SFGate

New game for Giuliani

Marc Sandalow Monday, November 5, 2001

AMERICA NEEDS Rudy Giuliani.

His toughness, passion and honesty, in abundant display since September 11, are needed to preserve a foundering American institution. In the name of patriotism, it is time for Giuliani to be named commissioner of baseball.

Forget replacing Tom Ridge as terrorism czar or Dick Cheney on the '04 GOP ticket. The national pastime is in dire need of a figure larger than the game.

The World Series that just finished was the perfect tonic for a terror- plagued nation. Yet, thanks to the short-term greed of the current crop of club owners, it was played so late on the East Coast that anyone either under the age of 12 or holding a job ought to have been in bed for the late-inning dramatics. Since the barons who now own the leagues deposed the last commissioner nearly a decade ago, there has been no one to tame their basest instincts.

The 57-year-old Brooklyn born mayor is the man for the job.

Giuliani is not a politician who discovered baseball. He's a baseball fan who went on to become mayor. Say what you will about Giuliani's mushy-middle GOP politics. When it comes to baseball, you cannot mistake his intentions.

"What's normal for October? The Yankees in the World Series," the mayor said a few weeks back as New Yorkers struggled to resume their everyday lives.

Giuliani does not wear those faux, two-team, Yankee-Met caps so fashionable among politicians who do not want to offend a segment of their constituents. Giuliani wears a Yankee cap -- Mets fans be damned -- as he did throughout last year's Subway series.

The past few months have only solidified Giuliani's claim to the job. This is a man who could be seen on national television at ABC News headquarters in Manhattan on the night that anthrax was found to have infected the infant of a news employee, and then an hour later sitting in his field-level box in the Bronx to enjoy the final innings of the Yankee game.

When the Yankees won the pennant, Yankee manager Joe Torre pulled the wide- eyed mayor onto the field where he exchanged hugs and high-fives before quietly returning to his seat with the rest of the fans.

Best of all, Giuliani -- whose tough law-and-order stances have made him the darling of conservatives and the bane of civil libertarians -- knows how to stand up to powerful interests and egos.

No one has been closer to Giuliani's heart in recent days than New York's firefighters. Yet, when unruly firefighters scuffled with police officers at the site of the World Trade Center on Friday, Giuliani did not spare the firefighters from his wrath.

"You don't get to punch New York police officers. For that you go to jail," he said.

America needs someone who can stand up to the baseball owners. After knocking off the last independent commissioner, Faye Vincent, for not being sufficiently obedient in the early 1990s, baseball has given longtime Milwaukee Brewer owner Bud Selig the title. Baseball needs someone to act in the best interest of the game, and not just be a mouthpiece for the owners.

The country needs someone who will bring back a daytime World Series so the next generation of fans will take notice. Someone who will stop labor disputes from killing off the next season. Someone who understands that you can count on baseball, in the words of the late commissioner Bart Giamatti, "to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive."

The Christian Science Monitor calls Giuliani "Churchill in a baseball cap." The British now refer to him as an "honorary knight."

Let's not lose ourselves here. But Mr. Commissioner would be about perfect.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 2001