The Thursday Thorns pieces exist to remind us all of uncomfortable facts and truths in the sports world. We remember when MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, someone we despise for his poor ethical and moral leadership, at least had the integrity to ban a wannabe Neo-Nazi racist from the league—looking at you, Marge Schott—and now his successor, Rob Manfred, cozies up to a convicted felon and racist President.

Oh, how times have changed …

Yes, Selig was Jewish, and maybe that personal subjectivity had something to do with one of the few good things he did as MLB Commissioner after taking over the office in a literal coup at the end of 1992. Clearly, Manfred has no qualms whatsoever about the long list of legal and sociocultural violations committed by Donald Trump, taking his advice on the recent, morally bereft decision to reinstate Pete Rose. Lovely.

As recently as 1989, MLB had a commissioner who once stated the following: “[L]eadership … is an essentially moral act, not—as in most management—an essentially protective act. It is the assertion of a vision, not simply the exercise of a style …” A. Bartlett Giamatti was 100 times the leader Selig was, and clearly, Manfred is doing his best to be worse than Selig—a puppet for profiteering at any moral price.

It was Giamatti’s successor, Fay Vincent, who was overthrown by a coalition of greedy owners, including Selig and soon-to-be-exiting Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who also owned the Chicago Bulls. Vincent, who passed recently, was the commissioner who banned the use of PEDs, really, in an official act/ruling (1991) that Selig basically ignored for decades based on profit margins. What a decline …

This is where we’ve come as a society now, too, symbolized by the fall of America’s pastime: the sport went from being overseen by a commissioner who had been the president of Yale University to a guy who takes his orders from a convicted felon, a court-confirmed sexual predator, a seven-time bankrupted narcissist, a documented pathological liar, and universially verified by experts as the worst White House occupant ever.

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?” (Mark 8:36)

Well done, Major League Baseball … this is one reason is so many of your stadiums are half empty in June and why so many fans have tuned out on the product you’re offering the public these days. You’ve lost the ethical high ground you earned with Jackie Robinson, Curt Flood, and many others that helped baseball lead the way in America on progressive ideas and moral growth overall. Moral bankruptcy isn’t pretty, is it?