Sports
Willson Contreras Against Kenley Jansen
Jomboy breaks down a fun moment between St. Louis Cardinals catcher Wilson Contreras and Boston Red Sox pitcher Kenley Jansen. Contreras messed with Jansen with his wits and that pesky new pitch clock rule.
Mike Shannon, RIP
Simply one of the voices in my head when I think about St. Louis Cardinals baseball. A sad day.
The Brandon Miller Situation Is Completely Grotesque
Writing for New York Magazine, Will Leitch has a take on the Brandon Miller situation.
At the risk of sounding histrionic, it is downright ghastly the extent to which the University of Alabama has attempted to normalize what’s happening here, simply because the school’s basketball team is so good. Jamea Jonae Harris is dead. The men indicted with her capital murder allegedly procured their gun from Alabama’s best player, who then delivered it to them minutes before the killing. Now he’s going to be a part of “One Shining Moment.” Isn’t this shocking to you?
I hate all of this. I mean, Alabama is a legitimate NCAA Tournament winner this year. They would not be without this one player, who should be in jail.
Aaron Judge and Paul Goldschmidt and the day they spent together
Chris Kirschner, Andy McCullough and Brendan Kuty, writing for The Athletic, has a cool story about Aaron Judge and Paul Goldschmidt hanging out in the off-season.
One day in January, the most exclusive club in baseball convened a meeting. Aaron Judge, the reigning American League MVP, booked a block of time at a baseball facility near his home in Tampa, Fla. Paul Goldschmidt, the reigning National League MVP, drove three hours across the state from his home in Jupiter, Fla., to join him. The session had been months in the making and the agenda was straightforward: discuss and demonstrate methods to further terrorize opposing pitchers.
It was the equivalent of Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z getting in the booth to talk about coming up with harder rhymes. It was J. Cole’s bar on “Middle Child” come to life, the one where he talks about his relationship with Drake: “they act like two legends cannot coexist.”
Yet, Judge and Goldschmidt did more than coexist. They made each other better.
This type of story is why I subscribe to The Athletic.
How Shaquille O'Neal Made Himself Bigger Than Ever
Will Leitch, writing for Inc magazine, has a business oriented profile of Shaquille O’Neal.
And to be sure, O'Neal's approach to business, at least until recently, has looked like a holdover from an earlier era of celebrity business that was rooted in sponsorships, endorsements, and licensing deals. But a new model has appeared in recent years--led by LeBron James and carried forward by Kevin Durant, Patrick Mahomes, and others--that's less about being a smiling pitchman and more about building empires. Durant's venture-capital firm, 35 Ventures, was one of the earliest investors in Postmates and Coinbase. James's production company, SpringHill, has a $725 million valuation. The conventional wisdom holds that O'Neal, by comparison, is just cashing checks.
But then you take a closer look. Consider the sheer number of companies that O'Neal owns a piece of, often a substantial one: Papa Johns, Five Guys, Krispy Kreme, Auntie Anne's. The connected doorbell company Ring, well before Amazon acquired it in 2018 for north of $1 billion. Even Google, all the way back in 1999, long before its IPO, when it was valued at only $100 million. (Guess he didn't lose it all on that one.) O'Neal has opened more than a hundred franchises--car washes, health clubs, restaurants--around the country. He founded a film production company, Jersey Legends, and won an Oscar with a documentary about women's basketball great Lusia Harris. He founded a marketing agency called Majority that has created campaigns for clients including Sprite, GM, and the CDC.
I had no idea about some of his investments. I always saw Shaq as a spokesperson and not really that invested in the companies he “shilled” for, and I was wrong. I love the Starbucks story and what he learned.
Rooted in the Game
My friend Joe created the graphic and photography for this profile of Illinois Basketball player Coleman Hawkins. I know Coleman wants to play in the NBA, but I hope he strongly considers coming back to the Fighting Illini for one more year and, hopefully, increasing his stock.
ICON Collective launches to strengthen Illini NIL effort
Jeremy Warner, writing for Illini Inquirer, has the story about the brand new NIL collective for Illinois Athletics, ICON.
ICON Collective is Illinois athletics' reaction to the NCAA’s guidance in October that schools cannot directly engage in negotiations for collectives or student-athletes, something the Illini athletics program had been doing during the previous months. In this ever-changing world of NIL — and ever-changing NCAA oversight of NIL — this meant the Illini needed to pivot and rely solely on collectives to raise and disperse NIL funds to student-athletes with the athletics department focusing on NIL education and guidance.
This is great. We need more ways for everyone to help attract the best student-athletes to the Illinois campus.
The Baseball Clock Is Good
Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine, has a story about how great the pitch clock has been for MLB.
This year, pitchers have 15 seconds to throw a pitch if no one is on base, and 20 seconds with a runner on. If they don’t throw a pitch in time, umpires will call a ball. But hitters have new responsibilities too: They have to be in the box “and alert to the pitcher” by the time the clock hits eight seconds, or the umpire will call a strike. What does “alert to the pitcher” mean? Essentially, it means assuming your stance and looking at the pitcher, ready to hit.
...
At a certain level, baseball will be criticized no matter what it does. Changing its rules offends purists, or at least people who consider themselves purists but really just hate change. Not doing anything at all gets the sport labeled stodgy. In a way, merely opening the door for change is a step in the right direction. Baseball isn’t the way it was when you were a kid because nothing is the way it was when you were a kid. Allowing it to break free from those constraints — to stop being a morality play or a paean to a supposedly more innocent time, to let it simply be a sport — is perhaps the best way to save it. We all grew up. Maybe it’s time to let baseball do the same.
Saving 30 minutes off of a typical game is pretty amazing. I still hate the rest of the rules (ghost runner on second, minimum batters, only two pickoff attempts, no shift, etc.), but this one seems good, so far.
World Series champion, TV analyst Tim McCarver dies at 81
Tim McCarver has died.
I will miss hearing his voice and his insight.
Behind the Essence of Matthew Mayer
Joey Wagner, writing for the Illini Inquirer, has a well-written profile on one of the most interesting dudes in college basketball and one heck of a player.
Matthew Mayer is a little weird, which is a good thing. I think.
Chip Caray, New Cardinals Broadcaster
Katie Woo and David O’Brien, writing in The Athletic, has the story on Chip Caray joining the announcing team for the St. Louis Cardinals.
I’m excited about the prospects of this change. I haven’t really followed Chip Caray’s career, but I love the Cardinals and St. Louis connection and I expect he will be here for the rest of his career.
Record-Setting Daredevil Robbie Knievel Dead at 60
Robbie Knievel has died.
I grew up idolizing Evel Knievel and always thought Robbie was the best extension of what I loved as a kid.
My favorite jump of his is Caesars Palace.
The Reaction to Damar Hamlin’s Collapse Represents Progress
I didn’t see it live. My brother texted me to let me know something happened. I flipped over to the coverage and eventually watched a replay of the event on Twitter. It is horrifying, but not in a gory way, as if someone’s leg or arm is broken.
He just fell.
Will Leitch has his finger on the pulse of sports fandom and reporting. His observation that the NFL understood the ramifications and handled things gracefully is to be commended. That being said, as someone who became blind in my right eye because of football, I can honestly say I’m just relieved they thought about the player and his family over the game.
Sting Rounds the Bases
Cameron Hawkins, writing for The Ringer, takes a nice look back at Sting’s wrestling career. A well-written piece.
Brazilian soccer legend Pelé dies at 82
Pelé has sadly passed away.
I have never been much of a soccer/football fan. However, growing up I loved the movie Escape to Victory. I have no idea why it stuck with me. Pelé, of course, plays an important part in the film.
In The Long Run, We Are All Dead
David Roth has an extended essay about Major League Baseball’s free agency.
There are three types of Major League Baseball teams where free agency is concerned. There are the ones that try to sign players, and ones that do not try to sign players, and then there are the teams that sort of try to sign players but mostly want it to be known that they were also in on a player that some other team signed. The membrane between these types is thin and highly permeable. Teams that signed players will reassess and decide to become the type of team that doesn’t, generally for reasons having to do with a plan that an executive the owner hired away from the Astros will hint at without ever really quite laying out in a legible way.
The rest is equally that much fun.
The Lovable Douche
Anne Victoria Clark, writing for Vulture, has a great profile of AEW wrestler, Maxwell Jacob Friedman (a.k.a. MJF).
In the world of professional wrestling, shoot is a term for a performer going off script — usually in a very bad way. When CM Punk, star of three-year-old wrestling promotion AEW, decided to start hurling insults at AEW management during a press conference in September and followed it up with a very real locker-room altercation, it was a shoot — one that would get Punk indefinitely suspended and his AEW World Championship title vacated. This kicked off a tournament to crown a new face of the promotion, during which one of the company’s biggest villains, Maxwell Jacob Friedman (a.k.a. MJF) has emerged as its biggest hero.
Friedman’s persona in the ring is, to put it bluntly, that of an asshole. He wears a Burberry scarf all the time. His tag line is “I’m better than you, and you know it.” He calls people “poors.” He constantly refers to himself as a “generational talent” and “the devil” (his fans are “devil worshippers”). And perhaps worst of all, he’s proudly from Long Island. Parents bring their children to gleefully be insulted by him, fans wait in line for him to scowl in photos and call them names, and people deliberately troll him and bring him homemade gifts to ruin. (In one video, after he drops a fan’s autograph sheet and storms off, the fan yells out, “That’s better than an autograph, bro. You’re the man!”)
I was lucky enough to have met MJF when he was out of character and I found him to be a delightful, smart, and charismatic individual. He was very high on AEW and what the company could create.