RIP, Rays radio announcer Dave Wills

Tampa Bay Rays radio broadcaster Dave Wills died this morning at the age of 58. It was unexpected, as he called the end of yesterday’s Rays-Yankees spring training game.

Unlike other sports, baseball is played almost every day. It’s there almost any time you want it. For me, in the car, that meant Wills and his partner Andy Freed, among the best radio announcers in the game. He made the game personal and interesting, even if it was a yawner.

There’s a connection you have with baseball announcers you don’t necessarily have with those in other sports. John Madden, great as he was, was typically talking to Pat Summerall. Though Lightning fans love our local radio guy, Dave Mishkin, erupting like every goal is the first one he’s ever seen seems over the top.

Good baseball announcers are different. Vin Scully welcomed you to each game, inviting you to pull up a chair and wishing you a very good afternoon or evening. And Wills made you feel like you were watching the game with a friend.

When I read of his death this morning, it wasn’t like I’d lost a friend, but maybe someone at work you crossed paths with and were always glad you did.

Everything I’ve read indicates that Wills was a special guy, one everyone seems to like. A guy who goes out of his way to treat people well. They’re the ones who feel the real loss. But when someone’s death saddens people who don’t know them, that’s a life well-lived.

Who would Jesus boo?

The Mets just got their ass kicked on successive days by a vastly inferior Nationals team. Their hitting slump continued. Their best pitcher may be on the way to the injured list for an extended period. And the Braves, who almost seem as pre-destined to win as the Mets are to lose, just keep winning. It’s almost like the first part of the season was a joke and my team is reverting to its natural status as the team other teams beat on their way to being good.

And don’t get me started on the extended train wreck that is the New York Jets. I’ve been a Jets fan since 1972. Outside the Detroit Lions, it’s hard to find a team that’s been more irrelevant for more seasons than the Jets.

When you become a fan, you draw part of your identity from the team. It’s why people like me pay for too much for shirts, hats, and other-priced officially licensed apparel items and pony up to watch as much of our favorite teams as possible.

Put another way, it’s not just the Yankees I don’t like–it’s the people who believe success and accomplishment are due them simply because of who they are. Of course we should win. We are the Yankees. The rest of the league exists for us to beat. Even their song drips with assumption.

There’s a certain impotence that occurs when your team sucks–when it seems like there’s no plan or direction in place. When you might as well root for the Washington Generals, whose job was to look like fools in favor of the Globetrotters every night. No one cared about the Generals and no one wanted them to win.

Why bother when it’s an embarrassment to admit your fandom? What’s left to do but boo?

I rarely boo at a game. And I actually felt bad when fans relentlessly chanted Joe must go! at the relentlessly overmatched Joe Walton late in his term as Jets head coach.

So it resonated with me when Paul Lukas wrote about rethinking his personal policy about booing at the ballpark. I don’t make baseball money, but I get paid pretty well for what I do. Outside an irritated internal customer kicking my ass, I don’t have to worry much about feedback. And usually, the ass-kicking isn’t really directed at me. It’s never about the milk.

In short, I’ve never had 60,000 people booing me while I try to do my job.

For that reason, Lukas’s post resonated with me, especially the part where he said he was doing it, in part, for himself.

As part of my ongoing personal growth process, I’ve become a lot more intentional about what I do and don’t do. I’m trying to exercise more control over my circumstances and, in particular, about my control over those circumstances. Person X may do something crappy, but I don’t have to be crappy in return.

That applies even when person X happens to throw five interceptions in the first half of a game. Against the Patriots. I hate the Patriots. I would root for the Galactic Empire over the Patriots, knowing full well what they did to Alderaan. I don’t care. The Patriots are worse.

In my job, I’ve had days where everything I touch turns to crap. Some of those days, it happened because I didn’t prepare the way I should. Other days, crap happened. And some of those days, I stood in front of a bad product and got my ass kicked because that’s what the job required–and sometimes people will kick your ass simply because they can.

That was in front of a few dozen people and most of them didn’t do the workplace equivalent of booing. I got by it, but it left a mark.

For professional athletes, the mark is bigger because the audience is bigger. Their pay is bigger. That doesn’t mean a bad day on the job is any less difficult. Ask the ghost of Bill Buckner.

Buckner was actually a very, very good ballplayer. He wasn’t a Hall of Famer, but he was always a guy you wanted on your team. He’s not the one who didn’t put Dave Stapleton in for defense in Game Six. He’s not the guy who removed Roger Clemens because of a blister Clemens claims didn’t exist. He’s not the guy who blew a 3-0 lead in the sixth inning of Game Seven.

He deserves better.

I need to be the guy who acts better to the Bill Buckners of the world. Because of the type of person I should be. Because everyone has bad days. And yeah, because I think Jesus would prefer it that way.

The privileges of fandom come with limits–like hinting a player’s death to his father

Joe Walton was difficult to stomach as the head coach of the Jets. It got to the point where I rooted against them because the best thing for the team was for them to be bad enough for them to finally fire him.

The end was ugly with a full house at Giants Stadium chanting “Joe must go.” As much as I wanted him to go, I felt bad about the chants. I’ve had some difficult days at work. I’ve been chewed out by members of the New York State Assembly, our armed services, and various and sundry co-workers that I’ve outranked and that have outranked me.

But I’ve never had 60,000 people chanting that I need to be fired. That would probably make me a little jittery–and I’ve been around a while.

Isiah Kiner-Falefa is the 27-year-old starting shortstop for the New York Yankees. He’s been okay this, year, though he’s made some visible mistakes and his fielding was problematic earlier in the year.

He’s hitting .276 with 1 home run and 36 RBI. Using baseball statistical magic, he’s 1.6 wins better than a generic replacement player, far better than any Yankees fan who isn’t named Derek Jeter.

That didn’t stop a Yankees “fan” from tweeting Kiner-Falefa’s father earlier this week, “IKF (his initials) shot dead in the Bronx.”

Kiner-Falefa plays a game for a living and will get paid $4.7 million to do it. When he’s on the road, he stays at top-flight hotels and doesn’t have to handle his own bags. His family, including his father, is probably set for life. If he doesn’t screw up the money, his family is set for generations.

Getting booed is part of the gig. Having people say mean things about you is part of the gig.

Having someone threaten your life in a tweet to your father is over the line.

Fans can be spoiled, self-indulgent, and even assholes–and that’s their right.

But there needs to be a line and this is clearly over it. Twitter appears to have left this guy’s account up. And Twitter is Twitter–a cesspool with a flower growing here or there. But the Yankees and Major League Baseball would be well-served to identify this guy and ban him for life.

More important, those of us who are true fans should call this out when we see it. It’s reasonable and appropriate to hate anyone in Yankees pinstripes, but there’s sports-hate and real hate. Sports hate is despising Chipper Jones for single-handedly ruining the Mets in the late 90s. It’s still being angry with Don Shula 40 years later for forgetting to put the tarp on the field at the Orange Bowl before the 1982 AFC Championship game.

It means that I hate your abilities until you’re on my team, then I’m a fan.

Real hate is entitled and self-indulgent. Real hate is always inappropriate.

There is no pay equity issue with the WNBA

The Los Angeles Times published an article last week in which they pointed out that imprisoned basketball player Brittney Griner is a WNBA champion, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and an eight-time WNBA all-star. Then they pointed out that she also travels overseas to places like Russia because she can make 4-5 times what she makes at home.

They point out that viewership in the WNBA final grew 15% and that the league is valued at more than a $1 billion. They point out that just .4% of total sports sponsorships between 2011 and 2013 went to women and that outside tennis, no one has ever been the top-earning female athlete since tracking started in 1990.

The article was written the same week the Washington Nationals traded outfielder Juan Soto because his next contract–due at the end of the 2024 season–is likely to top $500 million.

If one of the top male baseball players is worth half a billion dollars, shouldn’t one of the top woman basketball players be worth nearly as much?

We can argue all day long whether any athlete should be paid half a billion dollars over a decade or more, but when one guy’s contract is worth half the value of an entire league, the players in that league won’t be making the same amount.

According to a 2021 Deseret News article, average attendance at an NBA game is almost 18 thousand. The WNBA averages about 6,500. The average cost for a WNBA ticket is $17. For an NBA ticket the average cost is about $70. The 2019 NBA Finals averaged about 20 million viewers; the WNBA finals averaged about 400,000.

According to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the league loses $10 million every year it operates. Amortized over it’s 26-year existence, that’s nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in cumulative losses.

No reasonable person denies that women work just as hard at sports at the elite level as men. Like the men, they’re elite athletes, and they deserve recognition as such. But the interest isn’t there. My daughter was young during the run of the Mia Hamm-led US Women’s National Team. I’m not a soccer guy, but I tried to get her interested in the women’s game. She wasn’t having it. Her interests were elsewhere. She doesn’t care about sports.

I’d personally rather watch women’s soccer than men’s because the women don’t act like they’ve been shot when someone stares at them hard enough. As of 2019, the women’s team generates more revenue than the men’s team. While the women’s team recently achieved pay equity, if the women’s team generates more revenue they should be paid more.

That’s simply not the case with the WNBA. The Times article, which was sports news, not an opinion column, conveniently omitted any data that didn’t help it make its case.

What’s happening with Brittney Griner is wrong. As an aside, it’s interesting that many of the same people who question the ability of our election system to produce accurate results have complete confidence in the Russia criminal justice system.

But blaming the WNBA for the pay inequity is misleading and ridiculous.

Pete Rose’s response to unproven child sex abuse charges makes a great player look like an even worse person

Five years ago, the Philadelphia Phillies would’ve made news–and made a lot of people happy–by honoring Pete Rose, a cornerstone in their 1980 World Series team. Though Rose is primarily remembered as a Red, he was a difference-maker in the Phillies first World Series win in 98 seasons of existence.

They cancelled those plans after a woman identified only as Jane Doe came forward and said Rose had sex with her starting in 1973 when she was 14 or 15 years old. She also alleges that she had sex with Rose outside Ohio, where she lived at the time and where Rose played for the Reds. If this is true, it would be considered child sex trafficking. If convicted, someone accused of such a crime would face ten years to life in prison.

Rose’s lawyers say the claims can’t be verified, and even if they could, the statute of limitations has passed. For his part, Rose says the relationship started when the woman was sixteen.

Rose returned to Philadelphia over the weekend to celebrate with members of that 1980 team, a celebration postponed two years because of Covid. When Alex Coffey, a female baseball writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, asked about the charges, Rose replied, “No, I’m not here to talk about that. Sorry about that. It was 55 years ago, babe.”

When the Associated Press followed up on the comments to Coffey, Rose said, “I’m here for the Phillies organization. And who cares about what happened 50 years ago? You weren’t even born. You shouldn’t be talking about it, because if you weren’t born. If you don’t know a damn thing about it, don’t talk about it.”

Pete Rose is admitting to being a 32-year-old married professional athlete with two kids, sleeping with a girl he thought was just seven years older than his nine-year-old daughter. Although it’s a creepy and horrible thing to admit, he’d hardly be the first professional athlete admitting to creepy and horrible things.

The woman has good reason not to come forward. More than three decades after he was banished from baseball (a punishment he agreed to), his status still evokes strong feelings on both sides. If you were her, would you come forward?

Rose had to know the question would come up today. Yet, his response to Coffey could hardly be more tone-deaf, given the severity of the accusation.

On the other hand, Rose doesn’t get a chance to face his accuser. It’s entirely possible that Rose is right–that she was sixteen at the time, or he reasonably thought she was. It’s possible that Rose is every bit the throwback he appears to be. It’s possible that he’s an 81-year-old crotchety cuss with crappy social skills. He did clumsily try to make it right with Coffey, asking if he’d offended her, and asking forgiveness if he signed 1000 baseballs for her, then apologizing.

Pete Rose has more hits than anyone in Major League Baseball history. He was a hitting machine, leading the Reds from irrelevance to a team that won two World Series titles, four National League pennants, and five division championships in seven years. Then he helped the Phillies win their first title.

Technically, this won’t affect his standing with the Baseball Hall of Fame, which is what he and his fans care about. He hasn’t been formally charged. Currently, there’s an anonymous allegation that he denies. There’s no real investigation. No proof.

In reality, if there were some softening of Major League Baseball’s stance, this is likely to reverse that trend.

In assessing Rose’s position, it’s worth noting that Major League Baseball is the only major North American professional sport proven to have a championship tainted by gambling. That happened 44 years before Rose’s rookie season–the same number of years between Rose’s last year in Cincinnati and now. He knew the penalty–it was posted in every Major League clubhouse–and he gambled on games he managed anyway.

And while he bet on the Reds to win, he also had the ability to alter his approach to increase his chances of winning. Any game he didn’t bet on the Reds to win, he functionally bet on them to lose.

In spite of my life-long status as a Mets fan, Pete Rose was my favorite player as a kid. I still love the way he played the game. But by betting on games he managed, he put the integrity of the game I love at risk. More to the point, he made a lot of really rich people nervous about the integrity of their gravy train.

That having been said, Major League Baseball, like all major sports, is cozying up to the gambling industry. In light of the sponsorship money, it’s harder to hold the line on gambling-related sins, especially Pete Rose’s.

These accusations, and Rose’s ham-handed response to them, combined to make it much easier to keep him out.

A very pleasant good evening to you, Vin Scully, wherever you may be

We come for the games.

For the possibility that this mundane Tuesday night may be somehow transformed into something bigger. Something special.

Odds are there won’t be a no-hitter, or a triple play, or a game-winning homer in the bottom of the ninth. But the game will still be there, sweet as a cool breeze on a late summer evening with the first touches of fall kissing the air.

Though we all long for the magical, most of the games are like an uneventful, 5-2 final, with all the runs scored by the third inning. A chance to relax and let the stories flow as the game meanders by like the river you swam in as a kid, with water so perfect you barely felt it.

For most of the 67 years Vin Scully made the games better, I didn’t listen to him. He was a continent away in Los Angeles.

Even when he called the NBC Game of the Week for the last seven years of its existence, I didn’t fully appreciate his understated skill. True artists can be deceiving that way. They can make it all look so very easy.

Sometimes, you can only see it in retrospect—the warm invitation to pull up a chair, as if you were passing by on the street as the ballgame came on and he happened to have a spare rocker on the porch next to him as the first pitch lingered.

The perfect turn of a phrase to make you see beauty in something you would’ve otherwise looking past without ever noticing. I once heard him describe “a cotton candy sky with a canopy of blue–looks good enough to eat.” I remember that phrase every time I see a sky like that.

The way of telling you just enough of the story to supplement what you see and hear, not to be the main course, but the spice that makes the meal memorable. That was what made his best moments, the best moments.

His call of the last three outs of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game is more perfect than anything I’ve ever written (or ever will), climaxing by describing Dodger Stadium as containing 29,000 people and a million butterflies.

His call of Mookie Wilson’s grounder is my personal favorite. Starting understated, “A little roller up along first.” Then exploding at what we saw together, he and I, as I sat next to him on that rocker on his porch, “Behind the bag! It gets through Buckner. Here comes Knight and the Mets win it!” Then there was two solid minutes of silence as he backed away, gently, and let me experience the sights and sounds I remember 36 years later as if they happened yesterday.

Jack Buck’s call of Kirk Gibson’s home run in Game one of the 1988 World Series (“I don’t believe what I just saw!”) might’ve been perfect–if not for Vin, calling his last Dodgers championship on NBC.

Gibson could barely walk as the outmanned Dodgers mounted a comeback against the heavily favored A’s. And yet with his team down 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth against Dennis Eckersley, their invincible closer, Tommy LaSorda sent him up to pinch hit with a man on.

“You talk about a roll of the dice,” Vin said, “this is it.”

“All year long they looked to him to light the fire and all year long, he answered the demands.” Gibson hit the ball with a swing that didn’t look powerful. “High fly ball into right field…she is…GONE!”

Then after a long pause while Scully actually got up and walked around the booth while the pictures told the story, he came back on and said words he believed came from God. They still live in the hearts of every Dodgers fan watching that night, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”

But the call that sticks with me most is the last strike of the 1986 Series, Jesse Orosco facing Marty Barrett. The Buckner game happened on Saturday. Game seven was rained out on Sunday (NBC played The Natural, instead). In that movie, Robert Redford says, as Roy Hobbs, he wants people to look at him and say, “There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.”

And though the Red Sox actually led the Mets 3-0, as late as the bottom of the sixth that Monday night, the conclusion was foregone. The Mets roared back and claimed an 8-5 lead in the ninth as Barrett came to the plate with two out.

As Barrett waved at the last pitch of the season and the ball settled into Gary Carter’s mitt, Vin Scully simply said, “Got him!”

He was comfortable enough with his place in the game to let the sights and sounds tell the story. His job was to stay out of the way while the games did their job.

If I close my eyes, I can see Orosco throw his glove to the sky and the avalanche of Mets piling on top of each other in the middle of the infield while Vin Scully, the best there ever was, was comfortable enough to say nothing. A less skillful artist would’ve polluted that moment.

Vin Scully died Tuesday at the age of 94. It was maybe telling that he wasn’t at the All-Star Game in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago. Then again, it wasn’t his way to take the attention away from the game and its players.

A very pleasant good evening to you, Vin, wherever you may be.

Thank you for making the games special.

Why I have no problem with a six-year-old running a marathon

Rainer Crawford is a six-year-old who completed a marathon. His accomplishment has set the at-home geniuses on fire with accusations of child abuse and, if Rainer’s parents are being honest about it, threats against the family.

Most, but not all, of the condemnation from a distance (our national pasttime these days) comes from people who don’t understand running and the culture that goes with it.

The entire Crawford family trained for and rain the marathon. The rules said that you had to be 18 to compete in the Flying Pig marathon in Cincinnati, but the Crawfords said Rainer wanted to run and would run as a bandit, someone who wasn’t officially entered and would run, but wouldn’t get the benefits of hydration and medical care along the way. After a long discussion with Rainers parents, Kami and Ben, they decided to let Rainer enter.

So Rainer ran. It took him eight hours, but he finished the physically and emotionally grueling event. Which prompted this response (among others). In this case, the woman posting is a two-time Olympian and long–distance runner.

I don't know who needs to hear this but a six year old cannot fathom what a marathon will do to them physically. A six year old does not understand what embracing misery is. A six year who is "struggling physically" does not realize they have the right to stop and should.

— Kara Goucher (@karagoucher) May 4, 2022

Kara Goucher probably knows a lot more about it than I do, so her comment can’t be completely ignored. It’s possible that Crawfords did a bad thing. To call it child abuse–and add the weight of all that comes with that accusation, seems like overkill.

You don’t just roll out of bed and run an marathon. Most marathon training peaks with a 20-mile run. When you run 20 miles, that still leaves a 10K between you and the finish line, but 20 miles is a long way. The assumption is that Rainer did a 20-mile run, so he probably has some idea what’s involved.

Whether that’s a valid assumption is up to the parents and race organizers. Personally, I’d be looking for more than just the parents’ say-so on this. The race organizers have faced their share of heat for allowing Rainer to run. But if he runs as an unregistered runner, then he wouldn’t get the benefit of the hydration and medical services. The race was in a no-win situation. A strong case can be made that they did the best possible (least bad) thing by letting him register and run. It’s practically impossible to completely police a marathon course.

Ms. Goucher’s tweet said he didn’t realize he had the right to stop. According to the parents, they repeated he asked him if he wanted to stop and he adamantly said no. That’s what a runner does. Should I ever run a marathon, unless I’m injured or there’s global thermonuclear war, I’m not giving up, especially deep in the race. That last 10K probably sucks, but the 20 miles required to get there suck, too.

Some have made a point that the kid was crying as he ran. A six-year-old can cry if his sister eats the last Oreo. More to the point, I know adults who have cried during a marathon. I suspect they don’t cry if their sister eats the last Oreo (but, hey, you do you).

It’s possible that child abuse was involved and if that’s the case, it’s not the worst thing to check and make sure. But what if there wasn’t? What if this little kid wanted to run the marathon? By virtue of him finishing, he was able to do it.

What kind of message does it send to a kid to say, “Yeah, you did the training with us and you could do everything we did, but you can’t run because you’re little.” ?

The Flying Pig said they’ll strictly enforce the age limit going forward. That sucks if you’re a high school runner or a six-year-old who trained, but it’s their race and their rules.

It’s the height of arrogance to assume that you, sitting in your comfy chair, know better than this family who trained with their kids and included the youngest one after he begged them to do so.

Why I’m a sports fan

Sesame Street’s Count counting how many hits the Mets gave up in a wonderful surprise last Friday night.

The Mets have had some great pitchers through the years. Seaver, Gooden, Saberhagen, Dickey, and deGrom, just to name a few. As good as they were, it took them fifty years to register a no-hitter. In that time, Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax had 11 between them.

Almost a decade ago, on June 1 2012, I got to watch as Johan Santana, an aging pitcher with a rickety arm, lit up an otherwise moribund season by pitching the Mets first no-hitter. If it happened today, it wouldn’t have counted, as Cardinal outfielder Carlos Beltran’s fly ball clearly landed on the third-base foul line, but it was called fair. Today, that call would be overturned and the no-hitter would be lost.

If you look closely at the arrow, you can see the chalk kick up on the missed call that preserved Johan Santana’s no hitter.

Friday night, five Mets pitchers combined for a no-hitter, just the second in franchise history. Counting last night, there have been 315 no-hitters in big league history, dating back to 1875–about two a year. I reality, it’s not as special as it’s celebrated as being.

But as a Mets fan, at the beginning of a promising season after a mostly sterile two-decade stretch, it was special and a lot of fun.

If you count both the Mets and Jets, my primary teams, I have a grand total of one championship in nearly a combined century of sports fandom. It’s why the ’86 Mets team remains special to me, though time has revealed it had more than its share of jerks. In ’86, the bad guys won. But they were my bad guys.

In 1982, the Jets might’ve beaten the Redskins in the Super Bowl, but they lost games they should’ve won in a strike-marred regular season. When they played the AFC Championship game in Miami, the Dolphins forgot to follow NFL rules by putting the tarp on the field and the Jets’ offense was stymied. Richard Todd seemed to throw every pass to the Dolphins’ AJ Duhe and the Jets were shut out. They don’t lose that game if they play at home. The Jets have been mostly irrelevant since then.

This happened 40 years ago and it still hurts.

It’s been a long haul, but new ownership has things trending positive for the Mets, and a new braintrust and a zillion well-spent draft picks have me excited to be a Jets fan for the first time in more than a decade.

Sports isn’t central to life. As the first few months of Covid showed, we can get by just fine without them.

But between my Moderna hangover, a cold that didn’t let go, and a long stretch of Fibro-induced malaise, it’s been a long few weeks. I felt like a steaming pile last night and watching the Mets combine for a no-hitter against a division rival felt amazing. It gave me an unexpected pick-me-up on top of a challenging week.

Mets closer Edwin Diaz after retiring JT Realmuto to complete the Mets no-hitter

No-hitters don’t happen every day. Championships don’t come every year. They’re rare and special. Joe Garagiola said that losing hurts more than winning feels good. There’s no way that’s true. Sports fandom is the one area where sunk-cost isn’t a fallacy.

As someone with almost 100 seasons and one championship, I remember how good it felt to see my team win. I can still remember where I was when the Mets won–the campus bar at SUNY Plattsburgh, being doused with the best tasting cheap beer of my lifetime.

The memory of that feeling and the wonderful surprise of last night’s no-hitter are why I watch the games.

Please sign Kaepernick so we can dispense with the myth of his greatness

It’s a Thursday, so Colin Kaepernick is trending again because he may get a chance to show his greatness in the NFL. Success is a foregone conclusion because the dominant “wisdom” is that he was among the best quarterbacks in the league and in San Francisco 49ers history* when the league blackballed him for free speech. (*If you include all quarterbacks who were benched for Blaine Gabbert.)

In an upcoming episode of something called Race in America: A Candid Conversation, Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis said he would be open to having Kaepernick on his team, marking the first time he played since 2016. Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll has also said Kaepernick deserves a chance.

For the record, in a free society, if Colin Kaepernick wants to sit, kneel, or stand on his head during the national anthem, he gets to do that. If you laughed when Leslie Nielsen fumbled his way through the song, your stance in opposing Kaepernick isn’t the strongest.

More to the point, Kaepernick initially sat, until a guy named Nate Boyer, a former NFL player and Green Beret suggested he kneel. Boyer says he was pretty upset that Kaepernick was sitting and said he wanted him to stand. Kneeling wound up being a compromise of sorts. The fact that he agreed to kneel proves that.

But it was never about what he actually did, it was always about the new American tribalism and proving the purity of peoples’ stances (or not).

And Kaepernick, who also wore socks that referred to police as pigs and said he didn’t vote in the 2016 election, became a lightning rod when he was called out by then-President Donald Trump.

Running back Marshawn Lynch also sat, but for some reason, he didn’t get the publicity Kaepernick did. His career ran its natural course.

Kaepernick is often compared to Tim Tebow, both of whom accomplished some NFL success and wound up on the outside. Kaepernick is a far better quarterback than Tebow and was a key player in a 49ers Super Bowl team. Tebow was a member of a Broncos team that made the playoffs. Both were considered distractions at the time, but there’s really no comparison.

Kaepernick has also made it difficult for the NFL to sign him, initially insisting on being a starter, then holding a showcase, then changing the location at the last minute. He could’ve played in Canada to show his wares or signed as a backup and taken the reins when the starter got hurt, but he initially insisted on being the presumed starter.

Given the amount of time he spends trending on Twitter and the devotion of his defenders, he may be better off not playing.

It’s true that the NFL’s ownership group tends conservative, and not just politically. It’s also true that the league exists to make a lot of people a lot of money–and that they might make slightly more than they lose by letting Kaepernick back in. The league has recognized the money it receives because it highlights social justice issues, but also recognizes what it would lose if it didn’t. (We can talk about the sexual assaults and the Washington Commanders work environment another time.)

Kaepernick’s no innocent victim. And he’s not the first or last athlete to see his career path altered because of his stances. Mohammed Ali and Curt Flood come to mind. Kaepernick is neither one of those people.

He’s a savvy social media star who knows how to keep his name trending. Perhaps he’s working for a bigger cause, but he’s become a cult figure and his struggle has become more about him than about any cause.

Personally, at this point, I hope Davis signs him, if for no other reason than to finally put to rest the fiction that he’s an elite quarterback (again, he was benched for Blaine Gabbert).

In the history of 49er quarterbacks, he probably ranks behind Montana, Young, Brodie, and Tittle, in the same class as Frankie Albert and Jeff Garcia. He was good and exciting, but the league caught up with him.

RIP, Mad Bomber. He opened my eyes to the way football should be played.

Daryle Lamonica died yesterday.

That might not mean anything to you, but he was one of my first favorite football players. They called him The Mad Bomber, because he loved the vertical passing game–going long. He was the AFL’s most valuable player in 1967 and 1969, though by 1973, he’d given way to Ken Stabler as the Oakland Raiders’ starting quarterback.

Though the AFL stopped existing at the end of the 1969 season, I was an AFL guy. I’ve always liked football played vertically–and under Lamonica, the Raiders were good at it. Throwing to Warren Wells and, briefly, Cliff Branch, Lamonica’s penchant for the long pass made every play a potential must-see. To a kid, it seemed like Lamonica and guys like him could generate a score any time from anyplace on the field.

The Jets weren’t typically very good then, but the Raiders were, and they were often featured on the NBC double-header game or Monday Night Football (which they owned back then). And my love for the passing game blossomed.

Football in the mid-70s became a dreary affair as the long game of the AFL gave way to offenses where you ran the ball or threw to your running backs. By 1975, Lamonica and the vertical game he represented had largely faded from view.

The league recognized the need for offense and opened the game up by the late 70s, but by then, Lamonica had moved on from football.

Earlier this year, I thought about a buying a Lamonica jersey or a Dan Fouts jersey before decided on a Bert Jones jersey. All were strong-armed quarterbacks who could make football far more imaginative than three yards and a cloud of dust. (I chose Jones.)

Pounding the rock (running the ball) may be bad-ass, but there’s little that’s more exciting than a bomb that hits a fast receiver in stride, on his way to touchdown to change the face of the game.

Lamonica’s passing caused me to think about him for the first time in months, but it also elicited some selfish sadness. I never knew him, but he made a game I was learning to love a lot more fun and he helped me understand how I enjoy it best.

But the real sadness came from the passing of another personal icon of my youth. It comes with the times. Our heroes move on to other things, they age and one day we look at them and say “how did that guy get that old, that fast,” all while ignoring or own passage of time.

And then they move on to the next thing and we’re left with memories and one more reminder of our own mortality.

Daryle Lamonica’s passing is just one more reminder that time as we know it isn’t infinite. That we have a fixed number of days–and that the soon we use them as valuable finite resources, the better off everyone is.

And finally, he’s a reminder that you don’t have to be perfect to be exciting. And that nothing lights up a football game like a a deep post pattern thrown by a guy who can get the ball farther than almost everyone can run.