Tag: Major League Baseball

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Siguenza on Sports

Take me out of the ballgame

Is a Major League Baseball season going to happen? Should it at this point? We have reached the sixteenth of June, less than a month from what would be the halfway point of the season, and players and owners are at a standstill over compensation, writes the Associated Press.

AP Sports on Twitter

Sound familiar? Then you lived through the summer of 1994 when the season abruptly ended without a World Series for roughly the same reasons. What I remember from the last time was how angry the fans had become over the spat between employer and employee. I’ve seen a lot of the same threats of walking away from the game should the Major League season not happen.

But you have to remember: these are different times. There was no major health crisis to deal with in 1994 (no, OJ Simpson’s high-speed chase across the freeways of Los Angeles was not a major health crisis). The AP report mentions that tests on several MLB players for coronavirus came back positive. With that in mind, do we want to put more players at risk for our enjoyment? And do we want a season that goes into December? The idea of playing baseball in the middle of the holidays just feels wrong.

I’m not in the position to make this sort of decision, but no matter what anyone else says, it doesn’t seem worth it to even have a 2020 MLB season. The league should cut its losses and work toward possibly coming back in 2021.

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Communication & Fundraising in Sport

No joy in London as MLB cancels its UK series

View of the British Parliament from the London Eye taken July 2, 2016. (Brian Siguenza)
London has played host to a Major League Baseball series.

There’s something fascinating about North American sports leagues taking their game to international markets. I remember being in the UK when the NFL held a regular-season contest in London. While I was not in Wembley Stadium when the Chargers took on the Saints, I watched on the BBC, which itself was very different from the American broadcasts I’m used to.

Britain’s capital has become a popular spot for staging North American sports. Last year, the Yankees and Red Sox brought their storied rivalry across the pond. This year was to be a Midwestern matchup between the Cubs and Cardinals before Major League Baseball scuttled those plans on account of the coronavirus (Pavitt, 2020).

A Google search on the MLB London Series offers several stories from US sources like USA Today, CBS Sports, NBC Sports, and ESPN. The first British source does not appear until the second page of the results, from the Evening Standard, the newspaper hawked through the streets of London at the end of the workday. The Evening Standard story, written by Flood (2020), is to-the-point regarding the cancellation of the series. It mentions the previous year’s affair along with other major events that will not run during the summer, including the Olympics and Wimbledon.

The article from CBS Sports, on the other hand, is much more in-depth about the status of the MLB season in general. Axisa (2020) reports that games in Puerto Rico and Mexico City were also axed and that those events plus London could potentially be rescheduled for one year later. Meanwhile, on the chance the season started before June 13, the Cubs and Cardinals would meet at Busch Stadium, as St. Louis had given up those home games.

Compared to soccer and cricket, baseball simply is not a priority in Great Britain. Says Katz (2019), “baseball has not developed a mass following–in part, perhaps, because it seems impenetrable to people who didn’t grow up with the sport. It appears that soccer fans find baseball too slow and cricket fans find it too fast” (para. 6). As media works to cover items of interest to as many people as possible, the British audience may not be keen to hear too many details about what happens on the baseball diamond. There is also the matter of time–most baseball games anymore are played in the evening in the US and Canada, which is the middle of the night for Britons. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t spend the overnight hours following a sport when I have to be to work at eight a.m., save for perhaps the playoffs.

Still, baseball has its share of fans in the UK and even enjoyed demand from time to time, including last year when the Yankees and Red Sox sold-out London Stadium (Katz, 2019; Flood, 2020). Hopefully, MLB will get another chance to play games there and maybe I can attend then.

References

Axisa, M. (2020, April 1). Coronavirus: MLB cancels 2020 London Series between Cardinals and Cubs scheduled in June. Retrieved from https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/coronavirus-mlb-cancels-2020-london-series-between-cardinals-and-cubs-scheduled-in-june/

Flood, G. (2020, April 1). MLB London series 2020 between Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals cancelled due to coronavirus. Evening Standard. Retrieved from https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/mlb-london-series-2020-cancelled-coronavirus-a4404306.html

Katz, G. (2019, June 28). British baseball strictly minor league despite proud history. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/british-baseball-off-proud-history-64014484

Pavitt, M. (2020, April 2). MLB London Series cancelled amid coronavirus crisis. Retrieved from https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1092737/mlb-london-series-cancelled-coronavirus

Categories
Siguenza on Sports

MLB commissioner on CNN discusses plans to play ball

Chase Field in Phoenix, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. (Brian Siguenza)

CNN’s Thursday night town hall on coronavirus was the television program to watch if you wanted an idea of what a return to live sports might look like. That’s because Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred spent approximately fifteen minutes speaking with moderators Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta about his organization’s plans to start the baseball season. You can see a portion of the interview below.

CNN International on Twitter

There wasn’t any real earth-shattering information to come out of the conversation between Manfred, Cooper, and Dr. Gupta, but it was interesting nonetheless to hear the commissioner talk of playing games in front of no fans and the procedures that the league and its teams would take to keep players safe. Some items of note:

  • Manfred asserted that players who were uncomfortable with assuming the risk of being in close contact with others would not be forced to return to work.
  • In the event a player tests positive for coronavirus, he would be quarantined for two weeks, and then MLB would conduct additional tests on anyone the player may have had contact with.
  • Owners could stand to lose $4 billion if a season did not happen, an impact Manfred called “devastating.”
Anderson Cooper 360 on Twitter

Do the economics outweigh the health risks involved in playing sports during the pandemic? That is a question the major organizations are having to ask themselves and should be a contributing factor in plans to resume competition.

Categories
Leadership Archive

A bases-loaded jam

Now that it’s been a couple of weeks since the Super Bowl, we can begin the transition from the gridiron to the baseball diamond. And we find the major leagues in a difficult moment right now, with much of the news centered around findings that the Houston Astros employed sign-stealing methods en route to their World Series title in 2017. The fallout from these actions has been described by public relations experts and sportswriters alike as a crisis for MLB. By their accounts, commissioner Rob Manfred has handled the situation rather clumsily. Writes John Feinstein in the Washington Post, “Right from the beginning, MLB has botched this investigation, from the blanket immunity it gave players to Manfred’s refusal to…tak(e) the 2017 World Series title and trophy away from the Astros.”

As the head of a professional sports organization, it is perhaps inevitable that Rob Manfred would be subjected to fierce criticism of his decisions. But how do other leaders avoid the same kind of scorn from the public and the press? The answer, say Lussier & Achua (2016), is very simple: the leader must get in front of the situation and be able to communicate effectively with all parties. This includes the public, the media, and especially with employees in the organization.

Ideally, the firm will have a plan already in place for dealing with scenarios that are at best embarrassing and at worst have deadly consequences. They’ve assembled a team, determined possible threats to operations, and created an outline for publicly dealing with these threats (Lussier & Achua, 2016). Given the ability to react in real-time on social media now, as people did when Astros players apologized during a news conference, it is not unreasonable for organizations to implement so-called “safety measures” that protect their reputation from further damage.

I would have to imagine that for being such well-known entities in North America, Major League Baseball and the Houston Astros would have some sort of contingency plan for handling controversial matters, it’s just in this instance both seemed to swing and miss.

Reference

Lussier, R.N., & Achua, C.F. (2016). Leadership: Theory, application, & skill development (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.