Leave it to Major League Baseball to find a way to screw up the tenth anniversary of 9-11.
For some reason yesterday, the geniuses at MLB decided that they were not going to allow the Mets to wear commemorative hats honoring the fallen NYPD and FDNY members during their game IN NEW YORK yesterday. The excuse they used was that they wanted all teams to be consistent in their uniforms for the day, because, you know, the very fabric of our society would come apart if one team was wearing a non-standard cap while the rest remained normally dressed.
Considering that this is a league that forces all the teams to wear patriotic-themed hats on holidays like July 4th so that they have a whole new line of ugly hats to sell in the team stores, this makes the league look callous, stupid and greedy.
This wasn’t the Mets trying to sneak in a new uniform so that they could earn a little extra money in their own team store, this was a troubled franchise trying to curry some favor in their hometown that just so happened to be profoundly affected by what took place ten years ago yesterday. Why prevent them from doing so? MLB literally gains nothing by putting the kibosh on the Mets’ plans. Instead, they ended up getting egg all over the face of the league as no respectable news outlet covering the Mets could go without mentioning this bizarre decision.
What Bug Selig and his cronies should have done is latched on to the Mets’ decision and had ALL the teams wear some sort of commemorative hats, even if they are the hideous patriotic hats they conjured up. That would have been a show of solidarity and a more noticeable honor for 9-11 than the American flag patches on every players’ uniforms yesterday. Heck, even the NFL, notorious sticklers for even the slightest deviation from their uniform code let players wear any red, white and blue items during their games yesterday.
Shame on you, MLB.
Also last night: The Rays swept the Red Sox to trim their Wild Card lead to 3.5 games. What there’s another race? Yay!… Drew Pomeranz looked good in his MLB debut for the Rockies. Somewhere Chris Antonetti is punching himself in the face… and finally, Stephen Strasburg was strong in three innings of work.
What to watch tonight: As mentioned above, the Rays suddenly find themselves within striking distance of the slumping Red Sox in the AL Wild Card race. For a team that almost everyone wrote off weeks ago, you owe it to them to watch them play if only because they had the fortitude to not just close up shop and mail it in for the rest of the season. Now they are in position to shock the baseball world and return to the post-season where they could very well be a force to be reckoned with, all because they kept playing hard even when it seemed they had nothing to play for. Full schedule with probable pitchers here.
