Archive for the ‘baseball’ Category

A Bidenball MLB / NBA Anecdote

Posted: August 24, 2020 by datechguy in baseball, culture, nba, Sports
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Take this story for what it’s worth.

My workweek for my day (well evening) job is Sunday to Thursday and as my wife had already left for work and I hadn’t had a chance to go shopping I stopped by a local restaurant (not a chain) around 2:30 PM to have a bite before I went in.

Even though I don’t listen to the woke sports (or Bidenball as I call it) anymore I still tend to listen to sports talk radio on the way into work and just change the station if a game is on.

I turned on the 1st station 93.7 and the Red Sox were in the 4th inning so I switched to the 2nd station. On the 2nd station the Celtics 76ers playoff game was on and although the Celtics had a chance to clinch with a win I turned the radio off rather than listen. Just then I pulled into the Restaurant parking lot.

There are seven large screen TV’s in the place and on game days they are invariably on sports. On a day with Both the Redsox and Celtics on you would normally see 3 TV on the Celtics and 3 on the Redsox with one on either ESPN or Golf. As the Redsox are horrible this year and the Celtics games were playoff games I expected to see a 3-2 ratio with one TV for Golf & ESPN or maybe even 4-1.

When I sat down I was shocked to see that all seven TV’S were showing golf!

Remember there was a Celtics PLAYOFF game in progress and not a single set was tuned to it.

‘More importantly it is my experience at this place that if a patron wants a TV on a sport that isn’t on, the staff invariably will put one set on the desired channel/ They’ve done it for me for Red Sox games in years gone by.

But apparently not a single person in the place, and there were more than a few, asked to see the struggling Redsox, nor did a request to watch the Celtics play the Sixers reach the staff’s ears. As I ate my meal I watched as every single set remained on PGA golf until the time I left.

Now you might argue that this is only one bar/restaurant in a blue city in a blue county of one blue state and that’s true. You might say this is completely anecdotal and doesn’t mean it’s a trend and you might be right about that as well..

But I have a feeling that this scene is being repeated in hundreds of restaurants and bars all over the nation and that the various sports league will not realize the extent to which they have chased away their fan bases until it comes time to negotiate TV contracts.

I suspect I will find that a lot of fun.

DaTechGuy off DaRadio Secession Back in town edition

Posted: August 7, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, American Success Stories, baseball, culture, elections, nba, nfl, nhl, politics, Sports
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Today on DaTechGuy off DaRadio we have several interesting things to talk about

  1. The return of Secession as a Democrat election strategy
  2. Sports ratings for the new woke seasons of #bidenball
  3. Black “diversity” and Systemic Racism, reality vs Bidentalk

It all starts at 3 pm EST today you can watch the livestream here.

Hope you enjoy it

Three strikes, and I’m out

Posted: July 28, 2020 by chrisharper in baseball
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By Christopher Harper

Like most of my friends in the Boomer generation, I loved baseball as a kid.

My friends and I traded baseball cards. We’d oil our gloves during the winter months in anticipation of the spring.

If we weren’t practicing with a team, we’d hustle to the makeshift diamond our parents built in a nearby vacant lot.

I played second base. I didn’t quite have the arm of a shortstop. I usually batted second or third in the lineup because I was a good hitter.

When I was eight, I wrote a letter to the New York Yankees and got a bundle full of photos, autographs, and information about the team. When I visited San Francisco a few years later, my father bought me a baseball with all of the team’s autographs, including future Hall of Famers Juan Marichal, Willie Mays, and Willie McCovey.

My love affair with baseball was sealed in Yankee pinstripes and Giant orange and black!

As a journalist, I covered a wide range of sporting events, including afternoon games at Wrigley Field in Chicago and Harry Caray’s seventh-inning songfest. I wrote a profile of Rod Carew, who won six batting titles.

Later in life, I flew into Chicago from Beirut to see the White Sox in the 1983 playoffs. I enjoyed the Yankees of the 1990s when I lived there, and even took my 9-year-old daughter to a game. I relished the Phillies of 2008, where I now live, and their World Series win.

But those memories have become tainted by the politically correct version of baseball today. Baseball used to be a game I could attend with my friends and talk baseball, not politics.

Today I have two heroes left in the game. One is San Francisco Giants pitcher Sam Coonrod, the only player to stand rather than take a knee, telling reporters after the game that as a Christian he “can’t kneel before anything besides God.”

The other is Bryce Harper, who revealed a sports coat honoring the Phanatic and a pair of cleats that included feathers emblematic of the Phillies mascot. That was fun!

Whatever the case, I’ve watched my last baseball game until it becomes a game again rather than a political statement. I hope others feel the same way! Maybe Major League Baseball will get the message.

What if we applied the left’s Woke Rules to the NBA & NFL Rosters?

Posted: July 18, 2020 by datechguy in American Success Stories, baseball, culture, nba, nfl, nhl, Sports
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I could understand Cobb. Ty Cobb had what the black ballplayer had. The black ballplayer had to get out of the cotton field. He had to get out of the celery fields, and this was a vehicle to get him out. This was the same thing with Cobb. Cobb had to get out of Georgia. He had to fight his way out and this was why he had this great competitive spirit. And so what he’s saying against blacks was the same thing that I think every poor white man had against blacks. Because we were competition to him. 

Buck O’Neil

The left keeps insisting that we have to be hiring based on race in everything from police to orchestras so they “better reflect the communities they serve”.

What if we did this to the NBA & NFL or even MLB?

Think about that for a second.

The reason why breaking the color line in baseball was wrong wasn’t because a “black” men per se were being excluded from the game, it was because baseball players who were as good or better than the current players on the field were excluded that’s a big deal in baseball as Buck O’Neil the great Negro league player and manager put it:

For Jackie to play in the major leagues, that meant that one white boy wasn’t going to play. We had played against these fellas and they knew that we could play. And they knew if we were allowed to play, a lot of them wouldn’t play. See?

By an odd coincidence as the final teams in the league integrated and the white population of the league dropped to 82% in 1961 expansion in MLB took place with two teams added in 1961 and 1962 meaning there were 100 new major league jobs to the system and in 1968 when the white population of the league was down to 73% expansion happened again and another 4 teams (and 100 jobs) were created. (Note non-black “latinos” were not excluded from the majors but at 0.7% of the league the year Jackie Robinson debuted they constituted a nominal figure of about 4 players over a 16 team league)

Around this time Football began to overtake baseball in popularity and accordingly the best black athletes began migrating to that sport and as Basketball increased in popularity again black athletes moved in that direction in a big way.

in 2017 only 28% of the NFL was white and nearly 70% of the league is black (with Latinos and Asians at less than 2%)

In the NBA for 2017 the figures are similar with a slightly smaller white population (20%) a slightly larger Latino population about 5% and over 70% of the league consisting of black players.

Oddly I don’t hear anyone arguing that since the black population is about 12% that whites are unfairly underrepresented in the NBA or the NFL. We don’t see people insisting that that cause for this discrepancy is “systematic racism” Yet the same people who scream that because the number of black coaches is closer to the actual black population of this country as opposed to the percentage of blacks in the league don’t find it odd that those same coaches and the front offices seem to be signing black players way out of disproportion to white ones.

The simple fact is this. We have, thanks to the efforts of actual civil rights leaders (as opposed to the demagogues of today) reached a point where the primary question as to the signing of a defensive back or a wide receiver or a quarterback or a center in the NBA or a center fielder is the skill set of said player rather than their race (and occasionally the price see Cam Newton NE Patriots).

This is as it should be.

So when the racial demagogues start demanding quotas in all kinds of fields tell them you’ll consider it as soon as those same demographic quotas are applied to the high paying jobs in the NFL/NBA & MLB

Two closing thoughts:

As of 2016 the Demographics of MLB are 63.7% White, 27.4 % “Latino” 6.7% black (lowest since 1957) and 2.1% Asian. However I suspect this reflects black athletes gravitating more toward the NBA & NFL. I don’t know why black players are less interested in MLB as it’s a much better game and I would further submit and suggest that with guaranteed money, longer careers and less prospect of serious injury it’s a better choice and smarter choices for the best athletes out there. Plus you don’t have to play in the rain or freezing conditions but it’s not my call.

I haven’t included the NHL in these figures because while the NHL integrated in 1958 with Willie O’Ree joining the Boston Bruins (Ironically the Bruins integrated before the Red Sox) and while we’ve seen black superstars (HOF goalie Grant Fuhr who played from 1981-2000 comes instantly to mind) there just doesn’t seem to be the same interest in the game among the black athletes or the black community which more than anything else is the reason for the 90% white demographic of the league.

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