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.