Usually, when we talk about commissioners of the major sports leagues, there is contempt to full fledged hatred. Commissioners are not on the fans’ side – they are the employees (toadies?) of the owners, and their main job is to keep the money flowing to their bosses. Sometimes, the job is to act as judge of the activities of the other employees, mainly the coaches and players.
Looking at the major sports, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, while having some issues, generally is the least hated (from my perspective). NHL Commissioner Gary (“The count from Sesame Street”) Bettman will be hated forever because he has overseen two work stoppages including cancellation of the entire 2004-2005 season. That said however, he has increased the attention on the league, added more teams and certainly made the league more profitable, which is his main job, and has been a boon to the fans.
The biggest idiot has been NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. The vain Goodell has proclaimed himself the “sheriff” of the league, but for the tanned, rich white man trying to punish the majority African American league has been nothing short of disaster. The Ray Rice incident; Colin Kaepernick; Bob Kraft under indictment for soliciting prostitution/human trafficking; the crisis of CTE – they have all been handled poorly under Goodell. He was the Gold Standard of inept, out of touch Sports Commissioners. Over the past few weeks however, Baseball Commissioner Rod Manfred has made a solid run at Goodell.
The Houston Astros sign stealing scandal is the biggest scandal since the Steroid Era. Again, there have always been attempts to steal signs in baseball, but this was the first time (to our knowledge) that technology/television cameras were used to steal signs. The fallout was swift: the Astros fired their manager and GM, the two players who became first time managers this year were also dismissed. However, Commissioner Manfred did very little actually. The team was fined, but no players were directly punished, and the Astros were not forced to relinquish their World Series title.
The Dodgers, who lost that World Series and themselves haven’t won a World Series since the 1980s, are pissed off. They feel like their title was stolen. Players around the league have been very open and forthright in saying that the Astro players who participated in the scandal should have been punished. Now, to be honest, Major League Baseball has gone from having the most contentious relationship with the union to over two decades of peace with the most powerful union in the country. How much could Manfred have punished the players under the collective bargaining agreement? Maybe not much, and maybe not much without lawsuits flying all over the place.
Manfred wasn’t done; he had to insert his foot deeply into his mouth. Reacting to people calling for the commissioner to rescind Astros title, Manfred said “The idea of an asterisk or asking for a piece of metal back seems like a futile act. People will always know that something was different about the 2017 season, and whether we made that decision right or wrong, we undertook a thorough investigation, and had the intestinal fortitude to share the results of that investigation, even when those results were not very pretty.”
Calling the World Series Trophy, a piece of metal downplays the will, drive and work baseball players do to be a champion. Maybe the trophy is metal, the gaudy rings are metal and jewels, but the ability to call yourself a champion, means a great deal: to the player, to the team, to the fans, to everyone. Even though I cannot skate, the three Stanley Cups that the Blackhawks won mean a great deal to me; just like the 1985 Bears or the 1990s Bulls or the 2006 White sox Championship. If it’s “just a piece of metal” why is Astros Owner Jim Crane so defiant in saying that they are keeping it and that the scandal had “no effect of the game.” If there are two more clueless people in the baseball/sports world than Manfred and Crane, I can’t think of them.
The only think that Manfred has done correctly is to personally go to the Spring Training parks and warn people not to throw at the Astros. Maybe they deserve it (except for the people who weren’t there in 2017-2018), but to purposely throw a hard ball at 90+ miles per hour at a person, the chances of serious and permanent injury are too high.
There will be a reckoning. Maybe there should be an asterisk? Maybe the Dodgers should be proclaimed champions? The players may not have been punished, but they are pariahs as much as Pete Rose or the Steroid cheats (although a couple may be going to Cooperstown soon).
Regardless, Rob Manfred’s reputation has taken a gargantuan hit with the players, and the fans. He may surpass Goodell yet…

This weekend, the NBA world comes to Chicago for the annual All-Star Game, the first time this city has hosted the event since 1988. Unlike that game, the city’s reaction this year has been muted at best, ignoring at worst.
Yes, the best players in the world will be here but other than LeBron James and maybe James Harden, there really aren’t any transcendent stars playing. Yes, there are a ton of young, up-and-coming stars like Giannis Antetokoumpo, Luka Doncic, Pascal Siakam and many others. The 1988 game had Jordan, Bird, Magic, Kareem, The Mailman, Charles Barkley, and more Hall of Famers. Plus, the players were icons already: the Lakers/Celtics rivalry, Jordan was a global celebrity, Jabbar was nearing the end of his unbelievable career, Barkley was being Charles. And it featured the Heavyweight Championship of Dunk Contests: Jordan vs. Dominique Wilkins. It was a show for the ages. It was like the Oscars for basketball. (This is not to say that we will probably look back on the players in this weekend’s game with awe when many of them make the Hall of Fame.)
It is fairly easy to see why the city isn’t as over-the-top about the All-Star Game. In 1988, the Bulls were a team on the rise with Jordan and Scottie Pippen about to rule the basketball world. The current Bulls are underperformers without a standout superstar (no Bulls are even playing in the game and only Zach LaVine participating in the 3-point shooting contest). Years of “rebuilding” with little to show it and relations between the fans and the media calling for the firing of EVP of Basketball Operations Jim Paxson and GM Gar Forman (“GarPax”). The 19-36 record at this year’s All-Star break doesn’t generate a lot of buzz either.
One thing that is an improvement over the 1988 All-Star Game is the representation from around the world. There are more players from outside the United States than I can remember. As a city with a huge number of people from other cultures. Also, it will have a heartwarming tribute to the late Kobe Bryant and his daughter.
I have not followed basketball for a number of years because the game itself is boring to me. I won’t spend much if any time watching the All-Star Game either. A lot of Chicagoans will be with me.

One of the worst trends of the past several years is that non-apology apology. A person or company does something horrible and shortly after the act becomes public, the lawyers and spin doctors craft an “apology” which is neither genuine nor sincere. These non-apology apologies mostly sound like what they actually are, “we’re really sorry for getting caught.
The latest example comes from the Houston Astros. With the first day of Spring Training, the Astros players, new manager Dusty Baker, and owner Joe Crane were all paraded before the media to discuss the scandal. Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve apologized in brief statements for their roles in the team’s sign-stealing scheme in 2017. “I am really sorry about the choices that were made by my team, by the organization and by me. I have learned from this and I hope to regain the trust of baseball fans,” Bregman said. Altuve said the Astros had a “great team meeting” on Wednesday night and said the “whole Astros organization feels bad for what happened in 2017. I especially feel remorse for the impact on our fans and the game of baseball,” he said. They probably needed to make statements because the apologies are a 180 degree change from their responses at the team’s fan fest last month, when neither player showed remorse for his actions.
New Astros manager Dusty Baker said he hopes his players will be forgiven by fans and other players. “I ask the baseball world to forgive them for the mistakes that they made,” he said.
Crane, as he did last month after Major League Baseball released its findings and punished the organization for the sign-stealing scheme, apologized and vowed “that this will never again happen on my watch.” He pointed out that he went beyond MLB’s decision to suspend manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow by firing both men. Crane said that he agreed with MLB that the players should not be punished. He called them “a great group of guys” who didn’t get the proper guidance from Hinch and Luhnow.
However, that doesn’t change Crane’s bottom line – he will hold onto his title. He took little time to point out that MLB decided that Houston was keeping the title and that he agreed with that decision. “Our opinion is that this didn’t impact the game. We had a good team. We won the World Series and we’ll leave it at that,” he said.
Stealing signs successfully didn’t impact the game? Well, if that’s the case then why was anyone punished? I know that teams in many sports try to steal signs but it was hard looking from one dugout to the other, but with television cameras, it is much easier to do so and the Astros took advantage in an elaborate scheme that was fully endorsed by the front office, the manager and coaches and the players. I can understand the intent to keep their World Series Championship; when you have had no success in your entire history going back to when the team was founded in the mid-1960s, it’s important to hold on to the one bright light in history. Certainly, if a similar event had happened to the Cubs in 2016 after 108 years of failure, the Ricketts would hold on to the championship trophy like a survivor to a life preserver.
But the Astros deserve all of the abuse they’re going to get. They will be booed in every park other than their home ballpark. I look forward to the comments, signs and memes that will be coming out all season. The players deserve it. The team deserves it. The owner certainly deserves it. The only person who doesn’t deserve it is Dusty Baker since he wasn’t there, but he will be booed in association.
And they’ll all deserve it and I hope they’re ready because it is definitely coming.

With the discovery of the sign stealing being used by the Houston Astros during their 2017 Championship Season and the failure of Commissioner Rod Manfred to strip the Championship from the Astros, it was a cinch that the Baseball Gambler in Chief, Pete Rose would once again use this opportunity to have his lifetime ban overturned and allow him to be on the Hall of Fame ballot. After all, the major steroid era stars like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are getting closer and closer to attaining the vote total needed to enter the Hall.
I was a supporter of Rose being in the Hall of Fame because it seemed like he bet while as a manager, not as a player. Years later, when the full evidence on Baseball’s investigation, Rose bet while as a manager, but he also bet while playing. As another person who fell for Rose’s decades of lying, I, like many others turned my back on him.
However, my stance on Peter Edward Rose has been, I think, consistent. I do not believe that he should ever be reinstated; he should never be able to make a living in baseball. However, I have always thought that Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame. The 4,256 hits , .303 lifetime batting average belong in the Hall if, for no other reason that it is impossible to have a morals clause for the Hall of Fame when Ty Cobb was one of the first six enshrines (at least what has been written about Cobb – those stories may be fabrications and exaggerations).
Honestly, I think that baseball is waiting for Pete Rose to die. I believe that the powers that be will never allow Rose to be enshrined while alive. Rose has lied for decades; he would turn the Hall induction into another moneymaking operation, and who knows if that money is being used to gamble, which is something that baseball does not need.
I don’t think that Bonds and Clemens should ever be inducted because what they did was outright cheating. There’s no evidence that I’ve seen or heard that says that Rose threw a game, at least as a player. The younger, less experienced, ignorant members of the Baseball Writers of America, the group that votes on the Hall candidates every year seems to be ready to forgive Bonds and Clemens, or they’re ignorant on history. They don’t understand that both men were shoo-in Hall of Famers before they took one shot or banned supplement. Vanity, jealousy, the need to stay in the game longer drove these men to cheat. Greed and gambling addiction drove Pete Rose and maybe it would be fair for him to never be inducted in his lifetime.

With less than a week to go before pitchers and catchers report to spring training, there were two superstars on the trade block: the Cubs’ Kris Bryant and the Red Sox Mookie Betts. Bryant is on the block because relations between the team and Bryant’s agent, the noted shark Scott Boras are strained because the Cubs kept Bryant in the minor leagues for the first three weeks of 2015 season so that they could keep his rights for one more year. This went to arbitration and the Cubs won, meaning that they retain his rights through 2021 and won’t commit to a $270 million multi-year contract because they also have Javy Baez and Anthony Rizzo to try and keep in town. I wouldn’t bet on Bryant’s Cub future being very long.
Betts, another young star, was being shopped because of salary reasons. The Red Sox, one of the richest teams in the sport, still don’t want to pay over the salary ceiling for players and they have to pay a luxury tax. Finally, another of the big money, big market teams stepped up; the Dodgers, with several playoff appearances over the past few year including losing the 2017 World Series to the cheating Houston Astros, apparently don’t care about the luxury tax. They acquired Betts who is due for a huge multi-million long term contract and also David Price from the Red Sox in return for high prospect Alex Verdugo and they also sent Kenta Maeda, a mainstay in the bullpen to the Twins.
I hate to bring this up, but I do have to question whether besides being a deal they Red Sox needed to make fiscally, they also got rid of two of the most prominent players of color on their roster? Boston of course, was the last team in the major leagues to integrate. Boston of course remains one of the most segregated cities in the country, and is one of the starting places of the Tea Party movement that energized when Barack Obama was elected.
I’m not saying that this was the major factor, but I can’t say that it wasn’t a factor.

In a very surprising move, Mark Dantonio, Head Football Coach of Michigan State announced that he was stepping down to “spend more time with his family.” Whenever a famous person, coach or politician says they are quitting for family reasons, most likely, there are legal reasons, or in college, NCAA investigations that are the real cause.
In this case, the resignation is particularly questionable. First, Dantonio’s announcement comes one day after former Michigan State recruiting director Curtis Blackwell filed an update in an ongoing lawsuit claiming that Dantonio and the Spartans committed multiple NCAA recruiting violations. Blackwell said Dantonio helped arrange jobs for multiple high-level recruits and took Blackwell on recruiting visits, which is against NCAA rules because he was not an on-field coach.
Blackwell was on Michigan State’s staff from 2013 through 2017 during some of the peak years of Dantonio’s 13-year run in East Lansing. Blackwell’s contract was not renewed in May 2017. Blackwell filed a lawsuit last year claiming that he lost his job because he was made into a scapegoat for a stretch of sexual assault issues plaguing the football program and the university.
In an earlier filing for the same suit, Blackwell said Dantonio ignored warnings from two of his assistant coaches while recruiting former four-star defensive end Auston Robertson in 2016. Robertson, according to court documents, exhibited a pattern of sexual violence during his high school years and was expelled from his high school’s campus during his senior year for one incident. Less than a year after Dantonio brought him to campus, Robertson was charged with sexually assaulting a fellow student on campus. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and is currently in prison.
Michigan State athletic director Bill Beekman said the school was aware of Blackwell’s allegations and said the school would be happy to defend Dantonio and his actions in court.
It cannot be overlooked that Blackwell’s dismissal and off the field player issues came to light during/after the 2017 season. After having a dismal 2016 season (3-9 record), the Spartans had another 10 win season, the sixth under Dantonio, but afterward, the Spartans posted two 7-6 seasons – not bad, but not at the top of the conference either.
Other points that make this questionable: Dantonio stepped down one day after the university paid him a $4 million bonus. The resignation also comes the day before National Signing Day, when high school seniors can announce where they are going to play next year. Who wants to go to Michigan State now? Or, do they have a poor recruiting class and Dantonio could be blamed?
In addition, who quits in February? Dantonio says that every February he considers whether or not he’s going to coach the next season. The month with signing day? The start of Winter practice? When it is time to start gearing up for the next season?
Smells fishy to me.

I felt that the quote from Shakespeare was appropriate for the sudden death of Laker Hall of Famer Kobe Bryant at the age of 41 in a helicopter crash. Eight other people including Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter were also killed in the crash that appears to have been caused by fog.
I always had a mixed feeling about Bryant. Coming out of high school, son of an NBA player, Bryant was one of the players no fan knew that much about coming into the league. Of course, that was in the days of high school seniors jumping straight to the NBA; not like today when players have to “participate” in college for one year, giving the school one year of cash flow, and showing the players the hypocrisy of the allegiance of the NBA and NCAA. Kobe grew up in Europe and was multi-lingual, but it wasn’t until he hit the league that everyone realized that he was a unique talent. Over time, you had to admit to his tremendous athleticism and his drive to win. In that way, he was most like Michael Jordan to whom Bryant was always compared.
I admit that, on the court, my antipathy toward Bryant was solely based in allegiance to Jordan. As great as Bryant was, he was a lesser light around here to Jordan. Some people said that he needed Shaquille O’Neal to win his five titles while Jordan did not have a dominant big man (but that argument falls apart because Jordan had Scottie Pippen, perhaps the greatest number 2 man in NBA history). However, they both had that killer instinct on the court. My only issue with him was that he stayed too long. Like Jordan, they both should have retired a year earlier (for Jordan, for the final retirement).
I think I really fell off the Bryant fan club when he was charged with the rape of a 19-year-old girl in Colorado in 2003. The case was eventually dropped, but the young lady sued in civil court and the case was settled for an estimated $2.5MM. Bryant was married at the time to his widow. Stories about this incident made their way slightly in the stories about Bryant and it makes one wonder if there isn’t an impossibility for a black man, even a rich athlete, to considered rehabilitated if he has served his sentence (Michael Vick) or the criminal case was dropped and money paid in a civil matter.
Admittedly, the Colorado case was never the first thing on my mind when I thought of Kobe Bryant. In fact, I didn’t mention it here when he retired. Supposedly, he became a better person for his mistakes: a better husband; a better father. After making a disparaging homophobic comment in a game in the early 2000s, Bryant not only apologized, but he became an active supporter of LGBTQ rights. He was becoming the positive force that perhaps Jordan, bound by Nike money, could never completely be.
We are saddened by the death of the nine people in the helicopter yesterday, especially Bryant and his daughter. (As the father of a daughter only a year and change older, I was particularly saddened by her death and the other young people on the flight.) Kobe Bryant worked very hard to be better on the basketball court, and he succeeded – five NBA Titles, a member of the Hall of Fame. The greater achievement is that he took his mistakes and made himself a better human being. That is the message that we all should take from his sudden, tragic death.