Art Thiel is a longtime sports columnist in Seattle, for many years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and now as founding editor at SportsPressNW.com.
“It’s well documented what ESPN has done to try and get our league into where it’s at,” said Coach Dickert, offering out loud the part never addressed by insiders -- the Disney-owned network dictates terms and conditions for nearly everything in the industry.
Because he has a passion for the Arctic and a capacity for epic endurance, Kruger came upon a novel way to experience both. Over the past two summers, through some of Earth's most remote wilderness, he has paddled west to east atop the Arctic Ocean nearly 1,000 miles. Alone. No support boat. Few contacts with humans, and almost no chance for rescue in the event of, say, walrus.
In her seven-year tenure as top Dawg, Cohen made one good football coaching hire -- Kalen DeBoer, the current Huskies coach. Suddenly, she is golden. But until DeBoer delivered an 11-2 record in his rookie year at Montlake, she was a muddle in the middle of the college football industry's hierarchy.
Since the mid-1980s, major college athletic departments were awash in revenues from the innovation of cable TV and its ravenous need for content to fill the 500-channel universe (remember that trope?). But these days, cable TV is shriveling, thanks to the latest innovation, streaming.
Often overlooked in the sports journalism hand-wringing is the fact that the pro and college sports leagues shrewdly have taken over the business of daily news coverage of themselves. In creating mlb.com, nfl.com, nba.com, etc., the sites' wall-to-wall coverage far outstrips anything a single metro newsroom, or even a chain of newsrooms, can provide.
Trifles? Well, yes. So? It is a frothy exhibition game, and we are Americans. As noted baseball historian Stephen Sondheim once wrote: Something appealing, something appalling.
As you may have heard, team and town are hosting the 93rd MLB All-Star Game, a four-day seamhead festival climaxing at 5 p.m. July 11 at T-ball Park with the nationally televised game on Fox. Since the award of each season's host city is done several years in advance, it is not merit-based.
It is a bad time to be last into a disrupted marketplace, particularly after the chaos of the new rules governing legal payments of private money to players (NIL) and the transfer portal.
Baseball fans know well the hoary bromide that player payroll does not automatically convey success. But those in Seattle, with considerable justification, ask: We've tried it one way for 47 years, and remain the only team in MLB never to have made the World Series; can we try it the other way once?