Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-Opening day of the 2018 baseball season is on Thursday, but the joy of the diversion of the game and season is no longer enough to shield us from the things that punch us daily. Still, the Dodgers host their nemeses from the north, the San Francisco Giants, an adversary in a battle dating back a century to their days in Brooklyn and Manhattan respectively.
For those who follow, many who still cope with the void left by the retired Vin Scully, the sport has a heavy lift ahead because every day we are bombarded with new controversies and tragedies at a rate the season will be challenged to keep up with -- thanks in part to never-ending partisanship among genuine friends and strangers who social media giants like Facebook have mislabeled as “friends,” while egregiously selling our personal information to dark forces.
On Saturday, a crowd of people who could fill a substantial portion of Dodger Stadium gathered at Grand Park, across from LA City Hall, demanding wiser gun laws, as others defended the 2nd Amendment. While those ideas are not mutually exclusive, America has yet to find a happy medium.
Politicians who are employed on opposite sides of Grand Park, namely the LA County Supervisors and LA City Council, talk a good game, but rarely act. They could make local gun laws far more restrictive, but they haven’t and probably won’t. It’s a political thing to them, not life and death.And because of that, the status quo remains. Their favorite cheesy statement, “the winds of change blow from the west,” is a load of guano.
Four million of those kids who led protests around the country this weekendwill turn 18 years of age before Election Day in 2020. Perhaps they will teach those in power, regardless of political party, a lesson if they are failed again.
But it isn’t just the politicians from whom we sometimes need the diversion of baseball.
Next Saturday is the seventh anniversary of the Dodgers’ 2011 season, which had some serious highs and lows, not all of which related to the game itself.
That opening day, which the Dodgers won 2-1 against the Giants, will be remembered for what happened to a Giants fan in the parking lot after the game, when two local thugs nearly beat him to death, causing him permanent damage and resulting in long prison terms for themselves.
We later found out that the Dodgers were largely to blame as its then-highly leveraged team owners, Frank and Jamie McCourt, skimped on stadium security, and eventually paid that victim, Bryan Stow, nearly $14 million. In 2016, CNN produced this update on his recovery.
And the LAPD didn’t quite get it right in 2011, either. While it eventually caught the perps, they first publicly accused someone else of the crime, before being forced to admit he was factually innocent.
The 2011 season itself was also memorable because of the historic numbers hurled by southpaw ace Clayton Kershaw, who won the pitching Triple Crown and the Cy Young Award, and because his teammate Matt Kemp, who has since left and returned to the team this season, would have been the MVP, were it not for Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers. Braun won the MVP award in 2011 but was subsequently suspended by Major League Baseball for using performance enhancing drugs. But Bud Selig, baseball’s Commissioner at the time, whose family previously owned the Brewers, used another phony phrase to allow Braun to keep the MVP award: it was“in the best interest of baseball.” More guano.
In other words, absolutely everyone has their own agenda, and sports can no longer mask it.
That brings us to how we left off with the Dodgers in2017 when they won more games, 104, than any other team, reaching Game 7 of the World Series against the Houston Astros in Dodger Stadium; a game they essentially lost in the firstinning. That stung badly.
But it was in Game 5 that another knucklehead, a Houston Astro named Yuli Gurriel “celebrated” his home run off Dodger pitcher Yu Darvish by making a racist slur and gesture toward the Dodger pitcher, which was picked up by television cameras, causing a public outcry at the time.
As I wrote that week, baseball“choked on its Jackie Robinson moment”because that 70th season since the Dodger great broke baseball’s color barrier called for an immediate suspension of Gurriel, rather than his eventual penalty of suspension for the first five games of the 2018 season.
Again, baseball’s Commissioner Rob Manfred said it was “in the best interest of baseball.”
Gurriel’s bill is now due, costing him more than $320,000 of his projected 2018 salary of $12 million. How that impacts the Astros will be seen after they play those games without him, and whether that prevents them from reaching the playoffs later this year.
Baseball’s Opening Day has always been a time for optimism. The extra hour of daylight is back, summer is around the bend and good times are ahead, though we are neverassured of anything on the field, in parking lots, from politicians and police, institutions and corporations or in life itself. In 2018, the enjoyment the game promises us looks like an oasis from our troubles but is mostly a mirage.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. Verifiable tips and story ideas can be sent to him at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
