According to the Miami Herald (and SI.com) Florida Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is reportedly upset with the club’s failure to reach the playoffs. Loria will reportedly meet with front-office executives next week to decide whether to keep manager Fredi Gonzalez and the rest of the coaching staff.
This would be a typical move for almost all of Major League Baseball, and in no way newsworthy, except for the fact that Loria has cut the payroll to $35 million, by far the lowest in the majors. Despite this, the Marlins finished the season with the third-best record in franchise history at 87-75 and a very respectable second place finish in the always competitive National League West.
But club officials, including Loria, thought the team should have done better. How? Maybe a little support from the ownership other than the semi-annual fire sale of players and prospects would have been nice??? How can the ownership fire a guy who got his team to win and play together if he’s given nothing but kids and prospects? I can see the team pulling out the old cliché: “we need a guy who can take us to the next level.” Sparky Anderson, Casey Stengel, Leo Durocher, John McGraw and Abner Doubleday couldn’t manage a team without the support of the ownership.

Reportedly, the 1½ year old marriage of tennis great Chris Evert and golf star Greg Norman is over. The two have separated; there is no word whether there will be a divorce.
Ever since these two got together, I wondered if there was enough room for their egos, or their wardrobes, not to mention their tanning beds? I guess I was right.

We here in Chicago are used to failure, certainly concerning baseball. As the playoff bound teams wind down the schedule and prepare for the post season, for the first time in five years, there won’t be a Chicago representative. This season however, the Cubs have underperformed and the White Sox have been unbearably inconsistent. But there is one group of fans who have to feel cheated: fans of the Minnesota Twins.
Here, we hate the Twins because they are always either beating out the White Sox in the standings, or constantly nipping at our heals. Manager Ozzie Guillen called it right when he called them ‘piranha,” and to us, they have been, and doing so with mirrors. Every year, they seem to lose another great talent like Torii Hunter, Johann Santana, to free agency because the small market (small minded, cheap??) ownership cannot or won’t pay for talent. But their farm system keeps coming up with terrific players like Joe Maurer and Michael Cuddyer.
But for all of this success (and the fans support them) and the building of a new baseball only park to replace the Humphrey “Homerdome,” they haven’t wan a title since the glory days of the late Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek. With all of their home grown talent (and they have locked up Maurer and a few others to long term contracts), they have been unable to do better than second place for several years. They don’t even make the playoffs. Last season they lost a one-game playoff at US Cellular Field to my beloved White Sox, who then went on to get swept by the eventual American League Champion Tampa Bay Rays. In reality, the Twins wouldn’t have faired any better.
The Twins are one game away from being eliminated and having their second consecutive 2nd place finish in the AL Central Division. And while they have made the playoffs in 4 of the last 8 years,, they lost each time (swept 3-0 by Oakland in 2006; lost 3-1 to the Yankees in both 2003 and 2004; and lost 4-1 to the Anaheim Angels in 2002). Being a consistently good team, but not good enough to even make the World Series, and watching my best players leave for more money would drive me, as a fan, crazy. In recent years, the team starts slowly, catches fire in August and September, only to peter out at the end of the season.
The Pohlad family who have owned the Twins for years, are getting what they wanted, Target field, set to open next season. Now it’s up to them to spend some money to add to their core players to build a champion. Can they do it? Will they do it?
As a White Sox fan, I hope they don’t. If I were a Twins fan however, it would be time for the owners to “put up or shut up.”

SLAM! That sound you hear is the Chicago 2016 Olympic team including Mayor Daley, Patrick Ryan, Oprah, and unfortunately, President and Mrs. Obama being slammed. In fact, the Chicago bid didn’t even make it to the finals. It was the first city eliminated before the International Olympic Committee gave the 2016 Summer Games to Rio De Janeiro.
There was a building sentiment of people like me, who did not “Back The Bid,” because Chicago couldn’t afford it; improvements in the infrastructure should be done as a matter of course, and how many more of Daley’s cronies, distant nephews and other relatives need to fatten their personal wealth at Chicagoans’ expense?
Simply, this may be the first time in a long time that Daley has been rebuffed, and its about damn time. Corruption is at its worst in memory; even his father could cover his tracks better than his son. But no one is strong enough as a candidate to unseat Richard the Second. It would take another Harold Washington, who could pull together the North Shore, African-Americans, and Hispanics into a coalition that could beat Daley, and there’s no one who could pull that off. The aldermen and women are too frightened, beholden to Daley to challenge, and no one else has the money to build an alternative candidacy. How long will it be before some smart prosecutor gets the goods on Daley and sends him off to the Blagojovich/George Ryan wing of the federal prison?
For Pat Ryan, former CEO of Aon Insurance, I say, go back to trying to have your company survive. He has learned a bitter lesson that the IOC is not northwestern University – he can’t just throw money around and have football stadiums named after him and his wife. As you know, my enmity toward Ms. Winfrey knows no bounds, so, to see her fail is also welcome.
That the President and First Lady even got involved in this was disappointing, but understandable. The Obamas were trying to support a US interest, and probably repaying some political debts by traveling to Copenhagen on the Chicago bid’s behalf. But it was a big slam to them as their presence didn’t even get Chicago past the first cut. Some will criticize Obama for even going; some will say that he was embarrassed by Chicago being cut first. Most of these people are Obama haters who will criticize which side of the bed he woke up on this morning.
But, like the whole Chicago bid, the President has more important things to worry about: Afghanistan, Iranian nukes, health care reform, the economy. I don’t believe that his standing in the world or at home were harmed by the IOC vote, but there WERE better uses of his time.
So, it’s over. No more money thrown at this, and with the city eliminated early, there probably won’t be attempts for the 2020 bid or beyond. The sports fan in me is a little disappointed, but the pragmatist in me is SO glad we didn’t win.

With the Swiss arresting famed director Roman Polanski this week, this may finally bring an end to a 31-year farce. Polanski has lived abroad since being found guilty of giving drugs to a 13-year-old girl that he was photographing for Vogue Magazine and having sex with her. As the father of 2 daughters, I think that I would have been for arrest, extradition, and severe punishment, even though “Chinatown” and “The Pianist” are terrific films.
There is no excuse for Polanski’s actions, despite even the fact that he had to hide from the Nazis during World War II; having his mother killed in a concentration camp; and that he was obviously psychologically off-kilter after the Manson family slaughtered his wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child. This is even though there are reasonable questions about the young woman’s mother and putting the girl in such a situation of being around Polanski. But to most, Polanski is known just as a rich, famous man, who avoided prosecution by leaving the United States, never to return.
However, my opinion on the situation has changed as a result of watching “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.” This documentary gives all of the facts in the case, including interviewing the young woman at the center of the maelstrom; Polanski’s attorney and the district attorney who prosecuted the case. The young lady, now 41, who received a monetary judgment and reportedly “forgave” the famous director some years ago, says that the case against Polanski should be dropped and that the government’s actions had been move harmful to her than Polanski’s act.
The most telling portion was that the judge was more interested in his public image than the law or even the case. Polanski was found guilty and was sentenced to 3 months in jail and probation. Polanski served time, but the judge thought that the public would feel that the sentence was too light. Deal after deal was made and broken, and by the time of the final sentencing, it was obvious that the judge was going to break his deal with Polanski again. The prosecuting attorney said in the documentary that he himself would have run too under the circumstances.
Again, it is obvious that Roman Polanski did a dreadful thing, but it is obvious that there was severe judicial misconduct in the case. The judge cannot be reprimanded; he died years ago, but it was obvious that he acted in bad faith with Polanski and his attorneys. And while Polanski has been able to ply his craft in Europe, has gotten re-married and has four children, he has been hurt by being unable to be openly financed by Hollywood studios which has probably limited his ability to make more films, and of course, was unable to receive his Best Director Oscar in 2002 for “The Pianist.”
So, now Roman Polanski sits in a Swiss prison, vowing to fight extradition, while new prosecutors try to put the 76-year-old director in jail. While two wrongs don’t make a right, neither do several wrongs. Perhaps, the film and this arrest will finally get the sides to close the book on this case and allow Roman Polanski to face his remaining years free of the cloud that has hovered over him for three decades.

All along, I have been against the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid. It was too expensive especially considering how that money could be used for schools and infrastructure; no Olympiad other than Los Angeles in 1980 has ever finished in the black; and I don’t want to deal with the traffic and congestion that we will have to live through for Daley’s pipe dream. And speaking of Daley, how many more billions do his family and friends get to scam from the public?
It stinks like high heaven, and I had been secretly hoping that President Obama wouldn’t make the trip with his wife to push for the bid, but he decided on Monday to go. Is there any way that Chicago won’t get the bid now? With the most popular President abroad, along with Oprah Winfrey and “Da Mayor,” I have little hope that Rio or Tokyo or Madrid will get the bid. I concede that it would take a miracle of epic proportions for Chicago to not get the bid at this point. I wish that the President would have fought harder for a public option on healthcare for everyone instead of paying back political favors to the most corrupt civic administration in the country.
After the announcement on Friday, we Chicagoans will face seven years of hastle, millions of dollars spent, corruption that will make former governor Blagojovish blush, all for a three week party that regular people won’t be able to afford.

To be fair, I want to post the response from Lin Brehmer, WXRT morning man and my follow up response from yesterday’s post. First, Mr. Brehmer:

“I’m still not the music director. We have played Marshall’s new album, but not as much as some other new CD’s. I cannot second guess those people who have to make the difficult determination what artists require emphasis. We often do not send Dj’s to shows because we just have too many of them. When XRT sponsors a show, it is commonly the promoter who asks us to put our call letters on the event and we provide free promotional announcements. Signage is at the discretion of the venue.
The fact that XRT still plays cult artists whose greatest commercial success was 25 years ago is EXTREMELY unusual. I know for a fact that you will not find a commercial station in the world that plays Crenshaw, Parker, Joe Jackson, and Kings of Leon. As for Kings of Leon, they are a very good band that attracts listeners under the age of 40 without whom, we would cease to exist.
How was the show?”

My response to Lin was: “I know that you have little or no control. I just needed somewhere to discuss that “the suits” suck. And, I agree that it is great that a station still plays older artists, it’s just sad to see a great radio station seem to limit itself to 2-3-4 songs by those artists and not play anything else, especially their current music during drive times when older people, who don’t know the musicians are still out there, listen to the station. I know that there needs to be new music, and I hope to hear it, I just took a cheap shot at a band that bores me to tears.
And the show was great. It was a great setting: small, good acoustics, and I was amazed at how good a guitarist Crenshaw is. I’ve been taking lessons for awhile, and I was sitting in the second row, and I was just watching Crenshaw play. Just amazing. In addition, he was in fine voice, and he was playing with a great band which included the great Graham Maby (from Joe Jackson’s band).
It’s been six years since MC’s last CD and, while I must admit that it doesn’t really break any new ground (other than the use of some jazz-type chords and arrangements), it is a fine record and it was a fine concert.”

I would like to thank Lin for responding. Over the years, he has been the only person with the station to answer my questions and listen to and address my criticisms. Admittedly, the DJs are only doing their jobs (I’ve met a number of them over the years); it’s the management (and, to a certain extent, the non-demanding listeners) that has made the station a mere shell of it’s former self. (And the Kings of Leon ARE boring.)