Somewhere today Vida Blue is throwing figurative fastballs at Rob Manfred's head, or perhaps Rollie Fingers is strangling him with his luxurious 'stache. Next to them stand Joe Rudi and Gene Tenace and Reg-gie!, their potent bats twitching like cat's tails.
That's how you handle leg-breakers, see. You send in other leg-breakers to deal with them.
It's pleasant to think about now that Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, has instructed the Oakland Athletics to begin casting about for places the relocate. This is because the city of Oakland has futzed around too long on a proposed waterfront ballpark complex, which the A's and MLB have been lobbying for because it would enable them not just to suck dollars from a ballpark, but to mop up additional gravy from a surrounding commercial hub.
It's not that Oakland doesn't want to develop the waterfront. It does. But the city's been hurting for cash and investment for years now, and the pandemic has only aggravated that hurt.
So of course now is when Robby Manacles decides to put the arm on the city, its reward for loyally supporting the A's for 53 years.
The entire thing is just as sleazy and disgusting as it always is when professional sports blackmail cities for a better deal, a phenomenon we should be used to after all this time. Somehow, though, it's always a shock to see such naked greed and betrayal on display. And that's especially true when it comes at the direction of a sports league itself.
And to put the heat on when that league knows the city it wants to abandon is particularly stressed?
That goes beyond disgusting. That's damn near criminal.
Yet this is simply business as usual for Robby Manacles and his mobster brethren in the other major sports leagues, and it has been for a long time. Oakland in particular has been especially dissed, being especially vulnerable; the NBA Warriors fled across the Bay some time ago, and the NFL Raiders are now in Las Vegas, which has the kind of dough Oakland can only dream about.
And let's not forget our own Indianapolis Colts, swiped from Baltimore almost four decades ago.
As for the A's, Vegas could easily wind up stealing them, too. There would be a kind of symmetry to that, I suppose, Lost Wages having itself been built by mobsters. One assumes Robby Manacles and the boys would thus feel particularly at home there.
On the other hand, it didn't always end well for some of those Vegas mobsters.
Something to dwell on as Rudi and Reg-gie! and them stand in the on-deck circle, warming up their figurative bats.
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