When Satan slithered into the Garden of Eden and told Eve the edict against eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was fake news, he used a satiny sales pitch designed to create mayhem and consign mankind to thousands of years of sin and abominations like the designated hitter. Old Lucifer was pretty smooth, and he closed the deal by promising Eve that she and Adam would be equals of God if they partook of that outlawed item. When Eve arrived back at the cave, she probably said, “What a nice serpent.”
Since then, we humans have been particularly susceptible to the slick come-ons of salespeople, whose job it is to make us buy something that we don’t need, don’t want or can’t afford. Even after we have parted with our hard-earned cash, we still don’t recognize that the person pushing the product upon us is not our friend or confidant. And we recognize less that the company providing the unnecessary item has absolutely no interest in anything other than its P&L statement.
Hey, this is America. And capitalism reigns. You want something different? Try Portugal, where the Socialist Party has ruled for several years, and which finished 66th in the 2019 World Happiness Report (really!), behind Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, among other garden spots. So, don’t misread this as a call for revolution. El Hombre likes money. Likes new things. And he loves college football, which you sure as heck can’t find where the descendants of Karl Marx hang out.
But let’s be careful not to fall for the polished public personae of the uber rich, whose fortunes – if they made them on their own – have come from the ability to convince people to fork it over. Again: Yay, capitalism! They are entitled to their billions, but we as consumers, and in the case of Major League Baseball, as fans, should not take up their causes for them. Someone with one dollar wants two. Someone with $1 billion wants another billion. And someone with a baseball team wants to charge you 20 bucks for a domestic beer.
All of which brings us to the ongoing negotiations between players and owners regarding the potential re-starting of the MLB season. Public opinion has already started to move against the Union, which has the nerve to call the proposal to split revenues 50-50 unacceptable and to accuse the Rockefellers of trying to back-door a salary cap at a time when revenues are uncertain and it’s unlikely fans will be back in stadiums this year.
Let’s not forget that any return to action will require a heretofore unseen level of testing, tracking and proper behavior to make sure everyone involved is safe. Remember that the amount of testing materials needed is well beyond the available quantities. Couple that with a climate throughout the country in which uncertainty is the only certainty, and you have a gigantic problem to solve before even thinking about how to split up whatever money comes out of this.
Suppose everyone involved is satisfied that a cry of “Play Ball!” will not be accompanied by a rash of positive tests – hardly a guarantee. Then, it’s time to talk about money. And, as usual, the owners are trying to make fans sympathize with them by painting the players as greedy and out to harm the country by depriving it of a much-needed diversion during this difficult time. What really is happening is that by trying to push the 50-50 split in revenues, the owners are hoping to establish a new rubric for future negotiations, which they hope will result in a salary cap. Should the players agree to this, owners will absolutely try to push for something similar next year, when gate receipts will no doubt be down, thanks to fans’ trepidations about returning to ballparks. It’s not like they will return to the days of the Reserve Clause, when teams controlled the players for the durations of their careers, but don’t think for a second that they won’t take any opportunity they can to control labor costs. And, boy, would they love to have that Reserve Clause back again.
Now, it’s not easy for fans to feel sympathy for big-league players, especially those making gigantic salaries. Trust El Hombre: Bryce Harper isn’t worrying about how he’s going to pay the mortgage. The median 2019 MLB salary (the point where an equal number of players earn above and below it) was $1.4 million, hardly a subsistence wage. But while the players are making a lot, the owners are making more, no matter how skillfully they manipulate their books to make it seem like they are headed for skid row. The hidden money here is in the franchise values, which continue to climb. Only two teams – Pittsburgh and Miami – lost value in 2019, according to Forbes. All 30 teams are worth at least $1 billion, while 10 years ago, only two were. Forbes has been charting the teams’ worth for 22 years, and the average team has seen an 11% increase each year. Come 2022, when the new, $5.1 billion deal with Fox kicks in, that number should swell even more. Still feel bad for the big-wallet group?
In these situations, it helps to remember El Hombre’s Law:
In battles between millionaires and billionaires, always root for the millionaires.
We all want sports back. We all want to make our lives as normal as possible. How great would it be to care about managers’ decisions – although with the universal DH, there will be far fewer of those, but that’s a topic for another time – playoff races (let everybody in!) and the vagaries of the shift? But there is some work to do for us to reach the point where someone can throw out a first pitch via Zoom. And as that work is completed, please resist the urge to demonize the players and remember that every smiling owner is hoping you’ll buy his smooth pitch – and a seven-dollar hot dog.
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EL HOMBRE SEZ: El Hombre is starved for sports, but even he can’t watch NASCAR, Korean professional baseball or UFC bloodlettings. And isn’t it time for networks to stop marketing 2017 games between mediocre opponents as “classics”? Now on NFL Network: Detroit vs. Arizona in a 2018 showdown for the fifth pick in the Draft! Please. Would it be so hard to replay some games from the ‘70s? Now, those are classics. Everything else is just marketing…The Aquavit-and-double-anchovy-pizza-fueled nightmare of the last two years of Monday Night Football is finally over. espn decided to remove Joe Tessitore and Booger McFarland from the booth and release the hostages, er, viewers from captivity. Tessitore specialized in making a two-yard, first-quarter run off left tackle on second-and-eight sound like V-E Day, and McFarland was the master of banal “analysis.” Any replacement team will be an upgrade…If you haven’t been tuning in to “The Last Dance” on espn, you are missing some quality TV. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is a true documentary. It’s a docudrama produced in conjunction with Michael Jordan designed to paint him as the most competitive person in history and burnish his claim to being the Best Ever. (By the way, anybody who uses “G.O.A.T.” or “The GOAT” ought to lose his or her fan or media card. It’s over. Played out. Stop it.) Enjoy the production, the old footage, Jordan’s majesty, the rare glimpses of how a team works and the bold-print quotations, but remember that it’s a carefully-crafted production and not an unvarnished look at Jordan and the Bulls. (By the way, he was the best ever.)…The Rams finally unveiled their new uniforms, and they are not very good. LA will look like some nondescript college team and will play in off-white road unis the color of a college kid’s undershirts after his first semester. They are way worse than those of their future co-tenants, the Chargers, who absolutely killed it with their ginned-up retro designs…If the NBA re-starts, try to imagine the excitement that will come when league bottom-feeders like the Knicks and Cavs square off. In that case, it will be good that no fans have to cough up any ticket money. If the league does come back, its biggest question won’t be what to do about the playoffs but how to make sure fans don’t hear the curses spewed by angry coaches or the trash talk from players in an empty arena. Maybe the league can offer a “premium” package that allows fans full access to the profanity. If that happens, El Hombre is in!
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AND ANOTHER THING: Wait. You mean sainted Durham CC head coach Mike Krzyzewski might have fractured a couple rules when he was accumulating class after class of mercenary players over the past several seasons? You mean those five-star recruits weren’t merely attracted to the outstanding educational opportunities and classic Gothic and Georgian architecture on campus? The Dookie apologists have fed us fairy tales that even though just about everybody else in college basketball was offering cash and prizes to get the best of the best, that could never happen in the Blue Devil program, which we have been told is cleaner than a vat of hand sanitizer. But someone might just be tossing some bacteria onto that pristine reputation. Zion Williamson is being sued by his former marketing manager. You remember him, right? He spent about nine months on campus, soaking up all Duke had to offer. And if you believe the former manager, it offered a lot. A bag of cash. A nice house for the parents. The NBA’s New Hope might have to answer some questions – under oath – about whether he was a “professional” when he played for the Blue Devils. Krzyzewski might be deposed, too. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Of course, it’s most likely just a dream. Someone will broker a settlement before anybody sits in front of an inquisitive lawyer. And then Duke can go back to getting the players nobody else can by not doing what everybody else is.
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YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT? On the surface, the Eagles’ draft made sense. The team needed more speed, so it drafted a bunch of fast guys. Last year’s Super Bowl teams were the two fastest in the NFL, so the philosophy is sound. But there is track fast and football fast. Those are two different things. Bob Hayes had both. So did Willie Gault. But it’s unlikely the 2016 400-meter relay Olympic gold medal team was packed with guys who could get away from press coverage. This year’s draft produced maybe one player – first-round receiver Jalen Reagor – who could end up starting this year, and that’s just because the Birds’ receiving corps is a disaster. Would that make the draft a success? Not quite. As for Jalen Hurts, the question isn’t whether his joining the team will offend oft-injured Carson Wentz. It’s whether Hurts can play quarterback in the NFL. He wasn’t ever considered a first-round talent, so it makes sense that he is best suited as a good backup on a good team. Since GM Howie Roseman was so determined to draft a bunch of developmental players, he probably wouldn’t have chosen a starter in the second round anyway. That makes the Hurts choice relatively reasonable. It’s obvious Roseman thinks the current roster is good enough to contend. That’s extremely questionable and should be the basis for assessing his job performance in 2020.
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ONE FOR THE ROAD: Rick Pitino has moved into his office in New Rochelle, NY, to take over the program at Iona, which must be run by people who can’t read. Pitino has been twisting NCAA recruiting rules into disfigured heaps since he was helping players get used cars back in ’77 at Hawaii. He left Louisville a couple years back after his “assistants” were staging stripper parties for recruits and shoe company “representatives” were promising six-figure payments to prospects. All without Ricky P’s knowledge. Right. El Hombre sat across from Pitino once and heard him negotiate the price of a used car for a family member. He took 25 minutes. Wanted to make sure every detail was handled. All for a $10,000 automobile. Yet, he didn’t pay enough attention to his program to know about the malfeasance. Please. Iona has sold its institutional virtue in return for some basketball wins. Meanwhile, Louisville is sweating out an NC2A letter of allegations regarding the violations committed while Pitino is in charge. On the surface, it appears unfair that those left behind get hammered for the misdeeds of those already gone, but remember that the Louisville president and board approved Pitino’s hiring. They knew what he was about. And they approved it anyway. (Side note: Pitino should be banned from coaching for two lifetimes, just in case he converts to Hinduism and gets another go-round.) Sure, the school fired Pitino, his assistants, the AD and anybody else it could, in an attempt to ward off any NC2A penalties. But it also hired Pitino in the first place. And that wasn’t too smart.
1 comment:
An instant El Hombre classic!
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