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I had no inside knowledge that Steven Goldman would have a reaction to the Department of Defense briefly taking down Jackie Robinson’s military history to relabel it as “DEI,” but I knew he was good for it, and that it would appear if I would only be patient.
The reward for that patience was significant: Goldman wrote a wonderful rebuttal, explanation, whatever you want to call it to what went into the decision to remove Robinson, the history behind what made his being there in the first place such a significant deal, and some strong jabs at Thomas Jefferson’s trying-to-have-it-both-ways routine, for good measure.
No one should be dismissed on this basis, but to have the federal government do this to Robinson is especially appalling given his obvious, irrefutable achievements and his importance to American societal progress as a whole; he began at the major league level more than seven years before a version of the Supreme Court that now seems impossible said, “Separate isn’t equal, duh.” As Red Smith wrote in December 1956, “His arrival in Brooklyn was a turning point in the history and character of the game; it may not be stretching things to say it was a turning point in the history of the country.”
And yet, that this has been done to his memory—and it was done; despite the restoration of Robinson’s page he has still been slurred by, again, the government of the United States—shouldn’t be surprising. There is no bottom to the racist mindset, no level to which it will not sink in affirmation of its delusions. Robinson’s DoD page wasn’t exactly his plaque at Cooperstown, and almost certainly not the first place anyone looking to learn about him would go, but they had to deny the worth of a Black American anywhere within their reach.
Excellent stuff, and it happens to be a piece that’s free for anyone to read at Baseball Prospectus, to boot, so you have no excuse not to read it.
I had a piece of my own go live at Baseball Prospectus this week, as well, and while it’s free to read, you do need an email login to be able access it. (So, get one, it’s free and you won’t be inundated with emails.) You might have seen a reported piece by Dejan Kovacevic floating around, declaring that the Pirates are, in fact, in debt. Just a little bit of debt, as a treat, owing to the substantial off-the-field spending that they incur, spending so high they’ve had to take out loans to cover for it, actually, since their own revenue, and the extra cash received through revenue-sharing, hasn’t been enough.
I’ll be a little more frank here than I was at BP about this, but I decided to tackle this from more of a conceptual level rather than taking umbrage with everything that made me raise an eyebrow in Kovacevic’s piece. It’s written as if he just can’t believe what the results of all of these conversations and research were, but given the massive red flags he just ran right on by to get to this next points, it’s hard to believe how genuine that is.
It ends up reading like the Pirates — which gave him answers to his questions about their finances — realized they got a gift: someone willing to print their lies for them. So, they told these lies, and they went unchallenged. There’s just no way that their off-the-field spending to improve the team costs more than the team on the field does, especially when, huh, weird, the math just works out so that the Pirates are in debt, yes, and need help. In the form of a salary cap that Kovacevic says Nutting wants, and also needs.
As I get into in the piece, there is no chance — none! — that the Pirates gave him access to their “complete” books like he claims. They might have told him that, but anyone subscribed to this newsletter knows the score with MLB teams and their books. Those are for nobody to see, ever, and if they’re ever shown off, they’re also cooked. So right there is the problem. Kovacevic might have done a lot of good reporting in there at times, but he poisoned his data set, and therefore his conclusions, by involving the Pirates.
If you want more evidence that Kovacevic was fooled by the Pirates to further their own ends and change the perception of them with the media and public, look no further than their Opening Day broadcast: play-by-play announcer Greg Brown spent the sixth inning of their Opening Day contest going over the details of the report. Do you think that sort of thing happens without the team’s explicit approval or even encouragement?
We got a little more insight into the future of MLB’s broadcasts, or, at least, what they hope those look like. Commissioner Rob Manfred told MLB Tonight that the league would love to be on broadcast television more than once per week. Cable is obviously in a transitional phase — one without the massive carriage fees to draw from in their deals with sports leagues — and streaming can’t be the entire answer. So, that leaves going back to more and more broadcast television. FOX, of course, is an option, as is NBC. ESPN backed off of MLB after 2025, but one wonders if maybe Disney will decide that ABC is the way to secure at least some MLB going forward.
This isn’t a big story on its own, but it’s something to recall down the line when we see MLB start to make more significant moves towards its post-2028 broadcasting future.
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