Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Game Time: Behind the Scenes of Sports Controversies

I went to the LA Times Festival of Books (April 13-14). I'm posting my notes on the various panel discussions I attended.

The ninth and final panel discussion I attended was "Game Time: Behind the Scenes of Sports Controversies."

Here is an edited panelist biography via the LA Times website.

Ken Bensinger has been a working journalist for twenty years, getting his start in a small magazine in New York soon after graduating from college before jumping to the Wall Street Journal where he was given his first beats to cover.

Mark Leibovich is Chief National Correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Washington, D.C. with this family and occasionally eats lunch there. His newest book is "Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times."

Rob Neyer is the Commissioner of the West Coast League, the premier collegiate summer baseball league west of the Mississippi River. He's written or co-written seven books about baseball, and his latest "Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game," won the Casey Award as the best baseball book published in 2018. He lives in Oregon with his wife and daughter.

And the following are my notes from the panel discussion:

Ken Bensinger. Many books have been written about soccer and corruption. He wanted to do it from a different direction. FIFA bullies countries. FIFA will say that they will kick countries out of the World Cup. There needs to be oversight over FIFA. Media companies need to be looked at. Their money causes corruption.

Mark Leibovich. Football and politics both have redeeming qualities. Politics impacts peoples lives. In the NFL, you can’t hide from poor performance. He likes and dislikes people in both realms. Politics are for keeps. The NFL commissioner needs to be fired. There should be term limits for football owners. They have outsized influence.

Rob Neyer. Why write a book about a random baseball game: about a team that would eventually win the World Series versus a team that was out of the playoffs? His editor wanted him to pick a game that already happened: Oakland A’s versus Houston Astros.

Baseball should work towards a game that was played in the 70s and 80s. The game now is all about home runs and strike outs. In the 70s and 80s, you had players doing different things. Stealing bases, for example. Baseball fans spend too much time rooting for billionaires and millionaires. We need to worry about how minor leaguers live.