I do hate Cub fans. They’re part of the reason that I went from being a fan of both teams to rooting solely for the White Sox. The Indignant Wife and I went to a Cub game (before kids) and the Cubs lost 5-2, but the fans were ok with it, because the runs came on a Sammy Sosa home run. No, they should have been upset to lose a game they could have won and needed in the standings.
Cub fans used to be knowledgeable and discriminating (listen to the Lee Elia rant). Now that they’ve won a World Series, Cub fans have become Red Sox Nation Light – expecting victory and getting depressed and whining on sports radio and social media when they haven’t won every game. So far this season, the fans have been all over free agent acquisition pitcher Yu Darvish.” The Japanese pitcher has been injured all season and may not pitch at all the remainder of the season. Yes, the Cubs signed him to a $126 million contract, but that’s Theo Epstein’s call and the team’s lack of due diligence is to blame. The fans have been all over Darvish all season, and are ready to do everything except hang him in effigy.
However, the Cubs are in first place in a weird season where it doesn’t seem like they’re playing all that well consistently, but they quietly have the best record in the National League at 71-52, and doing so with injuries to Darvish and former MVP Kris Bryant, a slow start by Anthony Rizzo and some others. However, there is a call to fire Manager Joe Maddon if they don’t make the playoffs or go all the way. There has been enough talk to merit a column in the Sun-Times today about it. Just two seasons removed from the first World Series Championship in 108 years and you want to fire the guy? That’s ludicrous. Yes, he’s wacky (but not boring), and makes some calls that makes fans groan, but every manager gets that, and in a major media city, that happens more. The honeymoon shouldn’t be anywhere near over. The man shouldn’t have to buy a beer at any bar in the area, and there are some ready to let him go?
In 2012, after winning a Stanley Cup in 2010, the Blackhawks’ first in 47 years, but with two first round playoff exits, there were Hawks fans calling for Joel Quenneville’s scalp. Of course, with the wholesale changes on the team as a result of the salary cap, only top talent and a great coach could succeed over that. Of course, the Hawks won the Cup again in 2013 and 2015. After last season’s last place finish, the heat is on Quenneville again, which is fair, but the leash should be very long for coaches that win titles. If Q has lost the clubhouse, that’s a vastly different story. As crazy as Ozzie Guillen was and deserving of being fired, he should never have to buy a drink on the South Side for life after 2005.
Like Quenneville’s hot seat, I ask a simple question – who are you going to get that’s better? Who’s available? Dusty Baker? Been there, done that. Ryne Sandberg? To me, the guys is doing his job, winning baseball games. While there will always be some grousing, managers/coaches who guide teams to titles should get some loyalty from the fans before there’s any talk of change.
Cub fans need to get a grip.

Quite a few years ago, I made a daring proposal – reduce the number of teams in Major League Baseball. When I made this recommendation (early 2000s, they are here on the site), I said that there are too many teams who didn’t win and didn’t get fan support. The best these teams could hope for was to sign and develop young talent, get a few years of service, then watch them get signed by the bigger market teams. At that time, I suggested the Pirates, Brewers, Rays and Royals be disbanded. I even brought this up at a speech by Bob Costas at the Museum of Science and Industry, which didn’t go over well with a partial owner of the Brewers in the crowd.
My thinking was simple – there are teams who have never won a title or won one so long ago, no one under 30 remembers. The Pirates were natural, Pittsburgh is a Steelers town. At the time, PNC Field had just been built, so the new stadium added 10-15 years to a franchise’s life because the local municipality and/or the owners invested millions into this new edifice. However, unless a good team plays in the new stadium, there is a one year boost in attendance, just to see the new park. After that, you’d better win.
At the time I suggested this, the Brewers had just been given the 15 year reprieve of a death sentence with Miller Park. Since then, the Pirates have been contenders for a few years but haven’t made it deep into the playoffs. The Brewers have also been decent, but not great. Tampa Bay also saw success with some playoff appearances, but trying to compete in the same division with the biggest spenders in the game: the Red Sox and Yankees, dooms them. Tampa Bay remains the leader for retraction – the team is bad, the stadium is a pit, and there are no fans to speak of. The same can be said of Florida, although the Derek Jeter led ownership team makes this a compelling franchise, at least in the newspapers.
Of course, the owners weren’t buying it. Certainly the Players’ Union wouldn’t want to see jobs lost, so my discussion was futile. Or was it?
Why am I writing this (burying the lede again)? In 2015, I wrote that maybe parity had reached baseball. The Kansas City Royals had done the unthinkable – won the World Series. Despite being in one of the smallest markets in the game, stuck with a 40 year old ballpark and sports fans whose loyalty begins and ends with the Chiefs, had built a champion. Maybe, I wrote then, the Royals shouldn’t be considered for the scrap heap.
Jump cut to this week – the Royals and my White Sox are the two worst teams in the American League Central. Only the Baltimore Orioles are worse. The other night, the Royals took a 6-run lead over the White Sox, which most of the time would be an insurmountable lead, but not today’s Royals. The White Sox came back to win 7-6, dropping the Royals some 8 games behind the White Sox (34 ½ games behind division leader Cleveland). Most of the stars from 3 seasons ago have been traded, or are playing with youngsters around them who aren’t very good. Like new stadiums, perhaps there is a statute of limitations on fan loyalty after a championship.
I also bring this up because, with attendance down some 6.5% the last time I checked, and rules are once again being considered to speed up the game. Expansion is not even being considered at this time (in fact, a decision has to be made on Tampa). Should contraction be considered, and if so, do the Royals remain one of the major possibilities?

I’m Back

I know I’ve been away for awhile. Work and family duties and a well needed vacation to Europe have kept me away from these pages. I will do better in the future.
Now, it’s almost time for football, so let’s get talk about the cesspool that is college football…

Seriously? Part 1

How many will it take? How many football players at the college and high school levels will die of heatstroke because of lack of preparedness or just gross hubris and stupidity? Don’t coaches understand that one of their major responsibilities is to make sure that the young men under their tutelage live?
A few weeks ago, Jordan McNair, 19, collapsed on the practice field as a result of high temperatures. McNair died June 13, two weeks after the workout at Maryland’s outdoor practice field. An independent review reported that McNair did not receive proper medical care, and some members of the training staff made mistakes,
A University of Maryland football player who died of heatstroke this summer according to preliminary results of an independent review. The review, which will be made public in September, found that the appropriate emergency response was not followed in McNair’s case and the care the university provided was not consistent with best practices. McNair’s heat illness was not promptly identified, and athletic training staff did not take his temperature and apply a cold-water immersion treatment.
As a result, the university placed its head football coach, D.J. Durkin, and members of the athletic staff on administrative leave pending the investigation into circumstances surrounding the death. The university also accepted the resignation of head strength coach, Rick Court. “We will honor Jordan’s life and we will ensure that a tragedy such as this never happens on our campus again by working every single day to provide the safest environment for our student athletes on and off the field,” Director of Athletics Damon Evans said, fighting back tears in a statement to reporters.
Evans announced the preliminary findings hours after he and university President Wallace D. Loh met with McNair’s family and shared the findings with them. The two officials reportedly apologized to the family during that meeting in Baltimore and issued public apologies. Loh said he told the family the “university accepts legal and moral responsibility for the mistakes that our training staff made on that fateful workout day.” (Legal responsibility? I’m sure the university lawyers aren’t happy with that unsolicited admission.) Loh said he also told McNair’s family: “The university owes you an apology. You entrusted Jordan to our care, and he is never returning home.”
As usual, once the barn door is closed after the horse has already run away. Since McNair’s death, the university has given more training to athletic training staff and increased the number of breaks and cooling stations during practice, officials said.
Maryland, one of the latest members in the Big Ten, a move intended to broaden the conference’s geographic fan base and television audience on the East Coast, is a big time university despite having been mostly a punching bag to the other Big Ten schools. Nonetheless, Maryland is a multimillion dollar athletic program, a multibillion dollar state university. Certainly they have the money to train staff in how to handle these issues? There is no reason for young men to die on a football field.
However, coaches still operate under the old rules of “manliness” and “being tough” and “sucking it up.” Every summer, we lose young men to the blistering heat (not helped by climate change that makes the summers even hotter).
One would think that a death would make these coaches sit up and take notice. Maybe it will at Maryland, but “it could never happen here at (fill in the blank).” Until young men’s lives, especially young men of color’s lives are considered important, it will happen again and it saddens me.

While I was away, serious allegations and investigations have begun around Ohio State Head Coach Urban Meyer. Again, the Neanderthal attitude about players and coaches dealing with women came to the forefront.
In case you haven’t been following it, Meyer remains on paid leave after a report by veteran journalist Brett McMurphy came to light alleging that Meyer knew of domestic-abuse allegations involving an assistant coach in 2015, something Meyer has denied.
Zach Smith has been an assistant coach under Meyer at Ohio State and a graduate assistant while at Florida, which is where much of the problem occurred. Meyer has been very supportive of Smith in part due to the fact that Moore is grandson of the late Ohio State Head Coach Earle Bruce, who Meyer looks at as a mentor. Smith was accused of aggravated battery on his then-pregnant wife, according to reports, but the charge was dropped because of insufficient evidence. Meyer said during Big Ten media days that he knew of a 2009 report that prompted him to recommend counseling for the “young couple.”
Jump cut to 2015, when there were a series of incidents/allegations of domestic violence, one of which resulted in a menacing-by-stalking charge and restraining order, according to McMurphy’s report. The Smiths reportedly separated in June of that year and divorced in 2016. Meyer did fire the receivers coach on July 24 but only after McMurphy’s original story unearthed police reports that shed light on Smith’s abusive relationship with now ex-wife Courtney.
Meyer said he did not know about the events of 2015. “I can’t say it didn’t happen because I wasn’t there,” Meyer said of the 2015 allegations. “I was never told about anything and nothing ever came to light. I’ve never had a conversation about it. I know nothing about it. First I heard about that was last night … and I asked some people back at the office to call and say what happened, and they came back and said they know nothing about it.”
After the Big Ten media days, Ohio State placed Meyer on paid leave while it investigates the allegations and that offensive coordinator Ryan Day will serve as acting head coach. As of now, Zach Smith has not been convicted of any charges. He recently pled not guilty to a charge in May of misdemeanor criminal trespass after his ex-wife Courtney Smith accused him of driving to her apartment to drop off their son instead of an agreed-upon meeting place.
An Ohio court granted Courtney Smith a domestic violence protective order before Zach Smith’s firing.
McMurphy’s report includes photos and screen shots of purported text conversations between Courtney Smith and Meyer’s wife, Shelley, that, if authentic, leave little doubt Urban Meyer knew of the 2015 allegations and kept Smith on his staff. In Courtney Smith’s video on Facebook, she claims she sent photos to Shelley Meyer and spoke to her about the situation by phone. “Shelley said she was going to have to tell Urban,” Courtney Smith said in the Stadium interview. “I said: ‘That’s fine. You should tell Urban.’ ”
If true, these allegations appear to be another awful example of a coach protecting a program rather than someone’s well-being. It happened at Penn State. It happened at Michigan State. And it appears to have happened at Ohio State as well.
I don’t have much positive to say about college football coaches in general. They are paid multimillion dollar salaries, more than university presidents, to deliver wins in a sport that, with the revelations of CTE, may cause brain damage. All with the carrot of a potential NFL job, which numerically is at best a long shot (about 1 in 50 college players are drafted by an NFL team or about 2.0% but this only counts who were drafted – free agents who make it might bring the percentage up to 2.5% perhaps). College coaches are generally snake oil salesmen to me.
The big question is, will this permanently cost Meyer, an Ohio native who is 73-8 with a national title at Ohio State his job? I think the odds are worse than the chances that Donald Trump calls Robert Mueller over to the White House for a beer. Ohio State football is a religion like it is at Penn State, or Alabama, or Michigan. Unless there’s proof that Meyer hit the former Mrs. Smith himself, I think Meyer will retain his job.
The bigger and more important question is if Meyer and the other NCAA coaches will understand that the coaches are as responsible for their contact as the players are. If it had been a player accused of domestic violence, the wheels of “justice” would move very quickly, which is appropriate. I have long asked what message does it send to young men who coaches are supposed to be helping become men when they retain an incompetent assistant coach? What about a coach who abuses women (or men for that matter)?
Will they ever learn (again)?

I get the feeling that Northwestern Head Football Coach Pat Fitzgerald is only slightly more welcome to Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany than letters from me (I have written letters to the commissioner, but they have never even garnered a replay – I think they made it to the shredder).
Every move the commissioner makes has meant big money for the member universities, but at the expense of the “student” athletes. A couple of years ago, Delany planned of having one game per week on Friday nights, for television. This encroached upon the unwritten rule that Friday nights were for high school football, whether they were televised or not. Fridays were for high schools; Saturdays for colleges; Sunday and Monday for the pros.
As usual, there was very little comment from any of the schools or the coaches about this plan, except for Fitzgerald, who said that he was against it. It was less time for his players to have class, less preparation one week, too much the next, and it disrupted the season schedule. At first, Delany schedule NU on these Friday nights an inordinate number of times, in apparent punishment. No games on Fridays were played, I don’t remember what exactly happened to pull the plug on this misguided idea, but it didn’t happen, but I have a feeling that Delany is no fan of the Wildcats or Fitz.
If you haven’t looked, Northwestern plays on Thursday night August 30, less than 2 weeks away. OK, that’s been done before, I remember attending an NU/Oklahoma game in August at Soldier Field back in the Barnett days. However, the August 30 game isn’t against some small college team scheduled to be cannon fodder and pick up a nice check. No, this is a Big Ten game, against Purdue. Conference games usually come after the nonconference games, giving everyone a chance to get used to contact, understand schemes, and get an idea about the other team’s strategy and tendencies. I don’t know what Purdue did to anger the mighty Delany, but this is a potentially important game being played early. You don’t see Ohio State playing Michigan in August.

LeBron James started this – using his free agency to draft friends who he thought would mesh well with his game to build an NBA Champion. Building a “Super Team,” to win, and bypassing GMs and owners except for the money/salary cap part. It worked – the Miami Heat won two NBA titles with LeBron, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. Then, of course, LeBron came home to Cleveland, with Kevin Love who wasn’t recruited as much as Wade and Bosh were, and they won a title there as well. Last week, James put on his travelling shoes again, going to the Lakers and trying to get Kevin Durant to join him.
Durant is also a part, having left Oklahoma City to join the Golden State Warriors who had just won the NBA Championship without him. Durant, the best scoring forward in the league joined with Steph Curry, the best outside shooter, and won again, defeating James’ Cavaliers, this time even more handily. So now have reportedly signed another All Star, DeMarcus Cousins, who was injured most of last season. Durant, who opted out of his contract, is expected to resign with Golden State, now with a true All Star Team – KD, Curry, Cousins, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green.
The age-old question whenever you see these teams come together is “are there enough basketballs (Shots) for all of these All Stars?” That depends on the capability of the players involved. Durant and Curry got their shots during the season and playoffs, as did the other players. They sublimated their individual goals for a title, but now that the franchise has won three of the last four titles, one has to wonder if the egos might start to eclipse the greater all? If anyone can handle these men, it would be Coach Steve Kerr.
The bigger questions are two-fold: first, should we just give the 2019 NBA Championship to Golden State? The old answer to that – on paper, they have the best starting five in the league, perhaps since the Dream Team, the 1998 U.S. Olympic Team. Of course, the standard response goes – they don’t play on paper. Still, an NBA season is a marathon, not a sprint; will these guys actually mesh effectively on the court? And there’s always the question of injuries, complacency, and the other teams who are really good – Houston, Boston and Toronto come immediately to mind.
The second question is even harder to answer conclusively: is this building of super teams good for the NBA? Not if you want to have parity in the league, it isn’t. Right now, there are the 4 teams I mentioned, we have to include the Lakers just because they signed LeBron, then everyone else. The Pelicans, Bucks, and a few other teams have some interesting players, but without a legitimate chance at the brass ring, will their fans care? Will the casual fans tune in to watch them play amongst themselves (not against the big 4-5 teams)? This is what should be keeping NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and the ESPN executives up at night.

Long time readers know that this page was a lot more political in the past. I think that the breakdown was 80/20 sports to politics in the past, but today’s political climate has become so toxic and, for those of us who live in reality and grow ill of lies and racism, it’s just too much to respond to on any given day. Besides, sports generally provides a respite from the gloom.
However, I certainly haven’t been able to avoid politics completely; sport is often on the cutting edge of politics. I have written posts about the NFL and the National Anthem, Colin Kaepernick that are as political as any of my old posts. With the current trend of white people calling the police on black people minding their own business, cooking out, cutting the grass, I had to address it at some point. I failed to write about the appalling incident between Bucks player Sterling Brown and Milwaukee police.
Having missed the chance to comment on Mr. Brown, I am not going to miss out on another case of unfair and inappropriate treatment. Tennis superstar Serena Williams, recently returned to competitive play after having given birth, has reported that she is subjected to random drug testing much more often than the other players. Instead of marveling at both Williams sisters’ excellence and longevity, the powers that be are leveling a subtle message – “you must be doing this with the aid of PEDs and other banned substances. “
I wonder if the same level of scrutiny is being applied to Maria Sharapova, who tested positive and was suspended for two years for taking a banned substance? Of course, Ms. Sharapova is blond, Russian, while Serena, who has regularly beaten Sharapova on the court, is not the perfect white vision of beauty (although she is very beautiful and I know lots of men who lust after her).
So, it merits investigation as to whether Ms. Williams is being tested more frequently, and if so, someone needs to be held responsible. It is time to acknowledge that Serena Williams is the GOAT in women’s tennis and if that pisses some people off, that’s too bad.