WE WUZ ROBBED

 

               Conspiracy theories are the rage in the U.S.A., so I’m glad to report the demise of one. Debunking is tough because it’s hard to prove a negative, but I think it’s safe to say that the National Basketball Association no longer labors under the cloud that its playoffs and other functions are fixed for the New York Knicks to win. Forty nine years of no championships for the Garden dwellers, and just one playoffs appearance in the last nine seasons, seem finally to have put it to rest. Now, I guess, the L.A. Lakers have become the focus of the whispers, but they also didn’t make the current POs, so even those have been muted.

               The genre, however, is far from dead. Indeed, it seems to have expanded to make victims of just about every team in the league, and those in our other major sports, too. To hear the players, most broadcasters and many fans tell it, the referees and umpires have it in for everybody, and lay in wait to loose their venom at the most hurtful times. The cry “We wuz robbed!” reverberates through the land.

                Don’t believe me? Then check out the next NBA playoff game you see. Every time a foul is called the perpetrator lifts his eyes to heaven and raises his arms in disbelief, astonished to be so unfairly accused. If it’s a home-team player the audience responds similarly. It happens so often you’d think they’d get worn out, but one outrage just seems to fuel the next.

               I hate to get political here, even in a general sense, but I think what’s happening is that the ultrapartisanship that affects our politics has gravitated to sports. Paranoia is up, as are many forms of nastiness. Twice during the just-concluded NBA playoff between the Phoenix Suns and Dallas Mavericks players reported that their wives, girlfriends or moms had been insulted or worse by opposing fans in the stands during games, and players and fans in that and in other series have traded barbs directly. We Americans used to feel superior to the European and South American soccer fans who experience their loyalties viscerally, but we’re heading in that direction.

               You might think that sports-media pros would bring cooler heads to the frays, but many don’t. I see baseball games from around the country by way of the game’s Extra Innings cable-TV package and must report that homerism is rampant, affecting every facet of the broadcasts.

 Rooting from the baseball TV and radio booths is old stuff, dating back to my distant youth (Bert Wilson used to say he didn’t care who won as long as it was the Cubs), but in memory it used to have a joking aspect. Today it’s expressed by continual complaints about the umpiring, specifically about how all the close calls are going against whatever team the broadcaster works for. Even the electronic strike-zone box most games feature on television, and the microscopic analysis of plays subject to video review, don’t quiet the bitching; when a call goes against the homies it’s often explained away as too close to really determine.

It's no wonder that the NBA playoffs have amplified the bad-call mania. The NBA regular season is too long, meaning that many contests are desultory, but there’s little of that in the POs.  Players and fans are keyed up, and the familiarity bred by the best-of-seven format heightens individual animosities.

 Making it worse is that in the playoffs the league and its officials seem to do what the broadcasters call “let the boys play.”  Fans seem to like that in principle but in practice the phrase translates to “let the boys foul.”  NBA basketball is played by large, fast and muscular men who make the courts look small, and there’s so much banging around in the normal course of things that fouls could be called on just about every play. Not calling some of the usual fouls leads to greater feelings of unfairness about the ones that are called. The question then becomes how much is too much, and the answer varies widely. Where to draw the line on how often or hard Joel Embiid or Luca Doncic can bang his shoulder into an opponent’s chest to improve his position? Depends on who you’re rooting for.  Booooo!

Do the refs, umps, etc., make mistakes? Of course they do, as do players, coaches, sportswriters, accountants and surgeons. But are they intentional and directed toward helping or hurting certain teams? Zero evidence for that. Only once in the annals of modern big-time American sports has a game official being found to have used his position to alter games’ outcomes. That would be the case of NBA ref Tim Donaghy, who spent 15 months in prison for fixing games in 2006 and 2007. As far as is known his actions were aimed at benefiting only himself, by way of his bets.

 I’ve known refs and umps professionally and socially. My nephew, David Trachtenberg, referees high school basketball and volleyball games in and around Denver, where he lives. By my own and others’ accounts they’re a fine bunch, dedicated to their sports to the exclusion of other loyalties. Game officials in the NBA and Major League Baseball do well financially these days, earning between $150,000 and $500,000 a year depending on seniority, but they got their starts working high-school or kids’-league games for, maybe, 50 bucks per, if they were lucky. Without them those games wouldn’t be possible. Their fraternity should be cheered on that ground alone.

 

              

              

                

 

NEVER AGAIN?

 

               It was a nothing-special hit—a groundball single to right field—early in a nothing-special late-April game, but it stopped the baseball world. Fireworks exploded, people rose to cheer, the hitter’s wife, kids and mom raced to the field to embrace him. The ball was sent off to Cooperstown, presumably to rest in display with others like it.

               It was, of course, a very-special statistical hit, the 3,000th in the illustrious career of Detroit Tiger player Miguel Cabrera, putting him among the 33 men who have reached that level among the almost 20,000 who have played in the U.S. Major Leagues. At age 39 he’s not quitting yet and will go on to add to that total.

               Cabrera’s achievement well might stand out in a more singular way. He certainly will be the last to notch hit number 3,000 for a good many years and maybe he’ll be the last to do it—ever. Yes, ever is a long time and many unlikely things will happen in such a span; the rule “never say never” rightly applies to feats like his. But trends in the game are moving the wrong way for such a thing to occur.

That also is true about other hallowed numbers in the diamond sport, one that leans more than any other on round-numbered statistical feats to measure greatness. It used to be that 3,000 career base hits, 500 home runs, 300 pitching wins and 3,000 pitching strikeouts guaranteed Hall of Fame immortality. That no longer applies to players who stopped in juice bars along the way (Barry Bonds, ARod, Roger Clemens), or went out of their way to be offensive (Curt Schilling), but the standards held nonetheless. Now, not only the hits mark looks old fashioned, but the career-pitching-wins measure does as well.

Indeed, changes to the game seem to have permanently removed 300-win pitching careers from the above list containing 24 names, ending with Randy Johnson in 2009. One major obstacle besides the sheer difficulty of averaging 15 wins a season for 20 seasons has been the move to five-man starting rotations from four starting in the 1970s. Another has been the increasing role of teams’ bullpens beginning at about the same time. In 1974 there were 1,089 complete games pitched in the Major Leagues, or 28% of the total. Last year there were 14, six of which were no-hitters, and even taking a perfect game through seven innings doesn’t protect a starter from the hook. That’s what happened to Clayton Kershaw a couple of weeks ago, and he left the mound smiling.

Among active pitchers Justin Verlander leads in career victories with 227 as of last Thursday, followed by Zack Greinke with 219, Max Scherzer with 193, Kershaw with 188 and Adam Wainwright with 186. Kershaw is the youngest of the group at 34 but his annual starts have dipped into the 20s from the 30s the last half-dozen years. Verlander still is going strong at age 39 but another 70-plus wins seem undoable. Greinke is on his last legs at 38, Scherzer is 37 and Wainwright is 40.  Seems that 250 is the new 300.

Two members of the 3,000-hit club currently are active—Albert Pujols in addition to Cabrera—but from here it’s hard to see where another will come from. Under different circumstances Robinson Cano would be preparing to join them but he flunked a drugs test and lost 80 games of the 2018 season and then tied ARod for the all-time-dunce award by flunking another and losing the entire 2021 campaign. He had 2,631 hits through Thursday but at age 39 is hitting just .184 this year (7-for-38), and this season appears to be his last.

After Cano the decline in the active-hits department is steep. Yadier Molina, 39, is next at 2,116 but he’s already announced his retirement after this season and given his bruising position (catcher) and early-career struggles at the plate it’s remarkable he’s hit as well as he has. Joey Votto is next at 2,035 but he’s 38 and doesn’t have another 1,000 in him.  Jose Altuve has 1,783 in 12 seasons and Freddie Freeman has 1,726 in 13, but both are 32 years old and 3,000 seems a bridge too far.

A good measure of how great an achievement 3,000 hits is can be seen by the examples of Mike Trout, Nolan Arenado and Mookie Betts, the first three players I’d pick if I were choosing sides in the playground. In 12 seasons neither Trout, Arenado (10 seasons) nor Betts (9) is halfway to 3,000.   

Any foreseeable-future Mr. 3,000 would have to surmount just about every playing-field trend in the game. Just as fewer individual pitching starts and more bullpen emphasis is thwarting possible 300-game winners, it’s also making it tougher on hitters, fresh pitchers being more-formidable foes than tired ones.  Further, the guys trotting to the mound today are bigger, stronger and better coached than those of any previous era.  Computer tracking helps managers put their fielders where hitters are likely to hit.

Hitters are contributing to their own problems by trying to please chicks who dig the long ball, strikeouts be damned. The All-MLB batting average has dipped below .260 annually since 2009 and bottomed at .244 last season. Through 500 games this year it’s dropped to .231, which if it holds would be a record since they started keeping track in 1871. That would be worse than the .237 of 1968, “The Year of the Pitcher,” and the “Dead-Ball Era” low of .239 in 1908.

The cry of “Help!” you hear comes from the fans as well as the hitters. We want to see more guys getting hits, running around the bases, scoring runs. In 1969 MLB answered a similar plea by dropping the pitchers’ mound to 10 inches from 15. Another drop is in order, and an anti-shift rule as well.

And how about requiring batters to choke up at least an inch?

OK, maybe that’s too much.

STILL AT IT

 

               I saw the movie “King Richard” the other night, and liked it. I say this in full understanding that movies about real sporting figures and events are held to a standard of accuracy quite a bit lower than those of other mediums. Some measure of suspense must be conjured up even when audiences are aware of outcomes, and this requires that some facts be fudged. Heroes ofttimes must be burnished to appear to be more, uh, heroic than they are or were in real life, villains sometimes must be manufactured. That’s entertainment.

                In “King Richard,” the main character is Richard Williams, father of the tennis players Venus and Serena Williams, and the story centers on how he made his daughters what they turned out to be. The film ends with V and S still girls (Venus 14 years old, Serena 13) on the brink of the stardom we know will be theirs. That made them bit players in their dad’s drama.

               Will Smith plays Richard, and does so wonderfully. Smith is 53 years old, around the same age as Richard Williams was in the movie, but Smith can do young, middle-aged and, probably, elderly as well or better than any contemporary actor, so whatever he does on screen usually turns out well. As you no doubt know, he made news at the Oscars the other night with an impromptu performance that brought him much-earned obloquy. What you might have missed is that same night he won the best-actor award for “King Richard.”

               As for the truthfulness of the movie’s script, I give it a C. The movie’s biggest failure was its core portrayal of Richard as a steadfast father who, in his own, oft-spoken film words, would “always be there” for his family. The easily verifiable fact was that his family with Venus and Serena’s mom Oracene and her three girls from a previous marriage was his second. He’d had five children from his first marriage but abandoned it while all the children were age eight or younger, apparently with few backward thoughts (“he was a sperm donor, not a father,” one daughter from that marriage recently told a British newspaper). Post-movie timeline, he would divorce Oracene, remarry and father a son, then divorce that wife.  

               I was sportswriting during the late 1990s when the Williams sisters came upon the professional tennis scene (“burst” would be more like it), and had some personal knowledge of Richard Williams. He liked to talk generally and to me in particular, probably because he admired the newspaper I worked for. I liked him because he had a light manner that inspired grins, but he had a story to tell and told it at every opportunity.

               His main pitch had a two-pronged thrust: the “ghetto to glory” story of his girls’ roots and his own role in their ascent. The first part was true and amply covered in the movie. Venus and Serena grew up in mostly black Compton, California, and Richard, without much background in the sport, had them smacking around tennis balls daily on the city’s public courts from the ages of five (Venus) and four (Serena), even during rainstorms.  The movie makes a bow toward recognizing that some might consider his regimen excessive in the form of a busybody neighbor who sics the social-welfare people on him, but it portrays the girls as happy participants in his program. Nothing they’ve said since contradicts that.

               To its credit, the movie’s portrayal of the girls’ early coaching history probably is more accurate than Richard liked. Even after they were successful pros Williams’ family mythology had it that he was their sole guiding hand, but the movie shows them coming under the tutelage of California coach Paul Cohen before they were 10 and then moving to Florida to spend four highly formative teen years in the Rick Macci Tennis Academy, a well-known assembly line that also produced Jennifer Capriati, Andy Roddick and Maria Sharapova. That move also cast doubt on Richard’s repeated claim that education came first in his girls’ upbringing; in such places the emphasis is much stronger on the “tennis” than on the “academy.” 

               The part of Richard’s spiel I found most curious wasn’t covered in the movie. It was his insistence that tennis would be a fleeting part of his girls’ careers, that they had numerous aptitudes and soon would tire of ball-bashing in favor of other, weightier pursuits. Cut to the present, with Venus age 41 and Serena 40, with both saying they haven’t quit the game even though neither has played a tournament match since last summer. Both women have had various side interests, but their involvement has been more as celebrity decorations than as fully active participants.  

               F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that there are no second acts in American lives seems to apply particularly to sports, especially lately when sports’ rewards are enormous. But with 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them, and nine-figure net worths for each, money or acclaim can’t be compelling reasons for their continuing. Thanks in part to their dad’s inventiveness the Williams sisters occupy a singular niche in our culture, and I’ve hoped he’d be right about them focusing their abilities elsewhere.

               That thought has been with me of late, not only because of “King Richard” but also because of the recent retirement at age 25 of the Australian tenniser Ashleigh Barty, the sport’s No. 1-ranked woman.  In going out on top she joined a short list of athletes who’d done the same, including Pete Sampras, Jim Brown, Barry Sanders and Sandy Koufax, although Koufax might still be pitching if his elbow allowed. It might be a bit late to put Venus and Serena on that roster, but better late than later.

                

STARTING OVER

 

               Baseball is back, which is a good thing, but much of the news surrounding its return isn’t good. Here in Arizona, our economy deprived of the first three weeks of scheduled spring training, crowds at the first week of the resumed practice games were off about 25%. By my own unscientific measurements, fan mood is sour.

 Maybe I’m just projecting my feelings about the game’s nose-thumbing lockout, but maybe not. Last week I dropped by Sloan Field, the Mesa spring base of my Chicago Cubs, always the Cactus League’s darlings, and found tickets for sale at the box office instead of through recent-year scalpers’ monopolies. There were lots of empty seats in the park at game time and the faux-team jerseys some fans sported bore the names “BRYANT” “BAEZ,” “RIZZO,” “BANKS” and “LESTER” rather than those of any present team members. No surprise there since the current Cubs are pretty much incognito.

Roster changes had been expected as last spring’s exercises began; the rosy bloom of the 2016 championship team had faded and the core of that hallowed group—Kris Bryant, Javier Baez and Anthony Rizzo— were entering their final season before free agency. Most speculation had it that the team couldn’t afford paying today’s rates to retain the entire trio but probably would keep one or, maybe, two. Turned out they let all three go for prospects in mid-season trades, on top of the two other standouts (Yu Darvish and Kyle Schwarber) they’d shed before the season began.

 Suddenly it was déjà vu all over again, back to 2011, when newly hired baseball boss Theo Epstein dumped every saleable Cub in a frank project to tank a few seasons while manning up for better days.  We Cubs’ fans put up with it—even cheered—because of the numbers 56 and 103. Those were the years gaps between the team’s last National League pennant and World Series victory.

But that was then and this is now, and I’m thinking that the highs generated by a half-dozen years of playoffs contention has spoiled us for radical sacrifice, especially when another drought could have been avoided.  In billionaire Tom Ricketts the team finally seemed to have the sort of big-egoed, deep-pocketed owner who would spend with the big boys and, thus, avoid the downturns that come in transition periods.

Pre-pandemic full-house crowds at Wrigley Field, paying top dollar for their seats (only the Boston Red Sox have a higher ticket-price scale), meant the fans were doing their part. Major ’16 heroes Bryant and Baez, aged 30 and 29 respectively, had enough foreseeable good years ahead to sustain Cubs’ relevance. The teams that rewarded those two with long-term, megabucks contracts-- the Colorado Rockies (Bryant) and Detroit Tigers (Baez)—certainly thought highly of them.

But noooooo, it was back to the bad old days, and with an exclamation point. Sans stars, the 2021 Cubs’ limped home with a 71-91 won-lost record, going 29-58 after a decent start. That was the Major Leagues’ worst mark over that 87-game span.

The Cubs finally spent some money in the off-season, but on second-tier free agents. Their big splash was signing 27-year-old Japanese outfielder Seiya Suzuki, late of the Hiroshima Carp, to a five-year, $85 million deal. He’s supposed to be the best thing since sukiyaki, but Cubs’ fans can’t help thinking about a previous Japanese signee, Kosuke Fukudome (2008-11). He’s best remembered for screwing himself into the ground every time he struck out, which was frequently.    

Failure to develop pitching was the black mark on the Epstein regime, and new boss Jed Hoyer, Theo’s longtime second in command now in his second season in charge, has yet to prove he can do better. The Cubs’ other big offseason move was the signing of pitcher Marcus Stroman, ex of the New York Mets, to a three-year, $71 m pact. The most notable thing about him is that, at 5-foot-7, he’s the shortest pitcher in the Majors.

Stroman’s addition increased the team’s for-certain starting rotation to two—he and the veteran Kyle Hendricks. It’s just a week before the regular season is to begin and the identity of the other three starters remains mysterious. Venezuelan Adbert Alzolay last season became a rare starter who came up through the team’s system, but he was a disappointment (5-13 in wins and losses, 4.58 ERA) and will open this season on the injured list. The other candidates are retreads with no great promise.

Aside from Suzuki and outfielder Jason Heyward, who stays with the Cubs because no other team wants his $22 m-a-year contract that seems to have no end, the eight-man lineup remains similarly iffy. Catcher Willson Contreras is a good one but the team seems determined to trade him, if only for that reason. Middle-infielders Nico Hoerner and Nick Madrigal spent most of last season being injured.

  Frank Schwindel and Patrick Wisdom, a couple of career minor-leaguers the Cubs used to fill self-made holes at first and third bases last year, did well, but with caveats. Wisdom, 30, set a Cubs’ rookie home-run record with 28, but also struck out about 40% of the time and would have threatened a Major League strikeout record if he’d had enough at-bats. Schwindel played with 14 different minor-league teams before the Cubs brought him up at age 29. That is not the stuff from which dynasties are made.

Thanks to their kids-for-vets trades the team has a raft of young prospects, but none seem ready to step up to the Bigs just yet. None has nearly the pedigree of Bryant, the team’s top draft choice in 2013, who’d been the MVP in college ball, the minor leagues and the Arizona Fall League before being promoted in 2015.  Las Vegas puts the Cubs’ 2022 over-under win total at 75.5, but that’s stretching it, I think.  Starting over is hard to do.

 

 

 

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.