India T20 World Cup semi-final: Date, time, venue, and match schedule… — and more

Ah, “consumer economics,” my dear friend. No two words elicit such a potent combination of disgust and confusion as this catch-all phrase; one that covers all manner of commercial sins. And what sins are those? Well, do you want an authentic Aaron Judge World Baseball Classic jersey to arrive multiple months after the tournament ends? That will be $419.99.

Ripping Fanatics, the sports merchandise monopoly to end them all, is the easiest thing since inventing sliced bread. You cannot purchase an authentic NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB jersey that is not Fanatics-manufactured. The quality is… questionable, at times. The price tags are gobsmackingly high. For NFL, MLB and NBA jerseys, the prices range between $120 and $200 depending on the item. Hockey jerseys are never less than $200. Like I said, ripping Fanatics is like a knife through butter.

But we can do better than that. Much has been said about the Fanatics monopoly and how Congress should step in for the sake of the consumer — you know, like what the antitrust laws are designed to do — and they should. But they won’t. Save for the separate problem that the Sherman Antitrust Act was written in 1890 and wasn’t really designed for the ultra-digital age of techno-empires, American sports leagues are legal monopolies. It’s no shock that their merchandising arm is one, too.

Little discussed but gargantuanly important, the Supreme Court ruled in 1922 that the Sherman Antitrust Act did not apply to Major League Baseball, a decision that has been interpreted to protect the four major North American leagues ever since. These leagues are cultural institutions that have cultivated an exclusive right to our interest in particular sports. They have intentionally curated a calendar that squashes all opposition, particularly emergent women’s leagues like the WNBA and PWHL, who have a hard time getting primetime TV slots in the face of an oversaturated sports calendar. 

Yet the demand for their product is so consistent that they are guaranteed profitability regardless of performance. You know, like drug cartels! 

It’s why we discuss an MLB salary cap leading to a lockout. It’s why we care so much about tanking in the NBA. The product gets worse because everyone’s pocketbook is already protected. It’s frankly an economic disaster, but American culture wouldn’t have it any other way. We want the best players playing against the best players in one place. Horribly, there’s no other way to do it.

We also want to dress like our favorite players as a symbol of our support for our favorite teams. Jerseys are symbols of solidarity and of status within the fan in-group. If I see someone on the street in a Drake Maye or Jayson Tatum jersey, that’s sick. When I was perusing the Fanatics sites to check prices for this article, I saw MLBShop had restocked those awesome Green Roman Anthony jerseys for $179.99. In one of the greatest moments of irony in my life, I considered buying one. I’m still considering buying one. It’s like some kind of sick joke.

That’s the thing about jerseys: we want them, and we are willing to pay for them. Those whose solution to the problem of Fanatics’ monopoly is “just don’t buy them” are not being realistic. The most popular jerseys routinely sell out. Most people are not even given a chance to not buy them. If I wanted to go on NFLShop and not buy a Division Rivals Drake Maye jersey right now, I’d be out of luck. They don’t have any for me to not buy!

Fanatics — and by extension Nike, whose creative monopoly in several leagues has led to jerseys that, frankly, are lacking in innovative style — is a function of this interest and the inherent monopolistic spirit of American sports. If we want to fix it, we can’t go crying that they’ve unfairly gained control of the entire jersey market. We have to think outside the box.

Sure, it wasn’t always this way, but this situation is just leagues getting smarter. It is way too efficient to centrally plan and design jersey inventories because the demand is so variable. I can’t imagine anyone is rushing to buy a Utah Jazz jersey right now, but Detroit Pistons jerseys are probably flying off the shelves like you’ve never seen. Similarly, the demand is so concentrated; I will never buy a Charlotte Hornets jersey, nor will my friend from Denver ever buy a Seattle Seahawks jersey. These are hyper-specific submarkets within the larger structure, so planning the production accordingly is efficient, cheap and gloriously profitable.

If we want things to get better, we have to go after the root cause. Sports leagues are monopolies and always will be, but allowing them to vertically integrate their merchandising through a single partner is the issue. They can only do that because they hold exclusive copyright to their brands. Are you seeing it now? Let’sgo after the copyrights. 

This would take some serious lawyering and quite the legal interpretation of copyright laws, some of the most brutal and lucrative ones in the business. But some of these teams are rather old, and copyright is supposed to expire after a certain period of time. If we could somehow concoct a case that argued these brands are old enough and culturally important enough that they are in the public domain, we would have solved the merchandising crisis with just a smattering of anarchy.

Look, I’m not saying that’s realistic. I’m sure my lawyer mother is reading this in horror, and these leagues would rather relocate to Mars than give up their billion-dollar copyright controls. But short of congressional intervention that isn’t coming, that’s the solution I’ve cooked up. Just saying “break up the monopoly” has never held water in the sports industry, so we have to be more creative. The law, while complex, is actually quite creative.

Other brands could suddenly run wild. Instead of occasional collabs, there would be rampant competition. Which leads to derivative solution number two: let’s change the culture of sports merch. 

You can’t control demand for a product — that’s like… the whole thesis of capitalism. Demand is influenced by too many factors to understand, and people currently want jerseys. They have wanted jerseys for a long time, and my educated prediction is that they will continue to want them. But what if we all got together and decided that jerseys were lame? 

The era of dressing up like your favorite player is over. Enter: high fashion. Like the NBA players who reacted to David Stern’s sideline dress code by becoming the coolest dudes on the planet by wearing $5000 Louis Vuitton jackets, we’re following their lead. Now, you aren’t cool if you wear a jersey; you’re cool if you wear a creatively designed custom bomber jacket. You’re cool if you stitched together four different Celtics hoodies you thrifted and made one awesome super hoodie. You’re cool if you knit your own Bruins hat. That’s so cool, I should do that. We should all do that!

Everyone wants to be cool, so let’s stop letting Fanatics tell us what is and isn’t fashionable. If the government won’t save us from the monopoly, then we will resist with the coolest, most creative fits imaginable. You are cool, I am cool, sports are cool. Fanatics is not cool.

Fans of the Kansas City Athletics endured many disappointments during the team’s thirteen-year stay at Municipal. Where do we start? The many, often lopsided trades to the Yankees? How about the fact that the team never had a winning record during its stay in Kansas City? Then, of course, there’s the move. The move was a tough pill to swallow, even though the city and the fans had their fill of Charlie O. Finley. Finley was a visionary, but he was also a world-class ass. I could write a chapter on the number of times he insulted the city and the fans.

What made the move really painful was that we could see the team was going to be good. Catfish, Rudi, Fingers, Jackson, Bando, Tenace, Blue, Campy, and Green. One thing Finley had done right was accumulate a deep pool of young talent.

And right on cue, they posted a winning record in their first year in Oakland. Then they won three World Series in a row. I couldn’t have been the only one who thought, “Those titles should have been ours.”

Despite that litany of tears, my first disappointment as a fan came when I was old enough to realize the team had traded away Roger Maris. Roger Maris! The guy who hit 61 home runs in a season! That Roger Maris? I was probably seven. Maybe eight. I remember thinking, who was the idiot who traded away Roger Maris?

That would have been Parke Carroll. Carroll probably wasn’t an idiot, but you can make the case that his loyalties still ran with the Yankees and not Kansas City. Carroll had been employed by the Yankee organization, most recently as the business manager of the Yankees’ Kansas City Blues farm team. The Athletics were owned at the time by Arnold Johnson. Prior to owning the Athletics, Johnson owned not only Yankee Stadium but also Blues Stadium, which he agreed to sell to the city. With that bit of housekeeping taken care of, Johnson moved the Philadelphia Athletics into a newly revamped and renamed Municipal Stadium. Johnson’s director of player personnel was George Selkirk, a former Yankee player who took over right field when Babe Ruth retired. Carroll, Selkirk, and Johnson all had heavy Yankee ties. With leadership like that, the Athletics never had a chance.

The Athletics somehow found some talent. At various times they had guys like Bob Cerv, Ralph Terry, Clete Boyer, Bobby Shantz, and Harry Simpson. All those guys ended up being traded to New York.

The most glaring trade had to be Maris. The Athletics had picked him up, along with Dick Tomanek and Preston Ward, in a June 1958 trade with Cleveland in which they gave up Woodie Held and Vic Power. It was a heavy price to pay, as Held was an adequate center fielder and Power was an excellent hitter. Power had been a two-time All-Star and picked up MVP votes in four seasons in Kansas City, but Maris was different. He had a gift.

Maris had been a football standout at Bishop Shanley High School in Fargo. He set a still-standing national record with four return touchdowns in one game. Maris was such an excellent football player that the University of Oklahoma wanted him. He didn’t even like baseball until he got into high school, whereupon he excelled.

The Indians signed him as a free agent, and he was named Rookie of the Year at his first minor league stop, playing for his hometown Fargo Twins. In four minor league seasons, Maris hit .303 with 78 home runs. The talent was there.

He made his major league debut with Cleveland in April of 1957, going 3 for 5. Two days later, he hit his first major league home run, a grand slam. He was just 22 years old.

Cleveland fans must have also felt our pain. They only had Maris for 167 games over parts of two seasons before they traded him to Kansas City.

Maris battled injuries during his time in Kansas City, including appendix surgery, which hurt his production when he tried to come back too soon.

He made his first All-Star team in 1959 when he hit .273 with 16 home runs and 72 RBI in just 122 games. It looked like the Athletics had their right fielder for the future.

In between injuries, Maris had some fantastic games for the Athletics. On August 3, 1958, in a game at Municipal Stadium against the Washington Senators, Maris went 4 for 5 with two home runs and five RBI. He ended just a single shy of hitting for the cycle and collected 13 total bases during a 12–0 Athletics rout.

On September 24, Maris made his former team pay during a 9–3 Kansas City win in Cleveland. Maris went 3 for 5 with two home runs, three RBI, and nine total bases.

On May 10, 1959, Maris clipped the Tigers for two home runs, scored four times, and drove in five in a 7–6 loss to Detroit.

Once he got healthy toward the end of the 1959 season, it was impossible to miss the talent.

The evil axis of Carroll, Johnson, and Selkirk thought otherwise. On December 11, 1959, the team shocked its fans by sending Maris, Kent Hadley, and shortstop Joe DeMaestri to New York in exchange for Marvelous Marv Throneberry, Norm Siebern, Hank Bauer, and a sore-armed Don Larsen. Maris was quoted in the Reading Eagle as saying, “Believe it or not, I had rather stayed with the Athletics, but I’ll do my best for the Yankees.”

Throneberry was immensely popular with the fans but could never unlock the power he displayed in the minors. Bauer was already 37 and in steep decline. Larsen was 30 and came to the Athletics with a career record of 55–57. His claim to fame was throwing the only perfect game in World Series history. The only thing that saved the trade was Siebern, who over four seasons slashed .289/.381/.463 with 78 home runs and 367 RBI. He made two All-Star teams and picked up some MVP votes. Siebern’s four Kansas City years were basically peak Eric Hosmer.

Maris hit his peak in New York. In 1960, he led the league in several offensive categories, including WAR (7.7), RBI (112), and slugging percentage. His sweet left-handed swing was custom-built for Yankee Stadium. That production earned him the league’s MVP award. Ouch.

Maris was even better in 1961, slashing .269/.372/.620 and leading the league in home runs (61), RBI (141), runs (132), and total bases (366). He won a second MVP award.

Maris broke Babe Ruth’s cherished 60-home run record and received numerous death threats for his trouble. Baseball fans can get nutty. Not “soccer-fan nutty”, but nutty enough.

If you want to know what kind of man Maris was, consider this. His 61st home run ball landed in the hands of 19-year-old Sal Durante. The young man was immediately surrounded by Stadium ushers. He told them he wanted to give the ball to Maris personally. After the game, Durante presented the ball to Maris, saying, “Here’s the ball, Roger.”

Maris then signed and dated the ball and gave it back to Durante, saying, “Keep it, kid. Put it up for auction. Somebody will pay you a lot of money for the ball.” Durante later sold the ball to a California restaurant owner for $5,000. The restaurateur then gave the ball back to Maris. Can you imagine that happening today? How much is that ball worth now?

Maris donated the ball to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where it still resides.

Maris played in New York for seven seasons, during which he hit a total of 203 home runs and won two World Series titles. But he never got over the abuse Yankee fans heaped on him for breaking the Babe’s cherished record. Despite playing in New York, the Maris family maintained their home base in Independence, Missouri. Roger really didn’t want to leave KC.

In December 1966, in a puzzling move, the Yankees traded Maris to St. Louis for utility infielder Charley Smith. The Yankees believed Maris was in decline, but the reality was that he’d had surgery to remove bone chips from his hand in 1965, then played most of the 1966 season with a broken bone in his hand. His batting average slumped, and his once prodigious power all but disappeared. Understandable. I’m not sure how the guy played, except on pure guts.

With his hand healed, Maris enjoyed a late-career revival for the Cardinals. At the ages of 32 and 33, his power had waned, but his defense was as good as ever. He played a pivotal role in the Cardinals’ 1967 World Series win, hitting .385 with a dinger and seven RBI. He nearly picked up another ring in 1968, a classic seven-game series that pitted the excellence of Bob Gibson against the immovable object of Mickey Lolich.

Maris retired after that 1968 season and owned and operated a Budweiser distributorship in Florida, something that Cardinals owner Gussie Busch had set him up with. Maris had a 10-year estrangement from the Yankees, which ended in 1978 when he returned for their Old-Timers’ Day.

In 1983, Maris was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He battled for two years before succumbing to the disease on December 14, 1985, at the very young age of 51.

Maris first came up for Hall of Fame consideration in 1974 but could never garner enough votes for induction. Despite his two MVP awards, the home run record, three World Series titles, and seven All-Star appearances, his overall body of work fell just a little short.

Analytics, invented long after Maris’ passing, show him with a little over 38 WAR, certainly a respectable total, but not enough to warrant Hall of Fame induction.

Despite that, Maris’ legacy lives on. The Yankees retired his No. 9 jersey and gave him a plaque in Monument Park. Can you believe the Yanks have 22 retired numbers? If they continue at this pace, they’ll have to start assigning letters.

The Postal Service issued a Roger Maris commemorative stamp in 1999. Barry Pepper played Maris in the acclaimed movie “61*.” In 2023, a Maris game-worn 1961 jersey sold for $1.59 million. His last game was almost 60 years ago, but people remember.

If you ever happen to be in Fargo, plan to make a stop at the West Acres Shopping Center. The mall is home to the outstanding Roger Maris Museum. Always a modest man, Maris first rejected the idea of a museum in his honor. He eventually relented on the condition that the museum would never charge admission.

Former teammate Moose Skowron said, “People just remember the 61 home runs. They forgot that Roger was an excellent base stealer and a superb right fielder. He was the best defensive right fielder in the majors. He was an all-around ballplayer, a humble guy, and a real team player. History never gave him his due.”

Wrexham owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac will celebrate the fifth anniversary of their purchase of the Welsh soccer team by doing live commentary during a match later this month.

Reynolds and Mac, who purchased the then-non-League club in 2021, will call the game on a special broadcast when Wrexham hosts fellow English Football League Championship side Swansea at 4 p.m. ET on March 13. It is expected to provide "behind-the-scenes insight" and "documentary-style insider access" over the course of the match, which will be broadcast on Paramount+ in the U.S.

“As with our decision to take over Wrexham five years ago, we genuinely have no idea how this is going to go, but we will give it our best. Neither of us have called a sporting event of any variety, let alone a sport we basically learned the rules of five years ago,” the pair said in a joint statement.

“Either way, it will be another unpredictable day at the STōK Cae Ras and we can’t wait. We're grateful to our partners at the EFL and Sky Sports, the latter of which we hope is ready with the bleep button.”

Wrexham currently sit in sixth place in the Championship table, holding on to one of the four playoff places. The Red Dragons have won an unprecedented three consecutive promotions since 2023 and are looking to be one of the three teams from the division that will move up to the Premier League next season.

The Hollywood duo purchased Wrexham for $2.5 million in 2020. Since they acquired the club, it has drawn international recognition — thanks in part to the “Welcome to Wrexham” documentary series the two have produced on FX.