I’m headed to a Johnstown Mill Rats game tonight, a playoff tilt at Point Stadium, and it is going to be free admission, confirming a suspicion I had the previous – and only – time I went to a Mill Rats game.
Back then, the crowd was huge and there were postgame fireworks. My son and I took two granddaughters to the game and I ventured aloud then that we might have been among a handful of people who actually paid for their tickets. Not complaining, mind you. As I recall, said tickets were just $5 a head.
I had heard rumors then of the team papering the town with giveaway tickets. Fast-forward to Thursday night and a friend called inviting me to this game. Yes, he’d gotten free tickets – from a bank as I recall him saying.
The team web site lists a variety of places to scarf up free ticket “vouchers.”
While I am grateful for the free ticket, I’m not sure about the financial future of a franchise that feels compelled to give away tickets for a playoff game.
There has been a lot of similarly strange, often troubling news in recent days. To cover this, an edition of news and views is in order.
NEWS: The Pirates were sellers, as usual, at the trade deadline. Some of the national media types had speculated in advance of Thursday’s trade deadline that the Pirates might consider trading dominant pitcher Paul Skenes for a handful of players to boost the team’s many glaring weaknesses. But Skeenes remains.
VIEWS: To fully appreciate the pathetic ways of the Pirates, consider that Skenes has a microscopic 1.83 earned-run average, has struck out 146 in 133 innings, yet is a sub.-500 pitcher at 6-8 because the Pirates’ offense is weak. The Pirates would do Skenes a great favor by trading him to a team serious about winning. When do the Pirates begin to paper Pittsburgh with free tickets?
NEWS: This is the week the Federal Reserve again refused to lower interest rates, and the government job statistics again presented a confusing picture of soft numbers and re-stating previous reports.
VIEWS: This stuff is supposed to be apolitical. Yet, it is clear that Fed chief Jerome Powell has a personal vendetta against President Trump, sort of like the now outed deep state intelligence and law enforcement types showed with their Russia hoax. Keeping interest rates up is Powell’s Russia hoax, designed to penalize Trump and, by extension, the economy, hoping to swing the mid-term elections. Recall, Powell cut rates big just ahead of the past election, perhaps trying to do the impossible — usher Cackling Kamala into the Oval Office. While it is not clear if Trump can fire Powell, whose term is up in eight months or so, regardless, Trump can and did do something about the suspect job numbers. He fired the Biden appointee who has been producing the ridiculously arbitrary numbers.
NEWS: Kamala Harris has a book, “107 Days” and is making the rounds of sympathetic media hawking said tome that she allegedly wrote. This comes after a social media launch that, shall we say, painted Harris as still being a rather bizarre, out-of-touch human being.
VIEWS: The title should have been “How To Blow A Billion-Plus Bucks In 107 Days.” If you are thinking of buying me a copy for my September birthday, or Christmas, please refrain. Snippets, such as the Cackling One sharing with CoalBear she’s out of politics because the system is broken, tell me all I know about the book, that being Kamala still dwells in Denialville, unburdened by what has been.
NEWS: Responding to inflammatory statements from former Russia president Dmitry Medvedev, President Trump has ordered two nuclear submarines moved into position just in case the language morphs into action.
VIEWS: So, both the U.S. and Russia have ex-presidents from the recent past who are short on mental accuity. The problem is, where Joe Biden is walled off from power and spends his days traveling on trains, sniffing the hair of young children, eating ice cream cones, and giving ridiculous “insight” for speaking fees, Medvedev still has a role on the Russian security council. We also have other past presidents Barack Hussein Obama and Bubba Clinton, who seem to pop up in the spotlight way too often. Why can’t these guys slip quietly into private life obscurity, like George W. Bush did?
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