
With all due respect to the late, great Miss Cleo — and who could have foreseen her passing this week? — we have no vision statement about whether any of these things will actually happen.
But what if ...
• What if we never see Yasiel Puig in a Dodgers No. 66 jersey again, traded away in a deal by Monday’s deadline for Chris Archer or Jay Bruce or Andrew Miller or Wade Davis or Mike Trout (ah, just seeing if you’re paying attention)? What would be your lasting memory of “Little League” Puig? (As an aside: What if the White Sox decide to hold a Chris Sale fire sale, and the Dodgers pitched him the fact they’ll never have a throw-back jersey situation … would that be the deal breaker?)
• What if we never see Tim Lincecum in an Angels No. 55 jersey again after his start Friday night against the Boston Red Sox (leading all of the MLB with a .290 team batting average, 5.6 runs per game, the only team with more than 1,000 hits so far, and a .355 team OBP)? Considering today’s going market price is a shiny nickel in recycling fees, if they retu him to the Giants without seeking a full refund, is everyone cool?
• What if the Angels’ decision-makers finally decide Mike Scioscia is the real reason why they’re stuck in neutral and manage to thank him for all those past years, but kick him upstairs after 17 years? If he can wait it out as Billy Eppler’s coffee-chaser to ea the past two years and $12 million of his contract, to be replaced by Gabe Kapler or Raul Ibanez (both in the Dodgers’ front office, waiting patiently), so then he can go off to manage the Philadelphia Phillies when that gig opens soon?
• What if you could buy the first ride owned by Mike Trout? Keep on truckin’. The 2000 Ford Ranger pickup Deb and Jeff Trout bought for their kid as a high school junior nine years ago is up for auction by GoldinAuctions.com. It’s got 66,700-plus miles on it. Minimum bid: $5,000. Expected to fetch: $15,000 or more. He even autographed the glove box to authenticate it. No Golden Glove inside, though. So where can you get one of those cars that he won from being an All-Star Game MVP?
• What if, instead of getting hammered and sickled by all the individual sports commissions, declaring which athletes will be and are baed because of suspected doping, the Russian Olympic Committee bands together and declares a boycott of the 2016 Rio Summer Games, disgusted in the way it has been treated as a nation just two years after an ingenious staging of the Sochi Winter Games? How would that go down in the record books? Kind of like one of those MLB lockout/strike situations, where semantics lead to the same result?
• What if Nick Foles — not Case Keenum or Jared Goff — was really the chosen one who’d navigate these Los Angeles Rams to their first Super Bowl win as an L.A. entity? Is there still time for him to come back, in some kind of “Heaven Can Wait” scenario, and prove everyone wrong, in the nick of time?
• What if you were given a shot at competing in a professional league contest? How long do you suppose you last as a poser? What if we try this experience in the next MLS Galaxy game and see if anyone’s paying attention?
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• What if President Donald Trump’s first major decision when he fits his square peg into the Oval Office is to become commissioner/owner of a U.S. Football League revival, forcing all his other cabinet members (family) to also own a team, then have it rigged so his Greater New York Area Generals finally claim that championship he never got back in the ’80s, when Trump’s exit strategy was assuming he’d be folded into the NFL when everything blew up?
• What if political pundits could hit the mute button when tempted to use sports-related metaphors and analogies when it came to this current interpretation of the presidentially challenged runoff? “To use a soccer analogy … if you don’t knock it out of the park, you’re in trouble,” said one CNN talking head before Hillary Clinton’s Thursday night speech. Did Clinton at least put the ball in the basketball ring?
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نویسنده: جمشید رضایی