Korean baseball – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: The baseball gods are very, very angry

July 24, 2020 Neil deMause

Happy baseball season, everybody! Last night the New York Yankees were leading the Washington Nationals 4-1 when MLB commissioner Rob Manfred came out to explain the new playoff system in which 16 teams will make the postseason and the only advantage you’ll get from winning your division is home-field advantage in empty stadiums, at which point the baseball gods tried to kill Manfred by hurling lightning bolts at him and the game had to be called. This really could not be a more auspicious beginning.

Anyway, stadium and arena news, that’s what you’re here for:

The group fighting against Henderson’s $30 million or maybe $42 million arena subsidy for the Silver Knights minor-league hockey team has thrown in the towel, after a ruling that their petitions to get a revote on the November ballot were invalid, partly because of a printing technicality and partly because Nevada law doesn’t allow ballot initiatives over specific projects. “We are going to re-calibrate and look at what more we can do to help the community and to help the community’s voice be heard,” said John Dalrymple of the Henderson Coalition for Responsible Government, which is pretty much what you say to save face when waving the white flag, but there’s no shame in admitting when you’re outgunned.
The Inglewood city council approved the environmental impact report for the Los Angeles Clippers‘ proposed new arena, which means now the council just has to approve the land deal, but the project seems pretty fast-tracked to go ahead at this point. Just goes to show what wonders buying out the people who said they’d sue you can do!
Hamilton has approved a $500 million plan to redo its arena and convention center and add residential development, and the developer will put up the money and also take over capital expenses on the facilities, and it all sounds great but this is also only the city government’s presentation of it and no more details will be available until “late 2020” when the master agreement is finalized, so keep an eye peeled for dropping shoes.
Italy could start allowing some soccer fans back into stadiums by September, and China is allowing fans at full capacity for the basketball playoffs in August, and South Korea will allow baseball and soccer games at full capacity next month as well, now that Covid surges have been brought largely under control in those nations. In the U.S., meanwhile, some NFL teams think they’re going to have stadiums open at limited capacity by fall, but, yeah, probably not.
The Toronto Blue Jays‘ plan to play home games in Pittsburgh this year after Canada said it wouldn’t let ballplayers to travel there from germy America to play games was turned down by the state of Pennsylvania, which didn’t want more germy Americans either, but Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont says the Hartford Yard Goats stadium is ready to welcome all huddled germ masses yearning to breathe free, presumably because he wants to get something in exchange for all the public money the state is spending on the place, even if it’s just the Hartford skyline as a backdrop during Jays games.
Mikhail Prokhorov will get another 14 days from Nassau County to renegotiate his Nassau Coliseum lease, because the middle of an economic meltdown is no time to be playing hardball about people falling behind on their rent.
Did you know that half of all Coca-Cola sales are at stadiums, movie theaters, and other large entertainment venues? Me neither, and now it feels like public money for sports venues is a hidden subsidy to the sugary drinks industry, too.
Washington’s NFL team will officially be named the Washington Football Team for this season, with players’ numbers on the helmets in place of a logo. Don’t worry, though, there’s still a chance for the team to get renamed after a fictional race of genocidal robots, so this fun may never end.
Seattle’s new NHL team is officially the Kraken, but to they will forever be the Burninators to me.

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No, seriously, what will happen in restarted sports leagues when a player tests positive?

May 6, 2020 Neil deMause

Amidst all the so very many articles on when sports leagues may or could or are thinking of restarting, I’ve been keeping an eye out for discussion of one important question: If a league starts play, with precautions for testing players and coaches and TV crews and hotel workers and whatever, what happens when one of those tests comes up positive? And finally, one league has provided an answer:

Fans will be barred from games until the [Korea Baseball Organization] is convinced the risk of infection has been minimized. If any member of a team tests positive for the coronavirus at any point of the season, the league will be shut down for at least three weeks.

If you’re serious about using testing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus through your league, this makes total sense: Any positive test needs to be followed by quarantine of everyone who has had contact with that person in recent days, which in the case of a sports league is going to mean pretty much everyone in the league. It’s going to make for an awfully tentative schedule — not to mention a dicey ESPN programming schedule — but in a nation where they’ve been averaging only seven new cases per day over the last week in a population of 52 million people, I guess they figure it’s a gamble worth taking.

But what if you can’t reasonably expect to test everyone and have everyone test negative? That’s what we’re seeing right now in the Bundesliga in Germany — 1,000 new cases per day out of a population of 83 million — and the way it’s being managed is very different:

Two days before German government officials will announce whether the country’s top two professional soccer leagues may resume play amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, Bundesliga officials confirmed Monday that they had encountered 10 positive tests in their attempt to finish the season.

In all, the governing DFL announced Monday, 1,724 players, coaches, team physicians and other staff members have been tested. At least four of the positive tests came from players — three from Cologne and one “inconclusive result” from second-division Stuttgart on a player who has been quarantined for 14 days — and all 10 who tested positive are not believed to be displaying any symptoms of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to the New York Times.

That was yesterday. Today:

The German Bundesliga season can resume this month, Chancellor Angela Merkel has confirmed.

So … what’s the point of all that testing, if not to quarantine those who’ve been in close contact with anyone who tests positive? The Bundesliga has said it will be testing everyone twice a week, but that’s still plenty of time for a player or staffer to catch and spread Covid-19 in between tests, if they’re not quarantined.

Now, there’s an argument to be made that a perfect quarantine isn’t necessary: You really only need to keep R₀ (the average number of that each infected person in turn infects) below 1, and any new outbreak will fizzle out. The Bundesliga is adding a ton of other social distancing rules, from requiring that players shower and dress separately to keeping starting lineups to be kept separate from substitutes for meals and warmups, so maybe that will be enough to keep transmission rates low — maybe. You’ll have some individuals getting infected, almost surely, but if it’s only a few, on a societal level it won’t cause devastating effects. (Of course, if you’re a player who comes down with Covid and risks spreading it to your family members as a result, you may not find it quiet so reassuring that you’re statistically insignificant.)

And if R₀ can’t be kept low enough to stop one Bundesliga player or staffer from turning into a superspreader? No one seems to have thought about that, or maybe no one can bear to think about it out loud. German soccer officials have previously warned that 13 teams could be on the brink of insolvency if the season doesn’t resume, so apparently not shutting down until there’s an actual out-of-control outbreak is the gamble they’re willing to take.

And for sports leagues in nations like the U.S. (27,000 new cases per day in a population of 328 million), clearly even thinking about what to do in case of a positive test result is unthinkable, because no one is mentioning it aloud. In fact, sports leagues (and the sports journalists who uncritically reprint their pronouncements) aren’t mentioning lots of things aloud right now, as witness this article from CBS Miami on contingency plans for a Miami Dolphins restart:

Masks would be required. Fans would order concessions from their seats to be picked up later rather than waiting on line.

Okay, so everyone would wear masks, and to avoid close contact with fellow fans they would stay out of concession lines and instead pick up their food one at a time, and then go back to their seats and eat it … through their masks … um, CBS Miami, I have some followup questions? Hello?

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Friday roundup: Sports remains mostly dead, but train subsidies and bizarre vaportecture live on

April 24, 2020 Neil deMause

It’s been a long, long week for many reasons, so let’s get straight to the news if that’s okay:

Inglewood, California has now raised $328 million — $233 million in local sales tax revenue and $95 million from the California State Transportation Agency — toward the $1 billion cost of an “automated people mover” (read: an elevated trolley) to carry fans the 1.8 miles from the Inglewood subway station to the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium and proposed Clippers arena. On the one hand, this could be seen as a worthwhile public investment to reduce car use and provide a valuable service to local residents; on the other, spending a billion dollars in public money to build light rail on a route that’s already covered by city buses is pretty clearly mostly a benefit to the teams. We might have to add “free trains” to free land and tax breaks as among the more popular ways to subsidize sports venues in the 21st century while looking like you’re not.
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a motion by Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke to have a lawsuit over his move of the team out of St. Louis moved from a courtroom to arbitration. That’s bad news for Kroenke and good news for St. Louis, which is hoping for monetary damages from the team and league for skipping town in violation of its own relocation guidelines, but mostly it’s an opportunity for KMOV in St. Louis to employ such terrible football metaphors as “The Supreme Court’s response represents an incomplete pass on the Hail Mary heaved up by Kroenke and co.,” which really should win an anti-Pulitzer, if that were a thing, which it really should be.
Two New York City baseball fans have sued MLB and several ticket agencies to recoup money they spent on 2020 tickets that the teams are refusing to refund on the grounds that the games are just “postponed,” not canceled. The pair sued in California, where the consumer laws are stronger, and are seeking class-action certification for their suit, which if successful could draw millions of additional plaintiffs (including me, since I have a pile of now-almost-certainly-useless Mets tickets for this season).
Taiwan is playing baseball in front of cardboard fans, and South Korea has started exhibition games with umpires (but not players) wearing masks and gloves, but before you get any hopes up that this could mean the resumption of pro sports in the rest of the world, keep in mind that Taiwan used its experience with SARS to quickly use quarantines, testing, and face marks to contain the virus before it ever became widespread, and South Korea quickly snuffed out an outbreak using similar measures. South Korea saw only 14 new cases yesterday and Taiwan only one, so until the rest of the world is down to around that level, it’s unlikely we’ll see much in the way of sports.
Back in pretend land, the NHL is talking about finishing its season in four empty arenas, and MLB could maybe play games in Dallas in addition to Phoenix and wherever, and college athletic directors think there will be some kind of football season this fall, and the independent minor baseball league American Association has a “target date” of starting play before paying fans in July, and European soccer leagues are slowly restarting practices while trying to figure out how to stage games with between 50 and 300 people (including players and staff) total in stadiums, but this is all just wishful thinking and reshuffling deck chairs for the moment — we could see some play resume starting in May, or July, or not until 2021, as the error bars on virus projections are still just too big to say for sure.
Now that the XFL has folded, the Texas Rangers‘ old Globe Life Park is set to be used for high school football this fall, if anyone thinks that there will be high school football this fall and that if so it will take place before enough fans to fill a 49,000-seat stadium, or any fans at all. Financial terms for the Arlington Independent School District to pay the Rangers for using their 26-year-old stadium that Arlington replaced with a new one because it didn’t have air-conditioning were not disclosed.
The Atlantic Schooners have put plans for a Halifax CFL stadium on the back burner, partly thanks to the pandemic but also because one of its three founding partners took a job with the Ottawa Senators and anyway they weren’t getting very far at getting money out of the Halifax regional council, so yeah. Looks like Cab-Hailing Purse Woman will have to find her sportsball somewhere else for the time being.
Moody’s may downgrade Atlanta’s $150 million in bonds used to finance renovations of the Hawks arena because the car rental taxes scheduled to pay them off are through the floor thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. This doesn’t change my conclusion the other day that sports projects aren’t particularly threatened by the economic crash — bonds get downgraded all the time, and Atlanta is still extremely likely to pay off the arena debt in other ways if it can’t come up with enough car-rental tax revenue — but it’s a worthwhile reminder that sports subsidies are never free, even when elected officials insist that they can pay for themselves.
Guangzhou Evergrande is building a new $1.7 billion, 100,000-seat soccer stadium, in part as a push for China to host the 2030 World Cup, and while I can’t find details on how it’s being funded (the Bangkok Post cited a local journalist as saying the team is “likely” paying for it), we do know that it’s going to have a roof designed to look like an enormous lotus flower and apparently with an unearthly red glow inside and the ability to project the score onto the inside, so enjoy these visions of pro sports’ stupid future:

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