COMMENTARY : EXPECT CHANGES WITHOUT O'MALLEY.Byline: Mark Whicker Orange County Register Hold onto yesterday if you must. The rest of the sports world Sports World are a British sports Retailer, formerly called Sports Soccer. Founded in the late 1970's by former county squash coach Mike Ashley, the group Sports World International is now the UK's largest retailer of sports clothing and accessories. is speeding across that bridge to the 21st century, so keep your quarters handy. Get ready to buy those personal-seat licenses in Toyota Dodger Stadium • • [ . Brace yourself for ``Web TV'' logos across the webbing of every glove. See if Vin Scully For the American architecture historian, see . Vincent Edward "Vin" Scully (born November 29, 1927, in The Bronx, New York) is an American sportscaster, known primarily as the play-by-play voice of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers baseball teams. can refrain from gagging as he presents the Gatorade Starting Lineup For the line of action figures, see . A starting lineup in sports refers to the set of players actively participating in the event when the game begins. The players in the starting lineup are commonly referred to as starters, whereas the others are substitutes and the Immodium Block-The-Plate Award, from the Dodgers' lovely new spring training compound in Murdoch Acres, Ariz. It's coming. The Dodgers, the last crossing guards against the trivialization of baseball, are being sold, and we can only hope organist Nancy Bea Hefley gets to keep a couple of pedals, while ``Y'all Ready For This'' blasts its way through the speakers and into the ravine. Peter O'Malley didn't put billboards anywhere in the stadium, much less behind the plate. Some seats were better than others in Dodger Stadium, but the services aren't - nobody gets to watch the Dodgers behind a plate-glass window while munching mozzarella sticks. The Dodgers scoffed at those revenue streams and gambled that people still enjoyed whole-grain baseball. Year after year they were proven right. But O'Malley was a dinosaur even in his own family. It's hard to know who will buy the Dodgers, but it's impossible to decide who deserves to. But why should tradition survive here? Baseball itself doesn't care. Because it can't figure out which league to place the new franchises, Arizona and Tampa Bay, it is considering blurring the lines between the leagues altogether. A committee will return a report June 30 that might allow the American and National leagues to commingle commingle to mingle together, e.g. cattle mingling with deer. . Why not? You have wild cards and designated hitters and World Series games played on the last Sunday in October. You have kids catching fly balls in Yankee Stadium's right field, for home runs. The two leagues make less sense every year. Two separate bureaucracies, two separate presidents, making the tough suspension decisions that commissioners are supposed to make. Two separate umpiring crews with wildly differing interpretations. And two teams in Chicago, two teams in L.A.-Orange counties, two teams in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of that are mysteries to each other. What if UCLA UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UCLA University Center for Learning Assistance (Illinois State University) UCLA University of Carrollton, TX and Lower Addison, TX never played USC An abbreviation for U.S. Code. ? The Diamondbacks and Devil Rays will be baseball's 29th and 30th teams. Already the D-backs have sold 33,000 season tickets and their opening day is 15 months away. The ballpark in downtown Phoenix is being financed by a sales tax sales tax, levy on the sale of goods or services, generally calculated as a percentage of the selling price, and sometimes called a purchase tax. It is usually collected in the form of an extra charge by the retailer, who remits the tax to the government. that was ramrodded through the city council without anybody voting. Don't their fans deserve to see everybody? Here's one possible realignment plan that is so simple and painless it has no chance of even being considered: WEST - Dodgers, Angels, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego. (That was the easy part; even Bud Selig can understand it.) EAST - Mets, Yankees, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore. (A lot of rivalries that must be preserved, and besides, you get that Boston-Philly thing going.) SOUTH - Atlanta, Florida, Tampa Bay, Texas, Houston. (Also known as the Speed Stick Division.) MIDWEST - Cubs, White Sox, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City. (Gotta preserve the Cubs-Cardinals lovefest, and they're all in the same time zone.) CENTRAL - Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Arizona. (Arizona doesn't fit in anyplace else, and besides, the Arizona Cardinals are in the NFC NFC abbr. National Football Conference East. Besides, it gives the D-Backs instant competitiveness.) CONTINENTAL - Toronto, Montreal, Minnesota, Seattle, Colorado. (This is where you have to put all the misfits. But Blue Jays fans always come down from Vancouver to Seattle, and Ken Griffey gets to hit in Coors Field.) Scheduling? You play each divisional rival 14 times, for a subtotal subtotal /sub·to·tal/ (sub-to´t'l) less than, but often almost, complete. of 56 games. CAPTION(S): Photo Photo: O'MALLEY |
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