Last November, slugger David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox said the 2016 Major League Baseball season would be his last.

As the man who was a key contributor to the Decade of the Sox, which includes three World Series championships from 2004 to 2013, Ortiz has been feted repeatedly as he makes his final appearances in various ballparks.

One problem here:

Ortiz, 40, is having far too good a season to walk away from the game.

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Much of France is in the grips of the most severe drought since 2005.

No rain of any significance has fallen in the south of the country since October, and that has ramifications for brush fires and agriculture. Particularly in the vineyards.

The vines are struggling, here in the Languedoc. Some appear to have fewer bunches of grapes and the bunches that are emerging also seem smaller than usual.

As can be seen, above, some of the vines just don’t look good. At all. “Limp and lifeless” seems to sum it up.

This can be viewed in a couple of ways.

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Trying to remember when it seemed as if Landon Donovan making a comeback on the pitch … pretty much had to happen.

It couldn’t have been any later than the first month or two of the 2015 Major League Soccer season. Landon playing more games seemed inevitable, didn’t it?

Two powerful currents pushed him in that direction.

–At 32, he seemed too young to be giving up the game for physical reasons. He wasn’t broken down; he didn’t walk with a limp. He scored 10 goals and had 19 assists in his “last” season with the LA Galaxy, 2014 — numbers too strong for the best player born in the USA to walk away from the game forever.

–What else was he going to do? We have wondered for years how a retired Landon would keep himself occupied. There was marriage, travel, a son and (presumably) a welcome mental break from his life’s work. But he said he didn’t want to coach adults, and I believed him. He did TV work with Fox, but “TV pundit” is not a good role for him. The small screen seems to reduce his emotional range to a similarly cramped spectrum.

Also, Landon knows David Beckham played effectively till he was 38 and that current Galaxy imports Robbie Keane and Steven Gerard are each 36, and Frank Lampard is 38. When the itch to play returned to the greatest scorer in MLS and U.S. national team history … Landon was young enough to scratch it.

And now here he is, back in the fold and riding to the rescue (perhaps) of the battered Galaxy, thin in attacking players, a team that very much could use someone like the Landon of old as the MLS season winds down and the playoffs approach.

A fifth championship with the Galaxy? A seventh, personally (including his two in San Jose)?

Could be.

So, what happens next?

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Megan Rapinoe plays for the U.S. women’s national soccer team, and a few weeks ago she was front and center in the condemnation of teammate Hope Solo.

Solo, the veteran goalkeeper, whose description of the Swedish performance in a shootout victory over the U.S. in the Rio 2016 quarterfinals as “cowardly”, was strongly criticized by Rapinoe.

Rapinoe said she was “really disappointed, to be honest”, in Solo calling the Swedes cowards, adding: “That’s not our team, that’s not what this team has always been, that’s not what this team will be in the future.”

And a few weeks later?

Rapinoe piggybacked onto the Colin Kaepernick “take a knee” campaign, refusing to stand for the national anthem ahead of a women’s soccer club game. Using her right of free speech, that is.

Which leaves Rapinoe in the awkward position of condemning a teammate for speaking her mind … and then turning around and diving into a far more ticklish matter by refusing to stand for the playing of the U.S. national anthem.

Rapinoe’s team, the Seattle Reign, played the Washington Spirit in D.C. tonight, and the host team played the anthem while the teams were in the lockerrooms, spoiling Rapinoe’s announced plan to not stand for the anthem again while in view of fans.

Which infuriated Rapinoe. After the match, she said: “It’s [expletive] unbelievable. Saddened by it.”

The process left Rapinoe looking like a hypocrite for criticizing Solo for the goalkeeper exercising her right as an American to speak her mind … and then insisting on her own right to take a knee during the anthem.

Which is it going to be? Is some free speech freer than other free speech?

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Some might opt for England’s Premier League. Others would nominate the Uefa Champions League or perhaps the World Cup or European Championship.

But a strong case can be made that the greatest soccer competition is the quadrennial World Cup qualifying for South America’s 10-nation confederation, generally known as Conmebol.

And a writer is making that case in this story in The Guardian.

He makes many good points … plus, the story has embedded in it a special prize.

Let’s consider some pros and cons for “Conmebol, best soccer competition in the world”. Starting with the pros.

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The opening weeks of their second stay in Los Angeles may not be going quite as well as the Rams would have hoped.

Remember how they traded up to get the No. 1 pick in the 2016 draft? Ahead of their first season back in Los Angeles? The dramatic move clearly was intended to create some buzz around the team that has returned to Southern California after 21 seasons in St. Louis.

The Rams sent a pile of high draft picks — two first-rounders, two seconds and two thirds — to the Tennessee Titans so they could move from 15th in the first round to the top of the draft and select Cal quarterback Jared Goff, thought by some to be a can’t-miss star.

Turns out, many already are suggesting Goff is on his way to being a “bust”. Which may also say something about the Rams organization and its inability to produce competitive teams over the past decade.

(The Rams failed to post a winning record in their final nine seasons in St. Louis, going 42-101-1 from 2007 to 2015, and did not reach the playoffs in their final 11 seasons in Saint Loo.)

I have not seen Goff play; I live in France, where the NFL is widely ignored. But I stumbled across a preview of the National Football Conference West division on The Guardian’s website today, and the headline reads: “Is Jared Goff already a bust?”

So, I did a little investigating for you … seeing which other online sources are suggesting the Rams are at risk of having spent big on a guy who not only will not be a superstar … but may have trouble getting into the starting lineup at all.

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Only one sport really matters among the citizens of the United Arab Emirates. And, actually, it is a subset of one sport.

The men’s national soccer team. Not necessarily the domestic soccer league those guys play in; Emirati fans are far more interested in club soccer in other countries, particularly in England and Spain.

No, the UAE national team is what quickens the pulses of the citizenry, and the national team is about as good this minute as it ever has been. Good enough that it has a real shot to play in the country’s second World Cup, in Russia two years hence, and first since 1990.

The UAE’s chances improved significantly when the guys they have been nurturing for nearly a decade went to Japan and opened the third round of Asia qualifying with a 2-1 victory on Thursday over one of the continent’s powers.

Up next? Australia in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.

If coach Mahdi Ali’s team can pull off another victory?

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If it were not already time for this, it certainly is now:

We no longer can consider USC a “football” school.

Not after what Alabama did to the Trojans in their open tonight … a 52-6 blowout, nationally televised, that made the Trojans look like chumps.

Not after compiling a overall record of 57-28 since Pete Carroll got out of town, in 2009, just ahead of the NCAA coming down on the Trojans.

Until demonstrated otherwise — with, say, a victory over a top-10 team — the Trojans are just another team that plays in the Pac-12.

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I was reading a story about the planned Los Angeles bid to host the 2024 Summer Games, and that took me back to the 1984 L.A. Summer Games, and I was looking at the wiki page … and on the right side of the page it had a link to a snippet of the “L.A. Olympics Fanfare and Theme.” Which of course was done by the composer John Williams and has lots of brass … and I love it to death.

(Williams’s themes are the background music, I think, for the Baby Boomer generation. The huge movie stuff, as much as anything else, from Jaws to Star Wars and all the rest.)

Here is the 1984 L.A. fanfare in all its staccato brassy glory, as performed by the Boston Pops.

OK, it sounds a bit like a few other things.

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The Dutch are among the tallest people in the world. Some suggest they are the tallest, citing an average male height of 6 feet.

This is hard to be sure about. Poke around, and you can find web pages that insist Serbs and Croats are the tallest, others suggesting the Nilotic people (the Dinka, the Masai) are the tallest.

It seems safe to say the Dutch are among the tallest. It was something we noticed on our first full day in Amsterdam. Lots and lots of tall people. Men and, of course, women.

And it occurs to me that when it comes to sports opportunities … the Dutch are missing out on the game of basketball.

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