Wrong Answers Only Wednesday (even though it is Thursday): MLB playoff format, 'mad blood' at McMaster and hey, the OHL is back!
Hej vänner! Time to answer a fake mailbag where I give myself easy questions to look like a genius. Enjoy your Thursday.
What simple fixes should I suggest for Major League Baseball’s dumb playoff format, where the 106-win L.A. Dodgers had to play a one-game sudden-death playoff against the St. Louis Cardinals, which collected 16 fewer wins? — M.R., Nepean, Ont.
Well sir, in the best North American tradition, steal someone else’s idea. What if I was to tell you there is a compromise that would fix the first two rounds of the playoffs, add inventory for the media rights holders and make the regular season feel more valuable?
First step: use the KBO League’s format for the wild-card series. The KBO also has a 5 vs. 4 wild-card round, but the the lower seed must win two games and the higher seed only has to win once.
The second step: The Division Series then borrows the format from Nippon Professional Baseball’s Climax Series stage, which is the league championship series stage. The higher seed starts with an automatic 1-0 lead is a reward for their regular season, so it only has to win three games while the underdog has to win four.
The current format is so contrived it makes people have to root for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who never should have faced a do-or-done game against the St. Louis Cardinals on Wednesday. And, if the Cardinals had won two in a row in Dodger Stadium, then they would have earned credibility.
The change would mean potentially six more playoff telecasts. More money for you, MLB! And you get out of the heavy lifting of what really needs to be done to restore competitive integrity to the sport, which involves contraction, realignment and restoring a balanced schedule.
What is the real media bias in Canada? — T.A., Airdrie, Alta.
Algorithms that are calibrated to angry up the blood across the widest swath of people in a fragmented society. It is not liberal or conservative. It is all about fauxtrage.
But fauxtrage fuels the days of coverage about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau starting a vacation on National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, while there are crickets about two Conservative premiers effing the dog for weeks on end during a pandemic. Trudeau’s missteps are relatable across the nation, and Doug Ford and Jason Kenney’s cruelty-as-feature-and-not-a-bug terribleness is only hurting people in Ontario and Albertabama, respectively.
Media workers, present company included, all have access to analytics that show what stories ‘do well.’ Which is fine mostly, but it can also mean writing to the algorithms in a way that leaves out important context, or actual discussion about the direction and quality of governance a sometimes clay-footed PM’s party is providing. Political journalists are also on Twitter all day long, although they probably should not even have Twitter at all, and they might get twigged by whatever the bot farms have made trend.
Down in the Excited States, they are learning “how the mainstream media in the U.S. has ‘inadvertently’ contributed to the rise of extremism and erosion of democracy south of the border by treating what should be minor controversies as scandals and real scandals as minor controversies.” Canada is even more vulnerable since our media outlets run on the cheap thanks to corporate consolidation and cutbacks to the public broadcaster, CBC. Anything that is easy to cover through TV, through opinion and through social media, presses the thumb even more heavily on the scale.
There is a lot of effing around, and others have already found out where that ends.
So, yeah, fauxtrage. Avoid it like that guy who talks about his fantasy football team loudly on a train; try not to be too manipulated by your machines. Undoubtedly, this will sound like whataboutism, but we really should take this down to which leaders have policies that actively hurt people outside of your tribe, and the opposition which lets it slide. To wit, Ontario’s autism program waitlist has doubled in the last two years, and no one seems to care.
Who should I be mad at the most over the dudebro-fuelled mayhem at McMaster U. in Hamilton last week? — D.N., Welland, Ont.
Do not blame those dudebros, those sweet and tender dudebros. ’Cause they’ll never do it again; at least, not until the next time.1
Students have been partying since the University of Bologna’s inaugural homecoming weekend in 1093. The news cycle — images of a car getting flipped go viral, city mayor puts on their shocked face, TV news finds a couple students to express chagrin — fails to see a universal truth.
Any place where you have too many keyed-up young men is going to have violence. This is true the world over. That was a driving force in the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot in 2011, as Daemon Fairless explored in his book Mad Blood Stirring (covered during SportsLit’s Season 2). It was true during the V-E Day Riots in Halifax in 1945, when all the returning soldiers who were packed into the city, and unsure of what they would do next, went wild after the Allied victory was in the books. The energy can effect positive change, too; Fairless noted it helped push the Arab Spring in 2011.
I will not pretend to have a solution for how a university and its municipal partner plans around that. I am just a failed sportswriter. But the wild street parties, I submit to you, come back to the corporate capture of housing policy and universities’ priorities.
The first one is easy: I imagine rent has gone up for students due to COVID-19. Maybe a house meant for four is now sleeping six. That is a stress loader for a 20-year-old.
Secondly, not enough is said about how corporatized universities in Ontario are wired into an Endless Growth survival trip. There was, in olden times, a sensitivity about overrunning the capacity of the city.
That ended some time in the penny-pinching 1990s, when Ontario’s Mike Harris government began reducing funding to universities. They became more dependent on tuition to cover their costs. That has fed into believe they always have to be expanding, and recruiting internationally.
For an anecdotal proof, compare your alma mater’s enrolment today against what it was when during your school days. Queen’s University at Kingston2 had 32,000 students (26,000 undergrad) as of 2020. In the late 1990s, it was about 18,000 or 19,000 total and in the 14,000 for undergrads.
But the cities are still the same size, and there are people who like living near a university since they are typically walkable neighbourhoods. So it is a Hunger Games scenario, and one where Us-and-Them thinking will not solve anything. There will need to be some punching up, not sideways.
Again, do not read that as a defence of boorish behaviour. The rapey signs hung outside of homes were unconscionable.
The Ontario Hockey League returns to competition on Thursday. Who do you have coming out of each conference? — S.M., Hamilton, Ont.
Pro-style hockey, as major junior puck is called in this prefecture subject to workshopping, is unpredictable. After all, teenagers age. There is a longtime OHL chronicler who never made preseason predictions during the Before Times, when the league did not have a 580-day off-season due to Big ’Rona.
And this space only makes predictions based on desired outcome. Likelihood of outcome is best left to the accredited professionals. With that in mind:
If you want to watch the world burn: London vs. Oshawa
If you wish both teams could lose: still London vs. Oshawa
If you want to see if both teams can lose: Kingston vs. Sarnia
If you want a classic uniforms matchup: Peterborough vs. Sault Ste. Marie
If you get off on seeing the rug get pulled from under otherwise nice people: Niagara vs. whomever from the Western Conference
If you want your heartstrings zinged because looking at pictures of puppies ain’t doing it for you: Barrie vs. Flint.
Today, one is grateful the OHL has returned to provide a welcome distraction. Tomorrow, or some time beyond that, work begins on convincing people that asking 16- and 17-year-old ‘student athletes’ to play 80 to 90 games per season is counterproductive and immoral.
All in good time; Rome was not burned down in a day.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and please be kind.
With all apologies to The Smiths.
That is the official name.