The Sports Sewer, Episode 11: Tim Kurkjian
This one pains me because I’ve always thought Tim Kurkjian was one of the few things about ESPN which isn’t deep-fried monkey shit. Sadly, “Captain Kurk” is the latest example of how the culture at ESPN eventually turns even the most “really should know better”-type into a mold-brain.
The night before the baseball trading deadline, Kurkjian appeared on SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt (another casualty of the ESPN cuck-culture, but that’s for another time…) Not skipping a beat, Kurkjian broke out his best set of clutching pearls for some world-class virtue signaling. When the Toronto Blue Jays traded pitcher Roberto Osuna to the Houston Astros, “Captain Kurk” went full “Captain Cuck” by saying this deal made him “uncomfortable” and “didn’t understand why the Astros filled their need ‘this way.'”
What Kurkjian is referring to is the fact Roberto Osuna is serving a 75-game suspension which ends on Sunday for violating the league’s policy concerning domestic abuse. In other words, the knock on Osuna is he likes to knock women around, and there are pending criminal charges in Canada to support that perception.
To borrow an old phrase from the movies, let’s just cut to the chase…there’s three things about this story which put a burr under my saddle blanket.
First of all, why does “Captain Kurk” feel the need to make sure I know he doesn’t condone domestic violence? No human being worth a shit does. Kurkjian’s piety comes from that fact he knows nobody could possibly take offense to the “don’t hit women” position. Nobody who doesn’t want to get flamed to a crisp is going to go on national television and be “pro-wife beater.” Not to be the “stay in your lane” guy, but “Captain Kurk’s” job is to be the “baseball insider;” the guy who gives me the take nobody else does. This story gave me 53 different flavors of “pearl clutching,” and not one lame-stream media blow-hack bothered to ask the pertinent baseball question. With this guy being suspended for half-a-season, did anybody bother to find out if he filled his days with Netflix and Coors Light, gained 50 pounds and lost his fastball?
As a baseball fan, that’s what I want to know. I’ve got the courts for the other stuff.
That brings us to problem Number Two. I’m starting to wonder about Commissioner Rob Manfred because he’s making a mistake here which was already demonstrated by his NFL counterpart Kommissar Goodell. By trying to do the job of the criminal justice system, the NFL has caused itself more problems than Jamies Winston getting an Uber to Red Lobster, and now baseball looks to be doing the exact same thing.
Has anybody bothered to ask how it is that Osuna has already been suspended, but the criminal justice system hasn’t finished its course yet? Again, just look at the NFL, where the bungling of the Ezekiel Elliot case led to his six-game suspension in a matter which the justice system found lacking in sufficient evidence. Don’t think that isn’t going to figure prominently in the next collective bargaining cycle. If you think guys hitting their significant others is a public relations problem, wait until you see what another labor stoppage does.
In other words, let baseball do baseball and let the courts do the courts.
The biggest reason why that should be is problem Number Three. Justice is a complex and convoluted concept; it doesn’t just boil down to guilt or innocence. This is why due process exists. This is why lawyers are highly-educated and specialized, much like doctors are. The people I call the “internet lawyers” would never think of taking out somebody’s gall bladder, but they are never shy of legal opinions.
That might be a bit of an extreme example, but the real reason why you leave law to lawyers is just as ugly. The first written laws on earth were set in stone by the Babylonian king Hammurabi roughly around 1775 B.C. By 1776 B.C, it was pretty clear that the Code of Hammurabi was both harsh and unequal. It wouldn’t be until 1776 A.D. when the American Declaration of Independence espoused the concept of “all men are created equal under the law.” Granted the American system is not now, nor has it ever been perfect, but it’s a hell of lot closer than anything before or since.
From Hammurabi to today, you can pick whichever system of jurisprudence you want and you will discover they all have the same fundamental fault. They all have different tiers for different people, and even the American Founding Fathers couldn’t overcome the root cause. The day after Hammurabi’s code was etched into that stele of black diorite, there was no way to avoid a tiered system of justice, and it’s been that way ever since.
Nobody, particularly not Americans, want to admit that. But denying reality doesn’t change it. The reality of this matter is any system which involves one set of people passing judgement on another means human bias is inherent to the process, and that means flawed systems will show those flaws in Kurkjian’s “uncomfortable” ways. If you doubt that, we have a perfect reliquary of examples.
It’s called history, and you don’t have to go back to the cradles of civilization to see it.
Why do you think the Nazis framed Marinus van der Lubbe for their burning of the Reichstag in 1933? Because they knew there was no way a Dutch communist was going to get a fair trial in a betwixt-wars German court. The sports world has the perfect example of the current running the other way. If O.J. Simpson were a guy driving a bread truck, if he did not have celebrity status which afforded him the ability to hire an “all-star” team of lawyers, he’d still be sitting in San Quentin for a double-murder conviction.
Both of those examples are legitimately outrageous, but it is that “uncomfort” which causes the “Captian Kurk’s” of the world get off the rails. Kurkjian is “uncomfortable” because he thinks Roberto Osuna’s should earn him his own “Scarlet Letter” of untouchability. This is also why in America we don’t have a system which allows the “Captain Kurk’s” and the “internet lawyers” to individually assuage their “uncomfort” by doling out what they consider to be “justice.”
There is a place where that is allowed; it’s called the “court of public opinion.” This is where the “internet lawyers” abound and media-amplified moralizing piss-bags reign supreme. This is where facts mean less than the speed at which one rushes to judgement. But what is of utmost importance is ensuring your “politically-correct” banner is being waved fervently.
In other words, there’s no justice in the “court of public opinion,” just “pearl clutching” and “virtue signaling.” Worse yet, the media…both the lame-stream and social varieties…have become little more than the electronic expressway for the “pearl clutchers” and “virtue signalers.”
When you boil it all down, that’s all “Captain Kurk” is doing; pandering to the other sheep in the ESPN herd and twerps who follow them on social media. The “court of public opinion” is all about the cause célebre du jour; making sure you are aboard today’s hash-tag train. The “court of public opinion” is all about showing the rest of the sheep how much you care about something that in most cases is painfully obvious.
The saddest part I’m pretty sure “Captain Kurk” knows better. Again, you can thank the cuck-culture at the World Wide Bottom Feeder for that. That’s why “Captain Kurk” and the ESPN noise-holes like him ask idiotic questions “Why doesn’t somebody just say they care more about winning than they do about ‘what’s right?'” The reason why the question is idiotic is because the answer is obvious if you think about it for more than four seconds.
Winning is everything in the world of sports, and even if it weren’t, it doesn’t take much to trump a conflated self-moralizing sense of right and wrong. This is where the real dangers of the “court of public opinion” start to show.
In so many cases like this, the knee-jerk reaction is to destroy the ability to earn a livelihood for people running afoul of the “court of public opinion.” In the sports world, every proposed punishment from the “pearl clutchers” involves sweeping pronouncements about how “terrible” the criminal act was followed firing, kicking people out of the league. The demonization is important; once something is deemed “terrible,” a complete warping of the sense of the punishment fitting the crime is allowed.
Again, no human being worth a shit condones domestic violence, but the harsh reality is that in the pantheon of heinous crimes, it’s nowhere near the top of the list. That’s what is worrisome about the “court of public opinion;” it deals in extreme punishments for non-extreme crimes. In this case, it doesn’t take much of a logical extension to see that “Captain Kurk’s” opposition to a team trading for Roberto Osuna is right around the corner from demanding he be kicked out of the league entirely. After all, if one team having him is a problem, why should any team employ him?
The problem with that is even dysfunctional families need to be fed. That stops happening once you carpet-bomb a guy’s ability to earn a dollar. The “pearl clutchers” don’t care about that; they don’t give a damn about how their pronouncements of their so-called “justice” might affect innocent people. That’s why decisions about crime and punishment ought to be left to people trained to make such judgements.
And that brings us back to the issue of tiered justice. In a system in which social mores dictate crime and punishment; those same social whims will almost immediately create a disparity in treatment of the offenders. We know that will happen because once again, history is our best indicator. Just ask Marinus van der Lubbe.
That’s not meant to be an insult to fry cooks and mailmen; rather it’s to illustrate
This all begs the question…what’s the difference if we are always going to have one set of justice for a preferred class, and one for the others. That’s a very good question, because both options being discussed here share the same flaws, because they both inherently have human biases woven into their fabrics…probably because they both involve human beings. But there is an important difference. The legal system with an established means of providing due process eliminates the one thing “Captain Kurk” is embracing…mob mentality.
If only Marinus van der Lubbe had a 100-mph fastball…
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Since Kurkjian is such an expert on the matter, I’m surprised the four-letter didn’t have him on “Outside the Lines” telling us all how he felt about the Urban Meyer case.
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At least they have plenty of other “internet lawyers” to handle that.
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