The tradition of greedy owners destroying what makes baseball good to line their pockets is as old as the sport itself. But using a pandemic to expand the playoffs for good would be a new lowOne of the first examples of baseball’s near-sighted willingness to deface itself in the name of maximum profits came in 1887 when, in an effort to boost attendance for the upcoming season, the joint major-league rules committee decided to allow the batter four strikes instead of three. Chaos ensued, predictably, and they changed the rule back for 1888.Indeed, the blight of greedy owners content to muck with the formula and squeeze every possible dime out of the enterprise at the expense of what makes baseball...
With the coronavirus pandemic grinding the global sports world to a halt, Major League Baseball is exploring ways to start the season as early as MayAccording to multiple reports this week, the season would start in May with teams traveling to play each other in Arizona. There are 10 ballparks within 50 miles of each other in the Phoenix area, and one Major League stadium: Chase Field, the artificial turfed, enclosed, air conditioned home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, that could host daily triple headers. The other venues are open-air, and will be stiflingly hot during the Arizona summer, so any games in those parks would presumably need to be played at night. Fans would not be allowed into the stadiums....
The Rugby World Cup final and World Series went against the form book and most academics regard ‘the M word’ as a trick of the mind“Never underestimate the value of momentum.” That’s what Sir Clive Woodward advised after England’s rugby players lacerated Australia a fortnight ago. And how wise those words seemed when New Zealand were also scattered and flayed, and it seemed England’s name was all but engraved on the Webb Ellis Cup. And then, without warning, the team’s hot hand turned Arctic and the World Cup was ripped from their grasp by South Africa.“Momentum is so important in football.” That’s what Dimitar Berbatov told us on Friday, before predicting Manchester United would win their fourth match on the...
There is a school of thought that bowlers such as England’s Jofra Archer are bound to be faster now, simply because of the advances in sport science – reality suggests something differentAt 96mph the ball travels from the bowler to the batsman in the bat of an eyelid. Really. At that speed a batsman has around 0.4sec to play with which, most studies seem to agree, also happens to be how long it takes to blink. But that 0.4sec is only a fag-packet calculation. The true number would allow for the ball’s deceleration and its journey down into the pitch and up away from it, but still, we are dealing with the tiny margins, tenths and hundredths, that a batsman...
Fans flocked to the Red Sox-Yankees clash in their droves to guzzle hot dogs, belt out YMCA – and see a sublime openingBaseball makes cricket look like an almost stat-free zone. This weekend in London records have been falling over themselves with a regularity that probably constituted a record in itself.But the one that will resound through Major League Baseball’s executive suite is this: its first two games played in Europe drew the sport’s highest attendances in 16 years. US baseball no longer even has a stadium that can hold 60,000 spectators, never mind fill it, near as dammit, in mid-season. So by coming to London the sport seems to be on to something – if not big, then at...