There’s a decent amount of chatter in slightly–not–mainstream sports media about the rivalry between college basketball fans and fans of the NBA. The argument boils down to preference, of course, with some objective merit to both sides: The NBA has the incredibly skilled athletes performing dramatic feats of strength, skill, and physical grace. College basketball has the huge stakes accompanying each game and the chaotic recipe which creates such romantic upsets. On the other side of the coin, college basketball is often a slopfest, while for ten months of the year the NBA is basically a reality TV show about ballet.
This college basketball–NBA rivalry isn’t alone. A decent number of NHL fans hate the NBA, the Stanley Cup Playoffs losing the war for national attention as the NBA Finals approach and the NBA’s diva natures running in stark contrast to hockey’s emphasis on selflessness and toughness. There’s the rivalry between American motorsports—primarily NASCAR, but some IndyCar as well—and Formula 1, with F1 less competitive, NASCAR less compelling, and IndyCar simply hard to follow closely outside of one weekend of the year. Baseball is at war, to hear some tell it, with the NFL and the NBA at once, receiving less national media attention than the latter despite a similarly-sized fanbase and struggling to rise above the former for eyeballs even at its most dramatic times of the year. (Baseball and NASCAR have something in common in that each of their fanbases skews older, so even though NASCAR crushes F1 in ratings and MLB hangs in there with the NBA in total following, perceptions are the opposite within the younger-skewed media.)
We’ve hypothesized before about why Americans like the NFL so much right now, our best explanations ranging from the fact almost all games are played before the average American’s bedtime to how shiny the helmets are (other perceived factors include the importance of quarterbacks, the shortness of the season, the weekly nature of competition, the lack of an overlap with summer, and the sport’s easy translation to a fantasy equivalent—all of which boil down to the NFL being extraordinarily easy to follow at a variety of levels, and therefore a convenient source of fodder for small talk). Whatever the reason, the NFL does reign supreme, enjoying something like four times the interest of the NBA.
I think this contributes to the other inter-sport spats.
In the Eden period for a lot of sports fans currently in our late 20s to early 40s, the time when SportsCenter was a monolith, ESPN used to cycle through the sporting calendar like a first grade teacher traversing the various academic subjects throughout a day of class. The NFL, college football, and MLB ruled the fall. College basketball dominated March. In the February gap and then in the spring, the NBA and NHL rose to fill gaps. Summer was baseball season, with exceptions for majors in golf and tennis. There are still remnants of this—sports coverage still does follow a lot of that calendar—but the NFL is a year-round winner, with a joke in the industry being that if you’re hurting for ratings at any point in the year, all you need to do is rank a collection of quarterbacks. This isn’t hurting other sports—their followings have migrated to more niche outlets and sports media has grown so dramatically that no one is being left behind. (There’s space for college softball now. That is awesome and also shocking.) But it creates the illusion of starvation, and I wonder if that contributes to the bickering. When you love a sport, you want there to be times when everyone is talking about it. Unless you’re the NFL, which got one just last night as the Commanders and Ravens’ third strings played a thrilling fourth quarter to end a legendary Ravens preseason win streak, those times are hard to come by. Outside of college football and college basketball, I’m not sure any other sport is guaranteed to find one of those times per year.
The Latest on Wander Franco
Major League Baseball has placed Wander Franco on administrative leave, a designation which mostly amounts to MLB taking charge of his status and taking that out of the hands of the Tampa Bay Rays. Really, this has probably already been the case—the Rays and MLB have presumably been working closely on the matter at hand—but this makes that official. Major League Baseball will decide when and if Wander Franco can return. The Rays can fill his 40-man roster spot.
There’s a possibility that two or more underage girls are subjects of the investigation, with Diario Libre, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic, reporting that a 17-year-old filed a complaint in July, and that the 17-year-old is a separate person from the once or current 14-year-old referenced in the social media posts from the weekend before last. The situation remains very unclear and uncertain.
A Luis Castillo Theory
At one point in last night’s blowout win over the White Sox, Mariners pitcher Luis Castillo threw 47 consecutive fastballs. This was unprecedented. It also makes a lot of sense.
The incident has been painted as Castillo punking White Sox hitters, and yes, that is what happened. It might not have been the motivation, though. If a pitcher were, in August of a pennant race, trying to preserve his own arm by minimizing the wear and tear of individual pitches and minimizing the total number of pitches thrown, said pitcher would probably go about that by exclusively throwing four-seam fastballs, especially after being graced by his offense with a significant lead. I haven’t seen any comment from Castillo or other Mariners about the 47 pitches, but I’m curious if that was the motivation rather than something rooted in disrespect.
With the win and some dramatic help from the Diamondbacks, the Mariners closed their gap with the Rangers by an additional game, and with the Astros winning over Boston, the Astros closed their own gap with Texas. The AL West now has three teams within two games of one another.
Another Inside–the–Parker
The inside–the–park home runs will not stop, and they seem to have broken through to the broader baseball consciousness, which is nice because that means I don’t have to spend eight dollars on a Stathead subscription and do the dig myself. Bryce Harper hit one last night. It is becoming commonplace. I am bamboozled.
The inside–the–park home run might be the most exciting play in baseball, so it’s great that we’re getting so many, but I have a hard time thinking of any reasonable explanation for what’s driving the current surge. It has to be a small sample, right? MLB’s ball designers haven’t figured out how to make one that kicks off the wall at especially crazy angles?
The Arlington Heights White Sox?
There was a piece about the White Sox yesterday on Crain’s Chicago Business which suggested they might begin threatening to move from Chicago’s South Side, possibly in conjunction with Jerry Reinsdorf selling the team.
Two thoughts:
First, Reinsdorf selling the team seems unlikely to be motivated by finances. He could make a fortune, but he is a very old man. He is not going to enjoy that money for long. If Reinsdorf sells, it seems likelier to be to avoid a messy inheritance situation, and with no personal knowledge of Reinsdorf’s estate plan and little personal knowledge about Reinsdorf’s family, I don’t have any particular reason to anticipate that being a motive. The article seems to cast a wide net of possibilities, which is a good thing to do when framed properly (and I don’t think it was improperly framed), but it didn’t exactly scream, “REINSDORF IS GONNA SELL.”
Second, the Arlington Heights possibility—the possibility in which the White Sox could move to the Northwest suburbs and hop on the Bears’ potential new facility on the site of the old Arlington horse track—seems like it would be a slam dunk for the Sox in terms of facilities upgrades and attendance, but in addition to being a slap in the face to the historic neighborhoods the Sox have failed to invest in (host some damn concerts, guys), it might step on some of the Cubs’ territorial rights. This is hypothesizing on my part, but if the A’s were never allowed to explore San Jose because Major League Baseball viewed San Jose as the Giants’ property, I’d have a hard time believing Arlington Heights doesn’t belong to the Cubs. I also have a hard time believing Tom Ricketts and Crane Kenney wouldn’t care.
Long story short, I don’t think the White Sox are going to leave the South Side anytime soon, and I don’t think many seriously looking at this think that either. Really, the article’s just a reminder that like the Brewers, the White Sox are due for some stadium upgrades, and they’ll probably throw some threats around while that approaches. The Nashville/Charlotte/Portland/Montreal angle is an interesting question—could a big-market franchise move to a smaller market due to its own failures to capitalize on its fertile economic terrain—but we’re a long way from asking that in anything more than a theoretical fashion.
College Baseball Is Getting Better
Nolan Schanuel is in the big leagues just more than a month after being drafted. Paul Skenes is set to skip High-A ball and report to Double-A. College baseball’s regular season broadcasts are at an all-time high in viewership, and LSU recently poached a pitching coach from the Minnesota Twins. Two of these are lagging indicators, the other two are leading, but all point towards a situation in which the college version of the game is getting closer to its professional edition in terms of its ability to develop talent. The fact so many even know Skenes’s name is evidence enough. There’s money pouring in, and that money might be pushing things forward. Yes, Chris Sale did what Schanuel did too, and so did Ryan Zimmerman, and Skenes isn’t in the majors just yet. But if Skenes or another draftee gets called up this year, we will have matched 20 years of immediate call-ups in a single season.
How Do We Feel About Drew Smyly?
Drew Smyly takes the ball for the Cubs tonight, and I don’t know how long he’s going to go. He last started only two weeks ago, pitching into the sixth that day, but he hasn’t thrown more than seventeen pitches in an appearance since. The bullpen is decently fresh—Mark Leiter Jr. and Michael Fulmer each might be unavailable, but they should be the only ones—but expected long reliever Hayden Wesneski did get two outs last night, lessening the likelihood he’ll do a full piggyback off of Smyly. My guess is that the Cubs are looking for Smyly to make a normal start, but that he’s on a shorter leash than the rest of the location. Good thing they hung on last night.
With the win last night, the Cubs are up into fifth place in the NL, and while they only lead the Giants by half a game, that is significant breathing room and significant progress. Ultimately, the hope for the Cubs and the Brewers and all these Wild Card contenders is to wind up in third in the league, a position which will earn whoever holds it home field advantage in the Wild Card Series. Fourth will likely get a team that home-field advantage—it will if it’s the Cubs, because this is a division complication making it possible it won’t—but third is the goal, and the Cubs are just two and a half games away.
NASCAR’s Got a Good One
Here’s some fun game theory for NASCAR’s race Saturday at Daytona:
- It’s the regular season finale.
- One playoff spot, the 16th spot, remains up for grabs.
- If a full-season driver outside the top 15 wins, they get the 16th spot.
- If a top-15 driver wins, the spot goes to the top remaining points finisher, with Bubba Wallace currently leading Ty Gibbs by 32 points and Daniel Suárez by 43 points.
Wallace’s options, then, are to either race to finish or race to win. If he races to win, he increases the likelihood he crashes and doesn’t finish the race but decreases the likelihood a new driver wins and takes away his playoff spot. If he races to finish, he does the opposite.
Further complicating things?
You get bonus points in NASCAR if you’re in the top ten at the end of Stage 1 and/or Stage 2. In other words, if Gibbs wins each of the first two stages and Wallace is outside the top ten, Gibbs will have cut the gap to 12 points and will only need to finish 12 or 13 points ahead of Wallace (the tiebreaker is still up in the air) to make the field.
Ideally for Wallace, there’ll be a big (safe) wreck which doesn’t involve him early in the race, and even if it doesn’t take out Gibbs, Wallace will have a much higher floor for the day and better knowledge of which drivers are still on the track and could win. But it’s going to be interesting, and with the race happening at Daytona, one of motorsports’ most exciting tracks, you might have fun keeping close eyes on it while watching Ohio play San Diego State or San Jose State play USC.
Jirehl Brock, Farewell
Some news from late yesterday: Jirehl Brock has officially left the Iowa State football program. Brock was one of those charged in the gambling scandal. Best of luck to him, whatever the future holds. I believe this leaves Hunter Dekkers, Jake Remsburg, and DeShawn Hanika as the only ones charged who remain with the program. Meanwhile: Jeremiah Williams and Iowa basketball manager Evan Schuster have now been similarly charged. I wonder whether Williams expected this when he transferred to Rutgers, and I wonder whether Rutgers expected it. As for Schuster? You cannot trust Iowa student managers. Have long held that belief. Cannot emphasize that enough. If anyone has a childhood friend who recently taught their dad how to play Immaculate Grid and that friend was a basketball manager at Iowa, know this: You cannot trust that man.
