7 Baseball

It is late morning on a wet Saturday as the rains - more than a drizzle but not enough for me to consider taking an umbrella with me were I to go out - have been (more or less) steady since early morning, yesterday.  I'm gonna be indoors all day, today - still in my pajamas - no need to go out.......and our small home is pleasantly, comfortably warm - with a thermal vest atop the pj tops as the central heating keeps our place warm.

My life is intertwined with baseball tying so much more than the game into it.  Yeah, 'Baseball is Life'.........I wish I still had that T shirt!  I have been on a baseball odyssey from sometime in September, 1944 when my mother and her sisters Sarah and Faye  and 4 cousins attended Ladies Day at Ebbetts Field where the St Louis Cardinals beat the Brooklyn Dodgers.   Of course I don't remember it!  But it is what I do remember from 18 September 1947 on - far more than just the Dodgers and World Series matters.  I have had some life experiences that, in spite of getting older and battling against the 'senior moment' might be interesting were I motivated to write about it......first things first, I've boxed myself into a corner requiring my completing this part first and then editing an joining all seven parts into a long essay that will be readable....is that possible?  Only time will tell.

And the odyssey  continues - I'm not dead yet!  There's far more to talk about that concerns baseball tomorrow that I want to mention now.....and then finish off this part of the essay.......

**********

Look above and you're gonna see some dark clouds that will not go away:  A week after the Dodgers won the Series, Federal prosecutors announced that two Cleveland Guardians pitchers tipped off bettors about pitches they were going to throw so they could bet on these 'micro-bets'.  MLB's response was to 'regulate' this with the betting industry.   

And a week before that, investigators charged both current and former NBA players with 'betting problems'.

I was gone from life in the States for a long, long time and I came back, remembering no tolerance for gambling because the integrity of the game was more important only to find all aspects of gambling rampant on televised sports.  I am defiantly old-fashioned:  Once investigators findings are issued, I believe in a far more rapid due process and those guilty should be banned from sports.........It'll never happen but at least I can voice my thoughts as we look to another season after this coming winter.

In looking at the future of the Dodgers - especially after what that organization has accomplished in the becoming the mega-dynasty of today, I owe a whole hell of a lot to Andrew Gumbel and his NY Times brilliant piece of investigative journalism "The LA Dodgers won the World Series but for Latino fans it's complicated".

Nothing can be taken away from the sheer brilliance of the Dodger organization.  It is class.  It took in over 4 million attendees at Dodger Stadium this year when two MLB teams didn't even reach 1 million.  It had the money to purchase a lifetime of Shohei Ohtani's services (and cover up Ohtani's possible involvement with his interpreter's gambling involvements?) with two more pitchers from Japan that are also potentially of Hall of Fame calibre also signing huge contracts.

Hey, once upon a time I hated the Yankees as the evil empire.   Look at the Dodgers now - they are a dynasty.....are they becoming the new evil empire?  Mr. Gumbel looked at the Dodger ownership: "...the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its owned publishd balance shts, include a stake in the GEO Group, a private prison corporation that operats ICE detention centers."

When Trump sent the troops into Los Angeles, the two Major League Soccer teams in Los Angeles quickly issued media statements expressing solidarity with immigrant families.  The Dodgers were silent.  A few months earlier, the Dodger organization accepted  a 2024 World Series victory fete at the White House.  Dylan Hernandez of the LA Times called this 'pathetic...spineless...and hypocritical".

Gustavo Arellano, the most widely followed Mexican-American columnist has called the Dodgers 'the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos".....They've put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it."

What does the future portend vis a vis the love affair between the Dodgers and their community......will it endure?  

What will happen over the winter vis a vis investing in overcoming some weak spots of the past season and the hype leading up to striving for a threepeat..........

Regardless,  baseball will go on and on and on and grumpy old men like me will forever be grumpy about gambling.........but I will listen to games as long as I live.....I LOVE BASEBALL.....I LOVE THE DODGERS.....I LOVE LIVING IN LOS ANGELES.....!