A bad MLB team gets the all-star game but that is OK, the Canucks' COVID19 situation is real bad; also, Geoff Smith was the realest
Catching up on the longest Easter weekend
MLB will always MLB — even when it does the right thing
Since sports fans who are progressives win about as often as a street racer who drives a Prius, it was a Good Friday, indeed, when Major League Baseball yanked the all-star game from Cobb County, Ga.,1 on April 2. The decision was made in response to Georgia’s racist voting restriction laws. That news is old, but one small irony is that MLB’s course-correction in response to Republican horribleness involved rewarding perhaps the worst franchise in the sport, since the Colorado Rockies will now host MLB’s summer tentpole event.
Some might wonder about the Rockies getting the game. It was just two weeks ago that The Athletic exhaustively detailed the dysfunction in Colorado’s baseball ops. The Rockies are at the front of the line of teams that should be realigned into the NFT (Not Effing Trying) conference. Their last headline news involved paying US$50M to St. Louis to take all-world third baseman Nolan Arenado off of their hands.
But Colorado has automatic and same-day voter registration, so there is that. But Washington state has same-day registration as well, and the Seattle Mariners are at least cute about not winning many baseball games.
Hey, Ferguson Jenkins is getting a statue
Canada’s own pitching hall of famer will have a statue outside of Wrigley Field. How about that?
Is Jenkins historically underrated, even though he is in the hall of fame? Consider that he is one of only 16 pitchers in baseball’s integration era with over 80 Wins Above Replacement. Only two others in that elite company, Pedro Martínez and the late Bob Gibson, are BIPOC.
Be it resolved that the 75-WAR club should be the ’20s equivalent to 300 wins, since pitching wins should not even exist. Justin Verlander, with 72.3, is the next threat to join the club. Of course, the threshold is subject to review and revision.
The Vancouver Canucks got the P-1. Is that almost as pressing as the Leafs’ issues on the PP?
One does not get the sense of a great hue and cry regarding the Canucks having upward of 20 team members, plus their families, having the “three times as contagious” Brazilian variant of coronavirus. Someone who likes common sense as much as they like Sports! is probably looking around and saying, “What the fuck did you expect?” The National Hockey League had zero positive tests during its bubble in the summer/early fall of 2020. Then it decided to split into four quadrants for a 2021 season. For a spell, the all-Canadian North Division was doing the best at avoiding positive tests. But that was never going to last.
It is not as though the season really has a 100-per-cent legitimacy. But it definitely seems surreal if the NHL believes it can stickhandle through this without changing its plan.
The Toronto Maple Leafs, of course, had gone 11 games without a power-play goal before finally getting one in Calgary on Monday. Way to spoil the wordplay! At least it was the rare ‘score on the remaining power play after allowing a shorthanded goal’ salvo. You know what is the sad part of that? Even after an 0-for-30-something, the Leafs only have the third-flaccidest power play over the last 30 days. Anaheim and Buffalo are still worse.
Why Baylor and Stanford — especially Stanford — are fitting NCAA champions
If you read one bit of post-NCAA Tournament coverage, it should be Emma Baccellieri’s account of how the women’s champion Stanford Cardinal were on the road for 72 days at one point in the season. It seems like that was good prep for going into the bubble at the tournament. It feels kind of clumsy to point that Stanford, whose deep roster includes Toronto forward Alyssa Jerome, authored a movie rights-worthy story about women supporting women in very absurd circumstances.
The Baylor Bears, led by Jared Butler during their men’s championship game beatdown of Gonzaga on Monday, had a three-week COVID19 shutdown during their season. All of that raises questions about how history will remember the whole exercise in pushing through with a college basketball season during a pandemic. Will we know whether it was worth it? Will we learn anything from it or just couch it in terms of beating the odds and the adverse circumstances?
Of course, my cursory conclusion was that Gonzaga would finish off an undefeated season. That should make anything else I have to say about anything automatically suspect.
Remembering: Geoff Smith, 1941-2021
Anyone who was around the sports scene at Queen’s University at Kingston over the last few decades likely has a personal story about Geoff Smith, and probably considered him a friend since he made every encounter memorable in his way. Geoff’s boundless energy that he applied to his work as a historian, humanist and sports lover
Smith was a history lecturer, and a presence at Queen’s basketball games, before joining the school of kinesiology and health studies late in his teaching career. My pod’ner, SportsLit executive producer Neil Acharya, had a history concentration, was in Geoff’s classes. Yeah, I am jealous.
Queen’s, of course, is an establishment school in Canada. The above-linked tribute by Dr. Mary Louise Adams notes that Smith shook up the university’s history department “where he, a peace activist, and other progressive faculty were constantly embattled as they tried to make change in what was then a rigid, ‘traditional,’ old-boys department.” In the early 1990s, going off memory, Queen’s hosted panel discussions on whether the university should accept political correctness.2
Geoff displayed allyship, supporting the pro-PC side. “Disagree with me now, but thank me for this in 20 years,” he said, according to the Kingston Whig-Standard. Hopefully that made the point that what was, and is, called PC is just about accepting everyone’s humanity and finding our commonalities.
Near the end of the century, I was covering a Ryerson-Queen’s men’s basketball game sitting in the bleachers with a notepad writing down every scoring play in those pre-livestat days. Out of nowhere, Geoff alighted and sat down like we were best friends. I was wearing a Boston Red Sox hat in those days to passively protest a recent Blue Jays uniform redesign, so he started peppering me to name Boston lineups from the 1940s through to the 1970s. He was impressed that I knew Ellis Kinder had 27 saves in 1953. Whatever his motivation, Geoff made a lonely sports nerd feel special.
Smith was also my mother’s first professor when she returned to university to work toward the teaching career she eventually earned and enjoyed. The class met on Monday nights, and my hockey practices were typically on Tuesday morning, so the drive to the arena and afterward to school would usually be full of my mum telling me about Geoff’s performance in class the previous night.
Something that’s frozen in memory from around that time also speaks about acceptance. I was that sports-crazy kid, still am, who geek-loved something that never loved him back. One day, my mum spoke of how Geoff, during class, had describe a tense negotiation between the faculty association and the university admin. as being in “need of an 11th-hour three-pointer.” She related that hearing that from someone of Geoff’s intellectual stature shed light on why her son talked that way.
And hey, is that not what we all want — acceptance? Here is to hoping Queen’s puts up a statue of Geoffrey Sutton Smith, with that big smile, with a basketball under one arm and some books in the other.
Atlanta’s MLB team does not play in the city proper; their stadium is in the white-flight environs of Cobb County.
Chris Turner refers to these discussions in his book Planet Simpson.