OFF TRACK

 

               If you follow this space you know I used to share my Kentucky Derby picks and thoughts the week of the annual Big Race, but I haven’t done it the last two years and won’t be doing it this year. That’s because, again, I won’t have seen most of the prep races leading up to it.

               I’m still a fan of thoroughbred racing, and haven’t gotten lazy (about that, at least). It’s that a dispute between Arizona racing authorities and the Stronach Group have denied Arizona betting outlets the simulcasts from Stronach’s Santa Anita and Gulfstream Park tracks, the sport’s two most important winter venues. The beef is in its third year with no end in sight and the racing public, or what’s left of it, be damned. Those guys make Major League Baseball look good.

               And that’s just one of the black eyes the erstwhile Sport of Kings has inflicted upon itself in recent years, a strange practice for an enterprise that’s in bad shape to begin with. The sport’s biggest problem is an intractable one: an aging fan base that goes against the grain of our quick-thrill culture by poring over the tiny numbers in the past-performance charts in an effort to make intelligent bets.  Rather than allowing us to peter out in peace, it heaps indignities upon us, almost without number.

               Exhibit A on that list is the Derby itself, the one race the general public has when it’s having only one. Amazingly, the horses that crossed the finish line first in two of the race’s last three editions have not turned out to be the winner, shaking confidence in what once was a verity. Maximum Security, the 2019 winner, was taken down for interfering with other horses by briefly veering out of his lane in the home stretch. Last year’s winner, Medina Spirit, was disqualified just last month when tests revealed he'd had a banned substance in his system.

               Question marks remain over both outcomes. Disqualifying actions usually are blatant and obvious, but in the Maximum Security case Churchill Downs stewards examined race tapes for 22 minutes before announcing their verdict, as did millions at home via TV replays. Their decision was heartily booed at the track and elsewhere, mostly because a lot more people held winning tickets on Maximum Security at 9-to-2 odds than on the 65-to-1 winner Country House, but also because it’s rare that the winner of any big race is taken down. That hadn’t happened in the previous 144 runnings of the race. That Medina Spirit’s penalty was almost a year in coming made some question its formulation.  My advice for the next Derby, on May 7: Hold all tickets.

               The Medina Spirit verdict, and the animal’s sudden death in December (the announced cause was a heart attack), took on further import because the animal’s trainer was Bob Baffert. If the race had stood it would have been Baffert’s seventh Kentucky Derby victory, a record. Good-looking, glib and accessible, and with a distinctive shock of white hair, he’s been the sport’s dominant figure of this century, not only in the winner’s circles but also on the sports pages. There he’s been a proponent of stricter health and safety rules for the sport.

               That stance, however, has been in conflict with Baffert’s history of doping-violation penalties (30 by one published account) and the high number of horses that have died in his care. He’s currently under suspension in New York and Kentucky, and the most buzz as another Derby approaches is over what will happen to the half-dozen prospects in his barn. Like many a very-rich man, Baffert has fought actions against him by suing everyone in sight and appealing adverse rulings. He’s doing that now in an effort to get back his Kentucky license in time for the Louisville classic. Given the sport’s record of convoluted legal proceedings, he just might succeed.

It's worth noting here while Baffert can’t race in Kentucky or New York he’s still golden in California, where he’s the leading-money-winning trainer at the Santa Anita winter meeting.  In late 2020 the U.S Congress, in a rare, bipartisan display, passed the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, which would unify thoroughbred racing’s rules and administration under a single, national agency. When it’s supposed to take effect July 1, things like that won’t happen.

The law was a long time coming, mostly because entrenched interests in many of the 38 states that permit the sport—and create a jurisdictional hodgepodge-- wouldn’t let it. What turned the tide were the training or racing deaths of 24 horses at the 2018-19 Santa Anita winter meeting, something that stirred an uproar beyond parochial circles.

 Congress created the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) to enforce the new law and make it part of the Federal Trade Commission. Its jurisdiction would extend to track safety and maintenance, injury-data collection, disciplinary processes and sanctions and drug policy and testing. A crucial part would have taken drug testing out of the hands of the states and given it to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), the nation’s preeminent, independent testing lab.

But racing being racing a smooth transition was unlikely, and in December it was announced that the two entities had failed to come to agreement and suspended negotiations, leaving HISA to find a testing agency that, by statute, is “equal in qualification.”  There is no such agency, which puts the entire project in doubt. That would satisfy industry groups such as the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, which has filed suit to block it.

It's not yet clear how it’ll all come out, but it’s never been a mistake to expect the worst from the sport. As Paddy Bauler, the late Chicago saloon keeper and alderman once said about his home city, maybe racing “ain’t ready for reform.”   

                 

INSIDE BASEBALL

 

               “Inside Baseball” describes the tactical use of singles, walks, bunts, sacrifice flies, stolen bases and squeeze plays to manufacture runs.  It’s pretty much a relic of the past, the polar opposite of today’s dominant playing style, in which strikeouts are accepted and even welcomed in exchange for the big bangs they sometimes produce.  Sports metaphors being virulent, the term also has been used for the minutia of any field, the mastery of which can bring results when frontal assaults fail.

               The term is further apt for the issues that divide baseball owners and players in the contract talks in now progress, ones that could shrink the 2022 season. This blog is not intended to handle breaking news, so I wrote this piece yesterday (Monday), and the thing could be settled by the time you read it. But the lockout it engendered has taken a big chunk out of the game’s spring training, which is economically important in Arizona and Florida, and imperiled the scheduled opening day of March 31, so at best it’s an exercise in brinkmanship, and damage already has been done.

               My point is that the matters that divide the sides qualify as technical, ones that won’t much affect the game on the field or inflame popular emotions, and it’s remarkable--even mind-blowing--that baseball’s actors are willing to risk alienating a dwindling fan base for intramural gain. Annual attendance for the erstwhile National Pastime slid to 68.5 million in 2019 from 78.6 million in 2008, and cratered to 45.3 million in 2021 after the truncated, no-gate plague year of 2020. Instead of putting out the welcome sign now that the epidemic is waning, baseball has emersed itself in its own quarrels, and the public be damned.

               The last time baseball had a work stoppage was 1994, and it wiped out the last 50 games of the regular season and the year’s playoffs and World Series, and spilled into 1995. That was a strike, not a lockout, but there’s no practical differences between the two. Whatever the cost, the issues were obvious and important: the owners wanted team salary caps and an end to salary arbitration. The players resisted and neither demand was met. There’s no demand for formal team caps this time around, and only arbitration tweaks are being discussed.

               Ironically, the one issue that would change the game in the current talks is one on which the sides reportedly agreed to early on. That would be the National League’s adoption of the designated hitter. The two leagues have been split on the matter since 1973, and while the difference once helped the game by enlivening Hot Stove League discussions, that time is long past. Every baseball league save the National has had the DH for many years, and it’s about time it became universal. 

               The list of issues that are on the table is about as long as Randy Johnson’s left arm. I don’t know which are intended seriously and which are not; as a former labor reporter and bargaining participant as a union member I understand that some issues are not dear held by either party and are raised only to be dropped once the end-game trading starts. Things like a pre-arbitration bonus pool, ironing out service-time kinks and whether to limit the number of optional player assignments teams can use don’t raise temperatures anywhere I know.  

               What’s new about this bargaining round is the weakness of player salaries over the last several years.  Not only has the average annual salary stagnated at about $4 million but the more-important salary median—the 50-50 dividing line-- has dropped to $1.15 million last year from $1.65 million in 2015, according to the Associated Press.

The players at the top are doing very well, thank you—the top 50 accounted for fully one-third of the game’s 2021 payroll, and given the record $43 million-a-year the New York Mets pledged to pitcher Max Scherzer for the next three years they’ll continue to do so. But 70%-plus of last year’s players grossed less than $1 million a year and while, say, $700,000 is a princely wage in the real world it’s not that impressive in a profession with high qualifications and a typical career length of about five years.  Meanwhile, the market value of teams, which is the real measure of owner success, continues to skyrocket with the value of TV “content.” To take one example, the Arizona Diamondbacks, a failure on the field and at the gate in recent years, currently is worth $1.32 billion according to Forbes magazine. That's more than 10 times the $130 million owner Ken Kendrick paid for them in 1995.

A couple of issues stand out in the current talks. One is the minimum salary, which just about all rookies get. It stands at $570,500 now but the players want to boost it to $775,000 in 2022 and $875,000 in 2026, each of which figure is about $100,000 more than the owners have been offering (don’t hold me to those figures, they change by the day). Another is the “luxury tax” big-spending teams pay when their payrolls exceed a certain limit, but which also serves as a de facto payroll cap. It stood at $210 million last season and the players want to boost it to $245 million this year. The owners want it to rise to $214 million.

Chances are that the differences will be split, as they usually are in collective bargaining. It may happen in a day or so and the season could play out pretty much as scheduled, or not. No strike or lockout lasts forever and this one won’t be an exception. But so what?, it might be argued. It’s their money, not ours. But it’s also a reminder not to love your teams more than they love you.

 

              

RES IPSA LOQUITUR

 

               I’m not a lawyer, and I’ve never played one on TV, but along the way I’ve picked up some lawyer lingo, and one such phrase seems apt to describe a couple of current sports issues. It’s res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.”

               What that means is that, sometimes, the evidence supporting something is so obvious that no further proof of cause is necessary; for example, if an air-conditioner falls from a window and beans someone below, the fact itself proves negligence or bad intent on someone’s part. Ditto if a surgeon leaves a sponge in a patient.

The conclusion that’s obvious from any skim of the facts is that the National Football League has a dismal record when it comes to hiring black coaches. In a league in which about two thirds of the players are black, its 32 teams had exactly one black head coach—the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin-- in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl. A couple of recent hires—Lovie Smith by the Houston Texans and Michael McDaniel by the Miami Dolphins—increased that total to three (or to two and a half depending on how you’re counting, because McDaniel is biracial), but a deep deficit remains. That’s despite the pious rhetoric the league churns out over its minority-hiring policies.

 The issue was brought to the forefront by a lawsuit against the league and three of its teams by Brian Flores, a black man who was fired by the Dolphins at the end of last season despite having a respectable 24-25 won-lost record in his three years with the team, and 19-14 the last two. Flores further alleged that a couple of his interviews for a new job, with the New York Giants and Denver Broncos, were charades designed to put a good face on processes with foregone conclusions—the hiring of white head coaches.  

               The suit was especially notable because Flores filed it while still in the job market; not surprisingly, he remains unemployed. It stood out further for his assertion that during his first season with the Dolphins Stephen Ross, the team’s owner, offered him a $100,000 bonus for every game the team lost, with the aim of securing a better position in the NFL’s worst-is-first annual draft. That NFL (and other leagues’) teams sometimes “tank”—intentionally lose—is another res ipsa loquitur proposition, but the bribery angle was novel.

                 All of our Big Three major professional sports leagues give lip service to being color (and sex) blind in their hiring, but results vary widely. For example, the 30 teams of the National Basketball Association, about three-fourths of whose players are black, currently have 13 black head coaches, but number was in single digits a couple of years ago, while in Major League Baseball the current count is two (Dave Roberts and Dusty Baker), but it’s been higher.

 In none of those leagues, though, is the player-head coach ratio more out of whack than in the NFL. The league moved to remedy that in 2003 with the adoption of the so-called Rooney Rule, named for Steelers’ owner Dan Rooney, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for important posts, but by one published count only 15 of its 129 head-coaching vacancies since then have been filled by blacks. It’s probably also worth noting that the Texans’ recent promotion of the 63-year-old Smith is widely regarded as a stopgap until that woebegone organization can get the rest of its house in order.   

 Pro sports’ hiring practices are, no doubt, a complex matter, but one important part of it usually escapes notice despite lying on the surface: the dual nature of the leagues. They often are regarded as single entities, and they are for things like negotiating television and labor contracts, but in their day-to-day affairs they are many: 32 in the NFL. Further, each team save the community-owned Green Bay Packers is a fief run by a single person or family, a privately held corporation that doesn’t have to follow the disclosure and other rules publicly owned companies do.

             Owners typically are men who have made a lot of money elsewhere but yearn for the celebrity big-time sports ownership can bring. They’re in it for the money, of course, but they also treasure the locker room info and cred that comes with their unique positions. They may run their primary businesses like, uh, businesses, but for many their teams are personal playthings, to do with as they please. If their hires are based on man-to-man chemistry there’s no one, including NFL commish Roger Goodell, to say nay. As Carroll Rosenbloom, the former Los Angeles Rams’ owner once said, “I’ve given my children a great many things, but I kept the football team for myself.”  

                Flores’s charge of money for losses has been loudly denied by owner Ross, but the fact of tanking in sports is as beyond dispute as a surgeon’s misplaced sponge. It can be a tricky matter, because athletes are loath to take the field to lose, so teams get around that by stripping their rosters of saleable (i.e., competent) players and letting nature take its course. In baseball, the Washington Nationals’ management team of Stan Kasten and Mike Rizzo called that practice “The Plan” when they dumped the 2008, ’09 and ’10 seasons to man up for a later string of playoffs finishes and the 2019 World Series title. Theo Epstein repeated it in Chicago enroute to the Cubs’ drought-ending 2016 triumph. The Cincinnati Bengals dragged in at 2-14 in 2019, picked Joe Burrow No. 1 in the next draft, and wound up in the Super Bowl this season. 

                The race to the bottom became so obvious in the NBA that in 1985 the league introduced a draft-lottery system that makes it chancy for terrible teams to get plum draft choices; the latest of many versions makes the 14 teams that fail to make the playoffs eligible for one of the top-four picks. Establishing such a system in baseball is a topic in current labor-contract talks. In sports, the “what” often is nose-on-your-face apparent, but fixing it takes more doing than you might think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

 

   

                 

              

? ? ? ? ?

 

              

I turned 84 last week (Feb.2) but still have more questions than answers. Here are some of them.

--Is there a mattress store in America that isn’t having a sale?

--Don’t those ads for time-share freedom make you glad you never signed up for one?

--Is it possible to conclude a close college basketball game without the officials holding a five-minute huddle over the possession of a ball tipped out of bounds or whether a couple tenths of a second should be added to the clock?

               --Can anything enliven a sandwich more than giardiniera, a spicy-hot collection of diced, pickled vegetables packed in olive oil? Nothing goes better on Italian beef or a lunchmeat sandwich.

               --Why do some people use “anxious” as a synonym for “eager”? Anxiety implies a feeling of dread, eagerness doesn’t.

               --Did I ever say anything bad about Amazon customer service? If I did I take it back. Their phone service, at 1-888-280-4331, is excellent.

               --But why is it that when I call United Healthcare I have to answer five or six questions before they’ll let me ask one?

               --Don’t you think cell-phone makers intentionally make their products slippery so we’ll drop them and have to buy new ones?

               --Wouldn’t it be nice to get a Facebook “friend” request from someone you know?

               --Is there a less-edifying new baseball stat than “exit velocity”? Who cares how fast a ball was going when it left the park?

               --When did “length” replace “height” in describing athletes’ sizes?

               --Why do Trumpian election liars insist their man won by a “landslide”? Wouldn’t a narrow win have been enough to salve his wounded ego?

               --So you’re running around outside carrying a machine gun, and someone makes you “feel threatened,” so it’s okay to shoot him, right?

               --Why will baseball batsmen take a strike down the middle on a 3-0 count and then swing at a bad pitch at 3-1?

--Hasn’t the new-med-naming contest been settled by the entry of Imbruvica? What could top that?

--What does it say about the aging process when you come to regard throw rugs like poisonous snakes?

               --What are the most robo calls you’ve received before 8 a.m.? Our record is four.

--Why do the airlines make you print out five or six pages when all you want is your departure- and return-flight info?

--If it’s against the law in Arizona to alter auto license plates, how can so many people drive around with ones that are obviously doctored?

               --Is it possible to use one of those “super glues” without getting some on your hands?

               --Wasn’t not using email the smartest thing Trump ever did?

               --Doesn’t it look like NFL refs get paid by the flag?

               --Does anyone sitting on hold for 20 minutes believe that line about your call being “very important to us”?

               --Remember when VRBO really meant “Vacation Rentals By Owner”? Now it’s a big, bureaucratic corporation run by real estate agents with more rules than the SEC, and no owners in sight.

               --Why is a university’s chief sports officer almost always referred to as the “athletic director” when it should be “athletics,” plural? The position’s formal title is “director of athletics” and its occupant needn’t be jocklike.

               --Doesn’t it seem that everyone who goes unvaccinated will contract covid-19 sooner or later?

               --Is there such a thing as a good-news message from Microsoft?

               -- And relatedly, aren’t about half our waking hours spent trying to fix glitches in our electronic devices?         

               Just askin’.

IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY?

 

               The world today is quite different than it was in 1896, when the Olympic Games were revived after a 1,500-year pause. People got around mostly by ship or horse then, and although the light bulb had been invented a few years before most areas were lighted only by fire.

               International sports were all but nonexistent, with only the yachting America’s Cup operating on a regular schedule. Sports are a function of leisure, which in turn is tied to wealth, and what competitions there were were rich men’s provinces. Thus, when a group of European aristocrats thought that reconvening the O Games in the name of world amity was a nifty idea, they had in mind an upper-class picnic with nary a proletarian tinge.

Indeed, even training for a sport was deemed de classe then, and remained so for some time. If you saw the wonderful movie “Chariots of Fire,” about Brits training for the 1924 Stockholm Olympics, you’ll recall that Harold Abraham, the eventual 100-meter dash winner, was criticized for having a coach, Sam Mussabini, and that Mussabini had to hear about his pupil’s victory second hand because he was barred from the Olympic stadium, as were all other coaches.

The 1896 Games in Athens were attended by 241 athletes from 14 nations. Most of the contestants were Greek and most of the rest were from the U.S., Germany or Great Britain. All were male, women’s sports barely existing then. Women’s events were added at the 1900 Paris Games, but only 22 women joined the 900-plus contestants for that one. The Winter Games debuted in France in 1924 with a cast of just 258.

From such modest beginnings the Olympics have turned into its present mega size, with athlete casts of thousands (11,000 at Tokyo last year) and budgets in the zillions. Its original function of promoting good will among nations has been forgotten, its playing fields turned into proxies for whatever national rivalries happen to be perking. Far from being the “youth festival” its leaders describe, it’s contested mostly by hardened pros in their late 20s or 30s. Cheating always is a subplot, with Russia regarding its host status at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi as a license to dope its athletes on a grand scale. The International Olympic Committee’s lack of enthusiasm for enforcing penalties that may dim its show encourages such depredations.

The notion that politics have no place in sports is a running gag line. Countries have vied to host the Games because they provide a blank page for promoting anything from tourism to ideology before a world audience.  Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Summer Games and Imperial Japan was scheduled to host the 1940 Winter Games before war intervened.  Russia and China have gotten a number of IOC recent-year nods, the Soviet Union hosting the 1980 summer event, Putin’s Russia Sochi ‘14, Beijing the 2004 summers and this year’s winter event. IOC honchos like it that no pesty citizens’ groups can question Olympic preparations in those places. Pervasive official secrecy helps the graft flow smoothly and the authorities can ensure a tame public at game time.

China being what it is, next month’s Games already are shrouded in political turmoil; no less could be expected given China’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong and its mass imprisonment of its Muslim minorities. The U.S. and a few other nations are sending athletes but, in protest, not government officials.  Some protest, huh? 

On top of that is the covid epidemic that’s raging again worldwide. Some athletes, most notably players in the NHL, aren’t competing in Beijing because of covid considerations, especially the threat of long quarantines should cases emerge while the Games are in progress. How authorities will react if (when) that occurs remains to be seen, but substantial schedule changes could be involved. Like at Tokyo last year, foreign attendance will be banned, and there will be limits on local participation. In an especially goofy pronouncement the Chinese government said that spectators can applaud but not cheer or otherwise respond vocally.  It will be interesting to see how that will be enforced.

International gatherings of any kind were rare around the time the Olympics resumed, so a case could be made for using sports to get various nationalities together on peaceable ground. No more. Two U.S. major leagues, the National Basketball Association and the NHL, are a sort of ongoing Olympics in terms of participation; when their current seasons began the NBA had 109 “international” players from 39 countries on its rosters and the NHL had more than 200 from places other than Canada and the U.S.

 Every major ski meet has a United Nations feel, as do most tennis and many major golf events.  Even the American national pastime of baseball has an international glow, with about a third of Major League players coming from other lands.  Every sport on the Olympic roster has an annual or biannual world championship that can be viewed internationally on television, meaning that even in obscure sports athletes can test themselves against the best of their peers more often than every four years.

The “Is this trip necessary?” issue is coming up increasingly within Olympic ranks. The huge cost of staging the Games, and the attendant disputes and disruptions, has pared the number of countries wishing to host them, to the point where only two (China and Kazakhstan) put in bids for the current edition.

I covered three Winter Os-- at Calgary (1988), Albertville (’92) and Lillehammer (’94)-- but like most Americans have no great affinity for winter sports. The winter schedule is thin and full of odd and stylized sports, such as two-against-the-clock long-course speed skating, the biathlon combination of shooting and cross-country skiing (see the Russo-Finnish War of 1940), and bobsled racing, whose entry fee is a $50,000 vehicle. It’s a pretty good show, but just one among many and, by me, not worth the trouble. Ditto for the Summer Games.   

 

 

 

 

 

                 

NEWS & VIEWS

 

News: Baseball is in the midst of a lockout, the first such development since 1995.

Views: Mind the gap.

So okay, the lockout is on, but so what? Spring training isn’t for another six weeks and the regular season wouldn’t start until six weeks after that.  The kind of money that’s at stake for both the owners and players ought to mediate against turning off the spigots, right? The golden goose should be squawking, if golden geese did such a thing. And who cares about a squabble between millionaires and billionaires? And there’s football and basketball to keep us entertained for the nonce.

But some figures that have emerged since the so-far-painless stoppage began raised my eyebrows, something that doesn’t often happen in the wonderful world of sports. It revealed an income disparity between baseball’s have- and have-not players that parallels that of our country as a whole in size if not in seriousness.

According to the Associated Press 1,397 of the 1,955 players who had signed Major League contracts going into the last month (September) of the 2021 regular season—or 71%-- earned less than $1 million annually, and 1,271 of those—65%-- were at $600,000 or less, just a tad over the MLB full-season minimum of $570,500. Players shuttled between the majors and minors earned less than that. On the upside, the 112 who were paid $10 million a year or more amounted to just 5.7% of the total.

 The game’s 50 highest-paid players, led by New York Yankees’ pitcher Gerrit Cole at $36 million per, accounted for fully one-third of the game’s total 2021 payroll, and the top 100 gobbled up 52%. The average player salary (of about $3.8 million last season) gets most of the ink, but the median of $1.15 million is more representative. That last figure was down from $1.65 million in 2015, the AP noted.

Further, if nothing much changes those top-sided totals will be even more lopsided in 2022 because the new top so far—the three-year, $130 million deal ($43 m-plus a year) bestowed upon pitcher Max Scherzer by the New York Mets-- puts Cole’s haul in the dust, and some other top-tag free agents (Carlos Correa, Freddie Freeman, Kris Bryant) remain unsigned.

Now, I’m well aware that $1m per or thereabouts is a fine income, more than ample for the feeding of a village, much less any one player’s family, but baseball’s chasm-sized wage gap still is enough to give one pause and put the current contract negotiations in perspective. Both sides say they want to narrow it, but in quite-different ways. The owners say they’d okay a salary floor but the players say nay because they fear it might lead to a salary cap. The players want free agency and salary arbitration to come faster than they do now, but the owners say that would negate what they spend on player development.  At the least, a lot of tough talk remains between now and “Play Ball!”

News: Hockey is failing in Phoenix.

Views: Again?

The Wall Street adage that no tree grows to the sky is regularly breached in big-time professional sports, where money figures move in only one direction (up), but the Phoenix Coyotes, the National Hockey League team in my adopted hometown, provide a counterbalance. Perennially failing, they’ve been kicked out of their home arena and no ready new home exists locally.  A move to another city seems called for, but who wants the worst team in the league? It’s a puzzlement.

The team has been a mess both competitively and financially since it moved to the desert metropolis from Winnipeg, Canada, in 1996. On the ice, it’s the longest-running NHL franchise (42 years including its Winnipeg stay) never to have made a Stanley Cup final, and it’s string of feckless owners that kept it on a financial tightrope. Just when it seems things can’t get worse, they do.

The team’s move to Phoenix was botched from the start because the only venue that could hold it—the then-called America West Arena that also housed the basketball Phoenix Suns-- was too small for hockey, putting about 2,500 of the place’s 18,000 seats out of play. Real-estate skate Steve Ellman touted a plan to build an arena for the team in wealthy, suburban Scottsdale, but after a string of missed deadlines he left behind a wrecked-shopping-center site for a better deal (for him) in less-well-heeled Glendale on the other (west) side of town. The starry-eyed burg picked up almost all of the $220 million price tag for the place.

The move to Glendale came in 2003 and worked all right for a while, even though Ellman’s promise of commercial development that would repay the city for its generosity never measured up.   Lackluster teams and ill-equipped owners led the team into bankruptcy and NHL receivership from 2009 to 2013. The owner since 2019 has been Alex Meruelo, a casino and radio-station owner, but he quickly established himself as slow-pay or no-pay when it came to bills. Last month Glendale threatened to lock out the team over $1.3 million in unpaid taxes and operating costs. The Coyotes finally paid up but the city still decided they were more trouble than they were worth and canceled their arena lease at the end of the current season.  A dozen or so concerts annually would compensate for lost hockey revenues, city officials aver.

Meruelo & Co. has been noising about plans for a new, billion-dollar stadium and entertainment complex in the suburb of Tempe but that city, the home of Arizona State University, probably is too smart to bite. Even if it did, the place couldn’t be completed until about 2025, and the team has no obvious place to play until then. Options are so few that plunking down an ice rink in the Chase Field baseball stadium has been mentioned. Wouldn’t you like to see that?

The NHL swears up and down that the Coyotes aren’t going anywhere else, but Houston wants a team, even one that’s about a furlong deep in last place in the won-lost column and 30^th of the 32 NHL clubs in attendance, and it will be tough to say no to that.   A change of scene can only help this gang.

 

HANDICAPPING THE HALL

 

               Baseball’s HITS (Heads In The Sand) era, stretching from about 1990 to 2005, when it finally got around to penalizing players found to use performance-enhancing steroid drugs, may be over, but the malady lingers on. Not only does steroid use continue in the game (albeit at a reduced rate) but the issue pops up again every year at this time, when voters ponder candidates for its Hall of Fame.

               Indeed, steroid use will be the main theme of the 2022 voting, with BARRY BONDS and ROGER CLEMENS up for their tenth and final year on the sportswriters’ ballot and ALEX RODRIGUEZ and DAVID ORTIZ leading the list of new nominees.

Slugger Bonds and pitcher Clemens were the best at what they did during long playing careers that ended in 2007, but multiple and sometimes sworn testimony to their guilt as users has turned their cases into an annual referendum on the subject, with each so far failing to meet the 75% majority needed for election. Running as a kind of entry, their ballot count has climbed from about 36% in 2013 to just over 60% last year, but it’s been on a 60% plateau for the last several years and a jump to 75 this time seems unlikely.

 If the two again fall short they will be transferred to one of the veterans’ committees the Hall maintains for candidates that may merit further review. The standards of those groups are lower than those of the writers, and in the 1973 movie “Sleepers,” set in the distant future, the Woody Allen character said tobacco was found to be a health food, so who knows what may lie ahead.

ARod and Ortiz both were tarred with the steroids brush, but mostly ARod. He’s been a kind of poster boy for PEDS, busted in tests not once but twice. The first in 2004, spanning the 2001-03 seasons in which he hit 156 of his 696 career home runs, carried no penalty because there was none at the time. The second resulted in a suspension for the entire 2014 season, the longest such action before or since.

 He screamed bloody murder after that last one, spraying denials and threatening to sue everyone in sight. He even organized a “fan protest” picketing of Commissioner Bud Selig’s office on his behalf, a move that caused chuckles. With time he fessed up and now enjoys a prosperous retirement. Don’t feel sorry for him because he’s an ESPN baseball analyst, Jennifer Lopez is or was his girlfriend and he’s worth a reported $400 million. But don’t expect to see his plaque in Cooperstown any time soon.

Ortiz reportedly was named in a 2003 document fingering some 100 major leaguers as users, but that supposedly secret doc has been disputed. He’s denied it and, loath to tar their stars, baseball execs have supported him in that. His baseball stats, including 541 career homers and 1,768 runs batted in, support his candidacy. So does a rosy public image as the good-natured “Big Papi” who brought joy to his Boston Red Sox constituency. He’ll be elected, it says here.

There are 13 first-timers on the 2022 ballot, and just a few besides ARod and Ortiz rate prolonged scrutiny.  These include a couple of former Philadelphia Phillies, JIMMY ROLLINS and RYAN HOWARD. Shortstop Rollins played for 17 seasons (2000-2016). He accumulated a notable 2,455 hits, and was the 2007 National League Most Valuable Player, but by me he fit into the very-good-but-not-great category most of the time. Big first-baseman Howard was the 2006 MVP with a monster year (58 home runs, 149 RBIs), but while he was a star in the early half of a 13-year career (2004-2016) he tailed off badly after suffering a torn Achilles tendon in a 2011 playoff game.

TIM LINCECUM stands out in memory as a frail-looking young man with an exaggerated delivery, but while the San Francisco Giants’ pitcher wowed ‘em for several seasons (2008-2011) his time at the top didn’t add up to the Hall. I expect that he, Rollins and Howard will get enough votes to stay on the ballot in future years, but not enough for quick election.

The other newcomers are MARK TEIXEIRA, A.J. PIERZYNSKI, JAKE PEAVY, JONATHAN PAPELBON, JOE NATHAN, JUSTIN MORNEAU, CARL CRAWFORD and PRINCE FIELDER.

Among the 15 holdovers none is more interesting than CURT SCHILLING. The 20-season-veteran pitcher, in his 10^th and last year on the ballot, polled 71% the last time around, and nobody who’s gotten that close didn’t get elected the next time. Schilling, however, has been anything but curt in his off-field utterances. He’s been a regular on right-wing media and in Trumpian style has blasted the press collectively and individually, hardly endearing himself to this particular electorate.

After last year’s voting Schilling said he wanted off the ballot. “The writers hate my politics,” he declared. I wondered if that included the nearly three quarters who wanted him in and, anyway, he doesn’t get to make that call. I don’t agree with his politics but admired his pitching (216 wins and 3,116 strikeouts, 15^th all-time) and voted for him several times when I could. My guess is that he’ll succeed this time. I can’t wait to hear his acceptance speech, if he chooses to make one.

SCOTT ROLEN, the former third baseman in his fifth year on the ballot, polled 53% last year and probably will come up short again. Ditto for OMAR VIZQUEL  and GARY SHEFFIELD, who narrowly trailed Rolen in 2021.

That leaves Ortiz and Schilling as the sole likely  sportswriters’ electees when the votes are counted next month, but they’ll have plenty of company at the induction. That’s because two of the Hall’s several veterans’ committees elected a total of six old-timers to membership, including GIL HODGES and MINNIE MINOSO. The committees offer a side door to the Hall that, in my view, is overused. I’ll do a blog on that one day.