No Wonder Newspapers Are Dying

MINNEAPOLIS — Friday night, we spent a terrific night at the Metrodome in Minneapolis watching the Minnesota Twins turn the American League Central Division race into a real race.

The Twins got a tremendous pitching performance from Brian Duensing, a two-run bomb from Michael Cuddyer and held on in the ninth to shut out the Detroit Tigers 3-0. Great game, great night at the ballpark. And it was nice to have a brief chat with my old friends Larry Fitzgerald Sr. and Chuck Olsen in the press box.

But then, what happens in the cold light of dawn? The Twin Cities Star-Tribune newspaper arrives at my door (it was part of my hotel stay, I can assure you I wouldn't pay for it) and I read the column by Jim Souhan.

Nice premise: "On their feet, fans grasp the worth of important baseball." Souhan defended the American League Central Division, the Division that every baseball fan will agree is the weakest of them all, but he did it with a moronic, backhanded shot at the Division that showed his incredible ignorance. The ignorance only possessed by an unthinking mainstream media newspaper columnist in these days of the dying daily newspaper.

Souhan wrote: "Baseball needs a place to hide its weaker teams and the Northern League is full."

Whether Souhan failed to have the proper size of cojones to rip the American Association where the Twin Cities' own St. Paul Saints play or he was just rushing at deadline, is not for me to decide. But the truth is this. The Northern League is NOT full and it would gladly accept the American League Central Division's Cleveland Indians and Kansas City Royals.

Check the roster in Cleveland. This year's September call-up edition of the Cleveland Indians is not as good as the Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks. And frankly, that lousy Class A team is being passed off as a Major League ball club. That's nothing short of fraud.

But what the hell? Just as columnists make up phony plans for football stadiums (there is NO Plan B if David Asper fails) and others create hockey trades out of the ether, we've grown to accept pure, unadulterated mendacity in the mainstream media. I keep kicking myself every day, saying: "Why do I bother to read that stuff?"

No wonder newspapers are dying.