Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin, Part IX
March Madness edition … the drop in worker productivity … how basketball energizes baseball Spring Training ... Bracket Mania history … and revisiting a famed NBA/MLB athlete
"Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin" is my weekly Sunday feature that's a tribute to the sports columnists I grew up reading who penned Herb Caen-inspired three dot columns. It's an excuse to shamelessly plug my other side projects, post my favorite Immaculate Grid from the week with a story about one of the players, link to stories I found interesting, and string together loose topics on my mind.
Baseball has the title of America’s Pastime. Football is unquestionably America’s most popular sport. Hockey and soccer hold a patriotic place in our hearts every four years.
Yet no sport captivates our attention, and leads to less productivity at work, quite like basketball in March.
We miss work or school. We stay up late watching games. We sneak peaks for updates on our phones. We watch entire games from office TVs. Or if a game is a on a channel we don’t get, a savvy friend knows a website with bootleg copies of live sporting events to watch from a laptop.
Group text chats that went dormant for weeks (or months) are suddenly bursting with digital rallies, ideas to switch adult beverages to change the mojo, and plans to watch the next game.
In Albuquerque this week, and all around the country, high school games are played all day and night at famed venues, a steady stream of busses arriving and departing, nervous parents missing work to watch, players and cheerleaders missing school to perform, and media members chronicling all of it for eager viewers.
Starting tonight, and for the next two weeks, brackets will consume our lives for the NCAA Tournament. Regional pride and university loyalty will be tested in the name of bragging rights over your selections.
Spring training and March Madness
I covered Spring Training every day for 11 years. Whether it was the Giants, the A’s, or the Dodgers, the arrival of March Madness was the ultimate salvation at a time when it feels like Groundhog Day.
I fondly recall instances when the crowds at baseball games would suddenly erupt, even though nothing was happening on the diamond, and you knew it was because they saw the ending of a basketball game.
The biggest difference in the player/media relationships between the Giants and A’s can be summed up with the approach to March Madness brackets.
The Giants players were adamantly against the media joining their pool.
The A’s players quickly and happily accepted our money to join their pool.
I recall one time that about a dozen Bay Area scribes were enjoying all the games at McDuffy’s in Tempe. We were quite animated and loud. Watching from a distance, Matt Stairs was thoroughly entertained by our antics.
Stairs picked up our entire tab.
If you enjoyed last week’s Tony Gwynn stories, here’s another: he was in charge of the Padres March Madness pool for decades.
I saw this myself multiple times, in Yuma and Peoria, and was always struck that one of the biggest superstars in baseball, Mr. Padre, eight-time batting champion, collected everyone’s money and hand-written brackets, and dutifully went through each one with an assortment of colored pens, tabulating the points himself.
Gwynn arrived at the Padres spring training camp before everyone else so he could have all the results posted on the walls for everyone to see.
He truly was something.
A brief history of Brackets
Filling out brackets didn’t always consume our lives. If you’re under the age of 40, and definitely if you’re under 30, it’s doubtful you know a world in which Bracket Mania doesn’t exist.
The unofficial turning point for most of America was 1985. That’s the year the tournament expanded to 64 teams. Those brackets were now symmetrical. Newspapers devoted large spaces to print them and provide space to fill them out.
Before the internet, you had to cut out those brackets from a newspaper, go to Kinko’s to make copies, and pass them out to friends.
ESPN televised first-round games throughout the day in 1985 (plus more on tape-delay), while CBS showed games at night and the weekends, offering near around-the-clock viewing.
Interest in college basketball had been building, from the famed Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird finals matchup in 1979, to Michael Jordan sinking the game-winning shot in the 1982 final, and 1985 was the year the entire tournament began dominating the national conversation in March.
I can’t remember the first time I filled out brackets. I remember looking forward to Sports Illustrated arriving in the mail with empty brackets. I filled-in those brackets, not with my predictions, but with the results, and saved them for years.
My freshman year in high school, which was 1988, I was definitely filling in brackets with my predictions. I was the Commissioner many years in my life, an assignment that is glorious and totally overrated.
The internet made filling out brackets online much easier for casual fans, then PayPal/Venmo made it convenient to send money for a league in another state. Some people still insist on tabulating all the brackets by hand, including my friend Matt Linville, and I think that’s pretty rad.
I’ve never won a Brackets Pool, but finished in the top three once.
It was the A’s pool.
This week’s not-so random Immaculate Grid story: Danny Ainge
Danny Ainge is one of 13 athletes to play in the NBA and MLB. He’s probably one of the most forgotten two-sport crossover athletes and revisiting his story is head shaking.
In 1977, Ainge was drafted in MLB’s 15th round by the Blue Jays out of North Eugene High in Oregon. Ainge went to BYU and played four years of basketball. In the summer, he played minor league baseball, under a rule adopted by the NCAA that you could be an amateur in one sport and a professional in another.
The Blue Jays fast-tracked Ainge immediately to Triple-A – the highest level in the minors, without any stops in the lower levels – and promoted him to the major leagues in 1979, while Ainge was still in college.
I remember getting Ainge baseball cards and always assumed he was this remarkable talent. I just looked at his Baseball Reference page. Objectively, Ainge was terrible at baseball.
In 226 games in the minors, he slashed .237/.289/.299 with no power or speed. Sending a 19-year-old Ainge to Triple-A, with no spring training warmup, to compete against pitchers 5-6 years older than him, was a massive mistake.
Nowadays, there is zero chance you’d reach the majors with those numbers. You’d get sent to a lower level of the minors … or released. Yet, Ainge was promoted to the majors. In 211 games in the majors, over parts of three years, Ainge slashed .220/.264/.269 and his defense was never considered anything special.
It seems the Blue Jays knew Ainge was a budding NBA star and wanted to convince him to stick with baseball by fast-tracking him to higher levels. The plan didn’t work.
In 1981, the NBA’s Celtics drafted Ainge in the second round. Ainge figured his future was brighter in basketball. After a legal battle, the Celtics bought out Ainge’s baseball contract. Ainge played 14 years in the NBA, then became a decorated executive.
This week’s “Where Ya At?” podcast guest: Andrew Dyer
I host a podcast for San Diego State’s School of Journalism and Media Studies titled “Where Ya At?” Each week, I interview an alum to learn about their experience at SDSU, transitioning from student to professional, and their current job. You can listen on all podcast platforms, including Apple Music.
Andrew Dyer spent over 10 years in the Navy, then departed and went to college as a freshman in his early-30s. His writing career began covering Craft Beer because he was part of a Facebook group where he heard about an opening, then turned to Journalism as his major.
Dyer became the Editor In Chief of The Daily Aztec. I always enjoy exchanging stories with my fellow EIC’s about the most controversial topics from their year leading the famed student newspaper.
For me, the controversy was our decision to print advertisements for strip clubs. [Note to self, that’s a good topic for a future Substack Newsletter.]
For Dyer, it was the debate over the Aztecs nickname and the mascot. He shared lot of interesting stories about that topic, covering the military as a veteran, and following the new extremist movements in San Diego County. It was a fun conversation. Here’s a link.
How much productivity is wasted?
I haven’t the foggiest idea how to objectively quantify this stuff, but other people have attempted to put a number on what March Madness means to worker productivity.
In 2018, a WalletHub survey said it led to $6.3 billion in corporate losses.
In 2019, an Office Pulse survey put the number at $604 million.
In 2023, coaching company Challenger, Gray & Christmas bumped the total back up to $17.3 billion.
It seems like the larger the number, the more media outlets will cite your study.
All I know is that once President Obama filled out his bracket on TV in 2009, that was the equivalent of an executive order to fill out your brackets and enjoy March Madness.