BOWLED OVER OR OVERBOWLED?

 

               In the beginning, 1902, a group of farseeing civic boosters in Pasadena, California, decided to call attention to their balmy environs by inviting a couple of college football teams to supplement their city's Rose Parade and play a New Year’s Day game under the title East-West Tournament. The U’s of Michigan and Stanford accepted, the maize and blue winning, 49-0.

               The game then went into hiatus until 1916, when it was revived on an annual basis at the Tournament Park field near the Caltech campus. In 1923 it was moved to the newly completed Rose Bowl stadium, and renamed.

Pasadena’s Rose Bowl stood alone as a post-regular-season college-football event until 1935, when it was joined by the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. In 1937 the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, the Orange Bowl in Miami and the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas, came aboard.

The idea spread slowly at first­­—in 1950 there were just eight bowl games and in 1970 only 11. From there the line on the graph zoomed, to 20 games in 1997, 30 in 2006, 40 in 2015 and the present 42, 43 if you include the national championship contest, this year set for January 9 in SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, the new home of the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams.

 Once a reward for a season well played, bowl games now also celebrate mediocrity, with teams with 6-6 won-lost records qualifying and ones with 5-7 marks annually slipping in (5-7 Rice will grace the Lending Tree Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, on December 17). Once occupying only the Christmas-New Year week, the bowl season now runs from December 16 through the above-noted January 9.  Seemingly, every burg with a whistle to toot, and a corporate sponsor to back it, now has a bowl game, including frosty-clime Boston, Detroit and New York. Orlando, Florida, has three, and several cities have two.

 There are overlapping bowls-- the Armed Forces Bowl in Ft. Worth, Texas, and the Military Bowl, in Annapolis, Maryland. There are enough goofily named ones to amuse someone like me, including the Cheez-It Bowl, the Duke’s Mayo Bowl and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. The Gasparilla Bowl in Tampa, Florida, celebrates Jose Gasparilla, a pirate who may or may not have plundered the Caribbean during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. If you bought a ticket to the Frisco Bowl you’d better go to Frisco, Texas (it’s near Dallas), not San Fran.

Like everything else about college sports in these United States, bowl games are about money. The main engine in that department is ESPN, the all-sports network group, which airs most of them. The network pays up big for rights to the college football playoffs but considerably less for the lesser bowls that consume much of its air time during the December-January period. Still, its largess, plus that of individual-game sponsors, is what keeps the early games going despite the empty stadium seats you often see when you tune in.

Schools will reap an estimated $500 million in bowl revenues this year. Most of the money is negotiated by and distributed through the sports conferences, with each conference member—bowl-eligible or not—sharing in the proceeds. Each conference involved in the Rose, Orange and Sugar bowls will share $74 million under current contracts.  Expenses of the competing teams will consume about a quarter of the total; football players eat a lot, you know.

And also like everything else in college sports, football-bowl-season numbers go in just one direction—up.  That was made clear a couple of weeks ago when the schools announced that their championship-playoff fields would be expanded to 12 teams from the present four starting in 2024.  That would add two more rounds—and two weeks—to the season and mean that at least two teams’ schedules could stretch to an NFL-length 17 games.

               The U’s can do such things unhindered because they have no unions or other organized groups to say nay. While it’s no longer correct to say that college athletes no longer are unpaid—in addition to their scholarships many of them get “cost of attendance” payments of several thousand dollars a year plus whatever they can hustle up for the use of their names, images or likenesses— they have no control over the conditions of their employment. Even the cheesiest football bowl game adds about a month to their practice schedules, time that otherwise could be devoted to studies (for those who care about such things) or to holiday time back home.

               Football being a rough game, it also adds to bodily wear and tear and increases the chance of career-threatening injury. Like powerless people in other situations, college footballers who balk are left to “vote with their feet,” which is to say decline to participate in bowls. A growing number of players with professional aspirations are doing just that every year, and who can blame them?  Sounds like a smart move to me.

       

 

BARN DOOR II

 

               The drama in the annual elections to the Baseball Hall of Fame used to center on the sportswriters’ mail balloting, which takes place around year end with its results announced in January. Not so the last few years as the so-called veterans’ committees, now renamed, have done the bulk of the electing, accounting for nine of the 11 inductees in 2021 and 2022. The committees once were described as side doors to the Hall but lately they’ve been barn doors.

 For better or worse, that will be the case again this year, when the Contemporary Era Committee, charged with examining the credentials of men who performed mostly after 1980, peruses a slate of eight former players and announces its conclusions on Sunday, December 4. The sportswriters then will do their thing as usual with a different slate, but a less-interesting group of candidates means less attention to their proceedings. So score another for the vets.

The reasoning behind the system is opaque, to say the least. All the player-candidates the vets will examine have been rejected by the sportswriters on at least 10 annual occasions (it used to be 15),  and being retired from the diamonds their objective qualifications haven’t changed since their exits. That can bring into play other, fuzzier considerations, such as the post-career managing or broadcasting jobs and plain old popularity.  With 400 or so men and women doing the sportswriters’ voting, and a 75% vote needed for admission, the peripheral stuff pretty much cancels itself out. The 16-member vets groups also require a 75% vote, but that works out to just 12 yeas, so the table can easily be tilted. Would Benjamin Franklin have approved?

The procedure will get particular attention this time because three of the eight vets’ candidates have sterling objective credentials but were denied election on another ground. That would be their credible connection to the illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs during their playing days. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were the best hitter and pitcher, respectively, of their era, while Rafael Palmeiro had more than 3,000 hits and 500 home runs over his 20-season career, both numbers formerly automatic Hall triggers. But by reliable accounts all three chose to gild the lily of their abundant talents by juicing up, in the process putting ugly and permanent asterisks on the records that are baseball’s lifeblood.

Bonds and Clemens began their sportswriters-ballot odyssey by getting about a third of the vote in 2012 and ended it last year at about two-thirds, close but no cigars. Palmeiro, who under oath denied steroids use to a Congressional committee before failing a drug test, was rejected out of hand by the writers, flushed from their ballot after four years for failure to get the 5% vote required for retention. Thursday’s voters include seven Hall of Fame players, six executives and three longtime news media members, so their action will measure how what amounts to baseball’s Establishment views the steroids era, roughly 1990 to 2005. I’d be surprised if they welcomed any of the three, but I’ve been surprised before.

Two other vets-ballot members also haul lots of baggage. Albert Belle was an accomplished slugger but also one of the surliest men ever to play the game, a noted smasher of teammates’ boom boxes and upsetter of clubhouse buffet tables. His sportswriters’ vote topped out at 7.7% in 2006 and it’s a mystery why he’s getting another look. Curt Schilling was a fine pitcher but was disliked by other players and has spent his post-baseball career badmouthing minorities and the news media on right-wing political outlets. He got a 71% vote in 2020 anyway just might make it this time.

By me, the remaining three fit into the very-good-but-not-great category of many Hall nominees. Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy and Fred McGriff were also-rans in the writers’ voting, with Mattingly and Murphy never topping a 30% result. Mattingly now has an edge over the other two because of his managerial service and nice-guy rep.

               Of the holdovers on the writers’ ballot Scott Rolen, Todd Helton and Billy Wagner have the best chance of election by virtue of each polling more than 50% last year, but I’d vote only for Helton.  Pitcher Andy Pettitte is an interesting candidate because of his 256 career victories and post-season prominence, but his chances are discounted because of his admitted use of banned HGH in injury rehab and the fact that New York Yankees’ pitchers have a leg up in the wins department.

               Among the 14 writers-ballot newcomers only Carlos Beltran has first-ballot playing-field credentials, with 2,725 hits and 435 home runs in a 20-year playing career, but he carries his own potent negative—involvement in the 2017 Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. Indeed, he was the only player named in the commissioner’s report on the matter, and it caused him to be fired as the New York Mets’ manager shortly after he was hired in 2018. How Beltran fares in the voting will presage how other Astros’ stars such as Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman will do when their names come up in retirement.

               It’s possible that the sportswriters could refrain from electing any new Hall members this time, as they’ve done in some past years, and that’s a reason the vets committees are given the sway they have. The biggest event on the Hall’s annual calendar is its July induction ceremony, a weekend fest of baseball and speeches, and it wouldn’t be much of an occasion with no inductees. On such matters does immortality hinge.

    Epilogue-- On Sunday the 16-member vets group unanimously elected McGriff to the Hall, his blameless life helping boost his very-good-but-not-great batting stats. A two-thirds vote was required for election. Mattingly gathered eight votes, Schilling seven and Murphy six. None of the other four candidates received more than three votes. McGriff never topped 40% over 15 years on the sportswriters' ballot.   

 

 

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A LO-FUN CUP

 

               When I’m asked about the best events I covered in my 20-plus years as an active sports writer, I have a ready answer. It’s a two-way tie, I say. Number 1 was the 1994 soccer World Cup in the United States.  Number 1A was the 1998 edition of that tournament in France.

               The 1994 event was a revelation to me. Before it I had no great background in soccer and was stunned by the athleticism of the participants and the zest and color generated by the polyglot crowds. The Cup was a month-long carnival that far outdid any such fest I’d witnessed, Olympics included. The ’98 event was equally memorable, made especially so by the five-week stay in France it afforded me and wife Susie, who was along for the ride. The food alone would have sufficed to put the trip atop my list.

               It’s World Cup time again, starting this Sunday, November 20, and running through December 18, but I’m afraid it won’t be much of a treat for all concerned. That’s because it’s in Qatar, a tiny, dusty kingdom on the Arabian Gulf with no history in the sport whose award took “sportswashing” to a new high, as a result of an international bribe-o-rama for the ages. That’s saying quite a bit, because the previous record was held by the 2018 World Cup in Russia, although there most of the widely reported graft stayed home among Putin’s pals.

This Cup has been attended by criminal proceedings in the U.S., Switzerland and Brazil, among other lands. Those charged with bribe taking included Sepp Blatter, the longtime top man at FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, and Michel Platini, the No. 2.  Both were acquitted in a Swiss trial but the prosecution is appealing the verdict, and both still are banned from the sport by the organization that nurtured them.  A dozen cases in the U.S. resulted in guilty findings against corporate and soccer officials and some $40 million in fines and forfeitures.

Some criminal trials still pend, including one scheduled for January against two executives of Fox TV charged with bribing soccer officials to grease the network’s successful bid to televise the proceedings in the U.S.  Like a good little partner, Fox has said it will air Cup games without reference to the offenses that surround them. Maybe its own involvement in them had something to do with that, huh?  

A less likely place for the world’s most-inclusive sporting event (some 200 national teams competed at one stage or another) would be hard to find. Oil-rich Qatar is more a company than a country, the property of the Thani family, a hereditary monarchy whose head appoints the prime minister and his cabinet and all members of the judiciary. Of a total population of about three million people only about 300,000 are citizens, the rest being ex-pats and migrant workers. Stoning and flogging are legal punishments; homosexual acts are punishable by death.

When Qatar was awarded the Cup in 2010 it had just one suitable soccer stadium. It’s dotted the desert around Doha, its only city worth the name, with seven more since, their construction accounting for the bulk of the reported $220 billion it’s spending to stage the event. The grunt work on those was performed by workers imported from Asia who labored, and died, under near-slavery conditions until international condemnation forced some reforms a few years ago.

 Tourist accommodations have been slapped together similarly, with cruise ships and a tent city enlisted to help serve the expected influx. Alcohol use is prohibited in most of Qatar but for the nonce the country is creating “fan zones” around stadiums where visitors can indulge. Those who overindulge will be carted off to sober-up zones, there to stay under threat of arrest.  I’m not making this up.

The World Cup usually takes place in June while the world’s top club leagues are on break. It’s too hot for soccer in Qatar in or around that month so FIFA honchos, their pockets stuffed to overflowing, switched the thing to its November start. Among other things that will mean that players will be joining their national teams hot off competitive regimens, with a larger number than usual nursing injuries.  

The good news for us Yanks is that the U.S. team is in the field. It missed the 2018 fest in ignominious fashion after losing a final qualifying match to a team from little Trinidad & Tobago (pop. 1.3 million) when a tie would have sufficed to advance. A thorough shakeup of team management resulted.

The bad news is that U.S. prospects aren’t brilliant. The team goes to Qatar ranked 16^th internationally, but that may be higher than justified. It qualified for the Cup by finishing third in its regional group, behind Mexico and newly potent Canada, was shut out by lower-ranked Japan and Saudi Arabia in its two most-recent practice outings and has been beset by a number of injuries large by any standard. Its best players aren’t among the international elite, and it lacks the standout goaltending of previous U.S. elevens.

 The team opens on Monday, November 21, against Wales, meets England on Friday, November 25, and finishes group play on Tuesday, November 29, against Iran.  Traditional-power England, fifth in the world rankings, is the group favorite, and Wales and Iran rank just behind the U.S. in 19^th and 20^th places, respectively. It probably will take at least a win and a tie in the three matches to advance to the single-elimination round of 16, and that’ll take some doing.

The saving grace may be a team’s youth—it’s the youngest in the field by one recent measure. That means—who knows?-- it could outperform expectations. It also could bode well for 2026, when the U.S. will co-host the Cup with Canada and Mexico. Meantime, most of us can be glad we’ll be watching at home, out of range of Qatari beer patrols. Have another, if you want.

 

              

FALL BALL '22

 

               If you’ve been following this space for a while you know that my favorite time of year in Arizona, my home for 25 years now, is October and November. The weather is warm but, usually, not hot, the skies are deep blue and the snowbirds have yet to arrive in force and clog the roads. Best, it’s when the Arizona Fall League, baseball’s minor-league finishing school, convenes.

               It’s baseball at its purest, without most of the commercial clutter that attends the rest of the professional game. Six teams with 35 players each, mostly between ages 20 and 24 who’ve just completed Class A or AA seasons, are playing a six week, 36-game schedule ending November 12 in six of the wonderful spring-training ballparks in the Phoenix area. Admission is cheap, parking is free and easy and the local news media ignore it so crowds are small and you can sit where you want.

               The Majors use the league in part to test or preview rules changes.  In the preview category this year have been the bigger bases (18-inches square versus the previous 15 inches) that will be used beginning in 2023, enforced pitch clocks (15 seconds with the bases empty, 20 seconds with runners on) and—most notably—a requirement that each pitch begins with two infielders on each side of second base, eliminating the radical shifts that have helped throttle offenses in recent annums.  S’all good, I think.

               A wrinkle that’s being tested is a ball-strike challenge, giving each team three TV-replay looks a game at home-plate umpires’ calls if a pitcher, catcher or batter requests them. Glad to report, it’s been sparingly used here, and when it has the umps’ calls mostly have been upheld. I’d like to see all electronic second-guessing of umps’ decisions junked, but I know that ain’t gonna happen, and one day robots or somesuch will take over all officiating. I’m glad that isn’t here yet.

               The best thing about the Fall League is that it gives fans like me a license to pretend to be scouts, a role I embrace. Through my blogs I’ve tipped off my readers to the likes of Nolan Arenado, Kris Bryant, Francisco Lindor and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., flaming talents who as youngsters lit up the AZ circuit. Nobody this year has stood out like those guys did, but as usual some good-looking kids have strutted their stuff.

                  The two best I’ve seen are Jordan Lawlar, a shortstop in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ chain, and Zac Veen, an outfielder property of the Colorado Rockies. Both are 20 years old, meaning they probably won’t see the Bigs in earnest for a couple of years, but it might be hard for their hard-up teams to keep them down that long.

               Lawlar, from Texas, was the D’backs’ top pick in the 2021 draft, the sixth player chosen. He’s got a live bat and arm and good speed afoot. In one game I saw he had a single, home run, two walks and two stolen bases. In another he went 3-for-4 with a triple, and had another steal. The D’backs drafted another shortstop, Dansby Swanson, first in 2015, but in a typical dumb move traded him (to Atlanta, where he’s starred) before he reached the Majors. Let’s hope they hang on to this kid.

               Veen, from Florida, was the ninth player picked in the 2020 draft. He’s skinny-strong at 6-foot-4 and a listed 190 pounds. He takes his at-bats seriously, swinging lustily from a coiled stance, and once on base itches to steal. He’s batted around .400 for most of the season here and through four weeks led the league with 13 stolen bases in as many games. He’ll probably fill out as he ages, and slow down, but should do well with the bat in the light air of the Mile High City.

               The biggest celebrities among the players here are catcher Henry Davis and right-handed pitcher Kumar Rocker, and while both will see the Majors as a result of their lofty draft status they’ll need more seasoning before they ascend.  Davis, the first pick overall in the 2021 draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates out of the U. of Louisville, has a solid build and latent power at age 23, but hasn’t impressed in the minors, batting .207 at AA last season. He hasn’t distinguished himself here.

 The 6-foot-5, 245-pound Rocker, 22, wowed ‘em at Vanderbilt U., leading the Commodores to an NCAA title, but has been injury-plagued since and missed all but a few games of the just-concluded regular season following shoulder surgery. The third pick overall in the ’22 draft by the Texas Rangers, and awarded a reported $5.2 million signing bonus, he’s been on a strict innings diet here, logging just 10 2/3 in five outings. He went three innings on Monday , showing an effective variety of pitches while giving up no runs and one hit and striking out five, and while patience will be required to allow him to show at his best it’s apparent that his upside is high.

Good catchers always are at a premium and one who can hit is Drew Millas, a seventh-round draftee (2019) from the Washington Nats. Switch-hitting from a widespread stance, he regularly makes strong contact, and has been employed as a DH when he’s not behind the plate. He went 3-for-4 in each of two games I watched, with a homer and 9 runs batted in, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t clue you into him.

 Jordan Walker, 20, a St. Louis Cardinals outfield prospect, looks like a young Jason Heyward at 6-foot-5 and 220 pounds, but would be advised to run out ground balls. Middle-infielder Ronny Simon , 22, with the Tampa Bay Rays via the Dominican Republic, is a genuine “pocket rocket”  at a listed 5-9 and 150. He hit 22 home runs at A and AA last season, but also strikes out a lot.

Pitchers appear only a few innings every four or five games, and therefore are tough to scout, but even in a few innings it’s been clear that Alek Jacob is my kind of hurler. His fastball tops out in the mid-80s but he mixes it with effective slow stuff and a variety of deliveries that keep batters off balance. At age 24 he’s a bit elderly for the AFL, but his sub-3.00 minor league ERAs, with 17 walks to 106 strikeouts last season, marks him as a keeper for the San Diego Padres despite his 16^th round draft slot.

My team, the Chicago Cubs, sent two touted position players. One is Brennen Davis, a rangy outfielder who missed most of the 2022 regular season with a back injury. He was injured again here and bowed out after five games, not a good sign. First-baseman Matt Mervis is a sleeper, an undrafted player who was a pitcher for much of his college career at Duke U. At a husky 6-4 and 230, he smoked minor-league pitching in rising from Class A to AAA in the regular season, hitting a total of 36 home runs in 137 games. He’s kept it up here, tying for the league lead with five homers in 11 games through week four.

 Minor-league power doesn’t always transfer to the Bigs but, fingers crossed, it could with him. The Cubs could use help at first base, among other places.

              

WORLD BALL

 

               We don’t think about it much but sports haven’t always been part of Planet Earth. They are the product of leisure, which in turn is the product of prosperity. A society that’s worried about where its next meal is coming from doesn’t have the wherewithal for fun and games.

               That little intro sets the stage for the present—in much of the world, at least. Whatever else globalization has brought it also has resulted in a geographic spread of athletic accomplishment that has no historic precedent.  If you believe as I do that genius of every sort—scientific, intellectual, artistic and athletic-- is sprinkled randomly around the globe, needing only opportunity, instruction and encouragement to bloom, you find affirmation every day in the sports pages. While the world might be smaller in many ways, it’s larger in others.

               The Modern Age began with a global setback—World War II. It left much of Europe and Asia in ruins, while Africa and Latin America struggled with technological deficits and the colonialism that sent their resources elsewhere. Triumphant and intact, the USA pretty much stood alone atop the various medal platforms for a quarter of a century, leading many to believe the status was permanent.

               Not so, it’s turned out; the revolution has been quiet but relentless. In the 1948 Summer Olympics, the first after the war, athletes from 23 different countries won gold medals. The last time around, at Tokyo in 2020, that number was 65, almost three times as many, albeit in an expanded schedule.

               Today, the world’s best soccer player is Lionel Messi, from Argentina, or Cristiano Ronaldo, from Portugal, depending on whom you ask. The world’s top track-and-field athlete in this century has been Usain Bolt, the sprinter from Jamaica, and women from that small island finished 1-2-3 in the 100-meter dash at Tokyo.

 In the so-called “country club” sports Iga Swiatek, a Pole, is the top-ranked woman tennis player, and Novak Djokovic, a Serb, tops the men’s chart. There are more Asians (5) than Americans (2) among the current top-10 of women’s golf, and five nations are represented among the top 10 male linksters.

In basketball, a sport we Yanks invented, African-Americans still dominate, but any listing of the world’s dozen best players must include Giannis Antetokounmpo, from Greece, Nikola Jokic, from Serbia, Luca Doncic, from Slovenia, and Joel Embiid, from Cameroon. Touted as the best current young player is 18-year-old Victor Wembanyama, raised in France by a French mother and Congolese dad. He stands anywhere from 7-foot-2 to 7-foot-5, depending on what you read.  

But a couple of other examples of internationalization are more striking, straining credulity. The world’s best baseball player, with skills not seen since Babe Ruth, is Shohei Ohtani, from Japan. And reversing the usual order of ascension the best ice-hockey player is Auston Matthews, raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, a desert burg with a climate closer to that of Timbuktu than Medicine Hat.

Ohtani, born to athletically unremarkable parents in the small northern-Japan city of Oshu, is a kind of unicorn, a combination hitter-pitcher who is not just rare but unique over the last 100 years. Comparing athletes of different generations is a fool’s task because conditions are so different; while great athletes would be great in any era, today’s jocks are so much stronger and better coached than those of the past that they should dominate any imaginary competition. Further, Ruth’s Major League career spanned 22 seasons (1914-1935), while Ohtani’s so far numbers five (2018-22), and in two of those (2019 and ’20) he started just two games on the mound because he underwent reconstructive elbow surgery.  The kid (OK, he’s 28 years old) is just getting started.

But Ohtani bids fair to become the first player to both hit and pitch at a high level in the Bigs over an extended period. Ruth’s career had two, distinct segments: in five of his first six seasons, with the Boston Red Sox, he was a pitcher, and one of the best of the time, but once sold to the New York Yankees in 1920 he became a fulltime position player, making just a handful of foolin’ around mound appearances in his 16 seasons in New York. He seriously combined the two skills in just one year—1919—when he hit a then-record 29 home runs while pitching 133 innings.

After surgical recovery Ohtani has posted two excellent hit-pitch years—2021, when he won the American League Most Valuable Player award after pitching 130 innings with a 3.18 earned run average while hitting 46 home runs and batting in 100, and this season, when he upped his innings pitched to 166 while lowering his ERA to 2.33 and had power numbers of 34 and 95. He probably won’t repeat as MVP this season—Aaron Judge looks likely to get it—but he also might receive Cy Young Award votes. If he stays healthy that’s likely to be an annual occurrence for quite a while.

Auston Matthews was born in California, also to athletically unremarkable parents, and was moved to Scottsdale at age two months. He stayed there until, in hockey’s Dickensian youth-development system, he was packed off at 15 to join a U.S. national age-group team in Plymouth, Michigan. Children who grow up in frosty northern climes can have their own ice rinks in winter if they have a back yard and a garden hose. Most of the ice in Arizona is in drinks, with the flat variety confined to a few indoor venues that charge fees to use.

Young Auston played baseball as well as hockey but found the diamond sport too slow. His innate hockey aptitudes brought him to the attention of coaches. He went from kid phenom to National Hockey League pro, with the Toronto Maple Leafs, at age 19. He was a star from the outset and last season, at 25, scored 60 goals and won the Hart Trophy, the NHL’s version of the MVP prize. Hockey’s equivalent of pitching is catching—that is, playing goalie. He probably could do that, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

IT'S IN THE CARDS

 

              

This is an era of overstatement; if the word “incredible” were removed from the vocabulary TV news and sports casters could barely speak. Even the least-exceptional occurrence is thusly described; as my late friend Seymour Shlaes used to say, “It’s so incredible it’s unbelievable.”

               That’s why it’s good to focus on something exceptional that’s so often been repeated it has become ordinary. I mean the presence of the St. Louis Cardinals in another baseball playoffs season. While most of the attention in the now-concluding pennant races has been elsewhere they are there again, for the 16^th time in this 23-seasons-old century. And while they won’t be favored to reach the World Series the fact they’re in the mix gives them a shot. They’ve made it four times since 2000 and won it twice, in 2006 and 2011.

               Plus, they haven’t been bad in their non-pennant years. Since Y2K they’ve had just one sub-.500 season, a record exceeded only by the almighty New York Yankees.  And while it can be said that the Yankees (and their National League-counterpart L.A. Dodgers) buy their victories with a limitless budget, the small-market Cardinals, with a mid-level payroll, gather them the hard way, through skill, guile and perseverance. There’s a lesson there, for any organization that aspires to do the same.   

               You’re probably waiting for my “to be sure” paragraph, and I won’t disappoint. Point one in this regard is that the Redbirds’ success dates back farther than the year 2000. In the horse-and-rabbit stew that is Major League Baseball (the horse being the Yankees), the Cardinals have been the biggest rabbit, with 11 World Series titles (to the Yanks’ 27) beginning in 1926. Point two is that other small-market clubs, namely the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays, also have outperformed expectations over the last two decades, but their charts are roller coasterish while that of the St. Louisans looks like a placid lake.

               The Cards’ record stands in sharpest contrast with that of the Chicago Cubs, my team and their biggest rival. The Cubs broke their epic, 100-year-plus championship drought only after Theo Epstein showed up in 2011, cleaned the stable of every serviceable veteran, and intentionally sustained three bad seasons while building toward contender status. The drought was broken by a good run and the 2016 crown, but the Cubs never repeated that triumph and Epstein eventually left the team where he found it—near the bottom looking up. Its latest rebuild now numbers two dreary seasons with no certain end in sight.

               Fans love to debate whether good fans make good teams or vice versa (I favor the latter position) but it’s not debatable that St. Louis is as good a baseball town as there is. Except for hockey—a niche sport in the American Midwest—the Cards have the city to themselves, the NFL having fled in 2015 and professional basketball absent since the ABA folded in 1976. With a metro-area population of about 2.8 million people, 21^st on the U.S. table, the team annually ranks at or near the top of the MLB attendance list, regularly averaging more than 40,000 filled seats a game in its 44,000-seat Busch Stadium home. That’s despite local summer weather famous for its sticky heat.

               A larger asset has been the kind of organizational stability that’s rare in the impatient world of big-time sports. The current span started with Bill DeWitt Jr., who bought the team from the Anheuser Busch brewing people in 1996. He’s a baseball guy to the core, his father having owned and run the St. Louis Browns and Cincinnati Reds. His own history in the sport started as a nine-year-old batboy for the Brownies.

Walt Jocketty was the Cards’ general manager when DeWitt bought the team. He was kept on, serving until 2007. He then was replaced by his assistant, John Mozeliak, who in 2017 was replaced by his assistant, Mike Girsch. Similarly, the team’s recent managerial chain includes just Tony LaRussa (1996-2011), Mike Matheny (2012-18), Mike Shildt (2018-21) and, now, Oliver Marmol. Matheny, Shildt and Marmol all had Cardinals’ tenure before becoming managers. Marmol has been with the team since he was a 19-year-old player draftee in 2007.

That’s the “Cardinals’ Way,” the title the team affixes to the 86-page handbook it gives to every new employee. For players it lays out the fitness expectations, practice designs and on-field approaches it applies at every level of its system. For the Cards, the saw “being on the same page” is meant literally.

But if the Cards march mostly in step they can break cadence to plug holes. Their lineups typically are anchored by home-grown players, such as the catcher Yadier Molina and the pitcher Adam Wainwright, but when the need arises they can reach out for help, even if it means breaking the game’s maxims. For example, they ignored the lately popular “never pay anyone over 30” rule to trade for their two current best players—first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and third-baseman Nolan Arenado—after those guys’ original teams decided against paying them at market prices.

 Goldschmidt was picked up in 2019 at age 31 and given a five-year, $130 million contract. He’s repaying the Cards with an MVP-quality season at 34. Arenado, the game’s best third-baseman since Mike Schmidt, was acquired in 2021 at age 30 with six years remaining on an eight-year, $260 million deal. He’s annually been hitting 30-plus home runs and batting in 100-runs-plus as usual in St. Louis.

The Cardinals have been lucky—witness Molina and Wainwright going relatively injury free for extraordinary periods (Molina is in his 19^th season, Wainwright his 17^th). And Albert Pujols, the Hall of Fame-to-be slugger the team jettisoned in 2011 at age 31, is back at 42 and having a swan-song season worth a Hollywood script. In his case them that has deserves to get.

BAD OWNERS

 

 

               That life is unfair is a sad truth, easily confirmed if one’s favorite sports teams have seemed doomed for long periods. The saving grace is that just about every fan group has had the experience at one time or another. About the only exception has been backers of the baseball New York Yankees, but even that team has had occasional bad patches, and those among them who also root for the basketball Knicks or football Jets know prolonged misery. Losing is democratic, one might conclude.  

               But if sports’ normal vicissitudes can be rough, another factor can make them rougher. That would be the presence of a bad owner, one whose actions, or lack thereof, exacerbate the on-field failures. Most of us form our sports allegiances in youth and are pretty much stuck with them for life. The owner is the person in best position to make a team’s fans happy, and when he or she persistently falls short fan enmity can run high. And unlike bad politicians, who can be voted out, the bad owner is there for as long as he or she wishes to stay. Democratic, it ain’t.

               Team owners in big-time American sports come mostly from two sources-- success in another business or a happy accident of birth. People who have made a bundle oft times believe that anything they touch will turn to gold. Beneficiaries of inherited wealth and position tend to be like it was said of George W. Bush, a baseball team owner (the Texas Rangers) before becoming the capital “P” President-- born on third base thinking they’d hit triples. Neither path is any guarantee of sports success.

             The list of bad ownership situations in American sports is a long one, too long to be treated in a brief essay such as this, but football season is starting so I’ll deal here only with the National Football League. When the criterion is the performance of a team on the field, the best example is the Detroit Lions, whose ongoing record of ineptitude stands alone in any game.

               Interestingly, the Lions’ ownership combines both of the two origin paths laid out above. Since 1961 they’ve been the property of the Ford family, which made its fortune in… well, you know what… but whose present top officer meets any silver-spoon definition. Ironically, the family’s signal role in the last century’s industrial revolution belies its on-field failure in the football biz.

 The Lions have been NFL members since 1930 but have won only four league titles, the last in 1957. Since then—a span of 65 years-- they’ve won just one playoff game, in 1991. They are one of four teams never to have been in the Super Bowl, the others being the Cleveland Browns, Jacksonville Jaguars and Houston Texans. In this century they’ve had but five plus-.500 years and three post-season appearances. With a 2021 won-lost record of 3-14, that isn’t expected to change much this season.   

               Ford ownership began with William Clay Ford Sr., grandson of Henry and son of Edsel. William was in the family business for a spell, mostly as a designer; his claim to fame there was his role in fashioning the 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark II. By all accounts he was a nice man who let others handle the Lions’ day-to-day doings. As an executive he was “too patient, too forgiving,” according to one associate quoted in the Los Angeles Times’ obituary following his death at age 89 in 2014.

               William’s patience seemingly waned in the later years of his 53-year reign because the team has run through 12 different head coaches and six general managers since 2000. In 2014 the team’s chairmanship passed to his widow, Martha Firestone Ford. Six years later, at age 93, she passed it to her daughter, Sheila Hamp Ford. Now 71 years old, Mrs. Hamp’s academic degree is in early-childhood education. Her husband, Steve Hamp, is a former Ford exec, keeping everything in the family, as it were.

 The Lions’ gridiron travails haven’t hurt the Fords’ net worth; thanks mostly to the nation’s thirst for media content the team is valued at about $3 billion now, quite a bump from the $4.5 million William paid for it. The Fords may be crying all the way to the bank but Lions’ fans are just crying.

Just as the Lions’ ownership was an easy worst in the performance department, the worst-behaving-owner category also has a clear winner. He’s Daniel Snyder, boss of the Washington Commanders. Snyder made his money in what’s called “mass marketing,” a category that includes the all-ads TV screens that hang in doctors’ offices and office-building lobbies. He bought the team in 1999. He’s since been accused by team cheerleaders and other female employees of tolerating rampant sexual harassment in the work place, and reportedly has settled a $1.6 million lawsuit for that against him personally.

 He clung to the team’s odious “Redskins” nickname for 21 years before giving way and changing it (to the innocuous “Commanders”). He’s been accused of short-changing other NFL teams of visitors’ gate revenues and keeping two sets of books to hide it, allowing the team’s Fedex Field home to run down, attempting to intimidate witnesses in league proceedings against him and stiffing a Congressional inquiry by fleeing to the Mediterranean Sea in his yacht.  On the field his teams have had a sub-.500 won-lost record during his tenure and have had five straight losing seasons. He’s said to be the least-popular man in the nation’s capital, no small distinction.

One easily can conclude that Snyder also is less than beloved by his fellow owners. He could be ordered to sell the team by a three-fourths vote of those 31, but they have been loath to move against him except for a $10 million fine. That’s probably because they know he could do what they might in his situation, which is invoke the Donald Trump Defense by claiming victimhood and suing everyone in sight, tying up the matter for years.  Thus they, like the folks in D.C., are stuck with him. As my mother would have said, they should have been more careful.

 

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

               One of the reasons we follow sports is that they provide respite from the depressing stuff that comprises most of the rest of the news, but sometimes—and, it seems, increasingly—the “real” world intrudes even there. Such has been the case of late as two stories—the imprisonment in Russia on drug charges of the basketball star Brittney Griner and the penalty handed football quarterback Deshaun Watson for sexual predations—dominate the sports pages.

               In neither case is there much dispute over guilt; Griner fessed up that the two vape-pipe vials of hashish found in her luggage when she entered Moscow on February 17 were hers, and Watson’s reported settlements of 23 lawsuits against him by masseuses who said he tried to force himself on them during their ministrations amounted to the same thing, no matter what he’s asserted elsewhere. It’s the punishment side of the equation that has stirred debate.

Well OK, that’s not quite it, especially with Griner. Her sentence of nine years in prison for doing something that’s legal in much of the world, and petty in much of the rest, is ludicrous, the product of a legal system that exists to serve the country’s political ends. Really, she’s a hostage, opportunistically snatched to secure a ransom. The issue really is whether getting her release is worth the price it’s sure to command (and has already commanded), and her responsibility for it.

To say that the 31-year-old was careless is an understatement. She was no naïve tourist but someone quite familiar with Russia and its ways, having played basketball there for months annually since 2015. Foreign travel is a staple for American woman basketball pros, whose short summer season (May through August) in the domestic Woman’s National Basketball Association, and relatively low pay there ($228,000 a season tops), makes additional income attractive.

The Russian league long has been a favored landing spot for U.S. stars, especially the team in the city of Ekaterinburg, on which Griner played. Owned as a vanity project by Iskander Makhmudov, a mining magnate, it has paid seven-figure annual salaries to the likes of her and, previously, her Phoenix Mercury teammate Diana Taurasi. It also has thrown in luxury hotel accommodations, charter-flight game travel and personal cars with drivers. Unmindful of the international uproar over Russia’s threatened invasion of Ukraine, which would start a week after her arrest, Griner was returning from a season break when she was grabbed.

For regimes such as those in Russia, Iran and North Korea, which don’t care about the world’s good opinion and already labor under heavy economic sanctions, kidnapping a citizen of a democracy is the perfect crime, all take and no give.  Any American who visits those lands should have his or her head examined. Whatever political pressures the acts generate fall entirely on leaders of the victimized countries. Refusing to do business with kidnappers might make a good political applause line, but to the hostage’s dear ones—and their supporters— giving up Nebraska to get the person back seems justified.

 In Griner’s case Russia’s reported main demand is the release of Viktor Bout, a genuine bad guy serving a 25-year U.S. prison sentence for arms smuggling. Ransom settlements aren’t made public, so other things (like cash) may be involved. A swap should happen soon because Russia has milked the situation for about all its worth, but whatever the deal the U.S. should insist Griner give up her passport as soon as she returns. 

Watson’s misdeeds were egregious but, apparently, not criminal; a Texas grand jury refused to indict him after police investigated the charges. They did, however, meet the criterion of “offensive contact” needed to support claims of civil assault; hence, the lawsuits against him. He sat out the entire 2021 season (at full pay of $10.4 million, by the way) while the charges percolated. In the off-season he was traded by the Houston Texans to the Cleveland Browns for three first-round draft choices and a couple of other picks, and given a five-year contract worth an eyepopping $230 million, fully guaranteed. That was despite his facing further discipline.

One might reasonably ask where the National Football League gets off wielding court-like powers over its employees. It does so under the “personal conduct” clause of its contract with its union, made necessary by the fact that big-time footballers (like other top team-sport pros) are too valuable to be fired for offenses short of felonies, so public outrage must be satisfied otherwise. In July an arbitrator ordered Watson to serve a six-game suspension this season, but this was deemed too lenient in the court of public opinion so the league threatened to appeal, asking for 16 games, or a full regular season. Rather than drag the matter through a real court, the league and union agreed, Solomonlike, on an 11-game term, plus a $5 million fine.

The most-remarkable thing about the episode was how little it will cost Watson financially. His Browns’ contract works out to $46 m a year, but in the first year about $45 m of that is being treated as a signing bonus with just $1m as salary, and he’ll be docked 11/16^th of the latter figure. That’s about $690,000, hardly a tip for someone in his income bracket. The $5 million fine was a sop to possible critics of that arrangement.

The next most-remarkable thing was the 26-year-old’s fixation with massages as possible sexual outlets; by one published account he contracted for those with 66 different women over a 17-month period ended last year.  His penalty includes submission to counseling. That should be interesting, at least to the counselor.

 Did his punishment fit his crimes?  I don’t know. I do know it’s good to be a young, talented and very (very) rich athlete in present-day America. He’ll be booed for a while in road stadiums when he plays again, but a touchdown pass or two should make him golden in Cleveland. And after work he’ll have a nice ride home and place to live. And maybe a nice massage.

  

 

 

 

WALKING THE LINE

 

              

Mario Mendoza was the quintessential good-field, poor-hit baseball player, logging nine seasons in the Major Leagues (1974-82) with three teams even though his lifetime batting average was a puny .215. The shorststop failed to top the .200 mark through five different campaigns, maybe a record for a position player. In an offhand remark during a 1980 television interview, the sterling slugger George Brett coined the phrase “below the Mendoza Line” to describe the any player with a sub-.200 batting average during any season. ESPN personality Chris Berman picked it up and ran with it, making it part of baseball’s lingo.

               It should be noted that Mendoza survived the shame attached to his name by continuing in baseball past his playing days as a well-regarded minor-league coach and manager. Eventually, he was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame of Mexico, his native land.  As time wore on another term, “on the interstate,” has come to rival the Brett-coined one to describe batsmen with sub-.200 averages (I--, get it?). That, at least, makes the onus impersonal.

               The ignominy that attaches to recording Mendozian numbers seems to have dissipated with the years, however; their frequency has gone up as batting averages have gone down, the defining characteristic of the current diamond era. According to one internet posting, an average of 16.1 players with at least 100 times at bat averaged under .200 during the seasons 1981 to 1990. The next 10 years the figure rose to 18.2 and in the next 10 (2011-20) it more than doubled to 38.8. Over that 30-plus-year span overall MLB averages have dropped from the .270s to the .240s. A .250 hitter used to be considered a liability. Today’s he’s above average.

               That the trend has continued this season is surprising if not shocking. Last year’s overall batting average of .244 was the lowest since the .237 posted in 1968, in the Bob Gibson-Juan Marichal-Sam McDowell era. The game responding radically, the next season dropping the pitching mound to 10 inches high from 15 and four years later allowing the American League to enact the designated-hitter rule.

That last move worked immediately, with the all-MLB average rising to .257 in 1973 from .244 the season before. This season the National League finally took up the DH, a move that eliminated 2021’s 4,829 pitcher at-bats and .101 average. It also hiked enforcement of ball-doctoring, which is what those end-of-half-inning pitcher-hands checks are all about. Through last week, though, this season’s overall BA stood at .243, a loss instead of a gain. It seems that nothing less than turning to slow-pitch softball will stem the decline.

Indeed, the game’s main reaction to the hitting drought has been to denigrate the messenger-- the batting-average stat—as obsolete. In recent seasons the letters OBP, SLG and OBS have come more into view; respectively, they stand for on-base percentage, slugging, and on-base-plus-slugging, a combo of the two. The OBP adds walks and hit-by-pitches to hits in compiling batter efficiency. The slugging mark is a bow to power hitting, a home run counting four in the measure, a triple three and so on down. Anything above .350 is considered a good OBP, anything above .750 a good OBS.

 I’m old fashioned when it comes to baseball stats, leaning most heavily on batting average, home runs and runs-batted-in for grading hitters. Yes, those are incomplete measures, but like the Dow Jones Industrial Average they provide the comfort of deep and easy historical comparisons. Many fans know Babe Ruth’s lifetime BA of .342 but few know or appreciate his more-impressive OBS of 1.164.

Still, there’s something to be said for the newer approach. Last season, for example, Tim Anderson of the Chicago White Sox hit a robust .309 but walked just 22 times (to 119 strike outs) so his OBP was a just-OK .338, and 17 home runs lifted his OBS to .806. Teammate Yasmani Grandal batted .240—69 points less than Anderson-- but walked 87 times and hit 23 home runs, so his OBP was .420 and his OBS .939.  Which player would Sox fans rather have seen come up in a “clutch” situation last year?

Further, some of the players currently straddling the Mendoza Line are having what otherwise are good offensive seasons. Kyle Schwarber of the Philadelphia Phils, a heavy-legged outfielder, was batting just .211 last week but was named to last month’s All-Star Game and leads the National League with 34 home runs. Minnesota Twins’ centerfielder Byron Buxton is hitting .223 but with an OBS of .848. The New York Yankees’ first-baseman Anthony Rizzo’s comparable numbers are .224 and .846.

One-note sluggers long have been able to stay afloat in the Majors despite sub-Mendoza batting averages-- Mark McGwire hit .187 with 29 home runs in 2001, Mark Reynolds hit .199 and 32, respectively, in 2010. Their current-day counterpart is Joey Gallo, whose 38 home runs with the Yankees last season was a record for a sub-.200 hitter (he batted .199). This year Gallo is hitting .165 and wore out his Gotham welcome; he’s a Dodger now.

Injuries have reduced some former stars to Mendoza Line status. Dodger Cody Bellinger was the National League’s rookie of the year in 2017 and most-valuable player in ’19, but a series of mishaps—including one incurred while high-fiving a teammate during a home-run celebration—sent him crashing to a .165 BA last season and .210 on so far in this one. His teammate Max Muncy, a two-time all-star, is hitting .179 under similar circumstances. They have more company down there than they would have had in past years, but I’m sure that’s little consolation.

  

  

 

 

              

LIKE NOTHING EVER HAPPENED

 

               When I visited New York frequently, in the 1980s and ‘90s, my favorite restaurant there was Pino’s, on 34^th Street near Park Avenue. It was a neighborhood place, of the sort that when a regular wanted to make a reservation on his way home from work he’d lean in and holler “see ya at 7:30!”  The food was good, linguini with clams a specialty.

               The proprietor was Jerry Casale, a big, friendly Brooklyn native and gifted schmoozer. As a glance at the restaurant’s memorabilia revealed, he’d been a baseball player, a right-handed pitcher. In 1959, as a 25-year-old rookie whose career had been interrupted by a two-year Army stint (they did that then), he posted a 13-8 won-lost record as a starter with the Boston Red Sox. The next season he won two of his first three starts before he developed what was known as a “sore arm.” That was pretty much it for him; he struggled through the rest of that season and parts of the next two before the pain forced him to quit the game and seek his fortune elsewhere.

               Like many another pitcher with a similar history, Jerry’s misfortune was that he was born several decades too soon.  If he had played in this century or late last, chances are he could have undergone “Tommy John surgery” and pitched again, as well as before.

               I put the words “Tommy John surgery” in quotes because it’s unusual that a medical procedure be named for a patient, not the surgeon who devised it. John was a 31-year-old, left-handed pitcher, a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, in 1974, the year he went under the knife of orthopedist Dr. Frank Jobe, the Dodgers’ team physician. I’m not doctor, and never have played one on TV, but I can tell you that John had a strained ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow, the piece that connects the humerus, the long bone in the upper arm, to the ulna bone in the forearm.

 Using a tendon taken from another part of John’s body, Jobe replaced and reattached the injured sinew, something that hadn’t been done before. John sat out the 1975 season but returned to pitch the following year. He’d posted 124 victories in 12 seasons before the surgery. He was just as good afterward, winning 164 more games before retiring in 1989.

The technique is easily described but not so easily undergone. Although it’s usually performed on an out-patient basis today it requires about four months of inactivity to heal, and a year or more before pitching can be fully resumed. Further, the technique wasn’t an instant hit. Jobe wasn’t sure how it would turn out with John so he didn’t do in again until two years later, and didn’t see fit to publish an article about it until 10 years after that, in 1986.  Between 1974 and 1994 it was performed just 34 times.

But changes in the game have made pitchers’ elbow problems more frequent and increased the need for remediation. Pitchers keep throwing harder, and as speed-gun readings have increased so has the elbow stress hard throwing produces. Early specialization and longer schedules at the kids-game level also leads to more “sore arms” down the road.  

 As more surgeons learned it and as successes piled up (it’s about 90% effective now), the procedure became almost ubiquitous in baseball; it’s estimated that about a third of the 400 or so pitchers now on Major League rosters have had it, sometimes more than once. That’s in addition to the thousands of times it’s been done on players at other levels, down to high schoolers. Parents have been known to request the procedure for their sons before a problem develops, to improve the kids’ chances of success. That’s a bad idea, but it’s probably been done.

Ligament-replacement surgeries, sometimes using cadaver parts, have spread beyond elbows; ruptured Achilles tendons used to end sports careers, but now they can be treated that way. Ditto for injured-shoulder parts. In all, they’re probably the biggest advances in sports medicine ever.

 “Tommy John surgery” has become part of the American lexicon; a few years ago John turned over his original elbow cast, signed by Jobe and the 1974 Dodgers, to the Smithsonian Institution, for exhibition. It’s been suggested, seriously but posthumously (he died in 2014 at age 88), that the surgeon be named to Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Subsidiary but probably related celebrity for the name is seen in the advent of a Tommy John men’s underwear line. The ex-pitcher has no ties to the maker, and pondered suing it, but dropped the idea when he learned that it would cost six-figure legal fees to mount a court challenge.

Tommy John himself carries on at age 79, living in California with his second wife, whom he married last January. After he retired as a player he stuck around baseball as a broadcaster and minor-league coach and manager. In 2020 he contracted a severe case of covid that required several months of hospitalization and a rehab that continues. He’s said he watches little baseball these days, finding the sport “unrecognizable.”

John’s Major League career spanned 26 seasons (1963-89), a run matched by few. His career won-loss record was 288-231 and his ERA was 3.34. He was a very good pitcher for very long time but never a great one, and didn’t come close to the 75% vote required for election in 15 years on the Hall of Fame’s sportswriters’ ballot, topping out at 31.7%. Last year, however, a Hall veterans’ committee elected to membership Jim Kaat, whose pitching record (283-237 over 25 years) mirrored that of John’s, so John’s stock for eventual election has risen. When he’s elected (and he will be) they should transport his elbow cast from the Smithsonian to Cooperstown.

 

 

              

 

THE BARNDOOR

 

 

The new class of inductees into Baseball’s Hall of Fame has been selected, and there will be a party for them at the Cooperstown, New York, shrine a week from Saturday (July 23). Seven men will be inducted: David Ortiz, Bud Fowler, Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Minnie Minoso, Tony Oliva and Buck O’Neil.

               But “Wait a minute!” some will say. Wasn’t Boston Red Sox slugger Ortiz the only player picked by the sportswriters at their last election? That’s right, but there are other roads to immortality in the National Pastime, namely the so-called “veterans committees.” Their deliberations don’t receive as much attention as the writers’ balloting, but their results have the same effect.

               Those avenues have been called “side doors” to the Hall but, lately, that’s been a misnomer. They’re more like barn doors in their permissiveness. Of the 11 men dubbed for the 2021 and 2022 classes only two—Ortiz and Derek Jeter—have entered via the writers’ vote. The rest—Marvin Miller, Ted Simmons and Larry Walker in addition to the above-mentioned six—are vets’ choices. A bit of an overload, don’t you think?

               First things first, the vets’ committees aren’t called that anymore. Their number has varied from time to time but for the last few years there have been two of them—the Contemporary Baseball Era group, covering the playing years 1980 to the present, and the Classic Baseball Era group, covering previous years.

 Each committee consists of 16 members, including Hall of Fame players, former team executives and newspeople of long standing. Each meets once every three years. Candidates are funneled to those sessions by a steering committee. For induction, a vote of 75%, or 12 members, is needed.  That contrasts with the 400 or so writers who have taken part in recent elections conducted by the Baseball Writers Association of America. Seventy-five per cent approval also is required for election by that group, but the difference between the two is greater than that of scale. Getting three-fourths of any sports-writer assemblage to agree on what day it is quite a feat, much less on anything more contentious.

Hall vets’ committees have been around since 1937, a year after the Hall opened, but for many years they weren’t much active. That’s partly because the game didn’t have as much past then as it has now. From the start the units have had sole control over the admission of non-playing candidates, who now account for 74 plaques on the Hall’s walls of honor. That breaks down to 33 executives, 22 managers, 10 umpires and nine Negro League stars, the last category a recent addition.  Of the 268 players who have been honored 105—or 39%-- have entered via the vets’ route.

Interestingly to many, there are few standards for players appearing on Hall’s ballots. One only must have had a Major League career of 10 years or more, be retired for five years and not be on the game’s ineligible list. That last requirement is what has kept Gamblin’ Pete Rose out. A screening committee also must give its okay but that’s been granted liberally; every year’s list contains 25 or so new names but only about a half-dozen get the requisite 5% vote to go on to the next year. If a player falls short of the magic 75% count in 10 years (it used to be 15), he's turned over to the vets.

Vet-committee actions sometimes correct obvious injustices. For example, Nellie Fox, the old Chicago White Sox second baseman, was denied admission despite having received a 74.7% tally in his last year (1985) with the writers, but was admitted by the vets, albeit 12 years later and well after his death. Usually, though, the differences are greater. Among this year’s vet-picked player inductees only Hodges, the ex-Dodgers’ first baseman, topped 50% with the writers (63%). Oliva topped out at 47% and Minoso and Kaat never hit 30%.  Were they very good? Sure. Great? Uh, maybe.

O’Neil made the Hall as an exec, but his credentials were varied. He had a long Negro League playing career, then became noted as a scout and mentor. In 1962 the Chicago Cubs made him the game’s first African-American coach and he later helped start the Negro League Hall of Fame in Kansas City.

The case for Fowler is more iffy. Born in 1858, he was recorded to have played with a mostly white professional team in Pennsylvania at age 14 in 1872, apparently making him baseball’s first African-American pro. A barber by trade, he stuck around the game in various places and capacities until 1904.  He died in 1913 at age 55. Record keeping then wasn’t what it is now so any information from that era is questionable, and no one who might be able to say yea or nay firsthand is still alive.  His addition extends the vets’ dubious practice of digging up ancient names for recognition long past the time those honored might have enjoyed it.

Indeed, almost all the question-mark names in the Hall were put there by the vets, with non-playing considerations and popularity often involved. Cases in point are Ron Santo, Phil Rizzuto and Richie Ashburn. All were excellent players, and fine fellas, but their stats were H of F-borderline at best. Santo never topped 43% in 15 years on the writers’ ballots, Rizzuto's and Ashburn’s tallies were mostly in the 20 and 30 per cents.  But all stayed in the game as broadcasters and made friends and influenced people, including the 12 men whose votes made them immortal. The rest of us should have that sort of shot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                

SPORTSWASHING

 

               A new term is making the rounds. It’s “sportswashing,” which means the use of sports connections to burnish stained reputations. Nations do it. Individuals, too. It’s all the rage.

               The current best example is the LIV golf tour, launched in competition with the long-established PGA Tour.  It’s financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which gets its considerable money from the country’s oil sales. Saudi Arabia has been in bad repute for some time because it is waging war in Yemen, murdering its internal critics and treating women as second-class citizens, among other things. The country is pumping billions of dollars into the new tour so that when its name comes up people will think of golf rather than the above-named stuff.  

               If nothing else, the investment has disrupted the cozy world of The Tour, replacing all other subjects of conversation. It’s also provided a few public answers to a question most of us ask ourselves only in moments of reflective quiet—“What’s my price?” In the case of Phil Mickelson, a much-decorated linksman, the widely reported answer is $200 million, just to show up. That’s serious money; as the inimitable Charles Barkley put it, “for that much I’d kill a relative, even one I liked.”

          Sportswashing has caught on in part because the term is cute. Its use of “washing” mirrors the well-worn journalistic practice of attaching the suffix “gate” to any politic scandal, following the 1970s Watergate saga. Its root is “whitewashing,” the broadly used word to describe any effort to cover over wrongdoing. A currently popular offshoot is “greenwashing,” which applies to things like Big Energy’s trumpeting its investments in “clean” sources that are far more modest than its environmental depredations.

               The very-rich have similarly used philanthropy to obscure the sometimes-not-admirable sources of their fortunes. When the name “Rockefeller” is heard today people think of the family’s charitable foundation, not John D.’s monopolistic business practices. The name “Carnegie” now summons up libraries, not Andrew’s Darwinian capitalism.

               A cursory knowledge of history shows that sportswashing is anything but new. Ancient Greek kings and Roman emperors staged Olympics to improve their approval ratings, medieval European rulers thought an occasional joust would improve their odors among their serfs. Male members of the British royal family take to the polo fields from time to time to polish their regular-guy credentials.

               The 20^th century advent of international sports gave sportswashing a big kick forward. Exhibit A in that regard was Nazi Germany’s pausing its hideous beliefs and practices long enough to host the 1936 Summer Olympics.  It was abetted in that by the International Olympic Committee, which long has smiled on authoritarian governments that make the trains run on time and the graft flow smoothly. In this it was abetted by Avery Brundage, the businessman fan of Adolph Hitler who headed the American Olympic Committee at the time and, later, the IOC.

The IOC liked Hitler so well that it also gave Germany the 1936 Winter Games, the first and only time both events were staged in the same land. The 1940 Winter Games went to Germany and the year’s Summer Games to Imperial Japan, although both fests were cancelled by World War II. Later the IOC gave the 1980 Summer Games to the Soviet Union, the 2014 Winter Games to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the 2008 Summer and 2022 Winter Games to China.

But just because sportswashing is tried doesn’t mean it will succeed. Russia might have done well with its ’14 Winter Games if it had played it straight as an ad for its host city of Sochi, on the Black Sea, but Putin overreached and tried to steal the medals stands as well. The result was an ultimately laughable, state-run doping program that, among other things, involved passing “clean” urine samples through a hole in a testing-lab wall to replace medal-winners’ dirty ones. It was uncovered by whistle blowers and resulted in multisport bans on Russian athletes, some of which remain in effect. Sochi became a synonym for cheating, not winter fun.

The red-letter day for sportswashing was December 2, 2010, when in one breathtaking swoop FIFA, the French-named world-football (soccer) governing body, awarded its 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 event to Qatar, a tiny, dusty kingdom on the Persian Gulf with no history in the sport. The move was seen at the time as a bribe-o-rama, something that’s been confirmed since through investigations in several countries. A story in the New York Times last year reported that more than half the FIFA officers and directors then serving have been accused of wrongdoing, although not all had been criminally charged.  Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s head at the time, and Michel Platini, a former star player and top administrator, now are on trial in Switzerland for bribetaking. Additionally, several executives of the Fox TV network are charged in the U.S. for paying bribes to land television rights to the two events.

For sheer chutzpah, the Cup going to Qatar is in a league of its own. The country has a population of fewer than three million people, of whom only about a quarter are considered citizens. At the time of the award it had one stadium of World Cup class and nowhere for most visiting fans to stay. The weather there in June, when the Cup traditionally is staged, is about the same as the inside of a pizza oven.

Those were quibbles compared with the loot to be harvested. Cup dates were moved to November, playing havoc with national-league playing schedules worldwide. The Qataris have spent a reported $200 billion (that’s a “b”) on seven new stadiums and infrastructure that will be little used when the Cup ends its three-week run.

There’s a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect, named for the singer, Barbra. It seems that she valued the privacy of her palatial beach home in Malibu and was so offended by a publication of a photo of it that she sued. The result was to put many more eyes on the place than it would have had otherwise.

So there were the rulers of Qatar, quietly enjoying their limitless oil money and but yearning for sportswashed applause. And there came the world’s press, eager to report on the country’s medieval laws, brutal migrant-labor practices, human-rights violations and ridiculous expenditures, subjects that will continue to arise through the competition. 

 A win or a loss? They shoulda asked Barbra.

 

 

              

                 

              

 

              

              

DAFT ABOUT THE DRAFT

 

               We Americans love sports but we love sports hype more. Nothing makes that point stronger than the telecasts of the annual NFL and NBA amateur-player drafts, the NBA version of which will be held next week. The leagues have been televising those exercises “live” since 1980 and although the “action” consists of men in suits reading names, their ratings typically exceed those of the actual games the airing networks carry.

               The drafts are quintessential hype events, the culmination of months of speculation. With its seven rounds compared to the NBA’s two, the NFL’s is the bigger deal, having spawned a sort of mini-industry, but the basketball edition also is big stuff. Most of the players involved haven’t taken the courts for real since their college seasons ended in March, and won’t play again until the next NBA season starts in October, so that leaves a full six months to fuel imaginations.   

               Most fans never think about it, but the drafts are among the most unAmerican of American institutions. They are illegal on their faces, with the young men involved (and women, via the WNBA) having no choice in their initial professional postings. How would you have liked to have been told you had to spend a few years working in Oklahoma City, under a restricted salary scale, before you could do as you pleased? They exist because the players’ unions agree to them, and because our Congress and courts go squishy on anti-trust law when it comes to sports. That the unions represent only players already under contract is another reason to look askance at the process, but that, too, is generally ignored.

To hear the draft analysts tell it, talent evaluation in our big-time professional sports is highly scientific, based on many things that aren’t in the box scores. Prospects are weighed, measured, timed, tested, interviewed, investigated, poked and prodded, all with the intention of exposing weaknesses. To feed the hype machine the NFL has made a show of its draft preparations, televising its week-long “combine” in Indianapolis every February. Prospects run sprints before the cameras, pump iron and do such basketball-looking things as vertical jumps. Scouts hover, punching stopwatches. Commentators comment. The NBA also has tryout camps, albeit quieter ones.

Foolproof, huh? Not really. In this century the No. 1 choices in the NBA draft— supposedly the crème de la crème of their classes—has produced such busts as Kwame Brown, Greg Oden, Anthony Bennett and, apparently, the oft-injured Markelle Fulz, plus a few others who’ve had marginal pro careers.  The chance of any team’s top choice becoming a dependable starter is no better than 50-50.

The bust-out draft bust came in the NFL’s 1999 event, when the New Orleans Saints traded their entire list of picks, plus a few the next year, for the right to make U. of Texas running back Ricky Williams the fifth player chosen. Williams had an up-down, three-team career marked by suspensions and a premature retirement before he decided he liked marijuana better than football and quit the game altogether. He’s now an advocate of the weed’s medicinal properties.

Failures by the basketball and footballers are all the more apparent when their draft situations are compared with those of Major League Baseball. While our nation’s universities thoughtfully provide high-level care and training for young basketball and football players, the baseball teams must pretty much do that on their own dime, through their minor-league systems. The baseball draft, 20 rounds in all (it used to be 40 rounds), involves many high schoolers as well as collegians. These youngsters are, typically, three to five years from big-league ready.

“The toughest thing in sports isn’t hitting a Major League fastball,” Jerry Krause once said. He was a 15-year general manager of the NBA Chicago Bulls (1985-2000) and a baseball scout before and after. He continued, “It’s looking at a high-school hitter playing in 40-degree weather in the Midwest in April and projecting how he’ll do in the Bigs.”

Participants in the drafts always exude confidence in their choices, but this doesn’t mean they are free of doubt. As in other facets of their sport, they’ve developed their own language with which to discuss the proceedings. For instance, after every first-round pick except for the very first is announced, a honcho from the selecting team can be expected to say he was surprised to see that the lad still was available when he was, adding “we had him ranked higher.” What he really means is that he wished he knew what the other teams know that he doesn’t.

               Similarly, when a football player is drafted in the middle rounds, or a basketballer in round two, the drafting team will claim “he meets our needs.” Translated, this means that his team has so many holes that any large, warm body would be an improvement.

 If the exec is less bullish on a choice he’ll say he thinks the selectee “can compete for a job.” The unsaid line is “as a management trainee at Target.” If a kid is praised for “high character” it can mean that his rap sheet contains no felonies, only misdemeanors.

So enjoy the draft, but try not to get too carried away.