Sports and fiction

Sports connect people across time and space. So does fiction. So naturally I'm thinking about how sports are like fiction.

First, both sports and fiction are about consumption and analysis. The difference is that sports can be a shared experience at the time of consumption, when fiction really can't. Still, for the self-described "sports fan," sports is a lonely pursuit. In fact, I would say that pursuing sports when no one else is around is the very definition of being a "sports fan." If you just follow sports for the social benefits, I don't think you qualify. You're one of those people who say, "Sure, I like sports!" And that's okay!

While many sports fans, myself included, like to kid ourselves and think our knowledge of the past means diddly poo, sports are an in-the-moment experience. The reason we hate the day after baseball's All-Star Game is that it's the only day there are no sports. Fiction does not have this problem, obviously. It is not locked into any time or space. You can read it at 9 a.m., noon, 1:45 a.m. when you can't sleep, whenever. You don't need to wait for the game to start. Any anticipation you have for fiction is anticipation of your own making.

Is it fair to say that they are both unchanging by saying the details change, but mostly the mediums remain the same?

Any baseball season is dissimilar to any other baseball season. They are points of reference to each other, and stand in contrast. But any baseball season can find its analog in the catalog of baseball seasons that have been played, or by chopping and screwing a few here and there to make a composite copy.

The same goes with fiction. People love each other, people betray each other. One book might be dissimilar from the next book. (It almost certainly is.) But that one book is almost certainly similar to another book written somewhere, at some point, in some language.

Mostly these things exist so we can talk to each other about them, and feel like we're a part of something.

Jeter 3,000

There was a light mist on the upper Delaware River on Friday, the type of mist that's light right until you get up to it and it disappears, and it's misty up ahead. A light drizzle scared away all the insects, and a large thunderstorm was expected in the late afternoon, only it never came. I was an hour away from Binghamton, which was spared the storm's wrath—a Godsend for someone like me, who is terrified of lightning. (This is the type of place that will make you believe in God.) The storm did not spare Yankee Stadium, and the land was unforgiving enough to lack cellphone service, so that when we got in the car Saturday for the return trip we huddled around the radio to hear whether or not Derek Jeter had gotten his 3,000th hit the night before only to learn there had been no game. The soon-to-be-ex bachelor for whom we had come up here, who is a huge Yankees fan, was elated because he thought we might get back in time for him to make the game.

We didn't, but we were cruising down the West Side Highway when Jeter took a 3-2 pitch over the auxiliary scoreboard, as John Sterling repeated no fewer than 15 times, for hit number 3,000, and three-quarters of the car devolved into chaos. (I was the exception.) I like Jeter. I respect Jeter. But I do not like Sterling and Suzyn Waldman, who declined to describe the events on the field after the home run for a full five to 10 minutes, in favor of describing the home run and the "majestic" ballpark in which they work over, and over, and over. Derek Jeter will hit more home runs in his majestic career, but he will never have a celebration like he had for No. 3,000. Sterling and Waldman were, as ever, celebrating themselves.

The NBA is not losing money

The NBA has decided to fight back against friend-of-the-blog Nate Silver and Tommy Craggs with an aggressive PR campaign.

But if you look at what the NBA is saying, it's not much.

Example:

In the NBA's response to Silver's initial article, NBA spokesman Tim Frank writes, in response to Silver's claim that some NBA revenue can be moved off-book, that "All revenues included in "Basketball Related Income ("BRI") and reported in our financial statements have been audited by an accounting firm jointly engaged by the players' union and the league. They include basketball revenues reported on related entities' books." So they numbers are kosher? Well, no. In an ESPN article by Larry Coon, Billy Hunter calls out NBA accounting practices, saying it "depends on what accounting procedure is used."

David Stern wants to you think the NBA and the Players' Union agree on the way they do math. He also wants you not to question his claims of money loss, so he's repeating his number over and over: the league lost $340 million last year. Just remember that this doesn't pass the smell test, from the fact that the league calls Forbes' independent accounting of NBA revenues wrong without releasing its own data to the fact that the league prides itself on having released the most financial information in sports labor dispute history. You know it what it deserves for that? A gold star.

What the NBA is doing is using the fact that we don't know exactly how rich its owners are and playing it off the fact we know exactly how rich the players are. They want PR support because we can tell you exactly how much LeBron is making, but not how much Micky Arison is worth. It's easy for us to say LeBron should take a pay cut, because all he does is play basketball, right? And what's the difference between $16 million and $14 million, really? It's doing this because these are the numbers we have and love to play with. But it's the old Chris Rock bit about being rich vs. being wealthy. We know how much money LeBron James has because he's rich, and we don't know how much Micky Arison has because he's wealthy, and that's the way the wealthy guy likes it. It gives you less to take away from him.

These people aren't wealthy by accident, and they don't stay wealthy by accident, and they aren't losing money just because they say they are. They're perching ridiculous demands atop the fact that they happen to lord over a compelling sport, and are hoping that having a good PR team will close the gap between what they're asking for and something sane. Just as shooting threes often doesn't make LeBron a good three-position shooter, repeating your position doesn't make it right. The NBA didn't lose money because it says it did. In fact, its insistence that it did signals the exact opposite.

The NBA is locked out

Per Tommy Craggs yesterday, why you should be suspicious of any NBA owner's money-loss claims. It's not to say that teams are not, in fact, losing money, but that they have both the incentives and tools to say they aren't, no matter what the reality is.

As I wrote yesterday, I live within par 5 distance of the Nets' new arena. If I walk a block I can see it. I can't imagine all the nonsense happening for a money-losing business, unless that business was a loss leader... and even then, as Craggs notes, that value would never appear on an NBA balance sheet.

Of course, every sports franchise could act as a loss leader, losing money at the gate but recouping it with cable deals, skybox deals, retail deals, etc. Even in what seems like the extremely unlikely event that franchises are actually losing money at the gate, there's no real excuse to be losing money on the rest of the stuff. If so, that would be bad management, not a systematic problem with how players are compensated. The size and number of bad contracts in the NBA isn't the fault of the players, but the owners want you to think it is.

There should be no distinction between the NFL and NBA lockouts. While the NFL lockout is widely seen as a oligarchic power grab by the owners (who, to their credit, are just That Rich enough not to care how they're perceived), the NBA has sympathizers like Bill Simmons, who tells of seeing red ink-stained NBA ledgers and tells ghost stories of future people who trade the NBA game experience for the one in their own home. As Charles Pierce notes, you doubt that it's this gloomy NBA vision the globe-hopping Stern is pitching in China.

The difference between the NFL and NBA lockouts is just a matter of price, like the old Winston Churchill joke. Rich people don't stay rich by accident.

Hi!

Hello, Internet.

I'm a guy who lives in Brooklyn and I like sports. I live four blocks from what will be the Barclays Center, but is right now just a crosshatch of horizontal and vertical beams of steel. I'm not a Nets fan, but I can learn. I like teams from Boston, like any good Brooklynite, but I like sports more. I also hate the amount of bullshit in sports, and cutting through that will probably end up being the primary focus of this blog, because it's in even readier supply than the games.

I realize that there are many people who do this, and I'll be hanging out with them, so to speak, but I can dig it.

The email address for this blog is brooklynsportsblog at gmail and the Twitter handle is @BKSportsBlog. I made it easy. That's what I do.