Southpaw's Giving Thanks
Our Thanksgiving edition, Vol. 4.
Dear readers,
Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you all had a chance to unwind, spend time with your families, and eat and drink enough to be able to actually enjoy spending time with your families.
In keeping with the spirit of the holiday — and Southpaw tradition — we’re devoting this week’s edition to recounting the things that we’re thankful for in the world of sports and politics. We’ll dive into some specifics below, but at the top, we’d like to say that we’re grateful for all of you, our readers, who continue to make this project fun and rewarding. Thanks for sticking with us.
Now, onto the meaty stuff.
-Calder and Ian
We’re going to be honest with you: As we surveyed the past year of developments in the world of sports and politics, it wasn’t easy to find many things that made us hopeful about the future. After three-ish years of tracking the fits and starts of collective action — and, more often than not these days, collective reaction — in the sporting world, we’ve grown a little jaded about professional sports being a vehicle for positive political change at the moment. What seemed just a few years ago to be a real, athlete-led push for equality and justice in sports and beyond has seemingly congealed into anodyne “statementese” at best and outright reactionary politics at worst. More often than not, we feel a bit like Charlie Brown going to kick Lucy’s football: hoping, naively, that things will turn out differently than last time, but ending up on our backs.
Nevertheless, Thanksgiving invites us to find the good within the bad, so here we go:
Unions. It was a banner year for organized labor across the board — and the sporting world was no exception. In April, minor league baseball players’ new union — which was formed in late 2022 — won a historical deal for its members, guaranteeing sizable pay raises, year-round pay, minimum housing requirements and a whole lot more. Meanwhile, the Canadian Soccer Players’ Association helped the Canadian women’s national soccer team fight unfair budget cuts. In the world of college athletics, unions are helping college athletes fight for fair pay and better working conditions, even at tony schools like Dartmouth University. At a moment when bosses and their oligarchic pals are rushing to consolidate power over more and more of the sporting world, labor organizing by athletes continues to provide an essential counterweight to total domination by the ownership class.
Major League Baseball’s Pitch Clock. Readers who really want to get into the weeds can revisit our extended paean to Major League Baseball’s latest reform, but we love it so much that it’s worth restating here: the pitch clock is good — great, even. Beyond its material impact on the game — which is now faster, livelier and more watchable as a result — the pitch clock is also a testament to the power of smart, targeted reform. Plus, it somehow managed to draw bipartisan approval — a rare accomplishment in today’s political climate.
The death spiral of Barstool Sports. Maybe this one is cheating a little bit, but is it okay to be thankful for the demise of your enemies? We think so. In August, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy “bought his company back” from Penn Entertainment for one dollar after Penn realized Barstool was a toxic brand for its gambling content and jumped at a better offer from ESPN. Since, the company has been sputtering, trying to find out how to be profitable again. While we’re never going to root for anyone to lose their job, we do hope that he at least learns the lesson that constant personality-driven content featuring some of the weirdest and most annoying people in the world isn’t a money maker. Even while the company has gone through a big round of layoffs, he seemed to be leaning even further into his brand of weird, reality show-esque blogging. We’ll see.
Some absolutely incredible moments on the field. We know this newsletter is about the collision of sports and politics. But the reason that’s interesting in the first place is because of the remarkable moments of on-field athletic achievement. And in that respect, it’s been a hell of a year. To name a few highlights: the Caitlin Clark/Angel Reese rivalry; Novak Djokovic trying to fend off phenom Carlos Alcaraz, which culminated in the best set of tennis in over a decade in Cincinnati; Patrick Mahomes winning a Super Bowl on one leg; Spain capturing its first women’s World Cup. Our favorite teams have been terrible (though one of us did get to watch a Knicks playoff victory in an insane atmosphere), but we’re happy to report we’ve still had a lot of fun watching the stuff on the field. There’s only more to come.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . how fans own their own league in Swedish soccer? “Swedish Soccer Prioritized Fans Over Finances. Now, Business Is Booming.” by Rory Smith in The New York Times (Nov. 19, 2023).
. . . the gross allegations levied against Oklahoma City Thunder guard Josh Giddey? “Josh Giddey investigation by NBA for alleged relationship with minor, explained” by Ricky O’Donnell in SB Nation (Nov. 26, 2023).
. . . Trans exclusion in cricket? “Trans exclusion in sports in unfair, unscientific and just plain politics” by Natalie Washington in The Indian Express (Nov. 24, 2023).