The Columnist Manifesto

Remember Bosox first sacker Doug Mientkiewicz trying to keep the ball that was grounded into the final out of the Red Sox 2004 World Series Win? The story has more legs than the one about Donald Rumsfeld's repsonsibility for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Our bold news media is still doggedly reporting it. The LA Times made this report just a few days ago:

legal scholars say the team has a good case if it wants to fight Mientkiewicz in court.

"What appears to be emerging as a legal consensus is that the person with the least rights to it is Mientkiewicz himself," said Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh, who ranked the claims as: "the Cardinals, the Red Sox, major league baseball and then the guy who happened to hold it at the end of the game."

I wonder whether the LA Times sports reporter, who intrepidly phoned the dean of Yale Law School for a quote, asked "what do you see as the emerging legal consensus on this issue?" My guess is that the question was, "who do you, as a legal scholar, think owns the ball." The deanly response was to couch the answer in terms of "emerging legal consensus." I'm fascinated that there even is "an emerging legal consensus" on this issue.

By the way, if the LA Times had asked me to rank the legal claims, I'd say Cardinals (the home team, who presumably supplied the ball), Red Sox, Major League Baseball, the Busch Stadium grounds crew, the Red Sox travelling equipment guys, followed by any fan who likes the Sox enough to own a Red Sox cap, then Orlando Cabrera who fielded the ball and made the throw to Mientkiewicz, then any member of the Red Sox team who played for the Sox the full 2004 season (Mientkiewicz having been acquired at mid-season from the Twins) and then, if none of those folks wanted it, Mientkiewicz.