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 4^th 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.

               

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. 

                   

               

               

               

               

NEWS & VIEWS

                Situated between the end of football and the start of baseball, February long has been a slow news month in sports, but not so much this year. A bunch of things have been stirring the pot of late. Here are some of them.

                NEWS—Major League Baseball floated a number of proposed rules changes, a couple of them quite drastic.

                VIEWS—Don’t hold your breath for most of them to happen.

                Commish Rob Manfred’s wish list includes:

--the adoption of the designated-hitter rule by the National League.

--a rule requiring pitchers to face a minimum of three batters except when finishing an inning.

--a 20-second pitch clock.

--expanding team rosters to 26 players from 25 with a maximum of 12 pitchers.

--starting each half inning of extra-inning games with a runner on second base.

As any fan knows, the most eye-catching of those is having the NL adopt the DH, which the American League installed in 1973. The NL’s holdout is especially notable because the rule has become almost universal at all levels of the game, in the U.S. and internationally. The change, and the expansion of team rosters, well could occur because both have the backing of the players’ union, which favors anything that would add baseball jobs or extend careers, but it likely wouldn’t happen at least until the next labor contract in the game is negotiated in 2021. And even then it could be linked to reciprocal changes that would allow teams (i.e., owners) to control players longer.

By me, the NL’s no-DH stance has been maintained largely because it gives fans a continuing topic to gas about. Relinquishing it would be no small matter in a sport that thrives on that sort of discussion.

The most-likely change to take place quickly is the 20-second-pitch rule, which was tested in the   last two Arizona Fall League seasons. There it was loosely enforced, as it probably would be if it goes into the Big League books. Least likely is the man-on-second thing, which was tried in Fall League last year. It was fun but unbaseball-like, which is grounds enough for its rejection.

NEWS: The National Basketball Association wants to change its draft-lottery rules.

VIEWS : This one is gonna happen.

The move is another effort to counter the odious practice of “tanking,” by which teams strip their rosters so as to lose on purpose and gain better position in the following season’s draft. For much of its early-modern history (1966-84) the NBA awarded its top draft spot to the team that won a coin flip between the ones that had the worst won-lost records in each of its main geographic divisions. A lottery involving more teams was instituted in 1985. It’s formula has been tinkered with since, not always in the direction of discouraging losing.

 Last year’s system, adopted in 2014, gave the worst team among the 14 that didn’t make the playoffs a 25% chance of going first, with the second-worst team 19.9%, the third-worst 15.6% and the fourth-worst 11.9%, and the worst team could sink no lower than fourth. The new version gives each of the three bottom teams a 14% shot, with the fourth 12.5%, the fifth at 10.5% and so on down to 0.5% at No. 14, with the worst team liable to sink as low as fifth. 

A big deal?

Not really, but it should make tanking a little less attractive.

NEWS: Tyler Murray chooses a career in football over baseball.

VIEWS: Whaaaaat?

Young Mr. Murray, 21 years old, won the 2018 Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player after a sterling season as a dual-threat quarterback at the University of Oklahoma. He also played baseball there, as an outfielder, and last June was the ninth player chosen in the Major League Baseball draft, by the Oakland A’s.  He signed an A’s contract with a $4.6 million bonus from the A’s and said he’d concentrate on baseball. Then he said he might try both sports and, finally last week, firmly opted for football, where he’ll likely be a National Football League first-round pick. Top NFL picks earn more than baseball pays early on but, tellingly, football contracts rarely are fully guaranteed.

 Murray stands a reported 5-foot-11 and his listed weight is 190 pounds, both of which figures look like overstatements. In the NFL he’ll occupy the football fields with much-larger men bent on injuring him. No such danger exists in baseball.

 Is the kid nuts? Who’s advising him?

NEWS: Two assistant football coaches at Clemson University get $1 million-a-year contracts.

VIEWS: Wretched excess gets more wretched.

Tony Elliott and Jeff Scott, who share the offensive-coordinator duties at the national-champ public U, just got their pay bumped to seven figures. There they join the team’s defensive coordinator, Brent Venables, who vaulted past that threshold last year when he signed a 5-year, $11.6 million contract.  Clemson’s 10 assistant football coaches earn a total of $7.4 million, according to USA Today. Head coach Dabo Swinney makes $6 million per.

The paper said that nationally 21 college assistant football coaches now make $1 million or more annually, up from zero not long ago. Pretty soon mommas will be pushing their boys to study X’s and O’s rather than shooting for law or med school.

               

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                I turn 81 today (gasp!) but still have more questions than answers. Here are some of them:

--If the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results, why is that the only way to accomplish some computer functions?

--Has anyone succeeded in opening one of those crease-and-tear mailers without resorting to scissors or destroying the darned things?

                --What is a bitcoin? Where can you get one? What can you buy with it? Why should anyone care?

                --Is there a more-overused word than “even”? How does it make “better” better, or “worse” worse?

                --In its Olympics coverage, as NBC ever interviewed an athlete who hasn’t survived a life-threatening illness or injury, or whose grandma hasn’t just died?

                -- Don’t you love it when a TV ad for a drug is followed by one from a “bad-drug” law firm offering to sue the maker on your behalf?

                --Why are companies that use the internet permitted to employ “privacy” agreements that are intentionally overlong and difficult to understand? Those things speak volumes about the effectiveness of our “consumer protections”.

                --How much money do companies save by having online-application systems that require a half hour of a rep’s time to walk a customer through?

                --Who are all those strangers who say they want to be my Facebook friends? Is my photo popping up on their screens and are they wondering who I am?

                --Why does anyone put anything online with the expectation that the world won’t read it?

                --Aren’t most of our best travel memories about things we blundered into rather than set out to see?

                --How can either political party face the voters after their failure to prevent drug companies from charging six-figure annual sums to families whose members suffer from rare but curable illnesses?

                --Why do people keep returning to places that have experienced multiple natural disasters? Couldn’t they just move up the road a few miles to avoid the really dangerous spots?

                --Is there a better way to stifle discussion in a public body than to strictly apply Roberts Rules of Order? I think they were devised to turn substantive issues into procedural ones.

                --Why is it that catchers, who see more pitches than any other players, have no better judgement at the plate than the others?

                --If tax-resolution firms really can settle people’s overdue tax bills for pennies on the dollar, why should anyone bother to pay in full and on time?

                --Is there greater testimony to inequality in Major League Baseball than the Oakland A’s offering 81-game season tickets starting at $871 for 2019 while a single “prime” box seat for a Chicago Cubs’ game sells for about $700?

                --I’m probably the last person to notice this, but aren’t men’s clothes a lot skimpier than they used to be? The form-fitting look isn’t a great one for some of us older guys.

                --Isn’t calling out Trump’s lies, gaffes, character defects and crimes like counting grains of sand on the beach? After a while the effort pales.

                --Is there a better sign of old age than the necessity to insure every trip?

                --Can you name a worse baseball broadcaster than Alex Rodriguez?  

                --Don’t you chuckle over those doctor’s-office phone calls telling you to come for your appointment a half-hour early when you know they won’t see you until they’re a half-hour late?

                -- Why is it that every time you get competing bids on a home-repair job you get a great disparity in estimates? It makes you wonder if they’re looking at the same job.

                --Did you see those Domino Pizza TV ads promising to fix potholes that jar its products on deliveries? Has there been a more-pointed commentary on the sorry state of municipal services in many cities?

                --What’s the big deal about losing-candidates’ concession speeches on election night? Once the votes are counted the tallies speak for themselves.

                --Does every high-class steak house in American play Frank Sinatra records?

                Just askin’.

BORG VS. MCENROE

                I watch sports movies when an interesting one comes along, and last week, via Netflix, I saw Borg Vs. McEnroe, a 2017 release. It’s not a great movie but it’s a good one, about the two tennis players who dominated their sport in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

     

           Okay, you’re probably thinking, the contrast between the stolid Swede Borg and the mercurial American McEnroe would be the stuff of good drama. As the movie makes clear, though, that distinction was more apparent than real. Borg also had a fiery temper, he just controlled it better than Mac did.

         

             Indeed, a more-accurate title for the movie would have been Borg Vs. Borg and McEnroe Vs. McEnroe, because both men’s struggles were as much with themselves as with the guys across the net. That sort of inner drama probably is more frequent than we know at sports’ highest levels.

            

            The movie is a Swedish production, directed by a Dane, so it figures it would be more about Borg than McEnroe. Sverrir Gudnason, the Swedish actor who played Borg, is a dead ringer for the bland good looks of the tennis player, as are, I’d guess, a good many other young men in his native land. McEnroe is played by the American actor Shia Lebeouf, who bears only a passing resemblance to the real-life character. That alone made him harder to relate to.

            

            The focus of the movie was the epic 1980 Wimbledon final between the two men, sometimes hailed as the best tennis match ever. Borg, 24 years old at the time to Mac’s 21, won that one in five sets, so it’s ending likely was pleasing to the Swedish audience. The full rivalry was as close as it could be, with each man winning 11 times in their 22 head-to-head meetings. Twelve of those were in tournament finals and, again, their final toll was even at six.

 Mac had the last laugh, though, beating Borg in their last three Grand Slam finals, at the U.S. Open in 1980 and at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1981. Borg would retire from tennis the year after that, and the case often has been made that his decision stemmed directly from those losses.

The best actor in the film is Stellan Skarsgard, a veteran Swedish performer with a long list of international credits; if you’re a movie fan you’ll recognize him when you see him.  He plays Lennart Bergelin, Borg’s career-long coach and constant companion. Really, the Borg of the movie was a Team Borg, a threesome consisting of him, the coach and Borg’s then-girlfriend and later wife (the first of three) Marianna Simionesca. She’s played by Tuva Novotny, a Swedish actress with a Czech name.e plays LennartH

The function of the coach and girlfriend seemed to have been to keep Borg from slipping off the rails enroute to his tennis destiny. Bergelin spotted the young Borg as a kid prodigy with a temper so volatile as to be potentially destructive; early scenes depicted the teenaged him (played by his real-life son Leo) breaking racquets, slamming doors and assaulting trees in a Swedish forest after tennis setbacks. Bergelin calls him out more than once, telling him to shape up or ship out. He finally does so but not without adopting obsessive routines and doing a lot of staring into space. Winning for Borg wasn’t everything, it was the only thing, and without it there was no point in playing. Thus, his early retirement.

McEnroe was the second banana in the piece. He’s portrayed as being almost as nasty off the court as on, with the disposition of a hornet and a vocabulary to match. At one point in the movie a fellow pro tells Mac “nobody likes you,” but he doesn’t appear bothered by the news. He’s as driven as Borg, only noisier.

Mac's short shrift was a shame because the movie didn’t answer the one question I always had about him, namely, how he could be in full tantrum one moment and a few moments later resume performing at the top of his fine-tuned game. Perhaps relatedly, and also not addressed in the movie, was the fact that McEnroe liked tennis a lot more than Borg did. Mac won his last Grand Slam title at age 25 but stayed on the main pro tour eight years more and then moved on to “masters” and “seniors” levels of competition, even until today.

Additionally, he became a Davis Cup captain and a television commentator on the sport, a role he still fills with distinction. From all appearances he’s become a pretty nice guy, someone, in the current parlance, you’d like to have a beer with.

I recall the Borg-McEnroe era fondly because, back then, tennis still had the stylistic differences that made the sport interesting to watch. The main division there was the baseliner-versus-net rusher one than the two players embodied, Borg the former and Mac the latter. Theirs wasn’t the last such classic men’s matchup (Sampras versus Agassi was) but it was a great one, maybe the greatest.

Alas, by around the year 2000 advances in racquet technology had given a decisive and perhaps permanent advantage to the baseliners that made the serve-and-volley game all but extinct. Using today’s high-powered racquetry, players can return serves with almost as much speed as they’re delivered, turning the net area into a no-man’s (or woman’s) land. Now, everyone plays the same game, and if the players don’t wear different-colored clothes it’s tough to tell them apart. I’m not one to yearn for the good old days, but with tennis I do.

FOOTBALL, CONTINUED

                By the evening of February 3, aka Super Bowl Sunday, most of us will have had enough of football for a few months, but for those who haven’t help will be at hand. Just six days later, on February 9, something called the Alliance of American Football will make its debut, beginning a 14-week run including playoffs. 

                There already is a “spring” pro-football circuit called the Arena Football League, but because its games are played indoors and on a 50-yard field with eight-man teams, it’s really football with an asterisk. The AAF will be football in the sense it is usually understood.

                The new league’s games will be staged in eight cities, all in the South or West where any weather problems shouldn’t (but still might) be severe. They are Atlanta, Ga., Birmingham, Ala., Memphis, Tenn., Orlando, Fla., Phoenix, Ariz., Salt Lake City, Utah, San Antonio, Tex., and San Diego, Calif. It will play a 10-week regular schedule followed by two weeks of playoffs involving the top four teams.

 Although there is no such formal designation, it will be a football minor league, its rosters peopled by athletes who aren’t judged ready for prime time, or no longer are. The standard contract will pay $250,000 to any player who spends three years in the league, or about $83,000 per. That’s in contrast to the average National Football League salary of about $2.1 million, or median of about $860,000, so the two leagues won’t compete on that score. The AAF has a television commitment from CBS, meaning that its near-term survival shouldn’t be an issue. If any sports entity might consider it to be competition it would be the NBA or NHL, and one suspects they won’t be too worried.

Nonetheless, the AAF inevitably will be measured against such insurgent football leagues past as the All-American Football Conference (1946-49), the American Football League (1960-69), the United States Football League (1983-85) and the XFL, wrestling impresario Vince McMahon’s cartoonish loop that died after one season (2001) but is threatening to be reborn in 2020. The first three of the above-named enterprises also are generally recalled with derision, but shouldn’t be. Two of them made lasting impressions on the professional game and the third survives as a thorn in the saddle of the established league.

You have to be about my age (80) to remember the All-American Conference first hand; I recall going to a Chicago Rockets’ game at which about 5,000 people populated the 100,000-seat Soldier Field, most of them forming thong-like strips up the 50-yard lines. The AAFC was a financial failure, its main sin being prematurity at a time when the football pie was a sliver of what it is today, but the league brought the pro game to new cities and three of its teams-- the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts—were taken into the NFL when it folded. Indeed, its Browns immediately became the game’s best team upon joining the NFL in 1950, winning titles that year and in 1954 and ’55.

The American Football League had its zany aspects getting started in 1960 but solidified itself after a few seasons and eventually forced a full-scale merger with the NFL, increasing that league’s size to 26 teams from 16 starting with the 1970 campaign. The Green Bay Packers of the older league won the first two interleague championship games in 1967 and ’68 (the game wasn’t called the Super Bowl until later), but since then parity has set in, with each conference winning 25 times.

The USFL started as a spring league, and had big-league aspirations, but lasted just three campaigns. Its demise came when its anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL was decided in its favor but resulted in an award of just $1, upped to $3 after treble damages were applied. The USFL lives on through the animosity of one of its team owners, Donald Trump, who suffered a bruised ego when his attempt to come out of the wreckage with an NFL franchise was rebuffed. He’s taken potshots at the NFL since, their affect amplified by his present position.

The AAF has dealt with the nutsy-owner problem by making all its teams league-owned. Its founders are Charlie Ebersol, who has a TV background, and Bill Polian, the former, highly regarded general manager of the Buffalo Bills. Other exNFLers, including players, have executive roles in the organization.

The league’s biggest names going in are coaches: football lifers Mike Singletary, Steve Spurrier, Rick Neuheisel, Dennis Erickson and Mike Martz all will guide AAF entrants. The league already has had player tryouts and drafts and has a “notable players” tab on its website, but I didn’t recognize any names on it and so will not pass any along.  The NFL talent net has holes, meaning that some pretty good players will have slipped through to the AAF, but we’ll have to wait until it plays a few games to learn who they are. 

Much of the initial interest in the league has come from the rules changes it has adopted. Shooting for a time frame of 150 minutes a game, against the NFL’s 180-plus, it has eliminated TV timeouts and shrunk the number of other commercial breaks. Time between plays has been reduced to 30 seconds from 40.

There will be no kickoffs; the “receiving” team will begin play at its own 25-yard-line after scores and at the game’s beginning and start of the second half. Instead of onside kicks a team wishing to get the ball back after it scores will have a 4^th-and-10 opportunity from its own 35-year line. If it makes it it continues, if not it turns over the ball where its play ended.

 Extra points will be two-point plays from scrimmage. Head injuries will be assessed by sideline physicians not working for the league or its teams, a really good move. Single-game tickets will sell for $20 and five-game season packages for $75, both amounts reasonable by any standard.

It’s a shame that the new league didn’t choose to monkey with the game further with an eye to opening it up, like the Canadian League has. Adopting the college game’s 15-yard penalties for pass-interference calls also would have been good. Still, its version should be worth a look or maybe two.  Our sports schedule is crowded but I guess there’s room for a bit more.

    

HANDICAPPING THE HALL

                Voting materials are out for the 2019 class of the Baseball Hall of Fame and, as usual, the top-of- the-ballot choices are easiest. Among the 20 first-timers the peerless New York Yankees’ reliever Mariano Rivera is a shoo-in, a probable unanimous selection or nearly so. Among the 15 holdovers from previous elections Edgar Martinez and Mike Mussina are the likeliest inductees, having received 70.4% and 63.5% of the vote, respectively, the last time around. When someone gets that close he usually tops the magic 75% mark among the sportswriter electorate the next year.

                Martinez’s selection was all but assured last week when one of the Hall’s Veterans Committees elevated the ex-Chicago White Sox Harold Baines to membership. Baines was a designated higher for most of his career and his election seems to remove whatever bias the Hall holds against players who filled that role. Martinez was the American League’s leading practitioner of the DH art for much of his career (1987-2004). The annual award for the best in that category is named for him.

                Mussina, another ex-Yankee and like Martinez in his sixth year on the ballot, should have been elected by now. His 270 career wins (versus 153 losses) are about the most we’ll be seeing as starting-pitcher roles diminish in the game, and he ranks high in other Hall measures as well. I voted for him (and Martinez) when I was an elector and would do so again.

                For me, though, the real interest in this election is in the down-ballot voting, among the players for whom Hall support is an acquired taste. The recent spate of first-time winners (Chipper Jones and Jim Thome last year, Ivan Rodriguez the year before) obscures the fact that most eventual Famers built their vote totals gradually toward the 75% mark. Mussina, for instance, polled only 20% in his initial listing in 2014, and just 24% the next year. His record hasn’t changed with the years, but perceptions about it have.

                I’ll be watching to see how three other ballot newcomers fare when the results are announced on January 22. Pitchers Roy Halladay and Andy Pettitte are two of them, and first baseman Todd Helton is the third. I don’t expect any of them to gain admission this time but their chances down the road seem pretty good.

                The Halladay-Pettitte matchup is particularly interesting. Lefty Pettitte pitched longer than righty Halladay (18 seasons to 16) and had a lot more wins (256 to 205), but Pettitte played for the mighty Yankees during most of his career while Halladay labored for the usually so-so Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Philllies. The Yankee connection is why a major Pettitte accomplishment, his record for most post-season victories (19), is on his resume. Head-to-head, though, I judge Halladay to have been the superior hurler, and his two Cy Young Awards (Pettitte had none) and two no-hitters (one a perfect game) support that view.

                Halladay died at age 40 in a 2015 private-plane accident, something that brought heightened attention to his career. Pettitte will be hurt by drugs-related blemishes, mostly his admitted use of the banned Human Growth Hormone in treating a mid-career elbow injury. I expect Halladay to outpoll him this time and am curious to see how he’ll fare in future years.

                Helton was a terrific hitter in his 17-year career—2,519 hits, 369 home runs and a lifetime .316 batting average—but all of it was with the Colorado Rockies, perennial also-rans whose rare-air home clime is viewed suspiciously when batting records are assessed. His stats are close to those of another excellent ex-Rockies batsman, Larry Walker, who hasn’t polled higher than 34% in his nine years on the ballot. I think Helton will do better that but not by much at first.

                As always, much of the fan interest in the voting will concern the fates of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the no-doubt-doper duo. They’ve performed about in tandem since first appearing on the ballot in 2013, going from an initial 36-37%  to 56-57% last year.  Barring new rules, or some startling development, it’s hard to see how they could vault to 75% this year. If they fail to do so by 2023 they’ll be passed along to one of the Veterans Committees. The ways of those panels are mysterious, so anything can happen after that.

                Sixteen more men are ballot first timers. They are, alphabetically, Rick Ankiel, Jason Bay, Lance Berkman, Jon Garland, Freddy Garcia, Travis Hafner, Ted Lilly, Derek Lowe, Darren Oliver, Roy Oswalt, Juan Pierre, Placido Polanco, Miguel Tejada, Vernon Wells, Kevin Youklis and Michael Young.  All were fine players and, maybe, great fellas, but it’s tough to envision a Cooperstown plaque for any of them. Indeed, most probably won’t get the 5% of the vote necessary to be on next year’s ballot. Berkman, Garcia, Polanco and Tejada seem to me to have the best chance of sticking, but I wouldn’t bet on any of them.

                But Hall electors of various stripe are capable of surprising. The newly elected Baines, for instance, never got more the 6.1% of the vote in his five years on the sportswriters’ ballot. Old timers Gabby Harnett and Charlie Gehringer each got zero votes their first time around, in 1936, before eventually being elected by the scribes, Gehringer in 1949 and Harnett in 1955. That was long ago, and the voting rules have changed, but still…