Where you one of the almost six and a half million people who tuned in to watch the NASCAR race on Sunday? I was, but to be fair I’m a fan of NASCAR; so I would’ve watched anyway. This ended up being the most watched non-Daytona 500 race in three years.
Kevin Harvick picked up the win Sunday at the Darlington Speedway in The Real Heroes 400. Harvick led 154 laps on Sunday including the most important one the last one. Alex Bowman led 41 laps and ended up coming home in 2nd. Kurt Busch finished 3rd while Chase Elliott was 4th with Denny Hamlin coming in 5th to round out the Top 5.
Now if you wanted to watch Sunday’s NASCAR race and maybe forgot it was on or you just plain missed it you won’t have to wait long to get a chance to watch another race. Why is that? Well the next NASCAR race is tonight. The drivers and their teams stayed at Darlington Speedway for tonight’s race. They’ll run the Toyota 500 tonight on the same track that they raced on this past Sunday.
Ryan Preece starts on the pole tonight with Ty Dillion joining him on the front row starting 2nd. Joey Logano starts 3rd; Clint Bowyer will start 4th and Ryan Blaney rounds out the Top 5 starting 5th.
The Top 20 finishers from Sunday’s race were inverted to set the starting lineup for tonight. Drivers lining up in positions 21 through 39 are there as that is where they finished in Sunday’s race.
Due to the possibility of inclement weather NASCAR officials have moved the start time of tonight’s race up. The race was originally scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. Central time. The decision was made to move the stat time of the race up to 5:00 p.m. Central time to try and get the entire race in. The race airs live on FS1 tonight.
The Xfinity race which was originally scheduled to be run yesterday was moved to Thursday because of weather. The Xfinity race will start at Noon tomorrow.
This is the second race at Darlington Speedway in a four day span. This is also just the 6th race of the NASCAR season. This is also the first time since July 4th 1984 that there is a NASCAR race on a Wednesday. That last Wednesday NASCAR race was at Daytona and it was won by Richard Petty. That was Petty’s 200th and final win of his NASCAR career.
While I don’t expect as many people to be watching tonight’s race as they had on Sunday, but it will be interesting to see how many people they do get to watch. Will you be one of those people watching tonight?
Last week the owners in Major League Baseball sent a proposal to restart the season to the players union. I wasn’t surprised when there was some complaining right out of the gate by some players. That’s to be expected because there always is someone who doesn’t like something in these kind of negotiations, but other than the complaints we really haven’t heard anything on if they’ve made any progress on getting the season started.
Now the plan was to get the season restarted on July 4th weekend, but there was also talk of having a spring training that would last about two weeks. Now I don’t think it would take too long for a player to get ready to go back to spring training, but the fact that there’s been no news at all has to be concerning. To be honest I didn’t dig to deep looking for news; so it’s possible there has been some rebuttal by the players union and would have to guess that the two sides have at least been in contact with each other, but who knows.
Now if you’re a baseball fan or maybe just have casual interest in the game of baseball I’m sure that you’ve heard the incredibly stupid rant that Blake Snell went on while he was on Twitch. I’ve talked about that a couple of times on the Sports Time Radio podcast; so I don’t want to get into it here again, but I do want to look at this from another angle.
Now Snell was crying about not getting all of his money while he’s already been paid $286,500 this season without playing a game and I’m under the impression that most if not all major league baseball players have gotten some type of pay. Now they’re being paid by owner who aren’t having any income come in; so they’re looking at taking big financial losses this season.
Since this involves millionaires and billionaires most people understandably don’t care about this, but there’s a group of players that should care greatly about this and they should want the season to be restarted and the owners to start making money. That group is any player that is going to be a free agent after whatever the 2020 season turns out to be.
Mookie Betts is going to probably be the top free agent on the market this coming off season. Now Betts is in line of a big pay day and could possibly be set to get a contract in the $300 million dollar area like Bryce Harper and Manny Machado did when they hit the free agent market.
Now if an owner loses hundreds of millions of dollars this season like it appears that they’re projected to; are they really going to be doing that much spending in the off season? Now I know that immediately the players union will cry collusion and in most case they’re correct, but will that be the case this coming off season.
Right now the proposal has teams playing just one game over a half a season. Also remember there have been a lot of people who have been either laid off or have lost jobs do to this pandemic. How are ticket sales going to be? Do you think that ballparks will be full right out of the gate? Or is it going to take a little time until people will be able to afford to buy tickets to the games?
This is going to be an interesting situation that players like Snell don’t have to deal with and clearly wasn’t thinking about when he shot his mouth off online. I’m sure his soon to be free agent union brothers are just thrilled that he wants to get all his money when they’ll be looking for there’s in the off season.
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