Category: Sports

Man, the St. Louis Blues are going all out to win back fans after the lockout:

• The owners ensure fan loyalty and media coverage by announcing they want to dump the team.
• The management ensures fan return after the lockout season by letting popular, productive, but expensive players leave through free agency or through trade. The team suffers, the fans suffer, but the books look slightly better for anyone interested in the team, which will look much worse on the ice and in the standings as a result.
• One of the highly-paid star players doesn’t care enough to get into playing shape before reporting to training camp, showing the fans how much he cares about playing his best hockey.
• The team suspends the player, which means….nothing, really, except he won’t participate in training camp.
• The player files a union grievance for his suspension which, as I understand it, resulted not in a loss of money but merely in a loss of face.
• The captain and and assistant captain of the team openly, publicly, and insubordinately question team coaches and management in their decision to suspend the star player.

Someone said hockey was back this year. This ain’t hockey; this is cheap melodrama, some sort of working man against The Man mythbuilding where the oppressed working man and his allies are all millionaires, and The Man is putting one of their own down for not keeping in shape to do his freaking job. The passions are all misplaced, and we the fans know it.

The St. Louis Blues are eager to see Patrick Lalime, their new goalie, actually play a hockey game in the Blues uniform. How good is he?

In 2001-02, Lalime tied an NHL record with three consecutive playoff shutouts, against Philadelphia.

Odd, someone else tied that record that year…. What was his name? What team did he play for?

For your St. Louis Who?s:

Starting at center, Trent Whitfield!
Starting at left wing, Jeff Hoggan!
Starting at right wing, Aaron Downey!
Starting on defense, Eric Brewer!
Starting on defense, Jeff Woywitka!
And starting in goal, Patrick Lalime!

Coach Mike Kitchen and the rest of the Blues remind you…..

Jeez, who are these guys?

NHL returns Oct. 5 with busiest night ever: All 30 teams will be playing when league resumes after missed season:

Not wanting fans to have to wait one extra day to see their teams, the NHL has scheduled 15 games — including all 30 clubs — on opening night Oct. 5.

Because otherwise it would have been unsporting to schedule 15 games and only 29 teams. How the Atlanta Thrashers would have complained about their loss to the New York Rangers had they not actually played….

Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the move of the Cardinals from KMOX to KTRS in his column today:

This is no frivolous enterprise. There are plenty of legitimate, practical business reasons why the Cards are mulling a change. Yet in this parochial old baseball town that clings to routine like a pit bull gnawing on a bone, change is a strange and scary place. That is a quirky little characteristic of the Midwest, where the insular mood is to keep things just the way they always are.

Tradition, the bedrock loyalists call it. Inflexibility, the mystified outsiders mock it.

Let’s reflect upon how baseball crosses generations. When I moved to St. Louis in the middle 1980s, I listened to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon calling two Cardinals World Series appearances. When I returned to Missouri after college, they were still in the broadcast booth. As a matter of fact, Jack Buck called games for the Cardinals for fifty years up until his recent death. Mike Shannon still calls games.

However, in the last couple of years, the Cardinals (singular corporate entity) has provided a number of other guys in the broadcast booth. That “See! You! Later!” guy and Wayne “When Will A Real Market Call” Hagin.

As the Cardinals has proven its flexibility by breaking its bonds to my youth, I’ve gone to fewer games. Now that the team will play in a new stadium that I don’t associate fondly with growing up and which will bear numerous names in its existence and the games will play on a new, lesser radio station, I’ll probably listen to fewer games, too.

Because the Cardinals is not a hometown team any more; it is a corporate franchise owned and operated by a company based elsewhere with no respect–none–for St. Louis and tradition other than the tradition of taking money from St. Louisans for baseball.

Of course, we insular Midwesterners wouldn’t expect the well-travelled sports columnist to embrace tradition. He’s only here in the local paper because it offered the best check for now.

Not only will the Savvis Center henceforth, temporarily, be known as the TBD Center, but apparently the owners of the St. Louis Blues have put the team up for sale:

Citing heavy financial losses and concern about the future, St. Louis Blues owners Bill and Nancy Laurie have decided to sell the National Hockey League team and its long-term lease on the Savvis Center.

Bernie Miklasz, sports columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch lights upon the obvious answer (for a newspaperman): have the government pay for it:

With some cooperative tweaking, local politicians and leaders can ensure the Blues’ future in St. Louis.

Apparently, the cooperative tweaking that built and maintains a publicly-funded sports venue is not enough. Instead:

The state and the city have wobbled and given in on the tax issue before. The state and the city and St. Louis County teamed to pay for a football stadium that eventually housed the Rams. The Rams’ lease calls for the stadium to be maintained to high standards, so public money is still being used for periodic upgrades, even though the Rams are highly profitable. The Rams also got deal sweeteners, including a new practice facility, for moving here.

The Cardinals open a new ballpark next season, and they’re receiving public money for road and infrastructure work and other stadium-related costs. The city also waived its 5 percent amusement tax for the Cardinals owners to keep the new stadium in the city.

Instead of eliminating or reducing, in general, an onerous tax levied on entertainment events (designed, like hotel taxes, to soak outsiders who come to the city for an event instead of taxing the voters), Miklasz favors more crony capitalistic targeted subsidies so the government can prop up select, poorly-run enterprises. The Prince tour that comes through? Well, that private endeavor makes money, so it should shoulder its share of the burden–and that of the sports teams.

So point one is the government should favor the Blues because it favors the other teams. So it should continue to throw (or forego) good tax money after bad.

Argument two:

Again, I know what you’re thinking: Who cares? No public money for sports teams. OK, fine. But what will we do with Savvis Center? The city owns the arena. If the Blues head out of town, the city is stuck with the arena. Savvis Center creates full-time jobs, and a part-time workforce on the night of the events.

The Savvis Center however, won’t do jack for the city, and downtown interests, if there’s no hockey team or NBA team to fill valuable dates. That’s the reality. So really, it’s up to the city to decide what to do with this investment.

So the city of St. Louis has thrown this money away to build a large public venue that sat empty through the 2004-2005 hockey season. It should forego tax revenue on the main tenant of the building so that the building doesn’t go to waste.

Miklasz concludes that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it:

And we have a history lesson to draw on.

Once upon a time, when Ralston Purina sold the Blues, no local owners stepped up. The team was sold to Harry Ornest, who was based in Beverly Hills, Calif. After a few years, our civic leaders were so fatigued by the bombastic Ornest, they organized a local group to buy the Blues just to get rid of him.

Obviously, it would have been cheaper to buy the team before Ornest got a hold of it; instead the local leaders paid a lot more for the Blues once the team passed through Harry O’s hands.

Same with pro football. After the Cardinals moved to Arizona in 1988, the enormous cost of luring the Rams here was far greater than the cheaper alternative of keeping the Cardinals here.

If high taxes are going to drive the Blues out of this market – say, to Kansas City – then it’ll cost considerably more, long-term, to replace them.

Funny how my obvious solution differs from Miklasz’s. Why replace them? If they cannot make money here with the same tax burden and costs of business as any other enterprise, let them fail or move to some other city from which they can suck tax money.

Because ultimately, the only way the city can ensure that the sports franchise stays here would be to buy it outright and run it like another city department. Which cannot be any worse than sports teams run themselves anyway.

For twenty years, the Blues played at the St. Louis Arena/Checkerdome. Since the new facility was built by the city of St. Louis in 1995, the Blues have played at:

• The Kiel Center
• Savvis Center
• TBD

Just one more instance of how sports are killing tradition. The very name of the same venue changing every couple of years–and lots of venues have–breaks the link between the sports team present and the sports team past that fuels successful sports teams who’ve built a franchise and a fan base over time.

Granted, it’s not as bad as moving teams from city to city whenever the owner things it’s time for a free new stadium, but it’s part of the overall trend (including free agency) that’s made a sporting event as ephemeral as a rock concert.

In a book review for Slate, Josh Levin takes issue with a book’s nostalgia for baseball traditionalists versus number crunchers:

Bissinger challenges Moneyball’s analytical argument with unverifiable, splenetic opinions. On-base percentage is the “latest fashion fad.” Numbers are less important than human nature. The MBA-carrying thirtysomethings invading baseball’s front offices might know their way around Microsoft Excel, but they’ll never understand baseball. And so on.

As I have asserted recently, the MBAs in baseball are destroying the tradition of baseball from the front office. So let sportswriters capture the tradition and mystique of baseball without worrying about the detailed statistical analyses. Let managers go by gut sometimes instead of the actuarial charts.

When it comes down to mere statistics, why play the games at all when you can simply do the calculations on an expensive calculator? Or have the MBAs forgotten that statistics capture past behavior and that past behavior might not predict future success or failure? Isn’t that what business school teaches them to put on the bottom of financial reports?

Rumor has it that the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team will leave the radio station that has broadcast them for over 50 years to purchase, yes, purchase, the other leading AM talk station in the area:

The Cardinals’ contract with KMOX (1120 AM) expires after this season, and team officials have talked with KTRS (550 AM) owners about buying that station and moving the broadcasts there.

It’s good to see that the impoverished Cardinals, who couldn’t build their new baseball stadium without tapping government funds, have enough money in reserve to buy and run a baseball station while fielding a competitive team. I’m also looking forward to public/private “partnerships” in the future to build transmission towers and buy outrageously-painted vehicles with the call letters on the side. Memo: Please just change your name and mascot now to the St. Louis Crony Capitalists. The corporate fans for whom you’re building new boxes and clubs into the new stadium at the expense of inexpensive seats for families will enjoy the joke.

Here’s my bet: they will buy the other radio station. How am I sure? Because in every instance where the new MBAs running professional sports organizations must choose between tradition and business-school pabulum like:

If the Cardinals bought KTRS, the team would sell its own advertising as opposed to receiving a traditional rights fee. The Cards then could incorporate the broadcasts into a consolidated marketing plan that includes opening their new stadium next season, and placing their top two minor-league affiliates within a four-hour-or-less drive of St. Louis.

Building the brand through a consolidated marketing plan by putting the broadcasts on a small radio station that most Cardinals fans cannot hear? The MBAs love it!

And when the fans in Iowa, Kansas, Tennessee, and Indiana can’t get the broadcast on KMOX, don’t spend money for satellite radio, and eventually stop making the pilgrimage to Busch stadium, the MBAs won’t understand how the loss of tradition in a longstanding sport franchise ultimately hurts more than it makes hip.

The Milwaukee Admirals lost to the Manitoba Moose last night. The Moose backstopper Wade Flaherty won the MVP of the Calder Cup playoffs last year when he led the Milwaukee Admirals to the championship. And the Admirals had their backup goalie in, so essentially it was last year’s number one Admirals goalie against the number three Admirals goalie. What would you expect?

However, in accordance with the rules of the Hockey Whoopass Jamboree, I must post the winning team’s logo:

As well as a link to Your Moosey Fate, who had the foresight to pick the Moose in the jamboree.

Apparently, the Canadians are still blaming us for the lost NHL season, for they’ve decided not to let the United States protect them from nuclear missiles:

Prime Minister Paul Martin said Thursday that Canada would not join the contentious U.S. missile defense program, a decision that will further strain brittle relations between the neighbors but please Canadians who fear it could lead to an international arms race.

You know, Canada, you’d need to show some spine to warrant enemies who would attack. You’re safe.

World’s Longest Hockey Game; after 6 days and 2 hours, the score is 1295 to 1159.

It’s a charitable event for cancer research, so click on over and donate if you’re amused. Also check out the media clips.

(Link seen on Hockey Pundits.)