29 Sunset missives: August 2020

In case you forgot the NCAA ought to be dynamited

August 31, 2020

One of Anne Helen Petersen’s recent newsletter posts, about a pair of twins who are paid by Baylor University as social influencers, neatly summarizes universities’ hypocrisy when it comes to paying intercollegiate athletes.

The San Francisco Giants' face masks have an interesting backstory

August 23, 2020

This is a story about pandemic baseball and the surprisingly difficult task of identifying a specific piece of equipment used by multiple coaches and players on the field this season.

As a San Francisco Giants fan, I noticed that multiple members of the on-field personnel have been wearing a distinctive face mask. Manager Gabe Kapler, coach Alyssa Nakken, infielder Pablo Sandoval, and others wear a mask with straps that go around the back of the wearer’s neck and over their head, rather than looping around the ears. On Kapler, in particular, since he does mid-game interviews, I could see the fabric pulled tight against his face, showing the outline of his lips and nose.

MLB teams' empty-ballpark decorations, ranked

August 17, 2020

If you’re an MLB Extra Innings subscriber and you’ve flipped through multiple games in a day, you may have noticed that in the absence of fans Major League Baseball teams have dressed up the seating areas of their ballparks in a variety of ways. The following is a brief overview of each team’s approach, roughly organized from minimalist to maximalist.

It's long past time to let go of the Tiger Woods you once knew

August 9, 2020

Tiger Woods is unlikely to win another major tournament. He just finished well out of the running at the PGA Championship in San Francisco, and each time another major passes, the odds grow longer that Woods will pull another rabbit out of the hat.

MLB's cascading failures were foreseeable

August 2, 2020

By the time you read this, MLB’s season could be cancelled, because the league’s leadership, like much of the country, apparently can’t be bothered to take the coronavirus seriously enough to make real progress in holding it off, let alone suppressing it. Also, it was all foreseeable.

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