An AP story appears on cbs.sportsline.com today saying that Pete Rose bet on the Cincinnati Reds “every night” while he was managing that team. I guess there is an ort of news therein considering the phrase “every night”, but that is not the important part of the story. The story also says Rose thinks he should be reinstated into baseball because he is a good ambassador of the game and that statement is probably more true than false. But then, Rose takes his foot and jams it ankle-deep into his mouth one more time. He says that after he’s reinstated, he’d like to manage again in the major leagues.
I am on record for years and years now that Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame; I’ve said that there are 4,256 reasons why he should have been there long ago. I am also on record saying that so long as he bet on his own team to win, I have less of a problem with that than if he bet against his team even one time. I think it would be perfectly brilliant of Bud Selig to declare Pete Rose eligible for the Hall of Fame – thereby leaving his fate up to his peers on the Veterans’ Committee – but maintaining that he cannot hold any position in the game of baseball other than something like “roving ambassador” or “minor league instructor”. Pete Rose cannot manage a major league team ever again. Seamheads already parse every move made by a manager through eleven dimensions of reality and semi-reality; with Rose’s admissions on the books, he couldn’t scratch his butt without someone trying to decode if that was a signal to a bet-runner in the stands to “get down” on some prop bet. That simply will never work.
Gary Matthews, Jr. spoke out yesterday and said he has never taken HGH and that he is not the target of any law enforcement inquiry that would allege that he had. He said that the reason for his delay in making that assertion is that he and his representatives wanted to be sure he was not the target of any investigative processes prior to making such a statement and it took two weeks for them to find that out. OK, that’s good; we’ll never know if that was the reason or if it was Arte Moreno’s threat/demands that forced some statement out of Matthews and his representatives. I guess it really doesn’t matter all that much.
However, I have this nagging feeling about the scenario here. Let’s suppose that I were a person of some “celebrity” and that a story broke that I might be involved in some way with having sex with dead household pets. [I’m purposely trying to make this as bizarre as I can; go with it for a moment.] If I know that I’ve never been involved in that activity – and there’s good reason to believe that I’d know if I had ever engaged in such an activity – then what is the advantage to me to wait before I deny any involvement? Logic tells me that I’d only wait to see what the intentions of the investigators might be if I had some doubt about what they might find.
I am not saying that I believe Gary Matthews, Jr. ever took HGH. I am saying that his explanation for his delay in speaking out sounds good on the surface but still has a ring of dissonance in it.
While I’m on subjects related to baseball, Jerry Greene had an item in the Orlando Sentinel recently about the Tampa Bay Devil Rays signing some kind of partnership deal with a “dot.com company”. That sounds positive for the Devil Rays because you have to think that any new revenue stream that team can create will be good for the franchise. However, according to Jerry Greene, this partnership will allow fans to send text messages during the games for display on the scoreboard at Tropicana Field. Greene sums all this up in two words: Bad … Idea. Boy, is he right.
First of all, there better be a very savvy person editing and clearing those messages before they go up on the scoreboard. There will be a serious attempt by some fans to try to slip some “offensive material” through whatever filters exist to get it up on the scoreboard. You know people will try that; if they succeed, this initiative could blow up in the face of the ownership there. But there’s an even larger problem here.
Sporting events are becoming less and less about what is happening on the field/court/ice. The game – and watching the game – is becoming ancillary to a larger taxonomy of sensory stimuli and activities associated with the games. Fans spend more and more time distracted by flashing lights, product promotions, music and stupid mascots at the game venues.
New arenas are becoming WiFi hotspots so people are encouraged to bring computers with them to “check out” whatever else might strike their fancy at any moment of the game. No one – and I do mean no one – is so important and/or so busy that they must bring their computer to a ballpark and pay their bills online during a game. If they even think they are that busy or that important, they need psych counseling badly. And don’t even get me started with the annoying folks using their cell phones to call people to ask if they can be seen on TV or those other fans who just have to respond to one more e-mail on their “Blackberry”.
Teams are encouraging fans to come to the games and do a huge variety of things other than watch the damned game. A new level of silliness will happen sometime in June this year when the Phillies will have “Stitch and Pitch Night”. They want quilters and knitters to bring their projects to the game and work on them while the Phillies play whomever happens to be town that night. Maybe they’ll get a bunch of folks to the park who wouldn’t normally come to the park on that night. Maybe not.
Here’s a certainty; I will purposefully avoid going to the park that night. In addition to all the other chazerei going on that night, I’d have watch out for balls of yarn rolling down the steps. Going to a baseball game is about watching competition on the field and trying to figure out what might happen when the count is “one-and-two”; it is not about “knit-one-purl-two”.
Finally, here’s an observation from Bernie Lincicome in the Rocky Mountain News:
“A federal arbitrator has been assigned to settle a copyright infringement case over who is entitled to use the label “Fantasy League Baseball,” the stat geeks who make up their own teams and pretend to be owners or the major league owners who each spring proclaim their team can win it all. The Rockies’ Charlie Monfort has been designated to represent the owners.”
But don’t get me wrong. I love sports…