Tuatara tagged out at home

Odds stacked against baseball; LIV a hit in Oz... and a bit more stuff.

SMP Images (via Photosport)

Just a short-ish newsletter today and a longer, more oval-ball oriented one on Wednesday morning following the Warriors’ Anzac Day clash.

The Auckland Tuatara are no more. Well, the baseball franchise at least. Although the imprimatur is the same, the ownership of the basketball franchise is separate and remains unaffected by the news the baseball team has gone into liquidation.

In interviews over the weekend, team spokesman Dale Budge outlined some of the difficulties facing the club.

“Shortly after bringing the franchise to life, we were hit with the impacts of Covid, travel restrictions and the financial implications that came with it...

“The costs of participating have skyrocketed over the past few months and all teams competing in the ABL have found it challenging financially.”

The Tuatara  got unlucky. No doubt. First with Covid and then, upon return, having two of the five series effectively rained out, but even with all the circumstances falling in their favour, the Australian Baseball League in New Zealand was always a hard sell on a number of fronts:

• Baseball is a niche sport here;

• There is little to no culture of multi-day series attendance in New Zealand;

• The home stadium is in Albany, which essentially means you’re relying on fans north of the bridge and south of Orewa - that is to say, scale is not on your side;

• The league is inferior to the product we can watch on ESPN or MLB.com for 162 games per year, or more, if we wish.

The Bounce talked to two semi-regular Tuatara attendees this morning and both gave similar reasons for not attending more - cost, and in particular the “ridiculously overpriced food and drink” at the concessions. 

This is a bugbear of mine. Exclusive pourage and catering contracts are a big part of why New Zealand offers the worst sports stadium experience in the developed world¹. 

While baseball might not be huge here, there’s still a sense of disappointment in the diamond-sport fraternity and also questions asked around the decision to upgrade North Harbour Stadium to accommodate baseball on a 10-year contract.

Curiously, while the collapse of the franchise has been reported through a sympathetic lens here, it is less so in Australia, where it is seen more like a betrayal.

Baseball Australia chief executive Glenn Williams was dead-set grumpy about how it all went down.

“To be alerted about a situation of this magnitude through a public media notice after the support the ABL has provided the Auckland Tuatara is beyond disappointing,” Williams said. “As an organisation, Baseball Australia [has] been immensely supportive of the Tuatara. We recognise the various challenges the team has faced since returning from a Covid-19-enforced lay-off. It is important to note, these challenges were also faced by all domestic teams and the ABL during the same period.

“While we are extremely disappointed in the lack of common courtesy in communicating this news, our focus has already turned to assist the teams and players through what will be a difficult transitional period into new ABL teams for the 23-24 season.”

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Whether Scott Robertson is the winningest coach in Super Rugby history or merely the most successful, the clash against the table-topping Chiefs in Hamilton this weekend promises to be a beaut (unless, of course, they treat it like a no-consequence rehearsal for what is likely to be a game with a lot more at stake between these two teams in a couple of months).

We’ll dig a bit deeper into rugby news in the Wednesday edition.

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Last week, I highlighted AI’s role in the fake Michael Schumacher interview. It didn’t end well for the editor.

“This tasteless and misleading article should never have appeared. It does not in any way correspond to the standards of journalism that we – and our readers – expect from a publisher,” Funke Magazines managing director Bianca Pohlmann said on Saturday.

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I mean to say, could Ryan Reynolds actually be the world’s nicest person?

The Wrexham co-owner watched his team win promotion back into the football league and made one terminal cancer patient’s day.  

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David, who is fast becoming my resident golf expert, warned me not to expect too much from Lydia Ko at the season’s first major, the Chevron Championship at The Woodlands, Texas. The course was too long and Ko was too rusty, he said. Look out for her at the US Women’s Open at Pebble Beach, instead.

I defer to the vastly superior golf knowledge because Ko duly went and missed the cut.

Zephyr Melton of golf.com noticed other things, too, and pondered whether the newly married Ko had long left in the sport.

Although Ko is just 25 years old, she is a chiselled veteran in the pro golf world. She’s over a decade removed from her first win and has seen the peaks and valleys of the pro game in the time since. Summiting that mountain once is tough enough, but to be expected to do it again and again is a task that few players are up for. Ko has long stated her intentions to retire when she turns 30, but with her on the brink of the LPGA Hall of Fame, she’s also hinted that could come earlier.

It feels like I read these types of stories at least once a season so it’s too soon to talk about a post-Ko golf scene. Instead I’m going to take David’s word for it and look forward to her contending at Pebble Beach in early July. 

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If there was a country that was going to embrace LIV Golf, it was likely to be Australia.

Many of the early European settlers were the very embodiment of anti-establishment and that spirit washed over to their sport.

Look at their most popular winter code. It’s a bastardisation of Gaelic football and they give not one hoot that nowhere else in the world has embraced Australian Rules.

The country’s second-most popular winter code only exists because rebels split from the establishment following a meeting of northern rugby clubs at the George Hotel, Huddersfield. Of course Australia would embrace this version of rugby.

The only reason the Indian Premier League can pay its cricketers millions of dollars today is that a small group of Australians, bankrolled by Kerry Packer, disrupted the sport in the late-’70s.

The two-headed media hydra that was/is Packer and Rupert Murdoch has profoundly changed the way sport is consumed, essentially taking all the power away from those who enter through the turnstiles and putting it in the hands of a few broadcasting billionaires.

So yeah, as a sporting nation, they’re both fiercely independent and like to stir shit up. So while many among us might think that Greg Norman has done more than most to destroy his reputation and legacy - “look, we’ve all made mistakes,” was how he explained away the Saudi state-sponsored murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khassoghi - in his homeland they’re just as likely to go, “Yeah Sharky, keep chipping away at the PGA Tour.” So he bought LIV to Adelaide and, yeah, apparently they loved it.

Australian sports fans, as ever, appear powerless against his siren song. The golf course is heaving with over 35,000 fans daily. Admission has been sold out for all three rounds. A ticket into the ‘Cellar Door’ marquee back of the 12th green – known as the ‘Watering Hole’ and styled like the PGA Tour’s ‘Party Hole’ in Arizona – is $1200. The hole is surrounded by similar marquees and ‘sky boxes’. After a golfer’s shot, good or bad, plastic beer cups rain onto the tee like frothy white mortars.

1. While this is what’s known as exaggerating for effect, it’s also uncomfortably close to the truth.