Friday, August 22, 2014

When Baseball Meets Politics it Becomes Stupid - Cubs Blame TarpGate on Obamacare - I Kid You Not


A few days ago I wrote a fun post poking fun at the Cubs and the Giants subsequent misfortune. 

As you'll remember, Tuesday's game in Chicago was cancelled during the fifth inning due to poor field management (to say the least), so the Cubs where awarded the victory since they were in the lead at that time.  Later on, the Giants protested, prevailed and played the remaining innings a couple of days later.  They lost the resumed game, BTW.

But that's not why I am writing this post.  Instead, a bizarre post popped up by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones who pointed to a National Review article that had me laughing at first, but now has me feeling sad.  For some reason the "TarpGate" incident has gone full-on crazy... like into idiotic brainless babble... It has suddenly become political.

Wha...?

Here's what Ian Tuttle at the National Review writes:
Now insiders at the ball club report that the real culprit is Obamacare. Because the Affordable Care Act requires offering health benefits to employees who work more than 130 hours per month or 30 hours a week (“full time”), the Cubs organization reorganized much of its staff during the off-season. Sources that spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times claimed that, on Tuesday night, the crew was drastically “undermanned.”
Yeah!  Obama did it!

So, the Cubs want to hide their general lack of competence by blaming Obamacare?  Really?  If you've seen the video it's quite clear it wasn't the lack of personnel that caused the problem.  There was more than enough folks out there to get the job done.  They just had no idea what they were doing.  And as Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research notes, these employer sanctions are not in effect for 2014, so the Cubs would not have faced any penalties.

The real problem is that the Cubs management is filled with morons.

Or, maybe I'm wasting my time writing this post just so I can put up this awesome video again.

Video Link:

* Please follow on twitter @ernestreyes *
* Dodgers Blue Heaven home page *

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...