Phillies bring happiness, Hal Steinbrenner cries poor, and more
The Out in Left Weekly: May 26, 2024
MLB
Literally no one has seen a better Phillies team
The Philadelphia Phillies being the best team in baseball over the first two months of the season had elicited not joy but relief. Such is the feeling when chronic pain is alleviated. I finally submitted myself to happiness this week after a compatriot on Phillies Threads—yes, it is a thing—put the team’s .717 winning percentage into perspective:
Generations of Phillies fans yearned for a team like this. Instead, they got the losingest franchise in sports history. You may point out that they have won two World Series championships, but the first, in 1980, occurred 97 years after the team’s founding. The ballyhooed Curse of the Bambino last just 86 years. It really does amaze me that I am watching, so far, the winningest Phillies team of all time, and it makes me feel sorry that my departed brethren are missing it, just as it makes me feel more connected to those watching the team with me.
Until they started losing yesterday.
Against the 17-34 Colorado Rockies.
A day after the Phillies lost the series opener at Coors Field.
“Was a nice szn,” I texted the group chat when the Phillies went down 3-1.
“Disaster,” I sent after the eighth, with my side down a run heading into their final at-bat.
Of course, the Phillies came back to win, the final score 8-4. It’s just that type of year. Life is good (today).
Hal Steinbrenner, billionaire owner of the New York Yankees, cries poor
I fell ill this week. It wasn’t because of a virus or a bacteria or something I ate. It was because New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner said this about his team: “... payrolls at the levels we’re at right now are simply not sustainable for us financially.”
According to Forbes, Steinbrenner is worth $1.5 billion. His team is worth $7.1 billion, and in 2022 the Yankees banked $143 million from their TV broadcasting deal alone. (YES Network is the most profitable and most watched regional sports network in the country, thanks to New York City being the largest media market in the wealthiest country on Earth.) The Yankees took $1.2 billion from taxpayers to pay for their stadium. Team owners in the U.S. can deduct nearly every business expense from their taxes.
What Steinbrenner meant is that the Yankees’ $305 million payroll this year isn’t sustainable for the profit margin he wants, which isn’t profit he earned. Steinbrenner’s wealth accumulation is thanks to his late father George, who bought the Yankees in 1973 for $10 million, which today feels like my weekly grocery bill. If Steinbrenner isn’t trolling, then I almost feel bad for him. His believing that his excess profits are good for everyone and that we’d take his comments at face value indicates a terribly limited and deluded worldview.
But at the end of the day, it’s just lame. George reveled in turning the Yankees into a swaggering and lavishly spending circus that won often and entertained always. He knew that the best thing for him, for New York, and for baseball was the existence of an Evil Empire. His son is a lifeless bean counter who wouldn’t know what fun was if it hit him across his set, frowning jaw. As my Yankees-loving father lamented, the most important stat in sports anymore is EBITDA.
Other news
College athletes finally win revenue sharing
Current and former college athletes getting revenue sharing is a long overdue win for human beings, and it makes clear that tradition, competition, and community are mere window dressing for what college sports is all about: money. The NCAA and its member schools faced certain defeat in court, so they negotiated a settlement to limit the damage.
The revenue-sharing model is also an attempt to ward off the professionalization of its workforce. They are so afraid of their students unionizing that Rev. John I. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, called on Congress to grant the NCAA an antitrust exemption and to establish in law that student-athletes are not employees. It’s a venal stance for any academic, let alone for the leader of one of the most prestigious universities in the world, but morality never got in the way of the Catholic Church.
The workers/players will eventually win, though, and their NIL deals and direct payments from schools call into question the entire construct of the NCAA. If the NCAA governs amateurism so that it can control and exploit labor, and the amateurism model is essentially defunct, then what is the point of the NCAA?
The handful of universities with profitable football and basketball programs will cling to their cash cows, despite being even further divorced from the schools’ core mission of teaching people things. We see that now with the emergence of mega-conferences like the coast-to-coast Big 10 and the ever-expanding Southeastern Conference. The only prerequisites for schools getting absorbed into these conferences and cut into their multi-billion dollar broadcast deals are having some brand value and a willingness to get their ass kicked by Michigan and Alabama on national TV.
The college sports programs below the top tier will be cut out of the most lucrative TV deals, which means they won’t be able to afford the most talented players, which means they will fall further behind the big dogs, which means they soon won’t matter or soon won’t exist. It’s an ad hoc system devoid of vision and an ethos. It’s what happens to organizations when making money becomes the purpose rather than the byproduct. Where college sports is going I have no idea, and neither does the NCAA.
CityNerd sums up Out in Left in a 15-minute video
Recommendations
Because the book is better: True Grit by Charles Portis
Because it might be the greatest album of all time: Rip It Up by Orange Juice
As a die-hard lifelong Yankee fan who goes back before Mantle and Maris, I am saddened to have to say that Mr Dentino is absolutely correct in his excoriation of Steinbrenner Junior. Socialism is ok for the wealthy but not for the families of children who would love to see Soto play but for the problem it would cost a family $800 to see a game. What is not sustainable is the $15 hotdog and the fan lockout it implies. Keep telling it, Mr Dentino!