NEWS & VIEWS

 

               NEWS-- BRAVES, ASTROS SQUARE OFF IN THE WORLD SERIES

               VIEW-- YAY, BOO

               My rules for rooting in matters of sport are simple. As a born and bred Chicagoan, and resident there for 50 years, I root for any team that has the city’s name on its jerseys. Period.

               As a kid I had teams I hated, mainly the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. That was because they regularly beat up on the teams I rooted for. I also thought the members of those teams were bad people, on general principles rather than because of any specific reasons. Virtue, I believed, was the exclusive province of my Cubs, White Sox, Bears, etc. How could it be otherwise?

               As an adult, and later a sportswriter, I tempered the “hate” part of the above equation, having learned that good guys and jerks are about equally distributed among our sporting entities. My anti-Yankee stance in particular was blunted by my contact with Joe Torre, the team’s manager in the late 1990s and early ‘00s, whom I found to be a pleasant and gentlemanly person. Now I’m firmly neutral about the Yanks, as with other non-Chicago teams.

               But the current baseball World Series, matching the Braves of Atlanta, Georgia, against the Astros of Houston, Texas, provides an exception. I’m for the Braves and against the Astros. The reason should be obvious to any sports-page reader. Between late-season 2016 and mid-season 2018, the Astros perpetrated one the biggest frauds in the history of any sport by stealing opponents’ pitch signs and relaying the results to their hitters.   

               Yes, sign-stealing is a baseball tradition, and all teams do it or try to, but this was no canny coach’s trick but an organized, team-managed project with electronic help, a TV camera in the team’s home-park centerfield stands. It was cheating on a grand scale and it worked, contributing to the team’s 2017 World Series victory. It was discovered only after a player the team traded away clued in his new teammates to the scheme. How it figured this wouldn’t happen boggles the mind.

               Once exposed, the Astros pleaded guilty, or pretty much so. They were fined $5 million and docked some draft picks. Three men (general manager Jeff Luhnow, field manager A.J. Hinch and his bench coach, Alex Cora) first were suspended and then fired. It is testimony to the seriousness with which capital “B” Baseball took those actions that Hinch and Cora got other managerial jobs as soon as they became available, Hinch with the Detroit Tigers and Cora with the Boston Braves. In baseball the wages of sin are more wages.

No players were penalized, assertedly because they contributed to the investigation but probably because the owners didn’t want players’ union grief. The other penalties were similarly soft. The Astros should have had their ’17 title revoked and their 2020 (or 2021) season cancelled. I know, that last thing wouldn’t have been good for anybody’s business, but I’m just sayin’.

The playing- field core of the team’s 2016-2018 roster—Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa and Yuli Gurriel—are still around, hammering out hits and soaking up money and home-crowd applause. Excellent as they are, their actions should lump them with the steroid-using cheaters when they come up for Hall of Fame consideration.

Among the most-galling parts of the scandal’s aftermath has been the way the press, etc., has come to treat it. Journalists love to portray athletes as battling obstacles, and the booing the ‘Stros receive in foreign parks is viewed as one of those, bravely overcome by the doughty Houstonians. Teesh and double teesh.

NEWS: THE PHOENIX SUNS’ DEANDRE AYTON BREAKS OFF CONTRACT TALKS, CLAIMING LACK OF “RESPECT” FROM THE TEAM

VIEW: BELIEVE THE MAN

Ayton, the first choice in the 2018 National Basketball Association draft and the starting center on the Suns’ league-runnerup unit last season, is a fourth-year player and thus is eligible for a star’s five-year maximum-extension contract, currently worth $172.5 million. He asked for that in talks but the team balked, reportedly offering only three- or four-year pacts. A few others in his draft class, including the Dallas Mavericks’ Luca Doncic and the Atlanta Hawks’ Trae Young, had gotten the max, setting  Ayton’s teeth on edge, as it were.

“I want to be respected, to be honest,” he was quoted as saying. “I want to be respected the way my peers are being respected by their teams.”

His answer was widely haw-hawed, but I don’t think it should have been. Player salaries in our Big Four pro spectator sports have climbed so high as to be abstractions to the young men who get them. Separated from any earthly needs, they have become valuable mainly as status symbols, like a player’s position in a playground choose-up game.

Let us consider where Ayton is coming from. At age 23, with just a year of college (or, at least, college ball) under his belt, the seven-footer from the Bahamas already has received almost $28 million for his NBA labors, and is due to get another $12 million this season. Even after taxes, etc., that’s enough to absolve him and his family from work for several generations. In all likelihood he’ll earn several times that $40 million before he’s done playing, max-extension or no. He’ll be able to buy an island in his home chain when he quits, so a few million dollars more or less is no big deal.

It’s not much different down the pro-jock food chain. The average salary in the NBA is more than $8 million a year, which means many players earn more in a month than their fathers earned in a lifetime. Even the league’s minimum annual salary of almost $600,000 should be enough to give a young man a nice cushion for later endeavors.

 That’s great by me-- as Babe Ruth said (or is said to have said), “nobody who works for somebody else is overpaid.” Respect, though, is another thing. There’s a worldwide shortage of it, with no end in sight.