IT DOESN’T matter if it’s presidential politics, big industry or big sports, statesmanship is trending dead. Doing or even saying the right thing for the good faith it engenders is no longer a consideration. Everyone plays a self-serving angle – and no one is supposed to be smart enough to notice.
MLBPA boss Donald Fehr might’ve sowed some good will on Thursday during his Mitchell Report-response news conference. But he clearly chose not to.
During his opening remarks earlier Thursday, George Mitchell made it clear that while he felt that steroid use among big leaguers appears to be down, the use of Human Growth Hormone, as an undetectable, effective and illegal performance-enhancing substitute, is up. Mitchell made HGH a point of emphasis.
Yet, when Fehr made his opening, prepared remarks, he made sure to note that steroid use among his unionists is down – hooray for us! But he never even dropped as much as a hint that he has ever even heard of HGH.
Or weren’t we supposed to notice?
But worse was yet to come. When Fehr, during the Q&A, was asked about the delay in adopting an effective drug policy, he blamed the owners. He said that no one came to him with “a proposal.”
A proposal? The powerful head of the big-league baseball players’ union knows that those he represents are using dangerous and illegal drugs, but he needs a proposal from outside the union before he acts? He needed to consult the Collective Bargaining Agreement before acting on behalf of his rank and file’s good and welfare?
Doing the right thing for the right reasons is not a due-process issue, it’s a human-decency issue. Your guys were breaking the law, messing with their health, and you, their leader, awaited a proposal from their employers?
Where was Fehr’s regard for those MLBPA members and its aspire-to-be members who were put at career disadvantage because they played clean? Where was their due process? Fehr needed to negotiate with team owners for the right to stand up for the clean players instead of the dirty ones? That’s leadership?
And so we’re back to the same, over and over ending: Fehr, acting (doing nothing) on behalf of the players, like Bud Selig, acting (doing nothing) on behalf of the owners, never gave a rat’s knapsack about people or The Game. They cared only about money, maximizing their side’s cut.
That’s the bag MLB has been in since the owners appointed Selig to guard The Game, 15 years ago. And that’s the bag MLB will remain in until the commissioner is a genuine and independent statesman, an altruist instead of a CFO appointed by the team owners to do financial battle against the players’ union.
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Speaking of team owners, commissioners, absurd spins and the disappearance of integrity, the public framing of the Garden’s settlement of the Anucha Browne Sanders case was standardized Cablevision.
That the Garden is representing itself as the innocent party despite a jury’s ruling to the contrary is nothing out of the corporate ordinary. But to further represent that it settled the case – agreed to pay the plaintiff $11 million – only to please David Stern and for the good of the NBA, is the kind of spin that’s in line with the Cablevision Method.
After all, I’ve been covering Cablevision for over 25 years, and I’ve yet to see it issue a statement, declare a policy or launch an ad campaign that wasn’t designed for the approval of fools.
If Stern exerts that much influence over Jim Dolan, Stern long ago would have successfully encouraged Dolan, for the good of the NBA, to have sold Madison Square Garden and all of its parts.
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Anchoring from ESPN’s studios on Thursday, Bob Ley and Karl Ravech – and no doubt their background support teams – were magnificent before, through and after the Mitchell, Selig and Fehr news conferences.
They not only trafficked the breaking news and conducted interviews, they did so with newsroom professionalism, a steady, spoken aplomb that rivaled the best of Election Night network news coverage. Ley, for example, made sure to note that Fernando Vina, named in the Mitchell Report, is an ESPN analyst.
Thursday, Ley, Ravech, their producers and their staffs, rewarded those who remain conditioned to tune to ESPN for their sports news.
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Nothing backfires louder than sportscasters who try too hard to be funny. Chris Berman, Dennis Miller, Tony Siragusa, Joe Buck, Lee Corso, Steve Lyons.
Keith Olbermann, who should know by now that you can’t force funny, has nonetheless tried to during his NBC Sunday Night NFL pre-game appearances. This past Sunday, following a highlights package, Olbermann said, “There’s late news from the Patriots: Next week the Pats’ 3 will face the Jets, rather than the team itself.”
Ugh.
Sexist? Yes, especially from a fellow normally given to identifying and scolding social insensitivities. Cheap? Yes, that’s the other reason they’re called “throw-away lines.” Funny? Beyond a grammar school-age audience, no.