Last night, as the game went into extra innings and the Sunday Night Baseball crew started to run out of things to talk about, the broadcast turned hard on the Cubs as an organization. Started ripping on the Cubs. Started building up the Cardinals and White Sox as paragons of how to run an MLB franchise. Which…ok. There were some fair points. The Cubs could be more competitive while rebuilding, and Tom Ricketts is full of shit when it comes to why the Cubs are not more competitive while rebuilding (this is purely a business venture for Ricketts, and that’s his right but it’s also our right to call him a soulless coward for it). The Cardinals are admirable in their commitment to being competitive. They don’t take years off. But…
They aren’t actually that good at it.
And the White Sox are one of the worst-run franchises in professional sports.
The Cardinals haven’t had a losing season since 2007. This is cool. This is impressive. This is, if it’s your goal to always be in the picture, a successful performance. The Cardinals have also won a World Series in this span, and they’ve won an additional pennant, and they’ve made the NLCS three other times. But in the same stretch? They and the Cubs are even on division titles despite the Cubs declining to compete for a whole five-year stretch in there and now another two years this year and last. Who’s won more World Series in the stretch? They’re tied. Who’s won more pennants? The Cardinals, but only by one. Who’s won the division more recently, in this present-tense conversation about the state of the Cubs? The Cubs have. The Cubs have won the NL Central more recently than the Cardinals. If there’s any franchise in the division to fawn over, it’s the Brewers, who have their share of baggage (there’s a good reason to hate every team in the division, and I’m not even talking about the headhunting stuff) but have been much more consistently competitive in a real sense than the Cardinals these last five years, have reached higher highs within that, and are the better team this year.
And the White Sox? The White Sox play in the biggest joke of a division in professional sports and still have won it just once in the last decade. There are kids legally driving who were born since the last time the White Sox won a playoff series. Times are relatively great for the White Sox, but that’s because the word “relatively” in there gets to work with such a horrific batch of context.
Someone on the broadcast—I didn’t catch who—said there are six or seven White Sox players who are bigger names than anyone on the Cubs. I don’t know who those six or seven are. Joe Kelly, of course, but then who? José Abreu won a short-season MVP but wouldn’t get recognized on the street in the loop. Tim Anderson’s a household name in the sport, but is he more prominent than Willson Contreras? Is Lance Lynn more prominent than Contreras? Where does Marcus Stroman stack up in there? Does anyone outside of those who follow the sport closely know Yasmani Grandal or Yoan Moncada, and don’t those people better know Seiya Suzuki?
These White Sox are definitely a better team than these Cubs, but Patrick Wisdom and Contreras are more likely to be recognized on the street in Chicago than any single White Sox player besides honestly maybe Joe Kelly (admit it, he’s a household face), so cut the shit with the “bigger names” talk. The Cubs might suck right now, but the White Sox aren’t winning anything between the two but the majority of head-to-head games. That matters, and you can make that point, but that’s not the point ESPN was making. ESPN was trying to say the White Sox run Chicago. What a Bristol, Connecticut point of view.
It’s more likely the White Sox leave Chicago in the next twenty years than it is they win a World Series in that timeframe. Milwaukee rules the NL Central right now. The White Sox are below .500 and behind the Guardians in the standings. The St. Louis roster is so bad that FanGraphs has the team only three-in-five likely to make the playoffs even though they’re up four games on Atlanta, the current first team out. And on the spending thing: The Cubs’ payroll is virtually identical to that of the Cardinals, at least via Roster Resource, and it’s going to be higher than that of the White Sox from 2024 through the rest of the decade unless Ricketts ends up on the Magnitsky list.
Please, rip on the Cubs. Tom Ricketts is deserving of scorn, and it’s unclear if this rebuild is going to work or if Jed Hoyer’s going to have to sign free agents like there’s no tomorrow in two years. But don’t try to make the Cardinals out to be a current dynasty, and don’t try to make the White Sox out to be anything but a waste of a great fanbase and tons of untapped revenue opportunities.
The Oilers Are Done, the Rangers Are Making the Avalanche Rest
If I’ve interpreted anything correctly from this NHL postseason, it’s that teams are dominant while sweeping their opponents but if they have to take a few days off, they’re sunk, which is why the Rangers losing yesterday was such a smart move for their Stanley Cup chances. Now, if they do win the Eastern Conference, the Avalanche are going to have to relearn how to skate because the gap’s going to be so long. Brilliant.
On the topic of the Avalanche, the Oilers are not going to save America. No hard feelings—they’re all dealing with enough on their own, discovering that they can’t just outscore everyone by having one great player in a game where the best players spend more than half the minutes on the bench—but it’s all on the Rangers now.
Can Steph Curry Overcome His Past?
How many NBA titles does it take to wash away NIT heartbreak? Steph Curry’s trying to find out. After bowing out of the 2009 NIT in the second round, he’s been on a quest for vengeance and validation that would make Michael Jordan (who never came close to the NIT) blush. Three championships so far, and last night he kept the cause alive in the search for the fourth.
Obviously, no number of NBA titles can make up for missing out when that close to an NIT crown, but hey—what else are you going to do? Better than just going off to live in the woods and reflect on your mistakes until you need to move to a nursing home.
IndyCar Is Fun, But How Do You Make People Like It?
I watched a good chunk of the IndyCar race yesterday at Belle Isle, and it clicked for me a little bit. IndyCar is F1, but with a little more complexity, a little more randomness, a little less skill, and a lot less glamour.
A thing F1 fans tell you is that it’s “strategic,” which is true and also misleading. What most of them mean seems to be, “I thought auto racing was entirely about which driver is the best and which car is the fastest, and that turns out to not actually be the case,” which is fair but doesn’t make it any more strategic than me choosing what to eat for lunch. I don’t want to harp on this, because it pisses some F1 fans off (I recognize that it’s technologically impressive, guys, and I’m not saying you can’t like it—enjoy what you enjoy), but the “strategy” angle is overplayed and mostly comes from people’s surprise that the thing isn’t as simple as they thought it was.
IndyCar isn’t especially more strategic than F1. The basic bones of it are the same. But because the races are longer, and because passing is more possible, and because there’s a smaller variation in the quality of cars—partially because the good teams can have so many cars—it’s a lot more entertaining of a competitive product, should you theoretically strip away the Netflix marketing and the global element which favor the international open wheelers. In most F1 races, there’s a clear approach to tires and pitting, and contenders who start from behind have to try something alternative and hope for it to work out. In IndyCar, there are a handful of strategies and there are different variations within those. A lot of this comes from the length of the race and how competitive the cars are against one another: Teams have to plan more pit stops, and pit stops are more expensive in terms of the value of each second.
There’s a risk here for IndyCar that the strategies could get so varied as to be indecipherable for casual viewers. This thing can go too far. But something like yesterday’s race, where there were eight or nine guys who could believably win the thing at different points in the race, and those guys were using three core strategies with different variations? That was stimulating to the noggin. That had some drama to it without needing tires to explode or a late-race caution or any manufactured “rules.” It was easy to follow for someone who’d watched a handful of open wheel races, it was compelling, it was good entertainment.
On one side, there’s something F1 can learn from this. F1 fans are committed enough to F1 that they’d still watch if the races were half an hour longer or an hour longer (you could also necessitate more pit stops through different tire requirements, or by making the tires wear out faster, but you don’t necessarily want constant pitting, and longer races offer more advertising revenue for broadcasters). It’s not exactly a big secret that F1 is embarrassed about the quality of its racing. Adding length is one way to diversify the strategies and give more cars a path to a win on a given day.
On the other, though: IndyCar has a compelling product. More compelling than I’ve really realized. It’s not a problem with the racing. It, of the three biggest series here in the U.S. (NASCAR, IndyCar, F1, not sure the exact ratings order but I believe IndyCar is second in ratings and third in popularity with the most valuable demographics), has the most consistently high-quality racing. Its problem is not on the track. Its problem is everything else. This is getting better—the Nashville race was great, moving from Belle Isle back to a Detroit street race should be cool, there are pockets that really enjoy this sport—but there’s a long way to grow.
How to grow that? We’ve offered a lot of suggestions, but basically, you need to get people attached, and to get people attached, you need to follow some sort of competitive/narrative formula. A few options:
- Driver coming back from tragedy.
- Outlandishly lavish asshole driver.
- Head-to-head season-long two-driver rivalry.
- Team rivalry headlined by grizzled veterans of the sport.
In the absence of those, three of which are admittedly hard to manufacture (do not kill someone, IndyCar, it’s not worth it), it’s probably about building up the personalities of the drivers. Encourage villainy. Encourage white-knighting. Encourage dark-knighting. IndyCar has a bit of NASCAR’s problem in that the drivers are all minor variations of the same person. All cultural cousins of each other. It also has a problem in that the drivers get along with each other too well, or at least seem to, from the outside. Do drivers want to sell the sport? That’s not their primary focus—it’s winning—but the more you can get drivers to buy in and start playing up the bit, the better. Josef Newgarden needs to be more arrogant. Will Power needs to be more Australian. Pato O’Ward’s courage-based worldview needs to be more fully on display. Conor Daly needs to be slugging light beers on every camera on God’s green internet. When Marcus Ericsson doused himself with milk after winning the coolest race in the world, his rally from being an F1 castoff never given a real chance should’ve been the leading story on every sports talk show in the country. Some of this is the drivers themselves, some of it is marketing by the governing body, some of it is admittedly just where society’s at. But there’s more that can be done, and it thankfully doesn’t have to be done on the track at all.
Illinois Loves NASCAR, Everybody Hates Chastain
Fun race at Gateway yesterday—best one yet with the new car on a short track? Joey Logano outdueled Kyle Busch in overtime for the win, so that’s too bad, but before that we got bumper cars for a few hours, with everybody and everybody’s grandmother upset at Ross Chastain, including Ross Chastain, who was a little too apologetic after the race. Scared move, apologizing like that.
The core beef was between Chastain and Denny Hamlin, but Chase Elliott was also mad at Ross, Hamlin was also mad at Ricky Stenhouse, Bubba Wallace got spun by both Chastain and Stenhouse (the former indirectly), B.J. McLeod was mad at Elliott, and Cole Custer was mad at Todd Gilliland. Got a good ominous quote from Hamlin after the race about waiting until it matters to pay it back, implying he’s going to take a win away from Chastain down the line and call it retaliation for yesterday.
It was a sellout afternoon—NASCAR’s fourth of the year, following Daytona, the Coke 600, and the Phoenix spring race—and with it not at all boring, stock cars seem to be back in Illinois, just a lot of miles away from their former suburban locale.
A weird thing about Illinois is that its second-most significant city is in Missouri. Almost half the state, geographically, aligns more with St. Louis than with Chicago, and culturally, about seven eighths of the state (again, geographically) is more similar to Iowa or Missouri or Kentucky or Indiana or Wisconsin than it is to Chicago. Basically, you’ve got a Chicago corner and then you’ve got the rest, and the rest is all kinds of flavors of the Midwestern states, including Missourian.
This is nice for Illinois when it comes to NASCAR, because as the St. Louis market responds enthusiastically to the race at Gateway, Illinois gets the credit. Will Chicagoland come back? It’s been thrown around, now that NASCAR’s fixed its issue of being incredibly boring at intermediate-length tracks not named Texas (where it’s still bad racing), but we’re probably a couple years away at the very least, and the smart money seems to be on it not happening.
Anyway, good little comeback for Midwestern NASCAR. Having a good race in Kansas is helpful, too, and the potential’s there for a Brickyard revival after last year was great but only because it was a joke with the curb explosion.
Burnley to the World Cup?
Ok, still not sure if Connor Roberts and Wayne Hennessey are going to be Burnleyers again next year (my impression is yes, but I’m not seeing people say anything with certainty), but whether they are or aren’t, they’re playing in the World Cup for Wales in the fall after the leviathans took down Ukraine this weekend in the qualifier.
In other news, there’s still nothing final about Vincent Kompany being the new manager, and Wout Weghorst might be off to Istanbul after Turkish club Beşiktaş agreed with the Burnley front office on a deal. Weghorst has to sign off on it, but if he does, Burnley will have lost a third of the twelve million pounds they paid to add him in January. Big depreciated asset, and that’s not even adjusting for inflation. Bad vibe there.
***
Viewing schedule, today/tonight:
12:00 PM EDT: Louisville vs. Michigan, Louisville Regional Championship (ESPN+)
It’s a beautiful day of the year, when you can just put college baseball on TV and vaguely keep an eye on it.
4:00 PM EDT: Oregon State vs. Vanderbilt, Oregon State Regional Championship (SEC Network)
On that note: Excited to vaguely keep an eye on this one. Jacoby Ellsbury’s program vs. David Price’s program? I can feel the Red Sox fanbase grinding its collective mouth of teeth to the root.
7:00 PM EDT: Oklahoma State vs. Texas, Women’s College World Series Semifinal (ESPN)
The Longhorns are on the brink, but they aren’t dealing with anyone unfamiliar. Either the Big 12 is the dominant force in college softball, having the WCWS in Oklahoma City’s an unfair advantage, or it’s just coincidence that 75% of the remaining softball teams in the country hail from the same six-hour stretch along the 97th meridian.
7:00 PM EDT: Oklahoma State vs. Arkansas, Oklahoma State Regional Championship (ESPN2, second screen)
I stopped in Fayetteville a couple weeks ago and while I didn’t get there while the bookstore was open (summer hours), I’m still thinking about getting a Hogs trucker hat. Feel like that school has great trucker hats.
9:30 PM EDT: Oklahoma State vs. Texas Game 2, WCWS Semifinal (ESPN)
Oh wow, we’re all college sports today. This feels like a MACtion Tuesday in November with basketball ramping up.
10:00 PM EDT: Stanford vs. Texas State, Stanford Regional Championship (ESPN2, second screen)
Texas State and Stanford both being universities is pretty funny if you sit with it long enough. Would love Texas State to take them down. Hope someone does Horns Down if they do.
