Well, that’s surprising.
News broke this morning that the PGA Tour and LIV, former vicious enemies, will be merging, creating a new preeminent golf tour combining the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund’s resources with the PGA’s institutional strength.
It’s a stunning move, and one that reportedly only involved a handful of figures on the PGA Tour side, the supposedly player-led tour completely overhauling its model overnight based on the judgment of a few executive figures. There was no vote. There was no broad pitch to the majority of people professionally affected. There was simply a decree, laid down from on high, that all professional golfers—some of whom turned down massive money from the Saudis in order to stick with the PGA—will soon be living in a new world, one with higher payouts but probably nothing close to the initial bonuses LIV used to nab top golfers and establish itself. There will reportedly be fines levied against golfers who joined LIV as they reenter the PGA’s orbit, but it’s inconceivable that this goes any other way than LIV golfers netting out with more money than those who remained with the PGA Tour, relative to what they would have had if history had marched in a straight line. In terms of dollars and cents, LIV golfers won the bet. PGA Tour golfers lost.
The biggest question right now is not yet, “How?” It’s, “Why?” LIV seemed to be gaining a little traction in recent months, but the PGA Tour appeared to be doing just fine itself, and the viability of LIV’s gimmickry was suspect. The team concept was infuriatingly lame. The beer hole gets annoying after a while. That’s part of why not every PGA Tour tournament has copied Scottsdale. For the deal to have happened, LIV must have had some leverage. The immediate question, then, is which leverage it was.
It would seem that there are two potential answers to this. The first is that LIV possessed legal leverage. The sides were suing one another, LIV alleging antitrust violations, and it’s possible the PGA Tour was going to lose. This merger may be little more than an out-of-court settlement going by a different name. The second is that LIV possessed financial leverage. Perhaps the Saudis are merely too rich, capable of waiting the PGA Tour out. Perhaps the PGA Tour isn’t in a great place financially. Perhaps—and this is something that gets smokier with so few people involved in the decision-making process—Jay Monahan and his cronies had an attainable price. I’m not alleging bribes. I’m pointing out salary increases.
In the long run, the question will indeed become, “How?” The DP Tour—formerly the European Tour—is involved in the merger as well, leaving open the possibility of a true World Tour, but specifics are entirely unknown. This could be a great thing for golf. It could be the absence of a terrible thing, with Neil Paine smartly pointing out earlier today how badly the IRL/CART split hurt IndyCar. It could also be a bad thing, with an unlikely but believable possibility being that the new Tour flops and competition arises back in the United States from outside the PGA/DP/LIV triumvirate. There’s a lot that’s unknown. But the biggest unknown remains why the hell the PGA Tour gave in.
The Deal With the Big 12 and UConn
There’s a lot of Big 12 expansion talk right now, with the more consequential story being that Colorado is looking very likely to follow its established precedent and run for its life, fleeing the Pac-12 for perceived stability back with its old friends, and that Arizona is said to be about to join it. The source is suspect—the “report” included a hedge saying the move wouldn’t be final until the Pac-12 TV deal is on the table, which is something you and I could have told each other months ago; also, these things tend to be reported and then immediately confirmed, rather than leaking out over time—but it’s possible that Colorado could rejoin the Big 12 any day now, and it’s possible Arizona is their dance partner. If that happens, the question will become whether the remaining Pac-8 can hold together. The dynamic at play with that piece is that any of Arizona State, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Stanford, and Cal would probably be welcome in the Big 12, and that Washington State and Oregon State would probably have a harder time convincing the Big 12 to accept them as individual one-school packages (because they’re lower-revenue), leaving various merger possibilities on the table between the Big 12/Pac-12, the ACC/Pac-12, and the Big 12/Pac-12/ACC but a possible course of action being the Pac-6 leaving Washington State and Oregon State to the wolves and to the Mountain West.
The louder story, at least in my circles, is UConn. (My circles are disproportionately focused on basketball.)
UConn is not going to, in all likelihood, join the Big 12. The Big 12’s new TV deal evidently includes a clause which says that if they add a Power Five school, their revenue will increase proportionally, meaning everyone’s revenue will stay the same. If they add a non-Power Five school? No dice. UConn would only want to join in all sports, and UConn is not a Power Five school. They’re a Big East school, making them a power conference basketball team, but they’re not a Power Five school, and the revenue for college football dwarfs the revenue for regular season college basketball. Schools might take less money for the sake of self-preservation, but they’re not going to take less money to have a little more fun in hoops.
Gonzaga, on the other hand, does not have a football program. It would be complicated, and if Washington and Oregon cross the divide the emotional value would lessen (Brett Yormark says the Big 12 wants to be a coast-to-coast conference, and the sporting world doesn’t care enough about the intricacies of Spokane’s location to squabble about how inland it is), but it is conceivable to add Gonzaga to the Big 12, with or without a dance partner.
I remain curious about Creighton, the poorest geographic fit for the Big East, and I’m curious about Butler, playing in a decent-sized city and the only non-UConn non-Catholic school in the league (Butler has football, but it’s non-scholarship FCS). No one is talking about either of those programs, though, which could just mean the following: The Big 12 is worrying about football first, and if it can find a smooth way to add Gonzaga down the line, it would be interested.
Overall? It’s hard to see a world where it’s likelier for UConn to join the Big 12 than it is for Washington and Oregon to join. I don’t doubt that UConn’s the one that’s been directly discussed, but plenty of things get discussed that don’t make sense.
How Much is a Jacob deGrom Worth?
Jacob deGrom is going to have Tommy John surgery, and I feel a little sick writing that. One of the best pitchers the world has ever seen is going to miss even more time. He certainly won’t pitch the rest of this year.
I don’t have anything poetic or novel to say about deGrom. He’s a great pitcher with terrible injury luck, and perhaps those are correlated, but a lot of people will tell you that. What I think is more worth our attention is what this does to the Rangers, who are legitimate World Series contenders, currently sporting the second-best record in all of baseball and leading the Astros by three and a half games in the AL West.
Entering today, FanGraphs had the Rangers with a 51.8% chance of winning the division. That was before tonight’s games, and it was with Jacob deGrom expected to pitch most of the rest of the season. That’s the number we should check on tomorrow.
Adin Hill Is a Wall
It got overshadowed by Matthew Tkachuk’s hit on Jack Eichel, but Adin Hill appeared to make yet another stupendous save last night as the Knights hunted the Florida Panthers to near-extinction. Hill didn’t pitch a shutout, and he wouldn’t have even if that freak goal that bounced off two of his teammates stayed out of the net, but the guy is punking one of the most prolific scoring teams in the NHL. That can disappear in an instant, but it’s gotten the Knights to a two-game lead, and to the rather rare position of still holding home-ice advantage as the better seed heading into Game 3.
Quinn Mathews: Hero
I wish I had a full list of all the ballsy college baseball performances over the postseason, inclusive of conference tournaments, but for today, credit to Quinn Mathews, the Stanford senior who went seven innings and threw 114 pitches on Friday and then went back out there for four more innings and 66 pitches in relief last night on just two days of rest. I understand the risk of pitching too much. Pitchers get hurt. We just talked about Jacob deGrom. But most of these college pitchers are unlikely to ever sniff the major leagues, even if they’re drafted in the first ten rounds. So few pitchers make it. Why not risk it to leave it all out there for your tribe? And besides. It’s hard to say deGrom was overworked. Pointing to workload in the wake of the deGrom news is like looking at a tree on a power line and blaming nuclear energy for the outage.
It Wasn’t Just Cuzzi, But…
It’s hard to judge Kyle Hendricks’s outing last night because Phil Cuzzi had such a rough night behind the plate, but four strikeouts and no walks is a good sign. A great sign, really. The contact was still concerningly hard—Hendricks’s xERA sits at 6.67 through 15 innings and a third—but we like to point out that FIP and xERA are comparable predictors, and the FIP (3.74) is great. Maybe, in that case, it’s the better indicator?
What should be easier to judge is that the Cubs offense had a bad, bad night. Except…
Except Blake Snell has been a strikeout/walk pitcher all year, his issue has been walks, and Phil Cuzzi handed him multiple strikeouts that might have been walks in a challengeable universe.
I’m not terribly concerned about the Cubs not putting the ball in play against Snell. The loss sucks, it’s on the Cubs, umps rarely create five-run swings. But Snell’s problem this year hasn’t really been being too hittable.
Hopefully Hayden Wesneski has found his groove a little more. He wasn’t bad in relief of Justin Steele the other day. He, like Caleb Kilian, is one roll of the dice among many as the Cubs try to manufacture aces and solid rotation contributors. But rolls of the dice are independent, and in this case, they’re actually probably correlated positively. By which I mean: The Cubs might have ten potential rotation pieces in the farm system right now. Getting one to pan out doesn’t make the other nine less likely to work. It probably actually makes that more likely.
