Two Fourth Place Teams and Other Thoughts

After seeing the Dodgers at Citi Field back in July, I was hoping to get to at least one more baseball game this summer.  Vin invited me to a Met game so we saw the Mets and Pirates at Citi Field.  It was two teams that were not going anywhere, but it was good to see Vin and I’m always up for going to a game in the summer.

I took the train to the game and met Vin at Citi Field.  The Citi Field Long Island Railroad station looks like it was built as a giant Eagle Scout project 45 years ago.  It is very dilapidated.  It’s not handicap accessible and it’s definitely in need of a fresh coat of paint.  You walk up the stairs from the platform and then you walk across a bridge that goes over the train tracks.  The bridge is made out of very uneven wooden boards.  So yeah, they could definitely rebuild that and make it nicer.

Anyway, we both arrived early for Edwin Diaz Bobblehead Night.  Can Timmy Trumpet play a sad trombone?  Before the game we went to the DeltaSky 360° Club and got spicy chicken sandwiches.  Then we got Sam Adams Summer Ale.  It was my first Summer Ale on tap of the year.  I usually have a local beer at a baseball game, but I don’t feel obligated to follow that rule in New York since I live here and I can get beer from around here whenever I want.  And since I hadn’t had a Summer Ale on tap all year and it might have been my last opportunity to get one, it was an easy choice.  Every Major League stadium should have Summer Ale on tap as it is the perfect outdoor beer when the weather is good.

The starting pitchers were David Peterson and Bailey Falter.  The Mets took a 1-0 lead on a lead off home run by Brandon Nimmo.  He just missed a lead off home run at the last game I went to (his lead off double ended up being the only hit for the Mets).  The Pirates tied it with a home run in the second.  That was all both starters allowed.  Peterson only lasted three and two-thirds because he walked six guys.  Falter lasted five and a third.  It was 1-1 until the 7th.  The top of the 7th did not go well for the Mets.  Jose Butto got one out and allowed a walk, a double, and another walk.  The Mets brought in Grant Hartwig with the bases loaded.  He walked the first batter he faced, hit the second one, had a run score on a passed ball, and gave up a two-run double before he got an out.  After getting an out, he gave up another run on a triple.  So the Pirates led 7-1.  The Mets had back to back home runs in the bottom of the 7th to make it 7-4.  And that was all the scoring in the game.  Attendance was 35,439 and it was 78°.  There was a threat of rain, but that held off until after the game.  The game ended up going three hours and 12 minutes (the Mets walking 10 batters had a lot to do with that) so that was probably the longest game I’ve been to this season.  We both left early.  Vin had to get back to Manhattan and then get a ferry to New Jersey.  I had seen enough after seven innings of two bad teams.

It's been a while since I sat this close at a Major League game.

After the game, both teams were 54-66 and in fourth place.  The Mets are paying $376 million (including luxury tax) and the Pirates are paying $93 million for the same season.  Pittsburgh is one of my favorite cities and they have a great stadium so I wish they would spend more money and put together a better team.  I have mixed feelings about the Mets.  I do hope that they win a World Series someday for all the Met fans that I know.  And baseball is more fun in New York when the Mets and Yankees are good.  But I also like when they’re bad so that I can get cheap tickets when the Dodgers are in town.  This Mets team is pretty much my worst case scenario.  They’re really bad, but tickets and everything else (parking, food, etc.) are really expensive because of how much money they’re spending.

Thanks to Vin for the great seats and the food and beverage.  The last time we had gotten together was before the pandemic.  It was the Big East Championship Game in 2019.  It had been far too long so it was great to see Vin.  We talked about the Jets and Vin was very optimistic about the season.  It has to be better than this Mets season has been, right?  Right?  I hope so.

Summer is coming to an end.  It’s been an excellent summer for the Dodgers (pretty much starting right after I saw them in Kansas City).  Hopefully they can continue that into the fall.  And now I’m starting to think about other sports.  The NBA released the schedule for the in-season tournament the day we went to this game.  The in-season tournament is the dumbest idea Adam Silver has ever had.  Winning the in-season tournament would be like the NBA version of winning the Pinstripe Bowl.  Am I supposed to be happy about that?  Why would fans care?  The only reason to care is that the games count in the standings.  But they count exactly the same as every other regular season game.  So yeah, I hope the Celtics win those games, but I don’t care about them because they’re part of a tournament.  Actually, the one game that doesn’t count in the standings is the championship game (because it’s the 83rd game for those two teams).  If the Celtics get to that game, I definitely won’t care.  The players might care about the money that they get for winning.  The money will matter for some players, but it definitely won’t matter for Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.  If I was Brad Stevens and Joe Mazzulla, I would sit all the highly paid players if I got to the championship game.  The game doesn’t count and those guys don’t need the money.  Say to the other guys, “If you want the money, you go win it.”  And if the Celtics do win it, I would be angry if they hung a banner.  It means nothing.

College football starts on Saturday.  Hopefully it will be a year of growth for Marcus Freeman.  He had two really stupid losses last year.  He did some good things too.  I thought we might be headed for a 5-7 season or something and he was able to avoid that.  The Clemson win was fantastic.  We should get much better quarterback play this year so we can’t have any more of the stupid losses.  Hopefully we will win at least two of Ohio State, Southern Cal, and Clemson this year and not lose any stupid games.  It’s the last year of college football before some really stupid changes with realignment and it’s the last season before a really stupid 12-team playoff will greatly diminish the importance of the regular season.  So I’ll try to enjoy this season as much as possible.  I'm pretty excited about Notre Dame playing the first game of the season in Ireland (we were supposed to be the first game of the season three years ago, but that got cancelled).  I was there the last time we were in Ireland and that was fun.  This weekend is supposed to be the largest influx of Americans into Europe since World War II.  I won't be there this time, but hopefully we'll win by 40 and it will be our first win on our way to an undefeated regular season like it was in 2012 (but hopefully we'll get a better finish this time).  Go Irish!

Jim Yells at Cloud

When I was in college, my friends and I would talk about how to make college football better.  Nobody liked the BCS.  Well, college football is much different from when I was in college.  It’s not better.  It’s like somebody put Rob Manfred in charge of college football.  The people making decisions have taken something great and made it much worse.  I would absolutely go back to college football in the BCS era if I could.  This post is going to be rambling and probably unorganized because I’m pretty sad about the state of college football and college sports in general.

This is always how I feel about Rob Manfred, but now it’s how I feel about college sports also.

It’s not just college football that will be worse, it’s all college sports.  The Pac 12 will be dead a year from now and college sports might not have much longer to live than that.  They will continue to play college sports, but they won’t be what made college sports great.  They will be very different and much worse.  I can think of two blog posts about college sports where I was definitely wrong.  In December 2012, I lamented the death of the Big East.  The Big East is not the same as it was back then, but it’s definitely not dead either.  I wish Notre Dame was still in the Big East and a 16-team tournament over five days at Madison Square Garden was awesome.  Those days are gone.  But the Big East remains an excellent basketball conference.  The current Big East teams have a 7-1 lead in football/men’s basketball/women’s basketball national championships over the current Big 10 teams and their west coast additions in the past decade (and of course the Big East doesn’t have football anymore).  It’s still a 3-1 lead if you take out UConn’s national championships when they weren’t part of the Big East.  The other post that I was wrong about was lamenting the loss of college sports in July 2020.  As it turned out, Notre Dame saved that college football season by joining the ACC and playing that year.  It’s been interesting to see some people realize that Notre Dame’s independence is a good thing now.  Maybe we could save the ACC now, but I don’t really want to.  We probably can’t save all of college sports.

So yeah, I hope I’m wrong about the future of college sports, but I don’t think I will be.  I’ll focus mostly on football, but I’ll talk a little bit about basketball and the other sports also.  There’s so much about the present state and the future of college football that’s bad.  Rivalries have been killed by conference realignment.  Decisions are being made based only on TV and money and not what’s best for the students and fans.  The Big 10 is the biggest culprit in all of this.  Two years ago, I had a post dealing with many of my concerns about college football (I was more worried about the SEC, but the Big 10 turned out to be the biggest villain by far).  It was right after the ACC, Big 10, and Pac 12 agreed to the Alliance.  That alliance was as real as Jim and Dwight’s alliance in season 1 of the Office.  It lasted for less than a year before the Big 10 stabbed the Pac 12 in the back.  The Big 10 killed the Pac 12.  Let us never forget this.  It was not the Big 12, it was the Big 10.  The Big 12 was fighting for survival and they took Colorado (hardly a death blow).  Now they’re taking three more Pac 12 teams after the conference is already dead.  The Big 10 did not need to expand.  They took USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington entirely because of greed.  The Big 10’s greed and the incompetence of Pac 12 leadership is what killed the Pac 12.

So now the Big 10 will go from New Jersey to the west coast.  There will be too many teams and too much travel.  In football, the travel is not that big of a deal.  For teams to have to travel for six road games a year on Saturdays is not too bad for the players, but it is kind of bad for the fans.  Like if you’re a USC student, alumnus, or fan living in the Los Angeles area, the only easy road game to get to will be UCLA.  Are Michigan State fans going to like staying up for a night game at 10:30 in Washington?  It’s not terrible for the players, but it will be rough for the fans.  And for the other sports, the travel is going to be crazy for the players.

What even is an 18-team conference?  I’m sure they’re going to have protected rivalries in football.  Like Michigan and Ohio State will play every year.  But how often are you going to play the other teams in the conference?  It’s a little like Notre Dame’s ACC arrangement.  I would like Notre Dame’s ACC arrangement in football more if we didn’t have to cycle through every team.  Since we play an average of five ACC teams per year and we play each team, we pretty much cycle through the conference every three years.  Playing Duke and Syracuse as often as we play Florida State and Clemson is not interesting.  I would like it a lot more if we didn’t have to cycle through the whole conference.  Like if we could play Miami like six years in a row and revive that rivalry, that would be cool.  We’ve developed a little bit of a rivalry with Clemson with regular season games in 2015, 2020, 2022, and this year plus a playoff game in 2018 and an ACC Championship game in 2020, but after this year, we’re only scheduled to play them five more times in the next fourteen years (we’ll see if those games happen or not).  So unless we get some playoff games, that rivalry is probably going to fizzle out.  How are rivalries going to develop in the Big 10 with that many teams?

This whole wave of conference expansion started more than a decade ago with the Big East and Big 12 getting raided.  Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Miami, Rutgers, and Virginia Tech left the Big East.  Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, and Texas A&M left the Big 12.  We can add in Maryland leaving the ACC.  Has that worked out for any of those teams?  Are any of them better off in their new conferences than they were before?  Yes, many of them are making more money.  But are they doing better in football?  Some of them maybe are the same, but some of them are much worse off.  Leaving the Big 12 worked out so well for Colorado that they went back to the Big 12.  Leaving the Big 12 has been a disaster for Nebraska on the football field.  If you look at the four West coast teams going to the Big 10, I could easily imagine at least two of them becoming like Nebraska in the Big 10.

Oklahoma dominated the Big 12, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them become the Nebraska of the SEC.  Most of the teams that left the Big East are worse off in basketball than they were in the Big East.

What should Notre Dame do?  If we have playoff access as an independent, we should absolutely stay independent.  If we can’t stay independent, then I would rather join any conference other than the Big 10.  I would join the ACC, SEC, Big 12, MAC, Pac 4, etc. before I would join the Big 10.  My ideal scenario has always been staying independent in football and going back to the Big East for all of our other sports.  I’ve pretty much wanted that ever since we left the Big East.

Conference expansion is bad, but could we see conference contraction in the future?  I mean, conferences should be smaller, but if it happens, they way they get rid of teams will not be a good thing.  Like are Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, and USC going to decide that it makes no sense for them to be sharing money with teams like Rutgers, Purdue, Northwestern, and Iowa?  Are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee going to decide that it doesn’t make sense for them to be sharing money with Vanderbilt and Missouri?  I really wish we could just blow everything up and start over.  Maryland should be in the ACC.  Rutgers should not be in a power conference.  The Pac 12 should still exist.  I would be okay with having football conferences that are totally distinct from the other sports.  Like Texas and Kansas in the same conference in basketball makes sense, but it doesn’t really make sense for them to be in the same football conference.

I could imagine college sports dividing between two extremes.  One extreme is NFL Jr./NBA Jr./minor league baseball.  You could have two super conferences with professional players who aren’t as good as the best players in the world.  There will be no connection between the academic mission of the universities and their athletic teams.  You will have players quitting on their teams like they’re Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden.  You will have way too many teams in the playoff competing for a championship like in the NFL and that will destroy the value of the regular season.  As you can see, we’re already very much headed in that direction.

Allowing players to get paid for their name, image, and likeness was a good thing.  Like it was silly that EA Sports made a video game and couldn’t use the players’ names.  Make the game, use the players’ names, and pay them for it.  Nobody is against this.  But the results of players making money off of their name, image, and likeness have been really bad.  You already had college basketball teams built on hired mercenaries (Kentucky and Duke are the most obvious examples), but now you’re getting that in college football as well.  Many players are deciding where to go to college based entirely on money and not at all on the educational opportunities provided for them.  Dante Moore and Peyton Bowen would be at Notre Dame right now if that wasn’t the case.

The changes in transfer rules have been bad.  As somebody who transferred twice, I’m not against allowing players to transfer.  I am against NBA free agency coming to college sports.  It used to be that schools could prevent players from transferring to certain schools.  That is silly.  I’m glad that’s not allowed anymore.  But with no more requirement to sit out a year combined with money for name, image, and likeness, you have football teams built on hired mercenaries like basketball (USC) and players transferring all the time now and making decisions that probably aren’t best for themselves.  Like Tyler Buchner transferring from Notre Dame to Alabama could easily work out poorly for him.  He was close to graduating from Notre Dame and he might not even end up playing at Alabama.  If players had to sit out for a year, they would be much more hesitant to transfer.  I would make exceptions to that rule if a school changed conferences after a player signed with the school.  There are a lot of families who will have to travel really far to see their kids play for schools after they leave the Pac 12 so I would definitely let kids in that position transfer and play right away.  Before anybody could transfer and play right away, graduate transfers were allowed to transfer and play right away.  That kind of makes sense.  It’s a reward for players who have graduated and still have eligibility.  The problem is that these players are transferring and just becoming hired mercenaries.  They’re not real students.  I mean, Sam Hartman is not really a Notre Dame student.  He’s not working toward any degree at Notre Dame.  He’s like taking a class or something.  His academic workload is like Matt Leinart’s rigorous semester of ballroom dancing.  I liked college sports when the athletes were actually college students.  Many still are, but the best ones often aren’t.  I mean Stetson Bennett was in college for seven years and didn’t graduate.

The 12 team playoff in college football is so stupid.  I liked the four team playoff at first, but unless you have a 2004 situation with USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn all undefeated, the playoff isn’t necessary.  The BCS was better as long as you don’t have that situation.  The regular season was the playoff.  I want college football’s regular season to matter.  If we lose to Ohio State in September, I want it to ruin my week.  But because we play a good schedule, we would still have a pretty good chance to make the playoff with a loss to Ohio State if we can get through the rest of the season without another loss.  If we had the 12-team playoff this year, we could probably lose another game and still make the playoff.  You will definitely have teams with three losses make it and maybe even teams with four losses.  Losing a game will be like losing a regular season NFL game.  It just won’t be a big deal.

The other extreme is college athletics becoming like the Ivy League.  If you have two power conferences that break away from everybody else, that might be what happens to everybody else.  They’re not going to be making significant money off of athletics.  The players won’t be making much money off of their name, image, and likeness.  The sports might continue with actual college students participating in them, but is anybody going to care?  If we get to the point where the only other option is NFL Jr./NBA Jr./minor league baseball with professional athletes that aren’t really college students, I would rather see Notre Dame go the Ivy League route.  But I probably won’t care about Notre Dame’s teams very much at that point.  And my warning to the power conferences is that college sports might lose significant popularity if you keep moving in this direction.  Does anybody care about minor league baseball?  I like going to minor league games, but I have no emotional investment in minor league baseball.  The NCAA Tournament is the best part of college basketball.  If you kill that, are people going to care about what would essentially be the NBA G-League with more exposure?  I like college basketball, but I also know that college basketball today is not as good as it was in the 70s and 80s.  It’s never going to be as good as it was then.  And it might get worse if you kill the NCAA Tournament.

I fear that we’ve reached the point of no return where college football will follow college basketball in becoming worse and worse over the years.  College football is definitely affecting the other sports in a negative way.  Anyway, I am looking forward to this college football season.  I don’t know how many more I’m going to care about after this one.  Go Irish.

A Team that $376 Million Bought

The Dodgers and Mets opened the second half of the season with a three-game series in New York.  I got tickets months ago.  My dad and I were going to the Friday night game.  Of course, I was hoping to see Clayton Kershaw.  Unfortunately when Kershaw was put on the injured list, he was guaranteed to be out until at least their Saturday game against the Mets.  It sounded like he wouldn’t be on the injured list for an extended period.  So I was going Friday, but I probably would have gone back on Saturday or Sunday if Kershaw pitched either of those days, but here we are in August and he’s still on the injured list.  So I only went to the Friday night game.  It turned out to be the only game in the series that wasn’t delayed by rain so that was good.

So I didn’t get to see Clayton Kershaw, but I found out before the game that Marcus Freeman would be throwing out the first pitch.  We got to the stadium early and I walked around a little bit, but I wanted to make sure I was able to see his first pitch.  He threw it down and away to a right handed batter, but it didn’t bounce.  I’ll probably have some thoughts about the lamentable state of college football in my next post.

Usually I include a picture of the first pitch of the game, but I had to go with the ceremonial first pitch for this one.  Unfortunately the Mets were wearing their stupid black jerseys so that’s what they gave to Marcus Freeman.

We’ve played Shamrock Series games at Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park.  We probably won’t ever play one at Citi Field, but I would be in favor of having a game as close to home as possible.

It was a Friday so I didn’t have any meat.  I ended up getting mac and cheese empanadas.  They were good, but I would have preferred just mac and cheese.  The mac and cheese empanadas were one of three options at the empanada concession stand.  I would have preferred a mac and cheese concession stand with different mac and cheese options.  But it was a non-meat option and there wasn’t a long line so it got the job done.  I got a can of Brooklyn Lager.  Brooklyn Lager is always a good option when seeing the Dodgers play in New York.  I just wish Citi Field had more good draft beer options.

As for the game, it was Julio Urias against now former Met Justin Verlander.  It was 82° and drizzling a little bit at the start of the game, but it never got too bad.  It started drizzling a little bit at the end of the game as well, but the game ended before it got worse.  Brandon Nimmo led off the bottom of the first with a long fly ball to right center that was initially ruled a home run.  I didn’t think it got out.  I thought it hit the top of the wall and came back.  It was reviewed and that was exactly what happened.  So it ended up being a double.  Despite the lead off double, Urias was able to get out of the first inning without any damage.  For a while, that was the only hit in the game.  By the top of the fifth, it was still scoreless and Justin Verlander was pitching a no hitter.  He was walking guys and his pitch count was getting high so it definitely didn’t seem like he was going to last very long.  Verlander walked three in a row in the fifth and then Mookie Betts got the Dodgers’ first hit with a line drive single and the Dodgers took a 1-0 lead.  Freddie Freeman then drove in two more with a double.  So Verlander only lasted five innings.  Urias got through six scoreless and only allowed one hit and one walk.  Miguel Rojas had an RBI single in the sixth.  JD Martinez hit a solo home run in the eighth.  JD Martinez is officially my least favorite productive player on the Dodgers.  He’s pretty much only a DH and the DH is stupid and he took Justin Turner’s spot on the roster.  Justin Turner has been good for the Red Sox, but Martinez has been better.  So it was a good move by Andrew Friedman, but I can’t be overly excited about somebody who is only a DH and replaced Justin Turner.  Anyway, the Dodgers added another run in the ninth when Will Smith grounded into a force out.  Yency Almonte, Caleb Ferguson, and Ryan Brasier combined to pitch three scoreless innings without allowing a baserunner and the Dodgers won a 6-0 combined one-hitter.

So that was much more fun than watching the Dodgers lose back to back games against the Royals.  Attendance was 40,503 and the game lasted two hours and 48 minutes.  When my dad and I went last year, it was while the US Open was going on.  One of the games we went to last year was a 4:10 game so we were leaving Queens around 7:30 and then you added in Met game traffic and US Open traffic and it was really bad.  This time, it was really easy getting out of Queens.  It was a big crowd, but there were fireworks after the game.  We didn’t stay, but I guess a lot of people did because we didn’t have any trouble getting out at all.

Anyway, this year has been a disaster for the Mets.  My feeling about the Mets under Steve Cohen was that they were like the Dodgers after Mark Walter, Magic Johnson, and everybody else bought the team.  They were going to spend a lot of money and be good and eventually they would get over the hump and win the World Series.  Last year it seemed that we were headed in that direction, but this year was a big step back.  I was skeptical of the Mets this year because they were spending a ton of money on Verlander and Scherzer (a pitcher that’s older than me and a pitcher who is like six and a half months younger than me).  Now both of those guys are gone and the Mets still have to pay them a lot of money.  The Mets could get back on track in the next couple of years, but now I think there’s also a possibility that Steve Cohen could be like the Daniel Snyder of baseball.  I mean that in like the least bad way possible, but any comparison to Daniel Snyder is still bad.  You can spend a lot of money, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re not doing it wisely.  Obviously I know a lot of Met fans so I would like to see the Mets win the World Series at some point (I mean, I want the Dodgers to win it every year, but I realize that they’re not going to run off like ten consecutive World Series championships).  We’ll see what happens.

That was very likely my last Dodger game of the season, but they should be headed back to the playoffs this year.  They’re clearly not as good as they were last year, but regular season records don’t mean much once you get to the playoffs.  I’ve been skeptical of this team all season, but hopefully they’ll find a way to get it done in October.  And hopefully I’ll get to see Clayton Kershaw pitch for the Dodgers next season.