BERKELEY, CA – “You want to see what Americans care about?” Michael Lewis asks.

You probably know Lewis. He takes sports and societal narratives – the sabermetric undercurrent, a homeless kid seemingly born to be a left tackle, the careful yet tough influence of a high school coach – and turns them into influential books.

The really good subjects, he has found, are right under your nose and no one is saying anything about them. That eventually becomes impossible.

Take travel sports.

“Go to a 10 year old softball game and watch the parents,” Lewis said in March at the Project Play Summit. “They care about that more than anything.”

Across campus at the University of California, another author, Richard Reeves, raised within a British youth sports system much more infatuated with playing than the material things you can get from sports, offered this reading of the landscape: “Travel sports is the work of the devil.”

Reeves’ three sons were around middle school age when he and his wife brought them over from the United Kingdom to America, and into the so-called youth sports industrial complex.

 “You’ve got these kids being hauled around the country and thinking they gotta do this, parents shouting at the kids and they had scouts there and individual coaches,” he tells USA TODAY Sports. “I was horrified by the culture around it.”

Lewis had two softball-playing daughters and, like so many of us, gave himself to their careers.

“The most pathetic character inside it is the one who’s paying for it all,” Lewis writes in “Playing to Win,” his 2020 audiobook that details life in the complex.

“The sports parent funds the entire operation but is regarded by everyone else as expendable. The central truth of this elaborate mechanism we’ve built so that our children might compete against each other might be this: How little a parent can do to help the child. As a result, the overwhelming emotion of the sport parent is anxiety.”

But would he do it again? It’s a question he thought about as he wrote, and as he spoke to the crowd at Project Play five years later about what has become a $40 billion industry.

The two authors (and dads) offer perspective on their zany escapades within travel ball and advice on how we can negotiate it – or perhaps avoid it entirely.

Travel and youth sports can give parents a ‘moral education’

Lewis has raised two daughters and a son with his wife, Tabitha Soren. Soren thought softball would be a nice way for dad and his young daughters, Quinn and Dixie, to bond.

What could go wrong? Ther local softball league was founded by Cal religion professor Harlan Stelmach under the premise it existed for the “moral education of parents.”

It was against the rules to talk about the score, or even to use verbs from the stands to instruct or criticize your daughter while she was playing.

“Left to their own devices, children playing sports make it fun,” Stelmach said. “It’s when adults get involved that the problems arise.”

The goal was a .500 record, and an evaluation was held to select teams balanced equally by skill.

But dad coaches whose daughters were good players told their children to “tank” their formal evaluations so they would be undervalued. The rules were about adult behavior.

“You’re not just teaching the kids, you’re teaching the parents,” Lewis says. “Most of the competitive landscape was Daddy ball. It was dads who cared too much, who were frustrated by their own lack of success as baseball players, whose wives had seen this is the one way to interest their husband in their daughter was to get them into competitive sports and have them run their sporting lives.”

Haley Woods, an All-American catcher and power hitter at Cal who coached Dixie Lewis when she became a competitive travel player, had a poignant message for parents. It’s what we need to understand when our kids are young: Don’t see them as who you wish them to be, but for who they are.

Growing up in England, Reeves played sports all the time, with no infatuation with what he might become. Rugby didn’t help you get into Oxford, anyway.

“I wasn’t very good at anything, but my dad coached rugby,” Reeves says. “He’d played. We’d cut a hole in the fence so we could get into the school tennis courts, and they looked the other way, and summers were spent on the tennis courts. I never had an hour of tennis coaching in my life, but I’m an OK tennis player as a result. …

“I was fortunate enough to grow up with a very clear sense from my parents of the joy and the value of sport, but always on the play side. … I lived in fear of one of my kids getting good enough to play travel sports.”

Reeves wrote the 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About it.” His session at Project Play addressed youth coaches and administrators looking for ways to engage more boys in sports as their participation numbers are plummeting.

Problems with boys and girls sports can arise when we get out of our comfortable communities and into the industrial complex.

“It’s like, you have these small furry creatures who have been raised on an island without predators,” Lewis says.

We toss them into the jungle, and our education continues.

Observing travel sports can be a pill for improving a child’s character

At some point, with players’ and parents’ inner ambition brimming beneath the surface, the Berkeley softball league formed a travel team. Lewis’ older daughter, Quinn, was 9.

Now they were driving an hour away to play. At first they got pummeled, which tested the adults’ limits’ of frustration.

“At a kid’s ballgame, you’re never quite sure who’s going to go mad – only that someone will,” Lewis writes in “Playing to Win.”

No trait – education level, income, race or gender – was predictive of it, he observed. The explosion happened to the Berkeley parents the first time the team was close to winning.

Near the end of the game, one of their runners slid into home. The umpire called her safe. Lewis recalled four opposing coaches running out of the dugout and screaming at her, profanities flying.

The umpire started to cry.

“The Berkeley parents were always very good at not being the first one to throw a punch,” Lewis said, “but (they) are always on a hair trigger for other parents’ bad behavior. So their coaches get their fans riled up, they’re all screaming at the ump. The Berkeley parents are then outraged.

“On the field, they’re like 20 little girls looking back and forth, with 70 parents screaming at the top of their lungs, veins popping, faces red. Through the noise – and the din was incredible – you heard this Berkeley mom shriek, What horrible modeling for our children.”

The umpire tossed the opposing head coach. He then told her he was director of facilities and said she was fired. Lewis followed her as she moped toward the parking lot. He had to give her a pep talk to stay.

“I remember having this feeling like, yeah, on the surface, it is horrible,” he said. “On the other hand, softball became one way to show my children – and then basketball with my son – how not to behave as a grown-up.

“Mostly what they got from grown-ups was a lot of artificial behavior, like polite grown-up behavior. When they saw the mask come off, then we can have a serious talk about how you behave and shouldn’t behave.”

It’s a tactic Jeff Nelligan, another sports dad and commentator on American parenting I’ve interviewed, used with his three sons. Daily life, he writes, offers advice moms and dads can’t concoct on their own: good, bad, and inspirational.

Our job, Nelligan says, is to judge what we see.

“Every single one of us makes judgments about people and situations throughout our day,” he writes. “It’s the only way to successfully navigate through life.”

We learn about the length people go for our kids, and when we go too far. Perhaps for Lewis, it was when he went to Cal’s women’s softball team and, in his words, “threw a sack of money” at its players to coach the Berkeley team and reverse their losing.

Or when he was interviewing then-President Barack Obama for a story aboard Air Force One. When they arrived in Washington, the president asked Lewis to ride back to the White House to continue their discussion.

Lewis said he had to rush home for a girls softball tournament.

COACH STEVE: Ranking the 6 worst youth sports parents

Don’t look at travel sports as something that will pay for college, but as a learning experience

The next time you’re at your child’s game and want to say something out loud, pretend you are on a national stage. With social media documenting everything, you essentially are.

Before you speak, think about what you are about to say, whether it be an in-game instruction to your kid, who might just glare at you, or a jab at another parent, which will make you a spectacle.

Sports parenting is a lot like driving, Lewis writes. He says you want to go over and scream at the coach who benched your child like you want to give the finger to the person who cheated at the four-way stop sign. But 24 hours later, you have trouble even remembering why you got so upset.

Your exercise can start when your kids are young, when the stakes are much lower, nonexistent really. What you stop yourself from saying might teach you something about the industrial complex you are about to enter.

Reeves, the British author, says he came into it blindly.

“I think this whole college thing, the selection thing, the scholarship thing, it’s putting this downward pressure on youth sports that is very distorting, and I don’t know what to do about it, but I do know that we survived it,” he says. “We were never parents trying to get the kids into these highly selective colleges who would like do oboe on Tuesday and lacrosse on Wednesday and their nonprofit on Thursday and the Mandarin class on Friday.

“God, it was exhausting. I was like my kids are just gonna go to a state college and they’ll be fine.”

One of his sons, Bryce, wound up on a travel soccer team and got injured. At that point, the family decided they didn’t want the scene to infiltrate their life any further.

“Saturdays are for the sofa,” he says. “They’re not for getting up at 6 to drive to New Jersey.”

Lewis spent five years of nearly 30 hours per week running his childrens’ sports and 10 as commissioner of the travel softball league, mostly to the objections of his wife.

“In the beginning (it) was, ‘How sweet, Michael’s getting very involved in the daughter’s lives,” Lewis says, “and then it’s like, ‘Wait, we’re spending 52 nights a year at the Hampton Inn in Manteca?’ …

“Her view is there was a price that was paid, and the price was that our life was less diversified. It was more specialized, even if it wasn’t specialized in a single sport. It was severed but it was all or nothing, and the kids all approached it that way. They were all really into it.”

Dixie had a drive that was different, her dad thought. As a young teenager, she had sought out Haley Woods’ elite Cal Nuggets travel softball team on her own and made the team.

She threw herself into the journey and experience. She played in front of college coaches, and she found a role model.

“Everything she says to me, I take seriously, and there’s so few grown-ups I feel that way about,” she told her father about Woods. “She has a lot to say that’s really useful to me.”

Always play sports for the love of them, no matter how old you are

Lewis admits the tens of thousands spent on travel ball fees, private lessons and travel costs and the pursuit of athletic scholarships is much better invested in a 529 college fund.

Still, he also adds, “My view of all this was that there’s so many things you can learn through this experience that what sacrifice was involved was totally worth it.”

Lewis and his daughter observed that top softball schools barely acknowledged ones that couldn’t offer athletic scholarships. Dixie found top academic schools that also had softball teams were surprisingly accessible.

As they walked around the campus of Division III Pomona College after she had committed there, she told her dad the travel ordeal had been worthwhile.

“Look where it got me,” she said. “I feel so good about myself and where I am. I wouldn’t change anything.”

Dixie died in a 2021 car accident during her freshman year of college. Lewis almost gave up writing. He didn’t because it was something that made him feel better. He draws deep satisfaction in knowing, amid his sorrow, his daughter chose her own path through youth sports, and she wound up at her dream school.

Lewis, though, fully acknowledges that roughly half the children in America have been priced out of the industrial complex. Youth sports participation as a whole, Aspen Institute research has found, falls off sharply by age 11.

Reeves’ son, Bryce, is now a Baltimore city public schools teacher and girls soccer coach. He plays on the Baltimore City FC amateur soccer squad.

‘They scouted him – that’s the thing – and he’s having a blast,’ his father says, ‘and that makes me so happy. …

“I think there’s something beautiful to just watching kids running around and having a great time. I’m here to make the case for mediocrity. And the trouble is, that doesn’t sound very inspiring.”

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

Jake Paul is the frontrunner to fight Anthony Joshua in early 2026, according to Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn.
Hearn believes the potential fight between Paul and Joshua would be commercially successful, breaking records for the sport.
Paul is coming off a win against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., while Joshua suffered a knockout loss to Daniel Dubois in 2024.

Jake Paul vs. Anthony Joshua, a real possibility? Very much so, says Joshua’s longtime promoter, Eddie Hearn.

‘This bizarre world we live in, I think Jake Paul is absolutely the frontrunner to fight Anthony Joshua next,’ Hearn told Sky Sports, adding that, ‘I truly believe that you’re going to see it at the beginning of 2026.’

Jake Paul (12-1, 7 KOs) would be facing the biggest challenge in his boxing career against Joshua (28-4, 25 KOs).

Though Joshua’s career is on the decline, he still was the unified heavyweight champion in 2016 and 2021. And at 6-6, Joshua would have a substantial size advantage over the 6-1 Paul.

‘I think it’s wildly dangerous,’ Hearn told TMZ Sports. ‘I mean, Jake Paul is a madman.’

Hearn said he was in New York for talks with Paul’s business partner Nakisa Bidarian and of the possible matchup between the 28-year-old Paul and 35-year-old Joshua said, ‘commercially this fight breaks all kinds of records. … This is going to do the biggest numbers probably than we’ve ever seen in the sport.’

Paul is coming off of a victory over Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. by unanimous decision. Joshua is coming off of a fifth-round knockout loss to Daniel Dubois.

One year later, the fate of Jordan Chiles’ bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics remains in limbo.

Sunday marks the one-year anniversary of the controversial ruling handed down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which effectively lowered Chiles’ score in the floor exercise final and bumped her off the medal podium. The ruling drew swift backlash from Team USA, prompted the international gymnastics federation to revise its rules and has sparked an ongoing legal battle at one of the highest levels of the international justice system.

Chiles’ multi-pronged appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal remains pending, and it is unclear when the court — which is the top judicial authority in Switzerland — will render a decision.

But as Chiles waits, here’s an update on the state of the case, the key players involved and what could happen next.

What started all of this?

Jordan Chiles was forced into this protracted fight for her medal through no fault of her own.

Chiles initially finished fifth in the floor exercise final, her score of 13.666 putting her behind Romanians Ana Barbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voineau. (Barbosu and Maneca-Voineau had identical scores of 13.7, but Barbosu’s higher execution score gave her the tiebreak.) Chiles’ coach Cecile Landi appealed, arguing Chiles had not been given full credit for a tour jete, a leap.

A review panel agreed, and the 0.100 that was added to her score put the American on the podium ahead of the Romanians.

The Romanians appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, finally settling on the timing of Chiles’ inquiry as their reason. CAS ruled in their favor, finding Chiles’ inquiry had been filed four seconds after the 60-second deadline.

But there appear to be multiple flaws with CAS’ decision.

First, Chiles didn’t even learn she was party to the case until less than 24 hours before the hearing because CAS was sending emails to the wrong addresses. That left her almost no time to mount a defense or find evidence to back her claim — a significant detail.

Chiles also did not know that the head of the CAS panel had a potential conflict of interest because he’d done work for the Romanian government.

‘CAS argued that Ms. Chiles should have submitted additional evidence regarding the timeliness of the inquiry and objected to (the head of the CAS panel) before the hearing,’ Chiles’ attorneys said in a March statement after filing additional information to rebut CAS’ arguments. 

‘But these arguments do not take in to account the fact that CAS itself failed to provide sufficient notice to Ms. Chiles … And further, once Ms. Chiles was finally notified, she had only a matter of hours to find representation to put forward her case.  Even then, Ms. Chiles was only provided an incomplete record of the proceedings to that point.’ 

Perhaps most importantly, CAS’ decision was based on the incorrect assumption that making an inquiry and logging it occurred simultaneously. Sure enough, video discovered after the CAS ruling clearly showed Landi making the inquiry within the allotted time. Three times, in fact.

Chiles asked CAS to reconsider its decision after that video was found, but it refused. She then appealed to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, arguing CAS’ decision was ‘procedurally deficient.’

“Jordan will not give up her effort to make clear to the world that the procedures governing her case were one-sided and to fight so that truth will prevail,” Maurice M. Suh, one of Chiles’ attorneys, said in March.

Where does Jordan Chiles’ appeal stand?

Very little has changed since Chiles filed her appeal with the Swiss Federal Tribunal last September. Publicly, at least.

‘It’s still playing out overseas,’ USA Gymnastics president Li Li Leung said earlier this week. ‘It has taken longer than we expected for the Swiss Tribunal to come out with a decision, but we’re still waiting for that decision. Just like everyone else is.’

The last public update came in March, when Chiles’ attorneys released a copy of their filing rebutting claims by CAS and the Romanians.

‘The way in which (they) safeguard their interests in the comments of February 19, 2025, unfortunately require (Chiles) to comment on this very briefly within the framework of its constitutionally guaranteed right of reply,’ Chiles’ attorneys wrote in their brief.

In the brief, Chiles’ attorneys said both CAS and the Romanians tried to introduce defenses that were either outdated or irrelevant. This included CAS’ claim that everyone at the hearing agreed to use a report by Omega to resolve the question of when the inquiry was filed.

Landi and Chiles’ attorney at the hearing had disputed the report, Chiles’ attorneys wrote. Also, the FIG said Omega did not record when a verbal inquiry was made, only when it was logged.

‘Even the CAS Panel came to the conclusion that the Omega Report as evidence was `not fully responsive to the information the Panel had sought,’ Chiles’ attorneys wrote in the brief. ‘The CAS Panel obviously felt compelled to rely on the Omega Report (wrongly and without any reason) solely because of the lack of evidence, even though the Omega Report did not address the question posed to the arbitral tribunal.’

Chiles’ attorneys also criticized CAS and the Romanians’ assertion that Chiles should somehow have known about the head of the CAS panel’s potential conflict of interest.

‘This … argument is not only belated and should therefore be dismissed out of hand, but is simply untenable,’ her attorneys wrote. ‘According to (CAS and the Romanians), Olympic athletes always before the start of the Olympic Games would have to carry out comprehensive investigations into the vested interests of all arbitrators on the CAS list – prophylactically, abstractly and without the existence of a concrete dispute.’

What has Jordan Chiles been up to since?

Jordan Chiles has been busy since the Paris Olympics. She was part of Simone Biles’ G.O.A.T. tour. She published her memoir, ‘I’m That Girl’. She got her own Barbie. She walked the red carpet and was in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition. She appeared in Nike’s powerful Super Bowl ad. She traveled. She competed for UCLA.

But the saga surrounding her medal weighed heavily, Chiles acknowledged. In an Instagram post last week, she said, ‘This year had its highs, but the lows hit different.

‘Every setback and every disappointment made me dig deeper and showed me what I’m truly made of. It also showed me who’s really in my corner,’ Chiles wrote. ‘Even when something’s taken from you- your truth and your worth is…Untouchable.

‘To everyone who held me down this past year, who sent prayers, messages, and love when I needed it most- you reminded me I’m never on this journey alone. I love y’all for real. You kept me standing when I didn’t even know how to take the next step,’ she added.

‘Still here. Still fighting. Still that girl.’

Is Jordan Chiles still competing?

“I’m ready. I’m definitely ready to go into next season,” Chiles told the Big Ten Network in April. “Yes, I’m coming back. I’m not leaving the Bruins. I definitely can’t wait to see how my senior year turns out and, you know, bring back that natty for real for real this time.”

After doing Biles’ G.O.A.T. tour last fall, Chiles competed for UCLA in the spring. She helped lead the Bruins to the Final Four, where they finished second to Oklahoma at the NCAA championships. She also won the uneven bars title, her third individual NCAA title overall, and was fifth in the all-around.

Are the Romanian gymnasts still competing?

Yes, both Ana Barbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea are still competing. Both were part of the Romanian team that just missed a medal at the European championships in May, finishing 0.497 behind bronze-medalist France.

Barbosu also won four individual medals at Europeans: a gold on floor exercise; silver on balance beam; and bronzes in the all-around and on uneven bars.

Barbosu announced in January that she will compete for Stanford, beginning this season.

How has gymnastics’ governing body reacted?

The only good thing to come out of this debacle is that it forced the International Gymnastics Federation to change its rules to ensure it never happens again.

According to rules issued in June, decisions on inquiries are final and cannot be challenged ‘including appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which has no jurisdiction over any challenge.’

The new rules also state that inquiries are to be made electronically or, if no electronic device is available, through an official inquiry form. The inquiry officer is required to note the time the inquiry was submitted, verifying that it was made within the deadline.

What could happen next?

If the Swiss Federal Tribunal rules in Chiles’ favor, the case will be sent back to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. If it rejects her appeal, she will technically be required to return her medal. But good luck with that.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.

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Vikings WR Rondale Moore suffered a significant left knee injury during a preseason game against the Texans.
The injury occurred almost a year after Moore tore his right ACL while playing for the Falcons.
Moore’s injury happened during a punt return and required a cart to take him off the field.

It may be a very long time until Rondale Moore plays regular-season football again.

The new Minnesota Vikings wide receiver had an opportunity for a fresh start with J.J. McCarthy and Kevin O’Connell, but the chance was cut short when he injured his knee in the Vikings-Houston Texans preseason Week 1 matchup on Saturday, Aug. 9.

Moore was injured on a punt return, when he was tackled and pulled out of bounds by Texans linebacker Jamal Hill. He immediately grabbed his left knee after the tackle.

Unfortunately for Moore, the knee injury came almost a year to the day when he tore his right ACL during training camp with the Atlanta Falcons.

Here’s what to know about Moore’s injury and when we may see him again:

Rondale Moore injury update

Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell said that Moore has a ‘pretty significant’ left knee injury, and that an MRI on Sunday, Aug. 10 should detail the severity.

O’Connell didn’t provide an exact diagnosis or nature of the injury.

Moore was injured on a punt return, immediately grabbing his left knee after he was tackled. The cart was brought out soon after, taking him back to the locker room.

Moore spent the entire 2024 season recovering from a torn ACL in his right knee as a member of the Falcons. He was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals 49th overall in the 2021 NFL Draft.

(This story will be updated.)

Jaguars’ Cam Little kicked a 70-yard field goal vs. the Steelers.
He drilled it with room to spare as time expired in the first half.
Because it’s the preseason, the kick won’t count as an NFL record.

His name might be Little, but he has a big, big leg.

Preseason might not matter, but there still are 120 total yards on the field, there still are two end zones and there still are two goal posts. Jacksonville Jaguars kicker Cam Little tested the limits of the human leg on Saturday night.

With time expiring in the first half of the Jaguars vs. Pittsburgh Steelers preseason matchup, Little lined up for a lengthy, 70-yard boot, and he drilled it with room to spare.

The field goal brought the Jaguars to within a touchdown at the expiration of the half.

While it’s a cool bit of trivia, it won’t be an official stat: Preseason stats don’t count toward any official stat.

Still, it’s neat that the former Arkansas kicker made a little bit of history on Saturday night.

Longest field goal in NFL history

The record for the longest field goal is 66 yards, and that was notched by former Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker vs. the Detroit Lions in 2021.

Little’s 70-yarder won’t be found in record books, however, considering preseason stats don’t count toward official NFL statistics.

In pro sports, angry fans are vocally demanding regime change.
Oakland Athletics fans organized boycotts two years ago as the team plotted relocation.
“Don’t know how much front offices and owners pay attention. But players, we hear it,’ says a former A’s player.

“Sell! The! Team! Sell! The! Team!”

On this August evening, it wasn’t desperate and determined fans of the Oakland Athletics imploring owner John Fisher to sell their beloved franchise in the name of competence and to ensure a future in the Bay Area. That future is gone.

No, this time, it was the opposition: Washington Nationals fans, disgusted with their club giving up 54 runs in four games amid a flailing rebuild and uncertain regime change, voiced their displeasure with the Lerner family’s ownership and their desire for more robust stewardship.

Some fans were even clad in T-shirts with the “Sell The Team” message, the Nationals’ iconic curly W flipped upside down to form the “m” in “team.”

Certainly, ire at the executive branch did not begin with Fisher’s gutting of the A’s, subsequent pit stop in Sacramento and, he hopes, ultimate destination in Las Vegas. Yet in the years since “SELL” T-shirts became de rigueur in the background of live shots from A’s games, fans across baseball and the sporting world seem to have found a louder voice.

A USA TODAY Sports analysis shows that 12 MLB teams have engaged in the chant in varying degrees of organization the past three years, perhaps indicating fans have taken a cue from Oakland’s highly-publicized unrest to demand more from their ownership groups.

The three-word plea can come spontaneously, or after significant planning, or sometimes to simply prove a grander point.

In Denver, it was heard when the woebegone Rockies hit a low point this season, a 21-0 loss to the San Diego Padres that dropped their record to 6-33. (No, they didn’t sell the team, but they did fire the manager a day later.)

On Chicago’s South Side, “Sell the team” has been a refrain at least three years running, with longtime owner Jerry Reinsdorf presiding over 101- and 121-loss seasons and another 100-loss campaign in the offing.

Yet the cries have been most extreme in Pittsburgh.

In many markets, the chant occurs late in games, the score lopsided, the crowd count dwindling and those remaining well-served. Yet after more than three decades of almost uninterrupted futility, Pirates fans save their disgust for owner Bob Nutting for the most high-profile moments.

Like Opening Day, where the season wasn’t even an hour old before a plane flew a banner over the stadium bearing the message and chants rang out before yet another loss.

Or Paul Skenes bobblehead day, when a sellout crowd recited the phrase on a day honoring the franchise player. And the team’s third sellout of the season? That was on Pittsburgh legend Mac Miller’s bobblehead day, when lines to get in stretched back to the Clemente Bridge – and the team’s loss that day incited another chorus of chants.

Heck, the protest even commuted up the road to PPG Paints Arena, when Pittsburgh native Pat McAfee hosted his “Big Night Aht” and McAfee was forced to sidebar with WWE broadcaster Michael Cole to explain exactly what the crowd was chanting.

It’s virtually endemic at this point, to the point the Seattle Mariners, now poised to claim an American League playoff berth, caught the “Sell” stray earlier this year, when a group of fans landed on the big screen in shirts that read, “Go Mariners!” only to turn in unison and reveal the message on the other side: Sell the team.

For the players there at the beginning of this run, it conjures up memories but also a desire for things to be, well, normal.

Business for the owners, personal for the fans

Two years have passed since the “Summer of Sell,” when A’s fans organized a boycott of the team and marked the top of the fifth inning of every game – home and road – to remain silent for one batter before beginning a “Sell the team” chant.

It was an emotional two-year ride, during which the A’s finalized plans to move to Las Vegas, fans staged an emotional “reverse boycott” and finally, spent 2024 bidding farewell to the Coliseum, and Oakland.

“It’s crazy because I enjoyed my time in the Coliseum. It’s such a unique place and it’s sad that they’re not playing there anymore,” says Ryan Noda, the A’s first baseman in 2023 now with the Baltimore Orioles. “Talking to (A’s players), they’re like, ‘I’d never thought I’d miss the Coliseum so much, but I do.’ The last two games there were pretty awesome.

“But in ’23, it was pretty crazy. There’d be games when there was nobody in the stands, save for the true diehards. I feel for the fan base. Because it’s such a storied franchise. And it’s sad to see that happen but at the same time, it’s a business, on both sides, when it comes to location and players.”

It’s business, but always personal with fans. Though the A’s may be laying over for three seasons at a Class AAA park in Sacramento, fans nonetheless fill the Yolo County night with chants of “Let’s Go Oakland,” and “Sell the team.”

Brent Rooker, the A’s two-time All-Star outfielder, committed to the long haul when he signed a $65 million extension through at least 2029, which should ostensibly cover their first two years in Las Vegas.

The “sell” movement was at full tilt in his first All-Star season, when the 2023 All-Star Game featured both the now traditional fifth inning chant as well as a “sell” serenade when Rooker came to bat.

Rooker has appreciated the fans’ fervor. Yet 400 games into his Athletics career, increasingly surrounded by high-achieving teammates, he’d appreciate perhaps a bit more fan focus between the white lines.

“There’s both sides to it, I guess. You respect people’s right to voice their opinion,” says Rooker, on pace for his third consecutive 30-homer season. “At the same time, you kind of wish that energy was directed more toward supporting what’s happening on the field, because we’re giving a lot of effort and work really hard and a lot goes into going out and competing every night.

“So, you see both sides of it. you respect people’s rights to voice their opinions. But there are times we wished that energy was directed more at supporting what we’re doing on the field.”

Freedom of speech – just watch what you say

Yet inept or at least inadequate ownership is the hardest thing in sports to shake; barring high corporate crimes or misdemeanors, the owner is the one piece of a franchise that can’t be eradicated.

And that’s why “sell” has swept through several sports.

In the NFL, it hit at Soldier Field last December, during the Chicago Bears’ particularly desultory 6-3 loss to the Seattle Seahawks. Woody Johnson’s New York Jets heard it in an October game at MetLife Stadium.

It was a staple at Washington Commanders games until owner Daniel Snyder finally did, in fact, sell the team, though not until his wife’s image on the scoreboard was greeted with boos and pleas to sell.

And as his latest training camp superstar staredown unfolded, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones took a verbal ribbing and fans toted signs urging him to sell on Aug. 2.

Only drastic times seem to inspire the chant in the NBA, such as when the Detroit Pistons lost their 25th consecutive game in December 2023, or New York Knicks fans grew exhausted of owner James Dolan’s decades of mismanagement in March 2020.

Even Major League Soccer got a piece of the action, with Philadelphia Union fans organizing a Coliseum-like period of silence before launching its sell chant.

Yet fan messages that counter team talking points or state-sponsored pablum are often met with suppression.

Commanders fans were directed to remove bags from their face with the sell suggestion on them. A Knicks fan who chanted “sell the team” says he was “interrogated” by security before exiting Madison Square Garden.

During one of the Pirates’ “sell” chants this season, the team broadcast cut the crowd noise until the chanting ceased. And the A’s “reverse boycott” game has been scrubbed from MLB.TV’s June 2023 archives.

That leaves just the public square – arena, stadium, pitch – for the fan to know they’ll be heard – if not by management, then certainly the participants.

“I guess it goes back to freedom of speech and why the United States is so awesome,” says Noda. “I don’t know how much front offices and owners pay attention.

“But players, we hear it. And going through it for a whole year was weird. But we knew they weren’t saying it to us. We knew they still backed us and treated us like we were players. And they knew how hard we worked and how hard we wanted to get a win. At the end of the day, we kind of just blocked it out on our end and waited for them to cheer.”

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Former New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera returned to Yankee Stadium in a pinstripe uniform Saturday as a competitor in the franchise’s Old-Timers’ Day game.

It was the first time the Yankees held the actual game since 2019.

The 55-year-old Hall of Famer’s time in the game was cut short, however, due to injury. Rivera’s agent, Fern Cuza, told reporters that the baseball legend tore his Achilles tendon during the game.

He is set to undergo surgery next week. Rivera missed most of the 2012 MLB season, his second-to-last, due to an ACL tear.

What did Mariano Rivera do in Old-Timers’ Day game?

Rivera took to the plate during the game, hitting a single against Andy Pettitte.

Rivera had just four plate appearances during his MLB career and never recorded a hit. He had an RBI, one walk and one strikeout.