David Pintzow

@DavidPintzow

Musician, amateur photographer, Cresap Raider, father and husband. Life is good.

Westminster, MD

Joined December 2012

414 Following

73 Followers

1.7K Posts

DavidPintzow retweeted

Margot Cleveland

@ProfMJCleveland

21 days ago

Okay, who did this?

464

88K

704K

DavidPintzow retweeted

Sports Patriot

@SportsPatriotUS

24 days ago

An Open Letter to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert Dear Commissioner Engelbert, This is no longer incompetence. This is negligence. You were handed the greatest gift the WNBA has ever received, and you are finding new ways to squander it. For nearly 30 years, the WNBA has struggled to stand on its own merit. It has needed patience, protection, subsidies, excuses, advocacy, and endless goodwill. The league has been treated less like a professional sports product and more like a cause people were expected to support out of obligation. Then Caitlin Clark arrived. She was not just a star. She was the lottery ticket. She brought the audience. She brought the ratings. She brought the sold-out arenas. She brought fathers and daughters. She brought casual fans. She brought sponsors, road crowds, national television attention, and cultural relevance the WNBA had been chasing for decades. She made people care. And under your leadership, the WNBA has responded by acting uncomfortable with the very thing it begged the sports world to give it. That is the failure. You are not just mishandling Caitlin Clark. You are mishandling the future of the league. The WNBA wants her ratings but not her reality. It wants her ticket sales but not her protection. It wants her relevance but not her responsibility. It wants the money she brings while acting annoyed by the fans she brought with her. That is not leadership. That is doubling down on stupid. Let’s be very clear about what just happened. A player made reckless, non-basketball contact to Caitlin Clark’s throat area while she was vulnerable on the floor. The throat is not a shoulder. It is not a hip. It is not a forearm. It is the airway. The larynx. The trachea. The structures that allow a person to breathe, speak, swallow, and get oxygen. Contact to that area can become a medical emergency fast. The WNBA got lucky. That is the sentence. The WNBA got lucky Caitlin Clark got up. Because if that contact had caused a serious airway injury, a breathing emergency, a collapse, or something worse, nobody would be talking about “physicality” today. They would be talking about how everyone saw this coming. And they would be right. You should have known better. The league should have known better. The officials should have known better. The players should have known better. The coaches should have known better. And you, Commissioner, should have acted like the person responsible for making sure it never gets to that point. Instead, the league reviewed the play, admitted enough to upgrade it, called it reckless, called it a non-basketball act, and responded with one game and a $1,000 fine. One game. For contact to the throat area of the most important player in your league. That was an insult. That was the WNBA admitting the act was dangerous, then punishing it like it was an inconvenience. You did not send a message that player safety matters. You sent a message that the WNBA will wait until something catastrophic happens before it grows a spine. And if that day comes, the liability will not arrive quietly. It will come with a very large “we told you so” attached to it. Because fans have been telling you. Basketball people have been telling you. The video has been telling you. The pattern has been telling you. Caitlin Clark has been grabbed, bumped, shoved, poked, face-guarded, knocked down, crowded, tested, and hit while your league keeps hiding behind the word “physicality.” Physicality is basketball. Reckless contact is not. Cheap shots are not. A fist to the throat area is not. And every time your league responds weakly, every time your officials miss it, every time your media partners minimize it, every time players mock the outrage, and every time your office stays too quiet, you are teaching the league exactly what it can get away with. That is how standards collapse. That is how trust dies. That is how lawsuits are born. You have an obligation to protect the players in your league. Not just the players who fit the league’s preferred identity. Not just the players the old guard approves of. Not just the players whose fame makes everyone comfortable. All of them. Especially the player who has done more to grow the WNBA than anyone in its history. This is not about Caitlin Clark needing special treatment. This is about Caitlin Clark not receiving basic protection. That distinction matters. The WNBA does not protect stars because they are fragile. Serious leagues protect stars because the product matters, player safety matters, and the future of the business matters. The NBA understood this. The NFL understands this. Major sports leagues understand that when a generational athlete changes the economics of the sport, you do not allow resentment, weak officiating, cheap shots, and petty narratives to swallow the opportunity. You are not protecting the game. You are managing optics. And you are not even doing that well. The commissioner’s job is not to hide until the storm passes. The commissioner’s job is to lead before the storm becomes a disaster. Right now, the WNBA looks small, bitter, reactive, and unserious. That is on you. The officiating looks unprepared for the moment. That is on you. The discipline looks weak. That is on you. The league’s biggest star looks isolated. That is on you. The media narrative around Caitlin Clark has been allowed to become poisonous, dishonest, and dismissive. That is on you. The WNBA was handed the golden opportunity women’s basketball had been waiting on for decades, and instead of building around it with urgency, gratitude, and professionalism, the league keeps acting like Caitlin Clark is a problem it has to survive. She is not the problem. She is the proof of concept. She proved the audience exists. She proved the money is real. She proved people will watch. She proved women’s basketball can be mainstream, debated, emotional, commercial, and fun. And your league is proving it may not be mature enough to handle what she proved. That is the brutal truth. Commissioner Engelbert, you are now on notice. Not as a legal phrase. As a public one. The whole sports world can see this. If Caitlin Clark gets seriously hurt because your league refused to establish a real standard, nobody gets to act surprised. Nobody gets to pretend this came out of nowhere. Nobody gets to say the warning signs were not there. They are everywhere. Fix the officiating. Punish dangerous conduct like it is actually dangerous. Stop letting players disguise reckless behavior as toughness. Stop letting media voices gaslight fans who know exactly what they are watching. Stop treating Caitlin Clark’s fanbase like a nuisance while cashing the checks her attention creates. Stop hiding behind statements that say nothing. And stop confusing silence with leadership. The WNBA spent nearly 30 years asking to be taken seriously. Caitlin Clark made that possible. Now you have to decide whether you are going to protect the player who made the league bigger or keep letting the league act like she is the inconvenience. Because if the WNBA cannot protect Caitlin Clark, it cannot be trusted with the future she brought it. And if you continue to mishandle this, history will not remember you as the commissioner who inherited the Caitlin Clark era. It will remember you as the commissioner who wasted it. Sincerely, A fan who is tired of watching the WNBA endanger its golden opportunity.

118

440

33K

David Pintzow @DavidPintzow

about 2 months ago

@Orioles Great to see @CowserColton be the hero again today. We were Moooing so loudly in the stadium!!

444

David Pintzow @DavidPintzow

3 months ago

Love this. Thanks to @NASA and the Artemis II crew for expanding the world view…again.

Who to follow

Willem Rogers

@wi11_e_m

He/him — Westminster's resident piece of trash

emma

@ember_and_ash

24 • internet consumer • problem haver • dropout and critical role are the highest form of entertainment rn

Bobbi Leitner

@ms_leitner

David Pintzow @DavidPintzow

5 months ago

@Ravens adding Max Crosby tells me all I need to know about the direction they are taking this year. Glad to see a true sack threat on D.

David Pintzow @DavidPintzow

5 months ago

I might actually listen again. Jason was too much to handle at times.

The Baltimore Sun @baltimoresun

5 months ago

Baltimore sports radio personality Jason La Canfora confirmed to The Baltimore Sun he is no longer with 105.7 The Fan. La Canfora had co-hosted the show “Inside Access” since 2020 and was one year into a three-year deal with The Fan. He told The Sun that the station’s programming director held a meeting on Friday “to talk about being number one in all the weekly ratings and to tell us we had the best YouTube numbers at the station.” The situation apparently changed days later, with La Canfora saying, “there were no specifics given” for the change. Read more: https://t.co/y2C7YIS7JI