Alexander: True, KBO is real, live baseball, but …
The (quarantined) world according to Jim:
• I tried. I really did.
The Korea Baseball Organization made it to ESPN late Monday night, a seeming panacea for a populace desperately hungry for any sort of live sports. I made it through less than two innings of the Samsung Lions and NC Dinos, and maybe there’s a large part of the issue right there.
Yeah, it’s baseball. Yeah, it was live. And yeah, you didn’t know what the outcome would be. But are we really driven to care enough about players we’ve never heard of and teams whose backstories we don’t know? (Further, is just the sight of baseball and potential for bat flips enough to override the irritating artificial crowd noise ESPN pumped into its Monday night/Tuesday morning broadcast like a laugh track?) …
• I voted no. Game 1 of the ’88 World Series, with Vin Scully on the call, was on another channel at the same time. Even when you know the ending, that one never gets old. …
• The 10-team KBO, and Taiwan’s five-team Chinese Professional Baseball League, could be seen as test cases to determine when or if Major League Baseball can start up again. Or maybe not. These are leagues from smaller countries with far more organized approaches to combating the coronavirus pandemic. Taiwan began its schedule several weeks ago and could be close to allowing fans into its ballparks.
(And, may we add, in those countries there is less resistance to wearing masks and social distancing, “freedom” and “liberty” in those cultures evidently not incompatible with looking out for the health of others.) …
• Executives on these shores are watching those leagues closely, to be sure. So are those in Japan, where the latest reports suggest Nippon Professional Baseball might start in June at the earliest without fans in stadiums.
Here, there’s a multitude of possible plans, a host of variables, and a nagging apprehension that any progress we’ve made in controlling the effects of this pandemic is only temporary. We can root for a July 1 Opening Day, and it would truly be a joyous occasion even if played before empty seats. But it’s folly to assume anything now. …
• This Space will be the first to admit to not being any sort of expert on the law. That said, can we stipulate that the Hon. R. Gary Klausner, the L.A.-based district court judge who shot down the U.S. national women’s soccer team’s pay discrimination argument last week, is equally deficient or worse when it comes to knowledge of (a) the mechanics of professional soccer in this country, and (b) the premise that an entity shouldn’t be punished for success? …
• Klausner’s 32-page opinion issued Friday focused on the numbers and ignored the context. Yes, he cited numbers from the 2015 to 2019 cycle in which the women’s team made $24 million, or $220,747 per game, for 111 international matches while the men made $18 million total, $212,639 per match, for 87 games. Unsaid: The women’s team won a World Cup. The men missed the tournament altogether and have spent the past two years in rebuilding mode. In other words, even when you win, you lose.
• And yes, the women’s team collectively bargained a salary structure rather than a strict pay-for-play arrangement like the men, something the judge referred to as the women “asking for all of the upsides of the MNT CBA (namely, higher bonuses) without any of the drawbacks (e.g., no base salary).” Seriously? The men’s players all play in thriving (or at least stable) club leagues. If the USSF didn’t subsidize the National Women’s Soccer League by paying the salaries of its best players, it likely wouldn’t exist. …
• Maybe the lawyers for the women’s team should have offered these numbers: The 14 players who actually played in the men’s team’s last meaningful game – a loss in the final World Cup qualifier in 2017 at Trinidad & Tobago – averaged $1,975,243 in salary from their club teams, according to MLS salary figures and other published reports. The NWSL salaries of the 14 women who saw the field in last July’s World Cup final against the Netherlands each maxed out at $167,500, plus benefits, according to the CBA. …
• But there’s reason to believe a settlement is within reach between the team and its federation, and that U.S. Soccer – now headed by former women’s player Cindy Parlow Cone after the clumsy, sexist original response to the women’s team’s complaint forced Carlos Cordeiro out of the presidency – will at least remove some of the disparities and give the women’s team a bigger voice. …
• Quarantine time-killing suggestion: If you are a baseball fan, you could do far worse than the biographies of big leaguers past and present that the Society for American Baseball Research has on its website. Simply go to sabr.org and click on the Bioproject link. …
• Why do I get the sense that the NCAA’s seeming action on the Name/Image/Likeness issue, which purportedly would finally enable reasonable compensation for the athletes, is nothing more than the ol’ okey-doke? There’s been movement on the organization’s side toward fairer compensation of the athletes who generate the income. But there’s still this nagging feeling that the NCAA is less concerned with the athletes than with a fear that somebody, somehow, will get a recruiting advantage. …
• Under ordinary circumstances, Thursday’s unveiling of the NFL schedule is not only a national holiday to some but is followed by a mad scramble by fans to book flights and especially hotel rooms for particular games in particular cities. (Green Bay, I’m lookin’ at you.)
But under these circumstances, do you dare? …
jalexander@scng.com
@Jim_Alexander on Twitter