We’re often reminded— scolded, actually — that we deserve the politicians we elect.
Sports fans are sentenced to worse. We get what we’re given. Since the disappearance of “Miss Rheingold, 1964” on Mets’ Ch. 9 telecasts, we’ve had no vote.
For example, we all now know that big-time college athletics have nothing to do with college, thus they’re predicated on fraud. To full scholarships and cash Pell Grants have been added above-the-table financial inducements to recruit high schoolers and annual “transfer portal” travelers placing themselves up for auction in search for better deals.
Thursday night, the University of Cincinnati held a fundraiser starring the Brothers Kelce, Travis and Jason, former Bearcats football stars, legit college educations unknown.
The cheapest general admission seat for the fundraiser was $100, effectively eliminating many UC non-athlete students from attending a UC event although UC is a taxpayer-funded institution.
The recipient of the charitable proceeds was the war chest of the UC athletic department’s NIL proxy, Cincy reigns.
The money will probably be used to entice high school athletes and preexisting college athletes from other schools to play for UC, even if just a few months before seeking more elsewhere.
This is the new state of big-time college athletics. The requirement to seek a college education — let alone being able to read or write — has become strictly accidental.
It’s the worsening of a sick, socially counterproductive system to win ballgames. Everyone knows it has corrupted formerly genuine colleges, none of which include the need to win ballgames in their charters.
But nothing is done to reverse the corruption. On the contrary it grows worse. And the demand that we ignore what we see and know to instead believe what we’re told — to play increasingly stupid — persists.
Thus far we have been told to believe that this season, like last season, MLB games are vastly improved as per artificial additives and illusory bromides. But there is little-to-no evidence.
Though it’s early in the season, this past Sunday’s games did not provide what having the DH in both leagues — as if there’s now a difference — was supposed to provide: more offense.
In Sunday’s games five DHs, including the Padres’ indolent $300 million Manny Machado, were hitting under .200. Two other DHs were batting .208.
The next day, Twins DH Ryan Jeffers was batting .091. The DH has devolved into an analytics-bred home run-or-strikeout drag on The Game.
Two Mets games thus far have featured Brett Baty in once sensibly conspicuous bunting situations. On both occasions, first Ron Darling then Keith Hernandez, noted that it was painfully obvious that Baty — like former Met Dominic Smith — had no idea how to bunt.
Yet some still recall Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial, among other sluggers, laying down bunts to best serve the situation.
And thus the incomprehensible has become common.
The new, anything-for-a-buck official Yankees uniform now includes a commercial sleeve patch promoting an insurance company. But you can’t purchase the official jersey with that patch unless you spend another $15 to have it delivered.
To think that before MLB jumped into bed with Communist China-partnered Nike, the Yankees uniform was sacrosanct, no adornments demanded, needed, wanted. But greed wins again.
Given this offer, I’d prefer to buy the jersey with the patch, remove it and send it off for a $15 refund. How much for a “Kick Me” patch.
The madness in every sport has become so institutionalized that it’s in need of being institutionalized for shock treatments.
Saturday, with the Blue Jays down six to the Yanks in the seventh, career showboat Vlad Guerrero Jr. homered, then he and the third-base coach made a “be quiet” gesture to agitate the Yankee Stadium crowd.
On YES, Michael Kay noted Guerrero’s absurd gesture as, well, absurd.
But Kay should’ve added that this was exactly what Rob Manfred had in mind four seasons ago when he and MLB launched a promotional campaign celebrating in-game acts of brawl-to-follow immodesty — home plate-posing, bat-flipping, chest-pounding and any act of excessive all-about-me immodesty — as a surefire way to draw kids to TV sets.
Manfred’s MLB Network now regularly relishes unsportsmanlike behavior with its “Best Bat-Flips” feature, as if Manfred would encourage such conduct among the kids in his life.
I don’t recall voting for this. You?
This week, a video made the rounds of Chicago Bulls Torrey Craig and Andre Drummond making professional fools of themselves when, down to the Knicks, they went for imaginary style-points, turning an easy fast-break two points into a failed, off-the-backboard slam dunk. Ridiculous.
Three days before, ESPN carried the McDonald’s High School Slam Dunk finals, an assortment of kids trying all sorts of off-the-backboard and over-ladders and bodies slams, with obligatory mean-mugging of the TV cameras following successes. The scene and acts have grown tired.
Still, the two adult TV commentators hollered their joyous approval as if Gus Johnson and Kevin Harlan had simultaneously torn free of their straitjackets.
Friday night’s Mets-Reds, sold exclusively to Apple+ to ensure minimal viewing, not only taught more fans to find something else to do on a Friday night, the telecast was decorated with in-game, on-screen stats that would have been distracting if they weren’t so comically ill-advised.
Before every pitch, we saw designed-to-distract statistical detritus allegedly attesting to what the batter’s “probabilities” were now — percentage probabilities of a hit, a walk, strikeout, a double, an RBI or being stalked by a rogue garlic with anchovies pizza.
Who voted for that?
And new Mets manager Carlos Mendoza, former Yanks bench coach, appears to be a graduate of the Aaron Boone Analytics Academy of Fixing What Ain’t Broken, replacing effective relievers — and depleting a bullpen of question marks — with the less effective.
So don’t forget to not vote!
Women’s tipoff is right on time
The elements that made the South Carolina-Iowa women’s final a record-breaking TV event were several.
The obvious: Caitlin Clark, S.C.’s undefeated team and, significantly, a 3 p.m. start that gave everyone of all ages a good shot to watch the entire game. That’s something that inevitably will be lost to TV money that orders women’s basketball championships to be played in prime time.
Ah, but now the flip side, one impossible to ignore: It was the most heavily and widely bet game in women’s sports history.
Staley lets her girls play
South Carolina’s women finished 38-0 despite coach Dawn Staley’s Geno Auriemma-defiant coaching. For example, throughout the tournament, including the 79-58 semifinal vs. N.C. State, she wisely rested starters, playing 9-12 women where Auriemma would have played his starters virtually the entire game.
Arkansas, the nation’s fifth poorest state with an impoverished population of 15.2 percent, will pay John Calipari a base of $7 million per year, plus a $1 million signing bonus, plus $500,000 per year in “retention payments.”
Reader Mike “The Chef” Soper on the lunar eclipse: “The most over-hyped four minutes of excitement in darkness since the invention of wedding nights. But I didn’t notice any wagering options on FanDuel.”
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