The View from Right Field

The Economics of Big-Time Professional Sports In a Pandemic

With Major League Baseball and the NBA completing their seasons and football moving along with its season, Ben Cohen and Louise Radnofsky came up with some lessons after sports’ first Covid-19 season in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.  Among them is this:

“The past few months have taught sports that fans are important but not essential – at least for now.  The games can be played without them.  Being flexible and doing the unimaginable, whether it is a closed-door competition or shortening some baseball games to seven innings, paid off for the leagues.

The Greatest High School Football Player Who Never Was

This is the story of the greatest high school football player who never was.

One late summer morning, the high school football team was having try-outs.  Just as the tryouts were ending and everybody was leaving, the coach noticed a new kid walking up, sort of hesitantly.  The kid apologized for being late, but said he had just moved into town and didn’t know what time the tryouts were.  He asked if he could still try out.  The coach asked him if he had ever played before.  The kid said he had, a little. 

Even though the coach really wanted to leave, he decided to give the kid a chance.  With everybody else gone, the coach said he would give the kid a tryout himself.  When the coach timed the kid on the 40-yard dash, the kid was so fast, the coach thought his watch was broken.  The kid kicked field goals from 50 yards out and threw passes that hit the target 40 yards away.  He was the best player the coach had ever seen.  The coach knew, with this kid on the team, they could beat anybody.

Congratulations, Chiefs Fans. But 50 Still Isn’t 108.

With the Kansas City Chiefs having won their first Super Bowl in 50 years, some people in Chicago are saying, “Big deal.  Fifty isn’t even half of 108.”  Which is true.  But what is interesting is that some of the people making those comments aren’t even fifty themselves.  Which should, in theory, mean that there was no difference for those people between the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl after 50 years and the Cubs winning the World Series after 108.  Or, for that matter, for fans in their mid- 30s, there should be no difference between the Cubs in 2016 and the Pirates, who haven’t won a World Series since 1979, or the Orioles, who haven’t won since 1983.  Except there is.

Because even though there were probably only a couple of Cubs fans in 2016 who were alive in 1908, being a Cubs fan meant that it felt like it had been 108 years.  That is what the media always talked about and what we always read about every time the Cubs made the postseason and it didn’t work out (or when they didn’t even make the postseason).  It was always there.

LeBron James and China. Whose Financial Harm Is He Worried About?

At this point, to mix sports references, piling on Lebron James about his China comments probably deserves an unsportsmanlike penalty.  In any case, perhaps the most hurtful comment, at least from the viewpoint of LeBron’s normal constituency, was in today’s Wall Street Journal, when they noted how similar LeBron’s comments were to Donald Trump’s.  Ouch. 

The only comment I wanted to make was on LeBron’s concern that “so many people could have been harmed not only financially [but] physically, emotionally, spiritually” by Daryl Morey’s tweet.  Hmmm, “financially”.  Do you think LeBron was talking about little people, people who might lose their jobs in Hong Kong or China, or the U.S., if there is a big dispute between China and the NBA?

If You Wonder Why Football Is So Dangerous, Look at Jim Taylor’s Obituary

Unlike baseball, I have not written much about football.  I was, however, a football fan a long time ago,¹ which is why I noticed an obituary in Sunday’s newspaper for Jim Taylor, a Hall of Fame fullback, who played for the Green Bay Packers in the late 1950s and 1960s (Chicago Bears fans may boo now).

There were a couple of interesting things in the obituary, especially comparing pro football today with pro football back then.  First, Jim Taylor died at 83.  How many football players today, who play ten years in the NFL, like he did, are going to live to 83?

Colin Kaepernick and the National Anthem: A Bit of Baseball History

I am a little late on the Colin Kaepernick brouhaha, but then it is perhaps not too late to bring a little history to questions like this.  The question, of course, is standing for the National Anthem before sporting events – or, rather, the playing of the National Anthem before sporting events.  The National Anthem is always played before sporting events.  Baseball games.  Football games.  Just about everything.¹  So it is a big deal when some player won’t stand or pay attention during the Anthem.²

But the point is the Anthem hasn’t always been played before baseball games.  I remember the Chicago Cubs didn’t play the Anthem before games in late 1950s and early 1960s.  (I can’t speak to before the late 1950s; I wasn’t there – or at least I don’t remember.)  They would play it for holidays, like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, but not for regular games.  It was only when our involvement in Vietnam started to increase in the mid-1960s that Philip Wrigley began having the National Anthem played before all games.  Obviously, it is standard now (and Wayne Messmer always does a fantastic job when he sings for the Cubs), but it is perhaps useful to remember that it wasn’t always so.
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¹ It’s not played before high school or college tennis matches; at least not at the ones I have been to.
² I am always impressed by the respect that foreign baseball players show while the National Anthem is played.  I mean, if you are from the Dominican Republic, etc., it’s not your anthem.  But they always stand there respectfully.

High School Sports Teams in a Gender Identity Age

With all of the controversy about who should be using what bathrooms – and showers and locker rooms – in schools now that the Departments of Education and Justice tell us that a child’s gender identity trumps¹ their “sex assigned at birth,” the next question is sports teams.  But don’t worry.  DOE and DOJ have already provided a simple, clear answer to this question.  Here it is, courtesy of the “Dear Colleague letter" that DOE and DOJ sent out on May 13, 2016:

Athletics.  Title IX regulations permit a school to operate or sponsor sex-segregated athletics teams when selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or when the activity involved is a contact sport.  A school may not, however, adopt or adhere to requirements that rely on overly broad generalizations or stereotypes about the differences between transgender students and other students of the same sex (i.e., the same gender identity) or others’ discomfort with transgender students.  Title IX does not prohibit age-appropriate, tailored requirements based on sound, current, and research-based medical knowledge about the impact of the students’ participation on the competitive fairness or physical safety of the sport.

I assume that answers any questions you might have.  Either that or it leaves you so confused that you have no idea what to ask, which is pretty much the same thing.
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¹ Perhaps “trumps” isn’t the right word here.

Can You Really Change the Team You Root For?

I have written enough about politics and especially the candidates running for president recently.  Let’s talk about something important and fun: baseball.  We are approaching spring (in fact, to those who follow the meteorological seasons, we are already in spring).  And, as everybody knows, in spring, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of … baseball.

During the “Rock Star Rookies” session at the Cubs Convention back in January (clearly, both types of winter), a fan stood up and said to Kyle Schwarber that it took a Hoosier (Kyle played college baseball at Indiana University) to change him from a White Sox fan to a Cubs fan.

On the day the Convention started, the Chicago Tribune had an article on Ben Zobrist, who grew up in Eureka, Illinois.  The athletic director at Eureka High School said that, while Eureka is normally split 50/50 between Cubs fans and the St. Louis Cardinals fans, with Ben signing with the Cubs, “a lot more people will be rooting for the Cubs now.”

Another Former Chicago Bears Player Is Diagnosed With Degenerative Brain Disease – And That Is News?

The Chicago Tribune reports this morning on yet another former Chicago Bears great who was diagnosed as having had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain injury that has been found in lots of former professional football players.  In fact, the reports of former football players have CTE are becoming so common, it is almost not “news” anymore that a former football having the disease.  A couple more of these, and we will be at the point that the real news will be that a person played professional football for any period of time and did not have a brain injury.

Professional football has become nothing more than very large men shortening each other’s life expectancy.  Which makes you wonder how much longer parents will allow their children to play football.

Does Jon Lester Being on Sports Illustrated Jinx the Cubs?

There is in sports something called the “Sports Illustrated Jinx”.  You get on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and then you are jinxed.  (I don’t know if this applies to the swimsuit issue.)

If that is true, should Chicago Cubs fans be worried that Jon Lester is on the cover of Sports Illustrated?  No.  The Goat will beat Sports Illustrated.

But more importantly, players who aren’t good enough is even a bigger jinx than the Goat.