Category Archives: Sports

Basketball & Race

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Preface: This article is the final essay in a recent trilogy on the game of basketball. The first concerned sex toys being tossed by crypto groups in WNBA arenas, and the second is a general discussion on the game of basketball.

All the best basketball players are black, but the game was invented & developed in its early stages by whites. So who’s game is it? This is the question all the racists & racialists ask out loud in the media and privately to their friends.

Blacks were first allowed in the NBA in 1950, but they were limited in number and function– blacks were to be “role players only” on their white teams. It wasn’t until Bill Russell (1956) & Wilt Chamberlain (1959) came into the NBA, and immediately dominated, that blacks could be stars. From the time Bill Russell joined the Boston Celtics until he retired in 1969, it was him & Wilt for the title every year. Only once, when Bill Russell got hurt in 1958, did a “white team” win the NBA title as the St. Louis Hawks were led by Bob Pettit.

Red Auerbach was a mob-connected NBA operator who ran the league behind-the-scenes during its Bill Russell dynasty in which he led the Boston Celtics to 11 titles in 13 seasons, the last two with Russell as player-coach.

Red Auerbach was white and not a racist, he only cared about winning and everything that came with that. He ran the Celtics until his death in 2006 at the age of 89. He had appointed Danny Ainge as team GM by then, who then engineered the Kevin Garnett & Ray Allen acquisitions to go with Paul Pierce that won them the 2007-08 NBA title.

This highlighted & made aware the need for a “big 3” to win a title, over the HoF Shaq/Kobe, then Shaq/Dwyane Wade & Kobe/Gasol model of winning. A ‘big three’ means one more star player, which is easier to acquire & manage as compared to two superstar players. Egos between superstars are more likely to clash & combust. Tim Duncan was the humble superstar in San Antonio, and his organization would draft & develop at least two All-Stars around him to became a dynasty with that big 3 model. They couldn’t replace David Robinson, so they developed Tony Parker & Manu Ginobli, etc. You need three guys who can score when it’s their turn and also shut down their man because it’s really about ‘plus-minus on match-ups’ that determines winning hoops.

Today the financial cost & self-destructive quality of two superstars playing together makes NBA dynasties impossible to maintain. This is the challenge every winning GM & team owner has, it can all be gone when one or two key guys go down with a serious injury. Just like that it’s over and that team is in the draft lottery. Winning is such a thin margin, and more variable to injuries than ever.

For example, I’m watching the 2025 NBA Finals and the announcers are constantly going on about the Pacers as being “a well-run organization and will be a contender for years under current management…” Then, Tyrese Haliburton tears his Achilles tendon trying to play in Game 7, which he clearly shouldn’t have, and a front office & team medical staff that was responsible for the health of their franchise player let him play and inevitably suffer a serious sports injury that could have been avoided. When players are expected to make those sacrifices for their team, the entire sport franchise model needs to be re-evaluated from the top down.

The NBA season is brutally long, the most grinding marathon of all the major sports, by this sportsblogger’s account. The NFL is surely the most brutal, and thus much shorter with 17 games plus the playoffs which are 3-4 games for the Super Bowl participants.

MLB is 162 over six months, so players gets days off, pitchers have their rest days depending on usage to be ready for the playoffs through the World Series, where the eventual champion has to win 3-4 playoff series. The MLB wild card round is best-of-3, all games at the same ballpark. The divisional round is best-of-5 (2-2-1 home format), and the league championship series is best-of-7 (2-3-2), as is the World Series.

The NBA is 82 games, plus 4 rounds of best-of-7 series (2-2-1-1-1 home format) to win the NBA title. On top of that there is now the ‘7-10 play-in scramble’, which adds a game or two for those teams.

MLB, is a regular season marathon, then a 12-team post-season tournament to crown the champion. It takes a roster of at least 60 players & pitchers to be competitive in a modern MLB season. Once you survive that marathon, you have to be able to win short series match-ups against the best remaining teams. You need time to rest some of your best performers during the season which starts in mid-February for pitchers & catchers, and in March for the rest of the position players. They need to be fresh enough to perform when it really counts in October, that’s what they’re paid for and that’s what they play for.

The NBA starts in the fall and plays its finals though late-June. The NBA fines teams for resting their starters during the regular season, as hot-headed & ignorant fans complain about paying big money to see stars and they are all on the bench in street clothes. The season & playoffs are too long, as star players commonly get hurt towards the end which is a result of these abusive workloads.

The regular season needs to be shortened to say 64 games, and the playoffs need to go back to a mini-series (best-of-3, 1-1-1 home format) in the first round, and give the top teams byes into the second round, which should be best-of-five, then best-of-7 for the conference & NBA Finals. That would cut out a lot of unnecessary basketball and finish things from April to mid-May.

After the NCAA Tournament should [immediately!] follow the NBA Playoffs. This would help the WNBA too, by getting off the main stage sooner and letting the women own professional summer basketball. The WNBA is way more entertaining than old pro 3-on-3, I will say that, and so do the number of fans in the stands. 3-on-3 leagues, alumni leagues, etc, are the XFL-ification & Hulk Hoganization of pro hoops– in their presentation, marketing & content. Try to find a corporate sportswriter who can convince his editor to print that.

The ABA (1967-76) deserves a ton of credit for diversifying pro basketball and getting the game moving in the right direction. Cocaine and other illicit drugs were widely available to professional athletes throughout the 1970’s, and the NBA & ABA suffered for it. The quality of basketball was negativity affected by cocaine usage, which was estimated by the late-1970’s to be 40-70% of the players– black & white.

Professional basketball had become black dominated by the time of the ABA-NBA merger in the summer of 1976, but NFL & MLB players had drug usage issues which negatively affected their sports, which were considered ‘white sports’ by the racist media & team owners.

Julius Erving, AKA: Dr. J, came into the NBA with the Philadelphia 76ers, and the league had a new style it could promote to inner city black kids as well as small-town white hicks with imagination. Bird & Magic (then MJ) re-imaged the NBA by not getting caught up in drugs, thus becoming transformative superstars through leadership & example.

Basketball became an inner-city game in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and this is when the preferred style-of-play shifted from the strictly-disciplined, Kentucky-Indiana white rural style, into a playground creative free-flowing black style that became part of pop culture. It’s like going from Dixieland & big band jazz to bebop & Sun Ra– everyone knows the change is for the better. That’s how basketball became black. It’s more organized, concentrated & competitive in the big cities, so that’s where the best players come from. Larry Bird was the exception being from a hick town– making him a rare bird for sure. That’s why he had to prove himself to all the black players from the inner cities & major NCAA programs, which he did.

The bottom line is you need black & white to win at basketball. All the best players are black, but you’ll always take a white baller, particularly if he’s seven feet tall. Even if he isn’t but he can shoot, pass, rebound, defend then he’s a winning player and you want him on your team. You need role players & glue guys to win a title, not as much as stars, but enough to define the difference between winning & losing in competitive basketball because it’s a team game.

You need great coaching, scouting, medical & training staff, and front office support that manages its roster & playing rotations to get the most out of it. It used to be a NBA champion could win with just a great player or two, then it became a Starting 5. Today you need your entire bench, roster depth and G-League support, etc, to be in the hunt. It’s expensive & costly in every sense, and when it goes down with a knee or Achilles tear, it first makes you sick to your stomach, and then angry at the people who profit most from this abuse and know better but hide from their responsibility for it by paying the media to cover-up everything and make excuses for them. This sportsblogger watches of lot of sports with the mute button on.

It’s this way when it comes to race as a political discussion in the 21st century. Officially we have white supremacists as Trump’s MAGA base, opposed to Democratic Party racialist identity politics as the representatives of Wall Street & the CIA. Republicans are shameless liars, while Democrats are the party of the big lie. Both always try to foist their crimes onto their political enemies, ie– anyone who will tell the truth about things.

Anyone who has seriously played & studied basketball knows you need black & white together to win. It’s about team, it’s about unity and accepting everyone as your brother or sister. It’s about being open-minded, as well as suspicious, on new things you don’t understand and deciding on their merits. When it’s your turn to speak your mind, know how to speak respectfully and when it’s time to trash talk, execute with precision & impact. The idea is to get in your opponents head with some hard truths and let that break them down while others watch. Ultimately, basketball is all about respect, which is why everyone respects a serious baller.

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On Basketball

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I’ve proclaimed myself a basketball purist, so it is incumbent on me to define this & then prove it as a sportswriter. Really I’m a sportsblogger, which is a form of sportswriter, but different in that bloggers aren’t held to a corporate standard or code-of-practice which binds sportswriters into a political straitjacket, severely restricting them from expressing their truest & deepest thoughts.

So much has to be censored & covered-up, in the name of fake news, which means corporate media sportswriters only scratch the surface on the most serious stories. Their task is often to keep it vague, and then forget it & move on. Current stories like ‘NFL ownership colludes to suppress QB salaries, then covered-up by NFLPA legal representatives’ don’t play well in the mainstream media. ESPN has just announced the purchasing of the NFL Network, so there’s no way ownership-union collusion can be a story to investigate & feature any more than professionally required.

The most compelling sports stories are usually discovered (& always best-analyzed) by bloggers & other independent entities these days. Virtually everyone promotes themselves on social media, which organically helps bloggers over corporate sportswriters whom we’ve heard from too much already. We all know they have very little to tell us despite all their Hollywood access & face time on Network cameras.

Network (1976) is the best Hollywood film ever. If you want to talk film with me then start there, otherwise you’re shit on movies. That’s basketball trash talking on cinema. Notice how it is concise & directly to the point. That’s how you win at a fast-moving game like basketball.

I’ve loved this game since Bird & Magic, and of course I was a Celtics fan back then. I hated the 76ers & Lakers, until the Celtics won three championships. Then Len Bias tragically died and these Celtics were finished winning titles. It got to the point where I accepted the greatness of Magic Johnson. That junior, junior sky hook was undeniable in its beauty & championship finality. Larry Bird’s shooting and overall play made black players give their respect to white dudes who can play. That was only part of how they transformed the game of basketball.

Basketball is a game where it is accepted by all serious participants that the black players are the best. When it was Larry Bird taking the last shot, it scared opponents to death, because they went in so often, and Larry would look at everyone with an expression that said, “I knew it was going in. What did you expect?!” That’s legendary hall-of-fame trash talking from a master, the first time a white guy could really do it.

Michael Jordan became the ultimate hoops master, the perfect basketball player. What does this mean? It means he has no weaknesses in his game, every aspect is the highest level of excellence & durability: scoring, passing, rebounding, defense, making your teammates better, being a team leader, winning, handling the media & being an ambassador for the game without claiming to be perfect. It takes all that & more to be the best and MJ did that for Generation X. He was the first modern rockstar athlete who you compare to Tiger Woods, Roger Federer & LeBron James.

Before Michael Jordan, sports heroes were different. They were allowed their privacy because they were so revered by sportswriters, as compared to the TMZ paparazzi media we’ve had since the rise of ESPN. In baseball Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax & Bob Gibson would be treated much more harshly today by a media industry that is looking to build you up to tear you down. We shouldn’t do that to our sports heroes, and I’m a sportsblogger who understands & expresses that. Too many sportswriters have egos and want to make the game about themselves. For example the issue of PEDs & MLB hall-of-fame voting, it is very political with stubborn intransigence among a class of ‘old school’ sportswriters who are eligible to vote, but maliciously shut out worthy candidates.

The NBA is a much different game today because of the great players I’ve mentioned from the 1980’s. The 1992 Dream Team is unquestionably the best basketball team ever assembled. Being on that team is equivalent to winning a NBA championship, so Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullen, John Stockton & Karl Malone earn that respect. They are ALWAYS to be addressed as champions in NBA terms. What they did in Barcelona transformed the game. Opposing players were asking for pictures, sincere handshakes & autographs before their games because they knew they were going to lose and were simply honored to be on the court with them. No one had, or has since, seen anything like that in Olympic competition. It’s the athletes who create these-type moments that catapult them into the best-ever discussions, in any sport.

Here’s a digression that will eventually lead back to modern basketball, I promise. I’ve been a fan of women’s soccer since before the start because I played with girls in our hometown leagues as a kid and through high school. Summer leagues were more relaxed and you could pick your coach which was important because high school & traveling league teams were monopolized by local sports politics, with coaching dads often prioritizing college scholarships for their boys over developing the best players and building a winning style of play that can eventually compete with Europe & South America. That still hasn’t happened and that’s why the USMNT loses.

The World Cup is in North America next summer, so the USMNT gets the automatic hosting invite and didn’t have to qualify. If they had, they wouldn’t have made it. The next big day is when the World Cup teams in the 12 groups are revealed and the brackets are set. Lots of betting worldwide on the World Cup. It’s bigger than the Super Bowl because it’s only once every four years and football/futbol is the world game. The world stops when the ball is rolling in the World Cup.

As for the USWNT, their next World Cup is in 2027 and there will be no issue for them qualifying, they’ll again be a favorite but no longer THE favorite. The USWNT has slipped from it’s highest of highs in WC 1999 to settle in as a global force in women’s soccer. The best coaching in US soccer eventually realized the men were hopeless, so they gravitated into the women’s game. It was that dynamic that help US women’s soccer win the world.

Their best player from the start in 1991 was Michelle Akers. Mia Hamm was the first Gen X rockstar female athlete. They all had something you liked so they were like the Beatles in the summer of 1999, and after that it was cool to be a soccer mom. Soccer in the 1980’s didn’t have enough girls in most towns to have their own league, so they had to play with the boys.

The 1999 USWNT became the Dream Team of their sport. Now girls in every small American town have girls soccer leagues. What was achieved was a social revolution and what is important to understand is that an entire society was involved in it. Everyday people were inspired by this team of determined young women, and used their glorious victory to get something they didn’t even know they wanted for their children. The revolution was inspired by sports stars, but achieved by all the “little people.” Understanding that is the art & science of dialectics.

This is why I prefer the USWNT to the WNBA.  They did it more organically and under greater adversity, where the WNBA has had huge promotional assistance from the NBA & its corporate sponsors from the start. Since the USMNT has always sucked, the soccer women had to do it on their own, which is much more impressive to me. Soccer & tennis are the two sports I most enjoy watching women compete, outside of the Olympics.

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My all-time rotating basketball five by position: PG- Magic Johnson/Steph Curry; SG- Michael Jordan/Kobe Bryant; SF- LeBron James/Larry Bird; PF- Karl Malone/Kevin Durant; C- Kareem Abdul Jabbar/Wilt Chamberlain. You get two bench guys and three reserves on a NBA team. Tim Duncan is one and the rest are debatable among a dozen or so great great players. You want Phil Jackson & Gregg Popovich coaching, I’ve always loved Hubie Brown, Chuck Daly, Doc Rivers & Steve Kerr too. They know the game, understand what it takes to win, and always respect the talent and get the most out of it by treating them as men first.

If you want to become a good basketball player then learn the rules. Become an official and learn the game from a different perspective and get paid for it. You’ll play a lot smarter after doing this because you’ll know how & why officials make calls– good & bad. Handling the officials is a skill & artform and no one was better at it than Michael Jordan. This video is the only known instance of MJ getting handled in trash talk, and Magic Johnson still half-apologizes for it– because he knows. Larry just laughs. This is as good as it gets.

Basketball is the easiest game to manipulate/fix through corrupt officiating. Too many team fouls and the other team gets free throws (easy points to a good team) for the rest of that period. Too many individual fouls and you’re either on the bench or disqualified. No other sport has this as such a big part of the game that determines winning & losing. Soccer is the next easiest sport to manipulate through officiating, but fans seem to recognize it quicker so it’s less of a constant at the highest professional levels. VAR and replay officiating have cut down on bad calls determining the outcome, but also have slowed down the game.

The NBA has had officiating problems since before the ABA/NBA merger in 1976. The NBA allowed the ABA to raid its top officials early in their existence, which helped the ABA gain legitimacy with its players and hurt the NBA. If you know you have straight & professional officiating, then you can actually play. If you have an incompetent officiating crew, then it’s hopeless and good players will quit on it one way or another. No point busting your ass only to get cheated with every whistle. I’m not MJ, I can’t overcome bad officiating by being ultra-dominate to a point where the officials have to respect my game. That’s how the rest of us who aren’t superhuman approach playing against bad officials. It’s part of the game, no question.

As far as not watching the NBA, the Shaq/Kobe Lakers early 2000’s titles were all tainted by league-biased officiating, favoring the Lakers every step of the way to three consecutive NBA titles, before it blew apart. It was a political ideology of the era (9/11) that insisted on physical dominance being the most rewarded trait that biased NBA officiating in favor of Shaq & his power game. I always thought Tim Duncan was the superior big man to Shaq. He worked hard and was a better teammate, a true quiet leader– the rarest of rare birds.

There was an aesthetic quality to Tim Duncan’s game that really impressed basketball purists. There was no waste in how he did things. Economical equals five NBA titles with the right coach. Critics called his game boring. The lesson there is don’t listen to the critics. Tim Duncan was the last great college player (Wake Forest) to stay four years when he could have been a top pick earlier. The San Antonio Spurs were the perfect franchise for him, an organization that understood him as the main guy to replace Dream Team center David Robinson when he retired. The right organization builds a dynasty around that by properly valuing his contribution to winning and showing him contract respect by never letting him get close to leaving.

On the other side of the management scale, Shaq from LSU went to the Orlando Magic in 1992, which proceeded to foolishly squander its championship aspirations in that era despite have (on paper) what it took to win a NBA title. They had Chris Webber as the #1 overall pick to go with Shaq in 1993, and potentially replace him in case he bolted for Hollywood– which he did. Weak management in Orlando listened to Shaq lobby for Penny Hardaway, and Magic management let their superstar player make their trade, dealing away the best player in the draft in Webber, a sophomore from the University of Michigan’s legendary Fab Five.

When Michael Jordan came out of his first retirement to re-join the Bulls and kick every team in the Eastern Conference’s ass, that was when Shaq finally went to the Lakers as a free agent and trashed Penny & the Orlando Magic as he left. When Penny hurt his knee and Orlando Magic team physicians were too incompetent to diagnose & understand the serious nature of his injury, Penny Hardaway was finished as an All-Star player. They didn’t do too well with Grant Hill either, all covered in this classic write-up of this tragic franchise.

Brian Hill, Chuck Daly, Doc Rivers & Stan Van Gundy are all above average NBA head coaches (at least) which needs to be respected. None of them could win a title despite having hall-of-fame dominate big men in two different eras: Shaq in the 1990’s & high school #1 overall pick Dwight Howard in the 2000’s. That’s organizational failure starting with cheapskate ownership and its incompetent GM’s, first & foremost. They had great players and all the resources needed to be a dynasty, but couldn’t figure out winning and still haven’t. They have another chance now with Paulo Banchero, another miraculous #1 overall pick that fell in their laps (call it NBA Magic), but I don’t like the guys they have around him so color this central Florida native skeptical on the Orlando Magic for a NBA title. Salary cap aprons really limit a modern NBA franchise’s ability to maintain championship rosters, meaning ‘windows to win’ are shorter, tougher and less predictable than ever.

If it happens for the Magic, it would be like how the Bucks got lucky in 2022. You need a great player, some serious guys around him, good luck & full health. They all count the same when you do it, dominant or lucky. It’s so tough to win so it’s celebrated as greatness as it should be in any integrated & competitive era. Can you imagine the NBA without blacks or foreign players today? Just watch a few YouTube videos and you’ll see it’s unwatchable by modern standards, NBA & NCAA. Diversity is good for everything is the lesson basketball teaches us all.

To understand the greatness of Steph Curry requires respect for ‘old school’ to be blended with an appreciation of ‘new school’ when referring to style of play in professional basketball. When the NBA began after WWII, it was all-white & had only has two levels of scoring: the painted area and an outside shot. Both counted for two points, but since it’s easier to score the closer you get to the hoop, an inside shot in the painted area was always preferred as a winning strategy. Coaches, announcers & analysts harped on this repeatedly, so you couldn’t get past it.

The ABA (1967-76) had the three-point shot from the start and its outside shooters embraced it. Boston Celtics GM (& league power broker) Red Auerbach was against the 3-point with the NBA-ABA merger, but when he acquired the draft rights to Larry Bird in 1978 he changed his mind and the 3-point shot has been in the NBA since the 1979-80 season. Larry Bird was immediately the best 3-point shooter in the game and changed how NBA players & coaches thought about that shot as a weapon. Back then it wasn’t used enough to be considered as a consistent source of offense. That came with Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers and his era. Ray Allen is the other hall-of-fame sharp-shooter in the pre-Steph Curry era. Their three-balls were now a potent source of offense on championship level teams.

What the 3-pointer did was create a ‘third level’ of scoring offense, where you can get 3 points by making a shot behind the line. This opened the game up for little guys (under 6’5″) who can shoot, which is always fun & exciting to watch as a basketball fan. SGA of OKC has mastered the mid-range, the area between the 3-point line and the painted area. Jimmy Butler is another guy who has that mid-range game and can finish at the rim. The 3-point shot has caused a lot of young players (Gen Y & Gen Z) to mistakenly abandon the mid-range. There are plenty of clean scoring opportunities in the mid-range, without have to absorb all that contact you get taking it to the hoop. A good mid-range game is a career-extender at any level of play.

What Steph Curry did was create a ‘fourth level’ of offense, well-beyond the 3-point line. You can’t give Steph Curry a wide-open 30-footer, he’ll make that shot consistently and if he gets hot the other team is finished– at any point in the game. Draymond Green sets a solid screen just past half court and the defense is in trouble. No basketball player has ever created such fear & panic from a screen set just past half-court. That’s how far the ‘fourth level’ extends out from the 3-point line.

Everyone from Luka Dončić to Caitlin Clark are prodigies of the Steph Curry ‘new style’ of play. Big men now handle the ball & shoot 3’s, when that was discouraged or forbidden by head coaches back in the day. Quick shots are okay now because advanced metrics have proven you might not get a better look so take the shot. No need to make your team work longer & harder to get essentially the same (or a worse) shot. Hubie Brown & Tex Winter always understood this, but they were in the minority in the profession of basketball coaching.

This ‘fourth level’ creates more opportunities for little guys with skill. For big guys, they are considered & referred to as ‘wing players’ instead of forwards in modern basketball terminology. They need to be long, quick & athletic. Their job is to rim protect and cover out to the 3-point line on defense, and be a vice versa threat on offense. Centers are thicker today, all can shoot 3-pointers, and need to be good passers to help their team on offense. Wing players are more shot-blocking conscious than ever, so center dominance of the Shaq/Wilt variety isn’t really possible in today’s NBA. The level of grinding & physicality creates a big man preference towards skilled mid-range & 3-point shooting over power basketball in the painted area. This reduces wear-and-tear on the body, and saves energy for when it is needed late in the game & season.

Health is a skill, and staying healthy in such a grinding game as the NBA requires hard work and serious maintenance. LeBron James is the ‘old man’ of the NBA at age 40, yet he has maintained his body at the highest level of basketball fitness. He went straight from high school, at age 18 into the NBA, and now you can’t do that anymore. When they change rules because of your talent, and fans are still amazed at it over 20 years later, that’s true greatness.

Basketball is a trash talking game. Every sport has its form of discourse between the competitors, but basketball is a fast moving game that only allows a series of split seconds & brief pauses to say what’s on your mind, and if you hesitate, the moment is gone and the other guy might get hot from there on which really shuts down your trash talking ability. That’s why so many young players start trash talking from their first made shot, because they know they might not see another one go in, so they’re talking like they are Kobe Bryant. As a rule: If you don’t have the skills & ability to back it up, then it’s usually best to check your trash talk.

The best way to shut down trash talking opponents is to play good defense. Shut them down, steal the ball, block their shot, fake them into travel violations, etc, and they’ll get real quiet. Defense is ~15% physical technique with the rest being heart, hustle & brains. All great defenders are among the smartest players. They know the rules, as well as all the tricks they can get away with and how to work the officials. And how to trash talk.

The US men’s team lost to the USSR in the 1988 Olympics because basketball is a team game. The US had the most-talented players, but they were up against professional teams from Europe that had been together for years. Playing as a team is the ultimate difference maker in competitive basketball. This filters down to high school, AAU & even YMCA leagues.

Unless there is a player who is exponentially better than everyone else on the court, generally speaking it’s the side that plays most as a team that wins the game. If you have basketball talent, but don’t help your teammates, then you create a ceiling for that team’s success because it’s all about the individual ego. Speaking of egos in basketball, corrupt and/or bad officiating can skew any game into unwatchable madness. There are plenty of (too many) out of control egos in the ranks of basketball officiating.

This is how I view basketball from an amateur perspective. I’m an amateur in the sense that I’m not paid for any of this, I publish here because I love the game and believe these thoughts are worthy of your consideration. You don’t have to have played the game professionally to know the game, you just have to study & apply yourself at it and you can learn many things about yourself and the world we live in.

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The WNBA, ESPN & crypto dildos

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This is the story of Green Dildo Coin (DILDO).

Delbert Carver, 23, was arrested after throwing a sex object at a July 29 WNBA game in Atlanta. Charged with disorderly conduct, public indecency/indecent exposure and criminal trespass; Carver told police, “This was supposed to be a joke, and this joke (was) supposed to go viral,” according to the arrest affidavit. Since then at least half a dozen similar incidents have happened in WNBA arenas. WNBA spokespeople have been dumbfounded over this, often refusing to comment when pressed by media. This ducking of uncomfortable questions makes Trump’s continual lying on the Jeffery Epstein files look strong by comparison.

Los Angeles Sparks coach Lynee Roberts after Aug. 5 incident: “It’s ridiculous. It’s dumb. It’s stupid. It’s also dangerous, and you know, player safety is No. 1, respecting the game, all those things.”

“I would have picked that thing up and thrown it right back at them,” former Phoenix Mercury star Diana Taurasi.

If the sexist & hateful feminists who monopolize WNBA management can’t find a spokesperson who can understand what’s going on & represent the players here, then they all should be fired and replaced with real women such as those quoted above. Diana Taurasi is a strong woman who understands you can’t allow ANY disrespect on this, because once you do (by not having a serious & immediate WNBA spokesperson response), the league appears weak & becomes the butt of a sick joke. That devalues the league, and if the WNBA can’t handle this appropriately, then they deserve to be devalued.

I’ve never seen Diana Taurasi play, but I can tell you she’s a great player because she’s thought about this situation & understands exactly who to pass to. Basketball is a trash-talking game, which means you have to be able to handle it & dish it back out, otherwise you aren’t a real baller and you won’t get any respect. Players get this, while bureaucrats don’t.

Basketball purist thoughts

Was Diana Taurasi disrespected at the 2024 Paris Olympics by her coaching staff? It felt that way watching, even though I’m not a WNBA fan. I don’t follow the players because I don’t watch the games. I also don’t watch men’s college basketball with much enthusiasm anymore, as it’s a qualitatively inferior game when compared to the 1980’s & early 1990’s when it was at its best. The NBA is the best basketball organization by far, and I’m a purist, so as a sports fan I don’t really watch the WNBA because any men’s college team would beat any WNBA champion in any year. It’s my right as a sensible sports fan to not be interested in the WNBA for these reasons.

The following is a fact of sports everyone needs to accept: men are better because they are bigger & stronger due to natural testosterone. That’s basic biology and it isn’t going to change. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for women’s sports to be popular & respected. If it inspires young girls (& boys) to be healthy & active, then I’m all for it. If the WNBA gives good paying jobs that provide quality entertainment for their audience, then that should be encouraged in every way.

I notice they’re on everywhere these days: ESPN, ABC, CBS & ION. You can’t miss the WNBA, it’s on every weekend (multiple times) on network TV through the spring & summer. I’m a sports reporter so now I’ve had to start watching a few WNBA games because of how this sex toy campaign has gotten so out of control. That’s the real story here.

Barry Bremen was a salesman [!] who knew he didn’t have a life, so he became the great impostor. Those were different times and it was considered funny at first, but then he started getting arrested and it wasn’t so funny anymore. Barry Bremen died in middle age of cancer, so really his antics became defined as sad & sick cries for attention. It’s wrong because it disrespects the game, the athletes, coaches, officials, and everyone in the crowd who paid for a ticket. To continually insert oneself where you don’t belong is selfish & childish. Crypto enthusiasts & online gamblers (nurtured by ESPN) have taken the example of Barry Bremen to the extreme in this sex toy campaign.

The biggest problem the WNBA has had during this string of events is the lack of statements from their spokespeople, who are paid to represent the players in times of crisis, which this has become. Over & over I read, “A WNBA spokesperson declined to answer questions about…” The WNBA players have been requesting updates from the league, and getting nothing. Players have now been told by league officials they are “investigating claims that individuals were being incentivized” to carry sex toy stunts. All vague talk with no answers, explanations, or details to satisfy those asking the questions.

To get answers, we had to go to Dave Mason, brand manager of Panama-based online sportsbook BetOnline, who told ESPN that when the second sex toy was also green, he started looking for who could be orchestrating the stunts. Mason put a betting line on where the next toy would be thrown and what color it would be, then tracked his winning bettors and quickly found the crypto coin group Green Dildo Coin. Dave Mason said in an email to ESPN, “It’s part of the game when offering markets like these. We can either choose to offer them or not. We know people will have inside info and might bet.” To figure it out you have to follow the money, and notice it was an independent gambling site that discovered this, not ESPN or USA Today.

Green Dildo Coin (DILDO) is highly active in the Telegram community (& also X), and apparently they are behind this memcoin/sex toy stunt campaign. Green Dildo Coin is a Libertarian cyberpunk group, meaning they are young crypto Kool-Aid drinkers, responding to what they call a “toxic environment” in the current crypto world. This is a typical Kool-Aid drinker capitalist reaction to Trump taking over crypto & shutting them out. Green Dildo Coin’s deity is surely Elon Musk.

What I’m describing is the kind of leadership & understanding that is necessary to stop this nonsense, instead of relying on more police, security, media hysterics, etc. This is what spokespeople are paid for, so if officials all reply “no comment,” then the players will be asked about this when they shouldn’t have to answer to it. They are paid to play, not answer questions about how the league isn’t handling this issue and letting it get out of hand, and not figuring it out, etc.

Clearly there are too few adults in the WNBA front office, who don’t know how to handle this like a man. It’s young men (& a few inside girls who also want to get rich) that are doing this, so it therefore needs to be handled in a man-fighting way. Bitchiness & cat-fighting won’t cut it here for the WNBA, and it’s not unhealthy to admit this truth. It’s past the point of no return, where the WNBA players have to get together and put a stop to this the next time it happens, or they will continue to be disrespected & devalued. That’s a capitalist law.

Another law of capitalism is capitalists only care about money. So the players looking towards ownership & management for guidance on this is futile. Futility would be a good word to describe the WNBA spokesperson response since July 29, when the first sex toy in this memecoin campaign was tossed in a WNBA arena. Any WNBA player would be justified if she went into the stands and kicked that person’s ass. Fans would cheer that. As wrong as that would be (see the Malice in the Palace incident), it’s better than waiting for a WNBA spokesperson to make some lame politicized statement long after the fact.

This intersectionality of sports financialization with the political weaponization of sex, in the absence of trigger warnings, has made certain WNBA representatives very uncomfortable, and thus they have no comment. So they look to others to handle it for them, which no one respects.

An honest DEI spirit would be to have a few good men around (because diverse points-of-view & experiences are valuable) when shit like this hits the fan. But when #MeToo campaign feminists insist on running out all the good men because they are too threatening, this leaves WNBA players wide open to these kind of punk attacks, which are easy for any real man to handle, but can become troublesome because players are being misrepresented by enabled hysterical women who never became adults.

In short, there are too many sexist bureaucrats in management and not enough former players, which is a BIG problem no one in the WNBA wants to admit. This is also true in the NFL, NBA & MLB. Professional athletes need smart & successful former players in management to keep these union lawyers in line, otherwise these attorneys & PR flak will play back-room politics every time. This is where league officials are collaborating with ownership, instead of representing the interests of the rank-and-file. It’s not a sex issue as much as it is a class issue, but that isn’t allowed to be acknowledged in the capitalist media– another immutable law.

Legal fees are about to eat up all the betting & crypto profits of Green Dildo Coin, yet another capitalist law. Libertarians aren’t too well-read on history, politics, or anything else. They just want to make money fast and not have to pay any taxes. In a word they are lazy, impatient half-baked parasites. In essence those qualities define crypto and also modern-day capitalism.

Final thoughts

No one has been more of a crypto skeptic than Ric Size, as industry leaders hate me (bigtime) for it. When I posted on July 20, concerning the WNBA CBA situation after their All-Star weekend (linked above), I began with the statement that the WNBA was now a financial speculative bubble in terms of exploding franchise values, and later compared it to crypto in profitability. As a skeptic I am privy to no inside information, so I clearly had no official knowledge of this ‘crypto green dildo campaign,’ yet somehow I foreshadowed it and am not at all surprised by it.

I can explain all this emotional stuff (sex, sports, money) rationally in a media environment that is all hype, which is no mean feat. Any intelligent dissent has been censored, blacklisted & slandered for over a decade now– on all corporate platforms & political institutions. If you know sports as I do, then you earn some readership credibility over time. first with the athletes, and then with their leading fans who are online 24/7. I’m a players booster here because I’m ALWAYS a booster for the workers who create the economic value. That’s what a socialist is and it’s what scares Trump & his gang of fascists, first into incomprehensible fury and then into violent reactionary assaults on the working class.

All Trump can do is lie at this point, while the Democrats still accept it as good coin because he’s President, when really Trump is a sociopathic conman now hawking memecoins by pumping the Ponzi scheme known as bitcoin. Donald J Trump should have been thrown in jail for life with no parole long, long ago. He has committed heinous crimes against humanity and his accomplices are on both sides of the aisle.

Trump is the NYC underworld financial mob boss who became a realty TV star and then the fascist strongman politically demanded by the US ruling class, with the Democrats being his Vichy collaborators to recall a WWII analogy for Nazi sympathizers in France. The most serious lesson of WWII was that we can’t tolerate fascism in any form because it is inherently hostile to peaceful democracy & human rights. It never cuts off its own claws and can only be defeated through organized class-conscience struggle. That’s a Trotskyist– the most serious, respected & (by the bourgeoisie) politically-feared Marxists who are represented by the Fourth International, SEP branches worldwide, and the WSWS their daily publishing organ. That’s where to go for political clarity & leadership on a daily basis.

This crypto dildo throwing campaign has gotten so insane for WNBA players because everything is allowed to be irrational under Trump– tariffs, support for Israel & Ukraine, Jeffery Epstein, ICE Gestapo, public health policy, global warming, etc. These are the most dangerous criminals in the world, and it’s no secret, yet they keep presenting themselves as legitimate and are entirely propped-up by a corrupt corporate media which can now certainly be defined as entirely state propaganda. This is why people call it “fake news” and Trump now owns it with his political power over the media, courts, Congress, higher education, the police, military & intelligence, so this lewd behavior will be tolerated/exploited to its political limits by the anointed fuhrer. Only the political defeat of Trumpism (and all its state-corporate collaborators!) will stop this exploitative pornography.

You can no longer separate sports & politics, at all, there’s too much money at stake these days. Sports franchises are now expected to double in value overnight, yet player pay hasn’t increased along the same scale. It’s this nagging feeling working people EVERYWHERE have that tells WNBA players they are being cheated by capitalism, as salaries aren’t rising as fast as crypto profits for politically enabled pump & dump dildo memecoin campaigns. Like all the WNBA players, I’m over it.

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WNBA CBA issues coming this fall

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The WNBA is now a speculative bubble, and the only way players can significantly increase their salaries is to take ownership of the league for themselves. Expansion fees are now so high that owners won’t agree to any significant payroll increases during the next CBA negotiations starting this October. WNBA expansion fees for the newest franchises in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia were $250 million each, compared to $50 million paid by the Golden State Valkyries who began play this season.

How can the new owners in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia afford payroll increases with a $250 million entry fee? They can’t. Therefore that franchise value must go to the players who create the league value, otherwise the disparity between ownership revenues and players’ salaries will become highly contentious, threatening a destructive labor stoppage. The NFL, MLB & NBA have all experienced work stoppages in the past which hurt their leagues. At this crucial point in its development, the WNBA can ill-afford one itself, yet that is where it is heading.

WNBA franchise valuations have ballooned, with the average team value jumping from $96 million in 2024 to $269 million in 2025, according to GoLocalProv, a 280% increase in value in just one year [!]. The jump in WNBA valuation is entirely attributable to irrational exuberance & TV money, as the WNBA has secured a new media rights deal worth $2.2 billion over 11 years.

Caitlin Clark (2025 averages: 16.5 pts, 5.0 reb, 8.8 asst, 1.6 stl), personifies the irrational exuberance, as she has become the face of the league. Caitlin Clark adds value to the WNBA because: 1) she’s a transformative basketball player, and 2) she’s white– not necessarily in that order. The racialist aspect of this is not a good sign for the WNBA. Note that this is not Caitlin Clark’s fault, it’s the fault of ESPN and the media executives who encourage this.

WNBA minimum salary for players with 0-2 years of experience is $66,079, while players with 3+ years of experience have a minimum salary of $78,831 for the 2025 season. The highest-paid players can earn the super maximum salary, which is currently around $241,984, according to ESPN. The players naturally want a bigger piece of the pie as the league grows, but it is likely that the WNBA has already had its biggest growth spurt. It’s impossible to keep growing at a rate of 280% per year. The only other industry that does that is crypto.

So what the WNBA players face is a political choice of insisting on owning their league, or being salary-stunted by traditional ownership. “Pay us what you owe us” is an empty protest that will fall on deaf ears, as owners want to make money, and with such a high WNBA start-up cost the only way to do that is for owners to keep players’ salaries depressed. The only fair solution is for the players to become owners in the franchises they play for, as that’s where the money is.

But instead, the WNBA players have taken up a protest campaign, which may rally some support initially, but history shows that when the CBA negotiations come around, fans won’t be so sympathetic. Sports is entertainment, nothing more, and if these WNBA players strike over salaries that are already higher than what many fans make, they will be seen as greedy & selfish, just like the MLB players in 1994, the NFL players in 1987, etc.

When this much money is involved, it becomes a Marxist issue of worker control over production vs. exploitation. Instead of complaining about this unfairness, WNBA players need to take control of their game by becoming owners themselves, otherwise they will get cut out of the profits and be castigated by casual fans who view striking players as unappreciative of their privilege.

After all, sports is entertainment, and fans can turn off the TV and do/watch something else anytime they feel like it. What basketball players do isn’t essential, so the only way working people & youth (the vast majority of their fans) will get behind them is if they take a revolutionary stance at the next CBA– demonstrating actual leadership against ownership oppression. Any other position is acquiescence to the status quo, which inspires no one and is a losing proposition for the players.

NFLPA corruption: A serious lesson for the WNBA players

When it comes to representation in CBA negotiating, the WNBA players would be well advised to look at the current NFLPA situation where union representatives withheld evidence of ownership collusion from the players after QB Deshaun Watson signed a five-year, fully guaranteed $230 million contract in March 2022. Owners clearly colluded to suppress NFL player contracts after that deal and the players weren’t informed of this by their union representatives after evidence came to light in the courts. The NFLPA kept ownership collusion a secret from the NFL players for three years, until ESPN reporter Pablo Torre, broke the story a few weeks ago.

Union representatives who aren’t rank-and-file members, in any industry including the WNBA, are tools of management & ownership whose job is to keep labor in line and working for suppressed wages. These union representatives are nothing more than well-paid lackeys who collaborate with ownership to maintain their cushy jobs, salaries & benefits. This applies to teachers, auto & factory workers, municipal employees, etc.

This is why the emerging WNBA CBA is now a cutting edge sports issue. The WNBA’s new found success presents the current players with an opportunity to take control of their industry by representing themselves. For this they need to be a united fist of rank-and-file players, insisting on a fair stake in ownership, otherwise they will eventually be crushed by ownership duplicity with union/management collaboration.

These same issues apply to every industry globally, but they are more highlighted here because because sports gets so much media attention. WNBA players taking control of their negotiations and insisting on becoming the owners of the game they’ve created & built themselves is the key to a labor victory for the players. It is the only way to garner lasting public support for their cause without alienating their fans.

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The Eric Meeker

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Dr. Robert Cade at the University of Florida developed Gatorade in 1966. His laboratory potion had the right electrolytes & salts from the start, but it didn’t taste good, so the football players who needed it often wouldn’t drink it. Dr. Cade took home an early batch of Gatorade to his wife, who recommended cutting it with lemon, and thus sports science was changed forever. Sometimes a brilliant doctor just needs a good woman to help him out. Gatorade won QB Steve Spurrier the Heisman Trophy in 1966, and “The Sweat Solution” is one of the best ESPN 30-for-30 shorts.

Arnold Palmer popularized professional golf and invented his own drink, now commonly referred to as an Arnold Palmer– which is ice tea with lemon. There are arguments about how to proportion an Arnold Palmer, but Arnie says it is mostly ice tea with the lemon garnishing the drink. Some people prefer an Arnold Palmer with half lemonade or more, so it allows that flexibility and there are various acceptable preferences.

The most delightful moment in this ESPN 30-for-30 short is when Arnold Palmer reveals the moment he finally gave up and started referring to his favorite drink as an Arnold Palmer. His attributed concoction became so accepted & widespread that every waiter/waitress now knows what an Arnold Palmer is, so he gave up and started ordering it as an Arnold Palmer– laughingly hoping that no one will recognize him. It’s a great lesson in how to handle fame and giving up false humility from one of the most beloved athletes of the 20th century.

With that introduction, I am now sharing a drink I invented, which I have named after myself. An ‘Eric Meeker’ is half apple cider & half high-pulp orange juice. Individually orange juice and apple cider are very acidy, which limits  consumability, but surprisingly when these two are combined the acids mellow each other out and you are left with a fruity burst of natural sugar rich in vitamins & minerals your body needs. In this sense it is much better than Gatorade because it is organic. It’s superior to an Arnold Palmer in that it is much healthier, while being comparably delicious.

The Eric Meeker is a 50/50 mixture, and leans no more that 60/40 in either direction. The drink’s inventor says it’s better to have more apple cider than orange juice in an Eric Meeker, and you definitely need high-pulp OJ. Also, apple juice doesn’t work like apple cider. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about an Eric Meeker is its economy & easy mixing, with ingredients that are always available in any decent Midwest food market. The nutrient burst you receive from a cool Eric Meeker will replenish your body with what it needs– and fast.

For years Arnold Palmer didn’t self-reference his favorite drink when ordering it, but I’m skipping past all that. As I’ve learned, it’s a hoot to have invented your own drink, and this blog allows publication of the recipe with all the nuances, so enjoy!

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The 2025 Colorado Rockies & franchise mismanagement

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Preface: The 2024 Chicago White Sox finished 41-121, which ranks among the worst MLB seasons ever. Projections all indicate the White Sox will lose at least 110 games in 2025. Currently they are 9-24, worst record in the AL. Their Pythagorean W-L: 14-19, -25 run differential, indicates they have been quite unlucky early on, which may or may not turn itself around. When you are as bad as the White Sox, you can’t just expect luck to turn itself around. You have to play better to create more of your own luck, so Pythagorean W-L is not as reliable an indicator when a team is this extremely bad.

The 2025 White Sox still have a bunch of guys who can’t hit, including CF Luis Robert, Jr (.182/.300/.345) who is now officially untradable after being shopped for years Their pitching staff is a bunch of young arms with plenty of veteran flotsam mixed in. It’s going to be another long season for the South-siders, but it won’t approach the historical badness of 2024. This team is younger and will finish stronger than in 2024, where the White Sox had three major losing streaks, a 14-game streak (May 22-June 6); an AL-record-tying 21-game streak (July 10-August 5); and a 12-game streak (August 23-September 3). That’s hard to replicate in baseball, no matter how bad you are. The 2024 White Sox were really bad, and they had awful leadership on top of that, which turned them into a historical disaster.

The 2024 White Sox were completely demoralized by management & ownership, starting in Spring Training when they dealt their ace RHP Dylan Cease to the San Diego Padres. This unexpected trade (March 13, 2024) challenged everyone on the White Sox pitching staff to step up and fill a slot, and when they couldn’t it quickly collapsed. The key pitching prospect in the Dylan Cease deal, LHP Drew Thorpe, made nine starts for the Pale Hose until he came up Tommy John surgery. That’s how things started death-spiraling for the 2024 White Sox.

After unloading anything they could at the Trade deadline, the front office was unable to deal their most-coveted asset– young LHP Garrett Crochet, so the team had to ride out the rest of the season with their best pitcher on an innings-limit, so he would remain a valuable trade commodity in the winter. Garrett Crochet was dealt to the Red Sox for four prospects in December. The White Sox now have a top-10 farm system, so they will get better, which isn’t saying much but it is somewhat of a relief.

Setting the mark for most losses in a MLB season and putting your team in the discussion for ‘worst MLB team ever’ doesn’t happen every year, which makes the 2025 Colorado Rockies all the more remarkable. The 2025 Colorado Rockies are already a contender for worst MLB ever. The modern list starts with the 1962 New York Mets, managed by the great Casey Stengel, who were 40-120, with a .250 winning percentage. The 2024 White Sox lost one more game, but also won one more game and had a better winning percentage at .253. Mathematically speaking, as bad as the White Sox were last year, the 1962 Mets were a fraction worse. Futile teams from the dead-ball & pre-integration MLB eras include: 1916 Philadelphia Athletics 36-117, .235; 1935 Boston Braves 38-115 .248: 1904 Washington Senators 38-113 .252; so there are historical teams with a lower winning percentage than the 1962 Mets but they are of a completely different era.

Currently the Colorado Rockies are 6-27, with a Pythagorean W-L: 8-25, and a -83 run differential, by far the worst in MLB. This basically means the Rockies are who they are at this point. Their 8-25 expected winning percentage (Pythagorean) is .242, which over a season projects to 39-123 for the Colorado Rockies. But the Rockies are 6-27, which is a .182 winning percentage, which means they have to start playing a lot better just to get to 40 wins in 2025.

Looking deeper into this futility only reveals more bad news for Colorado Rockies fans. The White Sox have the good fortune to be in one of the two Central divisions in MLB, which are qualitatively less completive than the East & West behemoths in both leagues. By contrast, the 2025 Colorado Rockies are in the toughest division in MLB.

Furthermore, it is impossible to discuss Colorado Rockies baseball without understanding what high altitude does to the game, particularly pitchers. Coors Field fastballs don’t ride as much, sinkers don’t sink, and sweepers don’t sweep. The thin air doesn’t allow spin to work as effectively. It’s about survival, so Rockies pitchers have to pitch differently in their home park, and they all look forward to starting on the road. How can a baseball team win with that?

The altitude also affects conditioning, meaning shorter outings, more fatigue buildup during games and over the course of a season in Denver. With advanced metrics normalized across MLB, they now prove beyond any doubt that it is impossible to build a winning team in Denver, Colorado due to these conditions. The Rockies need to move their franchise (Oakland?) to ever have any hope of competing. They haven’t made the post-season since being ousted in the 2018 Divisional series, and have only fallen further from contention since. The last Rockies free agency splash was Ian Desmond in 2017, signed to play SS but had to move to 1B/DH, he produced -2.8 WAR in three seasons before retiring. Their 2007 World Series appearance is a distant memory.

Can you name one current Colorado Rockies player? Most MLB fans outside of Colorado can’t, and they aren’t intersted in learning, which is the problem. This is a boring, homegrown team that never makes a free agency splash anymore, because (outside of OF Larry Walker) none have worked. Since Bret Saberhagen, Denny Neagle & Darryl Kile, top free agent pitchers never list Colorado as a desired destination during hot stove season, and the same goes for position players who need to waive their no-trade clauses to be dealt– they NEVER authorize a trade to Colorado. How can a GM build an organization up against all this? It’s tough enough to beat the Dodgers at sea level, just ask the Padres, Giants & Diamondbacks, who are trying.

The Rockies have a beautiful ballpark, top-5 by MLB standards, and they fill it up with fans every year, so this comes down to a discussion about what is best for the game. Is it okay for a team that sells-out and has a beautiful modern ballpark to play where the game really isn’t baseball? Baseball in Denver is arena baseball, a distorted pinball version of the game. How long will Colorado Rockies fans put up with the inevitable futility on the field? These questions will grow louder & louder if the Rockies continue to play as they have.

We should not see two consecutive seasons of historic futility in MLB anymore, which is troubling for fans. This can only mean that in an era where sports is more competitive & lucrative than ever, it is now becoming commonplace for teams to completely give up before the season starts. The White Sox did it in 2024, and now it’s the Rockies in 2025 and possibly beyond. The Colorado Rockies are #18 in the latest MLB farm system rankings, but what does that mean when NONE of their pitching prospects can develop into real MLB pitchers?

Baseball is the most unique game, the only game where the defense has the ball, and that’s why you can’t play baseball at high altitude. You can play football, basketball & hockey in Denver, and it affects the game for sure, but it doesn’t handicap a NFL, NBA or NHL franchise from winning a title– which the Broncos, Nuggets & Avalanche have done. The Colorado Rockies aren’t anywhere close to that class of winning and never will be. It’s completely unfair to pitching prospects to be drafted by the Colorado Rockies, which is the worst place in the world to go as a young pitcher. That should have been recognized long ago, but MLB is run by owners & front-office executives who don’t understand the game because they can’t see past their ticket sales.

NBA mismanagement 101: This situation isn’t as extreme as the Colorado Rockies or Chicago White Sox, but it deserves attention from sports fans nonetheless. The Milwaukee Bucks have mismanaged themselves into a situation where they are about to lose their superstar, Giannis Antetokounmpo. It really began after the Bucks were defeated in the playoffs by the Celtics in 2022. Instead of getting younger around their two studs, Giannis Antetokounmpo & Jrue Holiday, the Bucks front office kept their aging, diminishing-returns roster together.

Most disastrous was the Damian Lillard trade in 2023, as Jrue Holiday is one of the most valuable players in the NBA as far as winning a championship goes. Steve Kerr knows that, and that’s why Jrue Holiday was on the 2024 gold medal US Olympic team, while Damian Lillard wasn’t. Lillard is now out for the next season-and-a-half, with a torn ACL, while ace defensive stopper Jrue Holiday (pic above) is trying to help the Boston Celtics to another championship. Plus, the Bucks gave up a first-round pick (and two potential swaps– more below) to acquire Damian Lillard, the inferior player in the deal.

The Milwaukee Bucks with all their fruitless wheeling & dealing since 2021, do not have a first-round pick in the 2025 draft. Their 2026, 2028 & 2030 first-round picks are subject to potential swaps with the New Orleans Pelicans & Portland Trail Blazers, meaning if the Bucks hit the lottery in those drafts, the Pelicans (in 2026) or Trail Blazers (2028, 2030) will get their pick. The Bucks do not have first-round picks in 2027 or 2029, which means their next available first-round pick is in 2031. When the Bucks trade Giannis Antetokounmpo this summer (as they now have to) they will be a lottery team for several seasons, in which their top picks will be going to other teams. That’s about about badly as a GM can mismanage a championship roster in four years.

The 2025 NBA draft lottery is Monday, May 12. The Houston Rockets & San Antonio Spurs have been rumored to be the teams most interested & able to acquire Giannis Antetokounmpo from the Bucks. It’s the ‘Cooper Flagg draft’ in the NBA this year, so the Bucks can shift directly into a rebuild with the young stud from Duke by dealing Giannis for the top 2025 pick, but it depends on how the draft lottery goes, so everyone in basketball will be watching.

Any of the teams involved can win the draft lottery, no matter what the “odds” say. There are years where it may have been rigged, going back to the first draft lottery in 1985, and there are too many instances where the team with the lowest odds has won the draft lottery for it not to have been rigged. In 2025: Utah, Washington, Charlotte and New Orleans are the top-4 favorites with the best “odds,” but none of them are thrilling options for the NBA in the Cooper Flagg draft. After that it’s Philadelphia, Brooklyn & Toronto which isn’t any better for media conscious NBA executives.

After that, San Antonio has a 6.7% chance of winning over two picks– 6.0% from their own, and 0.7% from the Atlanta Hawks. Houston has a 3.8% chance of winning, with rights to a Phoenix pick via Brooklyn. The Spurs or Rockets winning would be the most exciting draft lottery outcome for the NBA on May 12, but also among the least likely statistically– a 10.5% composite likelihood. Look for it anyways, since this isn’t fair play, it’s a ruthless business.

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Transgender athletes in mixed & co-ed sports

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Preface: This is my follow-up conclusion to “Trump to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports”, published yesterday and linked here.

Perhaps the final hurdle in this ideological debate is the question of transgender participation in co-ed sports. There are sports where women compete against men. Equestrian jumping & horse racing feature women jockeys competing against men from the Kentucky Derby to the summer Olympics. Auto racing forever changed with Danica Patrick. In these mixed sports (which men still dominate), gender doesn’t matter as much, since it is the horse or vehicle that is doing most of the work. Therefore transgender isn’t a competitive issue in these such sports.

For co-ed sports, there are rules to divide men & women– usually equally. For example, in most adult co-ed softball leagues there are 10-player teams (4 outfielders), divided half women & half men. The batting order has to alternate boy-girl-boy-girl, and if a guy is walked (intentionally or not) he gets second base while next batter up (female) gets a walk to first. This effectively disallows pitching around the men.

Transgender participants in co-ed sports need to be considered as their birth sex. If that fair-play rule violates their sensibilities, then don’t play. That’s how it goes in sports where competitive athletes don’t allow enabling. From all of us to them, “In you can’t play by the rules then form your own league or STFU.” Assuming they know how to play, a co-ed softball team with 5 transgender biological males playing as women would be unbeatable in most recreational leagues.

As I’ve discussed, this is an easy political victory for Trump when he needs it most. His anti-immigration policies, along with Elon Musk’s government takeover have backfired domestically, while his plan to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and build a casino resort for the rich on its ruins have been internationally rejected & condemned. Transgender athletes is a minor issue in comparison, but it gives Trump a much-needed credibility boost and thus more room for his fascist maneuverings. It allows Trump to go on the attack, with moral superiority over the Democrats. In Trump’s warped mind, canceling Biden/Harris DEI initiatives gives him the authority to attack anyone on the left. To be clear: DEI is fake left. Socialists who think & act like this writer are the true left, which is the real target of Trump & DEI/CIA Democrats.

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Trump to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports

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Donald Trump has announced today that he will ban all transgender athletes from competing against girls & women in sports. This is to apply to all ages, from grade school competition through NCAA & professional leagues. This after the Biden/Harris administration had backed their legal participation in women’s sports for years as part of their sweeping identity politics campaigns.

Much of this story was brought to a head by the controversy surrounding San Jose State University’s (SJSU) women’s volleyball team. The transgender athlete in question is Blaire Flemming (pic above), who led the 2024-25 SJSU women’s volleyball team in kills (314), kills per set (3.88) and total sets played (81). Second on the team in kills was Nayell T’ia with 228, and 3.45 kills/set. No other Spartans women’s volleyball player had more than 169 kills last season. A link to SJSU 2024-25 women’s volleyball stats is here.

A cursory look at these statistics, nullifies any argument that a transgender athlete creates no competitive advantage for a NCAA women’s volleyball team. Blaire Flemming was arguably SJSU’s most effective women’s volleyball player last season. Teammates & opponents describe how much higher Blaire Flemming can jump and how much harder she hits the ball, as compared to biological women.

Upon wide-spread discovery of this transgender athlete, NCAA opponents refused to play against SJSU women’s volleyball in 2024-25, as numerous matches were forfeited over principled opposition to a transgender athlete competing against women.

This is not a difficult issue for most of the population. Most people feel transgender people have democratic rights, but allowing them to compete as women in sports isn’t one of them. In fact, allowing this form of unfair competition only serves to increase society’s hatred towards those who are transgender. The problem here isn’t Blaire Flemming, the problem is the corrosive identity politics of the Democratic Party that (by design) irrationally divides society.

The team captain of SJSU women’s volleyball, Brooke Slusser, is suing her head coach, the university, and the conference over this, after being made to be the roommate of Blaire Flemming, without being told about Flemming being transgender [!!]. Apparently, SJSU & the NCAA knew Blaire Flemming was transgender when transferring to SJSU from Coastal Carolina in 2022.

ESPN has written multiple articles on this matter, in which they refuse to identify the transgender player as Blaire Flemming, in order to “protect privacy.” The privacy of Blaire Flemming’s roommates & teammates are of little-to-no concern to ESPN and this identity politics crowd. The mission of these moralist Democrats has been to create a post-modernist wonderland in female athletics, where protesters are silenced, while the “rights” of a handful of transgender athletes are tightly safeguarded.

Every male athlete in competition discloses that he is male to the NCAA. Every biologically female athlete does the same. But according to identity politics logic, transgender athletes can lie about their gender and are politically protected. For the record, Blaire Flemming is listed as “female,” not transgender, on the SJSU 2024-25 women’s volleyball page. This deeply unpopular & reactionary political position is despised by 99+% of athletes and the fans who watch. It allows a fascist imbecile such as Donald Trump to posture as a reformer for justice & common sense, and only the Democrats can do that.

One final note on gender identity. I always refer to Blaine Flemming as Blaine Flemming. That avoids the he/she them/they identity politicking. When I write about any athlete, I almost always use their first & last name together. For instance, Roki Sasaki was the most coveted MLB free agent this winter, and as a sportswriter I had to publish extensively on that. Notice that his name is Roki Sasaki, not Sasaki. Excessive use of a last name without the first dehumanizes the subject. In two long articles on Roki Sasaki, I referred to him by his last name only a few times over the course of thousands of words. I also referred to him, as a pronoun.

With men & women you easily can use pronouns. But with transgender, I prefer to use their full name only & always– writing & speaking. It’s the most accurate (& comfortable) way to write I’ve discovered. Consider that as my accepting nod of approval to transgender people who are having a hard time identifying themselves. The more these transgender people support the Democratic Party, the more voiceless & confused they become.

Liberals cry that “outing” a transgender person is a crime, when really it is a public reckoning of personal truth. You’re an adult now, so deal with it. It’s always uncomfortable, but more importantly it’s necessary. If you checked “female” to the NCAA when you are a transgender biological male, then you fundamentally lied. Enabling this pathological form of dishonesty is the root of all our problems.

Statistically speaking, as far as sample size goes transgender athletes are an extreme outlier. This means you can’t have a NCAA division of transgender competition because the numbers aren’t anywhere close to supporting it and never will be. There are so few of them, that if transgender people want to compete then they need to do it under rational scientific guidelines, meaning man/woman determination by birth gender. If there’s any question, then the athlete must submit to genetic testing, just like drug testing. Transgender athletes don’t get to make up their gender, or claim identity with a specific gender and make that a fact, which Democrats have shamelessly supported.

This isn’t an infringement on the rights of transgender people, it’s just a fair solution to a new problem. Instead of solving it rationally, the Democrats have tried to cynically exploit the issue of the rights of transgender athletes. What the Democrats always leave behind in the process are the rights of the great majority: in this case it’s the female athletes who have had to live, locker room, shower & compete with an unidentified transgender athlete that has been secretly protected by the NCAA from revealing their true biological gender. That’s creepy & murky murky.

The Blaine Flemming’s of the future will have to compete with the boys & men. It took Trump to do this, after 99% of the population already had clearly expressed their feelings on this issue. It’s an easy political win for Trump, always a specialty of the Democrats. Notice that I almost always refer to Donald Trump as Trump, and that’s because Trump is a dehumanized persona.

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Michael Jordan on defense

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I’ll review one play in Michael Jordan’s brilliant basketball career and it’s all you need to know about his defense, if you know what you are looking at. View this YouTube video for reference:

After he makes that famous shot, notice the great defense by Michael Jordan in confusing Fred Brown who is trying to pass to a teammate on the right but MJ is directly in the passing lane after he had picked-up his dribble in a posture & position where he couldn’t shoot.

James Worthy gambled on an overplay steal and was caught badly out of position when Fred Brown checked his pass to the right, but in that confusion (and with a five-second count ticking as MJ is defending two players at once), Fred Brown blindly passes the ball to James Worthy. That’s MJ greatness everyone witnessed, but few understand. Watch it again if you haven’t seen this, it’s total greatness. Billy Packer never saw it, even on the replay. I never hear anyone talk about that defense, just the shot, but MJ was a complete great player at that point and that play proves it.

Fred Brown made two critical mistakes before he threw the ball away. First was picking up his dribble before he knew what to do, along with being in poor shooting posture. Always remain in ‘triple threat’ position when holding the ball. After he picked up his dribble, all Fred Brown could do was pass and MJ played it perfectly. The second mistake was not calling timeout when MJ had him locked up and approaching a 5-second violation.

Georgetown had one timeout remaining, which John Thompson wasted as Billy Packer correctly points out before Worthy misses both free throws. But really, Fred Brown is on that list with Craig Ehlo, Bryon Russell, etc, as guys Michael Jordan dominated when the cameras were on and his team needed to win. Any serious baller can see the phenomenal athleticism, instincts & basketball IQ from MJ to lock up Fred Brown and force that error. MJ won that game for UNC at the end, on both ends.

Clock & timeout management was in its infancy back then and it shows. UNC had 4 timeouts remaining [!] after taking that famous TO with 32 seconds left. No tenths of a second, no shot clock, no three-point shot, or replay officiating. Apparently, neither team knew an intentional foul had been called on those final Worthy free throws, which is VERY poor officiating but also poor coaching by John Thompson. He took that timeout to organize his troops, so has to go to the officials and say, “That was a one-and-one foul, right?” You MUST KNOW before talking to your players about a plan for the final two seconds of the game. He definitely got out-coached by Dean Smith.

It’s striking how much the game was condensed w/o a 3-pt line. Poor spacing allowed MJ to eat up the space between Fred Brown & James Worthy’s guy he had to cover at the same time. Worthy being so out-of-position became a gift when Fred Brown figured it couldn’t be a UNC defender in that spot. James Worthy always gets the credit for that steal, and it was his steal, but it was entirely created by a basket savant named Michael Jordan.

Good spacing became easier to achieve with the 3-pointer finally in the NCAA Tourney in 1986. It’s as if you have to put a line on the court to direct players on where they should be. The game is better for it, that’s for sure and Georgetown-UNC in 1982 was THE game that catalyzed all that change in college (and pro) hoops.

So from now on, if you ever hear anyone say (as I’ve heard for decades), “I still can’t figure out what Fred Brown was thinking on that play,” you can correctly interpret that as an admission of not understanding the greatness of Michael Jordan. MJ knows, so it’s actually disrespectful. It happened in front of everybody, so why don’t you see it?  This happened before anyone knew Michael Jordan was Michael Jordan. But we all know MJ now, so it becomes easier to recognize when looking back at it.

Acknowledging this type of greatness separates those who love & understand the game from those who are in it for the hype. MJ attracted all that & more, but appreciating that level of skill used to matter a lot more in sports to people like Michael Jordan. When people don’t truly appreciate all that greatness, which took a lifetime of effort & sacrifice to achieve, it kills your passion for the game. I believe that is why MJ sold his Charlotte NBA franchise and went into racing.

In The Last Dance (2020) they show a clip of an ESPN reporter asking Michael Jordan what he was thinking after making that last shot. The freshman hero gave a canned, touchy-feel-good answer everyone loved and no one remembers. But his thoughts were, “I’m gonna lockdown Fred Brown (and whoever else I have to), then fake him out his shoes, until he cracks and throws the ball away.” Michael Jordan must have been thinking that because that’s what he did.

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Padres & the Roki Sasaki sweepstakes

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Read my preview analysis here

Silence from the Padres on the first day of the 2025 international draft means intense conversations with other GM’s regarding acquiring more bonus money for Roki Sasaki. This may be part of a series of trades AJP is about to make. Increments of $250,000 in international bonus money can now be traded. It’s not the money teams are trading, but the rights to spend that money on signing a player. How it is valued we are about to find out. AJP is a GM pioneer like that.

Consider this, if you were Padres GM AJP and wanted Roki Sasaki more than anything this winter, then you would do whatever it took to impress him, right? Money talks, so AJP is looking for 14 chunks of $250K from teams around the league who have international bonus money to spare. He’s letting all the other top talent get signed so every spender is spent, then AJP can get the international bonus money cheaper.

Timing is surely important to his plan, and that’s why it was so critical to keep East Coast Bias off his back while he executes it. AJP has until January 23 to sign Roki Sasaki before his Japanese posting window closes. Remember, the Blue Jays are the kicker team if MLB blows up AJP’s plan, as he brilliantly neutralized East Coast Bias with Laurentian Bias. It was a masterstroke of baseball GM genius.

By my calculations, the Padres & Blue Jays can acquire up to $3.5M, as no more than 60% from the base amount is allowed. The Dodgers can acquire up to $3M extra. If AJP is running this show, and I have postulated that he has from the start, then the Dodgers & Blue Jays are in no man’s land right now. Unable to act in the international draft in the vain hope of signing the ultimate prize: Roki Sasaki.

Every MLB team had a contingency plan to pivot from Sasaki if their bid failed. Some teams pivoted earlier than others. In many ways, the teams that were never in on Sasaki were the best off, as the weren’t distracted by something they weren’t going to get anyway. A Sasaki level of talent is like a drug that has you in the grips of addiction, you can’t quit as it consumes you. If affects your judgment because it’s so emotional.

Whatever the Dodgers Plan B on Sasaki is, it is slipping away as teams sign the top remaining international talent for 2025. This after they left $2.1M unspent last year on an early Sasaki signing gambit, that was as insulting as it was short-sighted. Andrew Friedman is currently in an impossible situation which he partly put himself in. If he keeps waiting, all the other top talent will have signed elsewhere and the Dodgers risk getting shut out of the 2025 international draft. The same dynamic applies to the Blue Jays, and that’s what happens when you go all in & fall short. If the Dodgers/Blue Jays sign another top talent, it’s a concession they aren’t getting Roki Sasaki. What do you do? Tick, tick, tick…

The only MLB team that didn’t have a Plan B on Roki Sasaki was the Padres. With their current payroll situation, this was simply a matter of failure not being an option for AJP and the Padres. You can follow this action from afar by monitoring which teams are signing the top-50 international prospects, and who still has bonus money to spare. Anticipate some complex 3-way deals trying to line up competing interests for the Padres purpose of AJP acquiring bonus money for Roki Sasaki.

Wed 15 Jan 2025 09:32 PM CST

End of Day 1 summary & analysis

Beyond the SDP, LAD & TOR, other WS contending teams that have been noticeably quiet so far are: NYY, BOS, ATL & PHI. Small market teams have feasted on Day 1 of the MLB international draft. On the big market side, the SFG & NYM each signed a top-5 prospect, but it’s the middle & small market teams that are reaping the early benefit of neutralized East Coast Bias.

Kudos to the Rays, Brewers, Twins, Marlins, Cardinals, etc, who are signing talent and using their pool money early & aggressively to improve their organizations. This is their big chance at low-cost future stars. Every draft class has a few guys who come out of nowhere to become impact players or stars. When the top prize is out of reach, a baseball GM must be realistic and find that talent amongst what remains available. That’s what organizational scouting departments are for.

AJ Preller is the type of GM who has the gonads to say to all of them: “I’m getting Sasaki. Who’s gonna deal me the $3.5M in Monopoly money in their bonus pool so I can pay this kid what he deserves?” It’s better to get it all at once and AJP will eventually find a price he likes in that market.

Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins and team president Mark Shapiro are at the helm in a long-shot situation in Toronto. They certainly know they are the kicker in this AJP deal. When do they act? Or do they just wait & see? Would they dare try to acquire $3.5M in bonus pool money? What would it cost them & what are the chances they will get stuck with it?

How about Andrew Friedman who is in a similar (but different) spot with the Dodgers? That $3.5M in funny money isn’t worth a whole lot, but perhaps it’ll return a better prospect from the Padres system than what was available in the 2025 international draft. Who knows? It will be worth a gamble for some team(s), and it only takes one with the unusable money to make a deal.

Too many teams still have most or all their bonus pool money for this not to be on MLB GM’s minds. Most heavyweights have usually signed a top player or two from this top-50 list by the end of day 1. The pickins’ only get slimmer on day two if you don’t hit the jackpot. From #2-50, only twenty prospects remain unsigned as of this writing. #2-7 are signed, with the Mets paying #3 prospect Elian Peña, SS, D.R. $5M. Other prospects around him got ~3$M. The other top prospects left will go for $1M-$2M. Prospects at the bottom end of the top-50 are going for $800,000+.

Beyond that it is a murky free-for-all, and that’s why it’s so important for an eligible international prospect to be on this top-50 MLB list. Most of the top prospects are from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela & Cuba– in that order. Prospects signed for <$10K don’t count towards the team’s bonus pool, and there are more than a few of those guys every year.

Sometimes the easiest answer to a difficult problem is a direct approach. A Padres three-way trade (as posited earlier) probably involves too many moving parts which can drop out, especially when Black Hand influence is in the midst. It allows for too many media leaks also. AJP needs one team (or two at most) to deliver the money for Roki Sasaki. Then he can sign the coveted ace with the proper financial respect, and all other Padres deals in the works can then be made.

Thu 16 Jan 2025 1:05 PM CST

It is now being reported on MLB dot com that the Padres & Dodgers have been calling other teams about acquiring bonus pool money– which is what I postulated yesterday. The Blue Jays apparently haven’t, which makes sense as I’ve outlined already. As a surprise dark hose, the Blue Jays have to be cautious with all these sharks in the water. The Dodgers are the beast of MLB right now, and clearly Andrew Friedman feels they should be all-in on Roki Sasaki to the end.

It’s a calculated risk based on the premise that Roki Sasaki is infinitely more valuable than any other eligible international draft prospect in 2025. It’s also his competitive nature to not give into the Padres on anything, who at this point are the Dodgers fiercest rival. Giving in is the worst sin.

Hypothetically, if the Padres currently have a 70% chance in these sweepstakes, with the Blue Jays at 20%, and the Dodgers 10%; Friedman would still play this same strategy. Andrew Friedman is (at minimum) trying to drive up the price for AJP to obtain the $3.5M he’s seeking from other teams. The Dodgers can only obtain up to $3M more, as they have a smaller original bonus pool.

Remember, this isn’t money that is being traded, it’s the right to spend that money on signing a player. In other words, the $3.5M (or $3M) these teams are seeking is monetary credit that can be traded and turned into bonus money which that team can pay to a new signee. Other MLB teams are now realizing they can possibly get a prospect in return for their bonus money credit, which both the Padres & Dodgers are seeking. Only one team can use this money to sign Sasaki, so it’s a game of blind-mans’ bluff between the Padres & Dodgers GM’s. If AJP suddenly acquires $3.5M, what does Andrew Friedman do? Or vice versa?

What the value of that bonus pool credit will be is what’s being discussed by these GMs, with other GM’s. The longer the international draft goes, the softer the market becomes for acquiring bonus money. The remaining international prospects aren’t as attractive, so acquiring a Padres or Dodgers prospect for Monopoly money gets teams excited to make a deal. As I wrote earlier, the Padres/Dodgers prospect they could receive may be better than anything left in the international draft, plus it won’t cost that team any real money to acquire that prospect. Nothing gets MLB GM’s more aroused than potentially getting something for nothing.

The Red Sox spent their pool money since my last update, so they are eliminated from this group of teams that have been inactive with possibly this trade strategy in mind. There is more than enough surplus bonus pool money around MLB for both the Padres & Dodgers to acquire their max limit, and even the Blue Jays too ($3.5M) if they were inclined. I don’t believe Andrew Friedman or AJP would give up anything close to a top-30 prospect in a trade market this soft, but it’s still unknown.

What I do know is that if the Black Hand of MLB blocks AJP’s pool money deal, he’s already picked out the Blue Jays prospect he wants for the $3.5M bonus money he has available in his bonus pool. AJP is far ahead of his competitors on this, as Andrew Friedman is stalking AJP’s every GM move.

If you want Roki Sasaki, then you have to go the extra mile and then some. Both Friedman & Preller know what is at stake, while knowing everything about how the system works. The Padres have more money to offer and can add more than the Dodgers. That is a fact. The Blue Jays can’t risk this gamble, which is an appraisal.

Between the Padres & Dodgers, one team is going to bust and go home with nothing in the 2025 international draft. Set-backs like that have rarely happened to the Dodgers under Andrew Friedman, as AJP seeks to level the competitive playing field with his arch-rival by doing whatever it takes to get Roki Sasaki ALL his bonus money.

This process is really about more than the money. It’s about doing your job as a GM to take care of a coveted player’s interests. It’s about proving your organization’s worth to that player to earn his loyalty. The team that does that best will win the Sasaki sweepstakes.

Fri 17 Jan 2025 11:52 AM CST

The Black Hand intervenes–again

It has just been reported by MLB that the Padres are out of the Sasaki sweepstakes and the Blue Jays have made a deal with the Guardians for the bonus pool money needed to sign Sasaki. Padres fans have seen this before, as this eerily recalls their pursuit of Shohei Ohtani in 2018. I suspect Dodgers GM Andrew Friedman convinced MLB to not approve any type of Sasaki-Padres deal– and they agreed out of competitive self interest. Clearly, AJP tried to get the bonus money for Roki Sasaki, but apparently no one would trade it to him– because the Black Hand was looming.

Notice that the Dodgers never got that bonus money the were talking so loudly about acquiring in the media for the past two days. Why not? It’s because they knew they were already out, and were doing anything (by hook or crook) to keep the coveted ace from ending up in a Padres uniform. Dirty tricks are part of the Black Hand’s modus operandi, and Andrew Friedman used his big-market clout to block his arch-rival AJP by that means. I have no respect for that. It’s equivalent to losing at something, then asking your parents to intervene on your behalf because you didn’t like the results.

This happened in 2018 when the Red Sox convinced MLB (in a more open & ham-fisted manner) that the Padres didn’t deserve Shohei Ohtani. How else does anyone explain Roki Sasaki to the Blue Jays? A few weeks ago, Toronto wasn’t even on Sasaki’s list, after he had been planning this jump to MLB for years. Once again, the Black Hand has revealed itself, and once again MLB writers & reporters who know better will bury this story. They could get fired & blacklisted for telling the truth here.

For seven years, no one (but me) has explained how Shohei Ohtani got to the Angels, the same way no one will honestly explain how Roki Sasaki is going to end up with the Blue Jays. AJP has been forced to pivot to the remaining international prospects after his Sasaki master plan was nullified by the wave of MLB’s Black Hand. The Padres organization & their fans wish Roki Sasaki the best in Toronto, but they are not only disappointed, they are disgusted by all this.

No, the best team doesn’t always win. That’s because there’s too many behind-the-scene machinations which rig the game in favor of the big market teams and their interests. It’s sad to realize this truth of life through a kid’s game like baseball, but these sports are big business and money rules.

Fri 17 Jan 2025 12:49 PM CST

Conclusion

The lesson of lessons in major sports, business & politics (which all this is) is: You must ALWAYS account for the Black Hand. Read that last sentence a few more times until it has absorbed into your marrow before reading on. I understand I’ve sounded somewhat like a lunatic-fringe conspiracy theorist at times as the Black Hand has been a leitmotif during my writings on the Sasaki Affair. But now that story has been written (largely by me), and it has unfolded in the context I provided beforehand, giving the reader everything necessary to understand this murky process, I feel it is time for me to take my leave.

Once again, it was NEVER an open contest among 30 MLB peer competitors. It is instead a monopoly capitalist rigged playing field. That is the Black Hand. Exposing that is more important to this writer than who gets Roki Sasaki. I love baseball, but it’s just a tool in life, and that’s the difference between me; and MLB writers such as Jon Morosi, Ken Rosenthal, Jeff Passan, etc, who have been reading & sharing me during the Sasaki Affair. My message to all of them is. “Tell the fans the whole truth– for a change… and fuck Buster Olney.”

In this spirit of sportsmanship, there are no hard feelings towards Roki Sasaki from Padres fans– particularly this one. This Padres fan holds those who are truly accountable to blame. The Black Hand hates exposure above all else, and this is how to strike back.

That’s what made my 2018 Ohtani Affair coverage so valuable, and why MLB has hidden its facts since. I believe my artist name was heatedly discussed at the MLB owners meeting held in Orlando, FL shortly after that murky 2018 international affair. My MLB account (handle: Ric Size) was deactivated and commenting became near impossible for me, until MLB killed all the team message boards later that year.

That’s an event that REALLY affected baseball fans and was never reported in the mass media, due to the Black Hand. If allowed to remain in the murky shadows, the Black Hand becomes the all-powerful nefarious force which violently consumes us all. In Trotskyist Marxist terms based on dialectical materialism, the Black Hand is imperialist capitalism.

Postscript

It was later announced in the day that Roki Sasaki chose the Dodgers. No surprise there either, which team would you rather play for? The Blue Jays were AJP’s kicker if his deal went bad, which it did, but it was Roki Sasaki’s choice to make. Sasaki made the ‘smart choice’ according to baseball insiders. I believe in his heart that he (& Shohei Ohtani in 2018) wanted to be in a Padres uniform, but elite athletic talent can’t resist the Black Hand as it is only a pawn in this game. Roki Sasaki understands that much better now and I hope those who are reading me do too.

The Dodgers are giving Roki Sasaki a $6.5M signing bonus. To get to $6.5M, the Dodgers must acquire an additional $1,353,800 in bonus pool money by next Thursday, January 23– an impossible task for AJP, but easy living for the Dodgers. As proof of favorable bias, the Dodgers get to announce the deal before they even have the money, something the Padres & Blue Jays would never be allowed to do by MLB.

After the first two days, AJP was unable to find another MLB team willing to trade him any Monopoly money to increase the Padres bonus pool for Sasaki and that was a clear signal from the Black Hand. Note that this Dodgers $6.5 is slightly more than the Padres had available at $6.2M. An appearance of legitimacy is what counts here.

Since the Diamond Sports Group bankruptcy in 2023, the Padres are now one of 7 (possibly 9) teams that broadcast through MLB in 2025. The significance of that is if MLB doesn’t want Roki Sasaki in San Diego, then MLB can coerce Padres ownership into yielding by threatening their broadcast deal, etc– meaning their revenue streams. I have a sense that when this ‘business proposition’ was presented to Padres ownership sometime last night, the decision was for AJP to drop his Sasaki pursuit for the ‘good of the organization’.

It’s this type of blackmail, coercion, tampering, collusion, or whatever else you want to call it, that sent Roki Sasaki to the Dodgers. It’s exactly this type of ownership dirty dealing & league interference that turns off fans. The Padres will obviously have no comment on any of this. Just business as usual for MLB.

Over & Out

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