I say this because I'm pounding away here on my Chiefs blog on a lazy Saturday without any baseball to watch. It hasn't been on national television Saturday middays for years now -- I don't even know how long it has been. I wouldn't be watching any of it anyway because of my sworn sports celibacy, though I'll pay attention when others remark so I may be in the conversation to some extent. But as I've shared many times in this blog effort I do deliberately work to avoid seeing any of it. There are reasons. But one of the main ones is all of the duplicity that happens within professional sports that has eviscerated competitive integrity.
When you look carefully at the history, you'll see it has to a large extent been that way for a long time.
I really believe it started in earnest, institutionally anyway, with Babe Ruth. His oversized hero status then in the 1920s and 1930s generated so much interest in the sport that the Yankees regularly winning became an important part of not just baseball but all professional sports. When teams in other sports attained some kind of grand mythological status they too needed to succeed, and some of those nudges to that end were justified to keep the entire enterprise thriving.
In baseball that has always been the Yankees and the Dodgers. In basketball the Lakers and Celtics (who're both yet again doing exceptionally well this present NBA season). In football the Cowboys and Patriots. Any New York team works fine, even though the basketball Knicks and football Jets have been so horribly mismanaged that they don't fit. But for a while the football Giants worked fine, as well as the long-ago Los Angeles Raiders until Al Davis lost his mind and wrecked the team.
Anything New York or Los Angeles works.
Again, the baseball history. After Babe Ruth the Yankees managed to put together powerhouses that always won -- at least enough to keep things rolling in the dough--er--rolling along nicely. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the Kansas City A's served as a Yankees farm system -- that's the major league A's, not minor league. It wasn't an accident, it was made to be that way be virtue of the relationship the owners had with one another.
In the late 1960s when the majors had to allow other teams to compete and look like legitimate contenders so the whole thing wouldn't appear arranged to benefit those favored teams, the Yankees and Dodgers were nowhere to be seen. This couldn't hold if the majors were going to survive, so, voila, free agency was born. Instantly the Yankees and Dodgers were now able to buy the better players, and sure enough from 1973 to 1988 New York and Los Angeles teams won 11 pennants and 5 World Series titles.
The strike of 1981 and the playoff arrangement thereafter alone was proof of the way the majors absolutely had to have the Yankees and Dodgers appear in the playoffs, it was deliberately manipulated to be that way.
When the Yankees and Dodgers slipped a bit from the tops of their divisions in the early 1990s, another strike was arranged so the bountiful benefits of free agency could further advance the cause of the New York and Los Angeles teams -- and by default all of major league baseball. The 1994 season ended without a postseason at all, but afterwards it was interminable glory days for those teams. You could add the Boston Red Sox in the mix a bit because they are the Yankees main rivals. (Ever see a Brewers-Pirates game on an ESPN Sunday Night Baseball event when a Yankees-Red Sox game is scheduled?)
Since that infamous 1994 year, a total of 31 baseball seasons, the Yankees have made the postseason 26 times -- 26 times! They've won five World Series titles and eight pennants
For the Red Sox, though not having the stature of the Yankees by far but still heavily favored to be successful with the benefits of free agency, they have made the postseason 15 times and won it all four times. Yankees success does in large part depend on something of a Red Sox success.
It should be worth noting, from confirmation of powers-that-be who've been willing to share, that these favored teams do not have to win championships to make all of this work.
They just need to get into the postseason.
If they win it all, that's a bonus. If they don't win but they are still appearing in every postseason there is, (1) it keeps their legion of fans (and their $$$) interested and attentive, and (2) it keeps the ruse going when most people can bleat, "Hey look! Another team won the championship! So there is competitive integrity after all!"
Why am I sharing all of this? Here in my Chiefs blog? A few reasons. One, I just like to pound my keyboard about this, really, for the therapy. I like telling the truth about it all because, well, I'm just that kind of Jeremiah (the Biblical truth-teller) and Cassandra (the Greek legend truth-teller) Both were punished severely for their devotion, but, well, not many people read this blog, and a whole lot of not many people pay any attention to the duplicity to care.
Two, it does impact the Chiefs. Not going to belabor a point I've made a number of times in this blog effort, but even though it is harder for the NFL to do what the baseball major leagues had done, by the Scorecasting exploitations they can still manipulate things for favorable outcomes in some meaningful ways. This past season the Chiefs got majorly hosed by officiating in so many close games that those horrors affected outcomes specifically to keep the Chiefs from dominating the sport when they have the greatest quarterback ever to set foot on the field. We simply can't have too much of Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, can we.
The NFL also does have free agency, and I hate that we must lose players we've drafted and developed. Bryan Cook, Leo Chenel, Jaylen Watson, and others, all gone. Fortunately the Chiefs GM Brett Veach knows about the limitations of free agency and the salary cap and adjusts accordingly, and does so brilliantly. Much more on that in a later post, after we see what we've got in the draft next month.
In this post I also just wanted to share a couple of links. One, to this article showing up in the Atlantic, just about a journalist's journey into the seedy world of online sports gambling. It is quite revelatory, I could emphasize a half-dozen different things shared there that make the whole online "Official Wagering Site of Such-&-Such Sports League" a fully reprehensible evil. I've written about this also a few times here.
I should add it isn't just the gambling connection that demonstrates how much Mammon is worshipped in all of this. One of the reasons I simply can't enjoy a regularly scheduled widely broadcast game any more is because of all the insane streaming and cable requirements needed to enjoy most games. I like NASCAR racing, too, yet almost every race is either on cable or streaming, for which a customer must pay a huge chunk of change for programming he doesn't care about just to have games show up on the television. In some profound way it just makes my sports celibacy commitment that much more robust -- that's a very good thing.
Finally there is this, my own elucidation of why exactly it is that teams like the Yankees and Dodgers are given the advantage they have. I've shared much of this already in this blog. I know it isn't Chiefs at all, but as I just shared the whole duplicity does impact their success in extraordinarily prohibitive ways.
The only redeeming value in any of it is that Veach and company know what they are up against and must work that much harder to overcome it. I can't neglect to share too that maybe these things are there to draw people from that wicked ugliness and into a deep abiding faith in The One Who Is The Only Deliverance from any of it.
Again, I'll likely post again when there is something of a shape of our team for next season, maybe in April or May right after the draft, or maybe as the preseason activities merit a preview post. Until then, find your vibrant fellowship with ones you love and do rich meaningful sportsy things with them that don't involve any of this, and yeah, make it part of your worship of the Lord in Spirit and in Truth.
Blessings.
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