Major League Baseball already has missed its opportunity to dominate the nation's sports scene in the early summer and produce record ratings for its regional sports networks. Now, the owners' man, Rob"Money" Manfred, and the players' man, Tony Clark, are doing everything in their powers to make any remnant of a season that happens to survive into a farcical afterthought.
Manfred is the main culprit here, and his willingness to sell out the game he doesn't love was on full display Wednesday with the first round of MLB's five-round draft.
Five rounds, then crumbs to sign. In other words, go away, you scores of talented youth trying to decide on an athletic future — Money and his pandemic-panicked, nearsighted owners don't want you.
The country already had a waning passion for the Grand Old Game, and now MLB is creating an avalanche of ill will with this failure to launch, the intent to strip down the minor leagues and the mini-draft — not to forget, the Cheatin' Astros.
What Manfred and Clark and Houston's Magic Garbage Can cannot kill is the desire to play this game at its grassroots:
Men in their 30s and 40s still relishing the day they made a play in the shortstop hole and teammates shouted, "Ozzie Smith," and men in their 20s with peak skills that shouldn't be wasted, and youngsters culled from the coach-pitch masses who managed to see the beauty in the game even as they attempted a throw across the diamond as if putting a 12-pound shot.
My love for Minnesota's unique bond with town team baseball has not been well-disguised. The admiration for these teams, usually a combination of young baseball addicts and warriors against age, has increased over the past couple of weeks, amid reports of our clubs heading to Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas to find games.
The guidelines for Minnesota's pandemic restrictions — known here as the "Rules of Inconsistency'' — continued on Wednesday to ban games, as town teams already were searching east, south and west to cure the itch to play an opponent.
