Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Sunday, February 03, 2013
“Corroded by scandal and undermined by shocking new science, America’s killer sport may be nearing collapse” Not if “Dr. Death” Steve Williams has anything to say about thi…oh, wait.
If baseball is, or at least used to be, a languidly paced sport played on an asymmetrical greensward that recalls America’s agrarian past, football is an industrial product of the modern age. Confined to a precisely measured rectangle that mimics the electronic screen, football plays out in staccato bursts of violence, interrupted by commentary and meta-commentary, near-pornographic slow-motion replays and scantily clad young women selling you stuff.
...It’s admittedly difficult to imagine that possibility now. For at least 20 years, football has had unquestioned supremacy among America’s major spectator sports. If the process wasn’t quite complete by the time baseball committed near-suicide with the 1994 players’ strike and the ensuing “steroid era,” that pretty much settled matters. Beyond the obvious fact that football is more fun to watch from the sofa from the stadium, and brings people together on weekends when it’s too cold to spend time outdoors, various aspects of the game seemed to capture the ethos of 1990s and 2000s America on a symbolic level. At least at the pro level, football focuses on freakish excesses of size and speed (augmented by who knows what exotic chemical regimens), head-on collisions that rival a demolition derby, and overheated masculine melodrama surrounded by endless nattering. It’s like all the vulgarity, violence and excitement of American life served up in a colorful three-hour package on Sunday afternoon. With beer! No wonder people enjoy it so much.
...Just as the Church in America will never be the same after the sexual abuse scandals, America’s dominant sport will never reclaim the air of cartoonish, ‘roided-up unreality it had a few years ago, when no one in sports journalism knew how to spell “encephalopathy.” All the loudness and emptiness of the Super Bowl spectacle can’t conceal the aura of doubt around the future of the game, or the collective shock of our discovery that the endpoint of this gladiatorial combat is actual death. Football is a central ingredient in the American narrative of masculinity, and it’s also the zillion-dollar linchpin of network television. But in case you haven’t heard the news, both those institutions are in crisis. Is it hard to imagine America without football? Yeah, but it’s time to start. It’s a killing game, and we have to let it die.
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Oh please. They'll make some changes that will delude enough people into thinking they've fixed the problem (baseball's drug testing program is a road map) and they will never miss cashing a check.
Super Bowl ads are, near universally, terrible. It's the most misogynistic collection of 60 second spots of the year.
FTFY.
If you had a 9th grade son, would you let him play high school football?
I have this feeling, alas, that the only thing that will cause football to truly change for the safety of the players will be a death on the field. And not just a death, it'll have to be a death in the NFL or a big-time NCAA game.
That will change when coaches and programs quit treating it like the sports equivalency of war.
I've also played it in 4 different countries, which you definitely can't do with football.
I'm not sure I agree with this. In the age of social media and 24/7/365 coverage, I think what it will really take is a ~50 year old ex-NFL player chronicling the struggles of his daily life post-football via Twitter or Facebook or whatever comes next for people to really have the impact of CTE/Concussions/NFL brutality hit home. Once there are personal and humanized faces, voices, and narratives on the quality of life these guys have even 10 years after retiring, it's going to make it hard for parents to bury their heads in the sand while signing whatever ridiculous release forms will be required to play even high school football.
Darryl Stingley came pretty darned close.
I hope football goes away, because right now it is a guilty pleasure, in the truest sense of the phrase. I feel great joy in watching the games, followed by deep recrimination and doubt about whether I should enjoy it. Been troubling me since Andre Waters's suicide.
(Sigh)
And spirals!
*Though I did get knocked out for a few secs in high school during lunch hour by a forearm. And even THEN the high schools were savvy enough to tell us to knock off the 'tackle stuff'. Forcing us to try and hide the games behind the stadium in some sort of illegal, underground tackle football.
As for..."An actual death required to effect change" What are we talking about here? Outlawing kick-offs altogether? How bout only allowing 10 passes per game? Go to flag football? I did at one point propose a weight limit on players though.
I'm married to a pediatrician, and she says that many of her patients who play football and get concussions are pushed by their parents to go back on the field as soon as possible, something the coaches are also encouraging. Scary stuff.
As far as I'm concerned, the sooner this barbaric sport becomes marginalized (a la boxing, etc), the better.
You guys let this one pass? Obviously the 1994 work stoppage hurt attendance, the sillyball era was an era of tremendous growth for baseball which has maintained through the roid scandals.
the collective shock of our discovery that the endpoint of this gladiatorial combat is actual death.
C'mon. Potential concussion-related deaths aside, if you weren't aware of the debilitating effects of football, you weren't paying attention. From Wiki's entry on Jim Otto:
Otto punished his body greatly during his NFL career, resulting in nearly 40 surgeries, including 28 knee operations (nine of them during his playing career alone) and multiple joint replacements. His joints are riddled with arthritis, and he has debilitating back and neck problems.
One time, Otto nearly died on the operating table. He also fought off three life-threatening bouts of infections due to his artificial joints, and during one six-month stretch, was without a proper right knee joint because he had to wait for the infection to clear up before another artificial one could be implanted. Today, Otto is handicapped, but he says he wouldn't change a thing if given the opportunity to do it over again. It's detailed, proudly, in his book, "The Pain of Glory" published in 2000.
Jim Otto had his right leg amputated on August 1, 2007.
Dick Butkus:
Butkus filed a lawsuit against the Bears in 1975, claiming the Bears knowingly kept him on the field when he should have had surgery on his knees. The Bears denied Butkus and their other players the right to seek second opinions with doctors other than the Bears team doctor. The team would also distribute painkillers so that Butkus, a major gate attraction, would be active.
Chuck Hughes, the NFL's on-field death (heart attack, not football-related).
But, yes, that sickening feeling in the stomach pops up every time a batter gets hit in the head or a pitcher takes one there just as surely as a Darryl Stingley or Napoleon McCallum type hit does.
I think it's the other way around. MMA has grown into the combat sport void created by the marginalization of boxing.
This comment is gay.
The death of Chapman was one of the reasons that the spitball was banned, and it sparked some early investigation into batting helmets (although they wouldn't start really popping up for a few decades).
No it's retarded, lame and indicative of a midget brain.
While the general trend seems toward increasing safety in sports, there's clearly a smaller opposite trend in the "extreme" direction and almost every small-time sport has its extreme wing. (I'm not sure what "extreme" baseball would look like.) Possibly this all started with the Ironman -- certainly the first well-known event I can think of. One of the century rides I do in cycling now offers the option to do it twice, four times or eight times (800 miles of cycling in 2.5-3 days) and even let a guy do I think 10 laps one year. On open roads no less.
If you do the 8-lapper you qualify for the Race Across America which is about 3000 miles. Last year's winner did it in a bit over 8 days. They have folks in their 50s and 60s doing this to themselves.
These athletes are always looking for the greater high, whether it be difficulty or endurance. MMA (presumably) draws a better TV audience than the Race Across America though.
While I understand where you are coming from, I'm not so sure. I remember when driving after drinking was considered a cool, macho thing to do. Not anymore. I think the immediate danger for football is the looming lawsuits. Some of them are going to be successful and it remains to be seen if the game can withstand that onslaught and still remain a game that we all recognize.
That, and all the corruption.
100% agree, but I chose to put it in language that Joey can understand.
This. The thing is though that boxing was marginalized because of corruption, lack of credible structure and titles, and the fact that major championship fights (especially at the heavyweight level) were both too infrequent and never shown on anything except pay-per-view. If boxing had been marginalized because people found it too unsafe and violent, it wouldn't have been replaced by MMA which seems to me to be even more violent and unsafe.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you put on old fashioned Roman-style gladiatorial fights to the death, millions would pay to watch... millions would also be outside protesting, but millions would watch.
I think the idea is to encase the brain in an impermeable shell, but it seems all that does after a hit is to cause the brain to rattle around inside the skull like a ping pong ball.
You missed the point. Let me put it more bluntly:
If you only came to realize how debilitating football is due to the recently discovered issues of concussion-related death then you have had your head in the sand for your entire football-watching life. Did you read the bit on Jim Otto? Did you seriously think I was promoting that as a good outcome?
And did you bother to read the bit I was commenting on? Here it is again: the collective shock of our discovery that the endpoint of this gladiatorial combat is actual death. Yep, as long as it was just disability, lifelong pain, crippling arthritis at 40, amputation we were fine with the "endpoint of this gladiatorial combat." The author of the piece apparently never gave a thought to what happens to these guys after they limp off the field for the last time until now.
It's been a barbarous sport for my entire lifetime. Some of us didn't require actual deaths to recognize that.
Didn't your daughter get hit by a foul ball when she was an infant?
Stuff like 'The Jack Tatum Hit of the Week' kinda gets to the football mentality. No, I wouldn't want my kid to play football.
There's actually been quite a lot of thought put into this. One problem is that softer materials mean more friction. When a modern football helmet hits another player or the ground, it tends to slide; if it didn't, every play involving the head would twist the neck of the wearer – well, even more than current helmets do.
If you can invent a soft but slick helmet, you'll find a market.
RE: the concussion/CTE problem, the latest research indicates that the problem isn't necessarily big, violent "helmet to helmet" collisions (though clearly those are bad news) but equally the smaller, repetitive hits and jars to the head (especially on the lines.) A game full of swats to the head by "swim move" d-linemen is worse statistically than one crushing hit from Ed Reed. In that same line, there's a growing pool of data against headers in soccer.
I did have one hit where I wasn't exactly seeing straight for a minute or two afterwards. I didn't think about it at the time, mostly because thinking in the long term isn't in the job description for a 14 year old, but in retrospect I'm glad I just did the one year. I stopped mostly because the coaches did a lot more yelling than I care to hear in peace time.
EDIT: Apparently someone named Clifton Dawson has played for a few NFL teams and was also on one of the teams in our conference that year. I don't recall him personally, but the team he played for destroyed us pretty handily. So that's something I didn't know before today. In all likelihood I was run over by a future NFL running back!
Nope. Yes, corruption in boxing had a lot to do with it. The move to pay-per-view wasn't a driver of boxing's decline in popularity it was a response to its decline. The boxing audience quickly became a specialized audience once Ali left the scene. Well, outside of the heavyweights it had been a niche market for a very long time, probably starting after WW2 when lots of stuff became pretty marginalized. When you have a small but dedicated audience, you take them for everything you can. Basically, if you can draw enough eyeballs to generate enough ad revenue, you're on regular TV; if you can't, the fans have to pay for it.
Sure, some violent stuff draws "millions" of viewers. Well, in a country of 330 million people, just 1% is 3.3 million yet 1% is fully marginalized. WS game 1 drew only 13 M viewers -- do you think gladiatorial battles to the death would do better than that? Do you think MMA can come close enough to that to ever make it on network TV? Ah, who knows, produce it cheaply enough and you can get anything on network TV.
It's a big country and almost everybody has at least one taste that's well outside the mainstream whether it's boxing or MMA or death metal or avant-garde jazz or competitive knitting or defecating on their sexual partners. Doesn't mean any of those are popular and they don't tell you anything about cultural trends except that, unlike the 50s, I can mention people defecating on their sexual partners and not be shunned for even knowing such a thing existed.
For the record, I prefer to defecate in full privacy.
– New York Times editorial, 23 November 1897
Always correct; sometimes early.
I think football players and fans weigh it up and are OK with pretty much all players aching more than non-athletes for their whole lives, a decent number stuck with a wonky knee or arm they can't raise above their shoulder, and a small number (but way more than you'd expect from the general population) dealing with a life-changing/threatening issue. Former players with brains like alzheimers patients is at the extreme end of that scale (if it's even on the same scale) in and of itself; but what should really prompt the collective shock is the discovery of CTE wherever they look for it. People are willing to write off the occasional Jim Otto or Terry Long; anyone could die in an elevator leaving the office. If serious mental problems are a likely consequence of playing in the NFL (or even just certain positions), I'd hope they're not OK with that.
CTE & Pro wrestling:
Last year, Wrestlemania XXVIII drew 80k in Miami and over 1.25M PPV buys at 60$ a shot. This year, WrestleMania is expected to top those numbers and it will be headlined by Hollywood's top action star, The Rock.
It's also important to note that Chris Benoit's brain was in awful condition when he committed those heinous acts, and since that point, WWE has materially changed the in-ring nature of their product by vastly limiting the number of maneuvers that involve the head and neck, no matter how safe they may appear. The Saturday morning kids show outright bans any attack above the shoulders. Obviously, matches are predetermined and somewhat choreographed, but I think this is indicative of the direction we're probably headed.
A quick review of the last 4th down play in the NFC Championship would indicate that the NFL is equally predetermined and choreographed.
that's the canary in the coal mine if true.
you just won't see the impact for another 20 years
Did the league also choreograph the Falcons not scoring any points in the 2nd half?
Yeah, right, I'm sure the NFL would prefer to feature a team from the underarm of America over San Francisco. Dream on.
Not that Sam's trolling should ever be taken seriously, but who outside of Atlanta doesn't prefer today's matchup over the alternative? Who wants to watch a team that blew 20 point and 17 point leads AT HOME in back-to-back weeks?
College football. Falcons, not so much.
Why? Because, the hilarious conspiracy theory goes, they wanted the Harbaughs to face each other. Which begs the question, why didn't they do that last year?
Sounds like a recipe for a Super Bowl with a thrilling comeback!
Funny -- I wish it were tennis (a great sport with long-declining popularity and no one promising in the American ranks), but figure skating is about as likely as tennis.
Seriously, up here in the Northeast schools (high school and college), lacrosse is a big winner when a kid decides not to play football. It's another sport that values size and speed, with lots of contact, but isn't as dangerous as football if you look at the rates of head injuries.
The 49ers didn't play the Lions.
Regarding 'actual death' to spur change, we regularly (if infrequently) see guys get paralyzed on the football field. If that's not 'bad enough' I don't know that a freak death would do it. But I totally buy Harveys' [58] and fully believe we'll start to see a marked dropoff in participation beginning soon (or now) and rolling up level by level. As for how the NFL will cope, and/or where those athletes will go if not football... interesting questions. Soccer maybe a bit, could be lacrosse or even rugby as previously mentioned will become the next big thing. Or Olympic-style team handball. That'd be cool.
Edit: Coke to [65] on lacrosse mention
and with the advancements in technology, you could fine-tune the point at which the helmet breaks away so that you'd know to take that player off the field and evaluate him for concussive injury. if you make a star player sit out 10 plays or 10 minutes or a quarter or a half because his helmet broke, i think you'd start to see such players make a much stronger attempt to avoid using his head as a battering ram.
Twice, in fact.
Not that I've given it a great deal of thought, but I've always found this interesting. Football seems like one of the more expensive sports - there's quite a lot of equipment that goes with it. Of course, lacrosse has a lot of specialized equipment as well so I don't mean to draw the comparison between those two.
The obvious parallel is soccer, which seems like the perfect sport for the lower classes. It sure seems to be the go-to sport in a lot of developing nations. Yet in America it seems to be a thoroughly wealthy white kid thing to do.
I suppose it just goes to show there's a lot more to sport selection than cost.
I only have daughters but wouldn't let my hypothetical son play in the current situation. Someone in the NFL office should have a big poster made of the Dempsey-Tunney fight with 100,000 people at Soldier Field and put it up in every exec's office as a warning that popularity doesn't have to be steady.
I could see this happening quickly, as northeastern and PacWest states begin to remove state funding from football programs (which means, you know, not subsidizing the physical destruction of "student athletes" at state funded schools.)
As an aside, I watched the doc "Head Games" the other night and recommend it.
When I played lacrosse in high school it was all club teams, there were no high school teams. So we had to pay for everything. Equipment, the field, a coach, transportation, etc. By the time my brother played our high school and a handful of others picked it up, so players were bused, jerseys were provided, a coach was paid for, things the football team already had. But it was still very much a niche sport. And that was in the northeast, and lacrosse is still of course very much a regional sport.
The cost, to the individual participant, these days is in travel. Travel football is really not much of an option, so it remains far more accessible to lower-income kids than baseball, soccer, volleyball (basketball is kind of an exception in that travel is a big part of it, though I suspect cost allowances are already being made for the very talented young kids from lower-income homes).
And as for 10. My boy hasn't and won't play throughout elementary and middle school. I would strongly advise against him playing in HS, though if he really wanted to play, I probably wouldn't stop him. But I'll do everything I can to steer him away.
Nike and McDonald's pretty much entirely cover these expenses. They're farming American lower-income areas much, much more efficiently than MLB is doing the same in Latin America.
That's kind of what I figured. My kid played for his local youth league's all-star team last year, which got destroyed against some travel teams in a couple of weekend tournaments. Considering how expensive just the one overnight trip was, I assumed there had to be some subsidizing going on.
If they test (I don't know if they can/will) Jovan Belcher's brain and it comes back with CTE, that really should be the end. The NFL will never be able to argue that Kasi Perkins "knew the risks associated with the sport".
America does such a terrible job of developing tennis stars, it's unbelievable. We have 12 ATP Tour events here, and only one on clay. "The game is more about agility and speed than ever before, the skills most useful on clay. Let's address this by doing nothing at all."
Also, who's the Pele of lacrosse, exactly? The NASL was built on its ability to attract international stars. That was the catalyst for everything.
I'd be much more inclined to believe that if dozens of similar articles hadn't been written about other players for about the past 15 or 20 years. There's also a split between outsiders who want the entire nature of the game to be changed, and the players who just want to make sure that their retirement plan covers all future injury-related medical expenses. If the players were as indignant about the brutal style of play as the outside critics are, they wouldn't have come out against those Bountygate penalties the way they did.
Football has an advantage in that it is more based on raw athletic talent than the other sports. I don't think you need to play football at a young age to make the NFL, it is all about being able to do certain things with your body. The coaches and scouts can work in foreign countries to identify the likely outstanding athletes that can play the sport without developing this nationwide feeder system, when they can more readily weed out the less talented players through skills measurement anyway.
The only commercials that aired during the blackout were for CBS shows. This makes sense when you think about it. Unless CBS air sellers were calling up Budweiser offering them another spot for 2M or so there's no way for it to work. Every commercial break in a Super Bowl is planned out and sold. Having unexpected time to fill doesn't mean a goldmine for the network.
As a hockey fan, *ouch*
Basketball went next, when he was 16. Most definitely a contact sport, like soccer, where players have little protection. He didn't enjoy the increasing physicality, and he suffered a couple injuries. Well, basketball without contact is like poker without betting; it can be a fun parlor game but doesn't make it as a competitive sport.
Baseball was always #1 with him. As a high school senior he was the #2 starting pitcher for a team that made the state quarterfinals (the #1 starter is playing Division 1 ball in college). By that time his main focus had shifted to other possibilities for his life than sports. The university he chose doesn't even play varsity baseball.
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