News Item: Cubs, Red Sox agree; Selig still has no San Jose decision

Now that the Cubs and the Red Sox have relieved Bud Selig of the burden they placed on him by asking him to determine appropriate compensation for Theo Epstein, maybe the commissioner can decide a weightier matter – the dispute between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants over the status of San Jose.

Just about three years have passed since Selig appointed a committee to study the San Jose situation, which should be more than enough time for any man who wants to make a decision to decide what his decision is.

Selig, however, is at his best when he is avoiding decisions, hoping that others will resolve the issues, as the Cubs and the Red Sox did months after asking him to decide whom the Cubs should give the Red Sox for allowing Epstein to leave Boston with a year left on his contract to became president of baseball operations for Chicago’s North Side team.

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This column was going to be about Gary Carter and the brain tumor that killed him, but before I wrote it I wanted to reread the column I wrote on the same subject last June, days after Carter had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma, a deadly tumor.

I found that the column was the column I planned to write in the aftermath of Carter’s death last Thursday, and I decided rather than write a new column with basically the same information and comments that I would reprise (that’s a fancy word for repeat, as is redux) the one from June.

I will add a few thoughts. In the column, note that one of Carter’s doctors, Henry Friedman, said, “We’re seeing a small increase in the number of survivors,” but another doctor said, “Henry Friedman is always saying we’re making progress.”

As it unfortunately turned out, of the seven former baseball players who have died of glioblastoma tumors, Carter had the shortest survival from the time of diagnosis. He lived only eight and a half months.

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The founding owner of the Florida Marlins honored Carl Barger, and the current owner has dishonored him.

Barger was the first president of the Marlins, recruited by their first owner, H. Wayne Huizenga, from Pittsburgh, where he had the same position with the Pirates. He died before the team played its first game, suffering a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at baseball’s winter meetings in Louisville in December 1992.

Before the Marlins’ opening game the following April, they retired No. 5 in Barger’s honor. They chose that number because Joe DiMaggio was Barger’s favorite player.

But now Jeffrey Loria, the present owner of the team newly known as the Miami Marlins, unretired the number, stripping Barger of the honor that Huizenga bestowed on him so that the team’s left fielder, Logan Morrison, can wear the number.

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