Friday, March 15, 2019

THE ENEMY WITHOUT


                In my early years in Arizona, when I was a lot sprier than I am now, I ran a couple of hiking programs, one part of which took Scottsdale public-school 4th graders, aged nine or 10, into the local environs. We’d cover, maybe, three miles, stopping often to talk about the flora we saw and the fauna we didn’t see, desert animals being notoriously people-shy.

                The hikes were popular with the kids, teachers, parents and our volunteer leaders, who enjoyed the youngsters’ curiosity about subjects with which most were unaware. That was strange, I thought, because the desert was, literally, the back yard of many of them, but it seems that parents these days keep the kind of tight rein on their children that discourages individual exploration. Too bad, huh?

                Alas, however, the program was canceled one fall because the insurance policy that covered the school-bus transportation of the kids between their schools and the trailheads no longer covered such extracurricular trips and the schools didn’t wish to pay extra to provide them. Insurance problems ruled the playgrounds and had curtailed other school activities, we were told with a shrug.

                Insurance came up again several weeks ago in a story on the excellent ESPN web site by the brothers’ reporting team of Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, and the focus was a lot larger than a few kids’ hikes. It was the entire sport of football and most particularly the National Football League.  Liability for the head injuries that have enveloped the American sport have sent insurers running for the hills, and without insurance the games can’t go on.  That’s not an immediate threat to the professional league but it already has happened here and there, and looks to get worse before it gets better.

                Reporting by the Fainarus revealed that the NFL no longer has general-liability insurance covering head traumas, and just one carrier is willing to sell it the workers’-compensation coverage the laws mandate; before the concussions’ uproar began in earnest in 2011 at least a dozen carriers vied for the league’s business, their story said. To continue to get coverage last season the NFL had to double its per-claim deductible for head injuries to $1 million and “significantly” increase the amount of damages it would self-cover before its insurer’s share kicked in. The NFL and its present and former insurers currently are embroiled in lawsuits over who will pay what in the $1 billion-plus settlement the league reached in 2013 with dozens of former players who claimed they were misled about concussions’ long-term dangers.

 The story went on that the insurance market for the junior, high school and college leagues that provide the sport’s underpinning is similarly pinched, as was the liability coverage for football-helmet makers, which also is down to a single carrier.  Last spring the Maricopa County Community College system in Arizona, which covers the area in which I live, eliminated football at its four schools after it determined that the insurance bill for its 358 varsity football players accounted for nearly one-third of all the insurance costs for its 200,000 students.

The Pop Warner organization, a non-profit that oversees leagues involving 225,000 youth players, could face a similar outcome. “People say football will never go away, but if we can’t get insurance it will,” Jon Butler, Pop Warner’s executive director, is quoted as saying.

What scares insurers most about head injuries is that the entire subject is pretty much terra incognito. The Fairanus pointed out that there are roughly 300,000 football-related concessions annually, but research into the effects of CTE, the Alzheimer’s-like brain condition most associated with them, is just getting started.  CTE can’t be diagnosed until after death and its triggers, and the factors that determine which players will or won’t develop it, remain a mystery. Further, research could enlarge the area of risk, linking football to other forms of dementia.

Worse, CTE’s symptoms might not become evident for years or even decades after an injury is sustained, making it the sort of open-ended, “long-tail claim” insurers fear most. Last June, the first of many head-injury-related lawsuits against the NCAA went to court. It resulted in a settlement with the widow of a former University of Texas linebacker and defensive tackle who was diagnosed with CTE after his death in 2015, 44 years after he last played.

“Thirty years from now you could be on the hook, and that’s a very difficult situation for an insurance company to be in,” the piece quotes James Lynch, chief actuary for the Insurance Information Institute of New York, as saying. “This is why the industry is concerned about it. You want to be able to box up that risk.”

As dire a situation as the story describes, there’s little doubt in my mind that it alone won’t bring down the NFL or the NCAA. The central fact about big-time football in the U.S.—both the pro and college varieties-- is that people like it despite (or perhaps because of) its gladiatorial aspects. By itself the NFL is a $15 billion-a-year business with immense market and political power. It can deep-pocket its way out of any number of problems and, now that the dangers of concussions are widely known, probably could get Congress to pass laws absolving it of blame for injuries to the players it enlists, volunteers all.

Chances are, though, that gnawings from without, both financial and moral, can undermine it to the point where it no longer commands the influence it has today.  Football will outlive me but, maybe, not my grandkids.


               

Friday, March 1, 2019

SAY IT AIN'T SO, GOLDY


                I’ve long had a theory that some people are born with a one-city-fan gene, and offer myself as proof. I’ve lived in the Phoenix area for 21 years (where does the time go?) but have yet to shake my loyalty to all teams Chicago, the city of my birth.

                That’s not true of all the Chicagoans I know who now reside in or around the desert metropolis. My friend Chuck Brusso is such a Cubs’ fan he can’t watch the team play for fear of disappointment, but has adopted the local Diamondbacks as his team 1A. It took my wife, Susie, all of a few months to shed her allegiance to the White Sox and become a D’backs’ rooter, and her closet now boasts D’back t-shirts in several colors and styles. She even backs the team vocally in front of our home TV set, a habit I wish she’d lose. I could cite other examples, but you get the point.

                The Arizona teams might have been tougher for me to resist if they’d been good these last two decades, but such usually has not been the case. The D’backs remarkably won the World Series in 2001, their fourth year of existence, but mostly have been so-so, perennially chasing the Dodgers and Giants in the National League West. Ditto for the football Cardinals except for one Super Bowl dash (in 2008); their holding the top pick in this year’s NFL draft bespeaks their present condition. The basketball Suns are a punch line to a bad joke and the hockey Coyotes lead their league only in rumors that they’ll move. Hockey is about as appropriate to our clime as an aquarium. And yeah, we have one of those, too.

                It’s not only that the D’backs have been bad, they’ve also been dumb. Their record in player trades is dismal, highlighted by the 2009 deal that sent double-Cy Young Award-winner-to-be Max Scherzer to the Detroit Tigers for Edwin Jackson and Ian Kennedy, a couple of mediocrities. Recent trades have cost them Jean Segura, Didi Gregorio, Trevor Bauer, Dansby Swanson and Mitch Hanigar, all of whom have thrived elsewhere.

                 For my money the worst D’back move was their letting go of Bob Melvin, their manager from 2005 to 2009. In 2007 Melvin achieved what only could be called a miracle by winning the NL West and advancing to the league-championship round with a team that gave up more runs than it scored during the regular season. The sterling skipper has since impressed annually by getting the most from his money-starved Oakland A’s clubs.

                But while you wouldn’t know it from the above, the intent of this piece is to defend a D’back move rather than to condemn one. I’m talking about their trading away Paul Goldschmidt to the St. Louis Cardinal during the last off-season. Goldy, as he’s known hereabouts, was a beloved figure, ranking with Luis Gonzalez atop the team’s all-time popularity pantheon. A six-time All Star in his eight-year career, the power-hitting first-baseman was a seeming nice guy to boot, admired by fans of all ages and sexes. The deal was greeted with outrage, with the smell of burning D’backs jerseys permeating the air for weeks after it was announced.

                Like just about everything else these days in baseball (and other big-time sports), Goldy’s departure was dictated by economics. He was in the final year of a six-year, $46.5 million contract that, including a $14.5 million club option this year, would expire at this season’s end and make him eligible for free agency.  Rather than risk losing him outright, the team dealt him for what it could get. This turned out to be a young starting pitcher with upside, an apparently serviceable back-up catcher, a minor-league infielder and a 2019 draft choice, not a bad haul for what could be a one-year rental by the Cards.

                That, however, was not the only possible outcome of Goldy’s AZ saga. In a teary, full-page ad in the Arizona Republic after being traded the player said it was hard to bid goodbye to his local fans, but say goodbye he did. I have no doubt he could have stayed if he wished, and at a nice raise over his fat, option-year wage, but instead he chose to try to maximize his return in the marketplace. It’s tough to blame him for that but he’s already swimming in money, so his stance hardly could be called admirable. For jocks at his level money is an abstraction, divorced from human needs, and serves mainly as a professional measuring stick. On that stage does the bidding proceed.

                The D’backs couldn’t go all in for Goldy because they already did that for pitcher Zack Greinke in 2016, giving him a six-year, $206 million deal that has three years left to run. That has earmarked between 25% and 35% of the team’s recent annual payrolls for someone who plays only one game in five. Greinke has been successful by just about any standard (his won-lost mark in AZ is 45-25) but he isn’t much loved here, mostly because he’s considered overpaid.  Talk about irony.

                Indeed, the failure to ride the Greinke-Goldy axis to glory these last few seasons has caused the D’backs to entrench generally. Besides losing Goldy in the off-season they allowed their next-best two players, pitcher Patrick Corbin and outfielder A.J. Pollack, to escape via free agency, with only stop-gap replacements available. To say that their prospects aren’t brilliant until they rebuild is to put it mildly.

                And really, that’s OK with me. Like I said, I’m a Cubs’ fan, and while I don’t wish the D’backs ill I like the fact that their losing will keep both attendance and ticket prices low at their Chase Field home, making it easier for me to go to games. Easy is good in my book.