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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