The SportsThink Review #110
September 6, 2024: Jenkins Medal, NIL, Baseball Weirdness
Welcome new readers! The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related reading and related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter. The newsletter is free, but comes with two requests. 1. I’m always open to suggestions, so send me the good stuff that you read! 2. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with other folks who might enjoy it as well. Finally, I try to focus on non-paywalled writing, but if you find yourself unable to access anything, just hit reply to the email and I’ll do my best to get you a copy. Thanks for reading!
Howdy folks, happy Friday. A few things to share this week, some old, some new. Let’s get right to it.
The Dan Jenkins Medal For Excellence In Sportswriting
Earlier this week, Katy and I had the honor of attending the dinner and ceremony for the Dan Jenkins Medal. Named in honor of the late, great sportswriter, the awards are annually given by UT’s Center for Sports Communication and Media. (I’m an affiliate of the Center, but I don’t have any involvement in the awards.) Center director Mike Butterworth put together a great program, with a keynote conversation with photographers Walter Iooss and Neil Leifer servingas the highlight of the night. Even if you don’t know the men by name, you are most definitely familiar with their work, which is some of the most iconic sports photography of all time, including 500+ covers of Sports Illustrated between the two of them. 500!!
This year’s award went to Sally Jenkins, for her wonderful piece on Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, which is well worth a read. And yes, Jenkins is the daughter of the man the award is named for, but she would have won for this even if she wasn’t in the family business.
The night ended on a somber note, with a lifetime achievement award for the late Grant Wahl, who you might remember died suddenly and tragically in the press box during the 2022 World Cup at just 49 years of age. It was an honor to be present as his wife and brother accepted on his behalf.
In the not too distant past, when soccer was just a footnote in American sports media, there were times when it felt like Wahl was the only American writing on the sport. But at least we had him, because he was pretty damn good! He loved the sport, but could be critical when the occasion called for it; he was always insightful and in many respects ahead of the curve in understanding the place of the sport in the US. My favorite piece of Wahl’s was this travelogue of his 2021 trip to Transnitria to figure out what the hell was going on with FC Sheriff, a team no one had ever heard of, yet had recently beaten Real Madrid.
Here’s what I wrote when I shared it three years ago:
“The Craziest Sports Story of 2021 Is FC Sheriff,” by Grant Wahl, via the Fútbol with Grant Wahl Newsletter. This is a doozy and the title is, somehow, an understatement. I shared a couple bits and pieces in previous newsletters about the Cinderella story of FC Sheriff of Tiraspol in Moldova, but Wahl’s travelogue of his visit to the (technically) non-existent country is wild. Yes, soccer is known for corruption, but this is a team that is the crown jewel of a money laundering empire. Furthermore, the team:
plays in a domestic league that is borderline professional and best known for match fixing and betting scandals
beat Real Madrid, in Madrid
is named (like all the other big businesses in Tiraspol) after the owner’s fascination with Westerns.
Seriously, just read it, even if you have no interest in soccer. Absolutely worth your time.
In College Sports’ Big Money Era, Here’s Where The Dollars Go (Joe Drape and Allison McCann, New York Times)
We are three years and a few months into the Name-Image-Likeness era of college sports and it still feels very much like the wild west. The courts have had/are having their say, the NCAA still prays for some sort of legislative solution from congress, and what was true in NIL just a few months back isn’t necessarily true today.
Two things seem to be true though. First, the money is flowing!! Second, if we assume that fan interest and viewership numbers are useful indicators of the health of college sports, the money did not destroy college sports (as the doomsayers predicted.) This piece from the NYT is a solid overview of where the money is coming from and where the money is going, even if the dollars are murky and hard to track (as the authors here concede). What is perhaps most notable is that female athletes are getting paid (often well!), really pushing back on the bad-faith arguments from a few years back hat NIL would further exacerbate the inequities in women’s sport. In a win for faith in the economic marketplace, the opposite seems to be true.
Phenomenal Baseball Trivia
From this article: Blue Jays-turned-Red Sox catcher Danny Jansen didn't just play for both teams in the same game -- a first in major league baseball history. He played for both teams in the same inning.
Ok, I know you’re envisioning him quickly changing his outfit in the dugout, but this is really just a major technicality with an amusing historical result. Jansen was at bat in June when a game between the two teams was called off for a rain delay…when the game was resumed, 65 days later, Jansen was on the other side and is now the answer to a trivia question that only baseball could produce.
Perhaps the greatest weirdness, is that he was technically catching for his own (suspended) at-bat…this is some real time-space continuum level stuff! I figured there would be some very interesting possibilities, so I went to Reddit to see what those beautiful nerds could come up with. Reddit user trumpet575 did not disappoint!
The stats could have actually said something like this if things played out a little differently. His AB before the postponement ended with one strike, but if it had ended with two strikes, the rules say a future strikeout with a pinch hitter would've been credited to him. So if he got one more strike before the postponement and then a dropped third strike resulted in the new batter running to first it could be credited to Jansen. And if Jansen had then made a throwing error allowing the pinch runner to try to score and be thrown out at the plate, the play could've potentially been "Jansen strikes out and reaches on a passed ball by Jansen, throwing error by Jansen allows Jansen to advance to second and third base, Jansen tagged out by Jansen at home plate." I doubt it would've been scored that way, but it theoretically could have.
The NFL Private Equity Rule-Change
Some more money talk, especially relevant to those readers who’ve been trying to buy an NFL team. Jokes aside, a small but significant development from the league, with the approval of handful of private-equity firms to buy passive stakes in teams. For what it’s worth, the NFL is the last major American sports league to make this move. Here’s a good summary and a decent explainer (both via Bloomberg). What to make of this? My gut says “not much to see here,” but just more confirmation that big time sports are somehow not as big as they can get. Cynically, if the standard private equity playbook is followed, we’re getting closer to the answer of just how much we can be charged for a beer and parking. My couch and refrigerator still provide the best deal in town.
As always, thanks for reading. Please share the newsletter and send me good content!
See you next time,
Tolga