First pitch: 7:10 Central
Weather: National Weather Service still gutted, humid with small chance of storms, 84°
Tonight’s Twins starter, or opener, or whatever, Pierson Ohl, has made it all the way from Fort Myers to Wichita to Saint Paul and Minneapolis just this season. He probably throws several different types of pitches, and I don’t care, unless he’s a knuckleballer, which he isn’t. So, nope, don’t care.
I will say that the Wichita “Wind Surge” is a sh***y name on two fronts. One, you had “Linemen” just sitting there, waiting for you. What, you hate Jimmy Webb? I dunno who or what owns the Wind Surge, but whoever you are, Jimmy Webb is cooler than you.
Here’s Glen Campbell doing the song;
here’s R.E.M. There’s lotsa good versions. Although, really, only the 5th Dimension should ever do Webb’s “Up, Up and Away.”
Second, I’m not crazy about team names based on natural disasters, anyways. I guess it’s moderately OK if the disaster is based on plate tectonics, like the San Jose Earthquakes or Salem-Keizer Volcanoes. Stiil, those things DO kill people. Anything exacerbated by climate change is really kinda yuck. This means you, Carolina Hurricanes. Maybe we could have one named after those wildfires so strong they create
fire tornadoes? There
WAS a team named the Worcester Tornadoes, after
a tornado that hit Worcester, MA, in 1953. Not a fire tornado, the regular kind. It killed 94 people, so root root root for the home team! The Worcester Tornadoes were part of the Canadian-American League, and existed from 2005 to 2012, when (per Wiki) “the Can-Am League announced that it was terminating the franchise’s charter due to a slumping financial state which included failure to pay for uniform cleaning.”
Speaking of Joe Pohlad,
Craig Calcaterra pointed out that the Twins, Angels, and Nationals have all had a tough time recently finding buyers. I dunno much about the Nats’ situation and am not gonna
bother to find out, but the Angels’ one was definitely connected to the little matter of the former mayor going to jail over
taking bribes from the team. (So, taking illegal campaign contributions is, correctly, a crime, but paying those bribes? Free speech!)
As new commenter
Real Viking observed the other day, the name of the game now in sports is being a real estate developer, and getting all that sweet, sweet property AROUND the stadium for people who want to live next to a sporadic traffic nightmare. The Twins can’t get out of their Target Field lease until 2040. That immediately makes them a less appealing purchase.
Although this could change. The original terms of the stadium deal stated that the Pohlads could not even sell the team before 2040, or else they’d have to repay Hennepin County whatever the increased sell price had become due to Target Field’s existence. It would have been a legal funtime battle arguing how to calculate that number!
That part of the deal appears to be dead now, probably bargained away for the Pohlads agreeing to spend a little bit of their own money in updating luxury seating boxes and stuff.
So it’s not inconceivable that a future bargain could include shortening the terms of the lease. “We agree to demand less taxpayer money now, if you let us sell the team to somebody who’ll threaten to move it unless they get MORE taxpayer money in the near future.” That’s entirely possible. When it comes to stadium demands, teams are like that character in
Yellow Submarine who inhales everything and everything into its honker until the entire world disappears.
(This character apparently
has a name: the Suckophant. So today you’ve learned a fact about
Yellow Submarine.)
Drew Magary at
SFGate wrote about how as part of their new TV deal, the NFL owns a little piece of
ESPN now. And this will probably be a wave of the future, with sports leagues demanding little pieces of the TV networks, be they CBS or Amazon/Paramount/whatever. Magary is right in mentioning that, while you or I don’t give five s**ts about who owns the like of Pat McAfeee and Screamin’ A. Smith, it is gonna be a loss once ESPN is forbidden to report on, say, the latest NFL player who shot himself in the heart because he wanted science to study his CTE-wrecked brain. And you can expect even less coverage of how stadium deals are a disaster for taxpayers, too.
Here’s a rather different sort of stadium deal!
Tom Dart of The Guardian about super-expensive high school football stadiums! Which sounds crazy, but you know how big a deal HS football is, especially in the South. So, maybe it helps schools to have these things, like a $70 million football stadium in Texas. Although, Dart concludes:
“Texas is ranked 34th for
educational attainment by US News & World Report, is far below the national average for
teacher pay and expenditures per student, and according to
one study, this year Texas teachers expect to spend on average $1,550 of their own money on classroom supplies. Many would argue there are better things to spend money on than school sports.“
Probably some of you applaud bigger football stadiums and making teachers poorer. You hate those overpaid teaching lazies! (Thanks for hating Mrs. James, by the way, I’ll pass it along.) But it might be worth noting what else Tom Dart’s article points out:
It’s long been common in professional sports as teams adopt a strategy beloved of airlines, with their myriad fare classes and options: charging wildly different amounts for the same product based on variations in the customer experience. As the masses in the cheap seats generate the noise, corporate boxes can deliver thousands of dollars in income per event, giant video screens appeal to advertisers…
Upscale new arenas are also a way to entice fans off the couch in an era when it seems like almost every sporting contest, no matter how obscure, is streamed. “Everyone knows their biggest competitor is being able to watch on TV,” [economics professor Victor] Matheson says. Climate-controlled facilities mitigate against extreme weather, and with gargantuan video boards, televisions on concourses, myriad food and drink options and glitzy graphics on LED ribbon displays, fans can go to the stadium, experience the live atmosphere and still gaze at screens…
The theory underpinning the design is that modern fans want a more intimate and luxurious experience, with changing tastes – and a changing climate – rendering even relatively recent venues obsolete. In 2020 Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers quit their open-air 48,000-capacity ballpark, which opened in 1994, for a new 40,000-capacity building with a retractable roof. This season a minor league baseball team, the Salt Lake Bees, moved from Smith’s Ballpark, which also opened in 1994, to a new home, hiking ticket prices and halving their seating capacity in the process. The concentration on high-end customers, of course, prices out fans who cannot afford to spend heavily on a night out at the game…
Sports’ growing focus on premium customers mirrors a shift in the American economy as a whole: this year a Moody’s Analytics
study found that the US economy is now deeply reliant on the richest households, with the top 10% of earners accounting for 50% of consumer spending, a sharp rise from recent decades.
I am a little bummed out on the Twins right now. If someone paid me $100 a month to write once a week about a KBO team, I’d be done with the Twins in a heartbeat. Make it $5000 a month, I’ll move to Korea and write about the team every day. (Nobody will pay me to do this; KBO teams have their own, better writers, who can write in Korean.)
But, maybe a little more than the Twins, I am just bummed out by sports in general. There’s probably a huge baseball CBO standoff coming, with the usual arguments about “greedy players demanding millions to play a game I’d play for free” (which, no you wouldn’t, not at that hours they put into it and the toll it takes on their family life). In a way, I get that people think athlete salaries are ridiculous. They ARE ridiculous. But so’s the money being made by owners. (Which, often, we’re giving them as taxpayers whether we like that sport or not.) So’s the money made by almost every CEO in the country. And teachers are paying out of pocket to teach kids.
I like to think of sports as a way to distract myself from the rotten things in our world. Increasingly, though, I think sports — the business side of sports — are becoming one of the rotten things in our world. And I don’t like that feeling. I like remembering the Jim Bouton quote from
Foul Ball (his book about trying to save a historic minor league stadium): “Baseball is like religion. A great game with sh***y owners.”
I don’t like feeling that just by writing about big money baseball, I’m helping contribute to the big money side of it.
Yesterday we ate out for lunch, a real treat for us, and the TV was showing some Little League World Series game. A team from, I think, the Czech Republic was just getting whupped on by a team from Japan. The Czech pitcher, in the second inning, had developed a major case of the yips, and couldn’t do anything but throw ball, ball, easy pitch to wallop, ball, ball. He walked a batter with the bases full.
Think about that poor kid pitcher’s head. He was probably fantasizing the day before about how he was gonna lead the team to the championship. Now, it’s the second inning, and suddenly he’s allowed five players to score and the bases are loaded and THERE’S STILL NOBODY OUT. He is the loser. He blew it. He’ll rue that day for years.
Who, among us, hasn’t BEEN that kid? In some way or another? Hasn’t completely screwed up and humiliated ourselves? Maybe in a way we can laugh about now, but it sure stung at the time.
I want watching pro baseball to feel, again, like watching that kid baseball game did. And not that I want to watch kids play baseball! (I don’t, they fu***ng suck at it, I wanna watch good players.) But I wanna stop thinking about the money and the exclusive seating areas and all that crap, and just enjoy the sport, you know? Enjoy the personal drama of it.
And right now guys like Rob Manfred and his 30 bosses aren’t letting me. And it bites.
