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Thoughts on Sportsball · Plausibly Live - The Dave Bowman Show Podcast

0:53
I am a nice long. It's the longest over there is
1:03
the Los Angeles Dodgers, although many of you would
1:07
probably think I'm a more rabid Dodger fan than Bronco fan, and
1:11
that's probably true today. There was a time in my younger
1:16
years though, that let's just say nobody wanted to be around
1:20
me when the Broncos were on TV. My 4th place team in length of
1:26
fandom is the Seattle Mariners. Now look, I moved up here in
1:30
1982 the first time, and in those days there was no chance
1:35
that the Dodgers and the Mariners would ever meet in the
1:39
playoffs. Well, they could be in the
1:41
playoffs, they could be in the World Series, but that was it.
1:44
And in in those days, the Dodgers were actually in Florida
1:49
for spring training while the Mariners were in Arizona.
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So they never played. So I didn't have to worry about
1:55
that. And since this was the Seattle's
1:58
the only Major League city up to that point that I'd ever lived
2:01
close enough to go to a game, the Mariners really became a
2:07
passion of fandom for me. Now, you'll notice that I
2:12
skipped #3 there's a reason for that, and I'll come back to that
2:16
a little bit later. I was listening the other day to
2:19
discussions about sports teams, stadiums, and in this particular
2:24
case, the fiasco over the Tampa Bay Rays and their new stadium
2:28
that is being built with public dollars or that wants to be
2:30
built with public dollars. There's also the Chicago Bears,
2:35
the Dallas Stars, and Mavericks, all these teams that are
2:39
actively agitating for new taxpayer funded stadiums or
2:44
lease stadium deals. And this all got me to thinking,
2:49
when push comes to shove, why do we support the teams that we
2:54
support Now? It'd be easy to say it's
2:57
geography. I grew up in Denver.
3:00
Yes, I was born in Oklahoma. I'm a native Oklahoman, but I
3:05
was raised in Denver. When we moved to Denver in
3:07
August of 1966, the house we lived in was about three blocks
3:11
from what was then Bears Stadium.
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Later it became Mile High Stadium.
3:17
And you know, my parents were very religious.
3:20
We went to church every Sunday, and it was not unusual for us to
3:22
not be able to get in her own driveway when we got home
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because people would be parked in the neighborhood and walking
3:30
to the stadium. So I have that connection to
3:32
Denver, so it makes sense. I'm a Bronco fan.
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I grew up a Bronco fan, grew up all those things.
3:40
Then there's there's Los Angeles.
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Los Angeles is not as much of A connection for me, but I did
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spend a good deal of time connected to Los Angeles.
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It's I've been to Los Angeles many times.
4:04
Much of my family, some of my family has lived in Los Angeles.
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I have a cousin who lives in Los Angeles.
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In fact, I have a a very famous cousin that I'm not going to
4:17
bring up here because it's not fair to him since I haven't
4:19
discussed it. I have a very world famous
4:21
cousin who is based out of Los Angeles.
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He's a musician, tours the world.
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In fact, I think he's over in Europe somewhere right now with
4:31
his band. So I have kind of a connection
4:34
to there. Plus the Dodgers always
4:37
fascinated me all the way back to the beginning.
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So I have that kind of geographic connection.
4:43
Of course, I have a connection here to Seattle.
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I've spent a lot of time in this area.
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I love this area. I don't love the people that are
4:52
running it. I think the people that are
4:53
running it are absolute morons. And you know, it's like the
4:58
same, he says. You know, you've heard of these
5:00
people. Morons.
5:01
That's that's who they are. My #4 my number three team
5:06
though, it's weird because I've actually never been to the city
5:11
where my third longest fandom is is based.
5:15
And that is, of course, Philadelphia.
5:18
I have been a Flyers fan since the early 70s, which you could
5:21
kind of say makes no sense, but Denver had a hockey team in the
5:27
World Hockey League in those days, the Denver Spurs.
5:31
But we, I don't know, my dad had no interest in hockey at all.
5:36
None. And so for us it was just never
5:39
a thing. We never went to see the Nuggets
5:44
or the Rockets as they were then.
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They later became the Nuggets. We either went to see the
5:50
Broncos and and there were three occasions where I got to see the
5:54
Broncos in Mile High Stadium 2 with my dad and one with my best
5:57
friend. Or on occasion my dad would take
6:02
us to the Denver Bears games and we would see baseball, minor
6:06
League Baseball. I've never been to Philadelphia.
6:09
If you had to ask me, if you asked me why are you a Flyers
6:12
fan, I would tell you because the very first Flyers game I
6:16
ever saw was the game against the Soviet Union during the
6:21
showcase. And of course I was raised to be
6:25
rabidly anti communist, anti Soviet Union and the Flyers just
6:31
beat the living hell out of this so-called greatest team in the
6:34
world. I mean, it was so bad folks.
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And I still have the DVD of the game.
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It was so bad that the Soviets actually refused to come out for
6:44
the third period. They didn't, they don't want to
6:46
play anymore because the Flyers were just beating the hell out
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of it. We also have connections to
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teams I I guess, and this is kind of changed in recent years.
6:56
We find ourselves less connected to the team and more connected
6:59
to the players. Why fantasy sports?
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I I remember when fantasy sports became a thing.
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I first got involved in fantasy sports 1992 into 1990.
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I guess it was 9293, but I I remember being weirded out with
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myself because there was a game. Still remember Cleveland versus
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Miami. I needed two points to win the
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game, to win my fantasy game. My other, my opponent did not
7:32
have a player playing on Monday night.
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It was a Monday night game. The Browns drove down, kicked a
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field goal. That's three points I'm going to
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win, right? It's a flag on the play.
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It's the most Cleveland Browns thing ever.
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But it's not. It's the penalties on Miami.
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So it moves the ball to the one yard line.
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They get an automatic first down, they push the ball into
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the end zone, get a touchdown and they kick an extra point.
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And my kicker only gets one point instead of three.
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I lose the game by one point. And I remember being so mad
8:02
about this. And I remember, you know, if I'm
8:06
a Bronco fan, shouldn't I be drafting Broncos?
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Shouldn't I be drafting John Elway and Sammy Winder and those
8:13
folks? But I wasn't, I was drafting
8:16
players to win the game. And I became more interested in
8:20
players. And so I kind of started losing
8:22
that geographical connection to things and it started being more
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about the individual players. Perhaps it's the mascot.
8:32
I know people that are fans of teams solely because they like
8:37
the team name, the team mascot, whatever you want to call it,
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the Chiefs. I, I had a friend of mine many
8:45
years ago that was a Falcons fan in Virginia, not because she
8:48
understood about anything about football or cared anything about
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football, but she just liked Falcons.
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And so there was a team called the Falcons.
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That's her team. And so every year for her
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birthday, I would get her Falcons stuff and she loved it.
9:01
Didn't work out though. So things in America though, are
9:07
changing. We are becoming a more mobile
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society, aren't we? We're moving around far more
9:15
than we used to, even 50 years ago.
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We've become less connected to our roots, as it were.
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You couldn't pay me money today to live in Denver.
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I as much as I like Colorado, you could not pay me money to
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live there. It's it's a hellhole, folks.
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You could probably pay me to live in Los Angeles and I've
9:39
never been to Philadelphia, so I couldn't tell you.
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I'm considering moving back to Oklahoma, but we have as as a
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more mobile society, we've become less connected with those
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physical routes. There was a time in this country
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when before you were anything else, you were your state, you
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were a Virginian and an American, you were a S
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Carolinian and an American. You were an Ohioan and an
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American. We, we have so much less of that
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today. We don't really feel that
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connection corporately. Now, there are a lot of people
10:14
that do, and I don't want to take that away from you, but
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it's clearly becoming less and less as time goes by.
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The other element in this is someone coined the term some
10:25
years ago, Balkanization, where California, Californian,
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Californianizing a state where people from another place,
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another thinking process, another culture moved to some
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other place and they began to kind of, they don't so much
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assimilate as they modify things.
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You see what I'm driving at? And so that kind of takes away
10:47
some of that element. It kind of changes things.
10:53
So we come back to the stadium dance.
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And of course, it was all based on this discussion about the
10:57
Tampa Bay Rays, whose stadium was obliterated by the hurricane
11:02
and it was rebuilt. And now they want a new stadium
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because, you know, there's reasons why these owners want
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new stadiums. And it usually has more to do
11:14
with prestige and higher ticket sales and PS LS personal seat
11:20
licenses and the likes of that. Then it actually has to do with
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anything about what they're going to actually put into their
11:25
team. The new stadium dance then
11:28
becomes about the taxpayers. How much should the taxpayer
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have to foot for a stadium that they may not actually care
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about? They not the statement.
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So, but the teams that play there, excuse me, if you're not
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a Tampa Bay Rays fan, even though you live in the the Bay
11:46
Area, there are Florida. Do you really care about the
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Rays? Are you going to go support
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them? Are you going to Seattle?
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Built 2 new stadiums up here, Newman Field and T-Mobile
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Stadium or whatever it is now. I don't remember the name of it
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now, of course now it's the World Cup.
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So they're nothing named. They're just FIFA statement
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anyway. When I was here before it was
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the King Dome. Did I care about that?
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I mean, I went, but other people didn't, other people didn't care
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about it. And of course then you get this
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tax based thing involved with it and, and all these other kinds
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of things. And this led me to think about
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some other things, some some ideas that I had that might, I
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don't know, maybe, maybe we should consider things because
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we get really mad at these owners, don't we?
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We get very mad about the fact that they want taxpayer money
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for a new stadium that's just going to put more billions of
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dollars in their pockets and really doesn't generate that
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much revenue for the city's. That's the big myth is these
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stadiums don't actually produce that much revenue for the local
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tax base. They don't actually produce that
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many jobs. They do some, but is it the
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economic miracle that people keep trying to tell you it is?
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No. But what if dot dot dot?
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You know, over in Asia there are two countries that love
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baseball, Japan and Korea. Now I want to look at Japan
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first because Japan is the older.
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Japan has been playing baseball since before World War 2.
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We've always had a connection to them through baseball, and we've
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always felt like, you know, we've got that there with that.
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Japan has a professional Baseball League that has 12
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teams in it, and these 12 teams are not related to cities.
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If you've ever watched the movie Mr. Baseball, the Chenichi
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Dragons, the Tokyo Giants, they're not.
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But even though they're called the Tokyo Giants, they're
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actually Yamamura Giants. They're not.
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They're just playing in Tokyo. They're not connected to the
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cities. They are owned by corporations.
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They are owned by companies who use these baseball teams and by
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the way, the stadiums that they build for them as corporate
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jewels. You know this, this company owns
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whatever, you know, we make. We make electronic devices for
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people to play with. And here is our beautiful
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stadium that is part of the company.
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The team is part of the company, the players are employees of the
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company. They that's how they do it.
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And it's all seen as advertising for the company.
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So you go to the the game and everything is Sony this or, you
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know, Mitsubishi that or Yamuri this or Chanuchi that or
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whatever. And it becomes this interesting
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thing and you can't tell where the teams are based by the name
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the Chenichi Dragons. You don't know where they are.
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Last I heard they were in Nagasaki.
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I don't know where they play now.
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It's not based on a regional thing.
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And because company life is so ingrained in Japan, which it
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isn't here, and I get that you're not going to go play for
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the you're not going to go play for the McDonald's clowns.
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I mean, it's not going to happen.
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But in Japan, it's a huge part of things.
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And people do that now over in Korea, which I actually think
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has better baseball than Japan, but that's a story for another
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day. In Korea, with the exception of
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a singular team, they are actually owned by these just
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gigantically wealthy families. They own the team, they own the
15:50
stadium and they're not even, they're not even advertising
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stuff. They just look, this is my team,
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this is like my my toy or whatever.
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And of course, you know, there's some tax benefits and the likes
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of that and they, their locations of teams.
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In other words, where they put their teams is actually dictated
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by the government. And that's a bad idea.
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I don't think we would want to go to that point, even if we
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could get to the point where the owners, you know, actually own
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the teams and the stadiums and quit leaning on the the public
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for anything other than tickets. It would be an interesting way
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to reimagine even just Major League Baseball, wouldn't it?
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Instead of being regional teams, the Denver or the Colorado
16:35
Rockies, sorry, the Texas Rangers, the Seattle Mariners,
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the California, California Angels of Los Angeles and
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Anaheim, whatever the hell they call themselves this week, or
16:47
even the Sacramento Athletics, you can't call them that.
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They wouldn't be regional teams if if we did it this way.
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What if we what if we took those teams and we took the companies
16:59
that actually own them or the business that the owner is
17:02
actually in and then relocated them to that position so that
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they represent that company, right?
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You with me here, you follow what I'm saying here.
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You say take the team, the team owner.
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What does the team owner actually do that allows him to
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own that team? And that's where you put his
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team? OK, so the Cleveland Guardians,
17:24
they move to Detroit. The Tigers stay in Detroit, but
17:28
but with the Guardians move to Detroit because that's where the
17:32
guy that owns Little Caesar's Pizza and he owns the Guardians.
17:38
This one kind of surprised me because really the team that is
17:43
really driving a lot of this ownership demand for things
17:47
right now, the Atlanta Braves. The Atlanta Braves have a really
17:51
unique set up. They own Truest Park.
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The, the whole the Braves corporation, the Braves LLC owns
17:59
that whole area, which includes, by the way, all that little city
18:05
just outside of Truest Park, that, that touristy mall,
18:09
restauranty tourist place to go, that, that place to go.
18:13
They own all of that. So even if the Braves aren't in
18:16
town, if you go down to Truist and you, you walk through all
18:19
their city, their, their whole thing there, everything you buy,
18:23
everything you spend, everything still benefits fits the Braves
18:27
LLC. But that LLC is not owned in
18:31
Atlanta or even the Atlanta area.
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It's actually located in Denver, so you'd have to move the Braves
18:40
to Denver. The Yankees move across the
18:43
river to New Jersey, no biggie there.
18:45
The Mets moved to Connecticut, again, no biggie there.
18:48
But what about the Dodgers? Wouldn't this be interesting?
18:55
The Dodgers could end up back in New York City if you did that.
19:02
Now here's the question that it really asks is how much would
19:04
you really care? Do I?
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Am I is my Dodger fandom the Dodgers or is it Los Angeles?
19:11
Is my Bronco fandom the Broncos or is it Denver?
19:14
As I said, you couldn't pay me to live in Denver now.
19:18
But I still get really uptight when the Broncos are playing.
19:22
I still get really how much would I really care?
19:25
How much would you really care? Does the idea of the Bears
19:29
playing in Gary, IN really matter that much to people?
19:35
The New Jersey, the the New York Giants, New York Jets already
19:38
play in New Jersey. Nobody seems to care.
19:41
Now, granted, it's literally right across the river, but it
19:46
doesn't seem to affect people that much.
19:50
Let's consider one case. Let's consider the Dodgers for
19:53
just a moment. The Dodgers, as you may know or
19:56
you may not know, began in Brooklyn, New York City, the
20:01
borough of brute, New York City. They got their name because in
20:05
the early part of the 20th century, to get to their games,
20:09
you had to dodge the trolleys running across the tracks.
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The last trolley, by the way, quit running in 1956.
20:15
So. But they were by that point
20:18
ingrained as the Dodgers. So that's where the name
20:21
actually comes from. In the 1950's, the Dodgers
20:24
finally won their first World Series. 55 but.
20:28
Walter O'Malley, the owner of the team, was concerned because
20:31
things were shifting in the 50s in Brooklyn.
20:35
The fans who lived in Brooklyn, who, you know, lived in the
20:40
neighbor, the players used to live right there in the
20:41
neighborhood, were starting to move away.
20:44
They were moving out on the Long Island, and they weren't willing
20:49
to commute in for a game even if they did.
20:51
Where do you park? I mean, these are all kinds of
20:53
problems. And so were they losing interest
20:57
in the team or were they just too far away to care anymore?
21:01
They went, they lost that regional connection to it.
21:05
See what I'm driving out here now?
21:08
Walter O'Malley saw this happening in the 1950s in
21:11
Brooklyn, and he came up with a huge idea.
21:14
He actually came up with Truest Park long before anybody else
21:18
did. He had the idea of building in
21:20
Flatbush, right downtown Brooklyn, this Geo aesthetic
21:26
geodesic, I can never say the word geodesic Dome, a Dome
21:31
stadium in the 1950s, early 1960s.
21:34
And it would be removable. I mean, it could open up and not
21:38
close, along with all kinds of amenities around their stores,
21:42
restaurants, shopping, parking and the likes of this.
21:47
And he wanted to build it right in downtown Flatbush.
21:50
He had the plans, he had the model.
21:51
All these things were done. This was in the 1950s.
21:56
By 1957, though, the guy that ran things in New York City was
22:01
not. The mayor was by the name of
22:02
Robert Moses, who was in charge of all the infrastructure of New
22:06
York City. And Robert Moses was just
22:09
absolutely not going to be moved on this.
22:12
He said no, he would have been fine with this new stadium out
22:16
in Queens, which eventually would become Shea Stadium.
22:20
He would be fine with the stadium out in the Long Island,
22:23
but he was not going to allow it in Brooklyn.
22:27
And so, history being what it was, Walter O'Malley moved the
22:31
Dodgers to Los Angeles. They departed for greener or I
22:36
guess more oranger Los Angeles fields, you know, in the Orange
22:40
Field. That's a bad joke.
22:43
But times have changed today. Brooklyn has kind of changed
22:48
again and now the New Jersey Nets, long in New Jersey team,
22:53
have actually moved back into Brooklyn.
22:57
And it makes you wonder, what if there was a long standing Dodger
23:02
presence there in Flatbush today?
23:04
What if the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn?
23:08
What if the in the Giants, the San Francisco Giants had not
23:13
moved because that was part of the deal with the Dodgers.
23:17
It's just an interesting thought about here was an owner who was
23:19
willing to take on that ownership that there was no
23:23
public financing that O'Malley wanted in that stadium.
23:27
He was going to do it all himself.
23:28
And of course that meant he was going to get all the profits.
23:30
But of course the city was going to tax those.
23:32
So Mandami today, what would he do?
23:38
All of this to say, what if we made ownership of sports teams
23:41
actually own their teams, not just use them as, you know,
23:47
leverage to get more tax bases and more taxpayer money and that
23:52
sort of things. And state what if they actually
23:54
had Donut? What if being part of that was
23:55
you? You're going to pay for your own
23:57
stadium. You're going to pay for your own
23:59
infrastructure. You're going to pay for all
24:00
these things. Yeah, you can probably use some
24:03
of us write off advertising for your team, your company,
24:07
whatever. It can be a point of pride for
24:09
your company. You know, it's the the Little
24:12
Caesars Guardians. Can you imagine that?
24:17
There'd be some tax benefits, I'm sure, but then we could get
24:21
these stadiums off of off of the taxpayer and on to them.
24:27
You'd have to probably see some some creative financing because
24:31
it wouldn't be quite the way things are.
24:33
And in the early 80s, a guy by the name of George Arduous owned
24:36
the Mariners. And the running joke back then
24:40
was we, we were just the minor league team for the for the
24:42
Yankees. Every time we'd get a good
24:43
player, he'd get traded off to the Yankees.
24:46
And not making this up in the early 1980s, I think it was like
24:50
8485, Arjurus put the team up for sale and a friend of mine
24:56
went down to one of the local branches of the Columbia Bank
24:59
here and we tried to talk them into fronting us the money to
25:04
buy the marriage. It was much less in those days.
25:06
It was, it was like 26 million or something.
25:09
And we had a plan and everything.
25:10
And we, they, they didn't laugh us out of the room.
25:14
They were polite enough to listen to us and say, you know,
25:17
we wish you could, but we can't. So you guys are just a couple of
25:22
sailors. There's nothing we can do these.
25:26
It's just an idea. It's just something worth
25:28
talking about. But I I wonder if it would work,
25:31
if we would be willing to lose our regional sports fandom.
25:36
I'm I'm a Flyers fan. I have never set foot inside of
25:40
Philadelphia. The closest I've ever been is I
25:42
drove through Delaware and I drove through Gettysburg.
25:45
Never been to Philadelphia. I want to go, but I've never
25:48
been there. But it doesn't hurt my my fandom
25:50
of Philadelphia. I spend hours on Philadelphia
25:54
Flyers boards during the season and watch the games.
25:56
I'm watching the games. And up here I got a chat going
25:58
on with people that are in Philadelphia or in, you know,
26:00
wherever, and we're all Flyers fans together.
26:02
And. Am IA Philadelphia fan or am I
26:05
Flyers fan? Am IA Denver fan?
26:08
Hell no. Am IA Broncos fan.
26:11
Yeah, it would be an interesting question.
26:17
It's just a thought. It's never going to happen here
26:19
in America because, well, it's just never going to happen.
26:25
I mean, look what's happening right now in Chicago with the
26:26
idea of the Bears moving. You'd think, you'd think it was,
26:31
well, you'd think they were trying to uproot the capital and
26:34
move it somewhere else. It's it's not quite that bad.
26:36
But they can't get their stuff together.
26:39
So, you know, little things like that, because the time when
26:42
sports franchises moving wasn't all that big of a deal.
26:45
But now somehow we've made it into one and we're willing to
26:49
give away billions in taxpayer dollars to prevent it when maybe
26:54
we should be looking at the Japanese and the Korean models
26:57
and saying, you know what, your team do what you want with it.
27:00
Isn't that what free enterprise is all about?
27:03
By the way, my only my, my other idea for Major League Baseball
27:08
to improve Major League Baseball is the only really good idea
27:11
that soccer has. I, I, I watch soccer now and
27:15
then not going to watch the World Cup because I don't care.
27:19
It's not my favorite sport. But what I like about soccer is
27:23
it's a, it's blocked out time. I mean, it's not going to exceed
27:27
that. They're not going to go into
27:28
quadruple overtime or anything. The only really good idea that
27:31
Premier League soccer, English soccer, football has relegation.
27:36
I like the idea of relegating teams, baseball, Major League
27:40
Baseball. And if we went to this corporate
27:43
ownership thing, that might be a, that might be a doable thing,
27:48
but that's a discussion for another day.
27:51
Take the time right now. I'll tell the people that matter
27:53
in your life, you love them very much.
27:54
You would miss them if they weren't there.
27:56
You don't want to have that regret because you're not
28:00
promised tomorrow, are you? So don't, don't do that.
28:07
I'm trying to use a new system here.
28:08
So it's kind of screwing me up for the Denver Broncos, the Los
28:12
Angeles Dodgers, the Philadelphia Flyers, the Seattle
28:17
Mariners and yes, Norwich FC. I'm Dave Bowman, and this has
28:22
been plausibly live. We'll see you next time right
28:24
here on the Dave Bowman.