For every 700 to 1,000 words of mine you read on any given Saturday, I have a list of callous, cynical thoughts and remarks I can make about the topics I discuss… easily five-fold of what I allow past my filter and, in turn, e-mail to my editor.
Here’s an example of something I’ve asked more gently in a past column than I’m asking here.
Who’s laughing all the way to the bank when a dugout full of kids pile up $5,500.00 worth of bats and get goose-egged in a double elimination tournament where the same collection of batters got on base maybe six times with bat-to-ball contact?
Along with a bat manufacturer like Easton, the hotels love it, the casual dining restaurants love it, the concessionaires love it… et cetera, et cetera.
The weather is warming up, and rip-off season has already started with club basketball and volleyball. Softball and baseball are rounding third and headin’ into summer at full speed.
Hotels will be filled with families schlepping their kinder to sports events that years ago were played within your town, county, or region.
From a selfish standpoint, the hotel bookings in the Southern Michigan area, an area I’d love to get away to more often, are often stuffed with scores of travel athletics caravans who consequently make MY hotel stay more expensive, Why else am I paying at least $270 for a Saturday night stay in small Michigan cities like Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Saint Joseph?
Sure, there are beaches near Saint Joe to make it more expensive, but those inland cities have nearby large universities and other venues hosting weekend tournaments for different traveling scholastic athletes.
I do have a rule of thumb to avoid hotels whose franchise names have a digit, some form of royalty, or a color in them, so there are less expensive options if I were to take a more rustic approach. I am part of the pricing/demand problem.
Are there good takeaways to travel sports?
There certainly are.
One, this helps offset the pervasive retreat of people at the end of their school and workdays just trudging back home to get all their dopamine from their handheld devices instead of interacting with others outside the nuclear and extended families they already have.
Two, some travel teams playing at elite levels keep getting better, and they are cultivating a mutually appreciative relationship rooting for each other’s successes. When I was a kid, we just blindly hated our rivals. This current environment is healthier.
I’ll move on to something else in the spirit of my “rolled out of the wrong side of the bed” current state.
Does the NBA season need a first-round playoff, best four out of seven game series formats?
No.
I like the way the seventh and eighth NBA playoff spots are determined with the play-in among the four teams who finished seventh through tenth in the Eastern and Western conferences. Among those teams I want the team who happens to be playing well in real time to be a team I watch in the two advancing teams’ fulsome best-of seven first round series.
There is still disparity from seeds one through eight in a league where these guys miss so very few warmup shots and have inimitable athletic ability; athletes who run so fast and cut so hard they need a new pair of shoes each game in some cases (look up Adrian Dantley, kids. Even back then….).
Earlier this week, about half the first-round games were not fun to watch. To the credit of the visitors, though, the ones blowing out their opposition are doing so because they’re playing good basketball. You don’t have to post four opening round wins to convince me you’re worthy of moving on to the conference semifinals.
I’ve come to the realization of the association and its broadcast networks television contracts, corporate loge and other corporate seating packages necessitate a seven-game series requiring four games because if it were a best three out of five playoff series, most of the series would be three-game sweeps.
Count the number of televised games without premium advertising revenue, where restaurants would instead be reduced to ordinary weekday business in most cases, and you realize it’s not about giving these competitors an optimum number of reps/games to be sure the best team moves forward.
Instead, it’s rip-off season in the NBA, too.
It would be too cynical to say the NBA doesn’t care if you come to watch their games, They need, instead, big money for seating licenses and season tickets than most of us have because those keesters in the seats are part of the planned revenue stream to give a guy a $50 million annual contract.
They care about paid attendance, but they filter in music and “DEE-fense” sound bites to compensate for crowds whose majorities tend to be comprised of mostly vapid corporate attendees.
I went back, for a moment, to my Celtic City discussion last week. If you’ve seen the series, take a good look at those rabid fans. This was how a professional sporting event used to sound. Look, also, at the everyday people who – in the present – couldn’t beg their way into those sections in today’s pro sports venue climate.
Those were the days. Granted, spilled beer from other folks or popcorn for that matter on a good shirt tended to be your typical collateral damage back in the day.
I’m a pretty calm basketball fan even at high school levels, so maybe on the surface it seems calling some fans vapid is hypocritical.
My economization of loud noise is more about preserving my PA announcer voice. I learned my lesson long ago, but I disobeyed my rule on voice control last November, though.
I was watching the Warsaw Lady basketball Tigers convincingly beat Fort Wayne Snider in mid-November, then paying dearly for it while announcing a varsity football regional where my last breath that ensuing Friday night was all I thought I had left.
Overtime would have required a back-up announcer.
Well, there you have it, closer to the 1,000 words in the 700-1,000 range I mentioned at the start. Enjoy the weekend, and don’t get ripped off.