The NFL Needs To Act
What a shame that the results of probably the two best back-to-back NFL playoff games ever played have been tainted by incompetent officiating and an incredibly stupid rule. The NFL needs to allow pass interference to be a reviewable challenge, and an overtime rule that allows a team to lose without being given the opportunity to have at least one possession of the ball is patently ridiculous. A case can be made that neither of the teams playing in this year’s Super Bowl deserves to be there
Roy Halladay
It wasn’t surprising that Roy Halladay was elected to baseball’s hall of fame on the first ballot. But his widow Brandy’s announcement that there will be no team logo on his plaque was a surprise.
Wasn’t Halladay’s signing a one-day contract with the Blue Jays so that he could retire a Blue Jay indicative of his wishes? Maybe so at the time, but management’s callous treatment of Halladay after he retired, in effect coldly informing him there was no role for him in the organization, may have changed that. Add their almost indifferent reaction to his untimely death and completely inadequate representation at his memorial service and the family’s antipathy towards the Jays becomes somewhat understandable.
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Phillies, with whom he spent four great seasons, were appropriately and admirably front and center in all these respects. I’ve also heard that the Phillies owner sent his private jet to Florida to bring Roy’s family to New York for the hall of fame announcement while the Blue Jays were nowhere to be seen.
It’s rumoured that Brandy Halladay informed the Hall that she wanted a Philly logo on her husband’s plaque but was refused on the basis that, given Roy’s long association with the Jays, it would be too disrespectful to them. No logo was apparently the compromise.
But Why Not Larry Walker?
Why isn’t Larry Walker in the baseball Hall of Fame? His lifetime stats (.313 batting average, 383 home runs, and 1,311 rbis) are hall of fame numbers. He also won an MVP award, three batting titles, three Silver Slugger awards, seven Gold Gloves, and made five all-star teams. It’s hard to imagine a better all-around career. Many baseball aficionados say that Walker is one of the best five-tool players (speed, power, hitting for average, fielding, and throwing) who ever played the game.
His naysayers’ conventional excuse is that his numbers are inflated because he played over half his career with the Colorado Rockies, a team that plays in a “thin air” atmosphere in which the ball carries farther than elsewhere. But, the Rockies play only half their games at Coors Field, so, in fact, Walker, who also played for the Expos and Cards, played only about 30% of his career in “thin air.” Considering that he still had to get his bat on the ball in order for the “thin air” to even be a factor, any effect on his overall statistics shouldn’t be enough to render him unworthy of the hall of fame.
Walker made great strides in this year’s voting (an increase of 20.5 percentage points over last year), but to get in next year he will have to at least match that gain, otherwise he will no longer be on the Baseball Writers Association of America’s ballot. He would still be eligible for later election by a vote of the Today’s Game Committee, a group of former players and executives designed to rectify egregious oversights by the writers. However, this later induction doesn’t carry the same cachet as being chosen by the writers.
Bulls In A China Shop
Justin Trudeau’s bungling of our relationship with China is approaching epic proportions.
The Chinese ambassador to Canada calls Canadians “white supremicists” and Trudeau doesn’t expel him. Then, our ambassador to China, the ever error-prone John McCallum, offers legal advice on how a Chinese executive being held here under an extradition request from the U.S., might avoid that fate, and Trudeau doesn’t fire him. Most of our important allies, because of security risks, have refused to allow Chinese tech giant Huiwei to participate in 5G technology in their countries, but Trudeau still refuses to take such a stand.
I’d like to give Trudeau the benefit of the doubt and consider this lack of backbone to be just another element of his overall incompetence, but I can’t get past his 2013 public declaration of how he admires China’s dictatorship.
John McCallum, while serving as a Liberal cabinet minister, frequently demonstrated his careless lack of judgement, but this week he reached previously unscaled heights. No government official, and ambassadors are high on that list, should ever comment on a case that’s before the courts, let alone give legal advice to a foreign citizen who’s the subject of that case. Also, by what perverted reasoning does McCallum, an economist by trade, feel that he’s qualified to give legal advice even if it were appropriate for him to do so? And McCallum’s subsequent mealy-mouthed reversal of his statement changes nothing.