SEASON’S WISHINGS (Flickr/Nick Amoscato).
In the old, bourbon-besotted days of yore, sports columnists facing a Christmas holiday and bereft of anything remarkable to write, turned to a creaky tradition: a mock “wish list” for athletic celebrities and enterprises.
Ah, the days of scribes with a bottle of Jack Daniels in the lower right-hand corner of the desk are gone, as are office Christmas parties which often resulted in a spike in DUI arrests within a three-mile radius of the newsroom.
- Shohei Ohtani: Good luck to yourself and thanks for six exciting years in Anaheim. Prosper in Chavez Ravine and we can’t wait to beat you in the Freeway Series:
- Arte Moreno: The confidence to stop chasing over-the-hill players and concentrate on building an Angels’ organization such as the one that used to produce outstanding home-grown talent.
- Brandon Staley: A few years of penance as an assistant coach, then an older-but-wiser stint as head coach of an NFL expansion team.
- CIF-SS: An end to the constant tinkering with divisions, league names, national telecasts and other assaults on the idea of neighborhood high school sports played for fun.
- Flag football: It’s great. Less violence, more action. May you take root and grow.
- High school coaches making a more vigorous effort at quickly submitting scores and results to local news media.
- Expand the college football playoff field and contract the college basketball playoff field.
- Buffalo Bills. Get a roof, guys.
- Ban Russia from all Olympic sports and competition.
- Later deadlines for daily newspaper sports sections so they can get the Monday results from Angels and Dodgers games into the Tuesday paper.
And for all of you who read The Tribune I wish that your favorite teams always make the playoffs and your favorite players consider free agency a temptation and not a requirement.