By Human Rights Watch

Child athletes in Japan suffer physical, sexual and verbal abuse when training for sport, Human Rights Watch said in a new report, released today, that documents depression, suicides, physical disabilities, and lifelong trauma resulting from the abuse. Japan will host the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics beginning July 23, 2021.
The 67-page report, ‘I Was Hit So Many Times I Can’t Count’: Abuse of Child Athletes in Japan, documents Japan’s history of corporal punishment in sport – known as taibatsu in Japanese – and finds child abuse in sports training throughout Japanese schools, federations, and elite sports.
In interviews and a nationwide online survey, Japanese athletes from more than 50 sports reported abuses that included being punched in the face, kicked, beaten with objects like bats or bamboo kendo sticks, being deprived of water, choked, whipped with whistles or racquets, and being sexually abused and harassed.

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Posted on July 22, 2020

By Roger Wallenstein

Baseball, being a game rich with numbers, has a new statistic in this shortened season that just might be the one analytic which will determine whether all 60 games for each ballclub will be played. Of course, I’m referring to the number of positive tests for COVID-19 that potentially could sideline an entire team if folks aren’t careful.
So far the results appear promising although this virus doesn’t differentiate between ballplayers and factory workers where the track record is alarming and dangerous. Tests for players and other personnel last week totaled 10,458, and just six – five players – came back positive. That’s so far below the Mendoza Line that you have to reach back to pitcher Bob Buhl, who in 1962 went hitless in 70 at-bats with the Braves and Cubs, for a close comparison. We can only dream of the days when world health emulated Buhl’s futility.

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Posted on July 20, 2020

By Thomas Chambers

When you were a kid, did you ever play with matches and set the drought-stricken short lawn on fire?
It spreads, fast, and you start doing a clog dance, as if your hair is also on fire, to stomp it out, your mind spinning: Where’s the hose?! Let alone getting caught.
I’m not going to comment on how this nation, regionally or as a whole, is handling the coronavirus, but I am firmly in the camp that it’s nearly out of control and I surely cannot get it.
Focus in. If you want to know what might happen as America’s behemoth team sports chase the money – it’s only about the money – head-on to restart, take a look at Thoroughbred horse racing.
Coronavirus has now struck the jockey colony with some of the top riders in America being reined in in more ways than one.

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Posted on July 18, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Is this really happening? Plus: Launching College Football; Corey Crawford Is “Unfit To Play;” Don’t Bank On The Chicago Marathon; Fluky Fire Singe Sounders; Red Stars vs. Reign, and more!

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Posted on July 17, 2020

By David Rutter

Get out your Sharpie and circle August 7 on the calendar. It’s a Friday.
For this brief “August 7 Survey,” you will be required to select one of two preliminary answers.
Eyes straight ahead, class.
In the realm of human cognitive ability, do you think humans would most usually be A) Smart, or B) Stupid. For streamlining, we have omitted C) Box of Igneous Rocks Stupid.
I always pick B and have no reason to change my attitude. So I do not believe there is much evidence that the brick-brain bozos who refuse to wear face masks and take normal sanitary precautions will stop the pandemic virus.
We apparently are a species with a suicide wish because, as we tell ourselves constantly with no evidence, we’re all entitled to our opinion. We have found a large cliff and come to the opinion we should hurtle over the edge.
That’s because we have left matters we care most about – living, for example – in the hands of the most dense, willful and ignorant among us. Many of them throw temper tantrums while sitting on the floors at Walmarts and screaming about having to wear a face mask.
The entitled opinion-holders, as every public health official acknowledges, are the single variable demographic that stops the nation from winning the pandemic scrum. You’ll have to stuff that face mask into my cold, dead hands, Snowflake.
August 7 is important because on that day you will know several things you don’t know now. It’s Launch Day for college football.

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Posted on July 16, 2020

By Jim Coffman

The Red Stars are on the board! And they did it just before the National Women’s Soccer League gets swamped by other sports, at least on standard TV, cable and satellite. On streaming services? The Red Stars still have a great chance to dominate that platform this summer, especially among young fans, which is almost exactly redundant.
And how glorious was it that Naperville’s Casey Short scored the critical (indeed only) goal! It is the ultimate local angle combined with the ultimate Black Lives Matter angle given that Short made national news with her emotional taking of a knee with teammate Julie Ertz when the NWSL tournament started two weeks ago.

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Posted on July 13, 2020

By Roger Wallenstein

Before there was the Dominican Republic, Panama, Venezuela, Mexico or Puerto Rico, there was Cuba.
As in professional baseball, in which Cuba led all Caribbean and South American countries in 1878 with the inception of the Cuban League. That’s just one little tidbit from César Brioso’s Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Baseball in Cuba. With today’s absence of the game formerly known as the National Pastime, a baseball fix is welcome, and Brioso’s tome has been preferable to watching the Korean League at 5 a.m.

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Posted on July 13, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

We’re day-to-day, folks. Including: Play (COVID) Ball!; Unless Someone Dies, Part 2; Blackhawk’s Life Mattered; Cubs Closer Posers; If The Pros Can’t Get It Together, How Can High Schools And Colleges?; Oh, Canada; WNBA Dedicates Season To Social Justice; Red Stars Life, and more!

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Posted on July 11, 2020

By David Rutter

Friends both Internet and Real have insisted for years that the NHL franchise naming itself for a 19th-century war chief was an honor to him.
He should be happy for having everything of value in his life taken from him, as long as he gets a good NHL logo.
There is a comfortable hubris to this point of view because it requires no proof because there is none. It’s a talking point.
The Blackhawks themselves make the same non-evidentiary case by occasionally trotting out Native Americans during game ceremonies. Token gestures are pretenses.
None of that posing or fandom self congratulation counts as actual “honoring” of anyone.
But one idea would.

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Posted on July 11, 2020

By David Rutter

Even more than the Atlanta Braves (stupid), the Cleveland Indians (idiotic), and the Washington Redskins (overtly but mindlessly racist), the use of Blackhawk in Chicago makes me angry.
We rationalize that using his name “honors” him when we – the Army we pay for – spent years trying to murder him.
It’s not merely an accidental theft of a tribal icon to make a buck; it’s deliberate cultural cancellation.
What’s more, the hockey team is not even actually named after him.

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Posted on July 9, 2020