based on Dolly’s singing, acting or song-writing. Personally, I was never a fan; Dolly’s singing voice always sounded to me like someone who has inhaled helium. Her songs were pleasant but unremarkable to my ear. As an actress, I place Dolly Parton in the large category of experienced public performers who can project their own personalities effectively into roles and stories where their personalities seem appropriate, a diverse group that ranges from the late Fred Thompson to the late Bob Newhart to the not-quite-late Ringo Starr.
Clearly, the reason Dolly is being mourned so vigorously is that her public persona was entirely benign, virtuous and lovable, even aggressively so. She literally gave nobody any reason not to like her. In 2020, as the Great Stupid was grabbing American society by the throat, Hollywood producer Rob Long wrote an appreciation of Dolly in “Commentary” exploring her universal popularity. He wrote in part,
Last night the Milwaukee Brewers tied the MLB record for the most lopsided shutout in modern history with a 22-0 rout of the Seattle Mariners. Once upon a time and not so long ago, the Brewers would have been shamed for “running up the score” because a very old unwritten rule of the game held that doing so was unethical: unprofessional, cruel, pointless, sadistic, and a Golden Rule breach. When the Texas Rangers defeated the Baltimore Orioles 30–3 on August 22, 2007, the most one-sided wipe-out in professional baseball since the 19th century, the Rangers were widely condemned for inflicting such a humiliation on another team and its fans. I think, with the Brewers win yesterday, we can officially pronounce the silly unwritten rule repealed. It never was ethical. Good riddance.
The unwritten rule probably dates back before professional baseball. Running up the score in Little League and pick-up games is cruel, pointless and, yes, a Golden Rule breach, but carrying it into games where spectators pay money and the players are compensated for their performance never made sense. It is a violation of integrity for professional athletes not to exert maximum effort. The score won’t stop, or shouldn’t stop, a player from making a spectacular fielding play, or hitting the ball into orbit. Real baseball fans love the game, not just a team. For a winning team to stop trying to score runs is unethical. Fans are being cheated.
A game with so many runs scored is long? Hey, nobody’s forcing a spectator to stay. If I pay to see a game, I pay to see the whole game. Moreover, one of baseball’s inimitable charms is that weird and wonderful things happen that have never happened before all the time, even though there have been roughly 243,700 baseball gamesplayed over the entire history of the sport since 1876. Just this week, a rookie hit three home runs in his first three trips to the plate in his first game ever, something that is unprecedented.
Is it really so hard for officials in the Womens National Basketball Association to come clean and admit “Of course we don’t think males who just decided one day “POOF! We’re females!” should play against women in sports. We were just virtue-signaling to knee-jerk progressives and we don’t want to publicly agree with anything the Trump Administration supports. That would put the WNBA out of business!”?
Apparently. Now the league looks like silly bunch of hypocrites and woke morons, which it is. Permit me to mock and excoriate them.
White, 35, a Republican candidate for US Senate, announced, “I’m transgender! I’m a woman… I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purposes of… professional basketball,” to Fox News. “I think I’d be unstoppable,” White continued, tongue sort-of in his metaphorical cheek. “But I’m a team-first guy. I’m a pass-first kind of player. I do the little things. I led my team in all five major stat categories at Iowa State University, so I do a little bit of everything. I’ll do whatever the coach needs me to do. I’ll do whatever the girls need me to do.”
Freedom, in his own “POOF!” moment, had been all technical and stuff, which is no fun. He said he had reviewed the WNBA’s eligibility criteria, and and that he meets all the requirements. Article XIII of the WNBA’s 2026 collective bargaining agreement says, “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” but the 409-page document diesn’t define “women” and has no policy on transgender eligibility, including never stating whether self-identification alone is sufficient sufficient to make everyone call a player “she” or “they” and allow the biological male to change in WNBA locker rooms and smash the girls on the court.
Royce took the pass and scored. The WNBA just has to be honest about the absurdity of biological men playing in women’s sports, Royce said. “I think the WNBA could come out and make a definitive statement about guys with a pair of balls playing in the Women’s Association,” he said. His plan: he is serious about wanting to be drafted and will proceed until the WNBA’s leadership stops trying avoid throbbing reality.
If he isn’t drafted, Royce says, he vows, he’ll sue. “I have to file a discrimination lawsuit, right? I mean, that’s, that’s ridiculous,” he told the Fox New. “We’re gonna have to have a huge legal battle about discrimination if I can’t play.”
Gotcha!
The WNBA only ethical and practical option now is to admit it, but its pusillanimous leadership doesn’t have the integrity, intelligence, courage and respect for the public to do it. Instead, it released a rare example of official “huminahumina.”
“I know many of you have received questions in recent weeks regarding transgender athlete participation in women’s basketball, and I expect this topic will continue to receive significant attention. I wanted to reach out to share how we are approaching these conversations at the league office and to thank those of you who have responded to questions from the media with thoughtfulness and professionalism. [The WNBA will] always approach this topic thoughtfully, respectfully, and in alignment with the longstanding values of our league. Second, our player eligibility rules, unlike the eligibility rules of some other leagues and governing bodies, are collectively bargained. Lastly, preserving the integrity of our game and ensuring fair competition will always remain among the league’s highest priorities. We recognize that this is a complex and nuanced topic, and we will continue to have important conversations with all of you and the Players Association in the weeks and months aheadWe also plan to convene additional discussions and offer listening sessions for any team leaders who would like to participate. Your perspectives and feedback are invaluable, and I appreciate those who have already reached out to share their thoughts.”
Ramalama ding-dong! The statement means absolutely nothing. Ralph Kramden’s famous “huminahumina” is actually more articulate. It isn’t a complex or nuanced topic at all, and Engelbert’s league epitomizes why, as Royce and Freedom make crystal clear. If males can be female just by deciding that they are, the WNBA is toast. If men can’t do it, boys can’t do it. She is defaulting to the infamous but ancient tactic of avoiding an inevitable conclusion with unpleasant ramifications (like admitting that people she hates are right, and obviously so) by calling for “discussions” when there isn’t anything to discuss other than “How the hell do we get out of this?”
Players who have responded to questions from the media with thoughtfulness and professionalism number exactly two: Caitlin Clarke, who said she didn’t want to talk about it, and the now iconic Sophie Cunningham, who has repeated her opposition to biological males playing against women in all sports because it is unfair, dangerous and stupid. The rest, if they said anything at all, echoed Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White, who blathered that she didn’t have the scientific background to have an opinion on the issue. Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said earlier this month, fatuously,”We need to protect trans kids. To me, it’s a human rights issue. Every kid has a right to sports.”
Are you willing to let biological men squash your female players flat to “protect trans kids,” you idiot? Are you willing to wipe out women’s basketball and sacrifice girls to protect them? Do you think before you speak?
The WNBA players union also resorted to self-contradictory gibberish:
“We embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion .Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change. Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm. We will continue to have hard conversations. But we will not be used as political pawns.”
Translation: “We embrace slogans that keep us aligned with the radical progressive bubble, but have no interest in living up to them when they are adverse to our own self-interest. We know we can’t simultaneously protect women’s sports and allow trans-women top dominate them, but we’re hoping the public is so stupid that they won’t see the obvious hypocrisy in our rhetoric. As with the rest of the ideological Left, we’re going to attack the messengers who carry the facts that reveal our absence of integrity, and hope it works for as long as possible. We trying the “pawns” analogy because it distracts from reality, which is that we leaped into this hopeless cause to signal our virtue, and made the WNBA combatants on the losing side of one of the Left’s dumbest obsessions.”
Popcorn popped, as the saying goeth. I can’t wait to see how the WNBA tries to extricate itself from its self-made mess.
Jefry Yan, a minor league pitcher renowned as an oddity for his bizarre and unique manner of celebrating strikeouts finally got to perform on the major-league stage this week. In the New York Mets’ 6-5, 10-inning win over with the Cleveland Guardians this week, Yan preserved a one-run New York lead in the sixth inning, striking out two Guardians in the process and punctuating each strikeout with his characteristic, er, flair.
Not long ago, maybe a couple of decades, a rookie pitcher who acted like that during a game would be taken to the metaphorical woodshed by a coach or a veteran player and told, “Kid, that’s not how we act in the Big Leagues. Don’t do it again.” One reason would be that the team he “showed up” by celebrating would make sure their pitcher hit his team’s star player in the ribs with a fast ball as soon as the player came to bat. Before the Designated Hitter, when pitchers had to bat, a hurler who behaved like Yan would be taking his life into his hands.
Now MLB has adopted the attitude of “let the kids play” to appeal to younger fans. Being a “Get off my lawn” guy, I don’t like Yan’s antics much, and I suspect a lot of batters don’t either. But I also remember how Dick Radatz, aka “The Monster,”the huge Red Sox closer in the Sixties who for three years may have been the greatest relief pitcher ever, used to throw up both arms over his head in a victory gesture when he ended a game with a swinging strike-out, as he inevitably did. It wasn’t as outrageous as Yan’s split, but at the time it was considered audacious.
And the fans loved it.
Mets Manager Any Green isn’t worried that Yan’s antics will cause any issues with the opposition. “I worry far less (today) than 20 years ago,” Green said. “I think he has developed a reputation throughout the game that this isn’t showing up anybody else, and people have accepted, largely, that this is a good-natured human who’s enjoying being on the field playing baseball. We didn’t have many minor-league teams take issue with his enthusiasm. They end up smiling at it if they’re not the one getting punched out.”
Yan is a bit defiant. “I’m going to continue to go out there the same way, to go out there with the same emotion to have fun as if I’m playing a kids’ game, like I always have,” Yan said before his Mets debut. “I’m going to enjoy that first (strikeout), like it’s my first and last one. I’ve worked a long time for that moment.”
I would offer two points. One: his displays of joy will become less tolerable if he doesn’t have consistent value to his team. The second is that I worry about the gimmick becoming a slippery slope. At what point do such eccentricities constitute “making a travesty of the game,” an offense that remains in the rulebook? What’s next? Pitcher’s doing “the worm” after strikeouts? Trotting out a home run backwards, as emotionally-troubled baseball star Jimmy Piersall once did? Cultural norms exist for reasons. Sometimes we don’t remember those reasons until it’s too late.
I remember sports columnist Steve Buckley, now with the Athletic (the Times’ captive sports publication) from my halcyon days in Boston. Now he’s issuing badly-reasoned, ethically blind sports commentary from a national platform. Yecchh.
As a special annoyance, his poorly-reasoned observations on sports figures weighing in on national controversies are under a misleading headline: “Aaron Rodgers, Sophie Cunningham speak out. Caitlin Clark doesn’t. Either way, they lose.” I assumed from those words that Steve was going to echo my long-time position regarding narrow-range celebrities in general: “Shut up and sing/dance/act/ dribble/run/kick/pitch.”
But no.
“…Sports people (and this includes sports media people) who weigh in on political and social issues can count on being inundated with anonymous directives that they should “stick to sports.” It’s a mystery who these people are who feel empowered to tell others to stick to sports. The mere utterance suggests somebody with a doctorate in government affairs, or who perhaps has served in Congress or the diplomatic corps. The hypocrisy is at once comical and frightening. We like it when our athletes offer their opinions on this or that issue, except when we disagree with those opinions. (Stick to sports!) And athletes who choose not to play this silly parlor game are dismissed as cowards. At the risk of boring you with seventh-grade civics, but to use a kitschy sports term to make the point, this would be a good time to have a Turn Back the Clock event that teaches and celebrates the protections of the First Amendment. And if you happen to be a member of a championship team who’s been invited to the White House, go ahead and go. Or don’t go. Do that First Amendment thing and tell everyone else to screw off. For sports people who want to take a stand on this or that issue and who are prepared to deal with the avalanche of positive and negative commentary that ensues, go right ahead. For athletes who choose to say nothing, allow them that right. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”
Because things are complicated, Steve—now I remember why I skipped your work at the Boston Herald—and because they are complicated, most sports celebrities have nothing of value to contribute in understanding them. Celebrities do, however, have outsized metaphorical megaphones that give their usually simple-minded opinions far more influence on the public than is healthy for democracy and the quality of civic discourse. I know why Buckley has his own simple-minded view of this issue: sportswriters are, with few exceptions (not him, obviously), also unqualified by intellect, education, experience and skill, to comment publicly on political and social policy matters. Like all journalists, they think they are smarter than they are. This column is a useful piece of evidence to the contrary.
The inspiration for Buckley’s piece was Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci after the Ethics Villain repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Senate hearing last week, plus Sophie Cunningham‘s public statements regarding trans-females competing in women’s sports, along with fellow WNBA star and team mate Caitlin Clark’s refusal to get drawn into the controversy. Right off the bat (that’s a sports metaphor), Steve trips on his sneaker laces by mixing apples and oranges (a fruit analogy).
I know, 50% of you will skip this one…and I pity you.
Today is a big crazy day for baseball fans: it is the MLB trade deadline, when those teams that feel they have a chance at post-season glory and World Series immortality will try to acquire significant reinforcements from the teams that have given up hope. The latter teams will dump contracts while trying to acquire younger, cheaper players, many still confined to the minor leagues, so “Wait until next year!” has a chance of coming true for their disappointed fans.
The event has become important since baseball emulated the other professional sports by diluting the importance of the regular season by increasing the number of teams that can qualify for the play-offs. As I have written in the past, I detest this development, which is a deformed offspring on the free agent system. After today, the 30 teams will have split into mostly non-competitive pushovers playing out the last two months without hope and much superior teams “going for the gold.”
The biggest star and the most valuable player in these annual sweepstakes is Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, the consensus choice as the Best Starting Pitcher in Captivity. Skubal has won the AL Cy Young Award two straight years. It is his free agent year, and the Tigers know his asking price to re-sign in beyond their resources. The team had to trade him now, and almost every team with a ghost of a chance to get to the World Series would love to have him. Who traded for him yesterday? Shockingly the one team that didn’t need him: the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers have won the World Series two years in a row, they are locks to win their division again, they have the most money and the largest payroll in the game, and basically have a team of All-Stars without Skubal. The trade reignited a protest in the sports media and on barstools that the Dodgers were unethically greedy and “ruining baseball” by monopolizing talent, emulating the New York Yankees dominance during baseball’s first century. (The classic 1950s musical “Damn Yankees” was adapted from the novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost The Pennant.”) My view: Nonsense. AOC, Bernie and Mayor Mamdani like that argument, because they are communists. The Dodgers have succeeded because they are well-run and make smart decisions, including making many that benefit fans at the sacrifice of the bottom line. Baseball, alone among team sports, promotes individualism, exceptionalism, and capitalist values. Teams are not are not limited regarding their payrolls, and players are not limited regarding how much money they demand to play. Furthermore, baseball has traditionally benefited by having teams playing the role of The Evil Empire. It’s like the villains in professional wrestling.
[Full disclosure:My feelings on the matter might be influenced a tiny bit by the fact that the Boston Red Sox, currently on a historic winning streak that pulled them out of today’s class of pathetic white flag-waivers into the mob of hopeful “buyers” (23 wins in the last 26 games) swept the Evil Dodgers in a three game series in LA, winning last night 8-4.]
“I don’t know that I would say that I’m educated enough from a scientific standpoint.I don’t ever believe that exclusion is an answer. I just don’t. I do think when we think about various levels of sport, various governing bodies of sport and things that go into that, like I said, I’m not, I’m not educated enough at the different levels. I know growing up, I played with the boys all the time.”
—–WNBA’s Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White, asked to expound on the controversy around her star guard, Sophie Cunningham, who has aroused the ire of transgender activists by stating her opinion that young girls in sports should not be made to compete against biological men.
What a pusillanimous, ignorant, disingenuous statement. White would have been better of to simply state that her policy is not to comment on matters that do not concern the WNBA or her job as coach. Her statement is on the same offensive level as woke Justice Jackson saying that she can’t define what a woman is.
How “educated” does one have to be to look at this…
or this..
….and conclude, “You know, that doesn’t look fair to me” ? How hard is that?
It’s hard for Wilson because, unlike Cunningham, she’s afraid of the vengeance of the radical left and its woke enforcers. Cunningham is a role model for young women who take seriously the feminist credo of not behaving passively, fearfully and compliantly or avoiding the role of a leader because that’s how ladies are expected to behave. She said regarding her trans-females in sports opinion when recently interviewed about the attacks on her for standing up for women and reality, “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”
Ah, but do you have the scientific training to have common sense?
Yes, it’s true, I regard professional soccer and professional women’s basketball as less than diverting, but this sport, Australia’s Run Nation Championship (RNC), not only requires morons to watch and play it, the sport is likely to turn competitors into morons if they aren’t already.
Part Sumo wrestling, part Easter egg cracking, part “Jackass” and part bumper-cars, the “sport” involves muscular contestants running into each other at full speed to see who falls down. This idiotic competition was spawned by ‘run it straight,’ a social media trend that had random people running into each other for online views. The videos of stupid teens colliding and often suffering injuries have gotten millions of views online. The Run Nation Championship is trying to make the sport mainstream.
RNC has different weight classes. Most participants, called runners, have a background in combat sports, rugby, or American football. Run Nation co-founder and CEO Tremaine Fernandez says he’s trying to make the new sport as safe as possible…you know, like the electric chainsaw juggling contests do. Fernandez admits that the collisions still risk concussions and serious injuries, but his organization has doctors on the sidelines, so it’s all good.
Sports neurologist Rowena Mobbs, among others, has been calling for the sport to be banned.“Certainly every time they run up and clash in that way, there’s likely to be at least a microscopic brain injury,” Dr. Mobbs said. “They are high-risk and harmful activities, and almost having these protocols and practitioners there whilst good overall, I would ask, is it sort of giving an air of reassurance, an illusion or an impression that these activities are safe?”
You mean that children and teens and drunks and cretins will think, “Hey, this looks like fun!” and people will get maimed and killed? Of course they will! I guarantee this new pastime, which essentially takes the complex strategy, scoring and rules elements out of football and hockey to focus on what its fans really like—the violence—will become a sensation in the U.S., fueled by social media, on-line gambling, and low IQs.
Ban it? Hey, this is America. We have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and if running full tilt into consenting people makes some dim bulbs happy, then let them do it. A few thoughts:
1. The female runners should make just as much as the male runners. It’s only fair…
2. The biggest societal benefit of the sport will be its Darwinian selection features.
3. As with NFL football, anyone who watches this sport is complicit in the injuries it will cause.
The U.S. soccer women’s national team had nothing to do with the U.S. men’s national team’s success in the World Cup it was eliminated by Belgium. Never mind though: because the men and U.S. Soccer allowed themselves to be bullied by woke-think and self-righteous women like Megan Rapinoe into an equal pay deal, the money–$16 million—the men earned will be split 50-50 with the women. Or as one wag put it: the men earned the money while the women stayed home. The news media has called the arrangement “ground-breaking.” It’s ground-breaking, all right. So would an agreement that required the men to clean Megan’s house with a toothbrush.
I should state up front that I could not care less what the men do with their prize money, and if they made a deal to give half of it to homeless puppies or the Obama library, that would be fine with me. However, this does represent a distortion of “equal pay” and one more high profile (well, for those who pay attention to soccer anyway) slide down socialism/communism’s slippery slope.
U.S. Soccer keeps 20% of the prize money, with the remaining 80 % is to be split evenly between the men’s and women’s player pools. That comes out to roughly $246,153 per player. Now, if we want to rationalize this crummy deal for the men, it could be described as a team unity, one for all and all for one device. That’s not what’s really going on, however. When the woman play in 2027, they will earn much less prize money than the men did no matter how well they do. The USMNT earned $13 million for reaching the round of 16 at the 2022 World Cup. The USWNT earned just $1.87 million for reaching the same stage at the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
Unfair? That contrast in rewards reflects a difference in talent and ability. In a meritocracy, which is what the United States is fighting to remain after 250 years of success with that motivation to excel, it is absolutely fair that the men earn more. A good men’s college soccer team would beat that U.S. woman, and the men play a faster, better, more entertaining version of the game. The Left’s version of fairness, however, is based on sharing benefits with the collective regardless of who did the most to earn them.
The men, weenies all, let themselves be pressured into the prize-sharing surrender in 2022, when blind DEI was ascendant and the Biden Administration along with the rest of the Axis of Unethical Conduct were twisting logic, ethics and fairness into metaphorical pretzels. We are now at the cross-roads of what “fairness” is. Does it mean to each according to his or her needs, and from each according to his or her ability?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is...
Is the U.S. Soccer “Equal Pay” deal fair, responsible and ethical?
Ethics Alarms 