Random Observations On Watching Sports; Or, Why Aren't I Being Paid For This?

--While watching the halftime coverage of the Miami Heat versus the Oklahoma City Thunder, I witnessed the following:

Michael Wilbon, on what he gathers from the fact that the Lakers viewed a tape of one particular game from last year's Finals before today's rematch with the Celtics: "It means Phil Jackson wants to win this game."

As opposed to every other game of the season, which he wants to lose.

--The Oklahoma City Thunder should really still be in Seattle as the Sonics. Nothing about sports should change from when I was a kid without getting my approval. This would not have earned my approval.

--Except for the Giants winning a World Series. That is an example of change in sports from when I was kid that is totally acceptable and needed no prior approval.

--I do like seeing the Thunder give the Heat all they can handle. Russell Westbrook is fun to watch. He stole the ball from James, drove the length of the court, and dished the ball to a teammate on the wing for a three-pointer even while colliding with a Heat defender. That is the sort of elegance that I enjoy in basketball, hard work and a keen pass, intelligent movement away from the ball by Westbrook's teammate, that doesn't rely exclusively on pure athleticism and spectacle.

--Watching Mexican soccer, I can pick up the gist of what the announcers say sometimes, from a smattering of Spanish I've learned, along with the context of the game. But there are certain moments when the announcers start screaming as if the world has come to an end, and I find this bewildering, because there are no goals, no blatant fouls, no alien invasion erupting in the middle of the pitch.

--The NFL's Pro Bowl is on today. It is absolutely pointless. Therefore, as an American sports fan, I am expected to derive some sort of enthusiasm all on my own. The timing of the game is weird, as it is the week before the Super Bowl, which means that the players from the Steelers and the Packers will not be there. The game serves neither as a welcome break partway through the season, a fun little sideshow, nor as a final bit of dessert to cap the season. Yet, somehow, the NFL moved the Pro Bowl to this time as a marketing ploy? It baffles me.

--I'm torn on the Super Bowl. Marina has a friend and a cousin--specifically, a cousin-in-law (shouldn't such a term exist?)--who are Packer fans, but Vaughn is a Steelers fan. Vaughn has a prior claim on borrowing my allegiance for the game, but Ben Roethlisberger, while a remarkable athlete, is apparently pretty sleazy as a human being. Decisions, decisions. Maybe I should auction off my allegiance?

Human Traffic

There's a rumor that Tottenham offered Newcastle 30 million pounds for striker Andy Carroll. There are two things that should strike that as odd to the American sports fan: one, why would anyone want to leave Newcastle for Tottenham (other than the prospects for Champions League soccer, the London life, more money, a more organized and more dynamic team contending to the top of table: trifling matters, all); two, could you imagine the Yankees, say, buying Cliff Lee from the Rangers in the middle of the season for $45 million dollars?

Actually, it doesn't seem that much different than a mid-season trade between teams, such as when the Rangers acquired Cliff Lee from the Mariners for several players this past season. The difference is the composition of the exchange. In soccer, it is typically a sale, although the occasional exchange of players does occur. In baseball, of course, sales of players have happened, most infamously when the Red Sox owner sold a young pitcher named Babe Ruth to the Yankees for enough money to finance a Broadway play.*

So in either case, teams have the ability to bolster their squads during the season. With soccer, there is the January transfer window, a time of hot gossip and rumors and salacious details about who's moving where and for how much money. In baseball, there are the rumors about which failing teams are prostituting their talented players to which contenders for future prospects. Basically, the same transactions, except on the one hand, it is for money, and on the other, for players.

What's the difference? Both involve money, really, but with soccer it is a more direct involvement, cutting out the representative markers of actual players.

Is there a reason for the difference, be it cultural or economic?

My first thought was that of the salary cap. In football, a salary cap means that trades of players must involve contracts of approximately the same value. In this case, an exchange of players requires a flexibility when it comes to the roster that isn't required in European soccer, where teams can simply buy a boatload of talent--up to a limit, of course, based on rules dictating the number of "homegrown" players that must be included on a 25 man roster--and there we get into all sorts of European labor issues that, while fascinating, are beyond the scope of a random sports blog.

The problem with this comparison is that there is no salary cap in baseball. There is a luxury tax for teams whose payrolls exceed a certain limit each year, which could act as a salary cap, except that the teams that have paid it, the Yankees and the Red Sox, for example, don't care about a salary cap, because they basically print their own money as baseball marketing empires.

Is it cultural? Free agency marked a big change in American sports scene. Prior to the struggles of Curt Flood and his successors, teams could hold on to a player even without a signed contract; players had no leverage, no unions, and could be sold or not sold depending on the desire of the owner. Free agency means that players have a lot more control over their careers by seeing out a contract and being free to go where they wish.

This does not seem like it would preclude players being sold in the middle of their contracts, though, assuming the buying team could reach an agreement with the player, much as a soccer team will generally try to negotiate contractual terms with the player after having a bid accepted by the team and before the transfer is actually complete. Furthermore, soccer does have a form of free agency, ever since the Bosman Ruling.

So what is it about American sports versus soccer that promotes the use of trades in the one and transfers or straight sales on the other? Does it matter? Does it have a root in different labor cultures? I genuinely want to know.



* No, No, Nanette for those trivia buffs among you

Et Tu, NFL?

Ever since Major League Baseball's 1994 season was cut short due a labor dispute, it has had to work hard to regain a following, and many in the media now say that American football, in the NFL, is now America's Game.

Now it looks like the NFL may follow baseball's shortsighted path, with the owners set to possibly lock out players next year for some or all of the season. In today's paper, I read that ESPN personality and former quarterback Ron Jaworski is guessing that between two and seven weeks of next season will be wiped out.

That seems like very poor timing. When the minimum salary is still several hundred thousand dollars, and when the owners are exceedingly wealthy men, to think of the stadiums sitting empty and desolate on weekend after weekend, when there are fans who need their circus to escape thoughts of their own economic worries, well, that just seems wrong.

I'm all for the rights of labor unions to negotiate for equitable pay and good working conditions. And yes, the owners have the right to close their businesses, in theory, if you want to look at football from a business standpoint, which you have to do. And yes, it is an expensive business for the owners who do have to pay high salaries, and yes, the players deserve to be paid very well for sacrificing their health and their bodies, gladiators except for not being slaves.

But let's just say that the NFL is not hurting in terms of revenue, and if I wasn't sympathetic to the Muni unions who wanted to strike when the drivers make almost three times what I make in a year, I would be hard-pressed to sympathize with people who make at least 30 times what I make in a year.

It is a fascinating thing in a troubled economy to watch all these people with so much money scrapping to make even more. It's why the Republicans got so much support, although how they managed to convince middle-class and lower-class Americans to vote against their own best interest is remarkable.

If I can't afford to go to games now, I'm certainly not going to be able to with the inevitable price increases that will be seen, regardless of how the labor negotiations go. And even if I could afford it, I don't think I would want to anyway. As long as there is baseball and soccer, I'll be just fine, and any such lockout will simply cement football's place as my third favorite sport.

Am I missing anything? Is there any rational justification for the owners to lock out the players? Or rather, any rational justification that does not involve treating the game as a business only and the fans as customers to be served poorly?

The Pendulum Swings

2010 has left, borne into the glorious past on the shoulders of a World Series victory for the Giants, leaving behind the forgettable details of a 49er football team mired in futility, and whose change of head coach and presumably quarterback will hopefully end this recent reign of error at Candlestick.

Spring Training begins in a matter of months, and no one gives the Giants any shot of repeating. The Phillies have been anointed champs already with the signing of Cliff Lee, so I guess there's no point in playing the games, then.

Alas, Edgar Renteria claims to have been insulted that the Giants offered him "only" $1 million dollars to come play one more season. All the people who attempt to justify his indignation need to adjust their definition of disrespect.

In the meantime, it is time to refocus on the English Premier League. Newcastle is in the thick of a relegation dogfight, with all teams ranked between 11th and 18th in table all within three points of each other. So that will be an ongoing narrative of survival, a question of adjusting life bit by bit, earning enough points to stay up in the Premier League, which is, of course, what most of us are trying to do in the metaphorical Premier League of life.

Without an apparent chance of Newcastle winning the title or qualifying for Europe, and with more anti-management anger after Chris Hughton was abruptly fired, the season becomes, for me, a matter of neutral enjoyment, with a tendency to hope for Arsenal or even Manchester United to beat Chelsea to the title.

And so it was that I watched Manchester travel to play West Bromwich Albion today, in the hope that I would see fine attacking soccer from a high-quality team, thinking that West Brom's injury crisis in defense would allow Manchester to play a free-flowing game and hopefully provide me with lots of fantasy points through Javier "Chicharito" Hernandez and Darren Fletcher.

The game was entertaining, but as always, nothing was simple. West Brom was clearly struggling on defense, conceding within three minutes to a fine header from Wayne Rooney, but for the bulk of the game, the Baggies, playing in front of a home crowd, looked much more enthusiastic on offense, harder-working, more dangerous. In particular, Chris Brunt, James Morrison, Jerome Thomas and Graham Dorrans were out-hustling the more famous names of Patrice Evra, Gabriel Obertan, and Dimitar Berbatov to the 50-50 balls, and Morrison scored the best goal I've seen this year on a long-range volley, and Manchester United was extremely fortunate to avoid being down to ten men when Gary Neville escaped unpunished for a tackle in the box that should have resulted in a penalty kick and a red card.

But the difference in quality in these teams showed through, as it so often does in the other 9 times out of ten encounters between a David and a Goliath. And it showed through in just a couple of details, a few moments that made all the difference. West Brom justly earned a penalty kick in the second half when Jerome Thomas cut past Rio Ferdinand who blatantly tripped him. This should have been the moment of redemption, a moment of justice for the earlier penalty that was not awarded. But Peter Odemwingie, in stepping up to take the penalty, twelve yards away from the goal, rolled the ball woefully wide of the post. And moments later, perhaps distracted by that failure, perhaps suffering from an abrupt withdrawal of momentum, West Brom's defense collapsed on a corner kick, allowing Hernandez to direct an unchallenged header into the goal for the win.

So in this game, as in so much of life, the (Red) Devil was in the details, but there was a lot of joy to be had in the big picture as well, for an entertaining game that could have gone the other way just as easily.