You are never going to be able to get rid of all sick people ever. These people find kids to victimize like that is their job. So absent a science fiction vaccine that wipes out whatever wiring flaw in people’s minds as makes them do this, what you have to have is an oversight structure with its eyes on the prize. The prize isn’t the football coach’s reputation, or the university president’s, or the football team’s, or the town’s. The prize isn’t keeping everybody quiet so that nobody at Sports Illustrated has to write anything awkward. The prize isn’t letting Joe Paterno retire quietly as a legend because legacy and winning and blah blah blah.

So my question for you all tonight is this: Who would you LIKE to see write the theme song for Monday Night Football?

Tonight, I’m going to take a break from my usual attempts at making sense of the senseless, aka the US economy. No snarking on the greed and whining of the banksters although a bit on the schadenfreud of watching some corporate greed backfire in the sports world. It will be time enough tomorrow to start wondering and worrying about how the corporatist SCOTUS will manage to screw us in decisions when they open their new session on Monday.

The latest Major League Baseball teams to participate in the It Gets Better Project (the award-winning grassroots video effort started by Dan Savage) designed to give hope to struggling LGBT youth are the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies.

Thanks to Marvin Miller, the players that were hired young and never had work experience outside of baseball now were able to fully support their families, set aside money for retirement, and rely on a strong support system should injury cut short their careers. Imagine what this could have done for someone like Harmon Killebrew, who instead of going to college signed his first major league contract before his eighteenth birthday because his widowed mother needed the money, and found himself retired and used up physically at age thirty-nine, without having had much of a chance in between to prepare for a post-baseball career.

Yesterday the Barry Bonds trial ended with a single conviction for obstruction of justice and a mistrial declared due to a hung jury on the other three remaining counts. There were originally five counts in the indictment, but count four was dismissed prior to the case being given to the jury.

Today, we are joined by Stephen Partridge, one of the editors of The Cambridge Companion To Baseball.

Have I mentioned recently that I love baseball? I fit the definition of “avid fan” (pg 35) in that I follow the sports statistics but have not gone the route of the fantasy league fan (described as “rabid”). I can watch a baseball game at any level of play from Little League up to the Major Leagues and enjoy the game as it is. I have multiple shelves on my bookcases with both fiction and non-fiction baseball books. I own and re-watch a number of baseball themed movies.

Gone Batty. This Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon was first released on September 4, 1954.

Yankees stars Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Bill Skowron, and songwriter Jack Norworth — Take Me Out To The Ball Game on The Ed Sullivan Show on April 13, 1958.

U.S. Steel’s threat to punish those of its workers who take a day off to watch the Super Bowl is unsurprising because mean-spiritedness was and remains still a prominent feature of America’s capital-labor conflict.