Monday Morning Halfback: Saturday Night Hockey’s lineup, and Guerrero finally hits one out of Rogers Centre

Simon Houpt reports on the business of sports for the Globe; Cathal Kelly is the Globe’s national sports columnist.

S.H.: Hey, Cathal – Jamie’s off today so he asked if I could be the one to play second banana to you this week. But you’ve been on holiday, too. I’ve always wondered – what does a vacation look like for someone like you? Do you log out of TSN and Sportsnet and, like, fire up a 12-part podcast series on Venetian Baroque operas?

C.K.: Co-banana. We’re all co-bananas here.

Baroque opera? No, I’m more of a commedia dell’arte guy. Given the choice between a book and a game, I’ll take the book. That said, this stuff seeps in at the edges, even when you’re trying to avoid it. I couldn’t help but get sucked in by the bit of a bait and switch at what used to be called Hockey Night in Canada.

For a minute there, it felt like the whole hockey broadcast ecosystem was about to be exploded. You wrote a lovely piece about it. But then Sportsnet came out with its new line-up – which is the old line-up, plus Colby Armstrong.

What do you, a long-time media watcher, make of the whole business? And do you think Sportsnet has improved what most people agreed was a bit of a dreary product?

S.H.: Why do I feel like you’re baiting me into pointing out that, sure, the new lineup is the same lineup plus Armstrong … but, um, minus the only woman hockey analyst who regularly appeared on Sportsnet broadcasts?

I thought Jennifer Botterill was great. I realize (because I unfortunately read the comment boards sometimes) that not everyone was a fan, but if that’s the metric that network executives are using then Ron MacLean (who, again, I like) should have been gone years ago.

At the very least, dumping Botterill overboard is a bad, bad look, and it’s definitely not going to help grow the game – which is supposedly what the NHL and Sportsnet are trying to do.

Having said that, I do think they could bring in new audiences if Sportsnet started producing some of the reality-style hockey programming that Amazon’s been doing. Wouldn’t you love to see a docuseries of the new Leafs star Gavin McKenna living with John Tavares’s family?

C.K.: What I’d like even more is a Philip Roth novel about an 18-year-old guy who’s been loosed in the world with millions of dollars burning a hole in his pocket, and finding out at the last minute that he has to live with one of his co-workers, who’s not exactly in the midst of his drugs-pubs-and-parties years. Call it Portnoy’s Hockey Complaint.

I’m weary of behind-the-scenes shows. There’s no behind any more. It’s all scenes. These are lightly scripted soap operas starring people so media conditioned that they are functionally professional actors. Very little ‘reality’ to this sort of reality TV.

I am vaguely open to the idea of more (and a lot better) sports fiction. Based solely on viewership, sports is the great cultural product of our time. So why has this century not produced a truly great piece of sports-adjacent art? Where’s our The Natural or The Sun Also Rises?

Checking the old ticker, I see that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has finally hit a home run in Toronto. It’s only been a year.

On the one hand, Guerrero has been a complete bust this season. On the other, maybe he’s trying to be more like one of those ski instructors who only works a couple of months a year, then spends the rest of it surfing. I suppose a September-October Guerrero is better than an April-August Guerrero.

Does this shocking development change your take on the Jays? And – remind me – what is your take on the Jays?

S.H.: Well, since I’m Jamie’s substitute today, and he already predicted the Jays are going to grab the last wild card spot, I guess I have to say this news definitely means they’re making the playoffs. But I almost wish they won’t: I’ve had enough thwarted hopes in my life, and even if they squeeze through it’ll just end in heartbreak, anyway. Might as well get that over before October.

I will say, some stories of pain are more entertaining than others. I noticed LIV Golf finally declared bankruptcy this week. Do you think that signals a turning point in the great era of sportswashing? Or does it just mean the end of dumb money in sports? Could Carney’s investment summit this week still squeeze a few billion from the Saudis for, say, the CFL or NSL?

C.K.: I believe the dumb money will continue to flow for the foreseeable future. It’s only a matter of time before the Sacramento Kings move to a corn field in Iowa and get renamed the Des Moines DataCenterz.

LIV’s problem wasn’t money. It was that everyone in sports management now styles themselves a visionary. They thought they could disrupt a sport that hasn’t changed in any substantial way in 500 years. New golf was always bound to do as well as New Coke.

They should’ve done the obvious thing – partnering with and then gradually consuming the PGA. That was and still is possible.

All of these leagues are vulnerable to foreign takeover, as long as the dollars are ridiculous and there is no actual business plan. Look at the NFL’s misadventure this week in Australia. Who thought dragging two teams 17 time zones away for a one-off game was a good idea? I’ll tell you who – visionaries.

On the subject of greed, the Leafs are getting it on the chin for jacking ticket prices again. The U.S. Open – where a grounds pass costs US$400 – spurred the same sort of conversation.

My take on this is that if people are dumb enough to pay it, teams and leagues are incentivized to be greedy enough to ask for it. What’s the most you would pay to go to a game?

S.H.: Listen, I’m still agog at all the soccer fans I talked to over the summer who happily spent thousands on World Cup tickets, so you’re asking the wrong guy. I’ve just never understood that mindset.

You know, after George Chuvalo died on Saturday, I took a look back in the Globe’s archives at some of our coverage of his 1972 match in Vancouver against Muhammad Ali. We ran a piece on the day of the bout about how the promoter, Murray Pezim, was charging $100 for ringside seats but sales were so bad it looked as if he was going to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. (There was, I should say, some gleeful topspin in the prose; our colleagues have always evidently enjoyed kicking a guy when he was down.)

Right below that article was an ad noting the match in Toronto would air “Free on Cable TV 10.” Once upon a time, it seems, Edward Rogers was only too happy to give away blockbuster sports programming. Mind you, back then his customers signed on for life; cable monopolies were a nice little business for a few decades there.

C.K.: I don’t think there is any ceiling on what some people will now pay to get into the big game. I was sitting there at this summer’s World Cup final in New Jersey, in what I thought were the best seats in the house (since they were amongst the very few that were shaded), thinking, ‘Someone would have paid my annual salary to be in this seat for the next three hours.’ It’s beyond bonkers. It’s obscene.

I’m not sure of anything when it comes to where sports is headed. But I am very sure that its current, vertical growth trajectory will end at some point. And I’m equally sure that resting the entirety of your business on the changeable appetites of the very rich, while spurning the middle- and working classes, is a great way to hurry that end.