LAST TEAM STANDING?

 

               OK sports fans, time for a quiz. What do these eight men— Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, Joel Embiid, Ja Morant, Julius Randle, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Chris Paul and Jimmy Butler-- have in common?

               All are National Basketball Association stars and the best players on their teams, or nearly so. And all have missed games due to injury during the current NBA playoffs.

               Some of their absences already have been crucial. The Los Angeles Clippers, minus George for the duration and Leonard for three games, were bounced from the tournament’s first round in five games by the Phoenix Suns, and the Milwaukee Bucks, top seeded in the East, suffered a similar fate to the Miami Heat with Giannis out for two of those games.  Without playmaker Paul for the last four games, the Suns lost in six to the Denver Nuggets in round two.

               More rounds remain so the injury story of this year’s playoffs hasn’t been completed. Many of the games so far have been brilliantly played, with epic individual performances by Butler, Stephen Curry and Devin Booker, among others, but the way things are going the race could be won not by the best team but the last one standing. The NBA season has gotten so tough and grueling that it rivals the National Football League’s in having injuries dictate its outcomes. And instead of looking for ways to limit the damage, the league mostly makes it worse.

               Schedules in our major spectator sports long have been governed more by commerce than by competition, but nowhere has the “more is better” philosophy been more damaging than in the NBA. The league has had a 82-game regular season since the 1967-68 campaign, but the game today is immeasurably faster and rougher than it was then, and the playoffs are longer. First-round playoff series’ used to be best-of-five-games, now they’re best-of-seven like the other three rounds, and this season a six-game “play-in” tourney was added among the seventh-through-10^th-place finishers in the two geographic divisions to determine who made the final eight in each. A winner now could play as many as 30 playoff games, against 28 before. Maybe that’s not a big deal, but it’s not nothing.

               In the NFL, the injury bug bites hardest on the quarterbacks. They’re the most important players on the field but also the most vulnerable, often gazing at receivers downfield while behemoth lineman intent on their demise bear down upon them. It’s a wonder they aren’t hurt more often than they are. In basketball the stars bear the injury brunt because they play more minutes than lesser lights and are more the defenses’ focus.

               Basketballers aren’t bent on mayhem the way footballers are, but the cagers play unpadded—in their underwear, by appearance—and they don’t call the courts “the hardwoods” for nothing. Spectators and photographers sit only a few feet from the side and end lines, adding to the danger. Both effort and intensity increase during the playoffs, and the unwritten but real refs’ dictum to “let the boys play” kicks in. And even an elderly gent like 38-year-old LeBron James is logging 40-minute games during the current go-round.     

               You can’t make any money while the store is closed so the NBA, like our other pro leagues, is loath to cut back on its schedules. It has addressed its injury problem in part by going corporate, legitimizing what it calls “load management.” That means it’s okay for players to sit out games from time to time for no other reason than rest.

 The injured parties here are the fans, who no longer can count on seeing their favorite players when they buy tickets. To find out how often that happens I counted the absences during the just-concluded regular season of the dozen players I considered the league’s best. Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Luca Doncic, Antetokounmpo, Curry, Leonard, James, Kevin Durant, Booker, Morant, Damian Lillard and Butler missed a total of 274 games for rest or injury, with Durant’s 35 the most and Jokic’s 13 the fewest. That works out to about 23 games each, or about 28% of their teams’ schedules.

Other players get hurt, too; 10 seasons ago 28 players appeared in all 82 NBA games but this season the total was 10. The league record for consecutive games was set by A.C. Green, a much-traveled frontcourter, whose streak totaled 1,192 games from 1987 through 2001. That’s way short of the baseball mark of 2,632 games set by Cal Ripken Jr., but it’s just about as remarkable; as Green put it, “Ripken didn’t have to fight off two or three guys every time he went to catch a pop up.”   The NBA’s current streak is 392, held by Mikal Bridges of the Brooklyn Nets, so Green’s mark won’t be topped soon, if ever.

To the question of why all the basketball injuries, the reasons are several. One, of course, is that even with load management the NBA schedule is too long. Another is the increased speed of the game, which ups the stress all around. A third, by me, is the fact that the wealthy pro athlete of today (and just about all NBAers are wealthy, or should be) is a jock in season and out, and probably is working out somewhere when he isn’t playing.

 All proper workout schedules have a rest component, but given the competitiveness of big-time sports few jocks can resist thinking that one more rep, or lap, could be the difference between a starting job and the bench, or somesuch. There’s a thin line between peak fitness and a pulled hamstring,  so all teams and their fans must hope their star’s next step won’t put him on the injured list. 

 

              

                

DERBY PICKS

 

               In the “Who Says There’s No Good News?” department, a notable entry last year. The Stronach Group and the state of Arizona settled their dispute, allowing AZ horseplayers to again watch the simulcasts from Gulfstream Park and Santa Anita, among other Stronach tracks. Thus, at Kentucky Derby time, I’ve had a decent chance to be prepared and share my views on the race with you, my dear readers.  At no charge, of course-- extra or otherwise.

               The Derby has been interesting during my two-year hiatus. In 2021 the winner on the race course, Medina Spirit, was disqualified months later for a drug violation, and last year an 80-to-1 shot, Rich Strike, snuck past two battling favorites at the wire to cause agita coast to coast. Add the 2019 race, when winner Maximum Security was taken down for interference and the 65-to-1 runnerup replaced him in the winners’ circle, and the warning to “hold all tickets” never has seemed more apt.

                  A return to what Warren G. Harding called “normalcy” would dictate that a favorite prevail this year, and there’s a clear one. He’s Forte (post position 15), who leads the field in wins (6, of 7 starts) and money won (about $2.4 million), and was both the two-year-old champion and the dominant three-year-old on the busy Florida winter circuit. About the only knock against him was that he won the Florida Derby by a scant length after going off at 1-to-5. A 1-to-5 shot is expected to win by a city block.

               So I’ll have Forte in my exacta tickets, but he’ll go off at 3-to-1 or less and to make any money I’ll have to pair him with longer shots. Also on both my tickets will be Angel of Empire, (PP.14), 8-to-1 in the morning line. He’s a late-runner who won two Derby preps by daylight margins. Because of the odds I’ll be rooting mainly for him.

                 The nice thing about the Derby is that you get double-digit odds on very-good horses. I’ll put two of those—Kingsbarns,  (PP. 6) and Two Phils, (PP.3)—on one of my tickets. Both are 12-to-1 in the morning line. Kingsbarns runs in front-- always a good place to be—and Two Phils travels well, having won races at four different tracks.

               On my other ticket I’ll have Derma Sotogake, (PP. 17), and Mage, (PP.8). Derma, off at 10-to-1, is Japanese owned and trained, and those horses have been doing well worldwide. Mage, 15-to-1, was a close second to Forte in the Florida Derby, so he seems to belong among the best.

               To summarize, barring late scratches and mind changes I’ll bet two $1, four-horse exacta boxes—3-6-14-15 and 8-14-15-17—costing a modest $24. Putting down a few bucks makes any race more interesting.  Enjoy.

              

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

 

               A few weeks ago the Dallas Mavericks played the Chicago Bulls in the final NBA regular-season game for both teams.  The Mavs sat Kyrie Irving and three other usual starters and limited their best player, Luca Doncic, to the first quarter. Their remaining players made a game of it but eventually bowed, 115-112. A spot in the “play in” tournament, the precursor to the playoffs, was on the line, but while the loss cost the Mavs that distinction they gained a better place in the next player draft.

In a word, the Mavs “tanked”—lost on purpose. That’s not uncommon in our big-time professional sports but it was unusual that the team was frank about it — “an organizational choice,” coach Jason Kidd called it.

The league responded with outrage, fining the Mavs $750,000 and saying their action (inaction, really) “undermined the integrity of the sport” and “failed our fans and our league.” But note the careful wording of that statement, the “our” instead of “their.” Chances are that many if not most Mavs fans, aware that their mediocre team’s title chances were close to nil, thought that a better draft position was worth more than a play-in game or two. Likewise, the three-quarters-mil fine was a pittance to the team’s famously rich owner, Mark Cuban; indeed, he was docked $600,000 for doing pretty much the same thing in 2018. “Losing was our best option,” he said then.

               What we have here is a classic example of unintended consequences. All four of our major pro- sports leagues— in baseball, football, basketball and hockey-- replenish their rosters annually with a worst-goes-first amateur-player draft, designed with the laudable purpose of improving their laggard teams. But what we see annually is the unedifying spectacle of a race to the bottom among teams who believe that’s their best road to the top.

               Now, losing on purpose isn’t as easy as it may appear.  No athlete, pro or weekend hacker, wants to lose, and with few exceptions will put out his or her best effort once the opening bell or its equivalent sounds. Fact is, in contact sports like football and hockey, less than whole-hearted effort can lead to injury. What happens, then, is that clubs will pare their rosters by trading away useful players for prospects or draft choices, hoping that their fans will stick with them while the kids they acquire grow up to fuel a renaissance. If they pick wisely, it’ll work. If not, it won’t.

               That’s been an option for decades but it took the baseball 2006 Washington Nationals to formalize it. That team, transplanted from Montreal the year before, and with dim short-term prospects, embarked on what top execs Stan Kasten and Mike Rizzo publicly called “The Plan,” whose essence is expressed in the paragraph above. The Nats endured losing seasons from 2006 through 2010 but accumulated the wherewithal to draft such worthies as Stephen Strausburg, Bryce Harper and Anthony Rendon. A period of success followed, culminating in a 2019 World Series victory.

               Other teams took note. Theo Epstein tanked the Chicago Cubs in 2012 through ’14 while he put together the roster that won the 2016 Series, ending an epic, 108-year title drought. The Houston Astros were doing the same thing at about the same time, with longer-lasting results. It’s noteworthy that those things happened in baseball, where the gap between the Majors and draft-level players is the widest among our Big Four. That entrenched the lesson.

               Baseball and football have straight-out worst-goes-first rules, and the NFL’s exciting bottom race this season came down to the final game. The Houston Texans, who do few things right, led most of the way, but surprised by winning two of their last three games to finish at 3-13-1 in the won-lost-tied column. That allowed them to be aced out by the Chicago Bears, who came in at 3-14.

               The Bears, with a new coach on board, were not terrible to start, standing at 3-4 after the first seven games. Then they traded away (for draft choices) their two best defensive players—lineman Robert Quinn and linebacker Roquan Smith—and went into a 10-game swoon. Among the early losses in that stretch were a few in which they were competitive, but they finished in full fade, being outscored 39 to 105 in their last three outings. Of such performances are No. 1 draft positions made. The team being hard up all around, they traded that top spot for more picks, but their talent deficit is so large it’ll probably take at least one more quite-bad season to get them into any title mix.

               The NBA and the NHL have tried to avert too many overt tankings by creating draft lotteries involving the several worst teams every season (their number has varied), but last placers still have an edge for the top spot, so the races continue. In hockey this season three teams—the Anaheim Ducks, Chicago Blackhawks and Columbus Blue Jackets—battled to the wire for last. The Blue Jackets were bad, finishing 4-9 in their last 13 games. The Blackhawks were worse at 2-11, but the Ducks put the puck in the net by going out at 0-13. The Ohioans and Chicagoans tied for second-worst in the standings, with the former getting the best of the tie-breakers. Anaheim will have a 25.5% lottery shot at No. 1, the Blue Jackets 13.5% and the Hawks 11.5.

               The top draft prize in hockey this year is substantial. He’s Connor Bedard, a smallish, beardless Canadian youth of 17 years who averaged better than a goal a game in his last two seasons of junior play.  He’s hailed as a unique talent, one who can set the league afire, but there’s many a slip ‘twixt the juniors and Bigs and any sport’s draft remains a crapshoot. Remember that when the numbers are drawn and the names are announced.

              

              

WE WUZ ROBBED

 

               The National Basketball Association’s seemingly endless playoff schedule starts today (April 15), made longer by the new play-in sked that began last Tuesday (4/11), but one of the game’s dominant themes already is reverberating through the land.  It’s the “We Wuz Robbed” cry from fans who think their teams have been or will be victimized by referee unfairness.

               It’s a claim that follows all sports, probably out of the ingrown touch of paranoia we all harbor, but none more so among our American Big Three than basketball. My hometown Phoenix Suns have been especially irate of late, citing a 21-25 per-game free-throw-attempt deficit during the regular season as prima facie proof of evil doings. If it’s occurred to them and their fans that, maybe, the Suns just foul more than foes, they’ve kept it to themselves.

                The hoops sport is singled out because its refs have more to do with the outcome of its games than most others. The on-court banging around that characterizes the NBA—and is celebrated by the league’s boosters-- is so pervasive that fouls might be called on just about every play.  As it is, NBA refs call 48 personal fouls in an average game. That compares with the average of 12 penalty mark-offs a game in the National Football League, a total that in itself stirs anger.

               The notion that game officials or the league itself favors some teams at the expense of others also is strongest in the NBA.  The model favored team is, of course, the New York Knicks, probably because of general hinterland bias against the metropolis, but also because of the 1985 draft-lottery drawing that gave the Knicks the right to acquire giant center Patrick Ewing, that year’s prize. Anti-Knick vibes have waned in recent decades, probably because the perceived favoritism hasn’t brought the poor guys a title since 1973. Now, I guess, the LA Lakers, from the West Coast metropolis, are said to be the pets.

               Anyone who’s been close to sports knows that the whole idea of organized official bias is ludicrous. I’ve known refs or umps professionally or personally (my nephew David Trachtenberg calls high-school basketball and volleyball games in the Denver area), and can say unreservedly that no other group matches them for pure-hearted devotion to their sports. Big-league game officials today make good money—NBA refs top out at $550,000 a year and MLB umps at $450,000—but just about all of them started out officiating kids’ games at $50 a pop, and that rate or close to it still prevails in the playgrounds. Without such heroes organized sports in this country wouldn’t exist.

               This is not to say that there is no such thing as official bias. It exists, but perhaps not in ways, or for reasons, some might expect. For these I refer to the book “Scorecasting,” by Tobias J. Moskowitz, a professor of finance at Yale U., and L. Jon Wertheimer, an editor at Sports Illustrated magazine. It took a statistical look at some of sports’ popular verities and debunked more than a few of them.

Published in 2011, the book is a dozen years old and some things have changed in that span, but because it draws on mountains of data that aren’t easily moved, its main conclusions remain valid. One, for example, showed that the NFL practice of “icing” placekickers by calling last-second timeouts doesn’t work— success rates with and without them were almost identical. Another showed that NFL teams that “went for it” on fourth down anywhere near the 50-year-line did better than ones that made the conventional choice of punting. A third questioned the widespread practice of removing from NBA games players with five (of the permitted six) fouls with considerable game-time left. Those guys foul out so infrequently (about 20% of the time) that it’s better to keep their production by letting them play.

The book’s most interesting conclusions have to do with home-field advantage; that’s one of the enduring truths of all team sports, with home edges of 55% to 60% across leagues since time immemorial. I’ll spare you from reading, and myself from presenting, most of the stats, but using clever measures it eliminated as causes such factors as home-field familiarity, home comforts and visitors’ travel weariness. What it found, regardless of nation, sport or decade, was official bias in favor of home teams.

The difference was strongest in low-score soccer, where European-league home teams win or tie about 60% of the time. Data dating from the 1800s showed that soccer refs consistently give home teams edges in extra time, red cards and penalty kicks, things that often are decisive in one-goal outcomes. In baseball, millions of MLB data bits collected electronically for more than 20 years show that ball-strike calls favor home teams. In basketball the homers get the breaks on not only personal-foul calls but also on ones involving ball-possession changes. The differences are small, usually amounting to just a few percentages, but you can drown in a lake that averages a foot deep.

The authors assert, convincingly, that the reasons behind the discrepancies have nothing to do with conscious bias. One is the all-sports dictum—real although unspoken—that the players should decide the games; for that reason, they say, umps are especially hesitant to make “ball four” or “strike three” calls on close pitches, and penalty frequency in all sports declines late in close-fought contests and in playoffs. Another is the tendency toward conformity found in all human groups, mirroring people’s psychological desire to be agreeable to those around them. Thus, the home-field edge grows with crowd size and the nearness of the crowds to the playing fields.

For more (and there’s a lot more) you gotta see the book. It’s not light reading, but it’s worth the effort for serious fans. It’s available on Amazon for $17, plus delivery.  And no, I’m not up for a slice.

 

              

              

BETTERBALL

 

               To say that the NCAA men’s basketball tournament has been upsetting is to say the least. A No. 16-seeded team beat a No. 1, a No. 15 beat a 2. All four regional top seeds didn’t make it to the round of eight. Kentucky, Duke and Kansas were out by the Sweet Sixteen, Florida Atlantic, Creighton and San Diego State were in. What in the world was going on?

               The TV commentators and sports-blab radio hosts were full of complicated answers, of course, but a simple one should suffice. It’s that lots of good young basketball players are around these days, lots and lots. Too many to man merely the game’s traditional blue-blood college teams and conferences, for sure.  In case you haven’t noticed, or even if you’d only sensed it, basketball has become our best-played team sport, by a mile.

               Not only are there more good teams than there used to be, but the players also are better individually, also by a mile. I wasn’t much of a basketballer myself—the playground on which I grew up had hoops but was covered in gravel, and you can’t really play basketball on that stuff. But my first paying newspaper job, in 1957 at age 19, was covering Champaign High School sports for the Champaign-Urbana (Illinois) Courier, and the basketball coach there, Lee Cabutti, was nice enough to give me a grounding in the game’s tactical side. That gave me a leg up as an observer.

`              As reporter and fan I’ve followed the game closely since, and its improvement in all areas can only be called immense. Back in the 1950s most players over 6-feet-4-inches tall could pretty much be written off as stiffs. Today point guards routinely top that height. High-school teams now are better than good college teams were then. The NBA is so good it can be enjoyed as performance art. The women’s game has kept pace, and then some; on a percentage basis its improvement has surpassed that of the men’s.

             Much of that can be traced to the nature of the game. It’s five players on a side as opposed to nine in baseball and 11 in football, meaning that it affords individuals a greater chance to shine. Basketball courts require less real estate than baseball or football fields and, thus, are more suitable to urban environments. Equipment costs are small—a ball alone suffices, no protective gear is needed.

 Football can be dangerous—someone’s out to get you on every snap. Baseball can be boring—an outfielder can stand around for hours and get maybe two or three balls hit his way. Basketball is the most fun to play and practice; a kid can spend a pleasant day alone dribbling and shooting, and games can be played one-on-one or two-on-two, up to the regulation five-on-five.

               Coaching is better at every level, and not all of it takes place on a court in a formal setting. Just about every pro or major-college game is widely televised, and with instant replay and ex-coaches or players at every microphone, every game is a clinic for those at home. Kids today know about things like ball screens and box-and-ones from early ages. It’s like with computers—it’s as though they were born with the knowledge. 

               And while basketball was a seasonal sport in ancient times, it’s year-around today, with the high-school season followed by summer camps and AAU leagues. Specialized high schools that put sports first flourish; even some public schools play “national” schedules that include air travel to meet out-of-state foes. Some high-school games are on ESPN, and the players are too sophisticated to say “Hi, mom!”     

               Behind all that is the sociological change that has affected all our sports, but basketball the most: the field gates and gym doors opening wide to African-Americans. It was anything but instant. It’s well known that Major League Baseball was integrated by the elevation of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, but less known that basketball took a full two-more decades before all its heavy bars were lifted.

The NBA signed its first black players in 1950, but it was a young and not-influential league at the time. The college game ruled then and took it’s time manning up. My school, the University of Illinois, had its first black basketball starter in 1957. He was Mannie Jackson, who later played for and still-later owned the Harlem Globetrotters. The Southeastern Conference didn’t integrate its teams until 1966, probably not incidentally the same year an all-black five from the University of Texas at El Paso defeated a favored all-white squad from the University of Kentucky for the NCAA crown.

In that same fateful year the empire struck back by banning dunk shots with its so-called “Lew Alcindor Rule,” informally named for the 7-foot-2 star, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who that season would lead UCLA to the first of three NCAA titles in his tenure there. Then as now most high schools followed college rules, so dunks were forbidden at that level, too. The NBA permitted dunking at the time but the practice wasn’t suffered gladly by foemen; any player who leaped for one could expect to have his legs cut out from under him.

 By the time the rule was repealed in 1976, just about everyone cheered. Dunking added a new dimension of showmanship to basketball and made it more fun to play and watch. Kids today learn to dunk on tiny goals before they learn to shoot.

The African-American ascent has lifted basketball, and brought riches to a few, but by me it hasn’t been an unmitigated boon. Too many black kids— and some white ones, too—fritter away their youths dribbling basketballs and dreaming hoops dreams to the exclusion of other goals, but for even the very talented making an NBA roster remains a struck-by-lightning proposition.  Someone should write a pamphlet for high-school basketballers titled “Have a Plan B.” Don’t read it, don’t play.

              

 

                  

                

BUYING A TITLE

 

               I was born and raised in Chicago, which the great Bob Verdi (with an assist from Carl Sandburg) called “the city of broad shoulders and narrow trophy cabinets,” so I’m acquainted with sports scarcity. That’s one reason I fit in nicely with the area around Phoenix, Arizona, my home for the last 25 years.

               Phoenix has representatives in all four of the major American team sports, but has little to show for itself in the prize department. The basketball Suns, football Cardinals, baseball Diamondbacks and hockey Coyotes have put in a total of 139 seasons in what we call the Valley of the Sun but have produced exactly one championship, that of the 2001 D’backs. If that ain’t a record for futility, it has to be close.

               During the last few weeks, though, folks hereabouts have been downright giddy over the prospects of the Suns. That stems not so much over the team’s won-lost record (37-32 as of yesterday, fourth best in the NBA West) as its outlook after the addition of Kevin Durant, one of the hoops sport’s certified superstars. The costs of the move were great (details below), but the upside is considerable. The local consensus is that the Suns have bought themselves an NBA crown.

               If they succeed they will join the crowd—that’s the way it’s aways been done and, probably, always will be.  The teams with the biggest payrolls don’t necessarily rule their leagues, but the teams with the smallest never do. The rule is that if you want to get into the post you’d better ante.

               Indeed, that’s how Phoenix got its only title. The D’backs entered Major League Baseball in 1998 in typical expansion-team fashion, with a low-payroll roster of rejects and rookies and a won-lost record to match—65-97 and last place in the National League West. The team packed ‘em in that first season, but solely on the basis of novelty. Its managing owner, Jerry Colangelo, also had owned the Suns and knew that Phoenicians were an easily distracted lot that wouldn’t long back a loser, so he almost tripled the team’s $29 million first-year payroll over the next couple of years in search of some instant success and history.

 Mostly, he paid up big for two proven pitchers—future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, who’d be in the Hall if he’d kept his mouth shut. The result was the 2001 World Series victory in only the team’s fourth season, the quickest that’s been done. Subsequent D’backs’ owners reverted to bottom-third payroll status, with predictable on-field and gate results.

Baseball is the sport with the highest correlation between spending and winning. That’s because it’s the only one without a salary cap. The game’s money gap between top and bottom is huge—an eight-times difference going into this season between the No. 1 New York Mets (at $336 million) and the No. 30 Oakland A’s ($42 m). That discrepancy dates from the game’s distant days, when the New York Yankees could pay Babe Ruth $80,000 a year (in 1930) when $10,000 was a good annual big-league paycheck.

 Low-payroll baseball teams can make title runs with canny management that builds rosters that feature young and relatively low-paid players, but only one (the 2015 Kansas City Royals, with a No. 17-ranked payroll) has won the biggest prize of late. In the NFL and NBA, the difference between the biggest and smallest spenders is about 2x, and a team like the Kansas City Chiefs can realize championship dreams at No. 24 on the salary list, but it won’t stay there long as its ring-wearers look to get paid. In this season’s NBA, the top half-dozen title contenders (the Milwaukee Bucks, Boston Celtics, Denver Nuggets, Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia Warriors and Suns) all rank among the league’s top 10 salarywise.

 Basketball is a five-players-at-a-time game, where a single player can make a big difference, so the Durant acquisition seems to tilt the floor in the Suns’ direction.  A near-seven-footer with an unblockable shot, he’s one of the game’s half-dozen best players, and his 27.3 points per game scoring average is tops among active performers. He was the league MVP in 2014, owner of two championship rings (2017 and ’18) and a 13-time all-star in a 15-season career. The Suns’ incumbent aces—Devin Booker, Chris Paul and Deandre Ayton—reached the league’s championship finals without him in 2021, so the trip to the top seems short.

But, but, but Durant comes with caveats. He’s 34 years old, and while his skills seem undiminished when he plays he hasn’t played much of late. He missed the entire 2019-20 season with injury, sat out 50 games the next year and 27 the next. He’s already missed more than 20 in this one, and in warmups before the fourth game of his Suns’ tenure sprained an ankle and might miss the next two or three weeks, it’s said.

               Further, new Suns’ owner Mat Ishbia’s new trinket is mind-bogglingly expensive even by modern-sports standards, with Durant pulling down $43 million this year and about $150 million more over the next three of the four-year deal he reached last season with the Brooklyn Nets. The Suns are on the hook for only about a quarter of his current-season haul, but his contract added a reported $35 million to the team’s “luxury tax” bill. Even the new billionaire on the block must have swallowed hard over that one.

               Finally, it would be no exaggeration to say the Suns mortgaged their future to get Durant. The deal sent to the Nets four of the team’s No. 1 draft choices—in 2023, ’25, ’27 and ’29—plus two very good young players-- Mikal Bridges and Cam Johnson.  Bridges was a first-team All-NBA Defensive Team choice last season, and as a Net he’s blossomed into a big-time scorer as well, averaging a Durant-like 26 points a game in his first 13 games in Brooklyn.  At age 26, he promises to be going strong after Durant has been pensioned.

               And as for the all-in Suns’ title prospects this season, maybe yes and maybe no. Other teams also have some great players, and they get the ball, too. As the racetrack announcers say post-race, “Hold all tickets.”

              

TICK, TICK, TICK

 

               Baseball always has been the game without a clock, but no more. Starting this season there will be lots of clocks- in centerfield, around home plate, on the second-tier facades. They’ll be measuring the maximum time between pitches the rules specify (15 seconds with the bases empty, 20 when runners are on base), the time between innings (two minutes, 15 seconds) and the time batters have to be in the box and ready to hit (with eight seconds remaining on the pitch count). Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

               That’s just a few of the changes the lords of the game have decreed to take effect in spring training, and in the new campaign. Another will be a requirement that each pitch begin with two infielders on each side of second base with their feet on the dirt. That’ll eliminate the radical shifts that have helped prune batting averages in recent seasons. Still another will be an increase in the size of the base bags to 18 inches square from 15 inches. That’s aimed at reducing injuries and making it a bit easier to steal, the stolen base being another casualty of game trends. Retained from last season—surprisingly to me because it’s so unbaseballlike—is the practice of beginning extra innings with a runner on second base and no outs. Fewer extras has been the goal there.

               To all of those I say “Hurray!”  I’m old, and thus a baseball traditionalist in most things, but times change and so should the National Pastime. Baseball’s stately pace and low-octane offenses have been  detriments in this quick-thrill era, with declines in just about every measure of public interest.

               I’m a bit of an expert on the above changes because they’ve been previewed during the last two Arizona Fall League seasons, which I’ve attended extensively. I’ve no stats to back my judgement but I think the anti-shift measure will have the most noticeable effect. How can it not, opening as it does bigger holes for pull hitters to hit through? The likes of Kyle Schwarber and Anthony Rizzo must be celebrating.

               By cutting the base paths by a few inches (4.5, actually) the bigger bases should result in a few more “safe” signs, but a bigger boon to would-be thieves could be a new rule to limit to two the number of times a pitcher can throw to a base to hold a runner on. The main aim of that wrinkle, though is brevity, not larceny.

               Ever heard the term “Five O’clock Lightning”? It referred to the late-inning run barrages produced by the 1927 New York Yankees, a gang still revered for its offensive power. Baseball games back then—all day games—began at 3:30 p.m. and, thus, were in their late stages around 5. Game times ran about two hours-- so the fans could be home for dinner, one supposes.  

               Baseball has gotten fussier since, and game times are longer, exceeding three hours in recent decades. Last season’s average was three hours, 11 minutes. That’s too long for current tastes, thus the advent of the clocks. Will they work? Sure they will, and the effects should be relatively seamless.  I didn’t hold a watch to the Fall League games I attended last year and the year before, but I can’t recall one lasting more than three hours. The penalty for a pitcher exceeding the clock is an automatic ball, with an automatic strike for an unready batter. Such calls were made only once or twice a game here, with little dispute. Commentators can be counted upon to obsess about them early on, but complaints should quickly fade.

               Fall League games were contested by kids in their early 20s, though, and they do everything faster than their elders, so the net effect on game times in the Bigs is uncertain. The game’s rulers should heed the self-help plans, which note that there are things one can control and things one can’t. In the latter category is the one that, by me, has affected baseball most over the current century. That would be the improvements in pitching. Big-league pitchers these days are monsters—big guys who can throw strawberries through battleships. Ninety-five-miles-an-hour fastballs used to be rare, now they’re commonplace. So are the drop-off-the-table breaking balls that make the heaters look hotter, a product of the coaching pitchers receive from an early age.

 Breaking balls are tougher on young arms than fastballs, but now there’s Tommy John surgery for injured wings. Strikeouts are up--way, way up—by about 25% in the last 20 years, to over 40,000 a season since 2017, and the trend seems inexorable. There have been more strikeouts than hits in the Majors the last few years! More strikeouts mean more pitches, whatever the time between them.

 The way pitchers are deployed has contributed further to blunting offenses, sending the game-wide batting average last year to .243, the lowest since 1968. Time was when starting pitchers were expected to finish, or at least last well into games. Now they’re deployed in relays, the better to keep batters off balance. In the 1960-1980 period, teams utilized an average of about 2.5 pitchers a game. Last year’s average was 4.67. That movement also seems here to stay.

               Nothing turns off TV sets like a mid-inning pitching change, and little has been done of late to speed that.  One typically begins with a stroll by the manager to the mound, where he takes the ball from, says a few words to, and pats the fanny of the outing hurler. The reliefer saunters in from the distant bullpen and another discussion takes place. Then he fusses around a bit and throws up to eight warmup pitches. Eight?! What was he doing in the bullpen, for heaven’s sake? Tick, tick, tick.

               If baseball is serious about moving things along, the whole “warmup” issue—one that it can control-- should be addressed. It’s the only sport that allows players to practice on the field while a game is (supposedly) in progress.

               Enough warming up. Enough playing catch. Play ball, already.