Tag Archives: MLB

Current Events, Recent Posts

Coke CEO

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Shut up and run your company

I find it remarkable that of all the corporations and organizations who have come out condemning Georgia’s latest legislation concerning voter requirements, nary a one has explained how the law disenfranchises minority voters. Amazing. I recently read where even CNN said it does nothing to harm minority voting. Have any of these woke companies/organizations even read the law? I seriously doubt it.  Someone, anyone, please explain to me how requiring an ID to vote in the United  States infringes upon a minority’s right to vote. Maybe I’m just out of touch with today’s world, but I don’t think so since the chart below shows an awful lot of “things” that require an ID. How does one exist in today’s world without an ID?? You all know from past posts I consider myself an Economist by education and hobby. I know for a fact that we, as consumers have more power than many of you think. Oftentimes, commenters have asked what we can do to help society get back on track. Well, let me tell you it’s plain and  simple. Spend your hard earned money wisely, that is, do not buy from producers who pay more attention to social media than running their business. Corporations like Coke rely on us for their existence. They should shut their woke mouths and concentrate on running Coke for the benefit of the owners, who are , of course, shareholders! Can you imagine if you forwarded this post to everyone in your address book, and they did likewise, we could really hurt Coke, and perhaps teach that idiot woke CEO, James Quincey, a lesson in Economics!

I recently switched razors to Harry’s, and was about to order some more blades. It’s going in the trash today. We should be together on this Gang. If you read about some company/organization  condemning Georgia for their new ID law, make a comment about on here. Let’s start a list so we all know who to stop buying from or supporting.

 

 

 

 

 

I know switching from favorites can be tough e.g., Tide is but one product of Proctor & Gamble. However, we have to do something rather than sitting round bitching about things. Please join me!

What I Wouldn’t Give for a Shave That Isn’t Woke

From my closet to my bathroom, my house is full of leftist brands. It’s time to do something about it.

From the WSJ

By Dave Seminara

April 4, 2021 4:16 pm ET

Maybe I was wrong to think conservatives should refrain from adopting the bullying, boycotting tactics of the left. I made the case against emulating progressives in these pages last summer as I lamented the rise of the woke corporation, documenting how many of my favorite companies embrace values antithetical to my own. But it’s increasingly clear that the sharp increase in corporate virtue signaling after George Floyd’s death wasn’t a passing trend but a sea change. Perhaps it’s time for conservatives to boycott companies that hate us.

Coca-Cola and Delta, a pair of Atlanta-based companies I’ve patronized for many years, became progressive boycott targets this month for allegedly not doing enough to stop Republicans in the state from passing an election-security law that’s been recast absurdly as a civil-rights violation. The companies haven’t withstood it well.

In an interview Wednesday with CNBC, James Quincey, Coca-Cola’s CEO and virtue signaler in chief, called the law “unacceptable” and “a step backwards,” but didn’t explain why. CNBC host Sara Eisen never asked if he feared a conservative backlash. Instead she pressed him on why Coca-Cola didn’t “publicly oppose this before.”

Mr. Quincey’s comments didn’t placate the woke mob on Twitter, with some insisting that Coke hadn’t condemned the legislation soon enough or forcefully enough. Delta CEO Ed Bastian appeared to be reading from the Coca-Cola script later the same day. His company released a statement condemning the law, and Mr. Bastian said in a memo to employees that the reform was “unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.”

Opinion: Morning Editorial Report

As the Journal’s editorial board has pointed out, the legislation is in no way a return to Jim Crow, but rather an honest effort to improve election integrity.

Coca-Cola, Delta, Microsoft and other companies my family supports all but called the legislation racist, implying that those, like me, who support it are bigots. As distasteful as this is, I can’t say I’m surprised. When I look around my house, I see many products from woke companies that want me to know how strongly they disagree with me on pretty much every issue of the day.

Start with Patagonia, one of my favorite clothing-and-gear outfitters. The top of its website exhorts visitors to “act now” to stop climate change, warning that “extinction looms for more than one million species of plants and animals.” Maybe so, but what about shoppers who are there just to pick up a $35 “live simply” T-shirt? The homepage tab next to “shop” is “activism.” Click if you dare, because you’re in for a world of lefty indoctrination. Patagonia even endorses political candidates. You won’t be surprised to learn that none of them in 2020 had an “R” after their names.

Moving to the bathroom, I encounter my progressive razors. No, not Gillette. I ditched those in 2019 after the company released a ludicrously woke ad decrying toxic masculinity. But last month I learned that the new brand I’d chosen, Harry’s, had pulled its advertising from the Daily Wire, a conservative website I like. The razor company fled after a Twitter user with 29 followers complained that one of the Daily Wire’s podcasts “is spreading homophobic and transphobic content.” You might think it’d be easier to find a politically neutral shave, given that a majority of men are Republicans and companies generally play to their customer base. But this reality is apparently lost on Harry’s—and Gillette, or rather its parent company, Procter & Gamble.

Another P&G brand my family uses—Pantene shampoo—recently released a commercial about the life of a young transgender girl and her lesbian moms. “She has always been super gender creative, and hair has been a big part of her transition,” says one of the moms. At the end of the commercial, a banner reads, “PANTENE Family is #BEAUTIFULGBTQ—Proud to Support Transgender Visibility.” The ad has about six times as many dislikes as likes on YouTube, but that hasn’t given the company pause. It tweeted that “transphobia has no place in our world or in our feed.”

Maybe Pantene believes that’ll be the extent of the blowback. Many companies take Republican customers for granted. Perhaps they’re right. I still have subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu and Disney+, even though many of their offerings, particularly documentaries, advance left-wing agendas.

But there’s money to be made on standing up to cancel culture. Last summer, after I complained that my preferred coffee company had gone too far left, readers suggested I buy from Black Rifle Coffee Co. “They support Veterans and the coffee is very good,” one reader wrote me. He was right and word is spreading. The company’s revenue nearly doubled in 2020—a year when every other business seemed to be going woke.

Unlike many on the left, I’m fine with companies not taking sides, and I don’t expect every company I patronize to embrace my views. But if Pantene can stand firm on behalf of transgender visibility, perhaps it’s time for conservatives to stiffen their spines, too. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask that the businesses I patronize refrain from actively and loudly despising me.

Mr. Seminara is a former diplomat and author of “Footsteps of Federer: A Fan’s Pilgrimage Across 7 Swiss Cantons in 10 Acts.”

Originally posted 2021-04-05 14:55:57.

Recent Posts

An Intentional Balk

6 Comments

LOL, I love it when these leaders of the sports world make decisions that they believe will save their beloved sport. Good luck! It’s Economics folks, pure and simple, which is a “social” science, so again good luck figuring out what your fan base will do when you enact something. Since I have never been an avid MLB fan, I could care less, but I will enjoy watching what happens. 

By Greg Maresca

In 1968, Simon and Garfunkel wanted to know where the Yankee Clipper Joe DiMaggio had gone. Over half a century later, the suits of Major League Baseball (MLB) have to be wondering the same for their younger fan base.

Economists say demographics are king, and if true, then MLB is in more trouble than the British Royal Family. A survey by Street and Smith’s Sports Business Journal reported the average MLB fan is 57 years old. By comparison, the average age of an NBA fan is 42.

 Baseball like the culture it entertains has its share of problems.

 The game is still popular but is rapidly aging. Declining attendance has also plagued MLB having lost 6.3 million in attendance over the last eight regular seasons.

Those who play the game are shrinking as well from Little League up through the minor leagues.

It is no secret that participation in Little League has declined greatly through the years. All one has to do is look around. The one youth baseball entity that is doing well is travel baseball. Travel ball provides a chance to play year-round with exposure to college coaches and professional scouts. The problem is the costs are out of reach for many families pitting the baseball haves against the have-nots.

Stickball and stoopball were both central components of the urban youth streetscape experience that have now joined Ringolevio, Hopscotch, and Double Dutch as just more relics of the past. What does any of this have to do with MLB?

Plenty.

All came of age like MLB during the first half of the 20th century. We are now in the first half of the 21st century and like anything else, change is in vogue and baseball is an agrarian game from another century.

MLB is trying to adjust, but at what cost?

The homerun is baseball’s signature and in 2019 BC (Before COVID), the regular season homerun record was broken. The strike-out record also fell that year turning baseball into a prolonged version of Gillette’s Home Run Derby. MLB’s response: the 2021 baseball will be slightly “deadened” meaning a 375-foot stroke will be a few feet shorter – enough to keep more balls in play.

 The changes that remain post-COVID include doubleheaders lasting seven-innings each. Positive coronavirus tests saw teams play 55 doubleheaders. These abridged seven-inning games took an average of just over two and a half hours. This change should help address today’s compromised attention spans that can be juxtaposed to a barn cat in June. And with the average baseball game lasting three hours and seven minutes – Houston we have a problem and it is much more than the Astros cheating.

One change suggested was that all television and radio broadcasts would only be able to air just one 30-second advertisement at the half-inning. Greed overruled and the idea was dropped as quick as conducting more Joe Biden press conferences.

After allowing the designated hitter (DH) during last year’s pandemic-shortened season, the National League (NL) will again have pitchers batting. However, this season could very well be the last time pitchers’ bat. The consensus is the DH is the future of the NL, as it has been in the American League since 1973.

 Moreover, all extra innings with start with a runner on second base. This has been successfully done throughout the minor leagues in recent years, but to the purists of the game it’s nothing short of baseball heresy.

The MLB playoffs will return to their previous format with three division winners and two wild cards per league. But when MLB’s collective bargaining agreement ends December 1 expect the playoff field to permanently expand.

There has never been a time where competition for the entertainment dollar is as fierce, so what does MLB do? Propose eliminating 42 of its 160 minor league teams.

The games abiding fabric can be found within the minors, where the prices are affordable and the players accessible. Kids can get on the field during promotions. The minors are not just for player development, but for fan development, too.

Eliminating many grassroots minor league teams which, in and of themselves, carry a longstanding history is baseball’s version of euthanasia.

This is no 7th inning stretch.

 

UPDATE:

As though all these woes are not enough, the MLB Commissars  have decided the MLB should enter the political arena. Since GA has enacted, or are about to, election laws requiring an ID to cast your ballot, they have decided to move the All-Star game and the MLB drafts from Atlanta to who knows where. Reason? They say enacting a requirement for an ID to vote restricts people of color from voting. WHAT? That is asinine. How many actions today require an ID? So people of color can not do anything today that requires an ID because, what — they do not have one? Why? Someone of color please explain that to me.

MLB is dying, as is NFL and NBA. And as far as I am concerned they can all go the way of the Dinosaur. I’ll continue to watch certain  NCAA sports, but it appears there could be some drastic changes coming about from that group of misfits as well e.g.,  some literal college grants a transgender a scholarship to play women’s basketball.. Don’t believe me, watch and see, I guarantee there is a university out there thinking about it and many transgender basketball players filling out their applications as I write.

Originally posted 2021-04-03 09:52:54.

Current Events

USSA

3 Comments

You ask what does USSA stands for? Read on!

Unityville, USSA

By: Greg Maresca

 

America has endured the worst public health crisis in a century, 70 million claims for unemployment, trillions of dollars in borrowed “stimulus,” civil unrest, a belligerent communist China, convoys of illegal immigrants on their way to the border, which begs the question what exactly is the priority of the Biden administration?

Apparently, impeaching the former president in an attempt to divide the GOP by splintering the MAGA and establishment Republicans, while simultaneously signing a record number of presidential executive orders is.

Call it unity – Biden style, which offers platitudes about bipartisanship and national harmony, while delivering leftist executive orders on a historic scale.

Our cognitively challenged executive order signer-in-chief is ratifying whatever his leftist minions put in front of him as your next president in waiting Kamala Harris is seemingly pulling the strings standing in the shadows.

With thousands of National Guard troops from every state in the union present for Biden’s inauguration, you can put to rest the notion that no one ever shows up for Biden.  Then again, perhaps they were there to ensure that Biden does not flee back to his basement campaign bunker.

How can signing so many executive orders on his first day in office – more than any other president – truly desire unity?  Talk of unity is one thing, but to govern, as the cliché goes, is to choose.  Biden’s choice is clear – govern by executive fiat. Biden’s calls for unity are strictly virtue signaling and intended to shame all who disagree.

Recall Biden’s October interview with ABC News honcho George Stephanopoulos where candidate Biden emphasized how “executive orders are the response of dictators.”  Biden talked up consensus, but since becoming president he has done the exact opposite.

Biden’s executive orders include wrecking women’s sports by allowing a man who identifies as a woman can now compete against them.  Ending thousands of jobs by stopping the Keystone Pipeline, and terminating the deportation of illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes – all extreme measures.  In 1984, President Reagan established the Mexico City Policy, which forbids American tax dollars from supporting international abortions.  In 1993, President Clinton rescinded it. Since then, the policy has been re-enacted by every Republican president and rescinded by every Democrat.  Biden desires to revoke it permanently.

The Wall Street Journal is calling Biden’s executive order jamboree the biggest expansion of federal power since the Great Society with more on the way.

Democrats and their allies throughout the mainstream media have insisted that conservatives need to be “reprogrammed and reeducated,” a phrase out of Nazi Germany, which has only fueled hateful rhetoric throughout social media.

Welcome to 21st century America where the literary works of George Orwell continues to spook our fruited plain.  One wandering soul pontificated how they are looking forward to political reeducation classes because they always wondered what college would have been like sober.

When I get back from my re-education camp, I will grasp that Unityville is not just a township in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming County, or a hamlet in South Dakota, but budding from sea to shining sea.  In my new reprogrammed unifying self, I will forever congratulate Joe Biden for winning the 2020 presidential election and Bobby Bonds for breaking Major League Baseball’s home run record, Lance Armstrong for his numerous Tour de France victories and those Tinsel Town actors for getting their darling progeny into elite universities.

If the Biden administration was serious, they would consent Congress to legislate, while promoting a spirited public discourse – stimulating the democratic process on a national level.

Instead, Biden has doubled down on “identity politics” and resuscitating “critical race theory,” while promoting equity over equality that divides people into victims and villains by race, gender, income, and education, ad nauseam.

Whatever happened to just being an American?

Over the next four years forget about the nation’s Fourth Estate of holding the Biden administration accountable. Only the next election can do that and given the severe lack of historical and civic knowledge of your average American that is unlikely to happen. Moreover, any semblance of unity will not be possible if we cannot agree that an inflated government is no universal panacea.

We are not yet the United Socialist States of America – but certainly on our way.

Gang, if you don’t think we are on our way to becoming the USSA, you’ve been living under a rock. We, as conservatives, MUST continue the fight or we will become the USSA.  Someone has even developed the country’s flag when it happens. DO NOT donate to the RNC or the GOP; they are not our friends. Donate to individual candidates even if they are not in your State, but vet them thoroughly! God help us!

 

 

 

 

Originally posted 2021-02-03 19:31:58.

Current Events

Sports

Image

Disgusting, absolutely disgusting!!!  Americans Favorite sport? Really? I’d rather sit by my pool and watch the grass grow.

LOS ANGELES, CA – JULY 23: Los Angeles Dodgers kneel during the National Anthem prior to a MLB baseball game on Opening Day at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on Thursday, July 23, 2020. (Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images).
                          How about this one for a reality check?

As a sports fan, it pains me to say this: I watched not one inning of the 2020 World Series. This revelation is not some preening, pin-a-medal-on-me political puffery — “Those sports ball players are annoying, America-hating commies, so I’m not watching” — but rather the embarrassed confession of a discouraged, disillusioned former fanatic who has come to realize that my erstwhile sports obsessions are really not all that important.

Apparently, I’m far from alone. The Tampa Bay Rays’ instant classic walk-off Game 4 win drew 8.95 million viewers, the second-lowest viewership in World Series history — ahead of only Game 3’s 8.2 million. For contrast, remember that only four short years ago, Game 7 between the Cubs and Indians peaked at 49.9 million viewers. Game 7 of the classic 1986 Mets-Red Sox series had an estimated viewership as high as 60 million.

The ratings numbers have attached themselves to an anvil and tossed the anvil off a cliff into a black hole. It’s a shocking decline. MLB is not alone in seeing its appeal become more selective, Spinal Tap-style. The NFL’s once-vaunted viewership juggernaut is shedding passengers at an alarming pace; the league is left celebrating a 33 percent decline year-over-year for the most recent Sunday Night game, because it represented a slight uptick compared to the rest of this season’s dismal numbers.

And the NBA?  Woof.  Game 3 of the 2020 NBA Finals averaged 5.9 million viewers. For comparison, Michael Jordan’s last game as a Bull, the clinching Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, averaged almost 36 million viewers. Overall, the Lakers-Heat series dropped 51 percent from the 2019 numbers and 67 percent from 2018.

To extend the Spinal Tap metaphor, the NBA is a few BLM woke bombs away from second billing behind Puppet Show. Let’s be fair: There are mitigating circumstances. Nothing about this year is normal. MLB shoehorned a 60-game season into a pandemic-ravaged sports calendar. The NBA played its Finals at a time of year when teams are normally in training camp. The NFL has clung to something resembling a normal schedule, but the mostly empty stadiums and piped-in crowd noise have lent a surreal, off-putting atmosphere to the proceedings.

Personally, I’ve found it hard to care about sports when the very future of the Republic seems to be at stake, and every day’s headlines bring some fresh hell to torment and terrorize my fragile psyche. Sport becomes far less relevant in times like these, even as simple escapism. There’s no escaping a pervading sense of doom. But after the election, will my apathy magically dissipate, much like I expect the pandemic panic to do? Will I re-engage my former passion for pro sports? It’s entirely possible. A return to normalcy in 2021 would likely include a reboot of a casual interest in the exploits of overgrown man-children and a willingness to set aside their silly political posturing. A post-election de-weaponization of the virus will allow us all to relax, breathe and reclaim life’s simple pleasures. I hope so, anyway.

One final piece of advice: Don’t wait for woke-ism to recede from pro sports before re-engaging. Believe it or not, it is possible to set all that aside and simply enjoy the games themselves. If I let politics control my entertainment choices, I’d be left with listening to the Beatles song “Taxman” on an endless loop, and not much else. Life’s too short, and Jon Voight’s not making many movies these days.

Originally posted 2020-10-30 10:52:09.

Current Events

MLB at its Greatest

7 Comments

LOL, I am not surprised by this at all. What else would one expect from the a third world shithole. Personally, I have never been a big MLB sports fan. Oh, I used to watch it periodically when I had nothing better to do with my time. Then it got so darn boring that I’d rather sit outside and watch the grass grow. That does not mean that I didn’t recognize it as “America’s Game.  What else could be more American than Father and son going to the stadium for hotdogs, cokes, and beer. Well, have fun now fathers, for you may have to explain some things to that young son. Good luck.

You can’t spell blasphemy without LA                     By: Greg Maresca

 The Los Angeles Dodgers are making plenty of news, none of which is for their play on the baseball diamond. Rather, the Dodgers have sold their souls to the whims of the woke. Headlines resulted after the Dodgers announced they would be honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at their annual Gay Pride Night on June 16th.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are anything but a group of pious Catholic nuns, rather they are a militant collection of drag queens who profanely mock God, nuns, and women. They go by names such as Sisters: Edith Myflesh, Anal Receptive, and Porn Again. Their blasphemy of Christianity doesn’t end there as they proudly host a “Hunky Jesus” event and endow a pro-abortion, “Free Choice Mary” award. “Go forth and sin some more!” is their motto.

 How is parading around in costume insulting Catholics a symbol of pride?

For a billion-dollar professional baseball organization, this is certainly a bizarre way to conduct business. The sports’ world, drowning in virtue signaling, has sold out to the woke minority without firing a shot.

When called out on these drag queens, the Dodgers lived up to their longtime moniker and quickly dodged right and disinvited the dragsters. Unable to resist the leftist LGTBQ+ blowback, they dodged again, this time going hard left by not only reinviting the Catholic mocking drag queens and offering “our sincerest apologies,” but will award the dragsters “the Dodgers’ Community Hero Award for service to the LGBTQIA2S Community.”

Why stop there? The Dodgers should change their name to the Los Angeles Drag Queens that would complement their prominent Bud Light sign in the outfield grandstands at Dodger Stadium.

 Why limit such profane mockery to only Christians?

Why not expand their repertoire to include The Mullahs of Mecca, who can do a drag rendition of the Islamic prophet Muhammad? While talking promotions how about black-face minstrel day … well, you get the idea. The left’s overwrought double standards never ceases to amaze.

Once upon a time in America, MLB teams had events like bat day, picture day, and seat cushion day to entice the fringe fans out to the park. In 2023, it’s perversion. Apparently, producing, promoting, and playing baseball is simply not enough. Is their product on the field that skewed that they must supplement it with such derogatory fashion as honoring drag queens that mock Catholics?

How do you explain this garbage to a 10-year-old who just wants to enjoy a game at the stadium?

 It is no secret that the Dodgers have been hosting Gay Pride Night for the last decade. Throughout that tenure, the only thing emanating from Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez was silence, until now. The Archdiocese called on “all Catholics and people of goodwill to stand against bigotry and hate in any form and to stand for respect for one another and for the religious beliefs of our communities of faith.”

Curiously, no mention of the Dodgers, who underscored how anti-Catholic bigotry remains the oldest and most acceptable of American prejudice.

Los Angeles translated from the Spanish “the city of angels” and not Hell’s version, is home to one million Catholics, many of whom are traditionally minded baseball fans who are Hispanic.

What about the Catholic ballplayers? Perhaps they don’t know that Dodger Hall-of-Fame pitcher Sandy Kofax, a practicing Jew, declined to start the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.

The Dodgers believe Christians can be bought off with a “Christian night” in July that will somehow make amends that is not only offensive but distasteful. People need to stop ignoring this insanity and step up to the plate – no exceptions.

No person of faith should support any business or organization aligned with such perversion that ridicules our Judeo-Christian heritage. Righteous anger should turn this publicity charade into the Dodgers’ version of Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney’s transgender moment. Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light’s parent company, has suffered a continuous drop in sales ever since. So has Target. Americans need to continue to respond by closing their wallets and continue what economists say is the most successful conservative boycotts ever.

Follow the money is the only game corporate America truly comprehends.

Oh, let’s not forget about the other corporations who seemed to be falling on their swords one after the other like Target, Kohl’s, and of course the greatest of all, Bud Light. BTW, have you seen the latest commercial developed by some entrepreneur for BUD?

WARNING: this commercial is rather explicit, so if you have tender ears, just skip it.

 

 

 

 

Originally posted 2023-06-02 10:43:25.