By Thomas Chambers

When is the Belmont Stakes not a real Belmont? 2020.
This 152nd running (Grade I, nine furlongs, 1-1/8 miles, $1,000,000) will be the first leg of this year’s convoluted Triple Crown. They scaled it back to nine furlongs. Always a long race, settled in at 1-1/2 miles for nearly a century, the last time it was run at this distance was 1893-1894. This distance will mean they’ll start in the chute, making it only a one-turn race, which is a huge difference for many horses. Running around two turns is not automatically easy for a horse.

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Posted on June 19, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Walls are falling. Plus: Rob Manfred Is A Cop; Wet Hot American Long Gone Summer; Bubble Life; Better At It Than Baseball; and Belmont Betting.

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Posted on June 19, 2020

By David Rutter

This idea was not my invention. I am merely an eyewitness to its application.
I was In “The Room Where It Happened,” as Hamilton’s gang might have sung it.
My eyeballs were open to the optical illusion at those moments, and I was being self-educated as a daily newspaper editor allowed into the sanctum sanctorum of labor negotiations.
My function? No power at all. Barely a hood ornament.
Now that the Major League Baseball season faces the real possibility of being stillborn, we will want to know why they could not keep the lights turned on, and who it was who pulled the plug.
That’s the easy-peasy part.

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Posted on June 16, 2020

By Jim Coffman

I want to make sure I have this completely straight: Major League Baseball owners, realizing the 2020 season would be shortened, asked players for help. And the players union agreed to pro-rated salaries, i.e., they only get paid the fraction of their salaries that match up to the fraction of the season that is played.
In other words, if a player has a salary of $2 million dollars and teams only play 50 percent of their season this year (81 games), the player is paid $1 million dollars. It is a move that would save owners more than a hundred million dollars and one would have thought it would surely ensure that professional baseball is played this year.
Then the owners apparently decided, “Wow, if these suckers would go for that, surely they’ll agree to give us hundreds of millions more with further salary reductions! Heck, they’ll probably even play for nothing.”

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Posted on June 15, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

A moment when everything seems possible. Plus: MLB Draft’s Dizzying Heights Of Hype; We Blame The (Lying) Owners; The Neverending Sammy Sosa Saga; and NBA & NHL Flux.

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Posted on June 12, 2020

By Jim Coffman

How about a tournament in which an NBA team can win a draft-order lottery by winning? Or one where they can avoid being replaced in the NBA by the Gatorade League team based closest to them (for the Bulls that would be their Hoffman Estates-based affiliate)? Best idea yet! A combination of the two.
The Bulls were bad enough when their regular season was permanently suspended back in March that they are among the eight teams on the outs in the NBA. We learned last week that they don’t qualify for the recently announced, “expanded so much it resembles an every-player-gets-a-trophy old-time youth sports event,” 22-team NBA playoff set to kick off next month.

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Posted on June 10, 2020

By Roger Wallenstein

Friends of mine growing up who were Sox fans often had parents and grandparents who emigrated from the South Side. They landed in the leafy environs of Highland Park on the North Shore to flee the burgeoning African-American population brought on by the Great Migration. The White Sox were part of their heritage.
Our family was different since my parents were Cincinnatians who came to the Chicago suburbs in the early ’50s because of my dad’s job. He rooted for the Reds, the ones who played ball. Being a patriot and a conservative Republican, he did a 180 when it came to the other Reds.

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Posted on June 9, 2020

By Alex Russell/The Conversation

Sports are restarting as part of easing restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic. But, to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission, there’s one crucial ingredient missing: crowds.
To provide atmosphere in the absence of people, broadcasters are experimenting with canned crowd noise, much like the laugh tracks used in sitcoms. Last weekend the National Rugby League unveiled its fake audience noise, drawing a mixed response from viewers.

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Posted on June 9, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Cancel culture. Plus: Defund Baseball; Bring On The Blackhawks; Bulls Miss Playoffs; Coffman Wish Granted; and Biggs Time.

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Posted on June 5, 2020

By Thomas Chambers

Writing about big horses with little riders running in a counterclockwise circle seems awfully disproportionate these days.
But horse racing too cannot escape being a reflection of the society in which it exists. I suppose the old cliche of something being a sum of its parts might be true.
On the other hand, it’s amazing how few parts, and one in particular, can wield the most power over the sport. First, barring an out-and-out boycott of any sport, the fans are most definitely not part of the parts. Fans, and people in general, exist only to be exploited by the fewer and fewer lords who have bought, stolen and fashioned their power purely for their own malignant aims. Racing is no different.

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Posted on June 3, 2020