Opinion

The city of Toronto, from a sports perspective, has been swimming through quicksand for a long time.

General mangers of the city's major sports teams have tried to put together teams that will contend or at least make a playoff appearance. Evidently, they’ve been coming up short.

The Brewers just finished up their first of three games in a weekend series against the rival Chicago Cubs at Miller Park. Let me say that the game was not played crisply by either club. The 7-4 loss dropped the Brewers' record to 3-5 on the season.

His numbers are indisputable, on paper Manny Ramirez is a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Manny announced his retirement today, ending a career in which he hit .312 on 2,574 career hits. Manny hit 555 career home runs and drove in 1,831 runs. He also helped the Red Sox win two World Series championships in 2004 and 2007.

The old baseball cliche is that pennants are not won in April, but they most certainly can be lost.

In an AL West that is expected to be tight all season, the A's can not afford to continue losing games in which their starting pitching puts them in a position to win.

Friday afternoon the A's dropped another close game, 2-1, to the Minnesota Twins in the weekend series opener. With the loss Oakland is now 2-5 on the season and 4.5 games out of first place.

What more do you want from Chipper now? 

He now has the hits, he is a few RBI from 1,500, and he has the home runs. What makes these stats more special is that he is a switch hitter.

If, more like when, he reaches that 1,500 RBI mark, then he will be only the second switch hitter in baseball history to have that amount of RBI, as well as 2,500 hits.

Some people do not think he will get in because he doesn't have 3,000 hits, or he hasn't hit 500 HRs. But what he has done, I think, should easily get him in.

We're still waiting for the details to come out, but what we know may be enough.

Manny Ramirez, the greatest right-handed hitter of our generation, got caught. Drug policy violation. Having violated the performance-enhancing drug policy in 2009, he was set to be punished. Again.

So what did he do? He retired. He didn't stick around for the judgment. Can you blame him?

The career numbers are staggering.

.312 batting average (87^th all-time)

555 homeruns (14^th all-time)

1,831 RBI (18^th all-time)

2,574 hits (82^nd all-time)

547 doubles (24^th all-time)

1,544 runs (56^th all-time)

1,329 walks (36^th all-time)

4,826 total bases (26^th all-time)

.411 on-base percentage (32^nd all-time)

.585 slugging percentage (9^th all-time)

Coming into the season, the New York Yankees' biggest weakness was their starting rotation. With no fourth or fifth starter and an inconsistent AJ Burnett pitching third, the Yankees were expecting big seasons from CC Sabathia and Phil Hughes.

There will not be a Chicago reunion tonight for Manny Ramirez, who played for the White Sox in the final two months of last season. He decided to retire after he reportedly tested positive for steroids.

Ramirez will face criticism for bailing out on the Rays and being busted for steroids.

After four games, the Brewers were 0-4 and struggling to get anything going. They lost a heart-breaker to the Reds on Opening Day after blowing a 6-2 lead, then lost the other two games 4-2 and 12-3. Then their home-opener came and the Brewers had a 1-0 lead until the eighth inning, when Martin Prado and Dan Uggla hit solo home runs to win the game for the Braves.