Blue Jays fly north to prepare for mini-season
Who own da Chiefs?
Ownz. Ownz.
Those lines, repeated over and over, are one of the great bits from the movie, Slap Shot.
And I thought of it the other day when I put in a request to interview the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays. Whoever that may be.
We know Rogers Communications owns the Jays. We know Edward Rogers, son of Ted, is chairman of the club. We know Joe Natale is the CEO of Rogers. But who, as baseball stood on the precipice in a nonsensical negotiation, as the Jays try to find a place to play, as the club tries to manipulate federal government regulations to be able to work at Rogers Centre and allow teams to enter Canada without quarantine, spoke for the ownership of the team?
I asked a media-relations person to arrange an interview. One media-relations person sent my request to another media-relations person. The corporate wheels spinning. It might have gone to a third one. I’m not sure.
The answer I got back was to talk to Mark Shapiro. But I pointed out, he doesn’t own anything, he’s an employee. He may be the club president, he’s not the owner. He has no skin in the game.
The owner is a corporation. A corporation with nothing to say as a major sport paddles in circles in the most complicated market in the game. What does Blue Jays ownership think of Rob Manfred’s leadership as commissioner, about a season without fans, about the players demanding too much, about owning a team and a stadium with so many issues, about COVID-19?
It was a funny bit in Slap Shot. Who own da Chiefs? Not so funny at this challenging time for baseball in Canada.
If there was a Hockey Hall of Fame for giving interviews, being available and insightful and cooperative, Kevin Lowe would have gone in first ballot.
He was the go-to dressing room guy on the great dynastic Edmonton Oilers teams. Wayne Gretzky spoke nicely in clichés. Grant Fuhr barely said anything interesting back then. Paul Coffey was too tightly wound to be comfortable in that role. Mark Messier, on occasion, could be the guy. But day after day after day, season after season, Lowe was the sound byte of the Oilers. The easy quote. The sure thing for context.
His steadiness on defence and his intelligence and leadership off the ice made him an enormous piece of a championship puzzle. The Oilers won five Cups in seven years. No one has been close to that since. No one may ever be close to that again. Lowe was an indispensable part on a team of so many superstars.
But he was never elite. Stay at home defencemen rarely are. He was never a first or second team all-star. The only NHL award he won was for leadership and humanitarian contribution.
Lowe was honest enough in many of his post Hall of Fame election interviews to say he never thought of himself as a Hall of Famer. He didn’t. We didn’t.
At least 14 of the 18 voters on the Hockey Hall of Fame committee thought differently
My friend Dave Naylor had the perfect answer to the question about whether the Raptors should retire Vince Carter’s number and raise his jersey to the rafters at Scotiabank Arena.
“Retiring Vince’s number,” TSN’S Naylor wrote on Twitter, “would be like hanging a photo in your room of the girlfriend/ boyfriend who dumped you.”
You might feel fondly about your ex. But he or she will always remain your ex … In the wake of his retirement, all the adulation of Carter’s career, this rarely gets mentioned. NBA superstars change teams. That’s what they do. Carter had the ability to do that — just didn’t accomplish it. In 22 NBA seasons, he made the playoffs 11 times, missed the playoffs 11 times, never won a championship, never played for a team in the Finals. He started 66 playoff games in 22 seasons … At the same time, Basketball Canada and Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame should honour Carter in some way for changing the game in this country, for getting kids playing, for making basketball cool. That was meaningful across the country — and remains meaningful.
The question both Ontario and NHL players should be asking: If the NHL’S hub format wasn’t good enough for Dr. Bonnie Henry in B.C., one of the MVPS of the COVID -19 season, why should it be good enough for Toronto and frankly, for those playing in it? What were Henry’s objections to the NHL’S plan — and how are those being addressed?