Sports

Curmie’s Conjectures: What the Hell Was ESPN Thinking?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

by Curmie

[My post yesterday about ESPN’s decision to ignore the pre-game events at the Sugar Bowl attracted almost no commentary at all, but it did prompt this installment of Curmie’s Conjectures, which makes it all worthwhile. This is cross-posted on Curmie’s blog; once again, I encourage everyone to visit it regularly. Curmie doesn’t post often, but as Spencer Tracy says of Katherine Hepburn in 1952’s “Pat and Mike,”…what’s there is cherce.” —JM]

There’s a lot of brouhaha at the moment, including Jack’s apt commentary, about ESPN’s coverage of Thursday’s Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans, or rather of the pre-game.  The game was postponed for a day in the wake of the horrific events of early New Year’s morning only a few blocks from the Superdome, where the game was played.

So why is the photo for this piece of a baseball game?  Allow me to explain.  I have been a fan of the New York Mets since 1962, the year of the team’s inception.  I can tell you with certainty that the biggest home run in Mets history had nothing to do with their World Series championship years of 1969 or 1986.  It was Mike Piazza’s two-run, come-from-behind, homer in the bottom of the 8th inning in Shea Stadium on September 21, 2001.  That’s what you see above.

It was the game-winning hit and it came against the best team in the division, the arch-rival Atlanta Braves.  Vastly more importantly, it was during the first major league game to be played in New York after the attacks of 9/11.  And, for the first time in a week and a half, the locals had something to be happy about.  That night, anyone who wasn’t a Braves fan per se (and probably a fair number who were) needed that home run.  Not just Mets fans.  Not just New Yorkers.  Americans.

We’d been told the everything was going to be OK, but we needed more.  David Letterman going back on the air helped, but everything was still somber.  The Bush jokes that would cement the resolve—you don’t joke about the President if your country is in crisis—were to come later.  But first, there was Mike Piazza.  Sometimes, sports matter.

In the winter of 1980, I lived in a small town in rural Kentucky.  I remember watching the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey game on the TV.  After the incredible upset of the powerhouse Soviet team by a bunch of American college kids, after the most famous line of Al Michaels’s career—“Do you believe in miracles?  Yes!”—there was a lot of noise outside, loud enough to be not merely audible but intrusive in my second-floor apartment.

Outside, there was a string of cars with horns blaring; their windows were down (even in Kentucky it can get a little nippy in February), with a bunch of mostly teenagers leaning out and chanting “USA!  USA! USA!”  I’m willing to bet that I was one of fewer than a dozen people in the entire town who’d ever seen a hockey game live, but here were these kids who didn’t know a poke check from a blue line getting excited about the Olympic semi-final.

In the midst of the Iranian hostage situation, with the country only showing the slightest signs of emerging from the energy crisis (is it any wonder the incumbent President was routed in the election a few months later?), we—again, all of us—needed something to grab ahold of, something to suggest that we’d weather the storm. There have, of course, been other moments that transcended sports: Jesse Owens dominating at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling in the first round, Billy Miles appearing from nowhere to win the 10,000m in the Tokyo Olympics; we might even add Spiff Sedrick’s improbable sprint to glory in the women’s rugby 7s in this year’s Olympics. But this year’s Sugar Bowl was most like that baseball game in September of 2001: what made it special wasn’t who won, or what political statement could be wrangled out of the victory, but the mere fact that the game went on was a sign of determination and perhaps a little bit of defiance.  If you’re a Georgia fan, you’re disappointed that your team lost, but you were reminded before kickoff that there are more important things than football games. 

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Ethics Dunce: ESPN (Disney)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The College Football Playoff quarterfinal at the Allstate Sugar Bowl between the University of Georgia Bulldogs and Notre Dame, postponed from New Year’s Day to yesterday afternoon because of the deadly terrorist attack on Bourbon Street began with a solemn rendition of the National Anthem, a moment of silence, and a defiant crowd chant of “USA! None of this was deemed worthy of broadcasting by the main platform for the event on cable, ESPN. After all, they had ads to sell.

ESPN cut to a commercial break as the moment of silence began, and deliberately—don’t buy the narrative that it was inadvertent—chose not to let the national audience see the emotional prelude to the game including the “U.S.A!” eruption from the crowd. Disney and ESPN are so blinded by their institutional wokeness that they couldn’t recognize that the pre-game ceremonies had cultural and societal significance.

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Ethics Dunce: Baltimore Ravens Wide Receiver Diontae Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It is sad but probably to be expected that so many professional athletes don’t get the ethics thingy. The latest incident: Diontae Johnson, a wide reciever for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, for refused when his coach ordered him to take the field late in the team’s Week 13 game against the Philadelphia Eagles. The Ravens are still trying to make the play-offs, but it wouldn’t matter if the game had no importance to the Ravens’ fortunes at all. Johnson is a member of the team; he draws a salary. Apparently he was angry and frustrated over his lack of playing time since the Ravens acquired him, and had been complaining to teammates for weeks. “Tough noogies,” as they used to say when I was a kid in Arlington, Mass. (An alternative was “tough bunnies.” I never understood that, any more than I knew what a “hosey” was.)

Johnson was immediately suspended.

Wait…why was this a difficult decision? It was an obvious decision. This week the Ravens announced that Johnson was told to stay away from the team as a likely disruptive influence. There was some question why the Ravens didn’t just release him, but apparently that is because they don’t want any other teams strengthening themselves during the play-off run portion of the season.

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Ethics Observations on the $765 Million Baseball Player

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

My Aunt Bea, the family progressive and knee-jerk Democrat, died this year at the age of 96, cantankerous and opinionated to the end. She was a big Cincinnati Reds fan (she lived in Dayton, Ohio) and I remember her having many arguments with my father when free agency exploded the salaries in Major League Baseball in the late 1970s. “No baseball player is worth those salaries,” she insisted. My father would laugh and say, “Bea, by definition they are worth those salaries, because the people who benefit from their unique talents are willing to pay them.” Then she would talk about teacher salaries, and my father would say, “It may seem unfair, but a lot more people are capable of teaching than are able to hit a fastball, and the sad fact is that a a large number of Americans care more about sports than they do public education.”

I wonder what my aunt and my father would be saying now after the announcement that Juan Soto, the young (26), amazingly talented slugger widely recognized as a generational talent and a certain Hall of Famer barring some catastrophe, agreed yesterday to a 15-year, $765 million contract with the New York Mets.

In his short major league career so far, Soto has already earned over 80 million dollars. Even though the previous record-setting contract was given out just last year to freakish Shohei Ohtani, who is both a great hitter (he was the National League MVP in 2024) and an ace starting pitcher, Soto’s new deal for just his batting prowess topped it. This contract automatically raises the worth of every other player, increases team payroll expenses, increases ticket prices, makes it increasingly unaffordable for families to attend baseball games, makes it more difficult for small market teams to compete, and, once again, makes Gordon Gekko look prescient when he said in “Wall Street,” “Greed is good!”

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America’s Pop Culture May Save Us Yet: The “Trump Dance”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This is the most wonderfully strange country, isn’t it? I have mentioned here before how the United States “won” the World’s Fair called “Expo 67.” A huge, imposing Soviet Union pavilion displayed threshers, tractors and other farm equipment, tanks and satellites, perfectly capturing the harsh gray gravity of life in the USSR. Not far away was the United States pavilion, housed in a giant transparent geodesic dome (courtesy of Buckminister Fuller), filled with joyful explosions of American pop culture: Raggedy Ann dolls, artifacts from the baseball Hall of Fame, cool cars, rock ‘n roll and classic movie clips running on loops. There was Gary Cooper alone in the dusty street; Cary Grant being shot at by that crop duster; Julie Andrews spinning on the mountain top at the start of “The Sound of Music,” Gene Kelly singing in the rain. Tough choice for the international visitors: which country would you want to live in?

And now, after one of the bitterest Presidential campaigns in our history, following almost a decade of a constantly widening breach in our politics, values and discourse, the essential light-heartedness (and habitual triviality) that has always been a feature of our national character is pulling us together.

I didn’t see this coming.

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Abortion Schmabortion: Women Are Finally Getting The Right To Play Professional Baseball! Rejoice!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is way, way, way overdue. The Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) announced that it plans to play during the summer of 2026.

League founder Justine Siegal, the first woman coach employed by a Major League Baseball team, and lawyer Keith Steinco World Series-winning manager Cito Gaston and Japan Women’s Baseball League pitcher Ayami Sato to join them in the venture. Good.

Ever since the Penny Marshall-directed film “A League of Their Own,” based on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which operated from 1943 to 1954. I have wondered why women haven’t had a professional baseball league since then. It is not a sport that requires great strength or size. Unlike basketball or football, I could conceive of an occasional female player making it to the major leagues, especially pitchers.

The problem has always been that talented female Little League players get redirected into softball because that’s the presumed path. There are no college women’s baseball teams; hardball has been a dead end for women. Maybe not any more.

WPBL needs to land a national television deal ahead of its inaugural season to be viable: I think that this can happen. (Suggestion: It should talk Tom Hanks into managing one of the teams.) The league intends to have a full season, playoffs and a championship, with six teams initially participating. If there is one in the Baltimore-Washington area, I’ll be in the stands.

“The Women’s Pro Baseball League is here for all the girls and women who dream of a place to showcase their talents and play the game they love,” Siegal said in the WPBL’s press relaese.“We have been waiting over 70 years for a professional baseball league we can call our own. Our time is now.”

Take THAT, “Handmaiden’s Tale”!

Baseball Ethics Assholes of the Decade: Austin Capobianco and John Hansen

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

(Naturally, they were New York Yankees fans….)

The baseball season ended last night with the Los Angeles Dodgers overcoming a 5 run deficit to win the World Series over the New York Yankees four games to one. Good. It is especially good because the night before, in the only game that the Pinstripes managed to win in the short series, two jerks in Yankee jerseys interfered with the game, the Series and Dodgers star Mookie Betts as he tried to catch a foul fly ball at the Yankee Stadium wall.

In the bottom of the first inning in Game 4 with the Yankees losing 2-0, NY lead-off hitter Gleyber Torres hit a high pop-up into right field foul territory. Dodgers right fielder Betts caught the ball with his glove, but Capobianco, with the assistance of his pal John Hansen, grabbed Betts’ glove with both hands, opened it, reached inside with his right hand and knocked the ball back onto the field. This was on national television for all to see. The umpires ruled fan interference and Torres was called out.

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Ethics Dunce: Ex-Jets Head Coach Robert Saleh

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Robert Saleh has been fired as head coach of the New York Jets after Sunday’s loss to the Minnesota Vikings. With high hopes for a winning season in 2024-25 because star quarterback Aaron Rodgers is finally healthy, the Jets have looked weak while managing only a 2-3 record. The King’s Pass might have worked for Saleh if he had led the Jets to a better record, but many suspect that the impetus for his dismissal was his controversial choice to sport a Lebanon flag below the Nike logo on the sleeve of his hoodie during the Vikings game. This was his tasteful choice while Israel was fighting for its life against the terrorist, Iran-funded organization Hezbollah, which uses Lebanon as its headquarters.

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A Visit to Football’s Bizarro World

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Sure, I guess in a crazy system where universities pay students to play football for them, this story makes sense, sort of.

The star starting quarterback for UNLV, Matthew Sluka is quitting the team after UNLV’s first 3-0 start in 40 years. He says he will sit out the rest of the season because the school hasn’t ponied up the $100,000 he says he was promised by an assistant coach before committing to the school this offseason.

Ah, remember those quaint old days when college football heroes devoted their passion and athletic talents to winning for team, the school, and fellow students? Today instead of “Win one for the Gipper,” it’s “Show me the money.” Tell me again why we let educational institutions run professional football and basketball teams stocked with phony students who usually graduate, if they graduate, having learned nothing but how to talk to their accountants?

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Ethics Quiz: The Offensive… Wristband?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Apparently a biological male who “identifies as female” plays on the Plymouth Regional High School girls’ soccer team in New Hampshire. When the team played its regional rival Bow High School, some Bow parents, protesting the presence of the player whom they regarded as a danger to the born-female players on the Bow team, wore wristbands like the ones above as a silent protest. The Bow High athletic director had told concerned parents before the contest that “in the wake of a federal judge’s ruling that the term ‘girl’ includes males who identify as female,” he felt he was powerless. (He’s a weenie. If he agreed with the parents, he could simply have his team refuse to play the Plymouth team, accept the consequences, and raise the issue.)

When the parents’ “XX” bands appeared at the game, school officials stopped the soccer match, ordered the parents to remove the wristbands, and even “issued [a] police-enforced ‘No Trespassing order’” against two parents who refused.

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