With the Chicago Cubs off to the kind of start that would justify the pre-season projections for their season, Theo Epstein could be in position to become one of the greatest general managers, if not the greatest, of all time.

The vast majority of the season remains to be played and then there are the perilous playoffs. But if the Cubs were to win the World Series, Epstein would be in a position no one has ever imagined, let alone achieved.

Epstein was Boston’s general manager when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 for the first time in 86 years. He is now president of baseball operations of the Cubs, who haven’t won the World Series in 108 years.

What are the chances that one man could pull off both incredibly long-shot feats? If one man did pull off both feats, how should he be …

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Watching a Red Sox-Yankees game this past weekend, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Here was a pitcher the Red Sox were paying $31 million a year for seven years, and David Price had thrown 104 pitches and had not made it to the end of the fifth innings. Manager John Farrell had seen enough and yanked Price from the game.

Less than 24 hours later Edinson Volquez of Kansas City threw one more pitch than Price while securing one less out. The Royals are paying Volquez a mere $10 million a year for two years.

The point is here we had two No. 1 starters, one of them one of the highest-paid players in the game, and they couldn’t get through five innings with 100 pitches. But they aren’t alone.

According to Bob Waterman of Elias Sports Bureau, starting pitchers, had thrown 100 or more pitches in a start and had failed to complete five innings …

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Forty-five years after the Major League Baseball Players Association shed the MLB commissioner as MLB’s arbitrator and replaced him with an impartial arbitrator, the National Football League Players Association remains saddled with the NFL commissioner as the league’s arbitrator.

As the baseball union argued nearly half a century ago, there can hardly be anything impartial about a commissioner in a dispute between a player and the commissioner. That’s why Tom Brady, the New England Patriots’ quarterback, stands to miss the first four games of the 2016 NFL season as he serves a suspension that a Federal appellate court recently upheld.

At the time that the baseball union gained an impartial arbitrator, Ed Garvey was the executive director of the NFL union. Garvey was a loser in 1986 when he ran for the United States Senate from Wisconsin, he was a loser in 1998 when he ran for the office of governor in Wisconsin and he was a loser in 1976 when he ridiculed Marvin Miller for not taking what the arbitrator gave the players – free and unfettered …

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