The Stacked Deck

Saw an ad on television the other day that really caught my attention. The way they use computer technology for special effects these days is amazing.

A guy is struggling to carry his lawn chair down the middle of the street, walking past all kinds of people running away from where he's going. Also going past him are all kinds of flying objects -- it is clear it is very windy. Very. He sets up the chair, sits in it, and kicks back as we finally see what he eagerly wants to watch: a huge violent tornado sweeping down Main Street. Shortly, however, he and the chair are swept back fiercely by its force, and as he flies away the frame freezes and white-lettered words fill the screen:

"There's a fan."

Turns out the ad was for NASCAR auto racing.

I thought, Ya know? This could be just as easily an ad for any major sporting event. Today, big sports is a massive, exploitative, greed-driven scheme that has utterly destroyed the true competitive integrity that gives it any meaning. That's the tornado. Joe Fan is the one who still sets up his recliner right smack in the face of brazen complicity and wholesale folly. He gets swept away, but no matter. His soul has been debased so much in it all that the thrill of a manipulated victory is well worth it. There he goes, but he's happy. He's got his little win.

The other night I saw a 60 Minutes episode about the ice-skating judging scandal. You know the one: This Canadian pair got jobbed by the judges, who gave the gold to the Russian pair. Now I should say first that ice skating is not a real sport. It may be nice and graceful and pleasant and whatever, but it isn't a real sport, just as boxing, gymnastics, and diving are not real sports. Why? To find out who "wins," some judge, or group of judges, has to subjectively decide. In a game like baseball, if the ball goes over the fence, it's a home run; if it doesn't, it's not. Period. You don't have a bunch of stiff, dour folks in the press box giving it a 6.7, 6.8, 6.7, 6.6 (from the Russian judge), 6.9, and 6.7. Hey, I have nothing against gymnastics and diving. I really like them. They're just not real sports.

What caught my attention was that everyone went bananas about how ripped off the Canadians were, and the television news piece went into detail about how much so. But the exhaustive story could not give one piece of concrete evidence indicating that there had been any foul play. There were intimations, innuendo, character assassination -- and please note, I'm not sticking up for these ice skating people (I mostly just don't care), I'm just saying that 60 Minutes didn't have the goods. And yet, here are millions of people going ape over this supposedly gross injustice.

In the meantime, tons of duplicitous activity is going on in Major League Baseball and no one says squat. Indeed, one of the reasons MLB gets away with it is that the objective nature of the game keeps people from seeing the covert machinations occurring to bring about the desired outcomes. In MLB the power brokers don't have judges whose subjective interpretations can always be called into question (a home run is a home run), but they can just as easily maneuver things behind the scenes to assemble the greatest revenue-earning product. Owners, players, and media moguls alike discovered that the rainbow leading to this pot of gold was free agency.

With free agency, the better players more frequently end up on the teams with the most fans paying the most money. If those teams are successful, then more of MLB is successful, even when certain less popular teams don't do as well. Free agency allows the Powers-That-Be to manipulate competitive integrity, giving certain teams advantages that we all accept as normal. We have a meltdown when we think that an ice-skating judge rigged his or her vote, but we get that goofy, naïve look on our face when the major league game is rigged.

The Powers-That-Be don't have to give the Yankees or Dodgers an extra strike or an extra out in the game to accomplish this. That would be too audacious. All they have to do is stack the deck beforehand -- shift the competitive advantage to the more popular teams using the third rail of baseball: free agency.

Ironically, free agency and my attention to the game began at about the same time: the early '70s. When I began following baseball -- and the other two major professional team sports, football and basketball -- I noted that the popular teams always seemed to win and have a history of winning. As one who has always highly valued authenticity, I was repulsed by teams that were successful merely because of the number of fans they had (far too many of them bandwagon jumpers), the times they appeared on television, or the attention given them by the New York media.

So the teams I automatically rejected were the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Lakers, the Celtics, the Raiders, and the Rams. The teams I embraced were the ones that had to step out and work a bit harder for their success because they weren't the darlings of the aristocracy: the Giants, the Royals, the Warriors, the Chiefs, and the 49ers. Certainly much of the reason for my choices was the regional appeal and natural rivalries involved therein.

I took extraordinary pride when the Royals of the 1970s and Niners of the 1980s each built some of the most dominant teams ever in their respective sports. Each team did it with smarts and savvy and plain stickin' it out against the media darling powerhouses.

But in a free-agency-dominated world, it would not last -- especially in baseball.

Look at the Royals now. They are in the very same floundering, slipping, sinking boat as two dozen other teams in MLB -- without a chance or a prayer to do anything. This is simply because free agency has been fully developed and firmly established to ensure success only for the bought teams, whether they are the enduring darlings like the Yankees or the one-year affluencia like the Diamondbacks.

In fact, the whole Diamondbacks story is a classic example of all this at work. The Diamondbacks essentially bought their team, and have discovered that to be successful they would have to continue to pour money into their team, buying free agents all along the way. As an expansion team they had to be given great advantages because without them they would have been useless to the more popular teams. The enormous expansion fees paid by these teams goes to undergird a system that favors those teams.

It's not tough to see. Do you think it is by accident that the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Lakers, the Celtics, the Raiders, and the Rams all have not gone (nor ever will go) very long without being a world champion? Why is it exactly that none of these teams will ever languish at or near last place for long periods of time like the Saints, the Seahawks, the Expos, the Royals, the Cavaliers, or the -- whimper -- Warriors? Indeed the zero-sum principal necessarily dictates that when some teams are given advantages to prosper frequently, other teams are destined to perpetually stay in last place. "Perpetually" means "always always always" -- and those teams are always always always taking their pitifully hopeful but wholly misled fans' money. The occasional one-year not-a-darling sensation team or the notoriously poor front-office abilities of some lousy teams do not alter the merits of my case.

The NFL's Oakland Raiders are a unique case. They probably have more people hating them than they do cheering for them, but that makes those who love them that much more devout (buying the team's merchandising products by the gob). Because of the extent of the love or hate directed at this team, people on both sides will pay big bucks to see them. Should this team wallow at the bottom for any length of time, that bounty from both rooters and revilers dries up. (And those merchandising sales are spread out to every team.) So it is imperative that the Raiders are successful. I cringe at the countless times this team has been given the opportunity to draft a Heisman Trophy winner deep into the first round of the draft after we were all told they weren't as good for the NFL as everyone thought -- remember Marcus Allen, Tim Brown, Charles Woodson? What a ruse.

With my Pollyanna 13-year-old sentiments I once thought that the evil teams' power of having the most fans would be overcome by the pure grit and guts of my virtuous teams. Now it has been both easy to see and difficult to accept that the very reason I wistfully decided to root against those teams was precisely the thing that guaranteed their greatest enduring success. With free agency it has gone from bad to worse, mostly because nobody says diddly about it like they do with Olympic ice skating irregularities. It doesn't matter how genuine and faithful a baseball team's fans are -- it just matters that there are a lot of them and they have money.

All my hopes and dreams for authenticity in major sports have been ripped apart by the abuses of the greed-driven power brokers. I've said a million times before, I'm not against the desire for a lucrative well-earned income. It is the thoroughly insidious wrecking of competitive integrity that has broken my heart. They could all make a bazillion dollars for all I care, as long as it was honestly earned. In my soul I just know it hasn't been. And by "honestly earned" I mean that people honestly paid for Major League Baseball and did so with the honest idea that they honestly thought their team had an honest chance to win the World Series that year.

Frequently I see plain evidences of this state of affairs, a condition I call the aristocratic conspiracy. Driving down a nearby boulevard I saw a kid with a Yankees cap. It was solid red. A red Yankees cap. That's red, as in not dark navy blue, the Yankees regular color.

Now let me see, how many teams have red as their theme color? There's the Phillies, the Rangers, the Cardinals, and, yeah, the Angels now sport a purely red colored cap, and my goodness, there's... the Reds! I doubt that even once in their entire existence have the Yankees ever, ever sported a red cap, not to mention a red uniform or red anything. Ever. Not once. Why on earth, then, would there even be a red Yankees cap? Because "the Yankees" is "the major leagues." They are the Phillies, the Cardinals, the Reds, and all the other major league teams, for that matter.

Don't tell me for a second that all this is on the up-and-up.

June 4, 2002

Oh good. We all got what we all wanted yet again: another New York-Los Angeles title game. (The NBA's Nets and Lakers. Never mind the Nets are in New Jersey: it's all still New York there. Northern New Jersey is just New York West.)

Well, maybe that wasn't what we all wanted, but what the most people the professional team sports Powers-That-Be could want wanted. Did that make sense? If not, you'll see. Just keep reading....

In the previous section of this piece I detailed how the deck is stacked in favor of the media-darling/high-profile/large-market teams and is so by design in order to bring about the most income from the given professional big league sports endeavor. I eschewed the idea that subjective factors such as judges divining the merits of a skating routine or a dive played a part in a baseball or basketball contest.

But after happening to watch enough of the sixth game of the NBA Western Conference title series, I am convinced that the referees and umpires can do just that: change the outcome of a game with their calls. Lakers center Shaquille O'Neal spent twenty minutes in the key and was constantly fouled when there was no foul. Even the television announcers, who themselves are, to some extent, part of the scam, criticized the officiating. A football referee can miss a crucial penalty call, and a baseball umpire can squeeze the strike zone a bit to favor a given team.

The con is in play, and has been for years.

The evidence is just too overwhelming.

For one thing, look at the markets. Many pundits write off the impact of sports team market size, but it simply cannot be ignored especially in light of the power of television in championship play. The largest market, the New York market, has over 21 million people in it. The second largest, the Los Angeles market, has over 16 million. All the markets ranked 11 to 20 have an average of 3 million people and include NBA cities such as Seattle, Miami, Phoenix, and Cleveland.

The Powers-That-Be know that every time they can get a New York team in the championship game, they get the equivalent of seven 11-20 ranked market sports team's fans. Every time they can get a Los Angeles team in there they can get the equivalent of five such teams.

Think about this now: To get the same fan buy-in from one New York team facing one Los Angeles team in the premiere pro basketball event of the year, you'd need to get a Seattle-Portland-Milwaukee-Phoenix-San Antonio-Minnesota-Cleveland team facing an Atlanta-Miami-Indiana-Denver-New Orleans team. Um, last time I looked, the most players that could be on the floor at any one time was ten.

No wonder the last time the two NBA finalists came from metropolitan markets not among the ten largest was -- get this -- 1955, when the Syracuse Nationals beat the Ft. Wayne Pistons. In the 47 years since then, NBA Finals matchups wherein both teams came from top ten-ranked metropolitan areas occurred 25 times.* For all such match-ups in the NBA since 1947, the following table makes it is easy to see the results of that duplicity:

Teams from Top-Ten Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas Reaching the NBA Finals

Number of Times Occurring

• Both teams: 27
• One team 26 (team from the top ten area has won 16 of them)
• Neither team 3 (all before 1956)

In last year's NBA Eastern Conference title series between the Philadelphia 76ers (metropolitan market size: 6.1 million) and Milwaukee Bucks (1.6 million), All-Star Bucks guard Ray Allen criticized the Powers-That-Be for working the game in favor of a Lakers-Sixers Finals match-up. He was roundly criticized, but the man was right. His frustration at the duplicity boiled over until he vented, was reprimanded, and was taught not to bite the hand that feeds him.

Still, guess which NBA Finals match-up materialized? Not the Spurs-Bucks, which would have been the first non-top-ten-market-size team match-up since 1955.

Turning to baseball, I did a survey of all the World Series played in the history of the game, 97 in all. Of those, 56 featured a New York or Los Angeles team. Thirty-nine were won by a team from those markets. If there were complete competitive integrity, statistical probability would tell a different story. Assuming there was an average of 20 teams in the major leagues for its history (in the early part of the century there were 16 teams in the majors; later there have been as many as 30), the odds of a New York or Los Angeles team (assuming there were three of them playing ball in any given season) winning the World Series would be the same as it was for all teams: about 1 in 7. That is, one of them would win once every seven years; any given one of the three would win once every 20 years. But what's happened is that they've won two of every five years. Look at the baseball standings today, June 3, 2002, and you'll see the Yankees and Dodgers off to roaring starts. Surprised?

I don't care if any given team is dominant. I'm all for it. If they built their team brilliantly then great, they deserve it. And I am well aware that top-ten-market teams are generally more stalwartly established in sports leagues. But this is ridiculous. The teams with the most fans paying the most money have always had a significant advantage, they still do, and not only is this fact always kept from common view but it is in effect because powerful people make it that way. As it is, most pro sports team followers who aren't fans of the media-darling/high-profile/large-market teams long incessantly for even the tiniest shot at the big upset for even one stinkin' year.

This Lakers-Nets matchup burns me up not because it is the result of teams who worked hard to get there. It burns me up because it is also the result of influences that work to make it happen unfairly behind the back of the average fan. It is even more frightening that the entire nation's psyche is wrapped up in the massive duplicity. I can't get away from it -- banners on every street and in every store; they talk about it at my work, in my classroom, at church, no less -- it's everywhere. A modern-day sage who studies contemporary politically institutionalized systems said of entrenched deception:

In a real sense my claims are written off as frivolous because I still like big-time professional team sports. I appeal to "the law" to get with the program and be virtuous. I call for reform, but by coming under its jurisdiction in my efforts I am authoritatively dismissed. I'm not conceding that I'm wrong; I'm just saying that the liars are in charge.

I acknowledge, however, that all of this is of the world, but for so long I have internalized its meaning and its force. I confess I have yet to fully heed the words of Jesus, "Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." I have yet to fully appropriate what it means to be a faithful servant: "So the last will be first, and the first will be last." The world's way is that one must be first at the expense of others. It is highly enticing. I can only pray as one once pleaded with Jesus: "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!"

Will big time sports get the message? It is unlikely, for there are still enough fans, especially in New York and Los Angeles, who fund the whole venture. As long as they keep pumping in the cash, the scheme will be in operation.

So why do I write about this all the time? I dunno. I guess to just plain ol' tell the truth. After the Lakers won yesterday I reminded my frustrated Sacramento Kings-rooting wife that the deck is always stacked against us beforehand. She didn't say anything, but then I pressed her: "Come on, tell me. What do you feel about that?"

She blurted, "I just refuse to believe it's true!"

I know a good many honest, genuine fans out there would say the same thing.

* The top ten largest metropolitan populations in the U.S are, in order: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington-Baltimore, San Francisco-Oakland, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, and Houston. For the most part, their place in the top ten has remained steady over the past fifty years, with Dallas and Houston most recently entering the top ten, displacing St. Louis and Cleveland.

(For a more thorough treatment of all this at work, visit An Open Letter to Rob Neyer)

EEEEEE! Contributing Editor David Beck has never worn a garment made from lime Jell-O and chicken skin while wearing long black velvet gloves on his ears.

Copyright ©2002 by David Beck

Gregg Pearlman, EEEEEEgp@EEEEEEgp.com

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