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Between a rock and a needle

This article about baseball made me smile. It’s spot on and it has implications across sports. In baseball, amphetamines and then steroids made the game more compelling for fans. In cycling it was the dominance of Lance Armstrong aided by sophisticated blood doping. The violent collisions are a big part of why people like football but they come at a severe cost to the long-term health of some players. What is the right balance between clean and compelling? How can leagues navigate their way towards a healthy equilibrium?

Fans Sick of the Steroid Era Shouldn’t Complain Now

by William Rhoden for the New York Times

“You can’t have it both ways,” I said, pointing to the television screen as another batter grounded out. “You can’t tell baseball to get rid of steroids, rage again at so-called steroid cheats, and then complain when you get this.”

Baseball’s conundrum is how to present a clean game, and a quicker one, too, for that matter, that can attract more young fans. Nine-inning games that last nearly four hours are not the answer.

As to whether baseball is a sounder game now than it was when balls were flying out of the park not long ago — that’s a matter of taste.

News Clippings: The Business of Sports

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me. Sports can be followed on many levels. For some fans, only the action that takes place during the games matters. For most fans, following sports means watching games, learning the personalities of players and coaches, and following the business of sports attentively. For most of this fall, the leading story in the business of sports has been the mishandling of domestic violence by the NFL. Bryan Curtis of Grantland argues that, although the focus of the storm, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, is still standing, the public uproar has had some positive impact. Despite the storm, the NFL is still eyeing potential expansion to London. Jenny Vrentas writes about how the NFL might work in London in The MMQB. Meanwhile, established international sport organizations are receiving their fair share of criticism as well. Dan Wetzel and Tom Ley wrote wonderfully about the International Olympic Committee, rivaled in its corruption and general crumminess by the international soccer organization FIFA.

The Goodell Blackout

By Bryan Curtis for Grantland

By blasting Goodell in print, sportswriters acted as pulling guards for the government officials in Washington, who are now torturing the league by threatening to revoke many of its long-standing perks.

Since 1975, a Federal Communications Commission rule has given the league an imprimatur to remove games that don’t sell out from local TV and cable. If it’s 15 below zero when the Packers take the field, the FCC’s chairman recently noted, then Packers fans have to buy all the tickets or find a TV in Chicago. That sounds like extortion.

For years, the NFL has also protected its federal tax-exempt status. The exemption dates back to 1966, and although it has been a perennial talking point for politicians of all stripes, it has also been considered inviolable. “Revoking the tax exemption isn’t in the cards,” the Washington Post argued on September 15. “The NFL doesn’t lose games on Capitol Hill.” Well, that was before Goodell’s lousy press conference and two more weeks of heavy shelling from the press.

Finally, pressure from sportswriters forced action inside the NFL, too. When Goodell was still staggered from the release of the second tape, the NFL suddenly got serious about revising its drug policy.

Why London and Can it Work?

By Jenny Vrentas in The MMQB

The International Series has been a testing ground for the logistics of basing a team abroad.

Teams scheduled to play in London begin planning for their trips in February. They take two reconnaissance visits overseas in the spring. In August they send a shipment of bulk supplies by boat to save money and space on the team plane. Included in the Raiders’ shipment: 10 cases of 8.5 x 11-inch computer paper for play sheets (standard paper is a different size in the U.K.), a couple hundred cases of Gatorade (teams are superstitious about flavors) and 600 outlet plug converters.

“As long as they get their paychecks,” Bills Hall-of-Famer Andre Reed assured the forum of local fans, “players would play in Alaska.”

Steve Smallwood, 49, of Eastbourne, on the Channel coast, sees the growth of American football in the U.K. as a good thing, the same way he views the growth of MLS in the U.S. “And,” he offers, “I’d rather watch American football than rugby.”

Why no one wants to host the 2022 Olympics

By Dan Wetzel for Yahoo Sports

Essentially the only places interested in hosting the 2022 games are countries where actual citizens aren’t allowed a real say in things – communist China and Kazakhstan, a presidential republic that coincidentally has only had one president since it split from the old USSR in 1989.

“The vote is not a signal against the sport, but against the non-transparency and the greed for profit of the IOC,” Ludwig Hartmann, a German politician said when his country said no.

The IOC has billions of dollars laying around and billions more coming because to most people the Olympics is just a television show and the ratings are so high that the broadcast rights will never go down. The IOC doesn’t pay the athletes. It doesn’t share revenue with host countries. It doesn’t pay for countries to send their athletes. It doesn’t lay out any construction or capital costs. It doesn’t pay taxes.

Top Female Soccer Players Sue FIFA Over Bullshit Artificial Turf

By Tom Leyfor Screamer

After weeks of pleading with FIFA to change its mind about playing the 2015 women’s World Cup on field turf instead of grass and being met with nothing but stubbornness, a handful of women’s soccer’s biggest stars have filed a lawsuit against FIFA to try and force the organization to put the upcoming games back on grass.

Turf sucks, everyone knows it, and there’s no way FIFA will force it upon the men’s game if it continues to cut up and piss off players around the world. But that won’t stop the organization from crapping all over the biggest tournament in the women’s game by forcing women to play on it. The only thing that sucks worse than turf is FIFA.

News Clippings: Want the truth? Ask the players!

Football players have been in the news a lot this fall and mostly for the wrong reasons. A string of high profile domestic abuse and child abuse cases has left many observers wondering about the present and future of the National Football League. Luckily, some great journalists and organizations have given platforms to players and former players and I have appreciated hearing from them. I’ve chosen just a few of the many public contributions to share with you today. These three athletes are a great reminder that as physical as sports are, they are equally a mental pursuit. It’s a mistake to think that just because a football player can run through a brick wall that they think like a brick wall.

Take Him Off the Field

Chris Carter on ESPN NFL Countdown

Former wide receiver Chris Carter was impressive on television discussing the Adrian Peterson child abuse case. He two best points were that taking a player off the field is really the only way to adequately punish him and that tradition is no excuse for wrongdoing.

Looking Through Bulletproof Windows

William Gay for The MMQB

On the subject of domestic abuse, there could be better voices out there, but there’s none more immediately relevant than an active NFL football player who volunteers regularly at a shelter for victims of domestic abuse and whose mother was killed by his stepfather. William Gay is all of those things and an effective writer as well. Here he is on the balance between punishment and assistance:

A lot of people have asked me for my thoughts about the Ray Rice situation. They want to know if I think the punishment has been fair. With all due respect to the commissioner, I couldn’t care less about what the punishment was. My concern is not about how many games Ray Rice is going to play or not play. This isn’t about games or football; it’s about the bigger picture. It’s about life itself…

If we’re going to fix this problem in the NFL, our focus can’t be solely on what the punishments should be. The main priority needs to be helping victims—to show them how they can be heroes. The league needs to be asking, Why is this occurring? And how can we help prevent this? The NFL needs to focus on setting up programs that can help men and women have healthy relationships.

The NFL Made Me Rich. I Won’t Watch It Now.

Anna Sale for Death, Sex & Money on WNYC

Death, Sex & Money is an excellent weekly interview show on WNYC. Its title is a clever reference to a cliché about the only inevitable things in life being death and taxes. The NFL is nowhere near as inevitable as death, sex, or money but during the past decade, during football season… it has been right up there! Now, due to an increasing reluctance among its audience for its violence on and off the field, many are wondering whether they will keep following it. With that uncertainty as the backdrop, Sale interviewed former player Dominique Foxworth about his experience in college football and the NFL and his reflections on it now that he has retired and graduated from Harvard Business School. We’ll cut into Foxworthy answering a question about the end of his career. He retired the fall after participating in a collective bargaining negotiation as president of the NFL Players Association:

I just participated as the president in the negotiations for the collective bargaining, the most recent collective bargaining agreement, and I sat across the table from the owners of the teams and negotiated over the ten billion dollars the NFL was supposedly making. And days later, I was on the practice field. Like, sweating and listening to coaches yell and all that, and that—at this point in my life, I felt more comfortable at the table than I did on the field. It didn’t feel like—I went from the top of the totem pole to the bottom. We get paid well because the talents that we have are so rare. But you’re still the labor.

Do you enjoy watching football now?

Nope.

No? Do you just not watch?

Nah. I have a hard time watching injuries. It’s difficult for me to watch guys get knocked unconscious. The strategy and the mental part of football, I still love. It’s a lot more like chess, and these calculated decisions, than these other sports are. And I love that about football, and I love that about business, and I love that about chess. But, the play-by-play guys don’t know what they’re talking about, which is shocking considering there’s so many ex-athletes, and maybe they just simplify it for the sake of the common fan, but I can’t listen to them. Most of them. because they don’t know what they’re talking about, and it makes it hard for me to watch, like, no that’s wrong. And I want to see the entire field, so I can, like, really analyze the chess match. TV copy, I can’t—the angles that they have, what I enjoy about football, I can’t see.

News Clippings: The Best and Worst of Sports

Why do Fans Ignore Women’s Pro Sports?

By Shira Springer in The Boston Globe

Although it’s been 42 years since Title IX required that federally funded schools provide girls and women with equal opportunities to compete in sports, 17 years since the WNBA played its first season, 16 years since women’s ice hockey debuted at the Winter Olympics and the United States won gold and spurred young girls’ interest in the sport, and 15 years since the US women’s national soccer team drew 90,185 fans to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena for a women’s World Cup final, widespread interest in women’s professional team sports remains frustratingly elusive. The problems that plague teams in Boston often stymie female leagues nationwide: small operating budgets; lack of exposure; ill-fitting venues; competition from live local men’s games and an ever-increasing variety of nationally televised sports contests; fans stuck on the fact that female athletes aren’t as fast, strong, or physical as their male counterparts.

Marketing expert David Schmittlein, dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, suggests light beer as a case study. “When light beer was invented, it was terrible,” he says. “If anything, it was for girls, because real beer drinkers didn’t drink light beer. Ironically enough, that changed with football players like John Madden characterizing it not as light but as less filling. . . . The challenge for light beer was to create a distinctive value for the product. That is to some degree the challenge for women’s sports.

“What makes it a different and, in some respects, a better kind of experience than the men? How is it better? I don’t think women’s sports leagues are very diligent about asking that or knowing the answer to that.”

What it was like to cover Derek Jeter

By Peter Abraham for the Boston Globe

Every clubhouse has players who are comfortable with the media, some who tolerate it and others who dislike the process. Accountability is important regardless. When the same players are constantly left to explain losses or answer for the mistakes made by others, resentment can quickly fester.

Jeter never let that happen. If the Yankees lost, he was there to take the heat. And not once did he slip up by criticizing a teammate or jabbing the opposition. In a city full of writers waiting to pounce, he never uttered something he regretted. That’s a streak better than Joe DiMaggio’s.

A few thoughts on the Ryder Cup, Roger Angell and my favorite sports gif ever

By Kevin Van Valkenburg

Some people love the World Cup, the NBA Playoffs, the World Series or the Olympics. Every sports fan has their “something” that connects with them on level that is a blends of nostalgia and excitement. For me, it’s the Ryder Cup. It’s my favorite “thing” in all of sports. I love the teamwork and cooperation it requires. I love that it turns typically-stoic and robotic athletes in to fist-pumping, awkward high-fiving lunatics. I love how much of it is mental, not physical, and that the athletes are playing for nothing more than pride and love of country.

It’s the caring that matters. You don’t have to follow games. I won’t fault you if you aren’t interested anymore, if recent news has soured you on the athletes we follow and the leagues we obsess over. I wish we could care as much about elections or fixing our schools or solving issues that truly matter. But… I don’t ever want to stop following, because no matter how selfish and soulless sports can sometimes be, my god, some moments are still such a gift.

Why Bill Simmons Needs ESPN

by Will Leitch for Sports on Earth

There was once a wall between editorial and business at every publication in the country. Those days are gone. When you criticize a business interest of your controlling company, you do so knowing full well what you are doing.

The list of human beings Simmons could have called a liar without consequences is basically infinite. Gary Bettman, commissioner of the NHL (a league the network has no deal with): Go ahead! Character actor John C. Reilly? Fire away! Miss Cleo? Sure! Your Uncle Terry? Go get ’em, Bill! What mattered was not necessarily that Simmons had called Goodell a liar: What mattered was that Simmons knew this was a sore spot, a stress point, for the network. That’s why the dare happened. And that’s why ESPN had to act. All that Twitter noise this morning, and Carson Daly explaining it on the “Today” show while Syria burns? That’s all ephemeral — soft, unquantifiable media. None of that compares to a call from the NFL’s Park Avenue headquarters. (Ask PBS.) That’s cash.

What Bill Simmons Showed about ESPN

By Amy Davidson for The New Yorker

Simmons’s anger is absolutely earned. Goodell’s denial is absurd; as I’ve written before, what did he think it looked like when a football player knocked a woman unconscious? (Note that Simmons is saying that he lied about knowing what was on the tape, not whether Goodell saw it himself.) There are a few levels of dishonesty here: when Goodell hears that a player—a man whom he watches on the field every week using the force of his body in violent collisions—has hit a woman, and says that he just can’t picture the mechanics of that action without a video, how many lies is he telling, to others and to himself? Perhaps in other cases, when players choked women, shot them, or dragged them by the hair, he needed a sort of animated diagram.

The only way for that not to destroy journalism as an enterprise is for reporters to have, at those moments, true institutional support. ESPN has done the opposite, doing the work of the angry, powerful people whom it covers for them.

Why is an NFL star driving a 1991 Mazda?

If you’re watching the Thursday NFL game between the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins, you might be thinking that the Washington running back, Alfred Morris, seems pretty cool. He is! Here’s an excerpt from a great story you should read about him — Why Redskins Star Alfred Morris’ Dream Is This Humble 1991 Mazda 626 by Patrick George for Jalopnik.

Morris, a Pensacola native, said he bought the 626 from his pastor for $2 back when he was playing for Florida Atlantic University. (The car still has an expired parking sticker from the college on its windshield.)

Morris is a cheerful, affable, down to earth guy. Even though he’s an NFL star with an NFL salary, he said he had more reasons to keep The Bentley than to get rid of it.

“This is my baby, man,” he said. “It’s more than just a car. I didn’t grow up with a lot. This helps me remember where I come from and where I’m going.”

Saarland and national teams without a country

From EPSN comes a fascinating story by Uli Hesse who writes about little known rules of international soccer:

It serves as a reminder that what we call national football teams do not all represent a nation. They don’t even represent a country. They are merely teams that represent an association.

That is why many countries have some sort of hidden football history, full of teams that few people know about even though they once were official sides playing official games.

Read the whole article: Saarland — the forgotten international team within Germany.

How does a baseball team operate smoothly?

From the Washington Post, here’s an article called “The Nationals employ more than 1,100 people who never get an at-bat or throw a pitch” by Barry Svrluga that goes in depth on the operations of a major league baseball team and gives a little bit of well-deserved credit to the people who make the buses literally run on time. Here are a couple great bits from the article.

So from his spot as gatekeeper, concierge, liaison… [Vice President of Clubhouse Operations, Rob] McDonald has not only watched as the Nationals have transformed from baseball’s Island of Misfit Toys into an organization that expects to compete for a division title every season, but he has helped shape it, in tiny but tangible ways.

“The reality is,” [baseball player, Drew] Storen said, “I’m pretty terrible at life during the season. These guys take the pressure off.”

Is your team mascot offensive?

In today’s New York Times, there’s a very enjoyable little guide to determining whether your team’s mascot is offensive. By Neil Irwin, I recommend reading, “ A Super-Simple, Step-by-Step Guide to Determine if Your Team Mascot Is Offensive.” Like the best comedy, there is essential truth lying underneath. My favorite part was his second step:

Step 2: Is your team mascot an inanimate concept? You’re in good shape here, too. If you are the Boston Red Sox, your name is fine because it is a color of footwear. Miami Heat? You are named for thermal energy, which does not have an opinion on whether it is an appropriate name for a basketball team.

News Clippings: NFL in Trouble & Swimming Superheroes

How Adrian Peterson Is Helping the NFL Avoid a Real Reckoning

By Bethlehem Shoals in GQ

In a lot of ways, Adrian Peterson has made Ray Rice less of a problem for the NFL. The narrative becomes one about violent athletes, not Roger Goodell’s backward attitudes and cold-blooded agenda.

The connection worth exploring isn’t the one between the behavior of Rice and Peterson, but the ways in which Goodell’s handling of the Rice situation—concealment, minimizing, double-speak, and dissimulation—mirrors the way the league continues to deal with the long-term effects of the sport on its athletes.

— — —

Giving Up on Goodell: How the NFL lost the trust of its most loyal reporters.

By Stefan Fatsis in Slate

In his book The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism, Dean Starkman describes two conflicting strains of American journalism: access reporting and accountability reporting. The former involves getting inside information from powerful institutions, the latter telling inside stories about them. “Access tends to transmit orthodox views; accountability tends to transmit heterodox views,” Starkman writes. Like Wall Street and other big institutions, the NFL prefers and—in the case of reporters like Schefter, ESPN’s Chris Mortensen, and Sports Illustrated’s Peter King—facilitates access reporting. It’s good business.

With the NFL’s possible perfidy the biggest story in all of American media right now, accountability journalists will rush in from outside the sports beat to dig for dirt. And inside the league’s formerly cozy media bubble, the men and women with access are going to start demanding answers, too. If he wants to keep his job, Goodell better hope that the answers he provides are the right ones, no matter which reporters he’s talking to.

— — —

The Plunge

By Carl Schreck in Grantland

Just as Karapetyan reached the bridge, the sound of metal smashing against concrete tore through the cool evening air. He looked toward the commotion, through the blizzard of dust that had kicked up from the hillside below, and saw a trolleybus disappear below the surface of Lake Yerevan. Its two electric trolley poles poked up from the water like antennae. If Karapetyan gave any thought to his next move, he doesn’t remember it. He sprinted down the hill, ditched the weighted backpack, stripped to his skivvies, and dove into the lake.

— — —

This Is Katie F---ing Ledecky: A Thesis About Kicking Ass

By Brian Phillips in Grantland

There’s a special kind of lightness you feel when you realize you’re seeing a truly great athlete for the first time. When you understand that what you’re watching is not someone who is merely very good, or very tough, or very skilled relative to her peers, but someone to whom the normal rules do not apply. When your imagination runs the math on an athlete and returns an error sign.

Have sports become politics?

Recently, I’ve been divided over what to write on Dear Sports Fan. How much space should I give to the various cultural issues around and within the sports world and how much should I stick to writing about the just the games. In my mind, there’s a three-tier setup being created. There’s the core of sports, which remains the games themselves, and then there’s the next layer that consists of all of the non-game stories that directly affect the game, like trade rumors, injuries, free agency, team chemistry. Finally, there’s the outside layer that consists of stories about athletes or other sports figures but not about sports. The core of my enjoyment of sports remains the games but increasingly, the headlines on most publications covering sports seem to be in the third group. Will Leitch, the founder of Deadspin.com, wrote a wonderful piece on this for New York Magazine recently. The piece is called, “From Mo’ne Davis to Michael Sam, the Culture Wars Have Invaded the Sports World.” I’m excited to share some of my favorite parts of it here but I suggest you read it in full over at nymag.com.

Leitch begins by talking about how little fun it’s been to cover the Michael Sam story for the past couple months because of how polarizing the response has been:

It isn’t just Sam. He’s just the most prominent symptom of a subtle but undeniable change in modern sports discourse, which is basically, and maddeningly, turning into politics.

He then moves over to sharing his memory of how loving, obsessing over, and covering sports used to be:

The fun of sports debates has always been how, even when they’re spirited and a little rancorous, they’re essentially harmless… Yankees fans and Red Sox fans hate each other, but only theoretically, and only on the surface: Their rancor was real but empty. Sports has allowed us to exercise our tribalist passions in basically trivial ways … and therefore productive and healthy ones… Not anymore. Now sports, like everything else, has been conquered by political tribalism.

I loved reading this article. I hope you do too.