Tag: Sports Business

A new group is buying up minor league baseball teams at a feverish pace. What’s the end game?
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A new group is buying up minor league baseball teams at a feverish pace. What’s the end game?

WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. — The artificial turf at Heritage Financial Park is new. So is the right-field wall that opens wide enough for an 18-wheeler to haul concert equipment onto the field. The party deck is sponsored by a brewery that’s 10 miles away, giant windows have been installed around the corporate event space overlooking left field, and the renovated home clubhouse, where the Hudson Valley Renegades dress before games, has two indoor batting cages flanked by state-of-the-art data and motion-capture technology.This is Class-A baseball in 2024. Quirky and local, but also big business that’s booming. Minor-league attendance is up and approaching pre-pandemic levels, new ballparks are being built, and existing franchises are selling at what are believed to be record prices. These are...
Iowa-UConn Final Four matchup breaks record for most-watched women’s college basketball game
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Iowa-UConn Final Four matchup breaks record for most-watched women’s college basketball game

Another Iowa women’s basketball game, another new record for the sport when it comes to viewership.Iowa’s 71-69 win over UConn on Friday night in Cleveland set a new record for the most-watched women’s college basketball game in history. The game was viewed by 14.2 million people and peaked at 17 million viewers. Chad Leistikow of the Des Moines Register was the first to report the news.This game tops the previous all-time viewership record, which was set on Monday when Iowa’s win over LSU averaged 12.3 million viewers and peaked at 16 million viewers. To put this in perspective. This game tops… • Every World Series game last year.• Every NBA Finals game last year.• Every Daytona 500 since 2013.• Every Masters final round viewership since 2013.• All but five CFB games in 2023. https://t.c...
How Cabot Citrus Farms made something new out of an old golf resort
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How Cabot Citrus Farms made something new out of an old golf resort

BROOKSVILLE, Fla. — Not every great golf course lives forever. Even fewer of the very good ones do.World Woods was a good bet to thrive when it opened in 1993, in the thick of one of the great golf booms in America, when the confluence of real estate development and suburban flight created an environment where a new golf course a day opened throughout the country.With a Japanese businessman owner who held deep pockets, one of the biggest golf course designers of the generation working on two courses and a location within an hour of a growing Tampa, World Woods bore similarities to Bandon Dunes and even had advantages over the Oregon golf resort that also opened in the 1990s.It all worked at World Woods — until it didn’t.World Woods had every reason to be a smashing success in the golf ind...
Inside the ‘very predatory’ world of illegal betting that lured Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter
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Inside the ‘very predatory’ world of illegal betting that lured Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter

In the story Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara initially told to ESPN, the two men logged into Ohtani’s bank account together on eight or nine occasions in 2023 and wired increments of $500,000 to Mathew Bowyer, an alleged illegal bookmaker under federal investigation. In the story Ohtani told the public days after Mizuhara recanted his initial claims and was fired by the Dodgers, the interpreter stole the money to pay off his gambling debts.Both versions of the story generated a question that stumped the general public: Why would a bookie extend a line of credit of at least $4.5 million to someone who said he was drawing an $85,000 salary as an interpreter with the Los Angeles Angels? The scenario was easier to understand for those acquainted with the inner workings of gambling ...
The business of Sarah Nurse: She’s one of the faces of hockey, but her sights are set on more
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The business of Sarah Nurse: She’s one of the faces of hockey, but her sights are set on more

TORONTO — Sarah Nurse was driving home from a recent PWHL Toronto practice when she got a bit of sage advice.It wasn’t from a podcast or a friend on the phone. The advice came courtesy of a billboard on the side of the road in Canada’s most populous city, featuring her own face with the Adidas slogan “You got this.”“I was like, yeah, I do,” Nurse said with a laugh.The billboard she drove past is one of many across the country, including a massive advertisement at Yonge-Dundas Square — Toronto’s closest approximation to Times Square in New York City — that pairs Nurse with Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes and World Cup champion Lionel Messi.Nurse, 29, has had major partnerships in the past. In 2020, Tim Hortons and Mattel collaborated to make a Barbie doll in her likeness. In 2022, she was f...
Professional tennis is broken. Here’s how to fix it
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Professional tennis is broken. Here’s how to fix it

Tennis is doing what it does every 10-15 years or so — having a reckoning with its endless schedule, its nonsensical governing structure, and a competitive format that even devout fans struggle to understand.The sport is played across the world, with countries on every continent except Antarctica producing top players. No major sport integrates men and women more successfully, or has come as close to pay equality, though there is work to be done on those fronts. Nearly every day of the year, an enticing professional match unfolds somewhere on the planet.And yet, the nearly unanimous opinion of everyone involved in the game — its leaders, its players, tournament organizers, sponsors, media executives, coaches — is that professional tennis is broken, a structural mess that exhausts its play...
NFL’s best touchdown celebrations of 2023: A favorite from all 32 teams
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NFL’s best touchdown celebrations of 2023: A favorite from all 32 teams

Scoring touchdowns during each offensive possession is the unspoken goal for every NFL team. For decades, celebrations have been the norm in accompanying touchdowns. It goes back all the way to the 1960s with Homer Jones and his touchdown spike.Touchdown celebrations have become a choreographed production for some teams. Think back to the 1980s when Washington’s “Fun Bunch” made enemies after its group of players participated in a jumping high-five after a score. And think recently when the Seattle Seahawks did their best New Edition and *NSYNC impersonations, or when the Minnesota Vikings decided to play a game of Duck, Duck, Goose in the end zone.GO DEEPERThe NFL's most memorable TD celebrations: Deion Sanders' high-step, the Ickey Shuffle, moreThe 2023 NFL season has had its share of m...
Shorter pitch clock, new runner’s lane among MLB’s rule changes for 2024
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Shorter pitch clock, new runner’s lane among MLB’s rule changes for 2024

A tighter, 18-second pitch clock with runners on base … a new, wider runner’s lane between home and first base … one fewer mound visit.All those rule changes are coming to Major League Baseball in 2024, as part of a series of tweaks and changes announced by MLB on Thursday. The Athletic initially reported on many of these proposals in early November from the general managers’ meetings. They were formally approved by the competition committee Thursday. The most notable changes are these:The pitch clock: With runners on base, pitchers will have 18 seconds between pitches, down from 20 this year. MLB proposed the change after seeing the average time of a nine-inning game grow by more than seven minutes, from 2 hours, 36 minutes in April to 2:44 in September.The runner’s lane: After years of ...
Golf with a purpose: How The Park dared to be different
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Golf with a purpose: How The Park dared to be different

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — It’s lunchtime on a mid-November Saturday afternoon and the word of the day is eclectic. I’ve just finished my morning round at The Park with a three-putt for par on the forgiving 18th hole, and I saddle up at the cabana, the bar/small bites stand strategically located at the front of the property.A foursome that was a few holes ahead of me is heading off to their vehicles — while allowing for their anonymity, let’s just say they can be members anywhere they want to be in the golf-rich West Palm Beach/Jupiter area. Making the turn to the back nine are the bros wanting to chase down their transfusions with High Noons. Though they represent very different ends of the Saturday golfer spectrum, you recognize both groups as what a golfer “looks” like.But the cabana occu...
Washington Spirit, Lyon owner Michele Kang buys London City Lionesses
Sports

Washington Spirit, Lyon owner Michele Kang buys London City Lionesses

On Friday, Michele Kang announced she has acquired London City Lionesses FC, an independent club competing in the FA Women’s Championship. The English club is another “foundational block” in her vision to grow her global multi-club organization, following her agreement earlier this year to take over OL Feminine and ownership of the Washington Spirit.“As you can imagine, if you’re trying to build a preeminent women’s football organization, you have to be where the center of gravity is,” Kang told The Athletic ahead of Friday’s announcement. “England is definitely one of them. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to land, and London City Lionesses being the only independent team, it was a no-brainer.”Rather than having to convince a men’s club to allow Kang to split their women’s team apart...