The recent intersection of Major League Baseball and the White House suggests that there was nothing Barack Obama did in two terms as president that is safe from Donald Trump’s destruction. If Obama did it, Trump is determined to undo it.
Trump reached into baseball last week for his latest “get-Obama” act. He quashed an agreement the United States had reached during the Obama administration with the Cuban Baseball Federation to allow Cuban players to sign contracts to play in this country without having to defect.
A lawyer friend who follows baseball closely disagreed that Trump’s act was another one aimed at Obama, his presidential predecessor, whom Trump sophomorically belittles at seemingly every opportunity.
The lawyer said he heard an interview with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in which he was asked if the Cuban baseball move was intended to put pressure on Cuba to influence that country’s stance on troubled Venezuela. Pompeo, the lawyer said, answered yes.
In addition, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, has been quoted as saying the Trump administration didn’t want the Cuban government to be able to use the players as “pawns” in its support of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
On the other hand, within days after the agreement last December, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) urged the president to block the deal and there was a growing movement in South Florida, home of many Cubans, to overturn it.
Trump’s decision came just days after the Cuban federation identified 34 players who were eligible to sign with United States teams. Under the agreement, the Cuban government would have received a percentage of a player’s signing bonus.
The last time Trump was involved in baseball was in 1994, when major league players were on strike and a group of entrepreneurs resurrected a 1989 project to start a new league independent of Major League Baseball. Trump was one of them, with his partner Meshulam Riklis, an Israeli financier and husband of the singer and actress Pia Zadora.
The project fell apart when Trump and Riklis failed to appear at an organizing meeting at which the prospective team owners were supposed to put up a substantial amount of money.
Trump initially had expressed great interest in owning a New York area team.
“I see it as a very viable league,” Trump told me in a telephone interview at the time, speaking of the 1989 project. “Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. We’ll have a long-term contract with a major television network or a number of major networks, including cable.”
When Trump’s name first surfaced as a possible owner, the popular speculation was Trump was maneuvering to get into the existing major leagues, similar to what he tried with his involvement in football’s U.S.F.L. However, he denied that was his plan, saying he planned to be in the league on a long-term basis.
The leagues, of course, never came into existence, and Trump never became an owner. He did, on the other hand, become president, and it was in that role that he killed the Cuban plan.
Cuban players had been ecstatic about the plan because it created freedoms they had never known.
“It’s a very happy day for the great game we share,” former pitcher Luis Tiant said. “I am thrilled that the next generation of Cuban ballplayers, who only want to succeed in the Major Leagues, will have a safer route to their dreams.”
At the time of the announcement, major leaguer outfielder Yasiel Puig said:
“Today is a day that I am extremely happy. Thank you MLBPA, MLB and the Cuban Federation for reaching an agreement to give Cuban baseball players an opportunity to leave Cuba safely and come to the United States to play baseball. To know future Cuban players will not have to go through what we went through makes me so happy. I want to thank everyone who was involved in making this happen and thank them personally for allowing an opportunity for Cuban baseball players to have the ability to come and show how talented they are. Thank you.”
Offered Yoan Moncada, Chicago White Sox third baseman, “I am extremely happy that an agreement has been reached. It is good to know that players will not have take a risk or be in danger to try and get to the United States to play baseball. I am really happy and wish future players the best. I’ll be waiting for you in the Big Leagues.”
And then Trump pulled the plug, short-circuiting the Cubans’ ecstasy.
NO NATIONAL BASEBALL NEWS FIT TO PRINT
When I began working for The New York Times in 1969, Leonard Koppett was the chief baseball writer. Whatever national baseball news developed he was responsible for covering it. If he developed a previously unknown baseball news story, all the better.
A few years later, Koppett wanted to move to California and craftily concocted a plan to achieve his goal. He convinced the Times editors that with the Yankees and Mets each going to the West Coast twice each season and other events mushrooming in the West it would make more sense to station a reporter in California, thus saving money and manpower.
Then Koppett, after being out West a couple of years, convinced the editors that games finished so late East Coast time that other than the Yankees and Mets the events weren’t worth covering so it didn’t pay for him to go to places like Denver and Seattle.
The primary point of this story is when Koppett went west I inherited the national baseball beat while at the same time I continued to cover the Yankees. I did both assignments through the 1986 season and continued as the national baseball writer until I left the Times in 2008.
As national writer, I took great pride in generally covering baseball news and specifically in creating the coverage of baseball contracts and pioneering an aggressive, intensive style of covering labor developments, not in baseball alone but in all of the major sports.
Tyler Kepner, the Times’ current national baseball writer, covers neither contracts nor labor. He doesn’t cover a team, and he doesn’t cover national news. He writes soft, fluffy features, interviewing players but not developing any stories that are considered exclusive, other than the fact he’s the only reporter who has written those soft, fluffy features.
But the Times, to its shame, doesn’t care because baseball is no longer important to the Times. Baseball kept the Times sports section afloat for decades, but now it is a stepchild to soccer, rugby, cricket and other sports in which American readers could not possibly have any interest.
If you want baseball news, you have to look elsewhere – in USA Today with Bob Nightengale, on ESPN.com with Jeff Passan, or with Ken Rosenthal at TheAthletic.com. When the Times has a baseball news development, it always says someone else reported it first.
For example, the Times reported the Cuban issue with Major League Baseball and the White House, saying it “was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and ESPN.” The Times’ article had two bylines and a line saying a third person had contributed reporting, but none of those reporters was the Times’ national baseball writer.
Perhaps Kepner feels his work would be wasted because of the Times’ dismissive treatment of baseball, but I think not. The Times had a sports editor in the ‘80s, Joe Vecchione, whose operating philosophy was “give me a good news story and I’ll find a place for it.” I did, and he did.
If national baseball writer Kepner gave today’s sports editor good national baseball news stories, the Times would be forced to use them. Instead of digging for stories, though, Kepner takes advantage of the Times’ misguided philosophy and doesn’t work at his job. He seems to think writing soft, fluffy features is his job.
Instead of asking or demanding its national baseball writer to do more, the Times rewarded him by running an excerpt from a book he has written about baseball. Kepner has every right to write a book, but for the first time in his 20 years at the Times, write something that other publications can say it was first reported by the Times.
The absence of that telltale sentence is the saddest development in my 55 years of familiarity with the Times and New York newspapers generally.