The treatment at www.masters.com is the ideal of what modern internet/TV coverage can be.
Category: Sports
Commentary and news about sports and sports teams — and media coverage of them.
Or about $20,600 a game
“According to [Major League Baseball Players Association] calculations, the average salary of 828 players on Opening Day rosters, including those on disabled lists, was $3,340,133 — a slight increase over the 2009 average of 3,317,475.”
“[T]he cumulative season-opening payroll of the 30 Major League clubs is $2,765,630,418…”
The minimum [MINIMUM] player’s salary is $400,000.
Alex Rodriguez’s salary this season is $33,000,000 or $203,700 a game (162 games).
If Alex Rodriguez had to share his salary with the 827 other major league players, they’d still make almost $40,000 apiece for the six month season.
Asterisks Dept.
From a brief, good piece “on continuity and baseball statistics” by Ben McGrath:
Remember 1987? Brook Jacoby—Brook Who?—hit thirty-two home runs. Wade Boggs, never before a slugger, hit twenty-four. The next season, they hit nine and five, respectively. The game’s self-appointed custodians that year whispered about juiced balls, not juiced bodies, but was it any less a disruption of the perceived natural order? More home runs were hit, per game, in 1987 than in 1998, the year, now tarnished in so many fans’ memories, of McGwire and Sosa.
More best lines
“Even Duke center Brian Zoubek thought it had a good chance. ‘My throat closed up, my heart dropped and it went in slow motion,’ he said.
“Duke forward Lance Thomas said, ‘The ball was in the air for three hours.’ ”
If you don’t know what the above is about, Butler’s Gordon Hayward launched a 55-foot shot as time ran out. It bounced off the backboard and rim, but did not go in. Had it done so, Butler would have won 62-61. As it was Duke won 61-59.
Some final thoughts from Indy
Tony Barnhart of the Atlanta Journal has a number of interesting insights into the game, Butler and Coach K.
Best line of the day, so far
“Gregg Doyel of CBS Sports sums it up nicely: In its last five possessions, Duke mustered just one point, one air ball, and two turnovers.
” ‘That’s not winning a national championship,’ Doyel writes. ‘That’s finding a national championship.’ ”
“However, this is the second major championship in a row in American sports where there was a clear-cut underdog fan favorite (New Orleans Saints/Butler Bulldogs) and a squeaky-clean, stiff do-gooder looking to return to prominence (Indianapolis Colts/Duke Blue Devils). Maybe we just got spoiled with the Saints’ upset in the Super Bowl and started to think Butler could pull it out.”
30-5
Our Lobos gave us a wonderful season. Thanks guys.
Idle thought
I’m thinking not very many people’s brackets have Northern Iowa advancing to the Sweet Sixteen.
Idle thought
I’m thinking not very many people’s brackets have St. Mary’s advancing to the Sweet Sixteen.
Best line of the day, so far
“There are five billion people on the planet. Major league athletes all over the planet total less than 10,000 people. They are all freaks.”
Bill Russell quoted in an article about Baylor’s Brittney Griner. She is 6-foot-8 and can slam (and punch).
Best line of the day
“That the N.C.A.A. would consider tinkering with its gem of a format in pursuit of the mirage of more television money is the real March Madness. Just think, a 96-team tournament might have included all 16 teams from a horrendously overrated Big East.”
Second best Tiger line of the day
“We don’t know about you, but we’re ready to quit gossiping and watch golf as it’s meant to be watched—focusing on Tiger Woods 99.999% of the time and totally ignoring the rest of the field.”
Best Tiger line of the day
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Tiger Woods couldn’t have picked a more appropriate spot for his comeback than Augusta National Golf Club. After all, that place’s attitude toward women is even more retrograde than his is — or was, prior to his ongoing rehabilitation.”
Best line of the day
“[Kentucky Coach John] Calipari is the only coach in NCAA history to bring to the Final Four two programs so utterly corrupt that neither of them officially exists in the tournament records any more.”
UMass had its 4-1 1996 NCAA Tournament record vacated.
Memphis had to vacate the entire 2007-08 season, including the NCAA Tournament and its standing as runner-up.
Yeah, but there’s still Kansas, Kentucky and Duke
“Imagine a tournament (this one) in which UCLA, North Carolina, Indiana, Connecticut and Arizona all failed to make the field; that hasn’t happened since 1966.”
UofA
This alum would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the passing of the streak. With its loss to UCLA today, the Arizona Wildcats ended their run of 25 consecutive trips to the NCAA tournament. They ended the season at 16-15 and stand no chance of an at-large bid.
Arizona had been there every year beginning in 1985 — twelve times to the Sweet 16 or better, four times to the Final Four — and the national championship in 1997.
Now that’s picking up a split
Give it a couple of seconds to start. You don’t need to click or anything.
[And yes, I realize the pins on the center lane are not set in the normal arrangement.]
Wilt Chamberlain
… who apparently scored often, did particularly well on this date in 1962, when he scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors vs. the Knicks. The game was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, before 4,124 witnesses. Wilt was 36 for 63 from the field and 28 for 32 from the line.
The Warriors won the game 169-147.
All my gripes about Olympic TV coverage
… were proven correct on the last day. Phil Mushnick puts it best at NYPOST.com. An excerpt:
Many of us sat down for Sunday dinner after that fabulous game, almost like the Nelsons, the Cleavers, the Waltons, the Huxtables, the Munsters.
When’s the last time you could say that about a World Series game or an NBA final? The CBS-leased NCAA basketball championship now tips at 9:22 on a Monday night. Baseball’s Opening Day, sold at auction to ESPN, is now at night, this year’s first pitch after 8 p.m. in Boston — on April 4.
If NBC, or any commercial network, yesterday had been able to shuffle and deal, Canada-USA would have begun at about 9 p.m. ET to maximize coast-to-coast primetime ad revenues.
And NBC would have much preferred that we watched the game alone — more TV sets tuned in, that way — certainly not in groups.
In other words, NBC (and CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox) would have preferred that we watched from the same place we now watch most games of national interest: that same chair or from bed, lights out, pillows up.
I watched with friends in a crowded bar where people cheered (for Canada, too). It’s a whole different and vastly better experience to share moments like these. (Ten of us watched the Super Bowl together at Jill’s. Same phenomenon — a wonderful shared experience.)
Olympic photos, part 2
Seventeen days after it began, the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver are now complete. A total of 258 medals were awarded, with the United States, Germany, and Canada collecting the most medals. The second half of the games went much smoother than the glitchy first week, with many memorable performances by athletes from all over the world. Last night, a crowd of 60,000 filled BC Place in Vancouver for the Closing Ceremony, which took place shortly after the final event – a Gold Medal win by host nation Canada’s ice hockey team over the U.S. The Olympic flame will next pass to London, England in 2012 for the Summer Games, and to Sochi, Russia in 2014 for the next Winter games. Collected here are photos from the second half of this year’s events in Vancouver (see Part 1 for the first half). (45 photos total)
Some great photography.
Oh, Canada
In light of the great Olympic hockey game Sunday, it seems to me the National Hockey League is missing a sure-winner by not having its annual all-star game be Canadian All-Stars vs. America/European All-Stars.
Canadians make up half of the approximately 740 players in the NHL. About 20 percent are American. The Czech Republic, Sweden and Finland contribute another 20 percent. The remaining 10% are from other European countries.
The Ligue nationale de hockey or National Hockey League was established with two Montreal teams, an Ottawa team and a Toronto franchise in 1917. The Boston Bruins joined in 1924, making the league’s name somewhat misleading. The Rangers, Red Wings and Black Hawks joined in 1926.
The NHL consisted of just six teams from 1944-1967 — the Canadiens, the Maple Leafs, the Bruins, the Rangers, the Red Wings and the Black Hawks. There are now 30 teams. You’d have to be a real fan to name all 30 cities and the team nicknames. (24 are in the U.S., six in Canada.)
Boy Meets Curl
Best line of the day
“… I realized I’ve been getting cranky in the evenings, just from being blathered to death watching the Olympics. Last night, I started muting the sound, and had a much more pleasant time.”
Why Won’t NBC Follow Its Own Advice On Live Broadcasts?
This one is for a particular reader. He/she knows whom I mean.
Oddly enough, going online during big TV events has the bizarre effect of boosting the ratings of whatever everyone is watching. Like the Super Bowl or Grammys or the MTV Video Music Awards, all of which saw big boosts in popularity in the last year. You don’t care about the show, you care about being able to talk about the show. This is called “community,” which is also the name of a terrible show on a terribly out-of-touch network called NBC.
Seeking to capitalize on the online water-cooler effect, NBC showed the Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and the network reportedly wants to do the same for the Emmy Awards this fall, so the entire country can watch (and chat online) simultaneously.Super-smart NBC has figured out that what all these big blockbuster Twitter-TV combo events have in common is that they are happening live. Shows that are broadcast at different times in different zones (and probably DVR’d anyway) don’t have the same effect. Yet, they have not applied this simple common sense approach to the Olympics.
Frustratingly, Olympic primetime ratings are also up this year and people are marveling about how sports fans will stay up long past their bedtime to watch events that they already know the outcome to, just so they can be a part of the phenomenon. It’s not because they prefer it that way. It’s because they have no other choice.
Best Olympics-TV-sucks line of the day
“Most emotional of all were probably the television executives who prefer to think of the Olympics as a two-week long soap opera filled with emotional turmoil, heartbreak, and redemption. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you overcame enough adversity to make your life story worth a three-minute interstitial package.”