Astros owner Jim Crane just latest leader to devalue the truth

It’s not that we can’t handle the truth. It’s more that it’s so seldom hit our way we’re rarely given the chance.

Astros team owner Jim Crane explained Thursday that his team’s sign-stealing video and garbage-can-banging perfidy was conducted despite its total uselessness in winning the 2017 World Series.

“Our opinion is this didn’t impact the game. We had a good team. We won the World Series, and we’ll leave it at that.”

Really? So cheating gave his team no advantage? The boxer who knocks out his opponent with loaded gloves — impacts his opponent with illegal impacts — would have knocked him out, anyway? If that’s a legit defense, why load his gloves?

Reader Walter W. Farley would have Crane prove it:

“I suggest the Astros be forced to announce over the public address system the pitches their pitchers will next throw for the next three years.”

But this is the bag we’re in — White House, to Albany, to City Hall, to the Commissioners’ offices — the truth has been terribly devalued — in stock market terms, rated a “sell.”

Roger Goodell claimed PSLs are “good investments.” Rob Manfred solemnly stated that kids, as the future of baseball’s sustained popularity, are MLB’s primary commitment.

Then PSL values quickly fell through the floor and MLB continued to bait-and-switch kids’ promotional Sunday afternoon games to late night games for ESPN money.

Sports Business Journal reports the NFL, in order to sustain or increase the TV value of its “Monday Night Football” telecasts, is considering “flexing” the team or teams scheduled to play the second half of the season.

Thus, paying customers of better teams, instead of attending games on Sunday afternoons, would further have the rug pulled from under them as their teams’ games are switched to Monday nights — an extreme, often impossible inconvenience — in exchange for their piles of dough and devotion.

And those forced to have purchased PSLs or get out — and stay there — would be further suckered by Goodell’s NFL.

If these were social experiments rather than short-sighted, consumer-abusing business decisions, they’d seem designed to see how much rotten treatment customers — human lab rats — can indulge before calling it quits.

So the Astros’ owner doesn’t think that knowing the next pitch “impacts” the game. As a highly successful businessman in the freight-and-shipping industry, Crane would therefore have no problem losing business to bribes, or if his competitors hired vandals to flatten his trucks’ tires.

ESPN’s message to kids: Put yourself in peril for fame

Casting the Latest Stones: Brian Cashman’s revulsion with Crane’s absurd response was justified as Crane made terrible worse.

Yet, how many games over how many seasons did Cashman’s Yankees win with drug-dirty players, starting with Alex Rodriguez? Roger “Needles” Clemens won 83 games for the Yankees. How many while clean?

There was a photo in Saturday’s Post suitable for framing in the National Rogues’ Gallery. It was of drug-cheat Robinson Cano, the ex-Yankee, broadly smiling in his Mets uniform as Rodriguez had his arm around Cano’s shoulder. Still can’t figure why Cano needed PEDs to jog to first.

Does ESPN ever apply a moment’s thought to what it promotes?

As alerted to by reader Rich Meyerson, last week ESPN distributed video of an 8-year-old on a bicycle using a ramp to make a full, high-above-the-sidewalk flip before sticking the landing on cement.

The kid seemed excited to have completed the stunt, as if he’d never done so before, or to have lived to have finally done it.

Some Twitter respondents questioned the sanity of the kid’s parents. I question ESPN’s.

But this is the ESPN that stuck a camera in the corner of a dugout to capture, live to a national audience, the sight of a 12-year-old pitcher sobbing after he was yanked in the first inning of a Little League World Series game.

That video reappeared within that night’s “SportsCenter” so an anchor could crack “There’s no crying in baseball.”

That ESPN-humiliated kid? To hell with him!

As we watch Jimmy Dolan brooding from his front row seat in Madison Square Funeral Home, we’re reminded of men who previously, successfully, ran The Garden.

Sonny Werblin would never be caught in the first row at Knicks’ games. He’d sit several rows up, to one side. He had too much class to sit in the best seats. He was a gracious, grateful man; customers came first.

Then there was Bob Gutkowski who’d spend games walking the house to field questions and complaints, making friends of customers. Gutkowski gave away his front row seats, once to tourists he saw leaving the box office after learning that night’s Knicks game was sold out.

But there sits Jimmy, legs stretched out before him, slumped in his front row chair, arms defensively folded in front of him, brooding.

Rev. Al barks at Dogg

Seems even the Rev. Al Sharpton was upset with Snoop Dogg for trespassing on his patch as a spokesman for black America and even African-American sports fans. Even Sharpton could not indulge Dogg’s disgusting word assault of CBS News’ Gayle King, a black woman, for her on-air reference to Kobe Bryant’s sexual assault case.

Imagine having to report what this vulgar rapper, pornographer and recidivist criminal thinks about anything! But such is modern news media.

By the way, what would have gone down had an out-of-work white NBA coach said he “probably needed to crack the whip a little more” with his previous players? He’d be permanently out of work, run through as a racist.

Yet, David Fizdale last week said exactly that about his Knicks coaching tenure. It was met with silence.

Even if unpopular truths are met with disfavor — and they can be as difficult to read as they are to write — pursuing equality through inequality, and selective blindness is a fool’s mission.

As per rule, New Jersey’s Interscholastic Athletic Association has banned two high school basketball teams, University and Newark Tech, from postseason play for a benches-clearing, audience-participation brawl last month that left one player hospitalized and included at least 40 participants.

Not that it’s any longer uncommon, anywhere, but both are girls’ teams.

Don’t know what Vince McMahon’s XFL drug policy entails, but if it’s anything like his WWE policy, it’s subject to sudden changes depending on who, what and when, including his own obvious, eventually admitted juicing — and public relations cons.

But as long as it’s McMahon’s baby don’t expect anyone on XFL telecast to bring that up.

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