GOING OUT OF BUSINESS?
Here's why there's so much at stake for MLB, Astros with lockout in full swing
Dec 2, 2021, 6:51 pm
Get ready to wait. Composite image by Jack Brame.
By locking out their players, Major League Baseball owners may not just kill their golden goose, they risk wiping out the whole gaggle. And, yes, I had to ask Siri, “What do you call a group of geese?”
Baseball’s lockout started precisely at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. Until team owners and the players’ union knock out a new collective bargaining agreement, there will be no free agent signings, no trades, no workouts or medical treatment at team facilities …
Essentially, America’s national pastime shut down tight. And like so often when multimillionaires get into a spat, it’s the little guy, the poor shnook who buys tickets and T-shirts, who roots roots roots for the home team, who gets screwed.
This is a tough one – whose side are we on? The players who make oil baron money for playing a kids’ game, who stay in 5-star hotels on the road, who get $100-a-day meal money even though stadium clubhouses put out a spread worthy of a Beverly Hills bat mitzvah, (the visitors clubhouse at Yankee Stadium serves steak and lobster), make a fortune scribbling their name at autograph shows and still leave 10-percent tips at Hooters?
If the visitors clubhouse at Yankee Stadium serves steak and lobster, what’s going on in the home clubhouse – wenches in togas feeding grapes by hand? Tough life these players lead.
Or the owners, even the skinflints who field last-place teams, who make millions by selling beer and hot dogs at six times what they pay at wholesale even on Dollar Dog Night. Jim Crane and his buddies bought the Houston Astros for $680 million in 2011. The team is valued at $1.8 billion today.
As usual, it’s all about money. Money can’t buy you love, but it can keep a Cy Young winner in Houston. Major League Baseball is a $10 billion-a-year industry. Players want to make more. Owners want to keep more. There you have it. Meanwhile Francisco Lindor, making $341 million, makes “thumbs down” gestures at his hometown Mets fans?
Poor Carlos Correa now has to wait for the players and owners to reach a new agreement before he can sign with another team … or the Astros. In the meantime, perhaps he should wear a Hazmat suit everywhere he goes and boil himself at night to keep from incurring an injury. And stay off the massage table, we know how dangerous a rubdown can be.
Analysts are saying it could be a long lockout, like the last baseball stoppage in 1994-95, when they canceled the 1994 World Series. Which brings up the question, how stupid is baseball? The game’s popularity is waning, young people don’t seem to care anymore, attendance is dwindling … and the owners and players, the two sides that benefit the most from baseball slap a “Closed for Business” on the locked front door. Keep it up and that sign may read “Going Out of Business.”
It took several years and a home run battle between two steroid freaks to revive baseball after the ’94-’95 players strike. That’s not going to happen next year. They hand out Dixie Cups now.
The hope is a settlement in by Feb. 1 so spring training can start on time, or at least by March 1 so teams can play their completely unnecessary 30-game spring schedule. Funny how NBA teams need only four preseason games, the NFL only three games and college football zero games. And those teams actually require players to be in shape from the get-go.
Baseball players are among the most pampered humans short of Halle Berry getting ready for the Academy Awards. Team owners make millions, in some cases billions, for sitting behind home plate and watching their team flop come crunch time. The New York Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009. The Yanks are worth $5.25 billion. The Chicago Cubs have won one World Series in Betty White’s lifetime …$3.36 billion.
It’s time for the players and owners to get this lockout over real fast. At some point fans won’t care when and if it’s time to “Play Ball.”
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NFL officials were heavily scrutinized for some of the flags they threw in the four divisional round games that saw the Chiefs, Bills, Eagles and Commanders advance to next weekend's conference championships.
Yet, it was one play that didn't draw a flag that could prove a most consequential non-call if the NFL decides to join the NBA and NHL in seriously cracking down on floppers, as ESPN broadcaster Troy Aikman suggested during the Texans-Chiefs game.
NFL players can be penalized for the big umbrella “unsportsmanlike conduct" infraction, but there isn't an official rule against flopping, and Aikman urged the league to address that during one of his several conversations with Joe Buck over the officiating in the Chiefs' 23-14 victory.
On the same possession where he benefited from his late slide that caused two Texans players to crash into each other, drawing a widely panned unnecessary roughness flag, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes appeared to try to deke referee Clay Martin's officiating crew into throwing another flag to aid Kansas City's drive, which ended with a touchdown that put the Chiefs up by eight in the fourth quarter.
Scrambling to his left, Mahomes pulled up just as he went out of bounds. When linebacker Henry To'oTo'o tapped him, Mahomes threw himself dramatically to the ground but failed to fool the officials — or impress Aikman, the Hall of Fame quarterback who earlier took umbrage at the roughing-the-passer call against Houston.
“He’s trying to draw the penalty. Rather than just run out of bounds, he slows down," Aikman protested. "And that’s been the frustration, and I get it. I understand it. That’s been the frustration for these defensive players around the league.”
Earlier in the drive, Aikman said he “could not disagree" more with the roughing penalty called on To'oTo'o and defensive tackle Folorunso Fatukasi, who smashed into each other and made incidental contact with Mahomes, who was underneath them after his late slide.
When Martin announced the penalty, Aikman interjected, “Oh, come on!”
“He’s a runner. I could not disagree with that one more, and he barely gets hit,” Aikman said, noting that Mahomes shouldn't have been afforded the extra protections provided quarterbacks in the pocket once he started running on the play. “That’s the second (questionable) penalty now that’s been called against the Texans. … It was a late flag, and it was Clay Martin who threw it.”
“They’ve gotta address it in the offseason,” Aikman added.
ESPN's rules analyst Russell Yurk concurred that no flag should have been thrown on the play.
After the game, Texans coach DeMeco Ryans suggested that his team expected the Chiefs to benefit from the officiating: “We knew going into today it was us versus everybody. And when I say everybody, it's everybody.”
Yurk also disagreed with a roughing-the-passer flag on Texans pass rusher Will Anderson Jr. in the first quarter that erased a three-and-out by Kansas City, which went on to score a field goal on that drive: “It looked like that first contact was to the upper chest area. I didn’t see anything there that supported a foul,” Yurk said.
Martin, the referee, told a pool reporter after the game that on the Anderson penalty, “I had forcible contact the face mask area,” and on the To'oTo'o infraction, when the quarterback slides, “he is considered defenseless. The onus is on the defender. I had forcible contact there to the hairline, to the helmet.”
Walt Anderson, the longtime NFL senior vice president of officiating who moved into a new role as the league's rules analyst and club communications liaison last year, said Sunday that both calls were correct under the current rules.
Anderson said in an appearance Sunday on the NFL Network that it might be up for debate about whether there was forcible contact on the roughing-the-passer flag in the first quarter, but he emphasized that the league's rulebook calls for officials to throw the flag if there's any doubt whether roughing has occurred.
As for the second foul, where Mahomes slid late, Anderson said the two Texans defenders who crashed into each other made incidental contact with Mahomes once he was on the ground, so replay assist couldn't be used in that circumstance to pick up the flag.
Anderson noted that the league's competition committee could revisit either infraction and tweak the rules this offseason.
Aikman, for one, would like to see the league crack down on flopping, as well.