Bad news beats no news
Perfect time for commish to announce Sox investigation findings
Opening Day was closed across North America Thursday. The coronavirus pandemic continued its vicious winning streak against professional sports, pushing back another annual athletic milestone on the 2020 calendar.
March Madness went out like a lamb. The NBA is in timeout. The NHL is on ice. The PGA Tour has found the metaphorical water. The XFL? Fuhgeddaboudit.
The Kentucky Derby, Indy 500 and Masters have all been postponed.
But this was Opening Day. And we missed it.
The Red Sox were scheduled to begin the season in Toronto. No matter where they are playing, Red Sox Opening Day is the unofficial first day of spring and the official first day of hope each year (post-Patriots playoff run) across New England.
The 2020 Red Sox are bereft of Mookie Betts, David Price, Chris Sale (until further notice) and any real hope of reaching the postseason. Still, they would have been perfect on this Opening Day. And the diehards, dreamers and Pink Hats would have the opportunity to demonstrate that the Red Sox can win 84 games without Mookie as easily as they can win 84 games with him.
These Red Sox have done their best to quarantine any optimism about the 2020 season. And yet the worst may be yet to come.
The Red Sox stand accused of stealing signs during their 2018 World Series championship run by using their replay room in violation of MLB rules. That’s the antiseptic way of saying they allegedly cheated. Former manager Alex Cora was dragged down by the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. That forever puts a Texas-sized asterisk next to Houston’s 2017 World Series title.
Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred now knows what the Red Sox did and knows when they knew it.
He’s just not telling anyone.
“We are done with the investigation,” he told ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt Thursday. “There’s been a delay in terms of producing a written report, just because I, frankly, have not had time to turn to it with the other issues. But we will get a Boston report out before we resume play.”
It appears all but certain that there will be some punishment delivered to Jersey Street.
In a related lawsuit last week, an attorney for the Red Sox hinted that MLB had evidence and/or concluded that the team broke the rules.
“I think that there are distinctions between what the Red Sox believe occurred and what the commissioner found,” Lauren Moskowitz of Cravath, Swaine & Moore told a judge. “And I think that certainly they’re entitled to disagree that that activity happened at the club level,” The Athletic reported.
COVID-19 is in the process of becoming the ultimate excuse for everything. This pandemic has changed
American life, culture, society and its economy in a way not seen since the Great Recession or 9/11, depending on whether or not you’ve lost your job and/or are dealing with the illness firsthand.
Manfred’s copout is an easy one. Baseball has yet to set a framework for any potential season given that everything must be done in unison with the players’ union. Scott Boras proposed a full season beginning in June or July with the potential of a Christmas Day World Series game somewhere in California.
Ho. Ho. Home Run. But Manfred is not doing the Red Sox any favors by delaying this report. There’s no better time to drop bad news about the Red Sox than right now.
Millions are on lockdown because of a medical and economic crisis strangling America. A record 3.283 million first-time jobless claims were filed last week nationwide. And that doesn’t even include Cam Newton, Andy Dalton and Joe Flacco.
The sports world is now less fertile than the surface of Mars. Last weekend, 903,000 people tuned in to a virtual NASCAR race that aired on FS1. Denny Hamlin won it. A similar iRacing event from a simulated Texas Motor Speedway will air on Fox at 1 p.m. on Sunday. You know you will be watching.
Locally, Jeremy Jacobs just bronzed his throne as the most despicable team owner in Boston. Parent company Delaware North put 68 salaried full-time TD Garden employees on indefinite leave, cut pay for 82 others, and left all their part-time workers in the cold. Jacobs is worth $3.4 billion.
With that as a background, Manfred could tell us Shoeless Joe Kelly is guilty of wiretapping the Dodgers’ locker room during the 2018 World Series and it would barely register a whimper among the Bay State masses.
We’re all desperate for any news that doesn’t include the words “pandemic,” “stimulus” and “quarantine.”
A good old-fashioned cheating scandal would be a welcome change for Red Sox fans everywhere. No matter how bad it may make the team appear.
After all, at least we’d be talking about baseball.