Good morning, all and happy 250th birthday to the United States of America!
Is there a UConn mafia? A Boston Globe sports columnist thinks so. I break it down in the above video/audio commentary.
When baseball was the attraction
On July 4, 1961, with the Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees embroiled in a red-hot pennant race, with talk of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle making a run at Babe Ruth’s single season home run record, the Yankees hosted the Tigers in a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium.
How big was this 4th of July attraction? A crowd of 74,246 jammed “the big ballpark in the Bronx,” as broadcaster Red Barber used to describe it. You read that correctly: 74,246. The Yankees outdrew the entire National League that day.
There were no giveaways; no free t-shirts to the first 18,000 fans, no bobblehead dolls. A good, old fashioned doubleheader, involving the American League’s top two clubs and stars galore on both sides, was the attraction. Dick Young wrote about the crowd in the next day’s New York Daily News:
I dare say there has not been a crowd that large to watch a baseball game without a give away since and there never will be, as today’s ballparks do not have that large a capacity. In 1961 giving away caps, balls, bats, t-shirts, etc. to fans was unheard of. Sixty-five years ago the fans turned out to watch good-old fashioned baseball.
Speaking of watching baseball…
If you plan on watching your favorite baseball team on its usual local station tomorrow, forget about it. MLB is promoting the day as “Star-Spangled Sunday.” It’s more, however, a look into how baseball will be delivered in the future, costing fans even more money.
Your local affiliate, be it the Yankees on YES, the Red Sox on NESN, the Mets on SNY, etc., will not be carrying their teams games tomorrow. Two of MLB’s 15 games will be televised on NBC. The remaining 13 will be carried by either the NBC Sports Network or its streaming service Peacock.
What all this means is, if your cable system does not carry the NBC Sports Network, you are out of luck. Of course, you can plunk down money to subscribe to Peacock, even though you are already paying money to subscribe to the regional sports networks being shutout by MLB.
MLB is attempting to put a positive spin on Sunday’s show, claiming fans will only have to seek out one entity - NBC and its streaming service Peacock- to watch their favorite teams. That’s a bunch of bullspit. The ultimate goal, once MLB settles its labor situation, is to take away as many games televised by the RSNs, and make them national so that you will continue to pay the same amount for an RSN subscription, while paying extra to watch your club on a national platform. Count me out, no matter how “Star-Spangled” Sunday may be.
What MLB is doing that I wholeheartedly endorse is combining a showing of the 1993 movie The Sandlot with an actual MLB game at select drive-in movie theaters across the country. Here’s hoping the Great Bambino goes long.
That is going to do it for today’s newsletter. Thank you for being a subscriber and have a great 4th of July weekend!
DAN
