Let's Talk About Neal - Part 3

Late last night Dejan Kovacevic posted his column that appeared in today's Pittsburgh Tribune.  I shared it among my Facebook friends, and also posted it to Pirate Chat, and it began to receive hits immediately.  For those of you who either are not on Facebook, do not get the Trib, or are out of town, I won't even try to restate what DK has written, but I urge you to read it.  Here is the link:

http://triblive.com/sports/dejankovacevic/2819385-74/pirates-polanco-baseball-players-team-hell-month-prospects-week-ankle#axzz29xfwc3PE

I am almost speechless in my outrage over what these guys - Huntington, Stark, Larry Broadway (who is a new member of this zany cast of characters) - are trying to do here.  This is a case, as my friend Brian O'Neill put it the other day, and I am paraphrasing here, of an employer saying to the employees "We are the Boss, and don't you insignificant little worms forget it!"

I know that minor league players are not part of the MLB Players Association, but surly the PA should step in here on something that verging on physical abuse and certainly has no relationship to developing baseball players (at which the NHR has proven itself to be pretty inept).  If ever a situation positively SCREAMED for a Marvin Miller Intervention, this is it.

By the way, over the course of 35 years in the corporate world, I have taken part in my share of "team building" days sponsored by my employers.  Some were better than others, and some were downright silly, but I recognize that they can serve a purpose.  What the Huntington, Stark and these other Loonies are doing is, as one Loyal Reader has stated "is a cross between fraternity hazing and corporate team-building gone amok."

And as a Pirates fan, isn't it nice to know that the rest of organized baseball considers your favorite team the "laughingstock" of the industry?

DK on Pujols

Rather that try to paraphrase, I will just cut & paste from Dejan Kovacevic's blog in this morning's Trib on line. It summarizes my feelings exactly.

Take it away, DK.....

>> St. Louis and its Cardinals do everything right by baseball. The city and its fans fill the stadium night after night, the ownership pays for a way-above-market payroll in a metropolitan area the size of Pittsburgh. But the Cardinals can’t keep the best player in the game.

Albert Pujols is an Angel.

And really, if you want a good feel for how little this fazes the national baseball media, good luck finding one outrage-type piece anywhere outside St. Louis this morning. If you see one, please link it here. I haven’t seen any. All I saw were how great this was for the Angels, the balance of power in the AL West, and all that. Everything’s great. This is just how it is in baseball.

>> This isn’t just the Cardinals’ loss. Even if you didn’t like what Pujols did to the Pirates, any pure baseball fan surely enjoyed seeing him play on the North Shore nearly a dozen times every summer. No one ever will do to PNC Park what Pujols did, with a .376 average and 29 home runs in just 89 games.

>> Pujols is to blame, too. He had a chance for a one-of-a-kind legacy with one team, and he chose 10 years and $250 million over 10 years and $210 million. That’s greed of a scope that’s hard to comprehend.