The buck stops at the top. In MLB, however, the buck stops at the start of next season. Faced with a tough call on whether to suspend Houston’s Yuri Gurriel for making a derogatory Asian gesture to LA Dodger pitcher Yu Darvish, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred decided to split the baby.

There are many reasons Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Blowing up the NFL was not among them. Frankly, if you listed the targets Trump was least likely to hammer in the first year of his presidency, the NFL would have been high on that list.

There was never any doubt. As he rounded third base win Saturday, Houston Astros second baseman José Altuvé was going to be out by at least ten feet at home. The diminutive Altuvé was trying to score in the ninth inning from first base on a hit into the right-centre gap by Carlos Correa. 

He was who we thought he was.

The news last week that the NFL’s TV ratings are dropping— down 11 percent from the previous season— was greeted with all sorts of interpretations from the media that makes it their business to know what the NFL does. 

Like nature, Donald Trump abhors a vacuum. And as the NFL has discovered to its regret, the president has filled the vacuum created by the league’s policy on players protesting during the national anthem.

Football has a problem. Okay, a couple of problems. 

Foremost among them is the the game is now being perceived as too violent for people— particularly young people— to play. The revelations about the apparent effect of playing the sport upon the brain combined with its other attendant miseries to knees, ankles, shoulders and backs is threatening to turn parents against the sport.

Are you a millionaire athlete in a scrape with the police? Caught in a place where you shouldn’t be? Running from the law when ordered to stay still? Then dial 1-800- CRY-RACISM. You’ll experience a soft landing from a forgiving media.

When people you know do curious things, it’s always hard to reconcile the act with the person. I was thinking of that last week as the Hamilton Tiger Cats publicly lost touch with their senses, hiring a toxic former Baylor University coach to come repair their imploding team.

History, as Karl Marx observed, repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. 

For those playing along at home, we are knee-deep into an Oscar Wildean farce of professional sports. Saturday night, the Connor McGregor/ Floyd Mayweather bout was deemed a resounding success— mostly because it didn’t suck as badly as the pundits had predicted. 

Readers of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, might have been unsettled by the appearance this week of CFL coaches and players sporting t-shirts that declared Diversity Is Strength. Apparently, the CFL has adopted Justin Trudeau’s catch-all immigration slogan to celebrate the varied races, ethnicities and languages spoken by the players, officials and administrators of the league. 

We have seen the future, and his name is Denis Shapovalov. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but the emergence of the 18-year-old tennis player on the national consciousness over a few steamy nights in August was enough to get the imaginations of Canadians racing.