Jim Alexander: Why is it, Mirjam, that the commissioners of our major sports leagues are such … well, goofs? (I had another word in mind but I’m being nice, kind of.)
Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred’s tone-deafness regarding the sport he administers is well established by now. Roger Goodell’s main tasks with the NFL seem to be image protection (defend The Shield at all costs), driving up TV revenue and taking the product all over the globe.
The NHL’s Gary Bettman established his fecklessness long ago; during a period where the games were on a cable network with little reach, he responded to the outcry by saying fans should “call your local cable operator.” And Don Garber (MLS) and Cathy Engelbert (WNBA) each have had their moments, the former for selling his league’s soul to Apple TV+ for a paltry $8 million per team per season and then saying that the critics are the ones who don’t get it, the latter for presiding over a pay scale that still lags behind what the league’s athletes are truly worth.
And now NBA commish Adam Silver has joined the Goofs Club. Not because of his stance on the Kawhi Leonard/Clippers/Aspiration affair and the possibility of salary cap circumvention; he’s being very cautious with that one, and I’d bet the league’s investigation will be pretty thorough.
But at the same post-owners meeting presser in which he discussed that, Silver had his own “let ‘em eat cake” moment when it came to watching his league’s games, the number of networks and streaming services that will carry those games – many of them, I gather, with exclusivity – and the amount of money a fan would have to shell out to watch all of the games they want to watch.
Consider this quote: “There’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free. I mean, this is very much a highlights-based sport. So Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, you name it. Any service, the New York Times for that matter to the extent that your content is not behind a paid firewall. There’s an enormous amount of content out there. YouTube, another example that is advertising based that consumers can consume.”
Content, as in highlights on social media. No thanks, I don’t need the meal. The hors d’oeuvres are quite sufficient.
There are, of course, some subtleties to this issue; Silver also noted that free/broadcast TV exposures will go from 15 regular-season games last year to 75 this season thanks to the new deal with NBC … but he ended that thought snarkily: “So to the extent that someone wants to put little rabbit ears on their television, you can still get 75 marquee games in essence for free in the marketplace.”
The NBA isn’t alone here. A website called sportscasting.com, which apparently is an odds service based in the UK, did a comparison of NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL broadcast availabilities and their costs. It would cost a consumer around $650 this season to see every NBA regular season game – but who can possibly see each and every one? The NHL costs the most (over $700 for the season), with $550-600 for baseball and $520 for the NFL thanks to all of that league’s streaming deals. (But the NFL does stipulate that games are always shown on free TV in the competing teams’ markets, so there is that.)
Bottom line: It ain’t any cheaper to be a sports fan.
Mirjam Swanson: Yeah, Silver’s comments really irritated me.
Just so smug and elitist and short-sighted.
Can’t afford the $650 to pay for ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock, Amazon Prime and a League Pass or local subscription to watch your team play every game? Stinks for you, peasant. Enjoy the highlights, enjoy your crumbs!
So NBA teams are apparently playing all of those 82 regular-season NBA games – including back-to-backs and four-in-five sets – for the ‘gram.
I guess, sure, people have shorter attention spans. I guess everything costs more. And I guess we should just expect for family traditions rooted in sports rooting to fade, along with the community ties that come along with being part of a fan base? Or for those things to be reserved for the rich?
Feels bleak. In June, I read the piece in the New York Times about how much it now costs to be a sports fan annually: $4,785. That’s counting the TV subscriptions as well as the price of attending games.
Joon Lee, who wrote the essay, noted that between 1999 to 2020, the average price of a seat across all sports rose roughly twice as fast as overall consumer prices – 19.5% between May 2023 and May 2025 alone, which was one of the largest jumps of any category that’s tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I suppose enough people, bless their hearts, are die-hard enough that they’ll sacrifice more of their spending money to keep up their fandom. As Lee put it: “Fandom isn’t being nurtured anymore. It’s being mined.”
And I guess there are also enough people who will still be able to afford watching games on screen or in real life to make up for those of us who won’t be able to.
I wonder though, how long until walling off so many games starts to erode interest more widely? And what will that mean for the long-term viability of our leagues? Of our sports? For these local institutions?
I wonder how many people reading this have found themselves attending fewer games in the past few years? Or tuning in less often because your team is playing on a subscription service you decided not to get? And what did you find yourself doing instead?
But I guess it’s not keeping Silver up at night.
Jim: This is a challenging time to be a fan, whether it’s in the stadium or in front of the screen. Exhibit B: Big Ten After Dark.
Weren’t we under the impression that once four West Coast schools joined the Big Ten and left their former conference by the side of the road, the practice of scheduling 8 p.m. or thereabouts games would be ending, lest fans in the Eastern and Central time zones have to stay up until the wee hours to watch their teams?
Oh, right.
Consider that next week, Michigan State plays USC in the Coliseum, and the game doesn’t begin until 8 p.m. – or 11 p.m. Eastern Time. (Put it this way: If you are a devoted MSU fan and you live in that time zone … well, if you go to church you might want to attend a Saturday evening service, because you won’t be getting up early Sunday morning. And you might fall asleep by halftime anyway, even with the best of intentions.)
Maybe this is Fox’s way of compensating for the idea that (as far as we can tell) none of the Big Ten’s West Coast teams will be hosting any of their 9 a.m. Pacific Saturday kickoffs. Either way, consider that even 8 p.m. starts, for a sport that routinely lasts 3½ hours or more, do fans no favors. That may have been one reason why attendance was so bad at the Rose Bowl for the UCLA-Utah season opener two weeks ago … then again, there are a host of other reasons why people seem to have given up on UCLA football until further notice.
College football is not the greatest of on-site attractions when the games are in the afternoon, either, even with the band, the horse (in USC’s case) and all of the other school spirit stuff. Having to just sit there during seemingly endless commercial breaks several times a game doesn’t do anyone on the premises any favors.
This goes back to our first topic, I suppose. But Mirjam, do you get the sense that leagues and teams have taken fans for granted to such a degree that there will be some sort of blowback, if that hasn’t already started?
Mirjam: I wish I had a crystal ball and could predict it.
For now, blame it on TV and the streaming wars and the fact that sports are the last bastion of a dependably large audience of real-time viewers. That has monumentally changed college sports, of course, funneling schools into the Big Ten and SEC while decimating conferences like our old Pac-12 – but not the appeal of Pac-12 After Dark.
Better take a pregame nap, Michigan State fans, for that 11 p.m. kickoff. This isn’t an Olympics or World Cup happening on the other wise of the world – this is college football in America. It’s wild.
My immediate prediction: Far fewer people will watch that game than if it was played at a reasonable time – both here in L.A. and definitely in Michigan. Thing is, though, however many people do tune in will be more than if they didn’t have a game airing at all that evening, and if you’re a network wanting to squeeze wall-to-wall college football coverage out of every Saturday you can, then you don’t care about who’s not watching as long as someone is.
But you can’t miss something till it’s gone, right? So we’ll see whether there’s ever an exodus, and what TV networks and leagues and conferences might do if there is – and whether it will all be too broken to fix at that point.
Jim: Last topic of the week, which says that the guys who decide on the odds are either way ahead of us or way behind: The email tumbling into my inbox this morning says the Dodgers are still favorites to win the World Series at 4-1, followed by Milwaukee at 6-1, Philadelphia at 13-2 and the Yankees at 17-2. This, even though the Dodgers have gone 27-32 since July 2, when they were 55-32, had an 8½-game lead over San Diego and seemed like they should be a runaway favorite.
But consider: They’ve had two months of offensive futility and bullpen failures – not to mention a 4-14 record against under-.500 teams dating to Aug. 4. But they’re getting healthy again. Max Muncy – who I’m convinced is this team’s MVP just for the stability he provides in the middle of the lineup – returned this week, as did Tommy Edman. Hyesong Kim was out for a while and has returned. The question right now is Will Smith, who was scratched just before Wednesday night’s game when his right hand, hit by a pitch a couple days before, swelled.
They’re hot again – and granted, they’ve won four in a row against sub-.500 teams the past few days, but that’s better than they were doing before against the laggards. They’re hitting productively again, and their starting pitching has been outstanding.
The only concern, and it’s still a big one: What happens when the bullpen gate swings open. I would think that Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates, to name two, will spend the rest of September just trying to make the playoff roster, because those two high-profile winter acquisitions have been anything but dependable. (I joked on social media a month ago that baseball should have an inactive list for players who can’t be sent down but aren’t performing, and that it should be named after Tanner Scott. The more we see of him, the less funny it is.)
So, Mirjam, should we bank on the Dodgers getting back to the World Series, should we resign ourselves to the possibility that they’ll be eliminated in the wild-card round, or will it end somewhere in between?
Mirjam: Again, I’m not one to predict. Especially when it comes to baseball.
I wouldn’t want to bet at all, but if I did, I wouldn’t bet against the Dodgers. On Tuesday, FanGraphs had their World Series odds at 16.6% – normally a pretty confident number … if they hadn’t come down from 22.9% at season’s start. Still, most clubs would love those 16.6% odds.
The Dodgers’ bullpen being shaky, as you mentioned, really doesn’t help going into a postseason that requires so much from bullpens. Otherwise, though, this is a championship team that’s getting healthy at the right time, gained some momentum with the sweep of the Rockies, and earned the right to be confident in the biggest moments.
They just summited baseball’s mountaintop for the second time in five years. They’re still that team.
But it’s baseball, and this year seems as wide open as any year – which isn’t what Dodgers fans wanted when they watched their club check out of the offseason with a $355 million payroll.
Money can buy you nice things. It can pay for all the streaming networks your sports-loving heart desires, pay for all the parking and concessions and tickets your family needs to catch a game.
But it can’t guarantee victory. It only guarantees the expectations of victory.