It seems like Jackie Robinson Day received more publicity and commentary than usual yesterday, which was appropriate, and besides, Robinson deserves it. In fact, I would support a national holiday honoring him. I watched, again, the 2017 film “42” last night in Robinson’s honor. At the same time I was watching that film, TCM was showing “The Jackie Robinson Story,” a remarkable independent film made in 1950 while Robinson was still playing. Amazingly, Jackie played himself, a very brave thing to do. There were no black male stars in 1950 who could have sold the film to white audiences, and Robinson recognized how important his journey was to tell, so he agreed to play himself. Sure, he’s a bit stiff, but Robinson doesn’t embarrass himself at all. Like so many old movies and plays, “The Jackie Robinson Story” is a window on a different era and how racially divided America was. (Of course, according to the antiracism, “1619,” BLM cult, nothing has changed.)

Back to “42”: I had forgotten its classic entry into the “print the legend” sweepstakes, which I wrote about here.

Finally, I have a bone to pick with Joe Castiglione, Boston’s Red Sox play-by-play broadcaster for the past 40 years, and as astute a student of the game as one could find. While I was listening to the Sox play the Twins in Fenway yesterday (Boston lost), Joe called Jackie Robinson “the most important player in baseball history.” That description is understandable hyperbole on a day honoring Robinson, but it’s wrong. Jackie Robinson is the most important baseball player in American history, but Babe Ruth has to be acknowledged as the most important player in baseball history. Not to diminish Robinson’s achievements in any way, but if he had not existed, another black player, like the great Larry Doby, who was the first black man to play in the American League a year after Robinson, would have broken the color line. However, there were no other Babe Ruths, and without him, it’s very possible baseball wouldn’t exist today.

Reckless hyperbole can cause confusion and long-term misconceptions.

1. Hey! That obnoxious “Black Lives Matter” sign that has stood in front of my neighbor’s house for two years (along with a suit of armor, for some reason) is gone! I hope the various Ethics Alarms posts about BLM’s scams I left with the knight influenced her decision….

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[Part 1, “The Good,” is here.]

The Bad

If it weren’t that I was emulating the Sergio Leone spaghetti Western, the title here would be, “The Terrible.”

This week, Los Angeles Dodgers Hall of Fame-lock Clayton Kershaw was pitching a perfect game against the Minnesota Twins with just two innings and six outs remaining. There have only been 23 perfect games—no men on base at all, no hits, no runs, no walks, no errors— in baseball’s 150 year+ history. Kershaw has never pitched one, and at 34 he’s closer to the end of his career than the beginning. He had only thrown 80 pitches, meaning that he was likely to finish a perfect game, if he succeeded at pitching one, with less than 110 pitches thrown, well under what is considered risky for starters. Yet Dodger manager Dave Roberts took Kershaw out of the game. He’s done this before with pitchers in the midst of no-hitters, usually when their pitch count was high, but this time there were no reasons, just excuses.

What’s going on here? It’s the corporate approach to baseball. Roberts used a utilitarian argument, saying that what mattered most was getting to the World Series, not any single game. In other words, the fans don’t count; even if the chances of our ace being hurt by pitching two more innings is remote, the decision has been made organizationally that protecting long-term investments like superstars with multi-year guaranteed contracts has a higher priority than the game itself.

Watching a pitcher try for a perfect game or even an ordinary no-hitter is any fan’s dream; not only is it pitch-to-pitch suspenseful, but if you witness one, you have been a part of history. Your ticket and program become collector’s items. Baseball’s priorities as demonstrated by this sickening episode are literally upside down. In recent years, it has eliminated two of the most exciting plays in the game, take-out slide at second base to break up a double play and the collisions at home plate, and all but eliminated the prominence of star starting pitchers by reducing their workloads drastically. It’s a professional sport where its athletes are all millionaires, but as Roberts’ decision proves, it is unwilling to take any risks to keep the game exciting and memorable.

Utilitarian trade-offs only are ethical if competing factors are assigned the right values.

The Ugly

Then there are the MLB teams that don’t even try to win or field a competitive product. The strategy is called tanking. After World Series title runs first by the perennial cellar-dwelling Chicago Cubs and then the Houston Astros, tanking has become a popular way to rebuild. Instead of accepting mediocre play that holds little chance of pots-season glory, a tanking team will trade away high-priced veteran players for unproven prospects and, to be blunt, stink for season after season, with small payrolls and a series of 100-loss seasons. Such teams do not reduce the price of tickets or ballpark food, though what they are selling has lost much of its value. The practice alienates fans and enriches tanking owners. Players hate it, because in any season at least four or five teams have taken themselves out of the market for the best free agents.

The new, contentiously-negotiated agreement between the players and the teams was supposed to address tanking, which can only be effectively addressed by a mandatory minimum payroll rule. When ethics fail, law or rules have to step in. Baseball teams are supposed to serve their communities, but the contagion of elevating profit and single-goal success over integrity and concern for stake-holders has taken hold of baseball’s culture. Days after the owners ended the lock-out to allow the season to begin, two franchises with grand traditions of fielding exiting teams held fire sales, slashing their budgets and signaling that they were joining the tankers: the Oakland A’s and the Cincinnati Reds. Good job, everybody!

In Cincinnati, fans and sportswriters were vocal in expressing their anger, so last week the team president, Phil Castellini, told them to stuff it, saying in part,

Well, where are you going to go? Let’s start there. I mean, sell the team to who? That’s the other thing — you want to have this debate? If you want to look at what would you do with this team to have it be more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. And so be careful what you ask for…I think we’re doing the best we can do with the resources that we have. We’re no more pleased with the results than the fans. I’m not sitting here saying anybody should be happy. I’m not polishing trophies in the office right now, and that’s what we’re here to do. 

His rant did not go over well.

Later the same day, after the team’s PR director had grabbed him by the throat and screamed, “What the hell’s’ the matter with you?” the Reds CEO issued a pro forma apology:

I apologize to Reds fans and regret the comments that I made earlier today,” he said. “We love this city, we love this team and we love our fans. I understand how our fans feel and I am sorry.

Right.

If you only skim the daily (well, almost daily) ethics warm-ups here, you might have missed this disgusting story, brought to you by the corrupt legal and political system in South Dakota. I’ve posted about it twice, so here is a summary to bring you up to date. On September 14, 2020, I wrote in part,

South Dakota’s Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg–he’s a Republican— reported hitting a deer over the weekend. In fact, his car hit and killed a man whose body wasn’t discovered until the next morning, the Department of Public Safety said today. Governor Kristi Noem confirmed that the Attorney General had been involved in a fatal crash. Ravnsborg told the Hyde County Sheriff’s Office that he hit a deer on the highway. At this time it is not known if Ravnsborg stopped to confirm that he hit a deer…It is unknown as of now whether if Ravnsborg called 911 or someone else, but the press has requested recordings of all calls related to the accident The body of 55-year-old Joe Boever was discovered the next morning.

On Feb. 26, 2021, I posted this update:

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was engaged in a fatal hit-and-run accident as discussed briefly on Ethics Alarms last September. He told law enforcement that he thought he had hit a deer on his way home from a social event. Prosecutors announced that they were only pursuing misdemeanor charges against him, which is beyond outrageous, especially since detectives found a pair of broken reading glasses inside Ravnsborg’s Ford Taurus.

They belonged to the man he killed, though Ravnsborg said he didn’t know he had hit a man until the following day, when he returned to the scene and found the body of Joseph Boever, 55, in a ditch. This means that either 1) he then took the glasses as a souvenir, which is creepy 2) the deer he hit was wearing…no, that doesn’t work, never mind, or 3) the dead man’s head came through the windshield, as one of the detectives concluded in an interview released by the South Dakota Department of Public Safety on Tuesday.

Incredibly, Ravnsborg says that he will not step down! “At no time has this issue impeded his ability to do the work of the office,” his spokesman said in a statement. WHAT? The fact that the public now knows that its top law enforcement officer is a liar, a drunk driver (this was why he didn’t stop, of course), guilty of manslaughter and a coward doesn’t undermine his ability to do his job? If he really thinks that, let’s add “idiot” to the list.

This week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers filed two articles of impeachment against Ravnsborg and South Dakota Governor Kristi L. Noem (R) called for his resignation. That’s a start. Now let’s see the hacks that only charged Ravnsborg with three misdemeanors for conduct that would have anyone else facing homicide charges lose their jobs and law licenses.

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“This doesn’t seem safe for us, this 990 structure — this nonprofit system structure. This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with.”

—-Patrice Cullers, co-founder and former executive director of Black Lives Matter, referring to the Federal laws that require all charities and non-profits to disclose their finances and activities to the public .

Yeah, I bet the laws requiring Black Lives Matter to keep records of its donations and how they are spent make you feel unsafe, Patrisse.

As Ethics Alarms discussed in February, Black Lives Matter is being slowly but surely exposed as a scam, as its fundraising arm can’t account for much of the $90 million it raised when the group pulled off a massive white guilt-fueled shakedown of corporations and individual donors. Cullers helped rip the veil away herself when she spent $3.2 million on real estate across the United States after BLM closed out 2020 with $60 million in the bank. Though BLM denied that Cullors spent BLM funds on her personal properties, the organization and other activist groups under Cullors’s control offered contracts to an art company run by the father of her only child. A coincidence, I’m sure.

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