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“Sports–T’is the Season”

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We’re waiting.  Everyone is waiting. Waiting for this pandemic virus to subside.

We may be in for a much longer wait.

President Trump held a 30-minute conference call with the heads of 13-different sports leagues detailing his hopes this weekend.

He has said he hopes sports teams will be back on the field, playing infront of fans on August 1st.  That’s 4-months from now.

Optimistic?  Pessimistic?  Realistic?  No one knows.

Here’s the latest on what the major sports are saying:

BASEBALL…Players are working out on their own.  MLB may need at least 2-weeks of ramped up spring training to launch a shortened season.  What was hoped for, a July 1st startup, seems impossible, considering the virus has yet to apex in the East, and has not arrived in the West.  Rob Manfred had hoped for a 100-game season starting July 1st, and an entire postseason of games in mid-October into November at neutral sights, in warm weather cities or domed stadiums.  Now the latest idea, take all 30-teams, move major league rosters to the Cactus League, use 11-spring training sights in Arizona, and play a shortened season, in empty stadiums, until the virus lifts around the country.  A complex project for sure, to transport, house, feed, and test players each day.

FOOTBALL…The NFL and college football have not been impacted yet.  But as the clock ticks, and days come off the calendar, time grows shorter.  No OTA workouts, no minicamps, for the mass of NFL rosters.  Virtually no spring football, and what appears to be a limited preseason workouts for college football.  And then again, where to play and practice if the virus is not tamped down by late spring into early summer.  NFL teams would need at least a month to get ready for the rigors of pro football play.  You’re talking 90-players in camp, and a whole support staff of coaches and trainers and equipment people, and doctors to test players.  College football says it needs 4-weeks of some type of camp, but how can you do that if college campuses are still closed down?  What about real hot spots like Seattle-Los Angeles and the late arrival virus to the West Coast? The NFL says full schedule-full stadiums.  Doctors say that’s not likely yet and there is no target date.  Football’s problems are still ahead of them.

BASKETBALL…The NBA is reeling, and the financial devastation is right infront of them.  They have asked their players to take a 50% pay-cut.  They are looking at 1.2B financial loss of half the schedule, and this comes on top of a 450M loss when the China dispute erupted in the summer leading to the cancellation of enormous sponsorship contracts.  Commissioner Adam Silver is considering going right to the playoffs now, with all the games to be played in 2-Arenas in neutral sight Las Vegas, only on TV, with no fans on hand.  Teams might have two weeks of a mini training camp before the so called tournament–playoffs would begin.  Doctors say they don’t know if you can bring all these teams in at once to play, and should those players be tested daily.  The cancellation of March Madness has led to a 62% drop of revenue sharing for every college athletic program in the nation, big time to the smallest of Division III.

HOCKEY…The NHL had no plans to finish out what was left of the regular season, and still does not know what its postseason would look like.  Hockey players are home, but there are no rinks open for skating, so to get them back on the ice, and in cardiovascular shape to play may take longer than just a couple of weeks.  Gary Bettman is inquiring about arena availability for dates in July-August.  Can you imagine ice conditions in places like Boston-New York-Tampa Bay-in mid-summer?

GOLF-AUTO RACING-TENNIS-HORSE RACING….A Kentucky Derby in September?  The Masters in October?  The US Open in fall?
Wimbledon in late fall?  A revamped NASCAR-Indy Car-Formula schedule over the final 4-months of 2020?  The Tokyo Olympics moved to next summer.  The English Premier League-MLS thinking 2-games a week starting in July?   That is what is being discussed, but no one know for sure, especially with the horrors of what is still happening in England, Italy, Spain, the heartbeat countries of pro soccer.

T’is the season for sports, but no games being played, everyone in scramble mode  to think what might be possible, fearing the impossible, that sports, as we know it, will remain closed down.

That there may be no games at all in 2020.  No one can predict.  The virus-crisis dictates right now.

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“Baseball’s Best–At the Movies”

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There are no games tonight around Major League Baseball.  We might not have games till July 1st.

But we do have history on our side, to take up some of our time, while we self isolate.

A baseball junkies look at my favorite Baseball Movies of All Time.

Understand I grew up in a baseball family, father a devout Cardinals Gas House Gang fan, and a pitcher in the A’s system, and my uncle covered the old Brooklyn Dodgers in the days there were 9-newspapers in New York.

I grew up watching the Yankees-Giants and Dodgers on TV.  The Saturday Game of the Week was a ‘must see’ in my house.  And I collected baseball cards, lots of them, and autographs, and still have them too.

My bookcases at home are filled with probably 200-books on baseball history, including a collection of the Spaulding-Reach Baseball Guides that go back into the 1930s.

Here’s my ‘hot list’

You can argue with me, but you’d probably be wrong.  I’m a sports-talkshow host too.

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1)..BASEBALL–9 INNINGS…Ken Burns documentary…I love history and what better way to enjoy it with the great production stretching from the Black Sox to Breaking the Barrier with Jackie Robinson to the Big Red Machine, to the Boss-Steinbrenner.

2)..BULL DURHAM…Pick any phrase…”Worship at the church of baseball…..I want to announce my presence with authority”…If you ever spent time in the minor leagues-you would identify with the storylines. A gem, thank you Kevin Costner.

3)..THE NATURAL…”I want to be the best there ever was” and Robert Redford delivered from every angle possible as Roy Hobbs.

4)..FIELD OF DREAMS…”Build it and they will come” …a creative look back at the Black Sox Scandal and the aftermath in the Iowa cornfield.  I visited the place-pretty cool…I can still hear Kevin Costner’s voice.

5)..8-MEN OUT…”I just wanna play ball….Say it ain’t so Joe”…A quality production dating to the 1919 scandal in the World Series……the Sox…Comiskey…Shoeless Joe and Judge Landis.

6)..MONEYBALL…”If you don’t win the final game then you are a loser”…Great performance by Brad Pitt and all things Oakland A’s baseball.

7)..A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN…”There’s no crying in baseball”…uttered Tom Hanks at his Rockford Peaches…a fun production and a true story about the girls league before the men came marching home.

8)..COBB…”You tell them how good I was”…a dying Ty Cobb-played by Tommie Lee Jones screams at a sportswriter in his dying days..a critical look at a possessed talent-lout.

9)..FEAR STRIKES OUT…”Was I good enough, Dad”…the amazing Jimmy Piersall story about his nervous breakdown with the Red Sox..very well done takeoff on the 1950s story.

10)..BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY….”They’re a swell bunch of fellas” says a dying catcher, Bruce Pearson, played by Robert DiNero, portraying the Yankees catcher fighting leukemia and major league pitchers.

11)..MAJOR LEAGUE…”Just a bit outside” shouts broadcast Bob Uecker about the last place Indians, Willy Mays Hayes and so many others….it was crude but good and if you spent time in Cleveland during the bad years, you could identify with it.

12)..42…”Nigger-Nigger” the Phillies manager chanted at the start of the movie and the start of the season, directed vitriol at Jackie Robinson…the movie was coarse-honest-emotional-sometime hokey..but superb acting by Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey.

13)..BAD NEWS BEARS….”Buttermaker you drunk”…shouts Tatum O’Neal at Walter Matthau…fun-probably somewhat true but everyone loved the kids on the roster.

14)..MR BASEBALL…”What am I doing here”…shouts Jack Elliott, played by Tom Selleck, in his debut in Japan…a fun look at the transition washed up major leaguers make going abroad.

15)..TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE…”I was always trying to protect you”…yells Clint Eastwood at his daughter…the story of a washed up Braves scout at the end of the road when the new breed of GMs were taking over the game…well done depth to the story.

Honorable Mention:

CATCHER WAS A SPY…A look at the Washington Senators catcher, Moe Berg,  who became a World War II spy in Germany.

BABE RUTH STORY…William Bendix played the role in a film made decades and decades ago.

PRIDE OF THE YANKEES…The Lou Gehrig story about his life and demise in the black and white world of film.

THE ROOKIE…A Story of dreams of a former pitcher making a comeback in the early days of the Tampa Bay Rays franchise.

FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME…Another Kevin Costner film about the end of the career of a Detroit Tigers pitcher.

PRIDE OF ST LOUIS….From the wayback machine..the story of Dizzy Dean.

THE MONTE STRATTON STORY…A look at the White Sox pitcher who shot his leg off and came back.

DAMN YANKEES…The broadway musical of the Senators player who sold his soul to beat the Yankees

A WINNER NEVER QUITS…The story of the St Louis Browns one-armed outfielder Pete Gray’s battle to get to the major leagues.

Got time on your hands, go chase them down on Netflix or Amazon or You Tube.

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“Aztecs Sports–Success–Trouble Coming”

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It’s a great time to be an Aztec.

Enormous success on the field in football.  The greatest season in Aztecs history.  A new football stadium on line for construction sometime to begin in 2020.

But now things have stalled.  The Virus-Crisis has thrown a road block into everyone’s life.

MLB-NBA-NHL, the NCAA, and at SDSU..

And now San Diego State, like every other Division 1-Athletic program in the country, is facing an enormous cash flow issue, with what happened two weeks ago, the cancellation of March Madness.

The biggest money making event in college athletics, is more than just a showcase for college basketball’s best players, getting ready for NBA careers.

It is monster money making event, and the mega dollars taken in from gate receipts, sponsorships and the TV contracts creates a massive pie.  And from that pie, every Division 1-school in the country gets a slice.

That money is what fuels all the other sports programs these Division 1-schools have, in every athletic program in the nation.

A prime example is the information LSU released on Wednesday night about its programs.  Ed Ogeron’s LSU football program made a profit of 56M last year.  LSU basketball had a profit of 1.9M.  The baseball program netted 965,000 in profits.  That’s it.

The other 10-athletic programs LSU operates, all lost money, starting with women’s basketball, which lost nearly 4M-dollars.  Football pays for virtually everything else.

It goes to show how big time athletics has to be funded, and how one sport drives everything else, from Baton Rouge all the way to the Aztecs Athletic Center.

But because of the cancellation of March Madness, the cash register won’t ring this year at the NCAA-headquarters.  And because of that, every Division 1-program is facing a massive dropoff in shared revenue.

The NCAA just 48-hours ago released the data.  Every Division 1-school faces a drop of nearly 60-percent of what they expected to get this year.

San Diego Stte, which has always operated on a slim profit-loss margin, even with an NCAA-basketball tourney team, and bowl games each year, is facing a problem.  Their cut of the NCAA pie this year will come up 800,000-dollars less than expected.  That is a huge drop-off.

Whereas LSU’s football program, Ohio State’s , Alabama’s drive all their other sports, they can withstand one down year.

Can San Diego State handle this kind of drop-off.  The Aztecs football does not generate enormous revenue.  The TV contract is substandard in the Mountain West Conferene so there is no bailout there, even with the new television deal kicking in.

Basketball has been absent from the tourney for 3-years in a row now, another drain of potential revenue.

And now this huge loss of needed money for the coming year, at a university that has 18-sports, that run up bills with enormous travel costs too..
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Schools were told the bad news on Monday.  Division 1-schools were supposed to get 600M-dollars as their share.  Instead from the SEC to the MWC, the take will be 225M. total for disbursement.

It filters down to Division II, which expected 53M, but will have just 13.9M to split up.
Division III went form 35M to just a 10M-payday.

Might there be layoffs coming in the SDSU infrastructure at the Aztecs Athletic Center?  Will John David Wicker asked the university to bail them out with a loan?

With the new football stadium on line,, and some 30M in private funding having already been secured, is there a way to find more loose change to bail out the 2nd floor at the Aztecs Center?

Tough couple of weeks.  The (30-2) Aztecs season comes to a conclusion.  No March Madness games to be played.  And now this financial setback, coupled with what looks like a bad economy going forward coming out of the Virus-Crisis which might end mid-summer..

A good time to be an Aztecs.  Not a good time financially.

How SDSU survives this will be a challenge.

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“Color of the Day–Black”

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We have never seen a day like this.
What should we feel now.
What is our future.
Wishing for the past.

The words are shocking.  The outlook is grim.  Our state of mind is numbing.  Our future seems scary.

It’s the Virus-Crisis we are dealing with, trying to live thru.

On a normal day today, we’d be talking about things we deemed important.  Not so much today.

..Will it be a Dodgers-Astros World Series of Hate?
..The Lakers-Clippers NBA playoff series-who will face Milwaukee?
..Will Joe Burrow be a Cincinnati Bengal?

None of that conversation today, for it seems so unimportant considering what is important at his hour.

The pictures are gripping.
The memories will forever be searing in our minds and hearts

The death toll as of Tuesday night has just surpassed the 9-11 tragedy and we know what that did to our psyche.

Consider where we are today and what we used to talk about.

The Padres opening day ceremony under clear blue skies.
..Elmhurst Hospital in New York, over-run with patients, lying in hallways.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s pronouncement-“With the last pick in the NFL Draft”
..The Red Cross ships pulling into New York and LA harbors

Lebron James and Kawhi Leonard’s postgame press conferences.
..Governor Cuomo press conferences pleading for medical equipment

Tiger Woods teeing off at the Masters in Augusta
..Nurses crying
..Doctors in surgery
..Tractor trailers full of bodies

Screaming NHL fans as the Stanley Cup playoffs begin
..Sirens of ambulances and firetrucks
..Helicopters landing at hospitals

20-horses to to the Gate at the Kentucky Derby
..Masks-Gowns-PPE equipment-Ventilators

“Gentlemen start your engines” at Indianapolis
..Reports of 88-year olds and 10-month olds dying

72,000-cheering Liverpool-Manchester City in English soccer
..Projections of 100-to-200,000 deaths in the next two weeks.

Free-Agency, the NFL Draft Board, Rankings, Trades.
..Unemployment figures, bankruptcies and a US map with red-circle hot spots everywhere.

We are no longer Padres-Chargers-Dodgers-Lakers-Angels fans.
..There are no longer Republicans-Democrats-we are now just Americans..

We are Americans and we are in trouble.

As our country came together in prayer and respect in the hours and days after the Twin Towers tragedy, we must come together now.

Never before have we needed unity in our nation.

Pray for a loving God to help us thru what is just ahead.

The Color of the Day needs to be Red-White-Blue.  Today it feels black.

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“Questions Worth Asking”

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As we sit here paralyzed at home by the Virus-Crisis, questions worth asking.

The modern day athlete makes so much money, they live in a different world, different solar system, with different priorities.

It has been interesting to follow what some of the unique people in sports have done this week in the midst of our national nitemare.

Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and family donating 25M to virus research, the Red Cross, Goodwill and more.

Atlanta owner Arthur Blank donating 5.4M to virus research in Atlanta.

Drew Brees putting up 5M for research in New Orleans.

Major league teams, led by Padres owner Ron Fowler, pledging 1M apiece to pay the salaries of their club employees during the shutdown.

The NFL and the Union putting up some 10M for charities in cities.

The Rams, led by Andrew Whitworth and Jared Goff, raising 2.2M in four hours on a telethon and putting 500,000 of their own money into the LA Food Bank Fund.

Individual players doing charitable things for their hometowns food banks and their own NFL cities.

The Cardinals Adam Wainwright, and the Astros Justin Verlander,  forwarding 250,000 to help pay the minor leaguers in the St. Louis and Houston farm systems, whose money runs out April 9th.

NHL players funding-donating money to food banks in their respective cities.

But not everyone has done something.

Couldn’t, shouldn’t the Padres players making 30M a year be doing something in San Diego.  Manny Machado and Eric Hosmer and Will Myers have the where-with-all.

Where are the richest NBA players, like the Lakers LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and all those 30M men?  Should they not be front and center leading a drive for contributions.

Where is Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, the billionaires of their sport?

Why the silence?

It would be awesome to see the ‘name athletes’ in each sport come together, and put together 1- national fund raising drive, that could-would-should include citizens, to pour resources in to help the hospitals and first responders, rally together.

A ‘Go Fund Me’ drive, a  “Crush Covid” national fund to bring the US together is this most critical time of need.

The superstars, in self isolation, can step out, should step out, and become leaders for our nation, in a very different spotlight.

Questions worth asking.

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