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Sports

What’s Ahead?

By Bill Plaschke
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Times reporters and editors predict what lies ahead in their areas in the coming year:

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Prices Finally Get Too High

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In 2000, high ticket prices will lead to a decrease in attendance in football, basketball and baseball. Pro sports will be slowly transformed from an common-man experience to a special-occasion event. The average fan, unable to regularly handle a $50 ticket, will only attend games on such occasions as birthdays, anniversaries and graduations.

Executives and athletes in all three sports will scoff at the figures until this attendance decline is accompanied by a decline in TV ratings. Television executives will then approach those executives to discuss rebates on the huge sums paid for the rights to broadcast games.

By the end of the year, the rebates will start being reflected in players’ contracts, and fans will have the satisfaction of watching salaries, for the first time in decades, actually decrease.

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Bill Plaschke

Bill Plaschke, an L.A. Times sports columnist since 1996, is a member of the National Sports Media Hall of Fame and California Sports Hall of Fame. He has been named national Sports Columnist of the Year nine times by the Associated Press, and twice by the Society of Professional Journalists and National Headliner Awards. He is the author of six books, including a collection of his columns entitled “Plaschke: Good Sports, Spoilsports, Foul Balls and Oddballs.” Plaschke is also a panelist on the popular ESPN daily talk show, “Around the Horn.” He is in the national Big Brothers/Big Sisters Alumni Hall of Fame and has been named Man of the Year by the Los Angeles Big Brothers/Big Sisters as well as receiving a Pursuit of Justice Award from the California Women’s Law Center. Plaschke has appeared in a movie (“Ali”), a dramatic HBO series (“Luck”) and, in a crowning cultural moment he still does not quite understand, his name can be found in a rap song “Females Welcome” by Asher Roth.

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