Sports

Abortion Schmabortion: Women Are Finally Getting The Right To Play Professional Baseball! Rejoice!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is way, way, way overdue. The Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) announced that it plans to play during the summer of 2026.

League founder Justine Siegal, the first woman coach employed by a Major League Baseball team, and lawyer Keith Steinco World Series-winning manager Cito Gaston and Japan Women’s Baseball League pitcher Ayami Sato to join them in the venture. Good.

Ever since the Penny Marshall-directed film “A League of Their Own,” based on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which operated from 1943 to 1954. I have wondered why women haven’t had a professional baseball league since then. It is not a sport that requires great strength or size. Unlike basketball or football, I could conceive of an occasional female player making it to the major leagues, especially pitchers.

The problem has always been that talented female Little League players get redirected into softball because that’s the presumed path. There are no college women’s baseball teams; hardball has been a dead end for women. Maybe not any more.

WPBL needs to land a national television deal ahead of its inaugural season to be viable: I think that this can happen. (Suggestion: It should talk Tom Hanks into managing one of the teams.) The league intends to have a full season, playoffs and a championship, with six teams initially participating. If there is one in the Baltimore-Washington area, I’ll be in the stands.

“The Women’s Pro Baseball League is here for all the girls and women who dream of a place to showcase their talents and play the game they love,” Siegal said in the WPBL’s press relaese.“We have been waiting over 70 years for a professional baseball league we can call our own. Our time is now.”

Take THAT, “Handmaiden’s Tale”!

Baseball Ethics Assholes of the Decade: Austin Capobianco and John Hansen

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

(Naturally, they were New York Yankees fans….)

The baseball season ended last night with the Los Angeles Dodgers overcoming a 5 run deficit to win the World Series over the New York Yankees four games to one. Good. It is especially good because the night before, in the only game that the Pinstripes managed to win in the short series, two jerks in Yankee jerseys interfered with the game, the Series and Dodgers star Mookie Betts as he tried to catch a foul fly ball at the Yankee Stadium wall.

In the bottom of the first inning in Game 4 with the Yankees losing 2-0, NY lead-off hitter Gleyber Torres hit a high pop-up into right field foul territory. Dodgers right fielder Betts caught the ball with his glove, but Capobianco, with the assistance of his pal John Hansen, grabbed Betts’ glove with both hands, opened it, reached inside with his right hand and knocked the ball back onto the field. This was on national television for all to see. The umpires ruled fan interference and Torres was called out.

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Ethics Dunce: Ex-Jets Head Coach Robert Saleh

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Robert Saleh has been fired as head coach of the New York Jets after Sunday’s loss to the Minnesota Vikings. With high hopes for a winning season in 2024-25 because star quarterback Aaron Rodgers is finally healthy, the Jets have looked weak while managing only a 2-3 record. The King’s Pass might have worked for Saleh if he had led the Jets to a better record, but many suspect that the impetus for his dismissal was his controversial choice to sport a Lebanon flag below the Nike logo on the sleeve of his hoodie during the Vikings game. This was his tasteful choice while Israel was fighting for its life against the terrorist, Iran-funded organization Hezbollah, which uses Lebanon as its headquarters.

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A Visit to Football’s Bizarro World

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Sure, I guess in a crazy system where universities pay students to play football for them, this story makes sense, sort of.

The star starting quarterback for UNLV, Matthew Sluka is quitting the team after UNLV’s first 3-0 start in 40 years. He says he will sit out the rest of the season because the school hasn’t ponied up the $100,000 he says he was promised by an assistant coach before committing to the school this offseason.

Ah, remember those quaint old days when college football heroes devoted their passion and athletic talents to winning for team, the school, and fellow students? Today instead of “Win one for the Gipper,” it’s “Show me the money.” Tell me again why we let educational institutions run professional football and basketball teams stocked with phony students who usually graduate, if they graduate, having learned nothing but how to talk to their accountants?

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Ethics Quiz: The Offensive… Wristband?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Apparently a biological male who “identifies as female” plays on the Plymouth Regional High School girls’ soccer team in New Hampshire. When the team played its regional rival Bow High School, some Bow parents, protesting the presence of the player whom they regarded as a danger to the born-female players on the Bow team, wore wristbands like the ones above as a silent protest. The Bow High athletic director had told concerned parents before the contest that “in the wake of a federal judge’s ruling that the term ‘girl’ includes males who identify as female,” he felt he was powerless. (He’s a weenie. If he agreed with the parents, he could simply have his team refuse to play the Plymouth team, accept the consequences, and raise the issue.)

When the parents’ “XX” bands appeared at the game, school officials stopped the soccer match, ordered the parents to remove the wristbands, and even “issued [a] police-enforced ‘No Trespassing order’” against two parents who refused.

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An Obvious Life Lesson From Baseball: Imitating Movies Doesn’t Always Work Out Well…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In the much-revered 1988 Kevin Costner film “Bull Durham,” veteran minor league catcher “Crash” Davis mentors a raw, talented rookie pitcher (Tim Robbins) and gets him ready for major league stardom. One of the catcher’s most audacious teaching devices is that when the cocky and none-too-bright pitcher insists on shaking off his signs, “Crash” tells the batter what the next pitch is going to be. Resulst: a massive home run and an chastened pitcher. It’s funny in the film.

The Minnesota Twins apparently have no sense of humor. The team released minor league catcher Derek Bender yesterday for emulating “Crash.” Bender was playing for the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels, the Twins’ Low-A affiliate, and in the second game of a doubleheader last week, Bender tipped off several hitters for the Lakeland Flying Tigers, a Detroit farm team, regarding the next pitch starter Ross Dunn was going to throw. Lakeland scored four runs in the second inning and won the game 6-0 to capture the Florida State League West division and eliminate the Mighty Mussels from playoff contention.

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Just To Be Clear: RayGun’s Apology Isn’t an Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

It isn’t even a non-apology apology.

Littlemore than two weeks ago, both Curmie and I wrote about the ridiculous “RayGun,” aka. Rachel Gunn, who made a travesty of the Olympics breakdancing event (which was arguably a travesty from its inception anyway) and who may have rigged the Oceana competition to represent Australia in order to get a free trip to Paris in exchange for making an ass of herself.

Now, apparently sensing that her metaphorical 15 minutes of infamy was expiring, she’s in the news again for issuing what the ethically-inert news media is terming an “apology.” In an interview with the Australian current affairs show “The Project” the 37-year-old university lecturer said this week that she is “very sorry for the backlash that the [break-dancing] community has experienced” following her performance.

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Ethics Hero: Pro Golfer Sahith Theegala

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Clearly, I don’t follow pro golf like I once did: I never heard of this guy (at first I thought his name was the second row on my keyboard). Now I think I may write in his name for President.

Playing in the PGA’s $100 million Tour Championship, (never heard of that tournament, either) at the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Sahith Reddy Theegala, an American professional golfer from Orange, California, called a rules infraction on himself, costing him two strokes. The self-reporting ended up preventing Theegala from tying for third place, and may have cost him five million dollars.

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 14: Female Baseball Broadcasters

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There is really no good excuse for this one, just reasons, but I’m trying, I really am.

Major League Baseball is making a concerted effort to get more women into the baseball broadcast booths for both radio and TV. I don’t know if this is a DEI-inspired initiative or just a rational response to a long-lasting gender prejudice. Either way, there is no reason why a woman who knows the game, has a pleasing voice and is an experienced broadcaster shouldn’t be doing play-by-play or color commentary.

I am not used to it, however; nobody is. Baseball games to loyal fans are the voices of Vin Scully, Earnie Harwell, Mel Allen, Curt Gowdy, Harry Carey, and the rest. It didn’t help that the first prominent national baseball female broadcaster was whoever the young softball star was who was put in a three-person ESPN Sunday Night Baseball booth next to Alex (yecchh!) Rodriguez several years ago. Cheatin’ A-Rod was terrible as always, but she was embarrassing: NOW should have petitioned to have her fired. She was cute, which I suspect was the major reason she got the job, but most of the time she was giggling or laughing. She set the cause of female baseball broadcasting back at least a decade.

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Ethics Observations On the Sale of Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” Jersey for $24 Million

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The jersey worn by baseball legend Babe Ruth when he “called his shot” in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series sold over the weekend for $24.12 million, setting the auction record for most expensive sports collectible. The previous record price for any sports collectible was the $12.6 million that a rare mint condition Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle card fetched in 2022. Babe’s jersey far eclipsed the $10.1 million a Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls jersey from Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals achived at auction that same year, the record for athletic attire until Babe broke it, like he shattered so many records when he was alive.

The sale raises many ethics issues, but the main one is that the exorbitant price is almost certainly based on a fabrication, a lie. It is similar to paying millions for the axe little George Washington used to cut down his father’s cherry tree.

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