Three Moves Ahead Episode 495: Sports

[Rob Zacny]

Three Moves Ahead 495:

Sports
With the sports world mostly on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, sports games have emerged to take their place in some of the oddest ways. Rob discusses this weird moment for sports sims with Troy, Jenn Cutter, and Kat Bailey. They chat about why sim motorsports seem to be working well, but most console sports sims don't seem to have the same resonance. Rob accuses Troy of being the target audience for beat reporting based on Out of the Park leagues. Troy denies the charge, then describes the travails of his Expos dynasty in detail.

Out of the Park Baseball 21, Probably some others

 

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[AndrewCC]

I hear Troy saying that the NHL might lose half its income this year and all I can manage is a big "Meh." Athletes and sports executives are overpaid anyway.

[jennegatron]

On 5/1/2020 at 11:23 PM, AndrewCC said:

Athletes are overpaid anyway.

 

 

LOLOLOLOLOLOL. I can't even imagine looking at the landscape of sports and saying this. College athletes, female athletes, even end of the bench guys in majors.

The ones that do manage to ever make any money out of it are well paid because they have like 5 years to make all the money they're going to make in their entire careers, especially because most of them have no prospects for a career after dedicating the first 20 years of their life to being a professional athlete. The average athlete is drastically underpaid , especially given how much money leagues as a whole make. The best players in the world don't even make the bulk of their money from their salaries, they make their money from external endorsement deals.

[AndrewCC]

The context of the original remark from Troy was about the top teams of the NHL. Not average athletes, where average counts everyone in the lower leagues too, but athletes in the top leagues where salaries average in the millions.

I feel silly having to say this, since it applies to everything anyone ever says, but: this is my opinion. And it's that they are overpaid. The money lavished on professional sport seem way out of proportion compared to the (little) value they bring to society. It's mostly all marketing. And if athletes in the lower leagues are badly paid, well maybe they should get REAL jobs. The world would benefit more from a single extra doctor/teacher/etc. than from 5 LeBron Jameses/Tom Brady/etc. The problem being that there's no glory in that. This also applies (to a lesser extent) to actors. 

 

[Khan Khomrad]

I always find this sport related episodes oddly amusing. As someone who is only interested in Wrestling and no other sport, I can't imagine myself watching two wrestlers duking it out online via WWE 2K19 or whatever other wrestling game. It would be incredibly silly and no different then watching two youtubers playing the game. Can't imagine t being too different in regards to other sports, even those --like F1-- that have good sim games.

 

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the decline of physical attendance and the increasing viewership that can't make it to a live event or has no interest of doing so when they can just watch online (paying or for free). This seems to be the case with the majority of the sports, both large and small. This could also be good for the E-sports scene if the "real sports" try to diversify into the E-sports scene or take a more serious approach on how they license their brands to Video game companies.

[jennegatron]

17 hours ago, AndrewCC said:

Maybe they should get REAL jobs. 

 

 

LOL

[ilitarist]

As a sociologist would say, a crisis doesn't change things, a crisis accelerates things.

 

Interesting to see how "real" sport is eager to share with e-sports.

[jennegatron]

Lots of sports teams have been investing in esports for years now http://foxsportsstories.com/2018/04/28/professional-sports-teams-investing-esports/ which lends credibility to the idea that this is just accelerating & bringing those investments to the fore.

 

People develop affection and like for players for their favorite teams/their favorite athletes. People will watch them stream their sport's game, but they'll also watch them stream COD or Fortnite or whatever game, because there is a lot of demographic overlap between mainstream/popular video game ass video game players and sports fans.

 

[Jerek]

Ill take the bait. Professional athletes are paid millions, are sponsored by many different brands, have their medical bills paid for and are well known enough not to have to pay for a lot of stuff the general population does have to pay for. They are overpaid. You MIGHT be able to find sports or leagues that don't overpay their players (CFL, college sports who underpay black players), but we're talking MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA etc. My opinion, and a very valid one. Once nurses are paid for SAVING LIVES as much as we pay for entertainment, then talk to me. 

 

[jennegatron]

2 hours ago, Jerek said:

Ill take the bait. Professional athletes are paid millions, are sponsored by many different brands, have their medical bills paid for and are well known enough not to have to pay for a lot of stuff the general population does have to pay for. They are overpaid. You MIGHT be able to find sports or leagues that don't overpay their players (CFL, college sports who underpay black players), but we're talking MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA etc. My opinion, and a very valid one. Once nurses are paid for SAVING LIVES as much as we pay for entertainment, then talk to me. 

 

 

where are all these losers crawling out of the woodwork from?

 

Literally all of college athletes, the WNBA, even end of the bench guys in the major male team leagues make very little given how much money is poured into sports and doesn't make it into the hands of the people whose labor make leagues and teams rich. LeBron James is under paid by the NBA given how much money he makes the league world wide.

 

Paying health care workers, retail workers, teachers more money doesn't have to come at the expense of fairly compensating athletes for the money their bodies make their organizations & it's disingenuous to argue otherwise. You're not brave for thinking nurses should be paid more, and you're kind of a jerk for creating a false dichotomy when there is none.

 

I wish I could only talk to you when nurses were paid as much as athletes, but you inserted yourself into a week old thread to grandstand.

[Gormongous]

I only wish I had the time to register an account on a random forum in order to clutch my pearls dramatically about how underpaid nurses are and how it's the fault of the jocks who bullied me in high school. Why is anyone mad about professional athletes and other entertainers being, on the far end of the bell curve, mildly overpaid? The most cursory Google search reveals that it'd be much more logical and effective to blame health system and health plan CEOs for giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses when it comes to nurses being underpaid, but I guess that that would require a critique of our society and not just blaming overpaid athletes as individual signs of our decadence.

 

Also, how about this: professional athletes absolutely destroy their bodies (and, in some cases, their brains) over what is usually a decade-long career and they deserve whatever money people are willing to give them without being made into a bogeyman for the vast societal inequalities that have allowed billionaires to add $262 billion to their already ineffable fortunes during a once-in-a-century pandemic? Like, yeah, some people are overpaid for the labor they do, but your first target is professional athletes, whose work you can see manifest on their very bodies? Really?

[AndrewCC]

I said "athletes and sports executives" You actively had to edit my statement when copy-pasting to make a strawman argument. 

I don't care about pro-sports and how you chose to spend your $$ supporting them makes 0 difference to me, heck I don't even live in the US, so I won't continue arguing that point.

3 hours ago, jennegatron said:

where are all these losers crawling out of the woodwork from?

*emphasis mine*

Unless you're a pro-athlete or close relative/friend of one, I'm unsure where such vitriol comes from.

@Gormongous Sorry, didn't realise this was a closed community, I'll just stick to listening to the podcast without engaging with the community, like I've done for years. I sure learned that lesson.

 There's some stuff I could say about how you're basically defending those billionares, since they're the ones who own the pro-teams anyway, but you do you.