🃏 The Cheapest Owner in Baseball Makes the Offer of a Lifetime

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I don’t know how baseball manages it, but they continue to churn out the most boring stars of all time. Look no further than MLB’s Rookie of the Year, who couldn’t have been less excited to win the award this week.

Is it the culture of the sport? Bad luck? Or maybe the fact that no one under the age of 50 watches the games anymore? The answer is probably just “yes.”

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: The Cheapest Owner in Baseball Makes the Offer of a Lifetime

📉 Biggest Loser: The Clippers’ New $100 Million Headache

🏆 Winner’s Circle: That Time POTUS Picked the CFB National Champion

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🗞 The Big Story

This just became the most valuable baseball card in the world, but some fans aren’t happy with how it happened.

Background: On November 13th, Topps released 251 cards from their MLB Debut Patch series into their packs.

Each one of these cards is a 1-of-1 and features an autograph as well as a patch from that player’s jersey from the day they made their MLB debut.

Last year, when Topps first launched this series, a trading card store offered $150,000 to the person who pulled the Anthony Volpe debut patch card, and even then, it took roughly eight months for that card to be found.

Pirates’ Bounty: These cards can be pulled in packs that sell at Walmart or Target for as cheap as $50 or $60, but thanks to a new bounty, some packs are selling for as much as $500… however, that’s not why fans are so upset.

See, three days after the rookie cards’ were released, the Pittsburgh Pirates put up a bounty for whoever finds the Paul Skenes rookie card. Their offer includes:

• Two Pirates season tickets behind home plate for the next 30 years

• A softball game for 30 of your friends at PNC Park

• Batting practice with the team

For reference, the most expensive Paul Skenes card up to this point was sold for $123,220 in September, but according to Cllct, the value of this trade offer could be worth well over $2 million — which is sort of the whole problem.

Because while the Pirate’s owner, Bob Nutting, is regarded as the cheapest owner in baseball for refusing to acquire top talent or even pay his own players, he’s willing to put up millions of dollars for a single baseball card.

Maybe whoever finds this card should get ownership of the team too…

📉 Biggest Loser

The Clipper’s new $100M video board presents a problem that almost no one is talking about, but it could be the reason the team makes millions.

Background: The Halo Board is currently the largest double-sided arena video board in the world.

Not only does it weigh twice as much as most NBA video boards, but if you were to roll it out, the Halo Board would be:

• 3.5x the width of the Hollywood sign

• The tallest building in Los Angeles (stacked vertically)

This gives the Clippers the equivalent screen real estate of 3,592 60-inch TVs, which they’ve been using for everything from advance player stats to games that fans can play with buttons built into their seats.

Challenges: The fact that no team in the world has ever had a canvas this big means that it has come with some unique challenges, including the fact that all maintenance has to be done from a catwalk more than 100 feet above the ground since this thing can’t be lowered.

But quite possibly the biggest issue the team and their graphics partners ran into is the fact that in the early stages, it took 51 days to render basic files for the Halo Board.

This is obviously an issue, since most graphics for basketball games have to be able to be changed at a moment’s notice, and even though the company, Spinifex, was able to cut that render time down, a 30-second clip for the Halo can still be as big as 150 GB.

For reference, my TikTok videos are less than 2 GB.

Potential: The novelty of such a big screen could be the reason sponsors haven’t “deeply engaged” with the Halo Board yet, even as the Clippers have pitched them on the possibility of a full-board takeover for cinematic advertising.

However, it seems that once sponsors catch up with just how impressive this thing is, it’s only a matter of time before the Clippers can probably start charging some of the highest rates in all of sports for in-game advertising.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

The United States President has the power to decide college football’s national champion, but the one time this power was used, it changed college football history forever.

Here’s the crazy story.

Background: In 1969, the Texas Longhorns and Arkansas Razorbacks were the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country heading into their final regular season match-up.

It’s important to note, that at the time, the AP and United Press International polls were responsible for determining the official national champion after each bowl season; however, this 1969 season turned out to be different.

Executive Decision: That’s because the 37th president, Richard Nixon, was a huge college football fan, and he wanted to attend the December 6th Texas-Arkansas game in person.

But it wasn’t his presence that ended up being the main story because, before the game, Nixon also declared that he would name the winner of this game the 1969 College Football National Champion, even though the official polls wouldn’t be decided for another month.

Now, on the surface, this unofficial declaration doesn’t seem like it should have been much of an issue—both teams were undefeated and deserving of being champions.

However, Nixon made one critical mistake with this announcement.

But before realizing it, he attended what would go down as a historic 15-14 Texas comeback victory, in which he even joined the halftime broadcast to give his prediction for the second half:

Left Out: It was during this interview that the commentator asked the POTUS about leaving Penn State out of his National Championship declaration since the Nittany Lions were on their way to back-to-back undefeated seasons.

Nixon said there might need to be a “Super College Bowl” after this game to decide the champion once and for all… and it actually almost happened.

In fact, after the Texas-Arkansas game, Nixon met with both teams and even presented a plaque to Texas’ head coach—which has since been lost over the years.

However, when Penn State got the chance to play the unofficial national champion Texas Longhorns in the Cotton Bowl that year in what would have been the official title game, the Nittany Lions opted out, deciding instead to play Missouri in the Orange Bowl where they won 10-3.

Now, there’s still no definitive reason for why they did this, and Nixon even tried awarding Penn State a second-place plaque, but coach Joe Paterno told him to “shove it.”

Ultimately, the AP and UPI polls agreed with Nixon, naming Texas the consensus national champions and leaving Penn State fans wondering “what if” the president had never gotten involved.

⏱ In Other News

• He Was the #1 TE in the Country, Then He Disappeared

• Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson Draws 108 million viewers worldwide

• I rated M&T Bank Stadium higher than Lambeau Field

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👋 Happy Friday! I promised an honest review of Soldier Field, and here it is:

@tyler.m.webb

My OFFICIAL rating of Soldier Field is… 🤔 @TickPick #nflfootball #chicagobears #greenbaypackers #soldierfield #chicago #nflstadiums #nfl... See more

TL;DR - the architecture is cool, the design sucks.