The Complaint Department: Bad Sports Reporting Edition

Plus more stuff about my mom...

As those of you with nothing better to think about may have already deduced, I’m back from California after celebrating my mother’s 99^th birthday with her and my family. Just in case you’re wondering how she’s doing, mom’s slowed way down, but still cracks jokes and when she started complaining about her vision getting worse, I thoughtfully pointed out she was still alive to complain and could go through what’s left of her Life thinking her glass was half-empty or her glass was half-full, to which she replied:

“I can’t see my glass.”

When my brother and I started talking about her will and what she wanted done after her demise I realized that might be an uncomfortable conversation for her to listen to so I said maybe she wanted to leave the room, to which she replied:

“I already have…mentally.”

If you’re scoring at home (and if you are, good for you because a lot of people aren’t) that’s: 2-0 Mom.

Anyway…

I usually write twice a week and since I haven’t drawn any cartoons lately, hoped Southwest Airlines would provide me with comedic material on my trip home concerning lost luggage or wayward Boeing airplane parts or fellow passengers with beriberi and a pressing need to talk about it, but wouldn’t you know it, both flights were on time and uneventful so now I need to come up with some material.

Lucky for both of us (OK, definitely more lucky for me than you) the Kansas City Chiefs played the Baltimore Ravens last Thursday night.

Which gives me a thin excuse to drag out an unfinished essay I wrote last season when the Chiefs beat the Ravens for the AFC Championship and I was reminded of it Thursday night when a sideline reporter asked the coaches what each team needed to do in the second half.

Andy Reid said take care of the football and whichever one of the Harbaugh Clones is coaching the Ravens said it would be a really neat idea if they executed better and without those penetrating questions, we’d never know turnovers are bad and playing well is good.

Way to go, sports media.

Questions That Shouldn’t Be Asked, But Are

Before the last AFC Championship game, Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh was asked what he expected the atmosphere to be like for a playoff game in the Ravens stadium and he said about what you’d expect, but it would have been much more entertaining if he’d said something like:

“I just don’t think the City of Baltimore and Ravens fans will be that into it.”

After his 49ers beat the Lions to earn another trip to the Super Bowl, coach Kyle Shanahan was asked if his team still had “unfinished business” and once again I would have loved it if Kyle had said:

“No, we’re pretty happy with the NFC Championship and when we get to the Super Bowl we plan on just going through the motions.”

As you may have already noticed, sideline reporters tend to ask questions you might expect from a special-needs third grader and athletes and coaches respond with meaningless clichés and platitudes, but there is one notable exception in sports – and if you’re not a fan now, you should be after you watch this – San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovitch who does not suffer sports-reporting fools lightly.

When a reporter asks a bad question Popovitch makes sure the reporter and everybody watching knows just how bad the question is and there are a couple references to the fact that reporters are expected to limit themselves to two questions:

Questions That Should Be Asked, But Aren’t

If you’re a sports fan you’re probably aware that teams are selling advertising space on their jerseys because team owners just aren’t rich enough despite selling fans $18 beers and hot dogs that have to be financed by small business loans.

OK, we get it: owners are going to gouge the fuck out of their team’s fans because they’re incredibly greedy assholes. (Wow, I really feel like I let you readers down by not including a third profanity in the previous sentence, but hang in there and I’ll try to make up for it.)

Anyway…

At the beginning of the season the Royals announced they would start wearing a QuikTrip patch on their sleeves because they were “partnering” with the convenience store to improve literacy rates in Kansas City.

QuikTrip announced it was going to make an unspecified donation (turns out the devil is actually in the lack of details) for every Kansas City Royals hit and also help old ladies cross the street and rescue kittens from trees and then hold hands and sing “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” in three-part harmony.

All of which is fine, but…

The Kansas City Star article about the patches made no mention of what QuikTrip would pay the Royals for advertising on their jerseys which made it sound like the Royals were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts which is pretty unlikely and here’s why:

According to a 2022 article from the Sports Business Journal website, the San Diego Padres got $9 million per year for their Motorola jersey patch and the Boston Red Sox got $17 million for their Mass Mutual jersey patch and according to the Sportico website the New York Yankees got $25 million a year for their Starr Insurance jersey patch.

Sports team owners, having pretty much the same set of business ethics as a Great White Shark with hunger pangs, are always looking for ways to get even richer by doing things like selling naming rights to their stadiums, playing fields and first-born male children and I foolishly missed the opportunity to name mine GEHA Field Judge.

I’ve grown used to the owners’ greed, but the part that bothered me was the media never asking how much QT was paying the Royals to wear their patches.

At the time it was announced I read four articles about the Royals new patches – KC Star, KMBC, Sports Illustrated and the MLB website – and if any of them even asked the Royals how much they were getting to wear those patches, I missed it.

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2022/07/25/Upfront/MLB-jersey-patches.aspx

I did eventually find a short article on something called SportsPro Media that at least mentioned the fact that the terms of the deal were undisclosed which tends to happen if no one asks the right question.

And…

While searching the web to find out how much teams are making for wearing advertising patches I came across an article from Trajektory, which if you believe their website is “the first sponsorship reporting platform that creates a consistent valuation and methodology across ALL assets” and if you don’t believe their website, seems like a bunch of guys pulling a bunch of numbers directly out their asses. (And there’s that profanity I promised you.)

Trajektory says they don’t want to discuss their methodology which is pretty much the same position the Wizard of Oz took when he advised Dorothy to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The article asked how much those patches should be worth and they made the hilarious observation that baseball teams ought to charge more for their jersey patches because baseball players spend way more time standing still than basketball players who make the patches hard to read by constantly moving with the possible exception of James Harden and here’s a video that explains that last joke:

(Sports fans and analytics advocates who should know better think James Harden is terrific because he scores points, but fail to ask how many points he allows because he doesn’t feel like running, moving his feet or playing defense. If you score 30, but allow 31 you’re not a winning player. The first time I watched this video I said I had no idea it was possible to play in the NBA and spend that much time walking.)

I was once told and choose to believe that pitchers can make more money for their glove endorsements than position players (who actually know how to use baseball gloves) because pitchers stand still and hold their gloves up in front of them so TV viewers can read “Wilson” or “Rawlings” and decide they want the exact same glove as the guy everybody else on the team doesn’t want attempting to catch a pop up.

(OK, I think we’re officially off track here and I used “we’re” instead of “I’m” because when anything’s negative I suddenly become a Socialist and like to share the blame.)

If the Royals are getting paid to wear the patches, that’s part of the story and if the Royals aren’t getting paid to wear the patches that’s an even bigger story and either way – as near as I can tell – somebody and/or everybody failed to ask the right question.

A Possibility That Shouldn’t Be Ignored

Semi-recently I heard fourth-hand (assuming I counted the number of hands correctly) about an ex-Big League manager who asked an ex-Big League player who became a TV analyst just when he developed the IQ of a tree stump. Apparently the ex-player was pretty sharp when he was still playing baseball, but once he got on TV asked dumb questions and made naïve observations.

The ex-player informed the ex-manager, that’s what TV wanted.

In my own experience, I was never encouraged to dumb things down, but I was under the distinct impression that an article explaining pitch selection and why you don’t pitch inside during extra innings and an article about two high-school sweethearts who hooked up after a Sadie Hawkins Dance in East Horse’s Snot, Wyoming and Their Emotional Journey to the Big Leagues were both viewed as usable copy and valued at pretty much the same level, although the East Horse’s Snot High School Sweetheart Story would be on Page 1 of the sports section and the article about pitching in extra innings would wind up next to a crossword puzzle. 

If you’re boss wants “How does it feel to hit a home run in the World Series?” stories, that’s what readers are going to get.

Before We Go: Why Don’t You Pitch Inside In Extra Innings?

I’m glad to pretend you asked.

Back before they screwed up baseball with analytics and a bunch of new rules to try to fix what analytics screwed up: you could pitch inside – off the plate to set up strikes on the outer half – but you didn’t want to throw strikes inside because in extra innings everybody’s trying to hit a home run and end the game.

As the late, great former MLB umpire Steve Palermo once said to me:

“Everyone wants to end it, but nobody wants to start it.”

Fans might think extra innings are great and “free baseball,” but players aren’t nearly as thrilled and want to go home after a long long day and if you think that seems selfish, imagine if where you work they occasionally came in and said today we want you to work an extra hour which we’re not going to pay you for, but we promised our customers “free tire rotation” or “free dental X-Rays” or “free lap dances” and you need to keep our promise. 

I have no idea how starting a runner on second base in extra innings has affected the way ballplayers think and it would be interesting to know if teams that move the runner over to third base with a bunt or a groundball to the right side win more games than teams that continue to swing away and I’m guessing someone somewhere has written about this – or at least ought to – but try to Google it and you won’t easily find an answer, possibly because too many sports reporters are busy writing stories about the deep, emotional connection between your favorite player and his handicapped Little League coach.

Today’s Lesson

Not all sports reporting is bad and you can learn a lot listening to guys like John Smoltz or Adam Wainwright analyze a ballgame, but analysts who talk about how and why things are done are the exception and sideline reporters who ask what do you need to do to win (as Gregg Popovitch once observed, “Score more points than the other team”) are a dime a dozen so on this particular subject my glass is half empty.

But at least I can see it.