Byline: Larry Webster
There is a place where young men are bought and sold, but only after they have been inspected to see that their bodies are sound and that they are strong and healthy.
The buying and selling of humans would be illegal every where else except in baseball, but a lot of stuff happens in baseball which would not be tolerated in the real world.
The Cincinnati Reds organization is run less like a plantation than it was under the feminist icon, Marge, who made the slaves pet her dog, but still has an overseer who must buy his manpower with limited resources.
The Redlegs are more like a mom-and-pop store trying to keep in business with a Wal-Mart next door.
The powers who run the game may not have noticed, but it is unlikely that there will ever be another World Series in which some team from New York owned by a trillionaire doesn't play some team from Atlanta owned by a trillionaire. Mere Chevrolet dealers cannot compete.
And when they try to by spending way too much on a superstar, the rest of the team consists of the rising or the falling or the sore-armed.
The way it works now is that if a team gets a hot prospect, they can only keep him for five years, so they try to see if they can use him up in that time. Statistics show that for every inning a pitcher throws before a fairly young age, that he will lose an average of two innings after that age.
If Cincinnati had had any assurance of keeping the flame-throwing Mr. Dibble, maybe he would have had a career now instead of a fading memory. To get somebody who seems capable of winning consistently, you must pay $10 million a year, but for that sum the Reds got a player that the other players don't like and whose former team did a lot better without him.
The question being asked is why the National Basketball Association is losing its fan base, and although everybody knows the answer, nobody will say.
We can't either, but let us say that baseball is headed the same direction if all the players are named Rodriquez, Fernandez or Martinez. Soon somebody will realize that most baseball salary dollars are being converted to pesos and are going for airline tickets to spots near the equator. The fans will soon notice that there are more names on the diamond ending with 'ez' than there are at the bullfights.
So this is the time of the year for us Reds fans to begin to try and learn the names of the cast-offs that Bowden has lured out of nursing homes to play for us, and maybe this is the year when somebody finally realized that watching a ballgame being played on a green carpet in a stadium with no corners in the most boring city in America is not the way to build a long-term fan base.
And I don't care who they sell naming rights to. Let's call it Riverfront just for spite. Cinergy sounds like the amount of calories the body uses to commit adultery.
Larry Webster is a Pikeville attorney whose weekly satire column, Red Dog, appears in the Appalachian News-Express.
