Now THAT'S what I call irony: Elijah Dukes fined...FOR PUBLIC SERVICE!!!

Disagree with you both. When a guy that troubled does something positive, a good manager, interested more in his team than looking like he is in charge, will look the other way. The manager who looks the other way, actually looks more in charge. Joe Torre has rules, but he knows when something is a big deal worth blowing up over and and something isn't. And it's why he keeps dumb, negative attention like this away from his team.

According to that story -- and if it is correct -- it was 5 minutes past an Acta rule. Be real. If Dukes showed ridiculously late to the ball park, missed batting practice, wasn't in uniform for the National Anthem, yeah, it's a problem. But according to that story he was 5 minutes, violating some third-grade rule designed to establish "team discipline." That is fine, and those kinds of managers can be effective, but have the flexibility to take into account a special circumstance. It's baseball. The Bill Parcells, Tom Coughlin approach has never been particularly effective in baseball.

When your jackass player, who has a history of trouble, gets to the ballpark 5 minutes after your rule because he was giving a speech to a bunch of little leaguers, it's really OK to look the other way. Not looking the other way leads to a story like this, in which your sorry franchise looks even sorrier. It sounds like he was conscientious enough to know that he had to be at the ballpark and was looking at his watch and sprinted to his car as soon as he could.

I can't believe I am reading about Elijah Dukes, of all people, getting in trouble and shaking my head over how he was being mistreated for actually trying to be a decent guy.

 

It's a major league clubhouse, not a military barracks. The good managers know when to look the other way and when to be disciplinarians. It's common sense. Bill Parcells had the strictest rules of any football coach I have every known, and Lawrence Taylor shit all over them. Parcells largely looked the other way, as long as Taylor showed up to play on Sunday. Taylor was never going to completely conform and if Parcells had turned it into a war of wills, he wouldn't have had LT when it mattered. One size fits all is usually a bad idea. In this case, Dukes was at opening day at a little league. The net effect was that he got to the ballpark 5 minutes after Afta's rule. Even Tom Coughlin might chuckle at this. No harm, no foul. Someone smart would have smiled over the fact that Elijah Dukes was doing a little league opening rather than calling the clubhouse to see if anyone there could bail him out on an assault charge.