J.C. Romero, meet Eddie Cicotte. Claude (Lefty) Williams, too. Romero should know (about) Cicotte and Williams because they are the only other pitchers to record tainted decisions in World Series games.
It may be a stretch to lump Romero with Cicotte and Williams; it may even be unfair. Romero would surely be offended and insulted by being mentioned in the same sentence as Cicotte and Williams, but the fact remains that there is a good reason for grouping them.
When Carl Pohlad traveled to owners meetings, he often didn’t like the way his shirts looked when they came back from the hotel laundry. “He was upset when they sent his shirts back wrinkled,” Fay Vincent, the former commissioner, recalled. “He would get an iron and iron his own shirts. He never forgot his roots. He had grown up ironing shirts in a laundry for a living.”
When Pohlad died last Monday at the age of 93, he was a billionaire three times over. The owner of the Minnesota Twins for a quarter century, he was ranked as the 102nd wealthiest man in the country by Forbes Magazine with a worth estimated at $3.6 billion. And he ironed his own shirts.
The New York Times Company is trying to escape a venture it should never have jumped into. It wants to sell its 17.5 percent share of the Boston Red Sox.
The Times company is the team’s largest minority owner. Large or small, the Times’ purchase was a mistake.
I emphasize Times company rather than the newspaper itself because that is how company officials rationalized the acquisition six years ago. It’s not the newspaper that owns 17.5 percent of the Red Sox; it’s the company. As if that made it all right.
