I have no real tie to Los Angeles. It is a city I like, but it isn’t my favorite city in the world to visit, and I’ve never lived there. I feel similarly about Los Angeles to how I feel about Montreal. It’s there. I see the draw. I have no personal loyalty.
Still, it really bugs me that the Angeles call themselves the Los Angeles Angels when they play in Anaheim. And it especially bugs me because it bugs Los Angeles.
Similarly, I have no tie to the Verizon Center in Washington D.C., or whatever it’s called these days. I’ve walked past it when visiting, but I’ve never seen a game there, and my feelings towards the Capitals and the Wizards are almost wholly indifference.
Still, it bugs me that another two professional sports teams are moving to the suburbs, as was announced yesterday. And this is why:
Just as college teams represent a community—the school in question, its students, its faculty, its alumni, their families, other people who support the university as a symbol of their geographic region or their culture—professional teams are supposed to represent their city. That’s implied by the city being the thing in the name. It’s also how these teams originated. Athletic clubs originated in cities, supported by the communities around them, and those clubs sent teams across the country to play one another. Moving teams to the suburbs—places that more and more resemble one another, the cultural equivalent of vanilla ice cream—cheapens that tie.
I don’t think teams shouldn’t be allowed to move their stadiums outside of city limits. Teams can do what they want.* But there should be an associated cost: If the NBA and the NHL and the NFL and Major League Baseball want to preserve some of the character of their league, they should enforce a rule saying that teams have to play inside the actual area located by their names. The Minnesota Twins? Go play in Edina if that’s what you want. Minnesota means Minnesota. The Chicago Bears, though? Moving to Arlington Heights is a problem. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim? Absolutely not. Teams should still be able to move to the suburbs, but they should have to change their name accordingly. The Arlington Heights Bears. The Alexandria Wizards. The Cobb County Braves.
All we’re asking is for honesty.
*Teams can do what they want, but: The recent trend towards forking over huge tax concessions to these teams, effectively gifting some owners free real estate, is a bad one, and it stems from a media failure. Owners make more money off of their investments in teams than the teams’ nominal profits imply. Franchises are appreciating rapidly as assets, and stadiums and their associated real estate packages bring in millions or possibly billions of dollars that never sniff the teams’ own (closed) books. There’s some monopolistic behavior happening here, and it’s enabled by our failure, as the media, to effectively communicate exactly how people like Cubs owner Tom Ricketts lie to their fans, and why we know they’re doing it.
Florida’s FSU “Lawsuit”
Florida’s attorney general announced yesterday that she’s investigating the College Football Playoff selection committee. Specifically, Florida’s antitrust division is, as ESPN reports…“ sending a civil investigative demand to the committee for ‘more information about the nature of possible contracts, conspiracies in restraint of trade or monopolization of trade and commerce relating to anticompetitive effects of the College Football Playoff.’”
This is, of course, very silly. I’m no lawyer, but it’s hard to find anybody providing a serious legal argument that the College Football Playoff, as an organization, did anything illegal by excluding a 13–0 team with the 55th-ranked schedule in favor of a 12–1 team with the 5th-ranked schedule, especially given Jordan Travis’s injury and the instructions bestowed upon the committee. It’s even harder to find any argument to that effect regarding the committee itself. I suppose there could be potential for this investigation to make public some previously private emails, and perhaps those cause scandal, but this is purely a political move, and it is definitely not a lawsuit, as some have called it.
Still, this is a good opportunity to remind each other how the College Football Playoff works:
- Schools formed conferences.
- Conferences formed the College Football Playoff.
- The College Football Playoff chose a selection committee and told it how to do a job.
- The committee did that job in what’s always been accepted as accordance with the instructions.
This isn’t dictatorship. It’s democracy. There’s no outside force who came in and militarily conquered Florida State, forcing them to live under the College Football Playoff’s iron fist. Florida State had some voice in how to build this thing, and we don’t know how exactly it wanted the playoff designed, but this is what its voice and other schools’ voices combined to produce. There’s a social contract here.
West Virginia’s WVU Lawsuit
This afternoon, U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey issued a 14-day temporary restraining order against the NCAA in response to a real lawsuit filed by West Virginia, Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee. The order restrains the NCAA from enforcing its two-time transfer rule, which says undergraduate athletes may only transfer freely once before having to sit out a year following each transfer. The lawsuit argues that this rule violates federal antitrust law.
Again, personally, I think there’s a social contract here. The NAIA and other NCAA competitors do exist. But I don’t understand antitrust law very well, the NAIA has a tiny market share, and it’s possible the two-time transfer rule breaks a law. Again, I’ve never formally studied law, and U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey (who is located in northern West Virginia) has a career’s worth of legal experience and knowledge. What I’m curious about, though, is the endgame here. If athletes can transfer as many times as they want, do they have to do it between seasons? Or could they do it in the middle of the year? Could they do it between the regular season and the postseason? It sounds absurd, but it happens in professional sports, and if it’s a violation of antitrust law to make athletes sit for a year the second time they transfer, would the NCAA equivalent of a trade deadline also violate antitrust law?
My guess is that the legal answer to this question is either 1) that enrollment is important, and students can only transfer between semesters, and/or that 2) it only matters if someone sues, and no one is going to sue over being forbidden from transferring in the middle of a season. But it seems worth thinking about, because it’s hard to find an argument for free transfers between seasons that isn’t also an argument for free transfers at any time.
Meanwhile, we’ll see if this restraining order stands (I don’t know if the NCAA can or will appeal the order), and we’ll see where the lawsuit actually ends up. If the restraining order does stand, we’ll see if any schools decide to trot transferring athletes out there during these fourteen days. If the general pattern is followed, schools will play players, daring the NCAA to rule these games a use of a year of eligibility. They’ll use the whipsaw as further justification that The NCAA (which they formed) Is Evil™, and that the schools should be given whatever they want as a result (with rules enforced for everybody else, of course). That’s mostly how such matters are approached these days.
How Good Will the Dodgers Be?
You can only be so dominant in Major League Baseball. This is why we have yet to see a team repeat as World Series champions since the Yankees’ 2000 title. You can build a 116-win team and get bounced early in the playoffs. The MLB playoffs are very random, and it’s hard to improve your odds beyond something like a 70% chance to win a given series.
The Dodgers, meanwhile, are desperate for a title. They won in 2020, but it was dissatisfying, not coming atop a 162-game season and involving no postseason games played at home (or on the road). They’ve been the best team in baseball this last decade, and they have only the least valuable title in the sport to show for it.
This is all awesome.
What’s happening now—as the Dodgers reportedly prepare to trade for Tyler Glasnow and continue to court free agent studs such as Yoshinobu Yamamoto—is that the Dodgers are trying to become the best team possible. They’re trying to load the postseason dice as much as they possibly can in their own favor. But while they’re doing it, they also know there’s no way in the universe to gain more than a 1-in-3 preseason World Series likelihood, or thereabouts.
So many American professional sports become, for desperate teams, a race to the bottom. Baseball is still very much a race to the top. The Dodgers can build a half-billion-dollar payroll. It’s the best chance they have. They’ll still probably lose.
This isn’t a perfect situation—you don’t want a shitty World Series champion, and while we haven’t really seen that, we also haven’t recently seen the dynasties in baseball which used to make it more compelling—but at the moment, the Dodgers are doing everything in their power to win, and that’s the right call, and there’s still no way they can get themselves even a coin flip’s chance of pulling it off.
As for the Cubs? I’m disappointed they aren’t being listed at the forefront of the Yamamoto rumors, and I know they eventually have to pick their spot and go for it, but there is way too much offseason left to panic. With an owner as fickle as Ricketts, patience remains a virtue. Over the last few years, Jed Hoyer has picked his spots well, and the likeliest thing is that he does that again. The Cubs don’t look like they’ll be on the same level as the Braves or the Dodgers this year, and the Cardinals continue to put together a savvy offseason, but the median scenario is that the Cubs make themselves NL Central favorites without sacrificing too many of their abundant young assets. That should get them to the trade deadline, at which point we can all reassess.
