Hey look, it’s Friday again! The St. Louis Cardinals are maybe (assuming no positive test results today) going to start playing games again tomorrow for the first time in 17 days; if they pull it off, and no other teams have outbreaks in the meantime, it will be the first time in nearly three weeks that all 30 baseball teams will be in action, and every team in the four major U.S. sports that are in action. That’s way better than I expected, frankly, and shows that isolating players from the general public (and each other) can work — there’s probably a decent chance that most leagues can limp to a conclusion without shutting down entirely, though football remains an enormous question mark with such huge rosters and no bubbles. Still, glass half full, that’s what I always say! (Okay, I never say it, but I’ll say it now.)
In other newses:
- A Florida judge has ruled that Inter Miami‘s ballot measure that approved its new stadium was written properly, giving David Beckham one less lawsuit to worry about. Now he just needs to figure out how exactly he’s going to build the stadium, but it’s still early, he’s only been working on this for seven years.
- Paterson, New Jersey, has approved a 30-year tax break for the refurbishment and redevelopment of its old Negro League stadium, Hinchliffe Stadium, but there remains no word on how much the tax break is worth. The Paterson Times calls the $129,153 per year in taxes the stadium will now pay “substantially less” than what it would pay normally, but math is still hard, man.
- A Florida man broke into a minor-league stadium in St. Petersburg and started living in one of the luxury suites and eating the concessions food that no one else was using, and instead of getting a medal for coming up with an ingenious solution to the region’s homelessness problem, he was arrested, I swear, there’s no justice in this world.
- The postponement of the Big Ten and Pac-12 college football seasons until at least the spring is causing an economic crisis for nearby coffee shops and local economies as a whole, according to “an author of several best-selling books on college football” and a “spokesman for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry,” respectively. Or, you know, not.
- Former San Diego Padres owner John Moores has gotten “involved” in plans to build a new arena in that city, getting “regular updates,” and that’s big news, says San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Tom Krasovic, because “consider his track record”! Moores’ track record, for those who may have forgotten: He got the city of San Diego to fund a new Padres stadium in part by putting ads for it on the outfield walls during Padres games, then proposed a combined stadium-and-convention-center for the Chargers that went nowhere. He did sell the Padres after the new stadium opened for a 500% profit, though, so he’s definitely good at some things.
- The Los Angeles Rams and Chargers‘ SoFi Stadium construction site is suffering a major outbreak of Covid, with 77 construction workers testing positive. That’s a positivity rate of, uh, the Los Angeles Daily News doesn’t actually say, so there’s no way to tell if stadium workers are spreading it at the worksite or just picking it up elsewhere in virus-riddled Southern California. It’s almost like reporting raw numbers without any context is bad journalism!
- The decision by the city of Henderson, Nevada, to spend upwards of $30 million on a minor-league hockey arena for the Silver Knights is paying off already, says a Las Vegas Sun column by … the mayor of Henderson? I guess it saves time to just let elected officials write the newspaper instead of having to have reporters go interview them and then interview other people and then try to figure out who’s right, but it’s kind of less useful for that whole “informing people” thing.
- The Green Bay Booyah summer collegiate league baseball team says it’s been holding games with fans allowed at one-quarter capacity and Brown County reports no outbreaks related to attendance at Booyah games, something the team and the county attribute to the measures taken by the team, which include wearing masks in indoor sections of the stadium and … and … oh, come on, seriously, WLUK-TV? The Booyah website isn’t much help either, though it does teach us that the Booyah logo is a rooster shouting “Booyah!” with a paddle for an exclamation point and … what is that in place of the Y, exactly? Too bad the team face masks depicting the rooster hiding in what looks like a vat of spaghetti sauce are sold out, because truly this is the greatest team merch ever.
Nice job on the interview NdM.
I’m assuming you saw that there were fans in attendance for an MLS game. This confuses me because I thought the tournament was the end of the season. https://www.thescore.com/us_fed/news/2001524
Nope, the tournament was just the relaunch of the season — the group stages counted as regular-season games, or somesuch. They still have to finish out the schedule between now and December.
Also, there is no way there were 2,912 fans at that Dallas-Nashville game, based on that video.
I predict we’re in for a raft of stories conflating the effects of COVID with the effect of sports shutdowns. “Arena District Restaurants See Deep Decline Without Home Hockey Games”, for example. Sports owners will use this as evidence of the economic impact of their teams while completely discounting the impact of the virus.
Booyah is still popular in Northeast Wisconsin. It is a rich soup cooked in large quantities for a group event (it cooks long enough that it can be called a stew). The idea originates in fund raisers and large group gatherings. There is usually a fair amount of diced tomato so while the sauce is not too tomato-y it can be a reddish gold color. Rocky Ball-Booyah apparently loves encouraging his kind to their slaughter/consumption.
Oh yearh, the paddle is for stirring the booyah. The Y in booyah is a chickenfoot.
Thank you for the edumacation! I think.
Apparently MLB’s plan for the Cardinals is that they will now play at least 11 doubleheaders to try and make up the games missed due to a small number of staff and players testing positive.
This has the tremendous benefit of disadvantaging both the Cardinals and their opponents for these games… all so MLB can say that, if you squint at it just right, this whole thing “worked” great and we have a world series champion. Just a couple of years after the whole garbage can thing.
Those of us (even those who aren’t Cardinal fans) who recall the 1981 split season will be thinking “oh, so, ya. Again”.
That is the best “Florida Man” headline I have seen in a while. Also I find the whole $5K bail thing ridiculous. If he had $5K to put up for bail then he wouldn’t be homeless in the first place. Secondly, jail is the only place he can get housing and food so he might not be too anxious to get out.
Time for a new movement in this country… Occupy Stadiums. After all most of these stadiums are built with taxpayer money without their real consent so they should at least have a say in what they’re used for during an economic crisis.